Keywords

1 Green Spaces in Times of Urbanisation: Between Sustainability, Contestation and Environmental Justice

Against the backdrop of accelerating global urbanisation, with the percentage of people living in cities rising up to 70% by 2050 (UN 2018), nature-based solutions to ecological, climatic or social challenges to urban sustainability have become ever more important. The role of urban nature for enhancing sustainability has increasingly been acknowledged in European and international policy, most notably as part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainable Development Goal No. 11, which focuses on “making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable,” has set the provision of “safe, inclusive and accessible green and public space” as a central objective (UN 2015). Accordingly, urban greenery has also become a popular topic of research and a subject of European and local policy intervention (Clark 2017; European Commission 2020), including the 2013 European Union Strategy on Green Infrastructure and the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation policy agenda on Nature-Based Solutions and Re-Naturing Cities. This edited volume adds to this debate by discussing sustainability through the prism of green spaces in times of increasing urbanisation.

It follows from the growing interest in green space research that uses of the terms vary. In their comprehensive review on green space definitions across disciplines and research fields, Taylor and Hochuli (2017) suggest working definitions for each research context. In this volume, we follow the green space definition proposed by Clark (2016, p. 2f), who describes them as: “large and small (sometimes very small) areas of urban open space, normally with vegetation, which are not built up or constructed over, which can be privately or publicly owned, and which have different and changing purposes and perceptions over time”. As such, urban greenery encompasses different kinds of green spaces such as parks and gardens, street trees, cemeteries, sports facilities, balconies, urban forests as well as urban wastelands and wilderness (ibid.). This includes public and private (e.g. private backyards, apartment building courtyards and corporate campuses (Wolch et al. 2010)), as well as common green spaces (Petrescu et al. 2016). While parks and gardens have been the main focus of research over time (Brantz 2017), other areas including urban wastelands and wilderness (Bonthoux et al. 2014; Brun et al. 2018; Gandy 2018; Kowarik 2018; Threlfall and Kendall 2018) and relatively new phenomena such as civic or guerrilla gardening (Barron 2016; Bendt et al. 2013; Benjamin 2020; Tornaghi and Certomà 2019) have recently received crucial attention. In line with this definition, the array of green spaces studied in this volume is wide. They range from public parks (Loewen et al. 2022; Smith et al. 2022), over urban gardens (Pungas et al. 2022) and green–blue spaces (Berglund 2022; Pikner 2022) to window-view, nearby and informal green spaces (Dahlberg and Borgström 2022; Pikner 2022; Sechi et al. 2022). Green spaces at a macro-scale, i.e. city-level or regional, are also studied (Collier 2022; Dahlberg and Borgström 2022; Loewen et al. 2022; Sechi et al. 2022).

Post-modernist planning principles evolving around the ideas of green, resilient, smart, and sustainable city (e.g. Anguluri and Narayanan 2017, for a critical evaluation, see: Kaika 2017) and cities for people (e.g. Gehl 2010) in particular have shifted our attention to the benefits and affordances that different kinds of green spaces have for sustainable city development, in particular in terms of ecological, health and economic benefits (Anguelovski et al. 2020). This is supported by a substantial body of research that points to the positive effects of green spaces for the urban environment and climate and as enablers of community health and individual well-being (Akpinar 2016; Carpenter 2013; Clark 2016; de Vries et al. 2013; Hitchings 2021; Kondo et al. 2018; Ward Thompson et al. 2012)—effects often discussed in terms of ecosystem services (Baró et al. 2020). The positive impacts that green spaces have on human well-being have come even more to the forefront of academic and public discussions during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis (Kleinschroth and Kowarik 2020; Nieuwenhuijsen 2020; Nigg et al. 2021; Samuelsson et al. 2020). Moreover, from an economic standpoint, green or smart growth strategies follow the promises of real-estate development, business creation and effective place marketing for tourists, residents and investors (Anguelovski et al. 2020). Despite these benefits and the increasing self-portrayal of cities as sustainable and green (Berglund and Julier 2020; Davidson 2010; Lindholst et al. 2016), urban green spaces are under threat. Green space provision and access is diminished by heavy densification in city centres as part of the wider sustainability narrative (Brantz 2016; Haaland and van den Bosch 2015), which often puts housing and green space provision in competition with one another (Benjamin 2020; Schmelzkopf 2002): urban sprawl occurs at the cost of surrounding green spaces (Sharma-Wallace 2016), and neoliberal urbanism fuels green space privatisation and commercialization (Smith 2018) as well as green gentrification (Checker 2011; Rigolon and Németh 2018; Wolch et al. 2010).

