Is all urban green space made equal? Is it all enjoyed equally? A 2014 paper by researchers from UC Berkeley, Griffith University, and the University of Michigan that compares greening efforts across the U.S. and China, reveals that in many cities this isn’t the case.

Manhattan’s High Line has been heralded as the successful implementation of urban green space. It brings in a huge amount of revenue from yearly visitors to the area and has raised property prices in the surrounding area. It is one example of the many kinds of urban green spaces that exist to introduce biodiversity, improve public health, and aesthetically elevate urban areas, like public parks, green walls, trails, community gardens, or even cemeteries. However, it is the same benefits that the High Line has brought about which have resulted in the displacement of residents who lived there before it was built.

The High Line is but one of the paper’s examples of green gentrification, which it defines as the “displacement and/or exclusion of the very residents the green space was meant to benefit” and typically results from the creation of large urban green space which drives up nearby household values and prices out the residents who lived there before. While the creation of urban green space can make neighborhoods more attractive and livable to a wider range of prospective residents, it often drives up housing prices and triggers rounds of gentrification.

In this way, urban green space becomes not only an issue of public health but also an issue of environmental justice, as access to these spaces is often uneven, based off socio-economic background. It is typically low-income neighborhoods and communities of color that are denied the benefits of urban green space that they acutely lack.

Part of the difficulty of designing equitable green space in cores of highly developed and dense cities is that there is no official consensus on how to measure access. The big question the researchers pose is “whether access to urban green space and its health promoting and or protective effects is distributed in ways that disproportionately advantage or disadvantage people on the basis of race, ethnicity, or class?”

The researchers make a case study of the Hangzhou Region, one of China’s “Garden Cities” for innovative and far-reaching strategies to green what is a quickly urbanizing city. Sprawl has subsumed much of its agricultural hinterlands, and the city is plagued with dense air pollution and high temperatures. Despite ambitious and impressive efforts to retrofit green space out of empty lots, old canals, and along transportation routes, the details of Hangzhou’s green spaces disappoint. Many are small and lack facilities, do not encourage active recreation, suffer from congestion, and are close to main roads which still expose people to pollution. Other research has also suggested that there are differences in access by socio-economic status of residents.

The researchers advocate instead for the “just green enough” design intervention, as proposed by the research team Winifred Curran and Trina Hamilton in 2012. This design framework promotes a bottom-up approach instead of a top-down one. A central idea of “just green enough” is that the affected communities themselves come up with green space projects that directly respond to their own concerns, needs, and desires.

A successful example is Greenpoint, a community in Brooklyn that underwent a “just green enough” transformation in 2012. The neighborhood demanded cleanup of a toxic creek and green space development that also allowed for continued industrial production and the protection of blue-collar jobs. Unlike the High Line, the community had a significant role in determining how and where to put efforts to green their city, collaborating with expert planners and scientists. They explicitly wanted to avoid what they termed the “parks, cafes, and a Riverwalk” model of a green city, which would substantially change the character of their neighborhood. The resulting outcome was successful remediation of an environmental justice issue that also avoided sparking speculative development in the area.

The “just green enough” philosophy is expansive with what makes for good green space interventions: they can be small-scale and scattered, as opposed to grander retrofit projects that require large patches of space and can raise property values that price out residents. Interventions like these can take shape in many forms, but it is who leads these projects that can help guarantee their success in serving sustainability, public health, and most importantly the historic neighborhood around the space. Cities are becoming more efficient, healthier, and greener with the creation of sustainable infrastructure and urban greenery; let’s make sure that everyone gets to enjoy it.

Research and Figure source:

Wolch, J. R., Byrne, J., & Newell, J. P. (2014). Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities “just green enough.” Landscape and Urban Planning, 125, 234–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.01.017

Featured image source:

https://ny.curbed.com/2019/5/7/18525802/high-line-new-york-park-guide-entrances-map by Max Touhey