Originally published on The Conversation

Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran: There are many indexes that aim to rank how green cities are. But what does it actually mean for a city to be green or sustainable?

We’ve written about what we call the “parks, cafes and a riverwalk” model of sustainability, which focuses on providing new green spaces, mainly for high-income people. This vision of shiny residential towers and waterfront parks has become a widely-shared conception of what green cities should look like. But it can drive up real estate prices and displace low- and middle-income residents.

As scholars who study gentrification and social justice, we prefer a model that recognizes all three aspects of sustainability: environment, economy and equity. The equity piece is often missing from development projects promoted as green or sustainable. We are interested in models of urban greening that produce real environmental improvements and also benefit long-term working-class residents in neighborhoods that are historically underserved.

Over a decade of research in an industrial section of New York City, we have seen an alternative vision take shape. This model, which we call “just green enough,” aims to clean up the environment while also retaining and creating living-wage blue-collar jobs. By doing so, it enables residents who have endured decades of contamination to stay in place and enjoy the benefits of a greener neighborhood.

‘Parks, cafes and a riverwalk’ can lead to gentrification

Gentrification has become a catch-all term used to describe neighborhood change, and is often misunderstood as the only path to neighborhood improvement. In fact, its defining feature is displacement. Typically, people who move into these changing neighborhoods are whiter, wealthier and more educated than residents who are displaced.

A recent spate of new research has focused on the displacement effects of environmental cleanup and green space initiatives. This phenomenon has variously been called environmental, eco- or green gentrification.

Land for new development and resources to fund extensive cleanup of toxic sites are scarce in many cities. This creates pressure to rezone industrial land for condo towers or lucrative commercial space, in exchange for developer-funded cleanup. And in neighborhoods where gentrification has already begun, a new park or farmers market can exacerbate the problem by making the area even more attractive to potential gentrifiers and pricing out long-term residents. In some cases, developers even create temporary community gardens or farmers markets or promise more green space than they eventually deliver, in order to market a neighborhood to buyers looking for green amenities.

Environmental gentrification naturalizes the disappearance of manufacturing and the working class. It makes deindustrialization seem both inevitable and desirable, often by quite literally replacing industry with more natural-looking landscapes. When these neighborhoods are finally cleaned up, after years of activism by longtime residents, those advocates often are unable to stay and enjoy the benefits of their efforts.

The River Walk in San Antonio, Texas, is a popular shopping and dining area catering to tourists. Ken Lund, CC BY-SA

Tools for greening differently

Greening and environmental cleanup do not automatically or necessarily lead to gentrification. There are tools that can make cities both greener and more inclusive, if the political will exists.

The work of the Newtown Creek Alliance in Brooklyn and Queens provides examples. The alliance is a community-led organization working to improve environmental conditions and revitalize industry in and along Newtown Creek, which separates these two boroughs. It focuses explicitly on social justice and environmental goals, as defined by the people who have been most negatively affected by contamination in the area.

The industrial zone surrounding Newtown Creek is a far cry from the toxic stew that The New York Times described in 1881 as “the worst smelling district in the world.” But it is also far from clean. For 220 years it has been a dumping ground for oil refineries, chemical plants, sugar refineries, fiber mills, copper smelting works, steel fabricators, tanneries, paint and varnish manufacturers, and lumber, coal and brick yards.

In the late 1970s, an investigation found that 17 million gallons of oil had leaked under the neighborhood and into the creek from a nearby oil storage terminal. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed Newtown Creek on the Superfund list of heavily polluted toxic waste sites in 2010.

The Newtown Creek Alliance and other groups are working to make sure that the Superfund cleanup and other remediation efforts are as comprehensive as possible. At the same time, they are creating new green spaces within an area zoned for manufacturing, rather than pushing to rezone it.

As this approach shows, green cities don’t have to be postindustrial. Some 20,000 people work in the North Brooklyn industrial area that borders Newtown Creek. And a number of industrial businesses in the area have helped make environmental improvements.

Just green enough

The “just green enough” strategy uncouples environmental cleanup from high-end residential and commercial development. Our new anthology, “Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification,” provides many other examples of the need to plan for gentrification effects before displacement happens. It also describes efforts to create environmental improvements that explicitly consider equity concerns.

For example, UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, is combining racial justice activism with climate resilience planning in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. The group advocates for investment and training for existing small businesses that often are Latino-owned. Its goal is not only to expand well-paid manufacturing jobs, but to include these businesses in rethinking what a sustainable economy looks like. Rather than rezoning the waterfront for high-end commercial and residential use, UPROSE is working for an inclusive vision of the neighborhood, built on the experience and expertise of its largely working-class immigrant residents.

