Injustice in Urban Sustainability
In spring 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic had become a global reality, the European-funded project UrbanA1 began engaging a community of practice around issues of urban sustainability and justice by bringing together research and community partners across seven countries in Europe. In our first encounter, academics, policymakers, local government representatives, non-profit organizations and activists came across some of the challenges around designing and implementing urban sustainability with the notion of justice at its core. Among other themes, participants discussed socially just and ecologically sound ways of renaturing cities that involve protecting the right to housing, urban nature and healthy environments and preventing the often-contradictory effects of such objectives, such as green gentrification. We explored the potential repercussions of a more feminist and care-centered approach to planning for urban sustainability that would recognize and center the undervalued, gendered and often invisibilized work of care (for people and nature). We also debated how to achieve socioecological justice through processes of urban commoning, movement organizing, creating, and supporting solidarity networks, and maintaining the social fabric that makes urban communities more cohesive and resilient. Nevertheless, as motivated and well-intentioned as these discussions were, they could not avoid contradiction. Embedded in a highly privileged environment with an educated and intellectual crowd of professionals, the majority of those with decision-making power were Western, white and male. As we were offered mint tea prepared by an undoubtedly empowered collective of women cooks of African origin who had started their small business in a northern European city at a venue dedicated to the heritage of immigration in that city, we could not help but notice the contradictions around us: right across the street, bulldozers paved the way for an urban regeneration project known to be displacing long-term residents including immigrant minorities from the neighborhood. It was during these uncomfortable moments that the concept of “urban sustainability and justice” manifested itself as a complex system of power and privilege that can only be addressed through a deeper engagement with on-the-ground realities and our own positionality and responsibility toward them. This book draws on these reflections to analyze ten drivers of urban injustice and how they are being challenged and transformed.
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