Conversion, coordination and care: Unpacking housing-featured urban renaturing in Taichung

The shift toward green and sustainable economies has led to the integration of ecological goals into land development strategies, resulting in diverse urban renaturing practices. These practices are often embedded within property-driven development processes, yet the co-productive relationship between urban greening and housing has remained under-theorized. Rather than treating greening and development as sequential stages, this study examines how they are operationalized in tandem, often reinforcing subtle forms of exclusion not captured by conventional analyses of displacement or gentrification. Drawing on the lens of urban political ecology (UPE), we develop the concept of metabolic greening to unpack a housing-featured renaturing apparatus. Based on a case study of the Unit Two land readjustment district in Taichung City, Taiwan, we analyze how greening practices and housing development are co-produced through iterative and interlocking processes. The research design integrates semi-structured interviews, policy and document analysis, and field observation to investigate the dynamics under study. We developed the 3Cs framework—conversion, coordination, and care—to serve two key purposes: to explain how housing-featured urban greening is organized, and to critically examine the exclusionary effects embedded in these processes. By repositioning greening as an integral part of property redevelopment, the framework advances a more relational understanding of urban nature production. The findings contribute to UPE debates by offering conceptual tools to examine how ecological interventions are not only organized through property but also implicated in shaping differentiated access, right, and control over urban green space.