Three Histories of Greening and Whiteness in American Cities

Abstract

How has urban greening related to the degree of whiteness in neighborhoods? The answer to this question provides an essential “historical diagnostic” that can be used to develop an approach to urban ecology which integrates racial and ethnic change into the planning for proposed interventions. In this paper we employ state sequence analysis to analyze the historical trend of greening (including the implementation of new parks, greenways, community gardens, green recreation areas, and nature preserves) between 1975 and 2014 in a sample of nine cities in the United States relative to concentrations of white and non-white residents. We divide the nine cities into three common growth trajectories and separately examine the trends for each growth trajectory. We further illustrate these trends by mobilizing qualitative data from field work in selected neighborhoods to help explain the processes that generate certain key findings in the quantitative data. We find that the relationship between greening and race/ethnicity differs according to city-level growth trajectory. Cities with continuous high and rapid levels of growth in the postwar period have the strongest link between increased greening and whiter populations. Meanwhile, in cities that contracted or had a punctuated growth pattern, non-white areas had a uniformly low level of greening that occurred mostly in recent years. In all, we show how urban growth, greening, and whiteness are inextricably associated qualities of American cities. We argue that understanding this association is essential for development of a race-conscious model for enhancing urban ecosystems.

Linking Urban Tree Cover Change and Local History in a Post-Industrial City

“…Tree planting and greenspace creation was carried out not only by non-profit actors like PHS, but also by the municipal redevelopment authority and private real estate developers. Although there is growing appreciation for the role of private developers in structuring urban forests [20,149], and for the association between historical redlining and UTC patterns [52,150], the connection between urban renewal and UTC spatiotemporal trends is not well understood, although there was one past study on urban renewal and tree planting in Baltimore [56]. Other planning districts that we did not investigate in-depth share broad similarities to the Lower North: the North, River Wards, West, and University Southwest districts show declining building cover and/or increasing UTC (Table 4), which reflect the impacts of urban renewal and urban greening initiatives [29].…”

“…Crucially, the land cover transitions within each planning district did not occur in isolation, but rather, were linked to other parts of the city in terms of planning policies and demographic shifts. Indeed, urban historians have noted the linkages between suburbanization and urban renewal [55], and urban planning scholars have observed connections between intra-city sociodemographic trajectories and public greenspace provisioning [150]. In Philadelphia, the increasing building cover and UTC on quasi-suburban developments of the Lower Far Northeast and Lower Southwest were socially and politically connected to the depopulation, declining building cover, and overgrown vacant lots in districts like the Lower North.…”

Rail-to-park transformations in 21st century modern cities: Green gentrification on track

“…Green gentrification scholarship tends to highlight the parks themselves as drivers of gentrification. Under this view, the gentrification process occurs after the green area is built and people start benefiting from it (Anguelovski et al, 2018b;Connolly and Anguelovski, 2021;Pearsall, 2010;Pearsall and Anguelovski, 2016;Rigolon and N emeth, 2020), or in some cases when the park is announced in the first place (Immergluck, 2009). It is then the idea of the park, its presence, and its attached value that drives gentrification.…”

Green gentrification in European and North American cities

“…Acknowledging that there are multiple definitions and understandings of greenspace across disciplines (Taylor and Hochuli, 2017), for the purpose of this study we define it as the creation of any of our five classifications of urban greenspace—parks, greenways, preserves, gardens, or recreation areas (for detailed description see ref. 24 ). In some cases, the boundaries and sizes of greenspaces represent a manually augmented version of publicly available files when missing spaces were identified through other sources.…”