Sustainability Policy, Planning and Gentrification in Cities

Susannah Bunce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367358365
• eBook ISBN: 9781317443711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Sustainability Policy, Planning and Gentrification in Cities explores the growing convergences between urban sustainability policy, planning practices and gentrification in cities. Via a study of governmental policy and planning initiatives and informal, community-based forms of sustainability planning, the book examines the assemblages of actors and interests that are involved in the production of sustainability policy and planning and their connection with neighbourhood-level and wider processes of environmental gentrification.

Drawing from international urban examples, policy and planning strategies that guide both the implementation of urban intensification and the planning of new sustainable communities are considered. Such strategies include the production of urban green spaces and other environmental amenities through public and private sector and civil society involvement. The resulting production of exclusionary spaces and displacement in cities is problematic and underlines the paradoxical associations between sustainability and gentrified urban development. Contemporary examples of sustainability policy and planning initiatives are identified as ways by which environmental practices increasingly factor into both official and informal rationales and enactments of social exclusion, eviction and displacement. The book further considers the capacity for progressive sustainability policy and planning practices, via community-based efforts, to dismantle exclusion and displacement and encourage social and environmental equity and justice in urban sustainability approaches.

This is a timely book for researchers and students in urban studies, environmental studies and geography with a particular interest in the growing presence of environmental gentrification in cities.

1 Introduction

Sustainability policy, planning and gentrification in cities

It is not difficult to feel engaged with the benefits of sustainability policies and planning initiatives in the central city of Toronto. As a city where the local government promotes walkable neighbourhoods as progressive spaces, creates infrastructure that supports bicycle commuting and currently owns and manages multiple hectares of park spaces and valley systems, residents can easily engage with environmental spaces and initiatives and often without question. The neighbourhoods of central Toronto represent multiple connections of sustainable urban planning – they can be largely navigated without reliance on an automobile, there are routes of mobility between neighbour-hood locations by public transit, the presence of government managed ‘tree protection zones’ to preserve tree canopy along roadways, and publicly owned and funded green spaces. While further public improvements to and additional funding for environmental initiatives have been a consistent need, Toronto – within a global context – is a city that has been at the frontline of local sustainability policy development as one of the first urban governments in the world to create an official local environmental policy agenda in the 1990s in collaboration with environmental non-governmental organizations (Desfor and Keil, 2004; Fowler and Hartmann, 2002; Gordon, 2016). Following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio Summit) in 1992, the city was home to the head office of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEIs), an organization that formed with the direct purpose of implementing Local Agenda 21 policy. In the early 2000s, Toronto’s government used the United Nations’ notion of sustainability as the balancing of social development, economic development, and environmental protection to frame the city’s official 30-year-long planning and development vision (City of Toronto 2002, 2015). At the core of the plan is an emphasis on urban intensification as a merged strategy to attract global and domestic financial investment in residential and commercial development while mitigating climate change and additional environmental problems through the production of more green spaces and denser, walkable districts with the intention of lessening automobile dependency (Boudreau, Keil, and Young, 2009; Bunce, 2004; Kern, 2007).

