Comment https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34942-x Challenging the financial capture of urban greening Melissa García-Lamarca, Isabelle Anguelovski and Kayin Venner Check for updates Urban greening is critical for human health and In our research, we use the term “urban green grabbing”8 to depict how real estate developers and the financial processes surrounding climate adaptation and mitigation goals, but its them partially or completely appropriate the financial and social financing tends to prioritize economic growth benefits generated by new or planned urban green amenities through imperatives. This often results in elite value and building a commodity (housing developments, often large-scale ones) to be bought and sold next door. They extract extra rent, surplus value, rent capture and unjust greening outcomes. We social capital, and/or prestige from locating or financing projects argue that cities can, however, take action to adjacent to new or up-and-coming green amenities, with benefits 1234567890():,; 1234567890():,; ensure more socially just impacts of green passed onto their investors and high-end clients. Such projects take a prudential, “safe” approach to financial risk, with return on investment financing. assured by the attractiveness of green real estate development as an asset class whose value will grow in the future9. Done in the name of green city-making, bolstered by an increased emphasis on urban cli- Elite financial capture of urban greening mate adaptation and resilience, these developments often exclude Urban areas have long been depicted as growth machines1, today working-class and racialized residents10. accounting for 80% of global Gross Domestic Product but also 75% of More financing for urban greening in the context of global climate global carbon emissions2. Urban greening—referring to the physical adaptation and mitigation strategies is critical, but to date it is insuf- greening and renaturing of cities through green infrastructure inter- ficient and unevenly available11. Faced with budget shortfalls, cities are ventions like rail-to-trail parks, remediated waterfronts or canals, large- increasingly financing green interventions through municipal (green) scale parks, or greenways and green streets—has a wealth of positive bonds, tax increment financing, sale of development rights, and other effects on mental and physical health and generates improved envir- direct and indirect value capture strategies12. These schemes embody onmental outcomes. The many green infrastructure interventions that the financialization of urban governance: city governments increas- cities have been actively deploying over the last decade or so have ingly come to directly or indirectly rely on financial products and land climate mitigation and adaptation co-benefits like carbon sequestra- markets to govern the city. Simultaneously, private capital sees public tion, reduced urban heat island effects, and improved flooding risk infrastructure or services as a site of accumulation, as financial inter- management. As part of this green mission, cities are mobilizing green ests secure revenues through the commodification and privatization branding to visualize their work and compete to be the greenest city of public goods13. Recent research has shown how green bonds, for among national and international peers. Greening has also become a example, tend to prioritize interventions that feed into urban eco- strategy to improve quality of life and attract private capital through nomic growth logics and often reinforce existing social and environ- direct investments or public-private partnerships which tend to mental inequalities or create new ones14,15. Moreover, the financing of increase housing prices and rents and reduce affordability3. Despite adaptation is so far not geared towards addressing recent or historic the latter’s negative impact on working class and racialized urban injustices, with recent research pointing out how financing institutions residents, the climate emergency is driving calls to policy-makers and often deny credit to racialized neighborhoods exposed to climate planners to expand the scope and range of urban greening interven- impacts16. tions, often framed as ways to unlock value and stimulate green growth. Green gentrification deepens urban injustices But we must ask: Unlocking value and green growth for who? The Elite financial capture of urban greening can produce a variety of “new” value that is generated in the process of creating urban greening injustices. The unequal distribution of access to green infrastructure comes from the metabolic relationship between capitalist societies primarily occurs because of the higher land and property values new and the biophysical world4. No matter how it is financed, urban greening has been shown to produce—for the benefits of a few and the greening tends to increase the value of land and property, operating as exclusion of many17,18. The term green gentrification is used to depict an accumulation strategy5,6 benefiting elite groups and reinforcing how green urban interventions attract investment and higher income existing social and environmental inequalities. For example, research and often White residents, while displacing historically marginalized on land politics shows that extensive wetlands in Colombo, Sri Lanka groups to less green and unhealthier, climate exposed