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This book uses a unique typology of ten core drivers of injustice to explore and question common assumptions around what urban sustainability means, how it can be implemented, and how it is manifested in or driven by urban interventions that hinge on claims of sustainability.
Aligned with critical environmental justice studies, the book highlights the contradictions of urban sustainability in relation to justice. It argues that urban neighbourhoods cannot be greener, more sustainable and liveable unless their communities are strengthened by the protection of the right to housing, public space, infrastructure and healthy amenities. Linked to the individual drivers, ten short empirical case studies from across Europe and North America provide a systematic analysis of research, policy and practice conducted under urban sustainability agendas in cities such as Barcelona, Glasgow, Athens, Boston and Montréal, and show how social and environmental justice is, or is not, being taken into account. By doing so, the book uncovers the risks of continuing urban sustainability agendas while ignoring, and therefore perpetuating, systemic drivers of inequity and injustice operating within and outside of the city.
Accessibly written for students in urban studies, critical geography and planning, this is a useful and analytical synthesis of issues relating to urban sustainability, environmental and social justice.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003221425, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
List of contents
Driver 1: Material and Livelihood Inequalities Driver 2: Racialized or Ethnically Exclusionary Urbanization Driver 3: Uneven Urban and Intensification and Regeneration Driver 4: Uneven Environmental Health and Pollution Patterns Driver 5: Exclusive Access to the Benefits of Urban Sustainability Infrastructure Driver 6: Unfit Institutional Structures Driver 7: Weakened Civil Society Driver 8: Limited Citizen Participation Driver 9: Power-Knowledge Asymmetries Driver 10: The Growth Imperative and Neoliberal Urbanism
About the author
Panagiota Kotsila is a postdoctoral researcher based at Institute for Environmental Sciences and Technology-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ).
Isabelle Anguelovski is the director of BCNUEJ, an ICREA research professor, a senior researcher and principal investigator at ICTA-UAB.
Melissa García-Lamarca is a postdoctoral researcher based at ICTA-UAB and the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ).
Filka Sekulova is a postdoctoral fellow at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and an associate researcher at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ) and ICTA-UAB.
Summary
This book, aimed at students in urban studies, critical geography and planning, uses a unique typology of ten core drivers of injustice to explore and question common assumptions around what urban sustainability means and how it can be implemented.