This approach illustrates a broader pattern identified by Macalester College geographer Dan Trudeau in his chapter for our book. His research on residential developments throughout the United States shows that socially and environmentally just neighborhoods have to be planned as such from the beginning, including affordable housing and green amenities for all residents. Trudeau highlights the need to find “patient capital” – investment that does not expect a quick profit – and shows that local governments need to take responsibility for setting out a vision and strategy for housing equity and inclusion.

In our view, it is time to expand the notion of what a green city looks like and who it is for. For cities to be truly sustainable, all residents should have access to affordable housing, living-wage jobs, clean air and water, and green space. Urban residents should not have to accept a false choice between contamination and environmental gentrification.

Header photo: Small tankers unload along New York’s Newtown Creek in 2008. Jim Henderson

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The Lab was founded and is led by Gabriella Gómez-Mont, as the experimental arm / creative think tank of the Mexico City government, reporting to the Mayor. It is highly innovative in its techniques and strategies for urban development.

“The Lab is a place to reflect about all things city and to explore other social scripts and urban futures for the largest megalopolis in the western hemisphere, working across diverse areas, such as urban creativity, mobility, governance, civic tech, public space, etc. In addition, the Lab searches to create links between civil society and government, constantly shifting shape to accommodate multidisciplinary collaborations, insisting on the importance of political and public imagination in the execution of its experiments.”

During the week I worked with the Lab’s Open City team, Gabriela (Gaby) Rios Landa, Valentina Delgado, Bernardo Rivera Muñozcano and Nicole Mey. I came away super impressed by their work, commitment and creativity. The work I was asked to do was highly varied and engaged a number of my specializations:

1. To run a visioning workshop with Lab people and key stakeholders to develop a vision for an Open City for CDMX, that could help guide city development in an inclusive and participatory way.
2. To deliver a talk on “Democratizing Design” in which I discussed some current “revolutions” in design and cosmo-localization from the perspective of the P2P Foundation.
3. To run a design session to develop an anticipatory governance strategy for the application of artificial intelligence in CDMX.
4. In addition I gave presentations to the Open City team on co-governance and the city as commons, vision mapping and the anticipatory experimentation (bridge) method.

Needless to say it was a big week!

Visioning

For the visioning workshop, we started by using a technique called “vision cycles”, which is a way of mapping the history of an issue, but in such a way as to discover the previous visions that have informed development (what might be considered “used futures”) as well the current vision and its effects, and what ideas for the future are emerging. After this we did a short visualisation process that helped everyone to picture the future city in their minds eye. We then used the integrated visioning method first developed by Sohail Inayatullah, where we looked at the preferred future, the future that was disowned, and then developed an integrated future.

One of the insights from the session is that cities have many selves, and it is worth interrogating what are a city’s dominant selves and what selves have been disowned. When a self is disowned and has no avenue for expression its behaviour shows up as undermining, disruptive, agitative. If the contradictions between the dominant self of a city and its disowned self is not resolved, then conflict can ensue. The integrated visioning method provides a way of seeing that can appreciate how the integration of the dominant and disowned selves of a city can lead to more wholistic or wiser development.

Anticipatory Governance

With an issue like artificial intelligence, there is not only great uncertainty regarding the potential impact on society, there is also definitional ambiguity as AI crosses many definitional boundaries (is it machine learning, neural networks, algorithms, robots, automation, etc), and the speed of the issue seems to be accelerating. Given this, the Lab was tasked with developing a set of policies for how this polymorphous issue is managed and governed. For this they asked me to apply the Causal Layered Analysis method of Sohail Inayatullah, and then to use the Anticipatory Governance Design Framework I have developed to provide the building blocks that can form an Anticipatory Governance framework for artificial intelligence. Needless to say the workshop was rich, exploring some of the core assumptions, worldviews and attitudes guiding people’s thinking, and new myth and metaphors that provides genuinely empowering pathways.

Presentations

In addition to this I gave presentation on some of my favourite subjects.

