Climate change is exacerbating storms at the same time that humans are increasingly settling in areas most affected by such storms. In theory, post-disaster recovery offers opportunities to rebuild for sustainable development. However, in reality, responses to climate events often result in greater inequality through a process we term resilience gentrification. Three possible resolutions to the coastal resilience dialectic are managed retreat, denial, and structural mitigation. Structural mitigation has become the most popular response in the Anthropocene. This response raises the cost of coastal redevelopment, giving capital greater access and control over development decisions. These changes make coastal areas more expensive and more exclusive. We illustrate this process in the post-disaster recovery of two very different communities: Gowanus, Brooklyn and the Caribbean island of Barbuda. In both cases, attempts to build it back “green”—using selective aspects of “sustainable development” as a guide—come at the cost of exacerbating existing housing inequality. In this way, “resilience” gets equated with wealth, thus reinforcing a cycle of climate injustice. To achieve a “just sustainability,” government responses must consider and address the equity impacts of climate change resilience policies. Managed retreat and degrowth strategies for climate resilience offer greater potential for a just sustainability in the Anthropocene.
In light of the discussions on relocating the capital city of Indonesia to a new location in Kalimantan, and create a new green capital city (referred to as IKN), the purpose of this meta-review paper is learn from experiences from other relocations of capital cities and creations of green cities in the world. Specific emphasis is hereby given to urban greening and gentrification. This article applies a meta-analytical approach by connecting the basic tenets of the 8R framework of responsible land management to assess the pros and cons of a selected set of capital city relocations and green cities. From the comparison, it is possible to generate general recommendations for Indonesia's new green capital city. The comparison reveals that each of the selected cases falls short in one or more aspects of the 8R framework. In all cases, constructing green capitals requires a mixed and integrated land use planning, a transparent regulatory framework toward land use control, extensive consultation with both local, national and international stakeholders, and participation with local residents. Only under these conditions, one can ensure ownership, respect and trust in the decision. The quandaries highlight the complexity of capital city relocation and green city creation. The originality lies in the specific land management framework perspective and discursive analysis of documented discourses on constructing new capital and green cities. This provides new options for devising and extending regulatory guidelines and for assigning responsibilities for such new mega-endeavors. Given the conceptual and discursive character of the paper, a limitation of the approach may be that there are no specific empirical data collected, yet several recommendations for further research include expanding the boundary work between the land management, the spatial planning and governance domains.
The design and deployment of green amenities is a way to tackle cities' socio-environmental problems in the quest for urban sustainability. In this study, we undertake a systematic review of research published in international peer-reviewed journals that analyzes environmental justice issues within the context of the deployment of urban green amenities. Since most studies focus on the Global North, where this scholarship first emerged, our goal is to link the literature focused on the North and the South. This study aims to outline similarities and differences regarding the nexus of justice and the greening of cities in both contexts as well as to identify knowledge gaps in this scholarship in the Global South. “Green infrastructure” and “nature-based solutions,” as the leading concepts for cities' greening agendas, are used as descriptors in combination with “justice” and/or “green gentrification” in searches undertaken of two bibliographic databases. Our results show there is a need to better delineate a research agenda that addresses such issues in a heterogeneous Global South context while gaining insights from advances made by research on the Global North.