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The Covid-19 pandemic and energy, climate, and demographic crises have shown how cities are vulnerable to these impacts and how the access to green and blue spaces has become highly relevant to people. One strategy that we can observe is the strong focus on the resilience discourse, meaning implementing more green and blue spaces in urban areas, such as at previous brownfield quarters. However, social justice implications of urban greening have been overlooked for a long time. The implementation of strategies to improve the quality and availability of the green and blue infrastructures may indeed have negative outcomes as far as housing accessibility is concerned by trigging gentrification processes. Issues related to environmental justice and socio-spatial justice are increasing in contemporary cities and call for a better understanding of the global and local mechanisms of production and reproduction of environmental and spatial inequalities. This thematic issue includes eleven articles with different methodologies, with examples from Europe and North America as well as different lenses of green gentrification. Some articles focus more on the question of costs, benefits, and distributional consequences of various infrastructural options for urban greening. Others, instead, discuss how the strategic urban planning tools and policy processes take into account distributional consequences, with specific attention on participatory processes.

This article analyzes the acceptance of climate policy measures in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam to understand how policy and planning interrelate with private and public interests. While legitimizing climate policy and measures, values can also cause conflict when operationalized locally. By analyzing value conflicts in public discourse, we gain insights into questions of environmental behavior and their influence on the acceptance of climate action. We report on quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis covering 410 articles from Dutch newspapers between 2015 and 2021 in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam related to the energy transition, mobility, and urban greening. Our findings show that public discourse mostly remains abstract and detached from local contexts. As experts and politicians dominate the debate, the discourse mainly addresses science- and policy-related arguments, representing the public interest but reflecting only insufficiently private interests and the local (re-)distribution of benefits and burdens. Therefore, we attribute spontaneous protest to the lack of reference to differentiated values at the local level and find the argument of NIMBYism insufficient to explain residents’ opposition. Instead, our findings point to experts’ and decision-makers’ lack of recognition of the local “idea of place” and a community’s identity as an explanation for the sudden emergence of protests. Here, urban design may bridge the gap between policy and planning by translating technical and economic constraints into place-specific designs.

Urban areas can be conceptualized as large and ever-changing playgrounds in which many diverse agents (households, businesses, developers, municipalities, etc.) are active. The interactions between the playground qualities and the players’ preferences are not unidirectional. However, sometimes, external events may change the perception of the playground qualities in the player’s eyes. The recent Covid-19 pandemic and its associated precautionary measures are a clear example. During the pandemic, the value of existing urban green infrastructures has increased, as lockdowns were imposed, and distance working became widespread. The concept of “passive” ecological gentrification is developed in order to characterize this type of process. In contrast with “active” ecological gentrification, caused by purposeful intervention in the urban arena, “passive” ecological gentrification is triggered by a change of context, such as the pandemic impacts. This article focuses on the appreciation of green urban infrastructures by urbanites during the pandemic, showing that the willingness to pay to live near green and open spaces has increased in general, but with significant spatial differences. The main research questions are: (a) How does the player’s perception of the playground’s value change in times of pandemic? (b) Do these changes support the emergence of “passive” ecological gentrification? The methodology is based on the analysis of changes in property values over time as an indirect measure of a location’s appeal, looking specifically at areas near green urban infrastructures, both in the inner city and in the peripheral areas. Relatively large changes in property value over time are a possible indicator of ongoing gentrification processes: When they are observed near existing green infrastructures, and not related to redevelopment initiatives, “passive” ecological gentrification may be the result. Using detailed spatial data on land use and property prices from the Netherlands, we find evidence that supports the hypothesis of a “passive” ecological gentrification drift towards areas around urban parks and green infrastructures in general.

Cities worldwide face multiple social and ecological challenges, such as climate change and its impacts. Adapting and transforming our urban environments is urgent to improve their resilience to uncertain scenarios. These challenges require renewed urban solutions and force us to rethink their design processes. Multiple actors are involved in such processes, coming from different sectors, and sometimes having conflicting agendas and knowledge backgrounds. Many of these processes can be considered co-design processes, with actors interacting to improve the design quality, legitimacy, and feasibility. Many conceptualise cities as social-ecological systems and public spaces are their subsystems. A collaborative approach to designing public spaces contributes to integrating the social-ecological knowledge from the public, private, and citizen actors. The question remains: How is sometimes conflicting social-ecological knowledge integrated into public space co-design processes? We study two large-scale urban parks in Chile. We framed them as social-ecological systems and analysed their co-design processes. This study aims to provide insights into the difficult-to-grasp phenomena of knowledge integration in co-design processes. We analysed these cases in previous studies. Now we provide insights into social-ecological knowledge integration in co-design processes. Although framed in Latin America, the findings may be helpful elsewhere.

