Eco-City dream: Urban realities of environmental injustice in Austin and Dallas

The concept of Green Cities/Eco Cities has emerged as a dominant urban imagination that is seen as an ecological solution to environmental crisis without compromising economic expansion, especially, through green investments. This article critically examines Green city policies in Austin and Dallas revealing, firstly, the gaps between sustainability policy discourses and the actual lived experiences, and secondly, the class-based and racially unjust nature of green urbanism thus, strengthening environmental justice literature. Employing discourse analysis of city policy documents and semi-structured interviews with residents from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, the study explores disparities in the distribution of environmental amenities. Findings indicate that affluent neighbors benefit from concentrated green investments, while historically marginalized communities face disinvestment, infrastructural decline, and green gentrification. Policies of both cities are rhetorically committed to equity, but because they work within the ecological modernization paradigms of capitalism, the green vision does not fundamentally alter the urban-nature dialectic as they work to preserve production-consumption-accumulation-based economic growth, therefore, in order to offset capitalism's contradictions they tend to perpetuate existing racial and class status quo in their socio-spatial practices. These results underscore how technocratic sustainability agendas shaped by ecological modernization fail to address deeply embedded structural inequities in urban governance. This article engages with degrowth literature that argues for a shift toward post-growth urban models that prioritize reparative justice, redistributive policies, participatory planning, and ecological care. The study contributes to scholarship on just urban transitions, calling for a reorientation of sustainability away from economic growth and towards fundamental societal changes that can be achieved through social and environmental equity.