Sustainable Cities Need More Than Parks, Cafes and a Riverwalk
There are many standards that aim to rank how green cities are. But what does it actually mean for a city to be green or sustainable?
We've written about what we call the "parks, cafes and a riverwalk" model of sustainability, which focuses on providing new green spaces, mainly for high-income people. This vision of shiny residential towers and waterfront parks has become a widely-shared conception of what green cities should look like.
Gentrification(住宅高档化) has become a catch-all term used to describe neighborhood change, and is often misunderstood as the only path to neighborhood improvement. In fact, its defining feature is displacement. Typically, people who move into these changing neighborhoods are wealthier and more educated than residents who are displaced.
A recent flood of new research has focused on the displacement effects of environmental cleanup and green space initiatives.
Land for new development and resources to fund extensive cleanup of poisonous sites are scarce in many cities. And in neighborhoods where gentrification has already begun, a new park or farmers market can worsen the problem by making the area even more attractive to potential high-income people and pricing out long-term residents. In some cases, developers even create temporary community gardens or farmers markets or promise more green space than they eventually deliver, in order to market a neighborhood to buyers looking for green pleasantness.
It makes deindustrialization seem both inevitable and desirable, often by quite literally replacing industry with more natural-looking landscapes. When these neighborhoods are finally cleaned up, after years of activism by longtime residents, those advocates often are unable to stay and enjoy the benefits of their efforts.
A. This phenomenon is often missing from development projects promoted as green or sustainable.
B. This phenomenon has variously been called environmental, eco-or green gentrification.
C. Greening and environmental cleanup do not automatically or necessarily lead to gentrification.
D. This creates pressure to rezone industrial land for residential towers or profitable commercial space, in exchange for developer-funded cleanup.
E. But it can drive up real estate prices and displace low- and middle-income residents.
F. Environmental gentrification naturalizes the disappearance of manufacturing and the working class.
