A research lab at ICTA-UAB
Predicting and Preventing Green Gentrification in Climate-Adapting Cities
Identifying the processes that have led to green gentrification in existing green projects is key to achieving environmental and climate justice. Municipal planners should be equipped with this knowledge in order to take action before green gentrification takes place in a proactive and collaborative manner better support marginalized communities.
Rather than seeing environmental justice and climate vulnerable groups as “victims” of climate impacts and inequitable climate interventions, this project meets residents with lived “expertise” to empower them and their representative CBOs by incorporating their knowledge and perception of climate gentrification risks into adaptive capacity tools. The project will promote residents to co-design and test anti-displacement policy tools in a regional partnership of community, CBOs, and municipalities. This process will ensure the policy tool’s implementation over time, ultimately building a future practice of urban climate justice.
This approach will uncover local spatial knowledge and perceptions (e.g. through a participatory mapping approach), through which residents can share their own notions of risks, adaptation capacity and resources, and overall ecological street knowledge.
In Boston (2023-) and Barcelona (2024-) ClimateReadyJustice aims to:
- Identify the extent to which resilient infrastructure might create greater vulnerability to future gentrification
- Incorporate risk (and resilience) perspectives from residents, outside the exclusive province of the expert researcher, valuing citizen science approaches and integrating vernacular knowledge
- Propose and test anti-climate gentrification tool, prioritizing residents’ voices and preferences
In these videos, we explain how heat justice is becoming an increasingly important aspect within the wider issue of climate justice. Access to cooler, greener neighborhoods is often a feature and a privilege of wealthier communities, while marginalized and working class neighborhoods remain at risk to the impacts of a warming climate and severe heat waves. We interviewed key figures from urban research centers, city councils, and community associations from Barcelona and Boston illustrate how these two cities have become paradigmatic examples of heat injustice.
Watch the full playlist here.
