Green gentrification & the luxury effect: uniting isolated ideas towards just cities for people & nature
Urban biodiversity and justice research often operate in silos. Comparing the luxury effect and green gentrification reveals this divide, showing how separating human and non‑human justice limits progress. The authors argue for integrated socio‑ecological approaches to build truly just cities.
Subject Tags
- Biodiversity
- Equitable conservation
- Social Sciences
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.
Citation
Eyster, H.N., Rodríguez González, M.I. and Gould, R.K., 2024. Green gentrification & the luxury effect: uniting isolated ideas towards just cities for people & nature. Ecosystems and People, 20(1), p.2399621. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2399621
TNC Authors
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Harold N. Eyster
Climate and Land Use Analyst, Colorado
The Nature Conservancy
Email: harold.