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The politics of urban greening: an introduction
Abstract
Global enthusiasm for nature in cities is at high point. Australia is no exception, where there is a great deal of policy momentum and research interest in urban greening. The challenges presented by increasing urban heat associated with climate change, greater awareness of the potential social, physical and psychological benefits of exposure to ecologies for people, and recognition of cities as vital habitats for more-than-humans are central tenants of urban greening enthusiasm. Yet, there is a need for a more critical lens on urban greening in Australia. One that interrogates the purported normative, apolitical and instrumental benefits of greening, to position greening within a trajectory of the power relations, settler-colonialism, socio-ecological processes and capital flows that constitute the urban. This editorial introducing the special issue on urban greening politics explores how different conceptions of urban natures – green space, urban forestry and green infrastructure – have been put to work, before outlining the potential of ‘urban greening’ as the terminology for a more politically sensitive and process-orientated framing. The editorial concludes with a summary of the contributions to the special issue.
... Our findings confirm that this issue also applies to cities in LAC, and those that increase their social inequities are reducing their vegetation cover and/or fragmenting its distribution, with greening policies not adequately addressing these issues. Equity and accessibility to greening require policy responses that ensure that the public benefits from the process are accessible to all (Anguelovski et al., 2020;Cooke, 2020). As several authors from LAC have previously documented, urbanization patterns in LAC may lead to a concentration of vegetation gain in more affluent sections of the cities (Vásquez et al., 2017;Dobbs et al., 2018;Vásquez et al., 2019;Ju et al., 2021;Flores et al., 2022). ...
... Our work addresses environmental inequities on a unidimensional aspect of equity by just testing the effect of economic inequities on urban vegetation. But inequities are not only economic, and addressing equity in policy from age, gender, race, culture and disability perspectives is also needed to promote benefits of greening for all (Cooke et al., 2020). ...
... For example, greening efforts in vulnerable communities may leads to gentrification. Greening policies can focus on promoting incremental greening in communities instead of large greening projects that lead to gentrification and the displacement of most vulnerable residents (Wolch et al., 2014;Cooke, 2020). For policies to be implemented adequately it is necessary to understand the democratic process (Campbell, 2015) in which they are inserted to align community and political necessities to the practicalities of their implementations. ...
As cities opt for green policies to address urban socio-ecological challenges it becomes important to evaluate how the urban landscape responds to them, and if these responses are strengthening the benefits of nature for all. The Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region is one of the most biodiverse and urbanized regions of the world, which makes it imperative to understand how greening policies have impacted the distribution, accessibility, and quantity of vegetated areas in cities through time. Using a landscape ecology approach, we explored the effects of local urban dynamics on the pathways of urban vegetation in ten LAC capital cities in the last 20 years. Our results showed a great fluctuation of vegetation cover change for the region, with Santiago (Chile) losing more than 10% of its urban vegetation to Brasilia gaining 19%, while fragmentation and inequities in the distribution of vegetation increased in all cities. Cities followed four pathways of vegetation change, displaying different patterns of change in fragmentation, size of the vegetated patches and their clustering. This discloses that the greening policies and actions adopted in LAC cities led to increased vegetation cover, or avoided its loss, but did not assure a better distribution of the green and its benefits. Vegetation in LAC cities are still fragmented, where vegetation is not connected and is not equitably distributed, showing that policies in place have not addressed distributional injustice yet. This is corroborated by the assessment of drivers of change where we found social factors were the most important determinants of urban vegetation dynamics. Results from our study provide evidence for developing policies towards urban greening and connectivity, not only to prevent further biodiversity loss but also for creating more resilient communities and cities that address environmental inequities.
... GI planning that respects and considers the local characteristics and features of Australian cities is a developing field of study, and all the state governments are trying to incorporate the GI concept in developing high-level policies [35]. For example, urban forestry strategies aim to increase tree canopy cover, and water sensitive urban design (WSUD) targets managing water resources by designing site-specific green spaces such as rain gardens and bio-swales. ...
... Accordingly, all potential green spaces at different scales with cultural values and environmental benefits should be identified to delineate a robust GI plan. Different types of nature (designed, native and informal) and the nativeness potentials in GI planning and governance need further research [35,80]. For instance, the potential of private land-uses in GI planning can be incorporated into GI planning by developing policies and guidelines [57]. ...
... Researchers have addressed the necessity of a critical review and examination of the urban greening policy and practice in Australian cities [35]. For example, more research is required regarding the implementation of nativeness within the urban environment and finding a balance between the ornamental character of UGS and the biodiversity conservation goals [19,84]. ...
Canberra, a city known as a “garden city” that emerged in the early twentieth century, is developing at a speedy rate. The compact city vision for Canberra was announced in ACT Planning Strategy 2018 while the city encounters climate change impacts. Although urban compaction has its own benefits, it is considered a challenge for maintaining and developing the quality and quantity of urban green spaces. Canberra owns a unique urban design legacy and is known for its bush capital/garden city character, which has intertwined the social and ecological layers of the city. The concern around urban compaction and densification calls for holistic green infrastructure (GI) planning to balance the built and non-built infrastructure. To do so, it is necessary to understand the underlying social-cultural and ecological layers of Canberra’s green spaces and the Ecosystem Services (ESS) they offer. The application of multiple ESS in the current GI planning and governance practices is another issue that needs to be examined to inform future development. Thus, this qualitative research seeks to understand the ESS discourses in Canberra’s GI and the challenges in applying these ESS in planning and governance. We used a socio-ecological approach to design the research and understand the multidimensional values and benefits of Canberra’s green spaces. We adopted semi-structured interviews with twelve experts from relevant disciplines with specific knowledge of Canberra’s urban landscape and green spaces to find out the socio-ecological synopsis of Canberra’s GI and green spaces governance. We found that it is necessary to mainstream multiple ESS in Canberra’s GI to amplify the existing socio-ecological values. The abundance of green spaces in Canberra can be better used to make a multifunctional landscape that serves multiple ESS. However, we identified the maintenance and budget issues as the main challenges that can be addressed by improving community engagement. To design an effective GI network and mainstream ESS in green spaces, the planning and governance system should employ a transdisciplinary, multi-object and multi-scale approach and state-of-the-art technologies. Moreover, this research underlined the importance of a protocol and guidelines that monitor the landscape projects’ design and delivery correspondence to the high-level policies.
... Promotional material communicates a variety of 'normative and instrumental benefits' of greening (Cooke, 2020, 138) focused on people rather than the environment, and claims that the multi-layered superstructure that covers most of the project maximizes trees and greenery, minimizes the use of personal cars to reduce pollution and the chance of accidents, and encourages walking and cycling as the main modes of transportation. Although a number of international awards have recognized Forest City's efforts at green building and infrastructure 1 , awards that champion greening depoliticize the project and obscure its many troubling aspects (Cooke, 2020;Perkins et al., 2004). This article draws on recent scholarship that critically examines the politics of urban greening, a topic that has been greatly expanded in recent years and rigorously interrogated in a special issue of Australian Geographer edited by Cooke (2020). ...
... Although a number of international awards have recognized Forest City's efforts at green building and infrastructure 1 , awards that champion greening depoliticize the project and obscure its many troubling aspects (Cooke, 2020;Perkins et al., 2004). This article draws on recent scholarship that critically examines the politics of urban greening, a topic that has been greatly expanded in recent years and rigorously interrogated in a special issue of Australian Geographer edited by Cooke (2020). It also engages with scholarship on colonial-era greening to interrogate the power dynamics behind Forest City's greening strategy. ...
... Specifically, we suggest that CGPV instrumentalizes urban greening to appeal to Chinese buyers, control access to the gated new city, and preclude criticism. In doing so, Forest City draws from narratives of urban greening within China that promote social exclusivity and environmental health benefits, illustrating how property developers and investors from China are key actors in circulating norms and aesthetics from China internationally and exemplifying the global mobility of urban greening approaches often devoid of socio-ecological context (Cooke, 2020;Peck and Theodore, 2010;McCann, 2017). ...
Forest City is a new city project being built from scratch on four artificial islands off the coast of Malaysia by one of China's largest property developers. Designed to accommodate up to 700,000 people, Forest City is created by and for Chinese nationals as a gated, luxury enclave in Malaysia. While Forest City is built on top of Malaysia's largest seagrass field and destroys or damages coastal mangroves, the project is branded as a futuristic model green city, featuring dramatic green walls and lush gardens with intricate planting. The project is conceived as a superstructure, with the surface of the city dedicated to parks and gardens, recreational uses, and pedestrians and cyclists, while car traffic and parking is supposedly relegated underground. Building on recent critical scholarship on urban greening and colonial greening approaches, this article examines the power dynamics and multi-scalar politics of urban greening in a new foreign-built green city. Beyond simply reflecting a growing global enthusiasm for nature in cities, Forest City strategically promotes a particular narrative of urban greening as a way to preclude criticism while serving the project's economic and geopolitical goals.
... State and local governments have developed similar initiatives. In our cities and regional centres, local councils have established sophisticated urban forest strategies that aim to increase tree canopy cover and expand green space networks (Cooke, 2020). These strategies are often deployed as policy solutions to the problems caused by urbanisation, climate change, and economic competition (Jones & Instone, 2016). ...
... Australian geographers have long problematised key concepts-such as nativeness and boundedness-that inform and impair nature conservation strategies (Gill et al., 2009;Head, 2012). This journal's recent special issue on the politics of urban greening extends this lineage to new spaces and conceptions of nature (Cooke, 2020). Together, these geographies are joined in resisting the false binaries and technocratic approaches present in environmental management. ...