Co-governance and the city as commons. This was more a conversation than a presentation, and to be honest they taught me much more than I was able to teach them. This conversation was one of the biggest learnings for me. First of all they were already familiar with the work of Christian Iaione and Sheila Foster (and others) on the urban commons. In particular while they appreciated the perspective on the urban commons, they questioned its translatability from the Bologna / Barcelona / Ghent context (small-medium sized cities, politically empowered population in Europe) to CDMX (24 million people, highly stratified between wealthy / empowered and poor / marginalised). They also felt that the spirit of CDMX resists monolithic prescriptions and wondered where / what opportunities exist for heterotopic futures, plural futures within the city … rather than a single / monolithic city vision. CDMX exhibits spatial diversity, a city with myriad groups, colonias, spaces, but also exhibits temporal diversity, where the pre-colombian civilization is layered and meshed into the colombian and global / neoliberal – thereby resisting the monoculture of linear time. The future cannot just be framed in modernist terms, it needs an ecology of visions.

Dovetailing with this is the concern with the somewhat trendy roll out of smart / digital city strategies that have the intention of making a city open and participatory, but which some felt have the opposite effect, they empower the people that already have power in a place like Mexico City. It became clear to me from the conversation that a truely “Open City” can only be one where core inequalities are dealt with. Poor people struggling to survive will never experience a city as “open” so long as they must toil for less than a living wage, and in which suburb by suburb segregation has been all but institutionalised along wealth lines. In this context CDMX’s historic crowdsourcing of their constitution was an important precedent, and in which Universal Basic Income was put forward (however apparently could not get through the legislative process).

In this context I also presented the core principle of implicated commons-governance, recently developed in this paper with Michel Bauwens, which I consider to have simple but radical implications for democratization of all aspects of life. (pre-print can be viewed here).

“This notion of ‘common concern’ serves to expand the scope of what is a commons and who is a commoner. In the case of planetary life support systems, the value of this as a commons is fundamentally implicit in that it does not appear valuable to a community until it is activated by virtue of a contextual shift. For an issue as fundamental as climate change, it is the personal awakening that we all share an atmosphere with seven billion other humans (and countless species) as a commons of concern. Through the accident of circumstance each of us have been ‘plied into’ this shared concern of the twenty-first century. The planet’s atmosphere has thus shifted from an implicit commons to an explicit commons. Our atmosphere has become a matter of survival for all, and suddenly people have become commoners to the extent that they see how they are entangled into this shared concern, with a concomitant responsibility for action. This implies a radical democratization of planetary governance.”

This principle of implicated commons-governance did resonate with them and we had a long discussion on how this might be applied in CDMX.

Vision Mapping and the Anticipatory Experimentation (bridge) Method. I also presented my work on vision mapping, the combination of visioning processes and online editable mapping based on open street maps and the map interface. One of the Lab teams were already using OSM for a project and there was considerable overlap in the use of participatory methods to map urban geographies and imaginaries. As well I presented on the anticipatory experimentation (bridge) method, which was very consistent with the overall approach to the Lab, as they are explicitly an experimental arm of the city government tasked with charting new pathways for CDMX’s urban futures.

Cosmo-localization

I presented on cosmo-localisation at a coworking space called wework, hosted by FabCity CDMX and Futurologi, where I got to meet Oscar Velasquez and Igna Tovar. With around 50-60 people I had chance to show off my bad spanish and my perfect spanglish. I spoke on a theme I’ve been developing with my colleagues through the P2P Foundation.

I described cosmo-localization as:

“… the process of bringing together our globally distributed knowledge and design commons with the high-to-low tech capacity for localized production. It is based on the ethical premise, drawing from cosmopolitanism, that people and communities should be universally empowered with the heritage of human ingenuity that allow them to more effectively create livelihoods and solve problems in their local environments, and that, reciprocally, local production and innovation should support the wellbeing of our planetary commons.” 

I worked on the themes of deep mutualization in the context of the anthropocene. Slides are here. Audio here.

Later that week I did a podcast with Inga Tovar where we discussed design global manufacture local / cosmo-localization, a collaboration between Centro Uni and Futurologi. This was a more relaxed conversation on the subject, conducted exclusively in spanglish (I attempted to speak in Spanish for the audience but had to revert to english again and again and get Inga to offer translations).  Audio here. 

Impressions and reflections

Overall I came away very impressed with the city of Mexico as a whole. From crowdsourcing a new constitution (perhaps the biggest experiment of this kind to-date), to becoming one of the first Latin American regions to make itself LGBT friendly, to its attempts to create a universal basic income, and of course the work of the Lab, CDMX, despite its many social problems, is an oasis of intelligence and progressive politics. I got the feeling that the city is on the cusp of a renaissance and potential transformation. That is my hope for the city’s many people, most who struggle day by day for survival.

