Practitioners’ perspectives on preventing environmental gentrification

Pollution cleanup, green space creation, and other improvements to environmental quality in cities are important to urban sustainability. However, because they occur within a political economic context characterized by structural racism, urban greening initiatives can intentionally or unintentionally reproduce racial, economic, and social inequities through environmental gentrification. We explored possibilities for improving environmental quality without displacing or excluding long-term residents including people of color, the poor, and members of other marginalized groups. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with community organizers, environmental justice advocates, urban planners, housing specialists, and others who held deep expertise through their lived and professional experience in relevant fields in Chicago, Illinois. Five interrelated themes emerged through inductive analysis of the interview data that offer guidance for leaders of environmental improvements: (1) co-construct knowledge and share decision-making power, (2) design inclusive community engagement that centers marginalized voices, (3) implement multi-issue interventions, (4) disrupt structural racism and other causes of disparities, and (5) coordinate policies and programs across local, state, and federal scales. These findings reinforce and extend established knowledge about the need to design inclusive, community-driven, intersectional, multi-scalar environmental decision-making processes that help disrupt the systemic drivers of environmental injustice to achieve equitable outcomes.