The New Urban Agenda agreed upon at the 2016 Habitat III conference in Quito highlights the need to create new green areas and invest in social well-being in order to achieve sustainable city goals. Bringing together greening, health and equity in urban planning, the efforts of policy-makers, planners, and civil society activists coalesced in Quito after 25 years of worldwide municipal sustainability interventions. With the approval of the New Urban Agenda, a decades-old push to increase and consolidate green infrastructure, green space, and urban nature within the social and environmental fabric of cities achieved a level consensus rarely seen within global policy. It also created an acute need for broad and systematic analyses of greening policy and its social impact in cities.
A New Analysis of Green Trajectories in Europe, Canada and the US
In response to renewed calls for research on the practice and planning of urban greening and in an effort to provide a comprehensive analysis of historical trajectories of urban greening initiatives in three emblematic regions, our lab has just released a new publication, the policy book Green Trajectories: Municipal policy trends and strategies for greening in Europe, Canada and the United States (1990-2016). Supported by the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) and co-sponsored by the ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability network, Green Trajectories is also one of the first products of a larger international European Research Council (ERC)-funded study called GreenLULUs that seeks to determine the extent to which green cities in Europe, Canada, and the US are also racially and socially equitable.
Based on research examining the urban green trajectories of 99 mid-sized cities, the book presents a historical analysis of urban greening and dissects the variety of greening strategies and governance structures adopted within municipalities since 1990. It also includes 50 in-depth case studies of greening trajectories, including a chronology of urban greening, key emblematic projects in each city, and policies and plans underpinning greening interventions. Based on in-depth policy document analysis, the book reveals that the majority of selected cities used physical greening and green amenities to address more than one of the following urban concerns: physical and mental health improvements, neighborhood and downtown revitalization, regeneration of vulnerable neighborhoods, redevelopment of post-industrial landscapes, climate preparedness and resilience, and nature preservation and ecosystem restoration.
Greening Policy: Talk vs. Action
Green Trajectories also reveals that, in most cases, the wide spectrum of municipal sustainability efforts has included an emphasis on green land use — from the preservation of natural environments and habitats, the creation of permeable pavements, stormwater green streets or rain gardens, and the expansion of urban green space. In Europe, for instance, between 1994 and 2005, Nantes (France) doubled the surface of green space in the city and now offers 57m2 per capita and a total of 100 municipal parks. Those efforts culminated with the 2013 European Green Capital Award. Among others, starting in 1994, Nantes initiated one of the largest urban brownfield site redevelopment projects in Europe, transforming the former industrial shipyard district in the center of the city, the Île de Nantes, into a multi-purpose, culturally diversified and environmentally-centered neighborhood with two new large parks and longitudinal green spaces.
This emphasis on green space has also taken place on the other side of the Atlantic. In the US, Louisville (Kentucky)’s goals to become a “city of parks” has been illustrated by the municipality’s commitment in 2000 to build 3,560 hectares of new parkland, seeking to have one of America’s most expansive “greenprints.” In Canada, the municipality of Québec City has focused on turning industrial sites along the St. Lawrence riverbank into parks or green amenities, improving surface water quality and protecting drinking water resources, and giving the river and its beaches back to citizens, including the Baie de Beauport’s new swimming beach and public park.
The analysis of the selected cities in Green Trajectories also compares cities along various aspects of greening policy by asking questions such as: Which cities have been the most outspoken about their greening activity in an effort to “brand” themselves as green? Which ones have more structurally integrated greening into core city policy and strategy? Which cities have policies and processes to involve residents in both planning and realizing greening projects? To what extent and how do cities integrate equity concerns into urban greening? How do cities take health concerns into consideration?
We find that greening and economic development are deeply intertwined within our cities. Many cities in our sample link their green performance with their capacity to compete for new investment and local development resources that are inevitably attracted to districts with rich and well-maintained urban natural amenities. For instance, Vancouver (Canada) praises itself for being one of the world’s most liveable cities and has been ranked as the fourth greenest city in the world by the 2014 Global Green Economy Index. This green identity has been central to Vancouver’s growth narrative over the past several decades. Such an urban green strategy seems necessary for many cities in order to boost their profiles vis-à-vis other cities in the context of global consensus over the desirability of green urban environments. This strategy helps them attract, among other assets, highly qualified service-industry workers for the new economic sectors they are hoping to promote.
This book also creates a baseline dataset, providing opportunities for further analysis of urban greening trends. Our recent quantitative analysis on green trajectories reveals, for example, that cities that score the highest on greening rhetoric and boast the most about their greening achievements also tend to be the most unaffordable ones, even when taking into account a city’s size and level of economic activity. Cities in this category include San Francisco, Zurich, and Boston. Such a finding points to how greening is branded and commodified in today’s municipal practice. However, when cities, such as Nantes, place equity and affordability at the center of urban green policy, the positive relationship between urban green branding and unaffordability disappears.
Towards Equitable Green Cities
Cities’ greening policies will continue to intensify and diversify in upcoming years, building on the momentum created by the New Urban Agenda. Yet, as urban stakeholders in Quito highlighted and as our research suggests, cities that do not bring social equity to the center of urban greening policy will not achieve long-term sustainability and risk creating only green enclaves for the elite. Cities thus need to account for equity concerns over the long term and take issues of green gentrification, socio-cultural representation and resident-driven green design, and other concerns over displacement, exclusion, and (re)-segregation seriously when planning and designing the future green city. By focusing on bolstering these strategies, the benefits of the urban green amenities can become universal rather than privileges for selected groups.
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Learn more about Green Trajectories, flip through the book or download the pdf here.
Top photo: Robson Square, Vancouver by Xicotencatl-Wikimedia Commons
