Green Gentrification

The neighborhood of Saint-Henri in Montréal’s Southwest borough has long been associated with poverty, marginality and squalor. But this is rapidly chang- ing as both extraordinary, large-scale green infrastructures and small-scale, more ordinary forms of greening are expanding across the neighborhood, amidst private luxury housing development and rising rents. Both extraordinary and ordinary greening are also connected to Saint-Henri’s transforming foodscape, where new gourmet restaurants and up-scale cafés, a renovated farmers’ mar- ket and renovated grocery stores are displacing the diners, dépanneurs (corner stores) and other food shops long frequented by working-class residents. What happens when, all at once, a community faces food gentrification, small-scale greening projects and large-scale green infrastructure? In this chapter we explore the greening-related tensions and inequities that are unfolding in Saint-Henri, where new multi-scalar greening projects and foodscapes are stitching together a post-industrial landscape to create new—and often exclusionary—forms of urban living. We also show how, at the intersection of these tensions, local com- munity groups have resisted and fought for alternative forms of development on multiple scales.

The extent to which new greening initiatives contribute to gentrification processes in urban areas is of rising interest to researchers and policymakers, but the precise (and often intangible) aspects of green spaces that embed them within gentrification processes are not well understood. The Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) literature offers new ways of measuring these aspects. In this study, we use geo-located social media data to assess the value attributed to CES in 18 urban parks in Barcelona, of which 9 were shown to have experienced green gentrification in previous studies. We performed descriptive analysis and statistical independence tests on 703 photos downloaded from the social media platform Flickr. Of the 703 photos analyzed, 85% were taken in parks associated with green gentrification; nevertheless, around 80% of all photos depicted built infrastructures rather than ecological features-indicating that green gentrification is not strictly about greenness and how visitors value it. Statistical results show that parks that experienced green gentrification were significantly associated with "aesthetics" and "recreational activities", whilst parks that did not experience green gentrification were significantly associated with "cultural identity" and "social activities". These results suggest that justice outcomes following from the relationship between urban greening and gentrification are dependent on the social-cultural associations with green spaces that the ecosystem services framework formulates, making it a potentially powerful tool for understanding how to generate more just greening policies in cities.

The Parc-Extension neighborhood is located to the North of the Montreal downtown core, and is bordered by Town of Mount-Royal (to the West), Outremont and Marconi-Alexandra (to the South), Rosemont (to the East) and shopping district Marché Central to the North.
Parc-Extension has a high proportion of low-income immigrant and racialized residents, and a strong community network.
In September 2019, the Université de Montréal opened its new Campus MIL on the south edge of the neighborhood.
Residents of Parc-Extension are already feeling the impact of the new campus, less than one year after the opening.

Key findings
Housing. The opening of the new campus has caused rent hikes, evictions,  and the displacement of residents, in a context characterized by low vacancy rates in Parc-Extension and in Montreal more broadly.
Community. Community groups have been displaced and support networks are being destabilized.
Studentification and professionalization. A specific form of gentrification is occurring, caused by an influx of Université de Montréal students to the neighborhood and a speculative housing market. This will accelerate a broader professionalization process in the neighbourhood: between censuses 2006 and 2016, the rate of people holding a B.A degree and more rose from 15% to 21% and the rate of households making 80 000 $ and more rose from 4.6% to 16.5%.

Missed opportunities
Good intentions, little action. Despite public messaging, the Université de Montréal has failed to act or take responsibility for their impact on Parc-Extension.
Student housing. The University included student housing in their initial plans, but has since sold this land to private developers.
Lack of transparency. Many proactive attempts were made by the community to develop a mitigation strategy, but documentation shows the University has not meaningfully engaged with these efforts.

Moving forward
Dialogue and mitigate. The authors call on the Université de Montréal to enter into dialogue and commit to using its position for mitigation.
Many models. Many universities have taken leadership in partnering with local communities. The Université de Montréal can learn from them.
Non-profit student housing. The University should offer on-campus student housing, and work with the government to develop a province-wide strategy for non-profit student housing.
Collaborate and support. Identify, in collaboration with local community groups, ways for supporting projects that are already working to mitigate the problems that affect Parc-Extension, for example, community housing projects.

This co-written post with Melissa Garcia-Lamarca forms part of the series “Green inequalities in the city”, developed in collaboration with the 'Undisciplined Environments' blog. The series seeks to highlight new research and reflections on the linkages between the dominant forms of “green” redevelopments taking place in cities and questions of urban environmental justice, and the challenges and possibilities these imply for more just and ecological urban spaces.

The post is intended as an opening salvo for a more extended paper on green gentrification in North Glasgow.

http://www.bcnuej.org/2020/12/02/what-will-glasgows-smart-canal-mean-for-its-historically-deprived-communities/