Starting from the paradox of the well-known benefits of urban green spaces and multiple challenges in their provision in times of intense urbanisation, this edited volume treats green areas as contested spaces in the city and views these through the prism of environmental justice. By addressing urban sustainability, which ultimately aims to create “green cities, growing cities, just cities” (Campbell 1996), from the perspective of environmental justice, this book responds to recent calls for a systematic integration and reflection of environmental justice concerns in planning for urban sustainability (Agyeman and Evans 2004; Anguelovski et al. 2020; Baró et al. 2020; Boone and Fragkias 2013; Plüschke-Altof and Sooväli-Sepping 2020). As there is often “an implicit assumption of ‘green’ trickle down effects spreading to benefit all” (Anguelovski et al. 2020, p. 1744), it is crucial to ask “whose green city” is created and thereby question the prevalent “discourse of unproblematic economic, ecological, social and health cobenefits from urban greening” (ibid.). Doing exactly that, the book starts from the premise of unequal rights to the city (Harvey 2003) and, by extension, to cities’ green spaces for different residential groups. For whom and for what purposes are urban green spaces accessible, and; even more importantly; for whom not? Whose needs and interests are (not) involved or are (less) considered in planning and decision-making? Former research indicates highly uneven access to and usage of urban greenery along demographic lines of age, gender, ethnicity or socio-economic background but also in relation to the type and quality of urban greenery or the individual living situation (Cohen et al. 2010; Krenichyn 2006; Lipsanen 2017; Sang et al. 2016; Schetke et al. 2016). This in return also affects the access to health and well-being benefits that (urban) nature can provide (Kabisch et al. 2017).

Studies by Hitchings (2013) and Boyd et al. (2018); in particular; have pointed out that green space usage does not solely depend on their provision, accessibility and usability for different groups. This is a fact that is often assumed in green space studies, including from an environmental justice perspective (Cohen et al. 2010; Kabisch et al. 2017; Krenichyn 2006; McCormack et al. 2010; van Hecke et al. 2018). Instead, the reasons for use or non-use might go much deeper, shedding light on daily routines, surrounding socio-spatial structures and culture-historical contexts (Anguelovski et al. 2020). It is exactly at this point—the underlying reasons, dynamics and processes of unequal access and inclusion—where this edited volume joins into the debate on green spaces. All nine chapters of this book challenge the assumption that “if green spaces are available nearby, we should logically expect to see people going to them” (Hitchings 2013, p. 99), which has been so prevalent in green space studies as to blind researchers to the wider contextual reasons of non-use (Bell et al. 2015; Hitchings 2013). Rather than focus on individual life worlds and demographics, daily routines or life stages (Hitchings 2013; Lebowitz and Trudeau 2017; Sang et al. 2016), the studies joined here, however, zoom into the wider socio-economic, political and cultural context that structures the use of green spaces.

2 More Than a Question of Distributive Justice: Environmental Justice Perspectives on Urban Green Spaces

With this political ecology approach (Boone and Fragkias 2013; Heynen et al. 2006), this volume understands green space access and use as a question of environmental justice. In a nutshell, environmental justice studies explore, map and understand how environmental “goods” and “bads” are endured or enjoyed, by whom, why and with what effects (Walker 2009). Accordingly, distributive justice is at the core of most environmental justice approaches (Schlosberg 2004), placing focus on the “distribution of environmental benefits and threats in relation to social groups, most often defined by race, ethnicity, and class” (Boone and Fragkias 2013, p. 5). In its beginnings, environmental hazards and the unequal distribution of associated risks were at the forefront in studies on distributive justice (for example, see Bullard 1990), with the premise of “bringing the human back” into environmentalism by scrutinising environmental questions through a justice lens. Over time, however, the other side of the coin also gained more prominence: who benefits from nature’s amenities; and; more importantly, who does not? In the field of urban green space studies, distributive justice approaches concentrate on the question of whether green areas are equally distributed amongst city districts and are accessible to different residential groups (De Sousa Silva et al. 2018; Kronenberg et al. 2020; Rigolon 2016). While often focused on distribution in quantitative terms, also the quality of green spaces in cities varies considerably, pointing to issues of maintenance and unequal siting of green interventions to adapt to climate change (Boone and Fragkias 2013; Finewood et al. 2019; Kronenberg et al. 2020). Green space research through a distributional justice lens also includes critical studies on the contribution of green interventions to displacement by processes of green gentrification (Anguelovski et al. 2020; Checker 2011)—a topic that is prominent in critical urban studies as well (see below).

