The Racial Inequities of Green Gentrification (original) (raw)
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Social and Environmental Justice in Waterfront Redevelopment: The Anacostia River, Washington, D.C
Urban Affairs Review, 2019
Waterfront redevelopment projects have often been criticized for prioritizing attractive skylines and glittering facades over the needs of local communities. Recently, however, they have increasingly seen goals of social and environmental justice integrated into their vision statements. This article focuses on the redevelopment of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. Since the early 2000s, the formerly neglected and contaminated river has been at the center of extensive regeneration efforts through the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative (AWI). We examine to what extent the AWI has helped to overcome inequities between the two disparate sides of the river. To answer this question, we build on interviews, analysis of planning documents, and site visits. Examining efforts toward both social and environmental justice, we show the convergence of the two but also the contradictions that arise between them. The findings suggest that employing a joint social and environmental justice approa...
Social and Environmental Justice in Waterfront Redevelopment: The Anacostia River
Urban Affairs Review , 2019
Waterfront redevelopment projects have often been criticized for prioritizing attractive skylines and glittering facades over the needs of local communities. Recently, however, they have increasingly seen goals of social and environmental justice integrated into their vision statements. This article focuses on the redevelopment of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. Since the early 2000s, the formerly neglected and contaminated river has been at the center of extensive regeneration efforts through the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative (AWI). We examine to what extent the AWI has helped to overcome inequities between the two disparate sides of the river. To answer this question, we build on interviews, analysis of planning documents, and site visits. Examining efforts toward both social and environmental justice, we show the convergence of the two but also the contradictions that arise between them. The findings suggest that employing a joint social and environmental justice approach to analyze waterfront redevelopments is important to reveal these tensions.
Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in Detroit
In 2014, approximately 100,000 lots lie ‘‘vacant’’ in Detroit after decades of industrial decline, white flight, and poverty. Planners and government officials have proposed to repurpose Detroit’s highest vacancy neighborhoods, deemed to have ‘‘no market value,’’ as blue and green infrastructure (retention ponds, carbon forests, urban farms, greenways). According to the Detroit Future City plan, traditional public services (water, street lights, transportation, garbage pickup) and the ‘‘grey infrastructures’’ that deliver them will be reduced and eventually withdrawn from these zones. While Detroit is widely touted for its potential as a model green city, the costs and benefits of green redevelopment are distributed unevenly within the context of gentrification and bankruptcy. Through an analysis of media representations, a contentious citywide planning project, and the construction of a private urban forest, I demonstrate how settler colonial imaginaries and rationalities articulate with austerity measures to prepare a postindustrial urban frontier for resettlement and reinvestment. During the historical era of U.S. settler colonialism, economic development happened through westward expansion on a continental scale (and then imperial scale), but today, in the urban United States, it occurs through internal differentiation of previously developed spaces and is taking a new form. Where the rural settlers of the 19th century sought to conquer wilderness, ‘‘urban pioneers’’ in the 21st century deploy nature as a tool of economic development in a city with a shrinking population and a large spatial footprint. Yet accumulation by green dispossession still turns on some of the defining features of settler colonialism, e.g., private property as a civilizing mechanism on the frontier, the appropriation of collective land and resources, and the expendability of particular people and places. The production of this new urban frontier also depends, like any frontier, on erasure: the material and discursive work of presenting ‘‘empty’’ landscapes as in need of improvement by non-local actors. I argue that understanding the stakes of postindustrial urban development struggles requires attention to how concepts of (white) settler society – which have been absorbed into political and legal-juridical institutions, discourses, myths, symbols, and national metaphors – are used to claim ‘‘wild’’ and ‘‘empty’’ lands like those in Detroit.
Decolonizing the Green City: From Environmental Privilege to Emancipatory Green Justice
Environmental Justice, 2021
The expanding reach of urban greening across the United States and beyond often materially and immaterially impacts communities of color, leading to displacement and decreased access to new urban amenities. While many scholars point to the persistence of racial inequality, we observe the urban greening orthodoxy in urban planning and development as evidencing a deeper strain of environmental injustice bound up in the legacy and continuance of White supremacy. In this article, following the prompts of the Black Lives Matter Movement to enact life-affirming Black geographies, we call for decolonizing the green city and for an emancipatory spatial imaginary to enact green justice. Reflecting on the development of the 11th Street Bridge Park in the predominantly Black Anacostia neighborhood in Southeast, Washington, DC, we ask how urban greening can enact a more emancipatory green justice. We use this case example to trace the contours and constraints of current greening and equity logics and practices and contend that decolonization and emancipation fundamentally require new spatial planning practices. While the green project is deployed as an ''intentional'' equity-centered infrastructure, it is limited in its ability to embrace multiple forms of land recognition, redistribution, control, and reparations and to develop green practices that engage with the history of a multilayered geography of dispossession and include cultural and symbolic recogni-tions of networks of resilience and care. We thus argue for a more emancipatory spatial imaginary in urban planning that more directly confronts White supremacist forms of dispossession, centers resistance to anti-Blackness, and articulates a geography of reparations through decolonizing settlement patterns at multiple geographical scales.