For CDMX the promise of commons governance and Cosmo-localization is really about the ability of Mexico city’s poor to be enfranchised rather than marginalised at a number of levels. In terms of co-governance and the urban commons, it is the principle that those that have a stake in the development of CDMX need to be given the practical ability and tools for making decisions about their city. In terms of cosmo-localization it is liberating the potential for any enterprising community to be able to produce was they need for their wellbeing and livelihoods.

My own interest in working in CDMX stems from family history. My mom was born in the Colonia Roma, and she spent her first 12 years there before immigrating to the US with her mother and sisters. I grew up hearing stories with CDMX as the backdrop, not all pretty ones either. For my mom and her family, life was hard, they were very very poor, and they struggled day in and day out for survival. This has a distinct imprint on my sense of identity. Despite my relative privilege as a travelling consulting futurist, for the purposes of CDMX I know that I am the son of a mother who came from the harshest poverty, and that in another life I am one of “los de abajo”. For my mom and her family, “moving up” for them was working as maids for the wealthy in central Mexico city. It feels as if, because we suffered from inequality and the stigma of poverty, it is something that we know too well must be addressed to fulfil the promise of the city. The disowned must be integrated into the future of the city for all to flourish.

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The selection of the papers for publication will be done by the editors of this special issue: Alexander Hamedinger (Assistant Professor, Centre of Sociology, Department of Spatial Planning) and Lukas Franta (Assistant, Centre of Sociology, Department of Spatial Planning).

Full papers (4.000-8.000 words) will undergo a double-blind peer review process.

“In context of the economic and financial crisis, which is profoundly reshaping Europe and its Cities and Regions, alternative forms of social and economic organisation are increasingly discussed in urban and regional research and practice. Particularly commons are (again) hotly debated as an alternative way to organize the production, distribution and consumption of certain resources. Recently, a number of urban, regional as well as planning studies have been devoted to the analysis and evaluation of commons in spatial development, using a range of different theoretical rationales. These include amongst others research inspired by the pioneering work of Elinor Ostrom to theories which deviate from methodological individualism e.g. more political-economic (David Harvey) and sociologically coined strands of thought. Commoning basically means the processes and practices of collectively self-regulating the production and/or distribution and/or consumption of resources, often with the aim of improving social cohesion and solidarity in societies. From a planning perspective commons are often interpreted as a new way of steering and coordinating collective action between state and market, of improving the efficiency of production and consumption of environmental resources, facilitating the accessibility of basic goods and services, empowering of local residents, improving social cohesion through building social capital or strengthening citizens’ participation in planning projects. However, they also are described more critically as part of a neoliberal spatial development or as niche product for a small urban elite.
This special issue wants to contribute to this discourse through critically reflecting on the potentials and challenges of commons and commoning practices mainly in the space- and planning-related fields of housing, public space and regional food. It welcomes theoretically and empirically as well as practice-focused/-oriented papers; contributions are welcome from across the social sciences and the application of different scientific angles to explain commons in urban and regional development is encouraged, e.g. economics, sociology, political science, geography, spatial planning, development studies, feminist studies, community studies or law.
The papers should address some of the following questions in the context of commons in housing, public space or local/regional food systems:

• Spatiality of Commons: How is spatiality constructed through commoning and collective action?
• Governance of the Commons: which actors and regulatory systems are characteristic for which action field of commoning?
• Legitimation of Commoning: who benefits from commoning practices? Who is included in/excluded by these practices?
• Contextualisation of Commons: which factors are influencing success or failure of commons?
• Planning and Commoning: how is state-led spatial planning related to commoning in urban and regional development?
• Commons and the city region: how do commoning practices influence economic and social relations between city and region?
• Added value of Commons: how do commons contribute to achieve the goals of social cohesion and environmental protection in spatial development? How can commons contribute to alter local and regional economic and social structures?
• Financing of Commons: Where do monetary and nonmonetary resources in commons come from, how is their internal and external exchange organized, and which provisions are taken to ensure long-term financial sustainability?”

The timetable for this special issue is:

• Aug 9, 2016 – Deadline for the submission of abstracts
• Sep 9, 2016 – Notification of acceptance, invitation for full papers
• Dec 9, 2016 – Deadline for submission of full papers start of review process
• Feb 2017 – End of review process information for authors
• April 7, 2017 – Final deadline for revised papers
• June 2017 – Publication (open access and print)

Photo by denisbin

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