Green Gentrification and Environmental Injustice

This volume offers a new policy perspective for strategically managing change in cities while reducing the risk of gentrification displacement, with the ultimate goal of improving neighborhood-level social justice. Environmental injustice, pollution remediation, and gentrification displacement are interlinked problems. However, public policy research and practice have tended to separately analyze urban policy issues such as how to clean up brownfields and other pollution, how to redevelop blighted neighborhoods, how to contend with gentrification displacement, and environmental injustice generally. Yet, in the urban setting these issues are inseparable because the city is a complex adaptive system. In this book, the authors take a new perspective to such intertwined urban policy issues, using complexity thinking and, more importantly, complex adaptive systems approaches in order to develop context-sensitive policy approaches to managing these ongoing problems. 

This book argues that given the complex nature of the urban environment, there is not one optimal solution to reducing environmental injustice, in part because there is no singular cause. Environmental injustice emerges in particular settings because of the combined and interdependent effects of a variety of different policy and community characteristics. The authors argue that addressing such interlinked problems requires an understanding of the clusters of community and contextual factors that combine in a variety of ways to both create problems and imply policy approaches to managing them, and that the use of complexity-informed methods such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Agent-based Modeling (ABM) lets us better identify plausible solutions for specific contexts. This book explains the way that complexity thinking and tools, along with case-based information, can help ameliorate stubborn environmental injustice problems in cities.