Abstract
Urban green infrastructure provides ecosystem services that are essential to human wellbeing. A dearth of national-scale assessments in the Global South has precluded the ability to explore how political regimes, such as the forced racial segregation in South Africa during and after Apartheid, have influenced the extent of and access to green infrastructure over time. We investigate whether there are disparities in green infrastructure distributions across race and income geographies in urban South Africa. Using open-source satellite imagery and geographic information, along with national census statistics, we find that public and private green infrastructure is more abundant, accessible, greener and more treed in high-income relative to low-income areas, and in areas where previously advantaged racial groups (i.e. White citizens) reside. Areas with White residents report 6-fold higher income, have 11.7% greater tree cover, 8.9% higher vegetation greenness and live 700 m closer to a public park than areas with predominantly Black African, Indian, and Coloured residents. The inequity in neighborhood greenness levels has been maintained (for Indian and Coloured areas) and further entrenched (for Black African areas) since the end of Apartheid in 1994 across the country. We also find that these spatial inequities are mirrored in both private (gardens) and public (street verges, parks, green belts) spaces, hinting at the failure of governance structures to plan for and implement urban greening initiatives. By leveraging open-access satellite data and methods presented here, there is scope for civil society to monitor urban green infrastructure over time and thereby hold governments accountable to addressing environmental justice imperatives in the future. Interact with the data here: green-apartheid.zsv.co.za.
Highlights
Green space and green infrastructure in cities and towns are increasingly recognized as crucial in any urban planning or policy strategy to promote urban sustainability, climate resilience and liveability
Bringing together the dearth of national level examinations of urban green infrastructure distributions, and the South African context, we aimed to examine how private and public green infrastructure are related to race and relative income geographies across South Africa
The Apartheid regime imposed a classification of people into hierarchical racial categories, and morally and ontologically objectionable and ambiguous the underpinnings of such a racial classification, the legacy of this is that such categories have become part of the lived experience of South Africans and are important to include in an analysis of the legacy of Apartheid spatial planning (Posel, 2001)
Summary
Green space and green infrastructure in cities and towns are increasingly recognized as crucial in any urban planning or policy strategy to promote urban sustainability, climate resilience and liveability. Ecosystem services and benefits derived from green infrastructure include improvement of air quality, amelioration of the urban heat island effect, carbon sequestration, water infiltration for recharging aquifers, and providing food and habitat for other biodiversity in the urban matrix (du Toit et al, 2018; Livesley et al, 2016; Lovell & Taylor, 2013; Venter et al, 2020). These services provide indirect societal benefits through improvement in physical and psychological health, social cohesion, sense of place, safety and livelihood needs (such as firewood, wild foods and traditional medicines in some African countries) to mention just a few (du Toit et al, 2018; Nesbitt et al, 2017; RojasRueda et al, 2019; Twohig-Bennett and Jones, 2018). There are fewer measures of green infrastructure quality used mainly due to the complexity of cultural and socioeconomic perceptions of urban nature qualities
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
