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Implementing densification while ensuring green space accessibility is a crucial planning challenge. The powerful role of private for-profit actors densification projects mean that green spaces are at risk of being co-opted by private interests and transformed into club goods. Using a new-institutionalist approach, we analyse the implementation of densification and urban greening based on two case-studies in Switzerland and the Netherlands. We ask what planning strategies are successful in ensuring public access to green spaces in private-led densification. To counteract club formation, planners need to restrict property rights, actively monitor implementation of planning objectives, and ensure an open physical design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Densification leads to a transition phase in which commoning can be supported. • Commoning initiatives in cities are largely dependent on support from the state. • New commons can change the conditions of governance of densification. • New commons can advance socially-sustainable outcomes in urban transformation. Although densification is generally seen to contribute to more sustainable urban development, it is often linked to market-oriented and for-profit development, contributing to the enclosure of urban space. We analyse how densification can take a different path through processes of commoning. We particularly aim to understand how commoning initiatives can contribute to new institutional arrangements that counteract enclosure and commodification in densification. We furthermore aim to contribute to conceptual clarity in the debate on urban commons by emphasizing the different roles of so-called 'old' and 'new' commons in urban development. Our analytical framework builds on a new institutionalist approach which stresses the analysis of localized and temporary institutional arrangements negotiated among actors in a given situation. We rely on a detailed case-study of a densification project in the city of Bern (Switzerland), where publicly-owned land was redeveloped into cooperative housing and urban green space. Our findings show how densification leads to a transition phase in which institutional arrangements defining land uses and allocating access and use rights are renegotiated. These are crucial moments where processes of commoning can shape the outcome of densification, although not independently from the supportive action of the public actor. We underline the potential of new commons, even when typically transitional, unstable, and temporary. Contrary to old commons, their potential lies not so much in the ability for long-lasting resource management, but rather in the capacity to change the conditions of governance during the transition between land uses, advancing more socially-sustainable outcomes in a key moment of the urban redevelopment process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]