When Hurricane Harvey displaced 30,000 people in Houston in August 2017, it became the latest warning sign that there are serious limitations to the urban sustainability and resilience movements. In what may now be a regular call-and-response to major hurricanes making landfall, Harvey led many to point out the role land use planning played in exacerbating the damage and the inequities associated with those impacted the most.
Yet, the rapid growth practices that generate vulnerability and inequity continue to expand in cities worldwide. Another Harvey would have the same effect in many other cities. And in 10 years, a similar storm would likely repeat similar outcomes in Houston.
Why have decades of effort to make cities more sustainable not affected outcomes for cities in circumstances like Hurricane Harvey? Primarily, because the political project that underlies the concept of urban sustainability has not been seriously addressed. This same problem has extended to the more contemporary concept of resilience and the recent efforts to achieve smart and adaptive cities.
Resilience: The New Sustainability?
The essential quality of the concept of sustainable urbanization is that it puts economic growth, social equity, and ecological preservation goals on even political footing within land use decision-making. In this ideal, those who profit from growth have no more say than those who advocate for environmental preservation and protections for the most vulnerable residents. Yet, we have seen a number of instances wherein mainstream urban sustainability initiatives sacrificed this essence by forwarding land use polices based on partial gains that reflect the uneven political power across economic, social equity, and ecological preservation interests.
Zaha Hadid designed one of the latest buildings along New York’s highline to be LEED silver certified. Meanwhile, apartments start at $5 million (US). Photo via Field Condition
Think of a typical urban sustainability initiative – a high-end green building. In order to call such an initiative sustainable, there is a political accommodation. Sure, the logic goes, these buildings are mostly about creating large profits from growth, but we get some environmental benefits and we will get around to social equity later. Compromises of this sort happened repeatedly over the past three decades in the name of achieving vaguely utilitarian and politically expedient ends. The result has been the shifting of cities across the world toward a state of pseudo-sustainability.
Recently, we have sought a way out of the urban pseudo-sustainability morass by formulating new concepts: the smart, adaptive, or resilient city. Perhaps these will provide opportunities that sustainability could not? As I and others argue, this has not been the case. Rather, efforts to mainstream these concepts have required the same sorts of compromises as with sustainability. These new conceptual arenas at least keep the urban land use agenda focused in some way on ecological preservation and social equity. But the project for institutional change that seeks to question the primacy of economic growth agendas is still stuck in the pseudo-sustainability morass.
Profit Over Equity
There is increasing awareness that the onset of urban pseudo-sustainability has proved especially unfavorable for social equity in cities. UN Habitat’s 2016 World Cities Report finds that 75% of the world’s cities have higher levels of income inequality than 20 years ago. The chart below shows that this trend has occurred alongside a steep rise in income inequality, especially in wealthy countries with lots of formerly industrial space in urban centers.
Especially in the US, Canada, the UK, and Germany, income inequality has soared during the period in which urban sustainability agendas have been implemented. Via
In her opening post to this blog, Isabelle Anguelovski provides several examples of green gentrification as one driver of increased social inequities in these redeveloped urban areas. From the greenbelt in Medellin to the Highline in New York City, she points toward the trend where cities seeking to attract new advanced service workers are awash in urban greening. Sometimes, these projects serve as a thinly veiled means of targeted upgrading that displaces vulnerable residents.
Many other observers have also noted that the outcomes of pseudo-sustainability have forwarded environmental interests at the expense of social equity. In 2011, Liz Mueller and Sarah Dooling already noted that “Environmental and economic rationales for redevelopment implicitly focus on the benefits brought by future residents of redeveloped neighborhoods,” but not on those of existing residents. A similar argument was made last year in the journal Nature by David Wachsmuth and colleagues who pointed out that urban sustainability policy narrowly targets ecological goals in a manner that leads to indifference to the effects on marginalized people. Earlier this year in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Robert Sampson reviewed evidence from Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles to further support the argument that urban sustainability initiatives often focus on ecosystems and physical infrastructure at the expense of creating “fissures in the civic infrastructure.”
It’s as if we are busying ourselves with developing new conceptual models of urbanism to avoid dealing with the politics that allow certain urban environmental initiatives to support growth at the expense of social equity. Calling for an awareness of these politics, however, is not to diminish the importance of urban greening, as Isabelle Anguelovski also pointed out in her post. The response to the current side effects of urban sustainability initiatives cannot be to sacrifice social or ecological goals. Rather, the response must be to reassert the essence of urban sustainability wherein these goals are placed on equal political footing with growth agendas in the process of making land use decisions.
In some areas, like Barcelona’s Vallcarca neighborhood, direct challenges of the growth agenda have been made by local residents who have also developed their own greening and equity programs for the areas undeveloped spaces. Translation: “Enough speculation, Vallcarca for the neighbors.” Photo by James Connolly.
Moving forward
So, how do we that? Two things are essential. First, we need to better understand how strong political coalitions that unite environmental and social equity interests take shape. Examples of this are California’s regional planning laws and Barcelona’s neighborhood-based resistance to gentrification where social-ecological coalitions were built before negotiating with more politically powerful growth interests. These coalitions are an important aspect of generating land use policies – and outcomes – that reflect a greater balance across social equity, environmental, and growth goals.
Second, in order to develop strategies for strong social-ecological interventions in cities upon which coalitions can be built, we need to understand who is vulnerable to social processes that exclude marginalized populations from receiving the benefits of urban greening. Our research here at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability will continue to build our understanding in these areas through qualitative fieldwork and quantitative spatial analysis, with the hopes that such knowledge will help us to move out of the urban pseudo-sustainability morass and toward a model of urbanization that actually balances growth with environment and equity.
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A version of this article was published on Huffington Post
Top photo via by Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle via Associated Press
