April 12, 2022

Environmental Inequalities in Cairo’s Urban Housing Sector

By Haley Parzonko. Cairo  is an example of the trend of megacities with rapid growth in size and environmental inequality, marked by a dual reality between informal areas with high congestion and pollution levels and lack of green space, and exclusive new high-end desert cities with ample spacing and private access to nature.  This trend is facilitated by state deregulation, privatization and commodification of urban space.
February 15, 2022

The unequal university will never be ‘sustainable’

By Ana Diaz Vidal, Clara Freudenberg, Isabelle Darmon. Through green rankings and strategies for sustainability and climate virtue, universities attract and reproduce wealth, driving high consumption – paradoxically exacerbating climate change and unsustainability. Only attending to inequalities can universities do away with the carbon fetish and work for actual sustainability. University staff and students, embarked on a UK-wide strike against staff exploitation and rising costs, need to make this point loud and clear!    
June 1, 2021

Portland’s Lauded Sustainability Falls Short on Racial Justice

By Margarita Triguero-Mas, Mario Fontán-Vela. Despite Portland’s reputation as a champion of sustainability, the city still struggles to overcome its legacy of racist policies and environmental injustice when it comes to the inclusion of Black residents.
May 18, 2021

Imbuing Notions of Climate Change Adaptation with Everyday Realities

By Daniela Schofield. Notions of climate change adaptation used for policymaking and planning often fail to be grounded in everyday realities of those practicing adaptation on a micro-level. Imbuing urban political ecology with such realities and their gendered dimensions can work to expand our understanding of urban environments and better inform policy and planning.
December 3, 2020

What will Glasgow’s Smart Canal Mean for its Historically Deprived Communities?

By Melissa García-Lamarca and Neil Gray A massive regeneration of the post-industrial canal is prioritizing higher-income newcomers over the housing needs of long-term, low-income residents.
November 3, 2020

Not All That Is Green Becomes Gentrified

By Ana T. Amorim-Maia. The photos you post of a park may hide clues about what leads to green gentrification in cities.
October 20, 2020

To Green Or Not To Green: Four stories of urban (in)justice in Barcelona

By Emilia Oscilowicz. A new short documentary shot and edited by filmmaker Alberto Bougleux sheds light on the dilemmas of greening cities.
October 6, 2020

Community Gardens, Gentrification, and Placekeeping in Minneapolis

By Kelsey Poljacik and Rebecca Walker. The newest contribution to the “Green Inequalities in the City” series analyzes the complex relationship between community gardens and gentrification in Minneapolis, and the choices and tensions community leaders face in shaping the impact these gardens have on their neighborhoods.
June 2, 2020

Are ‘Nature-based Solutions’ an answer to unsustainable cities or a tool for furthering nature’s neoliberalisation?

By Panagiota Kotsila. Nature-based Solutions (NBS) are broadly perceived as positive ‘triple-win’ strategies, though they have so far shown contradictions and limited transformational potential for advancing environmental justice and sustainability in cities. We can, however, recover the underlying idea of respecting and protecting biodiversity as well as caring for and with nature to repair or transform some of our broken systems.
April 21, 2020

Will Cleveland’s greening efforts perpetuate racial inequalities?

By Margarita Triguero-Mas. If equity is not made a priority, Cleveland’s vision of becoming a “green city on a blue lake” risks falling victim to the injustices of green gentrification felt in similar revival cities across the US.
March 24, 2020

How one of Montréal’s poorest neighborhood became ripe for green gentrification

By Melissa García Lamarca. Greening projects both large and small in the rapidly developing Saint Henri neighborhood are stitching together a post-industrial landscape to create new and exclusionary forms of urban living.
February 18, 2020

Can trees address environmental inequities in Mediterranean cities? 

By Amalia Calderón-Argelich, Francesc Baró, Johannes Langemeyer and James Connolly While the uneven distribution of street tree benefits in Barcelona favors elderly residents in particular and partially compensates for the lack of larger green spaces in several districts, it is clear that street trees must be accompanied by other sustainable mobility measures to advance urban environmental health and justice.