Green Gentrification
Walking through those areas of the city, once considered "degraded" and today undergoing "requalification" - those areas that still retain their original face, but where scattered structures begin to appear that distort their essence, such as trendy bars and youth hostels accessible only to wealthy tourists - it is always difficult to understand how genuine certain processes of urban transformation are. What is the condition that makes a certain type of change necessary in the urban areas in which we live? Is this change always driven by profit and the creation of an investment opportunity? What is sometimes perceived in areas where a process of transformation of infrastructures and urban spaces is not activated, is attributable to an economically depressed and stagnant context. It is therefore also through this perception that the processes of urban gentrification tend to be masked and motivated by a betterment of the quality of life, and by an understanding of change as a necessary condition for the development of human condition.
Behind this concept of change hides the highly exclusive nature of urban transformation processes, which takes shape where the possibility of creating an economic value that can be transformed into profit is identified. That profit, given for example by the increase in the value of a property, will then be exported far from the urban area concerned, together with the people who lived there, into the pockets of those who initiated the redevelopment project of that property by investing capital. Consequently, the accumulation of money, through expropriation, facilitates market dynamics to resolve issues of social hardship, distancing socio-economic well-being from degradation. Everything can change and transform, especially when money defines the value of a given transformation. Exclusion is therefore the perfect and most functional ingredient for creating well-being, and where the many are excluded from the positive factors of a change, business opportunities arise. The creation of money concentrated in the hands of the few, therefore, replaces change and becomes its essence.
With environmental awareness rising, processes of residential segregation are further facilitated. The renewal of urban spaces, in accordance with the environmental sustainability of infrastructures, has opened new doors to investments that more than ever have caused a clear division between the urban quality of affluent and poor neighborhoods. If before, investments were justified by the rhetoric of requalification, today the climate emergency justifies a further expropriation of capital concentrated in the hands of the few, veiled by the need to increase green spaces in city centers and the coexistence of infrastructures with nature. However, these processes often exhibit, in addition to the export of social unease, the peripheralization of smog and waste.
We are talking about Green Gentrification, defined by the Barcelona Laboratory for Environmental Justice and Sustainability as a process that, starting from the implementation of an environmental planning agenda connected to green spaces, generates the exclusion and displacement of citizens politically deprived of their civil rights. This is because the improvement of environmental quality in the city tends to increase the quality of life and the value of real estate, particularly when civic awareness on the environmental issue is rampant, forcing the most vulnerable residents to move away, to attract more affluent ones.
Land speculation associated with large-scale green projects is nothing new, however. For example, during the creation of the first public park in Europe in 1840- Birkenhead Park in England - park commissioners, understanding the potential rise in the price of surrounding plots of land, bought most of them to resell at exponentially higher prices in the time of construction of the houses. This was in fact one of the reasons that convinced the architect Olmsted to design Central Park, in order to increase both the value of the surrounding properties and the tax revenue of the city of New York. Also in Central Park, the forgotten history of Seneca Village is emblematic of a neighbourhood of African Americans that were evicted for the creation of the park. These mechanisms are increasingly present in today's cities, but over time forms of climate injustice have steadily increased. These affect people of lower incomes, of color, and immigrant communities; notoriously the categories that contribute the least to climate change, that have fewer resources to adapt to it, and with more limited access to environmental services such as green areas.
To better understand the essence of green gentrification it is useful to observe some significant cases of Western cities in which the new green and “environmentally resilient” urban models of the 21st century are imposed by the rhetoric of investors and real estate agents. These cases highlight the distorted image that local administrations and requalification projects propose in the disadvantaged neighbourhoods. An image far from the voice of those who live there, who consider the peripheral urban areas to be the “bins” of cities, which does not involve the people who know and suffer the problems of these places in its transformation processes. There is talk of projects that aim to improve the environmental quality and public health of the disadvantaged neighbourhoods without changing their socio-economic character. In many of the cities affected by these processes of change, however, there is a form of local urban resilience, which aims to include residents in the decision-making processes that determine the adaptation of cities to environmental needs.
In the Ted Talk “Greening the Ghetto”, Majora Charter recounts how the consequences of the New York administration's top-down planning in the South-Bronx have led to widespread unease in this area, characterized by significant environmental abuse. In fact, in the South Bronx, 70% of sewage sludge and more than 30% of all waste in New York is managed, much of which in the past was in Manhattan. This means that more than sixty thousand garbage trucks pass through the neighborhood every week, causing an enormous concentration of smog. It is in this context that organisations such as Sustainable South Bronx (SSB) emerge, giving active answers from below to what administrations and project managers fail to see. Not only has this reality set itself the goal of starting an "ecological restoration" that started from training the inhabitants of the South Bronx to carry out work in the "green collar" sector, such as cleaning contaminated land or managing the urban forest of the neighborhood, but SSB's greatest achievement consists of incorporating people who had never worked into the transformation of their neighborhood.
Moving onto the West-Coast of the US, Sarah Dooling studied the impact green urban transformation projects have on the lives of Seattle's homeless. In response to the call of Marxist geographer David Harvey to find a language that reveals the complexities and specificities of how socio-ecological injustices are produced, the author makes use of the concept of "green gentrification" to intentionally provoke that ecological rationality which, expressed through the implementation of environmentalist urban plans, produces social inequalities such as, in this case, the displacement of the homeless from newly renewed and well-spoken-of areas. In the case of Seattle, in fact, the right to housing of the homeless was neglected by an exclusive ecological rationality conveyed by the logic of the market. Environmental sustainability then becomes a means and an excuse to heighten the value of luxury goods obtainable through an economic expense that is accessible to the few and detached from the processes of communities’ social development.
Returning to the West-Coast, in the neighborhood of East Boston, historically inhabited by the Latin American and Italian working class, the development of a project has recently been launched to transform the city's coastline into a park in order to protect homes from future floods. Real estate agents see it as a profitable environment to invest in, and over time the first "green urban resilience plans" are popping up, where speculations on luxurious properties in previously humble areas are both initiating a process of rising rents, but also increasing the risk of flooding those surrounding houses that have not yet been adapted to the project. In the East Boston neighborhood, this kind of injustice takes place because the risks of socially vulnerable groups, such as expropriation, are put aside in order to prevent the risks produced by climate change, through the construction of green infrastructures. Again, the maximization of private benefits is anteposed over those of the community.
The ecological transition should be an opportunity and a means to encourage social cooperation and the direct participation of citizens in resolving a common crisis, one suffered most by those who have determined its causes the least. The environmental crisis will not be solved by demanding a radical change in citizen’s consumption- as if the action of individuals and communities began and ended by choosing which coffee capsule to buy- but it will be essential to give space to the activation and self-organization of local communities to find collective solutions. To begin with, residents of areas affected by green gentrification could be allowed to participate in the development of urban projects that reflect their individual and collective identity. As we have seen, the adaptation of urban transformation processes to the climate crisis has generated greater environmental inequalities and injustices in cities. The environmental issue has provided new profit opportunities to those actors who already led the processes of urban transformation, of requalification, and therefore initiated the gentrification processes. However, thanks to the union of urban and environmental justice issues, there is now more scope for renegotiating the terms of agreement between the predatory market forces and the populations of the disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
Written by Mose Vernetti
This article was originally published on Demosfera by L’Europa Futura , an emerging Italian Socialist voice supporting the vision of a social, feminist, green, and democratic Europe.