Just Green Enough : Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification

While global urban development increasingly takes on the mantle of sustainability and "green urbanism", ecological and equity impacts of these developments are often overlooked, leading to a flurry of developments that have been sold as 'green' with questionable social and environmental outcomes, often resulting in what has been called environmental gentrification.

Operating under the seemingly a-political rubric of sustainability, environmental gentrification builds on the successes of the urban environmental justice movement and appropriates them to serve high-end redevelopment that displaces low income residents.

While the term environmental gentrification is nearly a decade old, recent coverage of projects such a New York's High Line and Chicago's 606 trail have brought the specter of environmental gentrification to the forefront of urban debates about how to accomplish environmental improvements without massive displacement. In this context, the editors of this volume developed a strategy called "just green enough" based on field work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to describe a plan that uncouples environmental cleanup from high-end residential and commercial development.

A just green enough strategy focuses explicitly on social justice and environmental goals as defined by local communities, those people who have been most negatively affected by environmental disamenities, with the goal of keeping those people in place to enjoy any environmental improvements. Just Green Enough is a theoretically rigorous, practical, global and accessible volume exploring, through varied case studies, the complexities of environmental improvement in an era of gentrification as global urban policy.

It details the uneven urban development that has left neighborhoods in need of environmental improvements, explores the role of the state in a variety of political contexts, and offer examples of activism to contest environmental gentrification, leading to a conclusion that suggests new ways to understand what "green" looks like and ways to achieve it without displacement.