While global urban development is increasingly oriented towards strategies to facilitate green urbanism, potential community trade-offs are largely overlooked. This article presents the findings of a quantitative and qualitative meta-analysis of the current literature on green gentrification (the process leading the implementation of an environmental planning agenda displacing or excluding the most economically vulnerable population) in connection with climate change adaptation and mitigation across the globe. Based on specific keywords, we selected the recorded entry of 212 articles from Scopus covering the period 1977–2021. Our review focused on the historical and geographical development of the literature on urban greening and gentrification. The analysis shows that the concept of green gentrification has strong roots within the environmental justice debate in the US. In terms of intervention, most studies focused on urban parks and trees and were primarily oriented towards restoration. However, debates around the role of green facades, green roofs, or blue infrastructure (such as ponds and rivers) and other nature-based solutions as a driver for green gentrification are few and far between. Finally, we also identified a strong gap between the observation of green gentrification and potential countermeasures that respond to it. Most studies suggest that the existence of a stronger collaborative planning process within the affected communities may overcome the challenge of green gentrification. Based on our results, we identify several gaps and new research directions to design a green and just city.

Since its introduction, the concept of “nature-based solutions” has gained much attention, drawing public funds and private investments. Nature-based solutions conceptualise the use of nature in planning as a cost-efficient and sustainable means to address societal, economic, and ecological challenges. However, this “triple win” premise tends to conceal potentially resulting injustices, such as displacement through green gentrification. While these injustices have attracted the attention of environmental justice scholars, as exemplified by the “just green enough” approach, links to the “nature-based solutions” concept are mostly implicit. Further, the concept of environmental privilege, questioning who benefits from created natural amenities, has rarely been taken up. This article, therefore, argues that environmental justice should be linked closely to nature-based solutions. Supported by a theoretical perspective, the article aims at exploring who benefits from, and who loses out on, urban nature-based solutions processes. It builds on a qualitative literature review of the scholarly landscape on environmental justice and urban greening while linking to nature-based solutions, adding perspectives of environmental privilege. In this, it attempts to offer three important contributions to the current academic discussion. First, the article provides an overview of the debate on urban greening, (in)justice, and environmental privilege. Second, it relates the concept of nature-based solutions to the debate on environmental justice, opening nature-based solutions up for critique and conceptual refinements. Third, it outlines a way forward for reframing nature-based solutions through the lens of environmental justice and privilege. Thus, this article provides a starting point for further discussions on the implementation of just nature-based solutions in cities.

Despite global urbanization, not all cities have increasing populations. While not homogenous, shrinking cities arguably have different opportunities and challenges for green space than growing cities. This article reports a structured content analysis to investigate how urban green space planning evolved in two case study cities: Buffalo (New York, US) and Porto (Portugal). These cities both underwent shrinkage and suburbanization but with very different green space planning histories. The concept of green infrastructure is used as a lens to analyze green space planning change, specifically focused on multifunctionality. The aim of investigating how objectives and priorities for planning green spaces change during a period of urban shrinkage, and particularly what functions these cities have assigned to green space, showed that, over time, green spaces were expected to produce more ecological functions in both cities, and, particularly in Buffalo, contribute to the economic and demographic outcomes of the city. Overall trends in green space planning appear to have played a role but we find shrinking cities may leverage green space to meet unique needs. These findings contribute to the literature by addressing how shrinkage affects not only vacant areas but also overall green space planning, as well as suggesting that general green space planning studies should consider demographic change as a relevant context factor.

Urban forms can have numerous direct and indirect effects on the health of residents. This article focuses on the relationship between health and urban form, in particular the role of green open spaces. The goal is to identify criteria for evaluating the impact of physical forms such as streets and open spaces, green infrastructure, and built structures on urban health. These criteria are then used to identify paths for the redevelopment of modernist housing estates with the aim of improving living conditions. This challenge remains particularly significant in Poland and Eastern Europe, where a large share of the urban population lives in modernist blocks of flats. First, we examine the modernist housing concept in Europe and Poland and the guiding principles for their development, including the role of green, open spaces. Then, we refer to several studies on urban health to identify normative factors that define the open space design conditions in modernist housing estates. We apply the typo-morphological approach with qualitative and quantitative assessment of building forms and forms of green open spaces to examine the structures of two modernist housing estates in Poland: Lodz and Gdansk. We evaluate their living conditions, especially the organisation of outdoor space, in terms of their impact on the health of residents. A comparison of the two housing estates reveals common factors defining the relationship between urban form and health.