Green gentrification & the luxury effect: uniting isolated ideas towards just cities for people & nature

Abstract

The growth of cities creates challenges to biodiversity and social justice. Researchers addressing these challenges often do so in silos; their efforts persistently separate justice for non-humans and humans. We analyze this separation through two concepts—luxury effect and green gentrification—that each explores urban greenspace and justice, but from different angles. The luxury effect implicitly targets justice for non-humans by exploring biodiversity in cities and finds that wealth explains the distribution of biodiversity. Green gentrification explicitly targets justice for humans by examining how new greenspaces affect people and finds that such greenspaces often displace vulnerable people. Using scientometric analyses, we show the disjunction between these concepts. We draw on socio-ecological justice concepts to suggest that disregarding relationships and conflicts among humans and non-humans in concepts does not eliminate them in practice, but stalls progress toward just cities. We urge scholars to simultaneously focus on justice for humans and non-humans.

Keywords

• Jonathan (Yotti) Kingsley
• Biodiversity
• socioeconomics
• socio-ecological systems
• urban planning
• interdisciplinary synthesis