... In this paper, I bring the critical interest in co-production to a radically practical question: what drives people to voluntarily care for (urban) natures? While policymakers warm to nature-based solutions, their successful implementation will largely depend on the public's capacity for 'civic stewardship' (Cooke, 2020). State programs have long relied on volunteer labour (Fisher et al., 2012) and still deliver on-ground conservation work through community groups and non-governmental organisations (see: Measham & Barnett, 2008). ...
Australian governments are increasingly enrolling ecological restoration and urban afforestation to address climate change and support the transition towards sustainability. While policymakers warm to these 'nature-based solutions', their successful implementation will depend on the public's capacity to care for trees and spaces of (urban) nature. This underscores the importance of understanding what drives people to voluntarily care for trees and (urban) natures on public and private land. In conversation with existing research on urban forestry and environmental volunteerism, this paper tests the proposition that attention to atmospheres could enrich our knowledge of the forces that mediate care and volunteer motivation. Its novel empirical contribution is a description of the aesthetic, affective, and semiotic contours of two arboreal atmospheres called grace and vibrancy. The paper concludes by reflecting on the connection between these atmospheres and participants' capacity to care for the urban forest. It argues atmosphere could be a richly generative concept and offers some provisional conclusions about the empirical, methodological, and theoretical value it can bring to geographical-led studies of urban forestry and environmental volunteerism.
... Urban greening initiatives appear to be expanding around the world (Cooke, 2020), informed by a growing evidence base about the range of potential benefits they offer, from helping tackle climate change to making local areas more attractive to live in and visit. Research seeking to identify the range of resultant benefits has helped to support the case for policies promoting urban greening, evident in the rapidly expanding academic and technical evidence base around terms such as green infrastructure, nature-based solutions, natural capital, and ecosystem valuation (e.g., Counsell and Stoneman, 2018;eftec Environmental Finance Countryscape, 2019;Mell, 2019Mell, , 2021DEFRA, 2020). ...
... Seen from this perspective, work on green infrastructure and natural capital can be viewed as embodying instrumental and normative thinking about the value of policies to improve the environment (Cooke, 2020), meeting societal imperatives such as addressing climate change. Green infrastructure projects to create or expand urban forests or develop sustainable urban drainage systems, for example, can be accompanied by claims about their recreational value and their role in improving biodiversity, reducing water run-off to help prevent flooding, and contributing to carbon capture. ...
This article introduces the idea of hybrid rationalities as a complement to and extension of existing scholarship on hybrid governance and hybrid infrastructure. The research presented here also contributes to work on soft spaces and spatial imaginaries, which has mainly focused on planning and regeneration, by extending consideration to geo-environmental imaginaries and environmental soft spaces. A case study of the Mersey Belt region, which stretches between Manchester and Liverpool in England, reveals the ways in which multiple forms of new rationalities have been absorbed into the work of those looking to promote strategic environmental thinking that works at landscape scale, that is above the level of the individual site. In the process, multiple new geo-environmental spatial imaginaries have been created as part of the process of attracting funders and stakeholders. These new spatial imaginaries have been accompanied by experiments in creating new environmental soft spaces, supported by increasingly hybridized forms of governance in which the roles and rationalities of different stakeholders have to some extent blurred. In the process, actors have shaped, and shared distinctive understandings of how projects to support nature can be used to support wider goals such as addressing climate change, economic regeneration and social well-being.
... At the same time, NBS have multiple justice trade-offs (Sekulova et al., 2021). NBS are often developed in high-income areas, with little attention for the needs of socially marginalised groups and issues of climate justice Cooke, 2020;Verheij & Nunes, 2021;Wolch et al., 2014). Numerous, often interrelated causes of environmental injustices have been demonstrated, including powerimbalances Woroniecki et al., 2020), narrow definitions of values of nature and knowledge claims (Pascual et al., 2021), low levels of linking and bridging social capital (Agger & Jensen, 2015), and lack of resources for implementing and upscaling community-initiated sustainability projects (Dorst et al., 2021;Mattijssen et al., 2018). ...
... The connection between multifunctionality and GI is evident in the European Union's GI strategy inclusion of multifunctionality as one of its principal components (Hansen and Pauleit 2014). However, the planning, production and management of GI often obscures questions of who or what belongs in green spaces, and there are calls for greater political responsiveness to issues of social equity and justice for multispecies in green spaces and GI (Phillips and Atchison 2020;Cooke 2020). ...
... Alarming projections for global climate change are prompting scientists and allied researchers to emphasise the roles trees have in cities for human health and well-being (Coutts & Hahn, 2015;Kumar et al., 2019), climate amelioration and liveability (Kroeger et al., 2018;Norton et al., 2015), biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Le Roux et al., 2018;Pickett & Cadenasso, 2008), and sustainability (Turner-Skoff & Cavender, 2019). However, neither urban greening nor trees are universally good or equally valued (Cooke, 2020;Wolch et al., 2014). Differing values, experiences, and priorities often place urban trees at the centre of conflict and controversy (Cariñanos et al., 2017;Roman et al., 2021;Roy et al., 2012). ...
International and national policies are being used to prioritise increases in urban forest coverage and diversity, support equitable access to urban greenspaces, and advance sound environmental governance outcomes. Yet, the relationship between people’s feelings about urban trees and public policy remains under‐examined. Drawing on a unique dataset from an email‐a‐tree initiative, the objectives of this study were to identify how concern and connection for urban trees is expressed and determine how insights from the initiative might inform urban forest governance. We examined emails sent to trees using a mixed‐methods approach that included qualitative coding, VADER sentiment analysis, and statistical and spatial analyses. We identified and considered three themes based on emails sent by members of the public and municipal tree inventory data. Those themes were location, age and loss, and type. In accord with other studies, overall sentiment for urban trees was positive and underscored people’s strong connections with trees, often based on routine and repeated engagements. However, people noticed and were concerned about a limited range of trees and tree types in urban settings. Based in Melbourne, Australia, our case study shows how examining feelings for trees helps residents and researchers understand urban tree relationships and gauge how those designing public engagement programs might learn from such an initiative to create meaningful opportunities for active participation in governance.
... De esta manera, el apego al lugar puede detonar sentido de comunidad, confianza social, solidaridad y autoeficacia, propiciando residentes activos tanto en defender o gestionar el cambio de sus barrios (Drury & Reicher, 2005), como en buscar soluciones adaptativas in situ frente a problemas comunes (Marshall et al., 2012;Fong et al, 2019). Así, las dimensiones sociales y físicas de los barrios afectan la producción de vínculos sociales locales y la cohesión vecinal (Peters et al., 2010;Dai, 2011;Zhu et al., 2012;Krellenberg et al, 2014), dando pie a una sostenida atención al desarrollo de intervenciones, planificaciones y políticas urbanas centradas en constituir, promover y transformar estas dimensiones barriales (Hartig et al., 2014;Kelly et al, 2022;Akers et al., 2019;Cooke, 2020;Ulmer et al., 2016). Por lo tanto, el apego aumenta la predisposición a residir en el barrio y viceversa (Lu et al., 2018), denotando una relación positiva y percepción subjetiva de conexión de los residentes con sus lugares de vida (Marshall et al, 2012;Lu et al., 2018). ...
A partir del estudio de caso realizado sobre el barrio Michaihue, cuyo origen se produce por viviendas sociales progresivas en extensión y otras en altura, analizamos la posible incidencia que la tipología arquitectónica puede tener en la percepción declarada de preferencia y predilección barrial, entendiendo estos elementos como una base positiva para la generación de vínculos sociales vecinales. Metodológicamente, analizamos y contrastamos las respuestas de un CENSO de viviendas y hogares, además de un levantamiento de redes personales aplicado a vecinos propietarios de ambas tipologías. Nuestros hallazgos demuestran que, a igual contexto urbano y atributos individuales, la tipología habitacional marca diferencias al momento de expresar preferencia por vivir en su barrio y si optaría por quedarse o no en él. Sin embargo, la evidencia no nos permite afirmar si esto afectaría las dinámicas de producción de vínculos sociales vecinales. Finalmente, exponemos que una tipología arquitectónica “progresiva”, es decir, que permite la participación del propietario en su modificación-expansión, da mejores condiciones para una positiva percepción del barrio, lo que por sí solo no necesariamente altera las dinámicas de creación y rubrica de redes sociales vecinales.Palabras clave:vivienda progresiva, apego barrial, redes sociales vecinales
... Two decades ago, Cloke and Jones (2002) brought attention to trees as 'place-makers' that alter material and immaterial aspects in situations and locations. In terms of urban trees in Australia, geographers examine inequities of urban greening, attitudes toward and valuations of urban nature, factors affecting greenspace governance (including conflicts among professionals and residents), and lived experiences, digitalisation, and planning of more-than-human cities (Boulton et al., 2021;Cooke, 2020;Kirkpatrick et al., 2013;Phillips & Atchison, 2020;Prebble et al., 2021). Amid investigations of urban trees, Jones (2014) argues that there is a need to carefully examine the affective exchanges among trees and people. ...
Gratitude goes to the heart of discussions about ethics, care, and responsibility in a more-than-human world. Surprisingly, gratitude remains peripheral to geographical considerations of human-environment interrelations and sustainability. Moving beyond questions about whether gratitude to nature is sensible, we develop an understanding of gratitude that is relational, emotional, and practical (or enacted). We argue that focus on gratitude draws attention to a kind of attachment thus far neglected in geography, as well as enabling a new lens for what people value about their everyday lives, the labour of nonhuman-others in fostering a ‘good life’, and efforts to recognise and reinforce human-nonhuman interconnection. Drawing on emails written to trees in Naarm/Melbourne, we illustrate gratitude to trees for: support of life, aesthetic pleasures, moments of distraction, and solace in difficult times. Whether tantalisingly short or in-depth narration, individually and collectively, the emails demonstrate how people conceptualise and practice gratitude to nature in their everyday lives. Through attending to the power of small, embodied, emplaced gestures of thanks to trees, our analysis also suggests new ways of understanding people’s commitments to nature and possibilities for securing better futures for urban forests.
