Suchergebnisse

Environmental justice as studied in a variety of disciplines is most often associated with redressing disproportionate exposure to pollution, contimination, and toxic sites. In this book, Isabelle Anguelovski takes a broader view of environmental justice, examining wide-ranging comprehensive efforts at neighbourhood environmental revitalization that include parks, urban agriculture, fresh food markets, playgrounds, housing, and waste management.

At the request of the Editor, the following article has been retracted.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

AbstractLocal activists engaged in contemporary environmental justice struggles not only fight against traditional forms of hazardous locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), they also organize to make their neighborhoods livable and green. However, urban environmental justice activism is at a crossroads: as marginalized neighborhoods become revitalized, outside investors start to value them again and they themselves invest in green amenities. Yet vulnerable residents are now raising concerns about the risk of displacement from their neighborhoods in consequence of environmental gentrification processes. Their fear is linked to environmental amenities such as new parks or remodeled waterfronts, as well as (most recently) healthy food stores. Using the case of a conflict around a new Whole Foods supermarket in Boston, MA, I examine how food venues and stores labeled as healthy and natural can create socio‐spatial inequality together with privilege, exclusion and displacement in racially diverse neighborhoods. I analyze how high‐end supermarket chains target inner‐city neighborhoods for their growth and profit potential, and demonstrate that their arrival contributes to what I call 'supermarket greenlining'. This greenlining illustrates the process of food gentrification, and the manipulation of health and sustainability discourses about food by healthy and natural food investors and their supporters. The opening of high‐end supermarkets thus converts such stores into new LULUs for historically marginalized groups.

Over the past two decades community activists in distressed urban neighborhoods have been organizing to improve environmental quality and livability for residents through parks, playgrounds, gardens, farms, or sports facilities, and this across political systems and contexts of urbanization. To date, however, limited research has been conducted on the development and intricacies of neighborhood activism for long-term environmental justice in marginalized neighborhoods, and little work has been done in a comparative manner and through a place-based approach. Through three historically marginalized neighborhoods in Boston, Barcelona, and Havana, I analyze how internal dynamics and external contexts shape community organization towards improved environmental quality and livability, and how mobilization unfolds over time and space. Findings reveal that activists tend to resort to similar tactical choices to achieve their objectives, including broad and flexible coalitions, and what I call bottom-to-bottom networks encompassing three forms of activism: street activism, technical activism, and funder activism.

In recent years, local activists in the Global North and South have been organizing to improve degraded and abandoned spaces in marginalized neighborhoods by creating parks, playgrounds, urban farms, or community gardens. This paper integrates existing knowledge on urban place attachment and sense of community with scholarship on environmental justice in order to understand the role of place attachment in environmental mobilization in distressed neighborhoods across political systems and urbanization contexts. It examines the different forms of connections that activists develop and express toward neighborhoods with long–time substandard environmental conditions and how their experience of the neighborhood shapes their engagement in environmental revitalization projects. This comparison of three neighborhoods in Barcelona, Boston, and Havana shows that activists in all three places intend for their environmental endeavors to express grief at the loss of community, fears of erasure, and emotional connection and feelings of responsibility to place. To address environmental trauma, they aim to construct nurturing, soothing, "safe havens," recreate rootedness, and remake place for residents.

AbstractDuring the past 15 years, the Casc Antic, a traditionally low‐income and immigrant neighborhood in Barcelona, has been the site of community‐based mobilization to revitalize abandoned areas and improve local environmental conditions. The organization of residents and their supporters is situated within a broader context of urban political and socioeconomic change — the transformation of the urban economy into a decentralized, global and technology‐ and service‐focused system, accompanied by rising socioeconomic inequality and displacement in inner‐city areas. To date, few studies in the urban environmental arena have been placed within processes of urban change and offer specificity on the purposes, intents and goals that poor and minority residents develop as they understand, resist and challenge their marginality. Why do residents of marginalized neighborhoods and their supporters organize to proactively improve livability and environmental quality? To what extent do the environmental struggles of marginalized communities serve as means to advance more complex political agendas in the city? Through the examination of neighborhood organization for livability in the Casc Antic, I analyze how activists use their environmental endeavors as tools to address stigmas attached to their place, control the land and its boundaries, and build a more transgressive form of democracy.

This paper analyzes environmental gentrification (EG), or the exclusion, marginalization, and displacement of long-term residents associated with sustainability planning or green developments and amenities, such as smart growth, public park renovations, and healthy food stores. We consider how activists, communities, and urban planners address these unjust processes and outcomes associated with EG and how these strategies compare to those used by environmental justice (EJ) activists. Our evaluation of relevant literature indicates several similarities with EJ resistance tactics, including collective neighborhood action, community organizing, and direct tactics. We also identify several different strategies enabled by certain urban environmental conditions, such as leveraging environmental policies and taking an active role in neighborhood redevelopment planning processes, collaborating with 'gentrifiers,' and creating complementary policies to manage displacement and exclusion. Our analysis indicates a need for more research on how activists can better assert the social and political dimensions of sustainability and their right to the city, and how green and sustainable cities can achieve justice and equity.

"The Green City and Social Injustice examines the recent urban environmental trajectory of twenty-one cities in Europe and North America over a 20 year period. It analyses the circumstances under which greening interventions can create a new set of inequalities for socially vulnerable residents while also failing to eliminate other environmental risks and impacts. Based on fieldwork in ten countries, and on analysis of core planning, policy, and activist documents and data, the book offers a critical view of the growing green planning orthodoxy in the Global North. It highlights the entanglements of this tenet with neoliberal municipal policies including budget cuts for community initiatives, long-term green spaces, and housing for the most fragile residents; and the focus on large-scale urban redevelopment and high-end real estate investment. It also discusses hopeful experiences from cities where urban greening has long been accompanied by social equity policies or managed by community groups organizing around environmental justice goals and strategies. The book examines how displacement and gentrification in the context of greening is not only physical, but also socio-cultural, creating new forms of social erasure and trauma for vulnerable residents. Its breadth and diversity allow students, scholars, and researchers to debunk the often-depoliticized branding and selling of green cities and reinsert core equity and justice issues into green city planning - a much-needed perspective. Building from this critical view, the book also shows how cities who prioritise equity in green access, in secure housing, and in bold social policies can achieve both environmental and social gains for all"--