areas where have been turned into parks, canals, and real estate in recent decades, they can afford to live19,20. benefiting local and international investors, urban development Our recent study of 28 North American and European cities agencies, real estate developers, and the urban upper-middle class, identified that 17 out of 28 cities experienced these green gentrifica- while low-income and marginalized populations have suffered from tion dynamics between 1990 and 2016, whereby new green spaces— eviction, dispossession, and environmental hazards7. especially high-profile parks and greenways—in one time period nature communications (2022)13:7132 | 1 Comment contributed to subsequent city-wide gentrification21,22. For example, in reinforce or create new inequalities and injustices. While there is no Atlanta, property values increased 18%-27% more for homes located silver bullet to solve the problem of urban green grabbing, elite cap- within a half-mile of the Beltline greenway than elsewhere from 2011 to ture, and green gentrification, action can be taken so that the ecolo- 201523. In Barcelona, green gentrification trends started in the 2000s gical and social benefits of urban greening investment reach and have accelerated in the past decade, with more highly educated populations normally left behind. If we are to avoid future “climate and higher-income residents moving into traditionally working-class apartheid”31 that will entrench privilege and precarity within and areas like Sant Martí while existing working-class residents had to between cities, in both the Global North and South, a shift in approach move out. During the 2000s, the area immediately surrounding the to finance urban greening and the implementation of various tools and Port Olímpic parks and Poblenou Park already saw a 26.7% and 20.5% policies is paramount. increase in family income respectively over 5 years, compared to a 2.8% First, financing needs to be considered as a social and ecolo- increase in the rest of Sant Martí over the same time period24. gical process, embedded in relationships and power dynamics Urban greening can also directly remove vulnerable residents between humans, and between humans and nature32. We believe from their neighborhoods through dwelling illegalization and land emerging thinking around how to finance reparative climate infra- grabbing, rezoning residential neighborhoods into other uses, or structures is a foundational approach33. It considers shifting capital labeling specific neighborhoods as high climate-risk areas, at the same from destructive economic sectors to ones that redress some of the time that luxury residential developments often do not have to abide inequalities, trauma, and losses generated by uneven urban devel- by the same rules. In New Orleans, for example, the release of the Green opment and supporting socio-natural relations of care and mutual Dot Map just a few months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 already flourishing. For example, collective community resistance in outlined the conversion of racialized neighborhoods such as the Lower Jakarta, Indonesia has reimagined and in some cases reshaped the Ninth Ward into green areas, while higher-income, yet low-lying areas, top-down financialized coastal and flood protection infrastructures such as Lakeview were to be rebuilt25. Almost 20 years later, this prac- and their financial sources, directing some funds to upgrade kam- tice of unjust environmental expropriation is still visible through con- pungs (informal settlements) and build protective infrastructures34. tentious relocation or property buy-out programs (and subsequent re- Along these lines, we echo calls for further research into the finan- naturing initiatives) throughout the United States. Recent research cial relations and tools that can support smaller scale infrastructure shows that the criteria and processes used in buy-outs tend to lack initiatives, especially those operating through informal economies transparency and fairness: Low-value homes—those owned largely by and community-based forms of coordination, to better understand working class and racialized groups—are more likely to be designated the financial processes behind more inclusive urban climate as “substantially-damaged” and thus bought out26. Differential treat- action35. ment in the location of urban greening by race and class and protection Another means to shift capital driving urban green growth to of low-income homes is especially noticeable in the Global South27. In benefit working-class and racialized communities is through a bottom- Medellín, Colombia, as the Green Belt initiative was rolled out in the up approach to democratize climate finance governance36. Incorpor- early-mid 2010s, high-end residential developers in El Poblado were ating grassroots engagement, subaltern forms of knowledge37, trans- granted permission to build in an ecologically risky and protected area parency, and accountability as core principals is urgent both globally while low-income and indigenous self-built housing residents were and locally. Tools like participatory budgeting has challenged the physically, socially, and ecologically displaced in the name of nature predominant green growth paradigm in Lisbon, Portugal38. Lessons conservation and through elite and exclusive green space use28. can also be learned from the use of explicit equity criteria