... Tidball and Krasny [44] emphasise the active cultivation within a social-ecological or community context and operationalise greening as an active and integrated approach to the appreciation, stewardship and management of living elements of social-ecological systems. Cooke [45] acknowledges the importance of the political dimension of urban greening by highlighting that using the 'verbing' of green holds potential for 'or a more critical yet constructive dialogue on issues of sustainability, equity, justice, more than human agency and the politics of urban development'. ...
Former industrial areas in Europe are being redeveloped into residential and recreational spaces, often including sustainability initiatives. This study explores how the co-governance and management of a productive urban open space contributes to sustainable transformations, and aims to identify the opportunities and challenges that multi-actor design teams face when co-designing sustainable solutions. To achieve this goal, the landscape design process in Klosterøya urban park in Skien municipality, Norway, a privately owned yet publicly regulated park, is used as a case study in co-governance and analysed using the theoretical combined governance and management model developed. Data were collected through the observations of project meetings, document analysis and semi-structured interviews with the multi-actor design team. The results indicated that the working method, through co-creation, produced opportunities for sustainable urban agriculture, enhanced biodiversity, testbeds and water and resource circularities in the landscape, while ensuring a learning process and users’ involvement. Willingness to invest due to the lack of technical knowledge and soil contamination are revealed as key challenges. Conclusions emphasise the significance of co-creative landscape practices for productive urban open spaces and sustainable urban transformations, providing insights for an informed analysis of co-governance cases through the combined governance and management model.
... Some of these actors deliver intimate biographical texts of their personal experiences with nature, such as Olivia Barratt noted above, reverently immersing herself in a natural cathedral 'near her home' (Table 2, image 5). This new focus on nearby nature, which might signal a rising interest of BHA in encouraging experiences with nature beyond its reserves, coincides with rising interest in urban nature in Australian cities (Cooke, 2020). ...
Imaginaries of protected areas as state-based fortresses have been challenged by expansion of the global nature conservation estate on non-government lands, notably in contexts such as Australia where neoliberal reform has been strong. Little is known about the implications of this change for the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation. Images are central to public understandings of nature conservation. We thus investigate the visual communication of environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) involved in private protected areas in Australia, with particular focus on Bush Heritage Australia (BHA). We employ a three-part design encompassing quantitative and qualitative methods to study the visual imaginaries underlying nature conservation in BHA's magazines and the web homepages of it and four other ENGOs over 2004–2020. We find that visual imaginaries changed across time, as ENGOs went through an organisational process of professionalisation comprising three dynamics: legitimising, marketising, and differentiating. An imaginary of dedicated Western volunteer groups protecting scenic wilderness was replaced by the spectacle of uplifting and intimate individual encounters with native nature. Amenable to working within rather than transforming dominant political-economic structures, the new imaginary empowers professional ENGOs and their partners as primary carers of nature. It advertises a mediated access to spectacular nature that promises positive emotions and redemption for environmental wrongs to financial supporters of ENGOs. These findings reveal the role of non-government actors under neoliberal conditions in the use of visual representations to shift the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation.
... Recognising the benefits of contact with nature, urban greening transformations that include the creation of rooftop gardens, street verge revegetation, tree planting and the expansion of urban parkland have become popular urban regeneration strategies both globally and in Australia (Akers et al., 2019;Cooke, 2020). Policy makers anticipate that the regeneration of spaces that have fallen into patterns of disuse and/or have been environmentally degraded will result in better mental and physical health outcomes, as well as community cohesion and positive sociality (Coffey et al., 2020). ...
Urban greening is a popular nature-led regeneration policy based on the assumption that provision of greenspace improves the health and wellbeing of proximate communities. Entangled within these objectives are environmental justice principles that seek to remedy historical and contemporary concerns related to contaminated areas of post-industrial cities. This paper draws upon findings from an evaluation study of an urban greening project in a socio-economically disadvantaged suburb with a history of toxic contamination. Our aim is to understand if better and more greenspace derives improved social outcomes over time. Central to this inquiry is an attention to resident perspectives of the environment before and after greening to understand if meeting expectations of regeneration and environmental justice impacts upon subjective wellbeing.
... 738) there must be consideration of the neoliberal capitalist paradigm as the basis of their design that promotes and obfuscates the commodification of nature. Furthermore, Jones and Instone (2016) and Cooke (2020) highlight the strong focus on quantitative data collection and commodification of Australia's urban forest to date as a product of historical epistemologies. While there is emerging evidence of qualitative data analysis, particularly via platforms, our findings reflect these critiques as urban forests were reduced to numerical values within digital mapping, databases, and policies. ...
These are uncertain times in the Anthropocene, where the health and resilience of all urban inhabitants should be key themes for cities striving for sustainability. To this end, local councils in Australia are applying digital technologies with increasing complexity as components of their urban forest management. This paper applies a more-than-human lens to analyse Australian local council urban forest policies, documents and project information for their inclusion and application of digital technologies. In this scoping review, digital geographies informed data collection to answer questions about the type, use and ownerships of tree data, and more-than-real and ‘lively data’ concepts were employed to extend their discussion.
Our analysis found that local government policies focused on general urban tree data and canopy percentages and utilised this data to justify and create policy and program parameters. There was a general lack of more-than-human considerations beyond the focus on trees in creating and designing smart urban forests, but it is unclear whether this was due to technical limitations, council desires or other factors. Challenges identified for successful outcomes included balancing priorities, access to resources and information, technological constraints, and community factors such as capacity to engage and cultural values. Digital technologies that facilitate smart urban forests tended to reinforce and re-solidify Western values. However, strengths of current applications are also evident, and we explore how they provide more-than-real possibilities for human-nature relationships to deepen and foster collaborations between disparate groups and entities in urban environments. Greater consideration and acknowledgment of the more-than-human and understanding of the more-than-real in co-creation and co-design of digital technologies and their applications may facilitate more positive outcomes for human and non-human urban inhabitants.
... La producción de un espacio urbano sostenible y resiliente a los efectos del COVID-19, así como las propuestas de investigación planteadas en este estudio, se han de diferenciar de aquellas propuestas de urbanización basadas en las llamadas ciudades inteligentes (Kunzmann, 2020) y no quedar entrampada dentro de los límites epistemológicos que marca el urbanismo ecológico (Cooke, 2020), pues estas expresiones por impulsar un cambio en la forma de construcción de ciudades solo prioriza la conservación ambiental pero sin atender lo relacionado al crecimiento económico y el desarrollo humano; empero, el COVID-19 ha puesto sobre la mesa la necesidad de pensar la investigación urbana a partir de nuevos horizontes como puede ser la socioformación y el desarrollo social sostenible. La emergencia del nuevo coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 indica la pertinencia de reflexionar y llevar a cabo una investigación científica sobre las capacidades de corte socioterritorial que se requieren para lograr una transición hacia la sostenibilidad y resiliencia urbana en referencia a los efectos económicos y sociales derivados del COVID-19 (Luna-Nemecio 2020). ...
COVID-19 has exposed a series of economic, environmental, and social vulnerabilities as part of the exacerbation of the con- tradictions and conflicts that characterized daily urban life. This study proposes some general lines of research that must be taken up to redefine the academic study on the urban agenda and the definition of politics that aim to advance towards urban sustainability and resilience. The methodology was based on a qualitative documentary analysis that allowed the search, selection, and critical synthesis of scientific bibliography according to the research categories proposed. The results show three general lines of research that can be considered to investigate cities about the processes of sustainable urbanization and resilience to the socio-territorial effects of COVID-19. The study discusses how urban sustainability and resilience have been addressed by those proposals derived from smart cities and based on ecological urbanism, while it is necessary to rethink urban research towards the transition for urban sustainability and resilience.
... On one hand, the current volume provides a diagnosis of the justice implications embedded in recent efforts to renature cities. Urban planning and geography literatures in particular provide compounding evidence supporting the assertion that new green interventions are increasingly taking place in privileged urban areas, with benefits that accrue mostly to the middle and upper classes and ethnically or racially privileged residents, often at the expense of more vulnerable social groups , Cooke, 2020, Verheij & Corrêa Nunes, 2020, Plüschke-Altof & Sooväli-Sepping, 2020, Connolly, Trebic, Anguelovski, & Wood, 2018, Gould & Lewis, 2017, Wolch, Byrne, & Newell, 2014, Hamilton & Curran, 2013, Pearsall, 2010. Placed in the breadth of existing scholarship, this SI aims to explore the type of socioenvironmental contradictions and contestations emerging through the deployment of NBS in a range of geographies. ...
On the one hand the Special Issue provides a diagnosis of the justice implications embedded in recent efforts to renature cities. Placed in the breadth of existing scholarship, it aims to explore the type of socio-environmental contradictions and contestations emerging through the deployment of nature-based solutions in a range of geographies. On the other hand, this Special Issue works towards shaping a prognosis, or a potential future for the governance of nature-based solutions, that brings social justice, indigenous knowledge and more-than-human thinking into the design and execution of projects on nature-based solutions.
More generally, this Special Issue contributes to the growing literature in critical urban geography, planning and ecology on how different types of ‘natures’ are deployed and instrumentalized to defend dominant economic representations. Yet, for nature-based solutions to truly stand up to their promise, the logic and apparatus of urban development need to be decoupled from the ‘growth-at-all-costs’ mental cage by exploring degrowth narratives, for example as only then can environmental justice in its various manifestations be sought, defended and unfolded.
