Speaker
Description
Sustainability policies achieved increasing attention in the last decades, with the EU green transition initiatives, especially the European Green Deal, taking a leading role (Almeida, et al, 2023). There are now a series of concrete ideas adopted and under implementation in many cities and metropolitan areas, such as greening public space, renovating buildings, avoiding to develop unbuilt areas.
However, evidence shows that there are many potential negative socio-spatial consequences of these good-willing sustainability policies (Anguelovski and Connolly, 2021). Such unwanted social externalities might include green or ecological gentrification due to the price increase following greening initiatives, renoviction following the renovation and ecological retrofitting of buildings, displacement of the original residents during densification of urban areas.
The fundamental research question (linked to the Horizon Europe project „ReHousIn”, which started in 2024 under the coordination of Metropolitan Research Institute) is: what type of public policies might alleviate such types of negative social externalities of environmental policies? The paper examines this question through critical overview of the research literature (e.g. the analysis of the newly emerging ideas of ’sufficiency’ and ’stationary city’, Bihouix, 2024) and carrying out a ’resilience test’ examination on long term development strategies of European cities (Berlin, Brno, Budapest, Ostrava, Stuttgart, Torino, Warsaw), in discussion with urban planners of these cities.
Emerging key findings indicate special importance of metropolitan level coordination of sectoral policies. Besides restraining and modifying development ideas in each sector of development (e.g. renovation of the existing stock instead of building new, ensuring accessibility instead of increasing mobility, densification of built-up areas instead of building in greenfields), there is also an over-arching vision needed, based on a post-growth oriented strategic thinking. This can best be developed on the metropolitan level of governance, ensuring sectoral, horizontal, and vertical integration across the municipalities of the functionally connected urban area.
References
Almeida, D.V 2023: The “Greening” of Empire: The European Green Deal as the EU first agenda. In: Political Geography, Volume 105, August 2023
Anguelovski, I and Connolly, James J. T. 2021: The Green City and Social Injustice: 21 Tales from North America and Europe. Routledge
Bihouix, P, 2024: The stationary city: a new narrative on the future of urbanisation? In: Should I stay or should I go? Urban sprawl, density and a new planning agenda for Europe. Perspective Brussels, May 2024
Levine, J et al, 2019: From Mobility to Accessibility. Transforming Urban Transportation and Land-Use Planning. Cornell University Press
ReHousIn, 2024: Launch of the ReHousIn project: Contextualized pathways to reduce housing inequalities in the green and digital transition. https://mri.hu/en/2024/03/28/
| Keywords | sustainability policies; ecological gentrification; renoviction; displacement, metropolitan areas |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