However, other environmental justice aspects have also gained more prominence over time (Schlosberg 2004; Walker 2009). We would like to point out three dimensions here that altogether examine the fairness and participation in environmental decision-making, hence the very procedures that lead to distributive injustices (Boone and Fragkias 2013). First, procedural justice describes the equal access to (green space) planning and management processes and to related information, hence addresses questions of inclusion and exclusion in decision-making processes (Schlosberg 2004; Walker 2009). Second, interactional justice focuses on the right to recognition by questioning whether the full diversity of stakeholders and their experiences, needs, values and preferences are recognised in distributive and procedural justice (Schlosberg 2004). Interactional justice thus goes beyond spatially distinct patterns of distribution by focusing on socially differentiated needs and their recognition in green space planning (Anguelovski et al. 2020). Third, inequalities emerge in terms of capabilities, which acknowledges that people have different capacities to change unjust situations (Rutt and Gulsrud 2016; Schlosberg 2007; Walker 2011). The focus on recognition and capabilities in particular raises the issue of underlying power relations, as “urban greening is a deeply political project often framed by technocratic principles and promotional claims” (Anguelovski et al. 2020, p. 1743).

For the study of urban green spaces, questions of environmental justice relate to the “right to the city” debate. Coined by Lefebvre (1968) and Harvey (2003), this debate focuses on the exclusion of urban residents from the city’s resources, decision-making and common narratives, thereby raising the question of whose city it is (Mayer 2017) and urging for inclusion. This question has informed discussions on participative urban planning since the 1960s (Leyden et al. 2017). For the field of green spaces, this means that the traditional dichotomy between a green space supply (architects, planners, city councils) and demand side (users) is gradually overcome by involving other stakeholders such as developers, investors or green space managers and maintainers (Clark 2016; for an exemplary case study; see: Bonow et al. 2020). This also means that users are no longer confined to passive recipients but are acknowledged as those transforming urban green spaces from below through their habits, routines and engagement in planting, decorating and maintaining (Clark 2016).

Following this gradual extension of environmental justice research, the studies in this book scrutinise different aspects of environmental justice, including distributive, procedural and interactional justice as well as the question of capabilities. While a recent special issue indicated how a translation of the environmental justice approach to green space planning might be carried out in a city context (Baró et al. 2020; Langemeyer and Connolly 2020), the studies presented here take more a critical theory approach. Pellow (2016) and Anguelovski et al. (2020) have called for an advancement of critical environmental justice studies that pay close attention to the “invisible or situated experiences and everyday practices of urban green injustices” (ibid., p. 1744). This is what the chapters in this book aim to do (see Table 1) by studying environmental justice issues through the eyes of those with limited green space access (Collier 2022; Dahlberg and Borgström 2022; Smith et al. 2022). Moreover, they seek to shed light on hitherto understudied aspects of procedural and interactional justice (Berglund 2022; Loewen et al. 2022; Pikner 2022; Smith et al. 2022) by uncovering the knowledges, testimonies and practices that are legitimated and/or pushed aside. And finally, they discuss the underlying dynamics of environmental justice concerns, i.e. their social, economic, political and cultural contexts (Berglund 2022; Collier 2022; Pungas et al. 2022; Sechi et al. 2022; Smith et al. 2022).

Table 1 Studied Dimensions of Environmental Justice in Urban Green Space Use and Planning
Full size table

By studying environmental justice issues through the eyes of those with limited green space access, the contributions of Collier (2022), Dahlberg and Borgström (2022) and Smith et al. (2022) fine-tune the concept of access and accessibility in multiple ways. Going beyond more common conceptualisations of physical and social access, in the case of people with impaired mobility in Sweden and people of colour in the UK, Dahlberg and Borgström (2022) and Collier (2022) emphasise psychological barriers to green space use that have hitherto received less attention (for an exception, see Park 2017). These studies also exemplify unequal capabilities to contribute to environmental decision-making (Schlosberg 2007; Svarstad and Benjaminsen 2020), as in the case of Black Minority Ethnic (BME) groups in the UK due to racial discrimination by the environmental sector, or by the non-acknowledgement of heterogeneity within marginalised groups, as in the case of people in wheelchairs in Sweden. Anguelovski et al. (2020) have identified such cases as “testimonial injustice” as the knowledge and experiences that groups hold are less acknowledged and, in case of Collier (2022), also deemed less credible than others. By focusing on minority residents and people with impaired mobility, both contributions add to the research on green space access of understudied marginalised groups (with a few exceptions, e.g. Corazon et al. 2019; Jay et al. 2012; Lipsanen 2017; Stigsdotter et al. 2018). Analysing the dispute about private festivals in public parks in London, the contribution by Smith et al. (2022) points to a temporal dimension of non-access and inaccessibility of green spaces that is caused by their neoliberal commodification.

