Justice and power relations in urban greening: can Lisbon’s urban greening strategies lead to more environmental justice?

ABSTRACT

As urban greening has become a prevalent tool in the context of global climate governance, this paper examines Lisbon’s greening strategies in the context of its election as European Green Capital 2020. While applying an analytical framework based on environmental justice, we perform a cross-analysis of the city-wide greening strategies, together with a peculiar and unusual planning process for a new green space in the neighbourhood of Marvila. Based on qualitative research carried out in-situ, we argue that Lisbon’s greening strategies are based on a discourse of ecological benefits, without aiming to ensure access to green space for different population groups. Procedural justice concerns are widely undervalued, resulting in limited space available for community involvement. We show how urban greening is essentially a multiscalar exercise, impacted by and affecting multiple scales simultaneously. Hence procedural justice deserves a much more prominent role in urban greening, as participation and recognition can give local communities the opportunity to adapt global urban agendas toward their particular needs and desires. Our findings lead us to conclude that environmental justice is ultimately an exercise of multiscalar governance, where local decision-making needs to attend to contextual challenges but also to a long-term sustainability vision at a larger scale.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• urban greening
• multiscalar governance
• Lisbon
• European Green Capital

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the 4 Crescente Community Group for their generous contribution to our research, and the interviewees for given us their time and insights. We also want to thank the Association Rés-do-Chão and João Martins for providing us some of the images reproduced in this paper. Lastly we want to thank Siddarth Sareen and the participants of our writing retreat in Bergen, for the valuable input and feedback given to the first drafts of our paper. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See ‘Parque verde vai ligar a zona oriental de Lisboa’, available at: https://www.timeout.pt/lisboa/pt/coisas-para-fazer/parque-verde-vai-fazer-a-ligacao-que-falta-a%20zona-oriental-de-lisboa (accessed 8/2/2019).

2 See ‘Move to Marvila, Lisbon’s hip neighbourhood’, available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/move-to-marvila-lisbons-hip-neighbourhood-bdhns805k (accessed 01/10/2019).

3 The threshold ranges between 300 to 1000m depending on the size of the green space: the larger the space, the larger its ‘sphere of influence’. For the Monsanto forest and the large Bela Vista park this threshold is 7000m.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Commission under [Grant 730280].