Intensification planning in Toronto has largely emphasized the redevelopment of previously industrialized districts such as Toronto’s central waterfront area into mixed residential and commercial areas, increased building densities and heights and the creation of public green space networks and sustainable transportation infrastructure such as increased bicycle and pedestrian pathways. Despite the city-wide nature of the plan, much of its implementation has been directed to the central city while planners have struggled to implement intensification planning, reliant upon private development interest, in Toronto’s expansive, unevenly developed, culturally diverse and more impoverished suburban areas. This has produced a multi-faceted divide between the largely car-dependent, residential, and lower-income suburban areas of the city (Cowen and Parlette, 2011; Hulchanski, 2010) and an intensely developing downtown core; with compact residential and commercial buildings largely visible in the form of privately owned residential and office towers and varied environmental initiatives provided for by local government, private sector interests and civil society organizations. In referring to the creation and implementation of sustainability policy and planning in Toronto over the past three decades, I specifically point to the city, a place where I live and work, as a spatial context where sustainability policy and planning agendas increasingly coincide with experiences of gentrification. While slower patterns of what Zukin (1989) calls ‘creeping gentrification’ have occurred in Toronto over the twentieth century and into today through the transformation of older working class central city neighbourhoods by middle class, higher income residents (Caulfield, 1994; Mazer and Rankin, 2011; Slater, 2004) over the last decade, and particularly in the last few years, various other forms and pressures of gentrification have emerged. What Lees (2003) and Butler and Lees (2006) have characterized as ‘super gentrification’, in reference to New York City and London, respectively, has appeared in Toronto with intensive multi-scalar financial speculation and investment occurring most noticeably in the residential property market and demonstrated in public discourse about ‘residential bidding wars’, ‘Toronto’s red-hot housing market’ and ‘house flipping’ [buying and quickly selling for a profit] (Gee, 2017; King, 2016; McClearn, 2017). Relatedly, homeownership and the security of affordable housing is rapidly becoming more precarious and out of reach for lower income and even average income earners. Urban green spaces and other environmental infrastructure such as green corridors, parks, gardens and bicycle and pedestrian pathways have, interestingly, added to and not detracted from rapid gentrification. Property agents in Toronto now regularly apply a walkability score, a universal rating system for urban “walkability” produced by US company Walk Score (Zamon, 2013), to highlight pedestrian friendly neighbourhoods and close proximity to recreational pathways and park spaces in the marketing of residential properties (Lissner, 2013; Moranis, 2016). An environmental form of gentrification is emerging in Toronto where environmental spaces and amenities such as parks, green roofs and gardens, and bicycle and pedestrian pathways, are increasingly entangled with existing gentrification processes. The notion of a sustainable development paradox (Krueger and Gibbs, 2007), the contradictory associations between the progressive and necessary environmental characteristics of sustainability and the structural mechanics of profit interests and accumulation, applies here. Although official sustainability policy and planning initiatives in Toronto produce necessary and forward-looking environmental practices that attempt to mitigate climate change effects, reduce local-level pollution and encourage residents to participate in environmentally responsible activities, many residents cannot secure affordable living spaces, are struggling to retain housing or are made vulnerable to gentrification outcomes such as displacement.

I rely on the aforementioned example of Toronto in order to contextualize a problem of environmental gentrification that is occurring in cities more broadly through a framework of sustainability policy and planning. This problem raises central questions of why and in what ways environmental practices, commonly produced through both formalized and informal policy and planning initiatives, are interwoven with the structural processes and everyday lived experiences of gentrification in cities? As the starting place for this book, these questions are positioned in relation to the production of sustainability policy and plans, how such policy and plans are implemented, the involvement of government, private sector and citizen actors in the enactment of sustainability initiatives, and connections of these with both neighbourhood-level and wider urban gentrification processes. Such associations are not only explored within the context of Toronto but through examples drawn from cities such as London, New York City, and Paris among others, where governmental sustainability policy and planning directives and local environmental initiatives have converged with the experiences of gentrification.

Environmental gentrification

The broader definitions of gentrification that guide the following chapters engage with critical analyses of gentrification as a process that creates uneven spatial and social development outcomes of community-level eviction and displacement in cities. Hackworth’s succinct and widely applied definition of gentrification as the ‘production of urban space for progressively more affluent users’ (Hackworth, 2002, p. 815) underlines the connections between urban spatial transformation, the presence of higher income earners and associated income-based social and spatial selectivity. This useful definition can interpret the gentrification of already existing urban spaces through residential and commercial changes that benefit the needs of higher income urban residents. Yet, the definition can also be applied to the production of new urban spaces that are ‘ready-made’ for affluent residents and moves beyond understandings of gentrification as a longer term and transitional process that just occurs in older neighbourhood environments. This is particularly relevant for the notion of new-build gentrification (Davidson, 2006; Davidson and Lees, 2005, 2010) as a form of ‘instant gentrification’ where new residential and commercial developments automatically meet the residential and commercial demands and financial abilities of higher income individuals. It also helps to frame the notion of policy-led gentrification conceptualized as the link between public policies strategically aimed at the ‘regeneration’ of specific areas of cities and the instigation of gentrification through more complex arrangements and involvement of private sector actors and investment practices (Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Smith, 2002). Marcuse’s articulation of gentrification, first defined in 1985 but still very relevant today, is directed towards the spatial context of older urban neighbourhoods, but demonstrates how eviction and displacement work in relation to associated issues of class, labour and income and racism in the production of uneven spatial development. He defines gentrification as a process that occurs

when new residents – who disproportionately are young, white, professional, and technical, and managerial workers with higher education and income levels – replace older residents – who disproportionately are lowincome, working-class and poor, minority and ethnic groups, and elderly – from older and previously deteriorate inner-city housing in a spatially concentrated manner, that is, to a degree differing substantially from the general level of change in the community or region as a whole …

(Marcuse, 1985, p. 199)

The transformation of urban space that is based upon the problematic displacement of lower income and racialized persons is a critical thread that moves through the following chapters in connection to the production of sustainability policy and planning in cities.