... The papers in this issue discuss a diversity of urban greening projects and politics in Melbourne/Naarm, ranging from the social, technological and biological lives of urban forests (Phillips and Atchinson 2018), shifting regimes of governance (Coffey et al. 2020), diverse and affective public attachments to green spaces (de Kleyn, Mumaw and Corney 2019); practices of commoning in the more-than-human city (Cooke, Landau-Ward and Rickards); the politics of urban greening on First Nations' Country (Porter, Hurst and Grandinetti 2020) and the untidy propositions of the dirty, green city (Steele, Davison and Reed 2020). An important thread that runs throughout the papers is a move away from seeing urban greening as an instrumental outcome of urban planning and design (Cooke 2020). The papers, individually and collectively, draw critical attention to socio-ecological stratifications and injustices bound up within the lively infrastructures, multispecies entanglements and property regimes that are made possible through performances of the green city. ...
‘Urban re-generations' is written as an afterword to the special issue of Australian Geographer on ‘The Politics of Urban Greening in Australian Cities'. The collection prompts a deep questioning of reparative and regenerative work associated with greening, green spaces and green infrastructures. The climate-driven 2019-2020 bushfire crisis and COVID-19 have amplified the visibility of the more-than-human connectivity of our cities and the deep underlying structures of social and environmental inequity underpinning a variety of urban green spaces and agendas. Inspired by the articles in this special issue, the afterword explores how we might call back the grammars and practices of regeneration from their service to the neo-liberal, settler-colonial city and instead nurture reparative de-colonial practices that aid in the collaborative work of re-composing, becoming into better relation with, and working in modes of situated historical and cultural difference, with green and just cities.
The article is devoted to the creation of a fundamentally new scientific and methodological basis for the adaptation of construction project stakeholders to dynamic shifts in the construction market through the implementation of renewal and change management in the form of a target project for the introduction of innovative technologies in the construction organization. The urgency of revising the content of processes and approaches to the organization of the construction and investment process based on the analysis of global trends has been worked out. It is substantiated that, taking into account the operational and production features of the functioning of the developer as an executor of works in construction projects, with the further development and implementation of the BIM platform management industry model, it can form an information-technological integration basis for the reorganization of the technological processes of the construction enterprise. It is proven that the novelty of innovations is evaluated by technological parameters and from the market position. Product and process innovations are distinguished by technological parameters. A condition for the formation of an environment capable of stimulating the innovative development of construction enterprises is the formation of an innovative business system, which is based on integrated multi-level management aimed at the spread of innovative competences, taking as a basis modern concepts of the idea of digital transformation, the creation of clusters, as the newest forms of association of participants for achieving synergistic effects of development, and creating a platform of innovative development with functional infrastructural support of the construction organization.
City road verges often represent existing green space and provide opportunities for ecological enhancement. Urban greenspace improvement initiatives at the residential verge scale require genuine community support and engagement for success. We examined a community-based voluntary assisted verge greening program designed to enhance greenspace connectivity using native plants in a local municipality in Perth, Western Australia. A social survey of verge-greening program participants and non-participants was conducted to understand factors associated with community involvement. Results indicated general resident support for the program, where both groups viewed the program objectives positively. However, non-participants were less convinced, than participants, of the likelihood that the verge greening program would achieve its aims and the merits of some aims. This paper provides insight into a voluntary community engagement tool for developing urban green space connectivity and enhancing natural values at the residential roadside verge level.
Increasingly, responsibility for addressing climate change has been placed on cities. However, cities often lack the knowledge and resources to adequately respond. In the U.S., this task can be especially difficult for cities operating in Republican-led states, which are resistant to adopting green energy and job initiatives. Despite this, limited research has examined the strategies that cities working in conservative environments adopt to overcome such challenges. This paper examines the strategies that city leaders employed in Knoxville, Tennessee, between 2007 and 2015 to accelerate a green recovery from the Great Recession. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, focus group, and document analyses, the paper demonstrates how leaders initially operated outside of public purview and then strategically rolled out programs and messaging that capitalized on industry strengths and resonated with popular politics.
Urban greening is attracting considerable research and practical attention for its contributions to conserving biodiversity, mitigating urban heat and enhancing the liveability and sustainability of cities and urban areas. Much of the urban greening research is concentrated on major cities, with little focus on the needs and experiences with urban greening in regional cities and towns. This paper addresses this by presenting a case study of an urban greening project, ‘Naturally Cooler Towns’, focused on regional towns in north-east Victoria, Australia. The project was undertaken by the Goulburn Murray Climate Alliance, a regional alliance of local governments, catchment management authorities and a state government department. As the region faces increasing temperatures and impacts of more frequent heatwaves, the project aimed to review tree management practices and identify opportunities for increasing canopy cover with appropriate species for ‘climate adapted street trees’. We examine how urban greening is planned and implemented in these towns, and the roles of the regional alliance in providing a forum for collaborative adaptive governance. The regional alliance plays a key role as an intermediary facilitating approaches that demonstrate situatedness: credibility, salience and legitimacy. The paper contributes towards increased understandings of urban greening approaches beyond the major cities.
Imaginaries of protected areas as state-based fortresses have been challenged by expansion of the global nature conservation estate on non-government lands, notably in contexts such as Australia where neoliberal reform has been strong. Little is known about the implications of this change for the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation. Images are central to public understandings of nature conservation. We thus investigate the visual communication of environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) involved in private protected areas in Australia, with particular focus on Bush Heritage Australia (BHA). We employ a three-part design encompassing quantitative and qualitative methods to study the visual imaginaries underlying nature conservation in BHA's magazines and the web homepages of it and four other ENGOs over 2004–2020. We find that visual imaginaries changed across time, as ENGOs went through an organisational process of professionalisation comprising three dynamics: legitimising, marketising, and differentiating. An imaginary of dedicated Western volunteer groups protecting scenic wilderness was replaced by the spectacle of uplifting and intimate individual encounters with native nature. Amenable to working within rather than transforming dominant political-economic structures, the new imaginary empowers professional ENGOs and their partners as primary carers of nature. It advertises a mediated access to spectacular nature that promises positive emotions and redemption for environmental wrongs to financial supporters of ENGOs. These findings reveal the role of non-government actors under neoliberal conditions in the use of visual representations to shift the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation.
In Australia, COVID-19 has accelerated the reliance on resiliency as a tool of post-pandemic urban recovery. We draw on critical literature on resilience to examine its use in proposals for urban agriculture in cities after COVID-19. Crucially, we situate the pandemic in a longer history of settler-colonialism, and in the role of agriculture in the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We argue that the pandemic conditions which urban agriculture is currently operating within risks perpetuating urban colonial governmentality. This paper calls for a rethinking of urban agriculture for future cities by radically disrupting the foundational colonial logics of urban spatiality.
This article considers the more‐than‐human implications of environmental gentrification in cities. Through a synthesis of existing environmental gentrification literature, we highlight gentrification scholarship that has emphasized natural ecologies, animals, or other non‐human actors in its processes. We propose the concept of (un)commons as a conceptual basis that offers generative pathways forward for centering a more‐than‐human politics in environmental gentrification scholarship as well as ways to interpret the everyday impacts of environmental gentrification on more‐than‐human beings and spaces in cities.
COVID‐19 has brought the human world to crisis. This work examines how nonhuman animals are also connected to the pandemic in three ways that emerged early in the crisis. First, COVID‐19 is a zoonotic disease that reached humans via nonhuman animal hosts. Animal geographers and others cast light on the spread and control of animal diseases and on the “almost animal,” including the microorganism. Second, the outbreak is understood to have transferred to humans in a market selling live animals in Wuhan, China. Disputes over the source of the outbreak signal the complexity that characterises the commodification of animals. Third, social restrictions have seen city streets empty of people. In the ensuing quiet, unexpected animals have entered cities or begun to behave differently. The arrivals, and the wonder they have sparked among people, raise questions about who and what is deemed to belong in the city. This commentary aims to unpack how geographers and those in related fields might turn to the animals to analyse and respond to the pandemic and other disasters. Through these three case studies, I find that the lives of human and nonhuman animals are deeply connected, and yet relations are characterised by separation and objectification. I argue for further relational and political work to more deeply understand connections and their implications.
For cities to grow their urban forest canopy the formula appears rather straightforward: the right trees, plus the right conditions, plus the right care equals success. These simplified “tree chain of custody” steps, however, represent activities within a complex value-chain in Canada. Given that there is heightened demand for urban tree planting as natural climate solutions become the norm, how can we prepare the value-chain to meet these demands? To answer this question, we outline the pathways by which trees presently go from nurseries into urban and peri-urban areas. Delineating the actors, roles, and present barriers to success exposes the complexity of the process and relationships in the value-chain, as there are distinct phases with multiple actor groups involved who influence, and are influenced, by one another. We explore the issues that pose prominent challenges to, as well as opportunities for, the value-chain. Emergent themes include communication, forecasting demand and timing, underpricing and undervaluing tree establishment, lack of awareness on the importance of soils, juvenile tree health, species selection, and gaps in evidence-based decision support tools. The touchstones of science and innovation, collaboration, and knowledge mobilization are pertinent for the value-chain in Canada to draw upon to navigate the future.
Australia and New Zealand share many historical and contemporary commonalities. These define five contemporary forest environmental frontiers—for First Nations peoples, between agriculture and forestry, in forest management, in urban and peri-urban environments, and in relation to climate change. In both countries, the First Nations frontier is expanding in scale and significance with those peoples’ rights to land and forests. Frontiers with agriculture and in forest management are longstanding but
dynamic and as yet little realised in relation to the need for forest and landscape restoration. Both countries are highly urbanised, elevating the significance of the urban and periurban frontier, particularly in the context of climate change. In both countries, forests will be profoundly impacted by climate change and are central to mitigation and adaptation strategies. Experience within and intersections between the frontiers offer encouraging prospects for synergies and for learning between the two countries and more widely.
