Austin Gage Matheney is a doctoral researcher with BCNUEJ at ICTA-UAB, where he explores the impacts of urban greening projects on local communities. We caught up with him to learn more about what he aims to achieve with his work and what led him to it in the first place.
How did you become interested in urban and environmental justice?
I would definitely say that studying and working in such different places–from the US, South Africa, Germany, Argentina, India, Lithuania, and now in Spain, influenced my interests. At the core of my work I hold the importance of recognizing a variety of ways of knowing, being, and acting in the world (both inside and outside of academia), and this is what attracted me to the environmental justice (EJ) literature at its current moment: the focus on moving beyond Western conceptual frames.
Although a lot has been done to “decolonize” EJ literature at a conceptual level (see Álvarez & Coolsaet’s 2020 discussion on decolonizing environmental justice), I still find a need for the urban environmental justice literature to read through urban theory emanating from the global Souths. I believe EJ scholars have much to learn from Southern Urbanists and their conceptual and methodological toolkits.
Austin’s view of when the Cecil Rhodes statue fell at the University of Cape Town, a movement which then sparked the Rhodes Must Fall movement in the UK and the removal of colonial statues around the world
Austin (right) and Vishnu Muraleedharan (left) attending the 2018 European Sociological Association’s mid term conference hosted by research group Civil Society and Sustainable Human Development Research” at the Kaunas University of Technology, where Austin was doing an internship
OK…that’s my “academic” response, but in more concrete terms, my turning point was when I attended Professor Archana Prasad’s course Nature, Capital, Labor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This class was actually my first introduction to the work of Joan Martinez Alier as well, so there is a nice connection to this class and now being at ICTA-UAB where Joan is located.
Tell us a bit about your current investigation and where you want to go with it.
My most recent work aims to put several literatures into conversation with one another in order to develop a framework and methodological approach through which to analyze and make visible radical spatial imaginaries. By this I mean the discourses, practices and mobilizations of urban environmental justice movements. While this work does not produce any novelty in terms of new concepts or methodologies, its strength, I think, is found in refining conceptual discussions into an operational framework which can be deployed through an engaged methodology. The outputs of this endeavor can then be used as a tool for social movements, decision makers, and members of the public alike.
What do you most love about your work?
I feel a real passion for working with social movements on mapping their connections to place, their fears of future speculation, gentrification, and other injustices, their “ideal futures”, as well as how they perform these imaginaries within space and time. Our current work merely scratches the surface of environmental justice struggles in Barcelona and I dream of continuing this work for many years to come. Not only to build a database of urban environmental justice struggles in Barcelona which historicizes the lived experiences and demands of the city’s residents, but also to create a publicly available database which can be used by grassroots movements to fight for cities which are truly more green and just. I also want to recognize all of the work put in by colleagues and interns at BCNUEJ without their time, energy, and passion, this map would not exist.
Austin (left) speaking at an event in Gracia neighborhood (Barcelona) with the activist group “Plataforma Afectats per l’Abaceria i Abaceria Respira” who are calling for a new park rather than a new market to be built in the heart of Gracia
What are some surprising insights you’ve gathered through your research in Barcelona?
I am always surprised with Barcelona residents’ capability to organize and fight. As much as we academics are either labeled or tend to think of ourselves as “experts”, embodied knowledge will always surpass knowledge gained in the university. At the same time, I’m shocked by the power wielded by top-down urban greening projects. Through various meetings I was able to attend between decision makers and activists, I witnessed the ease with which local knowledge, (green) desires, and histories are sidelined in the name of ‘greening’.
Can you give us an example?
Well, I’ve been lucky enough to be welcomed by activists in the Barcelona’s El Carmel, who are fighting against the massification, gentrification, and destruction of cultural heritage in their neighborhood as a result of the 70-year-old plan to create a new “green lung” in Barcelona. First proposed in 1953 under then Mayor Josep Maria de Porcioles, the Pla de Tres Turons aims to connect the three hills: Turo de la Rovira, Turo de Carmel, and Turo del Coll, into a large park. While on the surface this may sound like an improvement or necessary development in a city with little green space and in the context of the climate crisis, the manner in which this plan is laid out is leading to further injustices for those who live in the area.
The neighborhood of Carmel has been strongly influenced by two large waves of immigrants (mainly from the south of Spain) during the 1920s and 1960s, who self-constructed homes on the hills. At the time, these hills also housed secondary homes for the city’s upper-class populations, meaning you can find self-built homes next to large, castle-like homes built in the 19th century. In the city’s plans, which have been modified four times, the self-constructed homes, which hold a super important place in Barcelona’s cultural and architectural history, are to be demolished in addition to nearly 300 other buildings. The need to remove these buildings was even defended by the recently ousted, progressive city government of Barcelona en Comu, as we were told by city hall members during meetings held between the ajuntament and activists.
A photo of the “pla popular” with activists of the “Plataforma d’habitatges afectats dels 3Turons”
What we see here is integral to what my work aims to explore. Why does the green city orthodoxy extend even through progressive city halls? Why is greening held above the wishes of those who live in a neighborhood? And what do neighbors want their neighborhoods to resemble? How have differing visions of “green” manifested in today’s society? And whose vision of green will play the largest role in helping us to face the climate crisis?
The Barcelona city hall has a chance to be a true leader in urban greening—being, to our knowledge, the first city to implement housing within a park, to create a truly hybrid landscape wherein neighbors live inside of nature and wherein there is a bilateral relationship of care between nature and humans. But, what we continue to see is a form of blanket greening, which takes a best practice from somewhere else and lays it on top of an existing social fabric, erasing its history, its present, and its future – all in the name of green.
So, all that glitters isn’t…green?
Not at all. Urban greening isn’t an innocent intervention on the social fabric and we continue to fight against its injustices.
Austin (right) at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, where a local activist explains the injustices surrounding a new Amazon factory on a floodplain and historically important site for indigenous (Khoe-San) population.
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Top photo: Austin giving a tour of green gentrification in Poblenou (Barcelona) to students from the University of Bristol