With their case studies on disputes around green space development, four chapters from Berglund (2022), Loewen et al. (2022), Pikner (2022) and Smith et al. (2022) shed light on the understudied procedural and interactional dimensions of environmental justice (Rutt and Gulsrud 2016). Pikner (2022), for example, demonstrates how non-human agents can gain voice in public discussions on green space development, even if these more-than-human voices are mediated by human voices. The case of disputes on waterfront access and use in Estonia exemplifies the potential agency of ecologies and landscapes that has been at the core of more-than-human studies (Maller 2018). In the case of environmental activism to protect an island from real-estate development in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, Berglund (2022) challenges the epistemic framework in which participation in urban planning and environmental decision-making has operated. Using the term “epistemic justice” (cf Anguelovski et al. 2020), the dominance of top-down expertise and nomothetic methodologies of “knowing” spaces is questioned, which sheds light on excluded voices, forms of knowledge and its production—a central issue of recognition in interactional justice (Svarstad and Benjaminsen 2020). While participative decision-making has become a trend in urban governance in general and green space planning in particular (Leyden et al. 2017), the studies convey problems on the field of procedural justice, by the marginalisation of community groups (Loewen et al. 2022) and criminalisation of activists’ views (Pikner 2022) in decision-making process, or the disregard of (privileged) residential concerns to limited green space access and ecosystem health as NIMBYism (Berglund 2022; Smith et al. 2022).

Several studies presented here also seek to deepen understandings of the surrounding systems in which environmental injustices are embedded. In the case of Northern Europe, which is the regional focus of this book, neoliberal urban governance forms a central theme (see in particular Loewen et al. 2022; Pungas et al. 2022; Smith et al. 2022). On one hand, this manifests in the neoliberal contestation of urban space. The exchange value that neoliberal urban governance ascribes to space (Peck et al. 2009) stands in stark contrast to the high use value of green spaces. This results in land use conflicts between green areas and more profitable uses of space such as housing (Benjamin 2020; Schmelzkopf 2002)—a main subject of the “green commons” debate (Petrescu et al. 2016). In other cases, it is abundant green spaces that raise the exchange value, resulting in limited access to green spaces for vulnerable groups through green gentrification (Rigolon and Németh 2018; Wolch et al. 2010) or green space commodification (Smith et al. 2022). Finally, neoliberal urban governance impacts the spatial appearance and preferred aesthetics of green spaces (Pungas et al. 2022). On the other hand, neoliberal urban governance also influences participative aspects of justice as it tends to favour managerialism and self-responsibility over empowerment and co-produced democracy, thereby often co-opting demands and achievements of activist groups (Petrescu et al. 2016; Pungas et al. 2022, see also: Anguelovski et al. 2020). These neoliberalisation processes are even more pronounced when intersected with post-socialist spatialities, as discussed by Pikner, Pungas et al., and Sechi et al. in this volume. Their contributions draw attention to the specific dimensions that have to be considered in post-socialist space where urban green space might be abundant also in less affluent districts due to the modernist city planning of the socialist era (Kronenberg et al. 2020). Amongst these specifics are the unequal distribution of green space quality instead of quantity (Sechi et al. 2022), challenges in terms of procedural justice (Pikner 2022; Sechi et al. 2022) and a neoliberal shift of responsibility for public space (Pungas et al. 2022).

3 Shifting the Gaze: The Region of Northern Europe

Contestations over green spaces and questions of environmental justice are studied here in the context of Northern Europe. The case study areas in this volume range from the United Kingdom (Collier 2022; Smith et al. 2022), over the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland (Berglund 2022; Dahlberg and Borgström 2022; Loewen et al. 2022) to the Baltic countries (Pikner 2022; Pungas et al. 2022; Sechi et al. 2022). While the UK studies provide insights into green space development in the context of neoliberal austerity (Smith et al. 2022) and post-colonialism (Collier 2022), the green space dynamics studied in the cases of Estonia and Latvia outline the specifics of the post-socialist context (Pikner 2022; Pungas et al. 2022; Sechi et al. 2022). The three studies from the Nordic countries, however, shed light on critical cases of green space development and usability in countries that are regularly seen as forerunners of urban sustainability (Berglund and Julier 2020). The marginalisation of community stakeholders in Norway (Loewen et al. 2022), green space users with impaired mobility in Sweden (Dahlberg and Borgström 2022), and alternative forms of environmental knowledge in Finland (Berglund 2022) raise important contradictions between sustainable images and existing challenges in practicing sustainable realities.

Beyond the regional specifics, the focus on a Northern European context aims to offer alternative insights to the often US-centred research on urban green spaces and environmental justice (Kabisch et al. 2017; McCormack et al. 2010; Van Hecke et al. 2018). Moreover, it enables us to shift the gaze from “poor or otherwise vulnerable victims of environmental injustice” (Berglund 2022; see for example Atikur Rahman and Zhang 2018; Bullard 1990) to the affluent societies who are typically seen as privileged. It is exactly the “wealthiest and most comfortable” (Berglund 2022) who seldom feature in the research (Wells and Touboulic 2017; Wiedmann et al. 2020). The studies by Collier (2022) and Berglund (2022), in particular, focus on white environmentalism. Collier’s (2022) sensitive auto-ethnography reveals the impacts that attitudes and practices of white environmentalists have on black non-presence in green spaces. While the fact that white affluent people often live unsustainable lifestyles is acknowledged in different studies (see Wiedmann et al. 2020), Collier (2022) emphasises the way in which they impede other groups’ abilities to partake in the benefits of nature visits. Berglund (2022) also acknowledges the negative impact of white affluent lifestyles on sustainability. She also warns, however, of quickly dismissing the affluents’ claims to environmental justice as NIMBYism (as is done in the case presented by Smith et al. 2022) and considers them against the backdrop of a shared planetary backyard whose gradual degradation might affect all—although to different extents—and thus raise genuine concerns.

