Urban greening holds the promise of fostering crucial socio-environmental benefits for city residents. Unfortunately, urban greening interventions tend to ignore deeply rooted patterns behind urban injustices. The lack of an equity perspective when implementing urban greening has been shown to result in the displacement and exclusion of marginalized groups due to increased housing costs and property values, adding a new form of environmental injustice. Despite this, urban greening interventions and polices often embrace a discourse promoting the greening of cities as a "win-win" solution, which can be harmful and important to acknowledge to avoid justifying greening projects that result in negative social implications. Hence, this study conducts a discourse analysis of various policies published by the European Commission promoting urban greening to examine how urban greening is discursively used and framed. To avoid adding new injustices, there is a need to center environmental justice concerns in research on urban greening. Environmental justice encompasses three interrelated dimensions: distributional, recognitional, and procedural justice. However, research on urban greening tends to focus on the distributional dimension. To contribute to filling this research gap, the thesis also conducts a thematic content analysis to examine how the multiple dimensions of environmental justice are considered within the European Green Capital’s urban greening policies. The study’s findings shed light on harmful discourses and a lack of consideration for particularly recognitional justice in urban greening policies, pointing to the need for policy discourses that problematize urban greening interventions and center environmental justice concerns.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-531552 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Elmström Friberg, Cornelia |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för geovetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Examensarbete vid Institutionen för geovetenskaper, 1650-6553 ; 2024/ 28 |
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