Towards conceptions of green gentrification as more-than-human

Abstract

This article seeks to expand scholarly conceptions of green gentrification by emphasizing the complex and contradictory connections between nonhumans and humans as critical for understanding neighborhood change. Drawing from posthumanist scholarship, as well as literature on urban political ecology, urban greening, gentrification and “just green enough,” this article argues that to understand green amenities not only as sites of injustice, but rather as dynamic sites of injustice and resistance, requires disaggregating amenities from traditional conceptions of green gentrification. In doing so, it is possible to analyze the complex agencies of greenspace itself as connected to pluralized forms of (in)justice associated with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. To illustrate this, I use a more-than-human framework to reconceptualize three existing “just green enough” case studies of (1) riverfront development, (2) urban linear parks, and (3) community gardens to show how injustice and resistance are not only broad-based, but unique to amenity and place. The aim of this review is to offer new ways of understanding and analyzing the dialectic of injustice and resistance associated with green gentrification.