4 Zooming in: The Mixed-Method Approach

The contribution of this edited volume to the green space debate is also methodological. In their mixed-method approaches, the chapters of this volume go beyond the dominance of nomothetic studies utilising quantitative methods that have been prevalent in green space research and environmental justice studies alike (see review by McCormack et al. 2010; for quantitative examples, see Biernacka and Kronenberg 2018; de la Barrera et al. 2016; Gupta et al. 2012; Heckert and Rosan 2016; Kabisch et al. 2017; Rigolon 2016; Wang et al. 2015). As Berglund (2022) points out, the dominance of nomothetic studies is also resembled in planning practice and environmental activism. Hitherto, qualitative methods have been employed to a much lesser extent in green space research—mainly utilising in situ observations and in-depth and expert interviews as well as discourse analysis (Bell et al. 2015; Brantz 2016; Hitchings 2013; Lebowitz and Trudeau 2017; Lertzman 2015; Lipsanen 2017; Woodgate and Skarlato 2015). Only by zooming in with long-term and mixed-method studies, however, it is possible to understand how established measuring standards, such as distance or availability, fit the life worlds of different groups (Anguelovski et al. 2020).

While also working with quantitative methods (foremost see Sechi et al. 2022), the contributions thus mainly offer alternative methodological approaches to studying green spaces and environmental justice. Through the usage of idiographic methodologies, the majority of chapters aims to deeply understand meaning-making and discourses, experiences, needs, and human-nature relationships of green space users and activist groups. As a result, the studies can describe feelings of being overlooked (Dahlberg et al. 2022), unwanted (Collier 2022) or unknowledgeable (Berglund 2022) and how these impact green space use and elements of participative justice (i.e. procedures, recognition, and capabilities). Moreover, the qualitative research approach enables researchers to zoom into so-called “confounding variables” of green space use across social, economic, political, and cultural contexts. Amongst these variables are urban neoliberal governance (Loewen et al. 2022; Smith et al. 2022) and its intersection with post-socialist spatialities (Pikner 2022; Pungas et al. 2022; Sechi et al. 2022), racial discrimination (Collier 2022) and hegemonic knowledge systems in urban green space planning (Berglund 2022).

5 Overview of the Book Structure and Chapters

This edited volume is divided into nine chapters. The introductory chapter provides the overall direction of the book. The other eight chapters address the issues of contested urban green spaces and questions of environmental justice from various angles. The book is divided into two main sections. The first section focuses on questions of environmental justice from the perspective of vulnerable groups: people with impaired mobility (Dahlberg and Borgström 2022), people of colour (Collier 2022), and people from poor socio-economic backgrounds (Sechi et al. 2022). The second section zooms into the issue of green space contestations by focusing on disputes over green space development and the contexts enabling environmental injustices (Berglund 2022; Loewen et al. 2022; Pikner 2022; Pungas et al. 2022; Smith et al. 2022). The book contributes to the international and multidisciplinary character of the Sustainable Development Goals series by comprehensively introducing the work of authors from multiple disciplines: urban planning, environmental anthropology, psychology and sociology, landscape architecture, human geography and recreational studies on the example of multi-sided case studies from the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Latvia, which are united by a common concern over just cities and contested green spaces in a sustainability context.

In the first chapter, Annika Dahlberg, Sara Borgström, Max Rautenberg and Nienke Sluimer tackle a central topic of environmental justice: access and accessibility. In the case of Stockholm, Sweden, the authors address urban green space access from the viewpoint of people whose mobility is dependent on a wheelchair. The chapter thus focuses on an understudied, vulnerable group (Atikur Rahman and Zhang 2018; Boyd et al. 2018) and—with its primarily qualitative research design—widens the conceptualization of access and accessibility. While the few former studies in this field put physical access into focus (Burns et al. 2013; Corazon et al. 2019; Stigsdotter et al. 2018), the authors argue to include social and mental dimensions (for a study on psychological park accessibility, see Park 2017). Next to this multi-dimensionality, access as a concept also needs to be broadened in terms of scale to include the whole route from home and back again as well as green spaces on a spectrum, from window-view to an urban national park. Otherwise, if access does not work all the way, “in the end it is not worth the trouble” (interview respondent, Dahlberg et al. in this volume). From an environmental justice perspective, it then follows that inclusion and access for people with impaired mobility needs to be accounted for in distributive terms, but also in the fields of procedural and interactional justice. This means that the needs and experiences of people in wheelchairs must be considered in all stages of planning and maintenance, while at the same time acknowledging heterogeneity within this group. The chapter concludes that it is only such a holistic approach that can minimise situations where “a nearby park or forest can become Mount Everest” (Dahlberg et al. in this volume).

