From green privilege to green gentrification with Isabelle Anguelovski

Large cities worldwide are increasingly deploying urban greening interventions to address socio-environmental and health challenges and harness widespread benefits for citizens, industries, and investors. While new parks, green adaptation infrastructure, or urban greenways (among others) promote city efforts to replicate green infrastructure through a city and create a new urban green brand, I argue that few of them begin with an equity lens and include concrete measures against white supremacy and towards for ensuring that greening solutions benefit residents and communities who are historically vulnerable to environmental racism and/or displacement. For the most part, there is an implicit assumption of “green” trickle-down effects spreading to benefit all. I illustrate this argument by examining--in North America and Europe --the extent to which urban greening creates equity in accessing the benefits of urban nature projects or, in contrast, perpetuates or produces urban inequities through processes of green privilege and green gentrification. ​
Isabelle Anguelovski is the director of BCNUEJ, an ICREA Research Professor, a Senior Researcher and Principal Investigator at ICTA and coordinator of the research group Healthy Cities and Environmental Justice at IMIM. She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Studies from Science Po Lille and a Master’s in International Development at the Université de Paris 1 Sorbonne, pursued a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Management at Harvard University and obtained a PhD in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT before returning to Europe in 2011 with a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship.
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This webinar was recorded on February 3, 2021