in partici- Such examples are evidence for the idea that the financing and/or patory budgeting institutional design in Cuenca, Ecuador, which has construction of green infrastructure and renaturing projects by private enabled more funds to be directed to residents most vulnerable to developers or by private-public partnerships—even when meant to be floods, landslides, drought and frost, all increasing in frequency due to open and public—is increasingly creating privatized and enclosed climate change39. spaces with unequal and limited elite access to ecological, health, or A range of tools and policies can also be implemented by cities social benefits. These financial processes for new green spaces insti- to regulate land use, development, and investment around green gate new rules, norms of use, and practices that often undermine those amenities40,41. Vacancy taxes and transfer taxes on luxury properties of historically marginalized groups, and racialized groups in particular. (Vancouver), rent controls (Berlin), development tax or linkage fee In Barcelona, gentrification has meant that new green spaces in the for affordable housing construction (Boston), and facilitating coop- Ciutat Vella (city center) have become appropriated by tourists and erative housing (Copenhagen, Barcelona) or community land trusts expat workers, mostly for entertainment and consumption purposes, (CLTs) (Washington DC) are examples of measures that can con- in turn compromising the use of green spaces by North African and tribute to increasing housing affordability and preventing green Latin American residents as well as their trust, sense of community, gentrification by controlling speculation and thus avoiding the dis- and place attachment29. When exclusive greening intersects with placement of long-term marginalized residents. More widespread racialized development, cities are additionally faced with threats to adoption of these well-established tools requires bold local govern- emancipatory and abolitionist justice, unable to challenge deep social ments who put equity and justice concerns for marginalized groups, and racial hierarchies and guarantee the right to a “sense of place” for rather than elite profit-making interests, at the center of city planning racialized groups30. and building processes. In closing, the challenge of building sustainable, healthy and Moving towards more socially just urban greening financing green cities is not simply one of increasing financing of urban green- practices ing, or closing the financing gap. Rather, financing urban greening We have made clear the processes and outcomes of the predominant should always be viewed in the context of how it inequitably impacts paths to finance urban greening and the ways in which they may land markets and socially vulnerable groups. We call for a shift in the nature communications (2022)13:7132 | 2 Comment Fig. 1 | Urban greening and its financing at a crossroads. The panel on the left contrast, the panel on the right shows how the proposed reparative approach, anti- illustrates the path to elite financial capture, with positive effects for investors and displacement policy tools, and democratization of climate finance governance can developers and negative effects for working-class and racialized residents. In pave the way to socially just financing of urban greening. way urban greening is financed from the predominant path that leads Received: 7 October 2022; Accepted: 11 November 2022; to elite financial capture to one that prioritizes equity by recognizing and seeking to meet the needs of marginalized communities. This can be achieved via a reparative approach, bold anti-displacement policy tools, and the democratization of climate finance governance (Fig. 1). References 1. Molotoch, H. 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Res. 43, Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in pub- 133–156 (2019). lished maps and institutional affiliations. 29. Oscilowicz, E., Honey-Rosés, J., Anguelovski, I., Triguero-Mas, M. & Cole, H. Young families and children in gentrifying neighbourhoods: how gentrification reshapes use and percep- Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International tion of green play spaces. Local Enviro. 25, 765–786 (2020). License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or 30. McKittrick, K. On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Soc. Cult. Geog. 12, format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a 947–963 (2011). link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other 31. Rice, J., Long, J. & Levenda, A. Against climate apartheid: confronting the persistent legacies third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless of expendability for climate justice. Enviro. Plann. E. 5, 625–645 (2022). indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s 32. Christophers, B. Risk capital: Urban political ecology and entanglements of financial and Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or environmental risk in Washington, DC. Enviro. Plann E 1, 144–164 (2018). exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright 33. Webber, S., Nelson, S., Millington, N., Bryant, G. & Bigger, P. Financing reparative climate holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. infrastructures: capital switching, repair, and decommodification. 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