Beth Collier continues with a study that explores the limited accessibility to (urban) nature and green spaces for people of colour in the United Kingdom. It thereby adds an in-depth study to the research on green space use by ethnic minority groups (Harper et al. 2009; Jay et al. 2012; Lipsanen 2017). From an environmental psychology background, the author analyses how dynamics of environmental racism and othering create emotional boundaries to accessibility and a sense of not belonging for black people. Collier (2022) proceeds to enlarge our understanding of environmental injustices for minority groups in terms of green space access. While former studies have rather focused on distributive aspects (Rigolon 2016), her study helps to better understand the limited capabilities of Black Minority Ethnic (BME) groups to contribute to environmental decision-making due to racial discrimination in the environmental sector. The chapter presents auto-ethnographic research (McClaurin 2001) from working in the field of human-nature relationships with a focus on urban residents. The results strongly question the notion of “the environmental field and the countryside as welcoming to all” (Collier in this volume) against which black absence in nature is often interpreted as a lack of interest. Instead, Collier’s analysis portrays black disenfranchisement from nature that is embedded in systematic racism leading to multiple exclusions from the environmental field. The chapter thus shifts the focus from black absence in green spaces towards the attitudes of white people to black presence in nature, which presents the question “whose green city” in a very different light. As a result, the author argues for a reframing of the problem—from black non-use of green space to the impact that white attitudes and practices have on the disenfranchisement of black people from nature and nature’s effects on health and well-being.

Guido Sechi, Maris Bērziņš, and Zaiga Krišjāne study green space availability in the post-socialist planning context in Latvia’s capital, Riga. Their study follows calls for a more thorough consideration of the specifics of the post-socialist planning context in studies on environmental justice (Kronenberg et al. 2020). Utilising a multi-method approach, the authors argue for a greater consideration of procedural and interactional aspects of environmental justice through studies that consider green space quality instead of quantitative measures of access and availability. Due to the specifics of the socialist modernist planning context, green spaces are usually abundant in post-socialist cities. However, as the authors’ analysis of distributive justice in green space availability shows, green space quality varies substantially. This is mainly caused by the lack of protection of informal green spaces (Feltynowski et al. 2018) that often suffer from abandonment and poor maintenance. The results of the analysis show that it is the poorer residents in Riga who are more likely to be “bound” to residential areas with low quality green space, while wealthy residents concentrate in areas with higher green space quality (hence to increasing segregation in post-socialist cities, Leetmaa and Hess 2019). These findings are illustrated with examples of contested green spaces that point to two main issues in terms of procedural and interactional justice. The first refers to the increasing neoliberalisation of spatial governance fuelled by the extensive privatisation of public land during the transformation period (Golubchikov 2016). This limits possibilities for green municipal land use and fosters the prevalence of more profitable land uses. The second refers to insufficient participatory decision-making practices, which rather resemble a “top-down management of interest conflicts associated with the recognition and management of public spaces” (Sechi et al. in this volume). Distributive inequalities in green space quality, insufficient and biased stakeholder inclusion in terms of procedural and interactional justice, and the neoliberalisation of land use suggest an overall increase in environmental injustice that needs to be studied with approaches that go beyond the quantitative provision of urban green spaces.

In their chapter on contested music festivals in public parks, Andrew Smith, Guy Osborn and Goran Vodicka analyse temporal green space accessibility. Through fieldwork and document analysis studying the shift towards parks financed by commercial income in London (UK), the authors reveal the negative effects of public park commercialization on green space accessibility for the broad public. Employing the theory of juridification (Blicher and Molander 2008; Talbot 2011), the chapter portrays the dispute around the Wireless Music Festival in Finsbury Park to analyse the negative impacts of commercialization on the free use of public space. On one hand, the commercial income from festivals affords park maintenance and additional revenues for the municipality. Moreover, the festivals advertise green space use to wider groups, and in the case of the Wireless festival, also specifically celebrate diverse inclusivity of urban space. On the other hand, the extensive permission of commercial festivals in parks substantially limits access for those residents who are not paying festival visitors. As the chapter critically scrutinises, these limitations are spatial—by cutting off substantial areas of the park from public use—and temporal, as the festival season coincides with peak usage months, while the closure encompasses not only the festival duration but also extensive periods of preparation and dismantling of the festival grounds.

