A new series of ArcGIS StoryMaps collections expose the adverse impacts of urban greening interventions and their connection to gentrification, while highlighting community struggles for equitable access to green space and housing.
In cities, critical and counter-mapping are effective tools to illustrate patterns of social injustice. Maps are tools of power and not neutral conveyors of information, and so critical mapping aims to incorporate voices, stories and experiences of marginalized communities that are left out of the mainstream narrative. In our first collection ArcGis StoryMaps, we documented urban environmental justice struggles in Barcelona to highlight opportunities for activism and advocacy. Now, our new collections on Gentrification and Greening portray the green paradox of environmental gentrification in European and North American cities and shed light on the policy tools and activism pushing for equitable urban sustainability policy.
Our new StoryMaps focus on four cities—Atlanta, Washington D.C., Nantes and Dublin—where both large and small-scale urban greening interventions are being used to address diverse socio-environmental challenges linked to climate change, biodiversity, and health while re-naturalizing the urban space. But despite their attempts to address long-term environmental inequalities in access to green space, they may not always take pre-existing vulnerabilities and inequalities, racial segregation, and the needs of local communities into consideration, resulting in a greenspace paradox of gentrification and displacement.
In Washington, D.C., the new green infrastructure project 11th Street Bridge Park has a clear equity-driven mission, yet has been criticized for driving up housing prices in what has historically been a predominantly Black neighborhood. In 2018, residents and community groups launched an Equitable Development Plan in conjunction with the Bridge Park to ensure continued access to affordable housing for local residents through the implementation of a Community Land Trust and the conversion of buildings into affordable units. But implementation, financial and administrative challenges have emerged along the way. In Dublin, on the other hand, the ongoing mission of the City Council to create more parks and gardens for everyone without compromising the availability of affordable housing is so far not guaranteed and requires inclusive, co-creation processes. In the working class neighborhood of The Liberties, land speculation and redevelopment by student housing- and tourism-centered investors is causing a spike in housing prices.
BCNUEJ researchers have drawn on a combination of quantitative and spatial data in combination with in-depth interviews with community activists and policy makers to uncover the socio-ecological challenges and tensions related to urban greening. The maps illustrate how current green developments are tied to housing price increases and new segregation trends along the lines of race and class. Present-day grassroots mobilizations in North American cities such as Atlanta and Washington, D.C. grapple not only with new challenges related to rising housing prices and (unequal) access to green space, but also work to dismantle a long history of racial segregation and marginalization. Meanwhile, in Europe, new trends regarding the establishment of urban centers as attractive locations for a new creative class and affluent students threaten the continued accessibility of green, beautified spaces for long-term local residents. Despite municipal efforts to create green spaces that benefit everyone, it takes time to challenge an urban development paradigm that prioritizes profit over justice and the inclusion of historically marginalized groups.
Our map series aims to make these findings accessible to a wider public by diversifying knowledge bases around urban development and offering these StoryMaps as teaching tools and resources for community empowerment, advocacy and social resistance in debates around urban environmental justice. We encourage policy makers and urban planners to include anti-gentrification and anti-displacement measures into green development in order to challenge the predominant green paradox and create sustainable, just and inclusive cities. Details about several of those measures can already be accessed in our 2021 Policy and Planning Tools Report for Urban Green Justice.
Learn more on the stories of Atlanta, Washington D.C., Nantes, and Dublin in each collection.
StoryMaps Authors:
Atlanta – Toby Godfray
Washington D.C. – Sarah Bretschko
Nantes – Franziska Link
Dublin – Alicia Vollmer
All Green Inequalities blog posts are edited by Ana Cañizares
Additional editors of this post: Emilia Oscilowicz, Isabelle Anguelovski, Helen Cole
