Segregation Histories, Wealth, and Community Engagement Shape Inequitable Burdens of Urban Greening

Incorporating vegetation into urban landscapes (hereafter, greening) has numerous ecological and social benefits. Not all greening processes are intentional, though, and not all nature conveys benefits to urban residents under conditions of uneven urban development, racial segregation, and unrecognized care work. We describe a framework for integrating multiple lines of evidence to explore the social contexts and socioecological impacts of urban greening. We assemble data (e.g., human surveys, Photovoice, spatial mapping, and ecological protocols) from neighborhoods in Baltimore City, Maryland, that were historically redlined and racially segregated but have subsequently experienced divergent paths of population and wealth accumulation, or continued official marginalization. Incorporating vegetation into cities offers both risk and benefit to local residents, and we demonstrate that the source of both initiative and resources matters. Greening initiatives that did not have local buy-in became local burdens. Although greening “vacant” properties in neighborhoods with population decline might convey city-scale benefits, local residents associated the greening with loss of valued human community, and they were unlikely to use or maintain such imposed or incidental green spaces. Local benefits, including heat amelioration, were not evident in our analysis. Discontent with greening was further associated with low expectations for help with other nature-based disamenities. In cities, reporting disamenities, such as mosquito nuisance, is often the trigger for directing resources toward management. In our study, residents with the greatest exposure to disamenities were least likely to initiate the processes that trigger external management.