For over a decade now, the greening of cities has been touted as an essential strategy in the quest for urban sustainability. Indeed, urban greening has demonstrated benefits on health, well-being and the environment, but how does it fare in terms of social inclusiveness?
As the UN Sustainable Development Goals make clear, a major challenge for urban planning is to prepare cities for growing populations while developing them as sustainable, resilient, safe and inclusive places. To address this challenge, the European Commission has introduced various strategies and funding schemes for green infrastructure and nature-based solutions.
The multiple benefits of such approaches in urban areas are intended to include fostering social cohesion or reducing socio-spatial inequalities. But there is a lack of empirical evidence supporting this claim. In a recent article, we suggest that under certain circumstances, greening or nature-based interventions can paradoxically lead to greater social inequalities often referred to as environmental, or green gentrification.
In examples as diverse as Lene-Voigt Park in Leipzig, Germany, the High Line Park in New York, US and Sienkiewicz Park in Lodz, Poland, trade-offs exist between different social goals. Even if urban greening projects include community empowerment processes and are not associated with the kinds of high-end housing development traditionally associated with social exclusion, such as the case of Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, Germany, gentrification and displacement of the most vulnerable social groups are still recurring issues that have sparked debate over how to stop it.
In the article we discuss whether the greening of cities and the implementation of nature-based solutions actually leads to social inclusiveness. We argue that there are six essential ingredients for fair urban green space development:
1. Experts and planners must recognise and take social inequalities into account.
2. Any process must not only include different social groups, but make sure that diverse and opposing views are heard during the planning and implementation processes.
3. While such schemes can have multiple benefits there are always trade-offs at work; these trade-offs need to be explicitly acknowledged.
4. It is important to consider the development of new urban green spaces as places for multiple and diverse social groups.
5. Taking forward green infrastructure and nature-based solution projects in cities will require forms of multi-actor governance that can take these different perspectives into account.
6. Research and assessment of the contribution of nature-based solutions towards addressing urban sustainability must take into account of questions of power and politics to ensure that they are not simply serving one market-based agenda for urban regeneration at the expense of others.
NATURVATION and ENABLE are BCNUEJ research projects funded by Horizon 2020 and BiodivERsA (respectively). It will take forward these recommendations, seeking to contribute to the development of socially inclusive nature-based solutions that can address urban sustainability for diverse social groups across different urban contexts.
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A version of this post originally appeared on the Naturvation blog.
Francesc Baró is a Postdoctoral Researcher at BCNUEJ (ICTA-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) working on the NATURVATION, ENABLE and Greenlulus projects.
Top photo: © Wong Maye-E/AP
