Green gentrification beyond residence: Diverging residential change and park-user restructuring in Shanghai

Green gentrification is commonly understood through residential upgrading and displacement, implicitly treating socio-economic restructuring as a coherent transformation across urban spaces. We challenge this holistic assumption by asking whether residential change around green amenities is necessarily mirrored in the social composition of the people who use them. Using seasonally matched mobile-phone signaling data for 297 parks in Shanghai in 2017 and 2023, linked to a fixed neighborhood deprivation reference, we compare changes in park-user residential origins with changes in surrounding resident populations. Park-user restructuring is widespread, but residential and activity-space trajectories are more often asynchronous than synchronous: 168 of 297 parks (56.6%) fall into mismatched upgrade/downgrade combinations. We therefore conceptualize green gentrification as a selective, multidimensional and potentially asynchronous socio-spatial process rather than an all-encompassing neighborhood transformation. Three contrasting cases illustrate plausible contextual pathways of integrated area development, community-oriented provision and functional specialization, without treating them as causally identified mechanisms. The findings imply that green justice cannot be assessed only through who lives near green amenities; it must also examine who uses, occupies and benefits from them over time.