“We’Re Being Left to Blight”: Green Urban Development and Racialized Space in Kansas City
2018
OF DISSERTATION “WE’RE BEING LEFT TO BLIGHT”: GREEN URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND RACIALIZED SPACE IN KANSAS CITY In this dissertation, I explore ‘green’ urban development and urban agriculture projects from the perspective of residents of an African American majority neighborhood in Kansas City—who reside in an area referred to as a ‘blighted food desert’ by local policy makers. In Kansas City, extensive city government support exists for urban agricultural projects, which are touted not just as a solution to poverty associated issues such food insecurity and obesity, but also as a remedy for ‘blight,’ violence and crime, and vacant urban land. Specific narratives of Kansas City’s past are used to prop up and legitimate these future visions for, and development projects in, the city. This dissertation lays out an argument for how, in Kansas City, the dominant narrative surrounding urban sustainability, agriculture, and history came to be constructed and informed by white voices, and docume...
Buildings, 2014
Urban blue space is increasingly embraced by cities as a specific and valuable genre of public space, valued for its economic, symbolic and experiential place attributes and essential to sustainable urban development. This article takes up the concept of urban blue space from a design perspective, extending and exploring it through a critical social science lens. Using the reconfiguration and redesign of the central Seattle waterfront as a case example, the idea of "doing justice" is enlisted to examine not just the design opportunities and formal characteristics of the site, but also the patterns of privilege, access and regional socio-ecological equity that are raised through its redesign. After situating the extraordinary design opportunity presented by this iconic urban blue space, and the imperative to do justice to the waterfront's physical situation, the article presents the site from four additional and discrete perspectives: economic justice, environmental justice, social justice and tribal justice. By thus foregrounding the urban political ecology of the waterfront, the article demonstrates that the most important challenge of the site's redevelopment is not technological, financial or administrative, although these are real, and significant challenges, but rather, the need to construct a place that works to counter established patterns of local and regional injustice. In Seattle as in other coastal port cities, urban blue space is a shared public and environmental good, with unique and demanding governance responsibilities for its conceptualization and sustainable development.
Green gentrification: urban sustainability and the struggle for environmental justice
European Planning Studies, 2017
Does greening whiten? Does greening richen? Does greening raise rents and housing prices? These are the core questions that drive environmental sociologists Gould and Lewis's recent book Green Gentrification. Building on research tackling environmental privilege (Park and Pellow 2011) and environmental/ecological gentrification (Dooling 2009, Checker 2011, Anguelovski 2016), Gould and Lewis contribute to this emerging field through their proposal of green gentrification as a process that fortifies environmental privilege for elites in the city. In this light the book makes a valuable contribution to a new strand of environmental justice research that has developed since the 2000s, unmasking how efforts to improve the environment can increase racial, class and other inequities as environmental goods become concentrated with wealthy and white populations. Green gentrification can thus invisibilise racial and ethnic conflicts as greening is appropriated into the urban green growth orthodoxy. Through their exploration of five cases of urban greening in Brooklyn, New York, Gould and Lewis illustrate how greening outcomes are environmentally sustainable but tend to be socially unsustain-able. The richest parts of the book are undoubtedly the case-based chapters, focusing on different typologies of sites-several rezoned from industrial to residential with either brownfield restoration or green space creation, one extensive park restoration and one new park alongside high density rezoning-with different actors initiating greening and varied community responses. The cases illustrate that achieving some degree of social equity in development outcomes only manifest when residents mobilise early on in the process to demand them, as seen in the Sunset Park case. Similarly, social equity can also be effectively resisted through the same process, illustrated by mobilised white, wealthy residents in the Brooklyn Bridge Park case actively resisting affordable housing development. All cases, nonetheless, illustrate the power of capital accumulation that both pushes and drives the
Three Histories of Greening and Whiteness in American Cities
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2021
How has urban greening related to the degree of whiteness in neighborhoods? The answer to this question provides an essential “historical diagnostic” that can be used to develop an approach to urban ecology which integrates racial and ethnic change into the planning for proposed interventions. In this paper we employ state sequence analysis to analyze the historical trend of greening (including the implementation of new parks, greenways, community gardens, green recreation areas, and nature preserves) between 1975 and 2014 in a sample of nine cities in the United States relative to concentrations of white and non-white residents. We divide the nine cities into three common growth trajectories and separately examine the trends for each growth trajectory. We further illustrate these trends by mobilizing qualitative data from field work in selected neighborhoods to help explain the processes that generate certain key findings in the quantitative data. We find that the relationship betw...
2016
The historically African American Albina District of Portland, Oregon holds a long track record of neighborhood neglect, devaluation and displacement of poor residents by private real estate companies and city government. Devaluation in the area was the direct result of discriminatory real estate policies and mid-twentieth century urban renewal projects. Starting in the 1990s, the City of Portland passed revitalization measures to increase private investment in the neighborhood. Since then, few historians have tackled studies of recent sustainability-oriented gentrification resulting from revitalization. 1 Though contemporary works in urban studies at Portland State University have looked at revitalization and subsequent ecological gentrification in the area, the history of gentrification in Albina needs more attention. 2 Ecological gentrification can be defined as an environmental planning agenda that leads to the displacement or exclusion of the most economically vulnerable human populations while espousing an environmental ethic. 3