Urban greening is about bringing vegetation into cities in ways that produce flourishing urban ecologies whilst also making cities more liveable for human inhabitants. We focus here on greening that is done through the maintenance or establishment of gardens, parks, urban forests and informal spaces. We argue that in contexts with established property law systems, such as Australia, making urban ecologies through greening is shaped heavily by relations of property tied to land. This includes constraining the extent to which urban greening can contribute to socio-ecologically just cities. We suggest that progressing greening that is more attentive to the geographies and temporalities of more-than-human life requires us to trouble the hold of property over greening. To do this we explore the possibilities opened up by the lens of urban commons/commoning. We engage with the emerging concept of more-than-human commoning as a way of attuning urban greening to nonhuman agency and affordances. We also grapple with the risk of obscuring or concealing difference between humans in the way commoning makes room for more-than-humans, especially in the context of settler-colonialism. We conclude by calling for a more overt politics of urban greening that encompasses diverse human and more-than-human experiences of the city.
In non-urban places of Australia, caring-as-Country frames natural resource management (NRM) as a practice of reciprocal, more-than-human care-giving (S. Suchet-Pearson, S. Wright, K. Lloyd, and L. Burarrwanga. 2013. ‘Caring as Country: towards and ontology of co-becoming in natural resource management.’ Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54 (2): 185–197). Caring-as-Country is an idea that encapsulates the entangled, reciprocal relationships that people have with, and as part of, agentic more-than-human worlds. In more urbanised places, however, practices of caring-as-Country are often unrecognised, undervalued and undocumented. In this paper we make explicit practices of caring, healing and rejuvenation at Yellomundee Regional Park, Darug Country in western Sydney. Our discussion of care, entanglement and reciprocity at Yellomundee focuses on two specific activities that embody caring-as-Country: the return of cultural burns and sustained presence on Country in the form of Darug-led culture camps. The Darug principle of yanama budyari gumada, to ‘walk with good spirit’, embodies and invites new ways of thinking and practising intercultural caring-as-Country in heavily colonised, urban places like Yellomundee. As we document the practices arising from this invitation, we consider its far-reaching implications for NRM and planning, and we expand on the importance of geographies of care for unceded urban places.
The urban forest has a significant impact on the city’s social and ecological performance. However, shrinking space and resources needed to care for trees means cultivating community care for the urban forest is an increasingly salient issue. To this end, the paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the powers shaping people’s capacity to care for trees. It identifies the body as one of these powers and turns to Deleuze and Guattari for a theory of corporeality that illuminates the body’s role in the process of becoming a ‘bushcarer’. This highlights the trans-corporeal practices and encounters that endow people with the skills and desire needed to care for the urban forest. With the ethical utility of the body being debated by social and cultural geographers, this article defends its potential by suggesting the body and its encounters are deeply implicated in the development of a dyadic capacity to care for the urban forest. For urban forestry, this means community engagement might be framed as an ethical event that facilitates experiments in bodily composition that might change our ways of thinking, feeling, and being with the urban forest.
To date, little is known about the extent to which the creation of municipal green spaces over an entire city addresses social or racial inequalities in the distribution of environmental amenities – or whether such an agenda creates contributes to green gentrification. In this study, we evaluate the effects of creating 18 green spaces in socially vulnerable neighborhoods of Barcelona during the 1990s and early 2000s. We examined the evolution over time of six socio-demographic gentrification indicators in the areas close to green spaces in comparison with the entire districts. Our results indicate that new parks in the old town and formerly industrialized neighborhoods seem to have experienced green gentrification. In contrast, most economically depressed areas and working-class neighborhoods with less desirable housing stock and more isolated from the city center gained vulnerable residents as they became greener, indicating a possible redistribution and greater concentration of vulnerable residents through the city.
There has been much debate about the effectiveness of different sized reserves for nature conservation. However, in human-dominated landscapes such as cities, conservation reserve systems are, by necessity, often determined without using conservation planning principles. This can result in reserve systems that are small, fragmented and disconnected. In this study, we conducted a floristic survey of 68 urban grassland conservation reserves to assess how reserves of different areas contribute to species conservation. Species accumulation curves, species-area relationships, and proportion of native cover were explored. We found that 87% of all native plant species were found in small reserves < 10 ha in size, more small reserves contained a greater number of species than few large reserves of a comparable area, and cover of native species in small reserves was no different than cover in large reserves. However, large reserves harboured more uncommon species than smaller reserves. This research has several important implications for conservation planning and design, highlighting that both small and large reserves can help to conserve native plant species in urban areas. However, a preference for large reserves over small ones is embedded in much conservation planning and management. There is a danger that a normative belief that large reserves are ‘good’ and small reserves are ‘bad’ has become entrenched in conservation thinking. While the theory and evidence showing the conservation benefits of large reserves over small reserves for some organisms is clear, in some cases, small reserves can make a substantial and genuine contribution to conservation outcomes.
Cities play important roles in the conservation of global biodiversity, particularly through the planning and management of urban green spaces (UGS). However, UGS management is subject to a complex assortment of interacting social, cultural, and economic factors, including governance, economics, social networks, multiple stakeholders, individual preferences, and social constraints. To help deliver more effective conservation outcomes in cities, we identify major challenges to managing biodiversity in UGS and important topics warranting further investigation. Biodiversity within UGS must be managed at multiple scales while accounting for various socioeconomic and cultural influences. Although the environmental consequences of management activities to enhance urban biodiversity are now beginning to be addressed, additional research and practical management strategies must be developed to balance human needs and perceptions while maintaining ecological processes.
Much planning theory has been undergirded by an ontological exceptionalism of humans. Yet, city planning does not sit outside of the eco-social realities co-producing the Anthropocene. Urban planners and scholars, therefore, need to think carefully and critically about who speaks for (and with) the nonhuman in place making. In this article, we identify two fruitful directions for planning theory to better engage with the imbricated nature of humans and nonhumans is recognised as characteristic of the Anthropocene – multispecies entanglements and becoming-world. Drawing on the more-than-human literature in urban and cultural geography and the environmental humanities, we consider how these terms offer new possibilities for productively rethinking the ontological exceptionalism of humans in planning theory. We critically explore how planning theory might develop inclusive, ethical relationships that can nurture possibilities for multispecies flourishing in diverse urban futures, the futures that are increasingly recognised as co-produced by nonhuman agents in the context of climate variability and change. This, we argue, is critical for developing climate-adaptive planning tools and narratives for the creation of socially and environmentally just multispecies cities.
In recent years the diverse primary food production activities in cities known as ‘urban agriculture’ have proliferated on the ground, in policy and in academic discourse. Most explicit representations of urban agriculture (UA) are positive, advocating its many related benefits and success stories, or critiquing barriers that restrict it. Despite widespread appeal, the way UA is imagined and planned remains highly varied and uncertain. To understand better the splintering and insular discourses and competing arguments about the role of UA in cities (especially in a developed world context), we draw on empirical research in Melbourne, Australia, to unpack what different stakeholders mean by the term. Using critical discourse analysis, we map contrasting perspectives on UA expressed by various groups (government, practitioners, media, academia) including some groups who could engage with UA but do not. We find that while UA is perceived by some as a strongly positive development, it is seen to be of little consequence by many others. General disinterest in UA is evident among traditional agriculture stakeholders and rural-oriented groups in particular. Discourses about UA reflect differences in (1) whether UA is primarily conceived through the lens of land, food or people; and (2) how UA is imagined to relate to the rest of agriculture and the rest of the city. We conclude that although UA is increasingly ‘inside the urban tent’ as a legitimate land use and activity, it remains marginal. Moreover, it remains ‘outside the agriculture tent’ in that it does not seem to be conceived as a legitimate form of agriculture in comparison to the implicit Other: rural agriculture. We conclude that UA needs to move beyond its city-centric approach and rural agriculture needs to move beyond its general disinterest in UA so that important and necessary connections can be recognised and forged.
Social equity and global impacts are missing from measures of cities' environmental friendliness, write David Wachsmuth, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Hillary Angelo.
The role of humans in facilitating the rapid spread of plants at a scale that is considered invasive is one manifestation of the Anthropocene, now framed as a geological period in which humans are the dominant force in landscape transformation. Invasive plant management faces intensified challenges, and can no longer be viewed in terms of ′eradication′ or ′restoration of original landscapes′. In this perspectives piece, we focus on the practice and experience of people engaged in invasive plant management, using examples from Australia and Canada. We show how managers 1) face several pragmatic trade-offs; 2) must reconcile diverse views, even within stakeholder groups; 3) must balance competing temporal scales; 4) encounter tensions with policy; and 5) face critical and under-acknowledged labour challenges. These themes show the variety of considerations based on which invasive plant managers make complex decisions about when, where, and how to intervene. Their widespread pragmatic acceptance of small, situated gains (as well as losses) combines with impressive long-term commitments to the task of invasives management. We suggest that the actual practice of weed management challenges those academic perspectives that still aspire to attain pristine nature.
We pass by street trees everyday. Their existence as well as their particular location in the city seems obvious, innocuous, natural. But, as is the case with most taken-for-granted "things" (Brown, 2011), some excavation is bound to reveal a more complicated and even ideological story. This study focuses on such a story: the story of the clandestine governance of nature and of humans by way of nature - all through the construction and regulation of city street trees. This story problematizes the mundane display of urban space in general, and of urban street trees in particular, as technical and apolitical, and instead promotes an understanding of nonhumans and humans as constantly negotiating spatial order and disorder through law.