The study on contested urban green space development in Norway focuses on shifting discourses of sustainability in public disputes on green space use. The authors, Bradley Loewen, Stig Larssæther, Savis Gohari Krangsås, Heidi Vinge and Alenka Temeljotov-Salaj, peek into the issue of procedural and interactional justice. The chapter starts from a critique on “sustainability as an ideological praxis” (Davidson 2010, p. 390). Davidson critically scrutinises sustainability as an empty signifier that is used for various social, economic and ecological purposes. Using a multi-actor perspective (Avelino and Wittmayer 2016), the contribution critically scrutinises “just sustainability” (Agyeman and Evans 2004, p. 155) by studying the way in which different stakeholders, their values, needs and discourses are represented in decision-making processes surrounding green space use. On one hand, the integration of multiple stakeholders exemplifies a case of striving towards transformed stakeholder relationships that go beyond a supply and demand division in which green space users are confined to a passive role (Clark 2016). On the other hand, the study shows, in the case of Trondheim, how in a country where planning and governance structures are oriented towards sustainability, urban green spaces fall under neoliberal development pressures which are potentially exacerbated by the underrepresentation of the community sector in decision-making processes. The results suggest the need for collaborative governance structures across sectors to support a deeper integration of multiple perspectives—a central topic of procedural and interactional justice.

The chapter by Lilian Pungas, Bianka Plüschke-Altof, Anni Müüripeal and Helen Sooväli-Sepping approaches the topic of environmental justice via neoliberal contestations over the “right kind” of urban green spaces. Hence, based on the analysis of extensive fieldwork since 2017, the authors shed light on the question “whose green city” by putting urban gardeners into focus. In particular, it focuses on two forms of urban gardening in the post-socialist city of Tallinn, dacha allotment gardens and community gardens, that are both fostering urban sustainability while being treated very differently (cf. Bendt et al. 2013; Jehlička et al. 2013). While the former are often negatively associated with a post-socialist “survival strategy of the poor”, community gardens are embraced for the transformative potential with regard to health, active citizenship, social cohesion and environmental learning. By critically scrutinising the neoliberal urban governance practises that co-produce environmental injustices in the post-socialist context (Jehlička et al. 2013; Kronenberg et al. 2020; Stenning et al. 2010), the chapter uncovers the underlying dynamics of this preferential treatment and thereby dives into what Tornaghi and Certomà (2019) have termed the “politics of gardening”. The analysis of neoliberalised socio-spatial discourses, spatial materialities and cultivated subjectivities (Barron 2016) negotiated in both gardening types conveys that dacha gardens rather quietly maintain the neoliberal governance system, while community gardens contribute to its thriving process by being visible, actively engaging with and supported by it. This preferential treatment, however, comes at a price of higher vulnerability to co-optation attempts and neoliberal control of space and human-nature interactions, to which dacha gardens have hitherto resisted.

Eeva Berglund addresses the topic of environmental justice and contestations over green spaces from their epistemological groundings. In the case of contestations over the island of Vartiosaari located in the Finnish capital of Helsinki, she focuses on epistemic injustices arising from privileging expert knowledge over other forms of knowledge in environmental struggles. Berglund’s (2022) analysis of the environmental activism organised to save Vartiosaari island from real-estate development illustrates the binary opposition between rational calculative knowledge built on a trust in numbers (Porter 1995) and affective romantic ways of knowing the environment. While the activists commonly used expert-based knowledge, they also actively proposed art-based forms of learning and knowing the environment. As a result, by drawing on Stengers’ Another Science is Possible (2018), the author uses the example of art-inflicted activism around Vartiosaari to question existing forms of knowing the environment and pursuing environmentalism. Firstly, the case study critically scrutinises the common antagonism between middle-class activists and poor or otherwise vulnerable victims of environmental injustice. While acknowledging the negative impact of affluent lifestyles on sustainability, also in “a lucky, green city like Helsinki”, Berglund urges to carefully consider this opposition, which as a result often dismisses affluent claims to environmental justice as NIMBYism. Against the backdrop of a shared planetary backyard, affluent struggles for environmental justice in Vartiosaari could instead be interpreted as an attempt to challenge hegemonic and exclusionary knowledge practises, while at the same time making way for others. Secondly, and related to the former, the chapter reveals that the different ways of knowing the environment do not merely represent a binary, but rather a hierarchy privileging rational knowledge that draws on technocracy, procedure, expert knowledge and numbers, which offer a “seductive sense of clarity and the promise of keeping value judgements and politics out of human affairs” (Berglund in this volume). This stands in stark contrast to the “overwhelming bodily experience, nourishing all the senses” (ibid.) in Vartiosaari and other urban green spaces. The chapter thus concludes that the hegemony of rational knowledge practises should be questioned—in environmental justice practice and research.

