How common is greening in gentrifying areas?

ABSTRACT

Green gentrification occurs when urban greening/sustainability interventions become implicated in neighbourhood upgrading and displacement of existing residents. However, current emphasis on urban sustainability in planning/policy agendas, coupled with political-economic factors producing uneven development, lead us to ask whether all gentrifying areas experience greening. Our descriptive analysis identified gentrifying areas in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto (Canada), from 1996–2006 and 2006–2016, and determined the extent to which various greening interventions (parks, cycle lanes, community gardens, LEED-certified buildings, and rapid-rail transit) were introduced before, during, and after gentrification. Greening frequently occurred before and/or during, and after, gentrification. Our results indicate greening is common in gentrifying areas throughout the gentrification process, suggesting the need for a broader understanding of the relationship(s) between urban greening and gentrification. We outline a future research agenda to examine greening across gentrifying areas and further understand how these two processes shape each other in the remaking of neighborhoods/cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental gentrification
• green space
• environmental justice
• green equity
• urban sustainability

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the handling editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on the initial manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While all three discourses have been seen in policy/planning documents and green-gentrification research, for simplicity we focus on sustainability as it is the most prominent term and overlaps with both livability and resilience.

2 This method necessitated using averages instead of medians for variables such as household income and rent costs, as the underlying distribution was no longer known.

3 Statistical analyses comparing the results (i.e. greening levels) of the 0–50% income quartiles to 51–75% quartiles showedno significant differences, indicating this decision did not skew the results.

4 This may be in part due to incomplete greening data for ‘before’ the 1996–2006 gentrification period.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Doctoral Award #767-2020-31021].