While these definitions anchor gentrification as a socio-spatial process, emerging scholarship that has occurred over the last decade on the topic of environmental gentrification or green gentrification has primarily focused on the associations between changes to the residential and commercial features of urban neighbourhoods for the benefit of higher income earners and the production of cleaner and healthier environmental spaces through brownfield remediation, the localized mitigation of environmental toxins and creation of environmental amenities in urban communities (Abel and White, 2011; Banzhaf and Walsh, 2006; Checker, 2015; Eckerd, 2011; Gamper-Rabindran and Timmins, 2011; Gould and Lewis, 2016; Hamilton and Curran, 2013; Pearsall, 2013). Other literature suggests that environmental features such as parks, community gardens and sustainable design techniques for buildings are now considered to entice, not dissuade, property investment and are high-lighted in the advertising and generation of property sales (Bunce, 2009, 2011; Quastel, 2009). Dooling (2009) employs the term ecological gentrification, instead, to underline how environmental initiatives can act to ‘greenwash’ particular areas of cities and, in the context of her research on a local government environmental planning and design for a park in Seattle and its displacement of existing homeless individuals who used that particular space, defines it as the ‘implementation of an environmental planning agenda related to public green spaces that leads to the displacement or exclusion of the most economically vulnerable human population – homeless people – while espousing an environmental ethic’ (Dooling 2009, p. 621). The exclusionary practices that Dooling mentions can be expanded more broadly to all residents who are made vulnerable to displacement and exclusion because of ecological gentrification. In particular, they can incorporate the displacement of individuals, often based on issues of racialization, class, and/or income disparity, who conflict with gentrification experiences that are propelled by the aesthetic, residential and commercial demands of higher income gentrifiers that support environmental initiatives and engage in environmentally sustainable practices (Anguelovski, 2015; Checker, 2015). The transformation of urban neighbourhoods into spaces with higher residential property values along with commercial and recreational landscapes that reflect an engagement with environmental issues – such as the growing presence of restaurants that promote organic and ‘locally-sourced’ ingredients, bicycle shops, crafting boutiques and holistic wellness stores, the proliferation of local farmers’ markets, and varied green spaces – suggests a new shape of gentrification that coincides with existing socio-spatial gentrification practices in cities.

In the work of this book, environmental forms of gentrification are addressed in a study of the ways by which assemblages of public, private and civil society actors, governmental policies, public and private sector planning initiatives, and more recent forms of gentrifiers interested in environmental issues co-produce gentrification through legislative and non-legislative urban sustainability policies and planning discourses and enactments. I explore this through three central themes– (i) the issues and predicaments regarding the absorption of often progressive sustainability initiatives aimed at mitigating climate change or fostering public interest in environmental practices into neoliberalized, profit-oriented urban regeneration and development activities that produce gentrification in cities; (ii) the implementation of urban sustainability policy and planning ideas, both formal and regulated governmental plans for sustainability and the less formalized sustainability planning initiatives of community-based organizations (CBOs) and/or individuals, and the spaces and experiences of social exclusion, eviction and displacement produced by gentrification and (iii) the search for local government and community-based policy and planning alternatives that promote more equitable and just forms of sustainability in planning and which resist gentrification as a process that galvanizes social inequity and displacement. In the following chapters, these themes are discussed through the use of different examples of the convergences of sustainability policy, planning and gentrification in cities and alternatives to these practices. While examples are primarily drawn from North American and European cities where these connections are more commonly identified in relation to the development and implementation of sustainability policy and planning agendas and rapid gentrification contexts, examples of the policy mobility of sustainable planning – particularly in relation to ur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Sustainability policy, planning and gentrification in cities
• 2 Convergences of urban sustainability policy, planning and gentrification
• 3 Sustainable master planning and gentrification
• 4 Sustainability, urban lifestyles and gentrification
• 5 Searching for equity and justice in sustainability in the gentrifying city
• 6 Conclusion: Future directions for resisting gentrification
• Index