The Hidden Costs of Urban Greening

This past week, our class explored environmental sustainability in Germany and the political economy of its environment. To contextualize this, we discussed The Green Paradox which speaks to the outcome under which climate policies backfire from their original intentions of ecological preservation, holding an opposite effect. It relates to Jevon’s Paradox and the Rebound Effect, an economic concept that states the dilemma that arises when the increased use of an efficient product leads to increased consumption levels, thus counteracting the intentions of saving.

Currently, Europe faces a crossroads of either initiating meaningful progression in its infrastructure or falling down a Green Paradox loophole in its strides toward urban greening. Green infrastructure or “urban greening” is the integration of green spaces and natural elements of a town/city’s ecosystem into its larger infrastructure. The European Platform for Urban Greening is a project being carried out by the European Commission that aims to cultivate supporting guidelines for towns and cities in enhancing and restoring their urban nature and biodiversity. The project holds the main objectives of providing a space to identify current needs in urban green landscaping and advancing the level of quality and adaptability of the skills ecosystem needed to implement urban greening.

Reading this, one may think how an initiative that presents the benefits of healthier, low-carbon and climate-resilient cities could become counterintuitive with increased consumption. The reality is that the overproduction and consumption of urban greening presents harmful consequences for social sustainability through its cultivation of green gentrification. In green planning, green gentrification is a byproduct that creates and maintains large inequalities that exist, especially by race and income, in the distribution and access to green space. Within this, there is a greenspace paradox that scholars have identified under which the deployment of climate-adaptive green space improves an area’s attractiveness, and thus increases its property values, and housing prices. The paradox lies within the displacement of working-class residents and racialized groups as a result of those changes who are disenfranchised in society. Already, it has been found in a study examining green planning in European and North American cities that green gentrification is an emerging byproduct of rounds of investment-oriented climate-responsible livability. The Barcelona Green and Biodiversity Plan is an example of this, a project that implemented urban sustainability initiatives and fell victim to green gentrification as a result increased property prices and a lack of housing affordability policies to protect those of lower socioeconomic status.

This post is bittersweet for me to write as I am a huge enthusiast of green infrastructure design as a means to cultivate sustainable communities. However, it is just as important to recognize the faults that can occur in its initiation just as much as the idea itself to enact meaningful change. Last spring semester at Babson I took a social impact class where I focused on UNSDG 11 on building sustainable cities and communities to initiate a sustainable on-campus project. This project held the aim of introducing permeable paving to Babson’s Wellesley campus. Although the project is still yet to come to fruition, the biggest lesson that I have taken away from it and that class is that sustainable change is social change, and to create social change is to create a voice for people who are impacted, yet never heard. With this, I hope that the European Commission carefully considers the social sustainable impacts of the European Platform for Urban Greening by listening to the voices of the people, so that this meaningful initiative does not fall victim to the harsh realities of the Green Paradox.