Just Green Enough Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City Series

While global urban development increasingly takes on the mantle of sustainability and "green urbanism," both the ecological and equity impacts of these developments are often overlooked. One result is what has been called environmental gentrification, a process in which environmental improvements lead to increased property values and the displacement of long-term residents. The specter of environmental gentrification is now at the forefront of urban debates about how to accomplish environmental improvements without massive displacement.

In this context, the editors of this volume identified a strategy called "just green enough" based on field work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that uncouples environmental cleanup from high-end residential and commercial development. A "just green enough" strategy focuses explicitly on social justice and environmental goals as defined by local communities, those people who have been most negatively affected by environmental disamenities, with the goal of keeping them in place to enjoy any environmental improvements. It is not about short-changing communities, but about challenging the veneer of green that accompanies many projects with questionable ecological and social justice impacts, and looking for alternative, sometimes surprising, forms of greening such as creating green spaces and ecological regeneration within protected industrial zones.

Just Green Enough is a theoretically rigorous, practical, global, and accessible volume exploring, through varied case studies, the complexities of environmental improvement in an era of gentrification as global urban policy. It is ideal for use as a textbook at both undergraduate and graduate levels in urban planning, urban studies, urban geography, and sustainability programs.

Contents

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Foreword

Introduction

Just Green Enough in Transition

1. Just Green Enough: Contesting Environmental Gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Winifred Curran and Trina Hamilton

2. A just enough green? Industrial gentrification and competing socionatures in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Winifred Curran and Trina Hamilton

3. Making Just Green Enough advocacy resilient: Diverse economies, ecosystem engineers and livelihood strategies for low-carbon futures

Sarah Dooling

4. Just Transition and Just-Green-Enough: Climate justice, economic development and community resilience

Julie Sze and Elizabeth Yeampierre

Green Displacements and Community Identity

5. Greening the waterfront? Submerging history, finding risk

Pamela Stern and Peter V Hall

6. Alternative food and gentrification: Farmers’ markets, community gardens and the transformation of urban neighborhoods

Pascale Joassart-Marcelli and Fernando Bosco

7. The production of green: Gentrification and social change

Jessica Ty Miller

State-led Environmental Gentrification

8. Environmental gentrification in Metropolitan Seoul: The case of greenbelt deregulation and development at Misa Riverside City

Jay E. Bowen

9. Displacement as disaster relief: Environmental gentrification and state informality in developing Chennai

Priti Narayan

10. Fixing sustainability: Social contestation and re-regulation in Vancouver’s housing system

Noah Quastel

Mobilizing and Planning for Just, Green Futures

11. Mobilizing community identity to imagine just green enough futures: A Chicago case study

Leslie Kern

12. Bring on the Yuppies and the Guppies! Green gentrification, environmental justice, and the politics of place in Frogtown, L.A.

Esther Kim

13. The contested future of Philadelphia’s Reading Viaduct: Blight, neighborhood amenity, or global attraction?

Hamil Pearsall

14. Informal urban green space as anti-gentrification strategy?

Christoph D. D. Rupprecht and Jason A. Byrne

15. Patient Capital and Reframing Value: Making New Urbanism Just Green Enough

Dan Trudeau

Index

Winifred Curran is an Associate Professor of Geography at DePaul University, USA.

Trina Hamilton is an Associate Professor of Geography at the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB), USA.