Resilience has emerged as a prominent paradigm for interpreting and shaping human–environment connections in the context of global environmental change. Resilience emphasizes dynamic spatial and temporal change in social–ecological systems where humans are inextricably interwoven with the environment. While influential, resilience thinking has been critiqued for an under-theorized framing of socio-cultural dynamics. In this paper, we examine how the resilience concepts of planetary boundaries and reconnecting to the biosphere frame human–environment connection in terms of mental representations and biophysical realities. We argue that focusing solely on mental reconnection limits further integration between the social and the ecological, thus countering a foundational commitment in resilience thinking to social–ecological interconnectedness. To address this susceptibility we use Tim Ingold’s ‘dwelling perspective’ to outline an embodied form of human–environment (re)connection. Through dwelling, connections are not solely produced in the mind, but through the ongoing interactivity of mind, body and environment through time. Using this perspective, we position the biosphere as an assemblage that is constantly in the making through the active cohabitation of humans and nonhumans. To illustrate insights that may emerge from this perspective we bring an embodied connection to earth stewardship, given its growing popularity for forging local to global sustainability transformations.
In recent times, local governments in Australia's major cities have embraced the idea that the trees in their streets, parks, and private gardens are parts of a collective urban forest that can be managed to address complex policy problems and create more liveable and sustainable cities. In light of this proposition, applied and critical urban forest researchers have typically focused on questions of quantity with regard to some of the factors that influence the density and distribution of urban tree cover. In a few cases, however, researchers have documented qualitative changes to the urban trees and woodlands that ostensibly constitute the urban forest, suggesting that it might be apprehended in a more mutable and dynamic way. Building on these accounts, we turn to Deleuze and Guattari's (, ) theory of becoming to read the urban forest in an active and malleable light, developing a historical geography of urban forestry in Australia that discerns three urban forest projects we call the 'forest in a city', the 'city forest', and a new but not yet realised, 'city in a forest'. This finding renders the urban forest in more contingent, multiple, and mutable terms, leading us to finish the paper with a consideration of what seeing the urban forest as becoming means for future research. There, we suggest that Deleuze and Guattari's becoming directs us to different kinds of empirical, political, and ethical concerns that haven't received significant interest in the current literature. These include asking how, why, and with what consequences do particular styles of urban forestry emerge at particular space-times. How is qualitative difference and urban forest multiplicity dealt with in practice, as well as focusing on affect and everyday embodied encounters between people and trees in different urban places.
Cities and urban settlements in Australia exist on lands that are the traditional lands of Australia's Aboriginal peoples (The focus of this article is on Aboriginal land claims in our capital cities and regional centres on mainland Australia rather than the Torres Strait, and consequently the term Aboriginal is used throughout except where the context makes it necessary to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander or Indigenous.). Yet the fact of continued Aboriginal presence, ownership and stewardship of Australian territory remains unrecognized in Australian planning. As a result, the profession is yet to grapple in a just and meaningful way with the fact of Aboriginality in Australian cities. Indeed, planning persistently renders Aboriginal people invisible, and perpetuates colonial dispossession. In this paper, we argue that planning in Australia must urgently shift to appreciate these issues, and begin to make amends. This involves understanding how Australian cities and towns can be understood as Aboriginal places, and the contemporary ways in which Aboriginal people are seeking recognition of their rights in cities and towns through processes like native title claims and determinations. We analyse urban native title applications as a key example of the challenges of recognition and the responsibility this lays down to planning and we make some suggestions for how the planning profession, practitioners, scholars and educators might proceed.
The ‘interpretive turn’ in policy analysis has greatly enhanced understanding of policy process dynamics. However, it has not afforded much attention to explaining the currency of novel concepts where open dispute appears absent in policy discussions. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by employing an innovative discourse analysis approach to examining the emergence of green infrastructure planning policy in the Republic of Ireland. Whereas the analysis accounts for the rhetorical force of language, it reveals that those advocating the green infrastructure concept were not passive actors in receiving a static discourse. Instead, it demonstrates that such agents actively sought to negate opposition and advance their policy objectives by exploiting the discourse’s flexibility and consensus-building potential, as well as strategically identifying and employing a range of dissemination opportunities. Drawing lessons from this case, a new framework for understanding the interpretive analysis of seemingly unopposed novel policy concepts is presented.
Urban parks and gardens may be failing to meet the diverse "nature needs" of a growing global urban population. Informal urban greenspace (IGS) such as vacant lots, street or railway verges and riverbanks may provide space for unstructured recreation and nature contact. Yet we know little about residents' relationship with IGS outside of Europe and North America, what factors influence IGS use and evaluation, or what role geographic and cultural context play.Our paper combines qualitative and quantitative methods to examine how residents in Brisbane, Australia (n=123) and Sapporo, Japan (n=163) perceive, evaluate and use IGS. Using statistical methods (e.g. correlation analysis) we analyzed what factors influence how respondents interact with IGS, including the amount of formal greenspace within 500m of survey locations using a GIS buffer analysis. Results were tested for differences and similarities between the cities.We found that respondents knew of IGS in their neighborhood (>80%), appreciated and used it (>30%), but more respondents in Brisbane used and appreciated IGS. The influence of demographic factors and local formal
Why do certain landscapes become contested sites for claims about identity? We approach landscapes as assemblages of human and non-human elements that reach beyond the confines of their immediate physical and temporal locations. Our empirical focus is a small group of pine trees in a Tasmanian suburb, where remnants of human and non-human migration are inscribed and live on in the landscape and in human memory. We demonstrate how the trees simultaneously invite and resist purification through binaries such as nature and culture, wild and domestic, then and now. The histories and futures of belonging assembled in and through these trees are nothing less than active, idiosyncratic and ongoing processes of differentiation that shed light on the working out of postcolonial, globalizing societies and ecologies.
Greening public city space is a growing issue in France. With examples drawn from Paris and Montpellier, this article seeks to understand what happens when city-dwellers green the public space outside their door and when policies encourage spontaneous flora on the street. Plants were already part of ancient cities and have been a tool for urban planning since the nineteenth century leading to the development of public green spaces and street-tree planting. Urban ecology sparked an interest for spontaneous flora in the 1980s. Public policies concerning water, climate, and biodiversity have been trying to take this unbidden vegetation into consideration since the beginning of this century. Besides, the social sciences have shown that city-dwellers are interested in plants to embellish their balcony, and in city gardens and parks. We tried to find out if this vegetation can be more than just a tool to plan, to green, to bring biodiversity, and to beautify urban space. We argue that letting planted and unbidden flora colonize sidewalks and allowing people to act directly on it brings residents and plants to co-inhabit and co-domesticate the streets, and challenges the timelessness of a city by introducing a life cycle.
Since the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, counting and mapping have come to dominate international debates around biodiversity protection. With the emergence of the Ecosystem Services concept, these counting and mapping efforts are increasingly imbued with an economic logic that argues that to save biodiversity, its goods and services must be given monetary value. This article offers a critical engagement with the Ecosystem Services discourse and the way it translates the diversity of nature into a single measure—a “currency”—to be included in systems of exchange. We argue that this conception of biodiversity is too narrow and potentially detrimental because it reduces biodiversity to a series of quantifiable fragmented parts that become liable to counting, mapping, and utilitarian use, and because it reduces social–natural relations to market transactions. Subsequently, we outline possibilities for conceiving and living with biodiversity that go beyond relations of counting, mapping, and commodification. It is important that biodiversity knowledge organizations, such as the recently sanctioned Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), take these into account. Conserving a diversity of life requires acknowledging a diversity of values, knowledge and framings of biodiversity, and fostering a diversity of social–natural relations.
Jong Youl Lee and Chad Anderson, “The Impact of the Restored Cheongyecheon on Quality of Life in Seoul,” Journal of Urban Technology, October 2013, 20(4): 3-22.
Conservative mayor of Seoul, Lee Myung-bak, oversaw a project to restore the Cheonggyecheon stream from 2003 to 2005. The purpose of the restoration was to improve the quality of cultural and environmental life in central Seoul, thus making the urban environment more attractive for residents while creating a more favorable economic climate. The restoration was based on a top-down vision but leaders tried to win over residents by providing broad benefits. The project improved the air quality in the area, provided more green space and an artificial urban waterway, improved traffic flow through the area, and has contributed to the improvement of Seoul's image and helped promote its tourism. On the other hand, the project went over budget, met some protest, promoted gentrification, and involved more of an historical and environmental reimagining than a restoration. The perceived success of the project helped Mayor Lee win the presidency, but he was unable to replicate the project on a nationwide scale and the new environmental/cultural development model heralded by the project has quickly receded, replaced by a new focus on welfare.
Informal urban green-space (IGS) such as vacant lots, brownfields and street or railway verges is receiving growing attention from urban scholars. Research has shown IGS can provide recreational space for residents and habitat for flora and fauna, yet we know little about the quantity, spatial distribution, vegetation structure or accessibility of IGS. We also lack a commonly accepted definition of IGS and a method that can be used for its rapid quantitative assessment. This paper advances a definition and typology of IGS that has potential for global application. Based on this definition, IGS land use percentage in central Brisbane, Australia and Sapporo, Japan was systematically surveyed in a 10×10 km grid containing 121 sampling sites of 2,500 m2 per city, drawing on data recorded in the field and aerial photography. Spatial distribution, vegetation structure and accessibility of IGS were also analyzed. We found approximately 6.3% of the surveyed urban area in Brisbane and 4.8% in Sapporo consisted of IGS, a non-significant difference. The street verge IGS type (80.4% of all IGS) dominated in Brisbane, while lots (42.2%) and gaps (19.2%) were the two largest IGS types in Sapporo. IGS was widely distributed throughout both survey areas. Vegetation structure showed higher tree cover in Brisbane, but higher herb cover in Sapporo. In both cities over 80% of IGS was accessible or partly accessible. The amount of IGS we found suggests it could play a more important role than previously assumed for residents' recreation and nature experience as well as for fauna and flora, because it substantially increased the amount of potentially available greenspace in addition to parks and conservation greenspace. We argue that IGS has potential for recreation and conservation, but poses some challenges to urban planning. To address these challenges, we propose some directions for future research.
