Urban greening and gentrification: quantitative evidence from 28 Global North cities

Keywords: green gentrification, environmental justice, US, Europe, spatial methods, bayesian statistics
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 6

Abstract

Although urban greening is universally recognized as an essential part of sustainable and climate-responsive cities, a growing literature on green gentrification argues that new green infrastructure, and greenspace in particular, can contribute to gentrification, thus creating social and racial inequalities in access to the benefits of greenspace and environmental and climate injustice. To date, there is limited quantitative evidence documenting the temporal relationship between new greenspaces and gentrification across entire cities, let alone across various international contexts. In this paper, we employ a spatially weighted Bayesian model to test the green gentrification hypothesis across 28 cities in 9 countries in North America and Europe. Here we show a strong positive and relevant relationship between greening in the 1990s-2000s and gentrification that occurred between 2000-2016 in 17 of the 28 cities. Our results also further refine the conceptualization of gentrification and green gentrification by identifying cities which we call “Lead Green Gentrification” where greening plays a central role in explaining gentrification unlike in other cities where greening plays what we see as an “integrated” or “subsidiary” role. Results also point to the need to put equity at the center of green climate strategies.