Speakers
Description
Cities stand at the frontline of the climate crisis, and are set to transform every aspect of urban life — from sustainable mobility and energy systems to food security, water management, and inclusive housing. As places of both vulnerability and innovation, they offer great potential for redefining urban living by implementing bold, forward-looking solutions. Among them, housing has emerged as a critical focus, given its role as a highly climate-exposed and energy-consuming sector. Our work lies in examining trade-offs and relationships between Environmental and Energy Policies (EEPs), and housing challenges through a comparative approach across different European contexts.
This project is conducted as part of the master’s programme “Governing Ecological Transitions in Cities” at the Urban School of SciencesPo Paris, in partnership with AESOP. It is developed in collaboration with the French team working on the European research project ReHousIn, which examines the interconnections between housing, social inequalities, and urban environmental transitions.
The first objective of our research is to map EEPs alongside socio-economic indicators to assess the current state of Paris and the potential for green gentrification. The analysis focuses on three types of EEPs: (1) Nature-based Solutions, i.e., actions inspired by or modeled after nature to address urban challenges; (2) Energy Retrofitting, i.e, renovation work within residential buildings, including heating, cooling, ventilation and renewable energy integration; (3) Urban Densification, i.e., policies aimed at limiting urban sprawl and promoting sustainable urban growth. The cartographic representation of both EEPs and socio-economic indicators in Paris reveals three key trends. First, Paris is prone to green gentrification due to the lack of control on the private housing market, as rent prices are consistently higher near major green and blue spaces, even in poorer neighborhoods (map 1). Second, citizen-led initiatives are more prevalent in low-income areas (map 2), and especially in the richest areas of the poor neighborhoods. Third, wealthier dwellings, despite similar levels of energy retrofitting as social housing, have significantly higher energy consumption due to both the rebound effect (i.e., an increase in consumption due to improved energy efficiency) and a lower population density, which increases heating demands (map 3).
The second objective of the project is to analyze and compare green transition initiatives both at the national (Orléans and Sens) and European (Paris, Milan, and London) level, focusing on their impact on housing inequalities. Paris, London, and Milan, as major European cities with distinct dynamics, provide valuable case studies for understanding how green transitions influence housing disparities across diverse contexts. At the national level, the comparison between Paris (a large city), Orléans (a mid-sized city), and Sens (a small city) sheds light on the situation in France, revealing that the impacts of green transitions vary significantly depending on the city’s size and characteristics.
The third objective of the project is to develop targeted policy recommendations to promote greater equity in urban development. Our results allow us to draft some preliminary conclusions: (1) Since the implementation of NbS tends to be a strong factor of green gentrification, in the absence of new municipal instruments to control prices on the private market, increasing green coverage in the city tends to increase the eviction process of poorer working classes. (2) As the residential energy consumption seems more related to the income of dwellers than to the quality of their insulation, energy retrofitting, while being socially useful, seems insufficient to largely reduce energy consumption in Paris. As such, our work not only contributes to the academic discourse on equitable urban transitions, but also provides practical insights for policymakers to build both greener and fairer cities.
References
Anguelovski, I., Connolly, J. J. T., Cole, H., Garcia-Lamarca, M., Triguero-Mas, M., Baró, F., Martin, N., Conesa, D., Shokry, G., Del Pulgar, C. P., Ramos, L. A., Matheney, A., Gallez, E., Oscilowicz, E., Máñez, J. L., Sarzo, B., Beltrán, M. A., & Minaya, J. M. (2022). Green Gentrification in European and North American Cities.
Cucca, R., Friesenecker, M., & Thaler, T. (2023). Green Gentrification, Social Justice, and Climate Change in the Literature: Conceptual Origins and Future Directions.
Machline, E., Pearlmutter, D., & Schwartz, M. (2018). Parisian Eco-Districts: Low Energy and Affordable Housing? Building Research and Information.
Naylor, Sam, et al. (2023). The State of Housing Design 2023: Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. [Online] available at: https://www.sciencespo.fr/centre-etudes-europeennes/fr/recherche/projet/rehousin/
| Keywords | Housing Inequality; Green Gentrification; Energy and Environmental Policies |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