Supported by a large body of scholarship, it is increasingly orthodox practice for cities to deploy urban greening interventions to address diverse socioenvironmental challenges, from protecting urban ecosystems to enhancing built environments and climate resilience or improving health outcomes. In this article, we expand the theoretical boundaries used to challenge this growing orthodoxy by laying out a nuanced framework that advances critical urban environmental justice scholarship. Beginning from the now well-supported assumption that urban greening is a deeply political project often framed by technocratic principles and promotional claims that this project will result in more just and prosperous cities, we identify existing contributions and limits when examining urban green inequities through the traditional lenses of distributional, recognition, and procedural justice. We then advocate for and lay out a different analytical framework for analyzing justice in urban greening. We argue that new research must uncover how persistent domination and subordination prevent green interventions from becoming an emancipatory antisubordination, intersectional, and relational project that considers the needs, identities, and everyday lives of marginalized groups. Finally, we illustrate our framework’s usefulness by applying it to the analysis of urban residents’ (lack of) access to urban greening and by operationalizing it for two different planning and policy domains: (1) greening for well-being, care, and health and (2) greening for recreation and play. This final analysis serves to provide critical questions and strategies that can hopefully guide new urban green planning and practice approaches.
Urban greening is a buzz term in urban policy and research settings in Australia and elsewhere. In a context of settler colonial urbanism, like Australia, a first fact becomes clear: urban greening is always being practiced on unceded Indigenous lands. Recognising this requires some honest reckoning with how this latest urban policy response perpetuates dispossessory settler-colonial structures. In this paper, we listen to the place-based ontologies of the peoples and lands from where we write to inform understanding the city as an always already Indigenous place – a sovereign Aboriginal City. In so doing, the paper tries to practice a way of creating more truthful and response-able urban knowledge practices. We analyse three distinct areas of scholarly research that are present in the contemporary literature: urban greening and green infrastructure; urban political ecology; and more-than-human cities. When placed in relationship of learning with the sovereign Aboriginal City, our analysis finds that these scholarly domains of urban greening work to re-organise colonial power relations. The paper considers what work the practice and scholarship of ‘urban greening’ might need to do in order to become response-able and learn to learn with Indigenous sovereignties and ontologies.
The green city is being elevated to the status of a self-evident good in the theory and practice of urban sustainability. A large literature documents the linked environmental, economic and well-being benefits associated with vegetating urban systems to maximise the ecosystem function. Contemporary urban greening seeks to challenge attempts to expel nature from the city in a quest for order and control. However, by imagining nature as a new mode of urban purification, much effort in the name of the green city inverts and reproduces dualistic understandings of natural and built space. In response, we disrupt the normative dialectics of purity and dirt that sustain this dualism to expose the untidy but fertile ground of the green city. We draw together Ash Amin’s four registers of the Good City – relatedness, rights, repair and re-enchantment – with the artworks of the Australian visual ecologist Aviva Reed. Our work seeks to enrich the practice of more-than-human urbanism through ‘dirt thinking’ by imagining the transformative possibilities in, of and for the dirty green city.
Urban greening can enhance sustainability and liveability, through conserving biodiversity, mitigating urban heat and enhancing people’s health and wellbeing. However, urban greening is complex, as it occurs in unique ecological settings, with social, cultural and economic factors shaping the forms it takes. This raises questions about the governance of urban greening, including what counts as ‘good governance’. In this paper, we first outline principles of good governance drawn from the natural resource management context. We then present four urban greening initiatives from Melbourne Australia representing different scales, land tenures and organising structures. Following this, we analyse how governance of the four initiatives addresses good governance principles. Our analysis shows that there are diverse ways in which urban greening can be practiced and governed. The importance of more ‘informal’ initiatives should not be discounted relative to formalised initiatives, as a spectrum of approaches can be seen as strength. Further, in determining what constitutes good governance, the standards against which initiatives are assessed should be tailored to their specific circumstances, and consider impacts to the environment itself. These findings point to good urban greening governance being both situated and principled.
Urban greening, the improvement or increase of green spaces in cities, has purported environmental, individual, social and cultural benefits. The extent and qualities of urban green spaces, and our opportunities to engage with them, reflect and shape human responses to those spaces. Planning scholars recognise the traditional role and obligation of planning to help reduce social problems and see the potential for the public to be leaders in defining responses. However, use of technical, scientific and economic approaches by urban land managers can limit recognition of diverse connections to urban green and advance narrow conceptions of nature. We sample people’s responses to different forms of urban green and greening in three case studies from Melbourne, Australia. We show that modern connections and expressions are personal, social and dynamic. Human experiences are embedded in nature and connections develop from interactions with and about nature, in formal and informal spaces. Diverse connections prompt responses to nature, and actions affecting nature itself. Accordingly, we propose ways to develop more receptive, responsive, inclusive and connected forms of urban greening. These include recognising diverse connections and expressions, encouraging dynamic relationships with nature, and providing varied ways of engaging with urban green spaces that foster stewardship.
Urban spaces have long been places to think through human relationships with nature. The recent shift in thinking from urban green space as outcome to urban greening as a process provides an opportunity to consider more explicitly how we engage with more-than-human worlds in urban spaces, in more differentiated ways, and for what ends. In this paper we contribute to growing interest in improved urban sustainability and well-being by bringing human geography perspectives on more-than-human worlds into conversation with the literature on urban greening. Drawing on key examples oriented around urban trees, we consider two main themes: sensibilities and belonging. We argue for an understanding of urban places as collective achievements that not only involve knowing and living with diverse humans and non-humans but also involve the re/making of sensibilities and belongings. Through this paper, we aim to open dialogue about how more-than-human geographies might help us to differently understand urban trees, contemporary urban greening, and people–plant relations.
There is global interest in increasing the complexity of urban ecosystems to benefit both people and nature in cities. However, to successfully plan for and manage more complex landscapes greater attention is needed on understanding the complementary role of different types of green spaces in cities. Wild spaces occur in many forms across the landscape. In this paper, we discuss the different social and ecological roles that wild urban spaces play in our cities, and how they vary across space and time. We then assess the role and benefits of wild urban spaces in relation to other types of green space. Wild spaces are spatially and temporally diverse, and can act as refuges when other green spaces are not available. Many important differences exist in the composition, structure and management of wild spaces in comparison with other kinds of green space that drive their unique contribution to urban ecosystems. This discussion paper highlights these differences, and brings together knowledge of the role of wild spaces in urban landscapes from a multidisciplinary perspective.
Planning for green space is guided by standards and guidelines but there is currently little understanding of the variety of values people assign to green spaces or their determinants. Land use planners need to know what values are associated with different landscape characteristics and how value elicitation techniques can inform decisions. We designed a Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) study and surveyed residents of four urbanising suburbs in the Lower Hunter region of NSW, Australia. Participants assigned dots on maps to indicate places they associated with a typology of values (specific attributes or functions considered important) and negative qualities related to green spaces. The marker points were digitised and aggregated according to discrete park polygons for statistical analysis. People assigned a variety of values to green spaces (such as aesthetic value or social interaction value), which were related to landscape characteristics. Some variables (e.g. distance to water) were statistically associated with multiple open space values. Distance from place of residence however did not strongly influence value assignment after landscape configuration was accounted for. Value compatibility analysis revealed that some values co-occurred in park polygons more than others (e.g. nature value and health/therapeutic value). Results highlight the potential for PPGIS techniques to inform green space planning through the spatial representation of complex human-nature relationships. However, a number of potential pitfalls and challenges should be addressed. These include the non-random spatial arrangement of landscape features that can skew interpretation of results and the need to communicate clearly about theory that explains observed patterns.
At the request of the Editor, the following article has been retracted.
Isabelle Anguelovski, “Urban greening as the ultimate urban environmental justice tragedy?” Planning Theory first published on June 29, 2016 as doi:10.1177/1473095216654448
Green Gentrification looks at the social consequences of urban "greening" from an environmental justice and sustainable development perspective. Through a comparative examination of five cases of urban greening in Brooklyn, New York, it demonstrates that such initiatives, while positive for the environment, tend to increase inequality and thus undermine the social pillar of sustainable development. Although greening is ostensibly intended to improve environmental conditions in neighborhoods, it generates green gentrification that pushes out the working-class, and people of color, and attracts white, wealthier in-migrants. Simply put, urban greening "richens and whitens," remaking the city for the sustainability class. Without equity-oriented public policy intervention, urban greening is negatively redistributive in global cities.
This book argues that environmental injustice outcomes are not inevitable. Early public policy interventions aimed at neighborhood stabilization can create more just sustainability outcomes. It highlights the negative social consequences of green growth coalition efforts to green the global city, and suggests policy choices to address them.
The book applies the lessons learned from green gentrification in Brooklyn to urban greening initiatives globally. It offers comparison with other greening global cities. This is a timely and original book for all those studying environmental justice, urban planning, environmental sociology, and sustainable development as well as urban environmental activists, city planners and policy makers interested in issues of urban greening and gentrification.