The final chapter by Tarmo Pikner on the topic of contested waterfronts in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, focuses on interactional justice. It argues for a more thorough integration of contingent relations between humans, non-humans and the surrounding environments, thus seeking to address the critique that there is “little environment in environmental justice” (Boone and Fragkias 2013, p. 2). Even as humans negotiate the role of nature in urban areas through their representations of space, the study describes how these representations reflect more-than-human agency. Pikner contends that non-human entities and surrounding environments form a crucial stakeholder whose needs and agency have to be considered for achieving interactional justice in the city. This point is exemplified in the case of blue-green spaces in Tallinn. Common to the discontinuities of green space in other post-socialist cities (Haase et al. 2019; Kronenberg et al. 2020), Tallinn’s natural environments at the waterfronts could develop with less human imprint due to disturbance-related ecologies (Tsing 2015) and longer time frames of closure to the public followed by interim uses. In recent disputes on the future of Tallinn’s waterfronts, the ecologies and landscapes that evolved as a result of the partial non-accessibility of the seashore during the Soviet era has given voice to environmental justice concerns. In both cases, the evolved landscapes and ecologies were represented by interest groups to argue for more balanced private real-estate developments that would consider the right of human and more-than-human species to access nature.

6 Concluding Remarks and Future Research Agenda

What unites these chapters is that they address questions of environmental (in)justices in the case of urban green spaces from unusual angles. While two chapters apply a more direct environmental justice approach (Dahlberg and Borgström 2022; Sechi et al. 2022), the rest of the contributions (Berglund 2022; Collier 2022; Loewen et al. 2022; Pikner 2022; Pungas et al. 2022; Smith et al. 2022) stems from the fields of environmental psychology, cultural geography, recreational studies, environmental anthropology, urban sociology and planning. As a result, the chapters present interdisciplinary and multi-method studies that enrich discussions on contested urban green spaces and environmental justice in urban greening. They do so by providing in-depth research of the life worlds of those with limited green space access, thereby uncovering understudied dimensions of accessibility (Collier 2022; Dahlberg and Borgström 2022; Smith et al. 2022). Moreover, they discuss the epistemic (Berglund 2022) and testimonial injustices (Collier 2022) as well as the marginalisation of human and non-human stakeholders in decision-making and participation processes (Berglund 2022; Loewen et al. 2022; Pikner 2022; Smith et al. 2022). And finally, the chapters of this book offer in-depth analyses on the contexts of injustices in green space use and development (Berglund 2022; Collier 2022; Pungas et al. 2022; Sechi et al. 2022; Smith et al. 2022). In Northern Europe, which is the geographical scope of this book, neoliberalisation of urban governance (Loewen et al. 2022; Smith et al. 2022), post-colonialism (Collier 2022), a nomothetic knowledge episteme (Berglund 2022) and the specifics of the post-socialist context (Pikner 2022; Pungas et al. 2022; Sechi et al. 2022) are amongst the most influential. With these foci, the edited volume advances the research agenda of critical environmental justice studies (Anguelovski et al. 2020; Pellow 2016) while at the same time also giving insights for urban sustainability studies.

Recent studies have already set the path on how to transfer such critical insights into green space planning (Anguelovski et al. 2020; Baró et al. 2020) and we follow them by calling for a more consistent inclusion of justice concerns into urban sustainability studies in general and green space studies in particular as to go beyond the “orthodox, positivist green discourse and practice in cities” (Anguelovski et al. 2020, p. 1746). Based on the cases studied here, we suggest future research on urban green spaces to focus on foremost three aspects. First, to go beyond quantifiable factors and universalistic measurements of green space (non-)use. The research by Hitchings (2013, 2021) and Anguelovski et al. (2020) in particular have drawn attention to the contextual factors that influence who can take advantage of green space benefits in the city. Next to individual life worlds and cultural aspects of (non-)use, also knowledge hegemonies, institutional structures, spatial orderings, political power relations, as well as historical and socio-economic contexts play a crucial role, which calls for a more holistic study of green space use and planning. This would not only put green space non-use and its reasons into focus, but also shed light on the ways in which dilemmas surrounding green space planning and its potential benefits and pitfalls are negotiated locally. Amongst those are the tensions between community stewardship of green spaces and the shift of responsibility from the state to its citizens (in neoliberal settings in particular), the acceptance of green space renewals versus the risk of displacement (i.e. green gentrification), or the active co-creation of green spaces versus a potential co-optation of activists’ demands and achievements. Finally, we call for widening the spatial contexts of knowledge production in green space, environmental justice, and sustainability research. On one hand, former reviews have acknowledged the dominance of US-centred research on urban green spaces and environmental justice (Kabisch et al. 2017; McCormack et al. 2010; Van Hecke et al. 2018). On the other hand, Jehlička (2021) critically noted that due to the current power relations in knowledge production, some regions are generally not considered a theory-generative context in sustainability studies. This puts considerable restraints to understanding and theorising green space use and planning, thereby impeding the sustainability agenda in urban scholarship and practice. After all, a green city should be a city for all.