The gradually decreasing connectivity of habitats threatens biodiversity and ecological processes valuable to humans. Green infrastructure is promoted by the European Commission as a key instrument for the conservation of ecosystems in the EU biodiversity strategy to 2020. Green infrastructure has been defined as a network of natural and semi-natural areas, designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services. We surveyed Finnish experts' perceptions on the development of green infrastructure within the existing policy framework. Our results show that improving the implementation of existing conservation policy instruments needs to be an integral part of developing green infrastructure. Despite the potential of green infrastructure to benefit biodiversity, existing conceptual ambiguity of green infrastructure with rather complex role of ecosystem services – and the possible interpretation of this in practice – raises concerns regarding its ability to contribute to biodiversity conservation.
For well over a decade, urban political ecology has been concerned with the neoliberalization of infrastructure as a key site of struggle in the reproduction of urban space. While urban forests, trees, and parks have not featured as prominently in that literature as other resources (e.g. water), they are increasingly managed and promoted as a form of “green” infrastructure by city governments eager to ally themselves with new environmentally-oriented framings of the modern city. Yet, the relationship between these new forms of green infrastructure and the neoliberalization of the city, in particular their ability to enable new ways of taking about the city and nature, and to constrain others, has been understudied. In this paper, I examine the ways in which urban parks are enrolled in political struggles to reorient the techniques of urban governance toward entrepreneurialism as the only viable model for economic development. Through a case study of Philadelphia's Fairmount Park System, I examine a series of events during the previous three decades in which Fairmount Park has become subject to this reorientation toward entrepreneurialism. Specifically, I examine how parks, no longer treated as spaces of “nature”, have been reframed as self-supporting constituents of a business-minded urbanism, promotional tools for the attraction of new labor to the city, and a reinforcement of the notion of entrepreneurialism as the inevitable urban development strategy for the 21st century. Yet, I also argue that these transformations are always in a process of negotiation. Even as parks become subject to these dominating discourses, new park construction is a site in which the conceptual assumptions that underpin neoliberal urban policy aren’t frictionlessly transferred from one instance to another but, even when successful, require significant work to overcome competing visions of urban nature.
The Philadelphia Water Department has committed to taking a green infrastructure (GI) approach to reduce stormwater runoff and prevent combined sewer overflow events. Promoting GI as a stormwater management technique in a city necessitates development of a more distributed urban environmental management system, through which the city's water department needs to coordinate with a wide range of public and private stakeholders, shifting power from the utility to these other stakeholders. We argue that distributed urban environmental management can lead to more inclusive outcomes but only if there is an intentionality about how funds are distributed, which communities are prioritized, how partners are chosen and cultivated, and which types of projects are implemented in which neighborhoods. We suggest the development of an equity index to help identify communities that would most benefit from GI investment as critical for equitable GI planning. Using Philadelphia as a test case, we develop a Green Infrastructure Equity Index, designed with the indirect benefits of green infrastructure in mind, to determine which communities could benefit the most from investment in GI based on their “equity void ranking”. We argue that developing a GI Equity Index provides a much more nuanced analysis of communities that takes into account the built environment as well as the underlying social and economic conditions. The GI Equity Index also allows for a shift in the way we define equity. In doing so, it 1) changes the conversation about equity in GI planning using careful data analysis that takes into account both socio-economic and built environment variables; 2) provides a visual tool that communities can use to understand underlying conditions and the existing placement of GI; and 3) serves as a framework that can be tailored to allow communities to weight their priorities, putting more power in their hands.
Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has much to teach us in our current moment of environmental crisis. Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans sought to shape society into what they thought of as an Arcadia-not an Eden where fruit simply fell off the tree, but a public garden that depended on an ethic of communal care, and whose sense of beauty and repose related directly to an acknowledgement of mortality and limitation. Sachs explores the notion of Arcadia in the works of nineteenth-century nature writers, novelists, painters, horticulturists, landscape architects, and city planners, and holds up for comparison the twenty-first century's-and his own-tendency toward denial of both death and environmental limits. His far-reaching insights suggest new possibilities for the environmental movement today and new ways of understanding American history.
This paper explores how arborists negotiate their work environment, including the pressures of policies, the labour market, technologies, government regulations and lack thereof, and the non-human agencies with which they are confronted. The political climate surrounding urban forestry in Southern Ontario influences and governs operations and physical labour. There are many (f)actors and conditions (both external and internal) surrounding fieldwork in urban forestry and that these affect work and personal lives. The questions guiding this paper include: (a) How do various political and labour conditions impact arborists' sense of pride, independence and skill?; (b) What are the social and labour divisions within the culture of arboriculture?; and (c) What is the lived experience of urban forest workers, their employment, and what is it like to be a frontline worker? This paper provides a closer look at licensing, work conditions, subcultures and social dynamics in urban arboriculture. Using accounts from semi-structured interviews with arborists across Southern Ontario and by examining field arborists' activities, relationships with co-workers and working conditions through participant observation and ethnographic field notes, I explore and reveal how arborists feel about their working environment and the labour processes and people who oversee and surround them. Findings reveal that despite dehumanizing (f)actors within the field, there are elements of resistance and negotiation, and potential for an alternative future.
Economic metaphors – including natural capital, natural assets, ecosystem services, and ecological debt – are becoming commonplace in environmental policy discourse. Proponents consider such terms provide a clearer idea of the ‘value’ of nature, and are useful for ensuring the environment is given due attention in decision making. Critical discourse analysis highlights the ideological work language does; the way in which we think, write, and talk about the environment has important implications for how it is governed. Consequently, the widespread use of economic metaphors is politically significant. This article discusses how metaphors have been analysed in environmental policy research, surveys the use of prominent economic metaphors in environmental policy, and considers the politics associated with such terms. The uptake of various economic metaphors represents a form of reverse discourse, varies in politically significant ways, and narrows the terms of environmental debate.
The term ‘ecology’, which first emerged in relation to the biological sciences in the 19th century, has subsequently undergone a series of conceptual permutations in an urban context. Existing tensions around the definition of ‘the city’ as an object of analysis have become further complicated by the increasing deployment of ecological metaphors in urban design and related fields. It is suggested that the limitations of urban ecology, as a coherent approach for urban analysis or intervention, stem from the dynamic, interdependent and historically contested characteristics of urban nature and the ambiguous dimensions to ecology as a leitmotif for urban politics.
This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment of New York City's High Line. Taking the abandoned-queer-ecology-turned-homonormative park as a novel form of gay and green gentrification, I argue that the ‘success’ of the project must be critiqued in relational ecological terms. Intervening into the literature of gentrification, I begin to account for the material and symbolic aspects of ecological gentrification with the help of innovations in plant geography and queer ecology. To ground my analysis, I look to the process of ‘succession’, focusing, in particular, on one of the most established and successful plants growing on the abandoned High Line, Ailanthus altissima or the Tree of Heaven. Drawing on empirical insights, this account of the High Line's redevelopment tracks relations between queers and plants. Through layers of sexuality, ecology, and geography, the matter of displacement becomes central to a consideration of ethico-political possibilities for a queer ecological critique of urban space. In conclusion, I argue for an ethics and politics of responsibility to and for abandoned spaces that calls us to pay closer attention to the queer, the ecological, and their ongoing entanglement.
While sustainability and green urbanism have become buzzwords in urban policy circles, too little analysis has focused on who gets to decide what green looks like. Many visions of the green city seem to have room only for park space, waterfront cafes, and luxury LEED-certified buildings, prompting concern that there is no place in the “sustainable” city for industrial uses and the working class. We will use the case study of Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, New York, to explore how different visions for the green city are enacted through activism and policy-making. Neighbourhood residents and business owners seem to be advocating a strategy we call “just green enough”, in order to achieve environmental remediation without environmental gentrification. Following the crash of both the financial and real estate markets, attempts to construct a sustainable city that is economically diverse and socially just seem to be taking hold. We interrogate how urban sustainability can be used to open up a space for diversity and democracy in the neoliberal city and argue that there is space for interventions that challenge the presumed inevitability of gentrification.
The usefulness of the concept of biotic nativeness has been challenged in both the social and natural sciences, for different reasons. This paper explores the particular construction of nativeness in Australia in relation to plants, showing that the definition builds on and inscribes more deeply the boundary between humans and the rest of nature seen in the wider literature. In this context two further boundaries are etched: between some humans and others, and before and after European colonisation. Such a use of nativeness as an axiom of environmental management is argued to be problematic, foreclosing a number of future options just when we need to increase our capacity to deal with contingency and unpredictability. But if Australia has experienced distinctive historical processes of entrenching these boundaries, it also has a distinctive heritage of destabilisation in a range of geographic work. The paper discusses how we might build on this heritage to imagine more open futures in which the problematic boundaries were removed. Some of these futures resonate with vernacular recombinations of plants from diverse origins.
Urban green spaces (UGS) have been shown to provide a number of environmental and social benefits relevant for a higher quality of life of residents. However, population growth in cities combined with urban planning policies of (re)densification can drive the conversion of UGS into residential land. This development might result in an unequal distribution of UGS in a city. We present an analysis of UGS provisioning in Berlin, Germany in order to identify distributional inequities between UGS and population which are further discussed in light of variations in user preferences associated with demographics and immigrant status. Publicly available land use and sociodemographic data at sub-district level are applied in a GIS, dissimilarity index and cluster analysis approach. Results show that although most areas are supplied with more UGS compared to the per capita target value of 6 m2, there is considerable dissimilarity by immigrant status and age. To address rising concerns about socio-environmental justice in cities and to evaluate the (dis)advantages of applying UGS threshold values for urban planning, visitor profiles and preferences of a site-specific case, the park and former city airport Berlin-Tempelhof are analyzed. Results from questionnaire surveys indicate that the identified dissimilarities on sub-district level are not the same as socio-environmental injustice in Tempelhof, but point to a mismatch of UGS and user preferences. In addition to evaluating UGS distribution, the match between quality of a park and specific cultural and age dependent user needs should be considered for successful green infrastructure planning rather than focusing on target values.