Greening the City, Displacing the Community: Exploring the Nexus of Green Urbanism, Environmental Gentrification, and Citizenship in Prague

Abstract

This thesis looks at how people engage with and are affected by urban greening projects in Prague, Czech Republic. Greening projects, such as parks and gardens, increase the quality of life by decreasing the environmental risks in urban contexts. The idea behind the implementation of greening projects is called green urbanism (Bhargava et al. 2020). Green urbanism seems like a neutral strategy to reduce environmental risks, however, it also contributes to social inequalities. Environmental gentrification refers to the process where low-income and often non-white residents are excluded from their homes due to the implementation of greening projects, and are displaced by new, higher-income, and often white residents who are attracted by the greening projects (Checker 2011; Dooling 2009). Green urbanism is thus influenced by aspects of intersectionality since race and class determine whether you are included or excluded from greening projects and creates contestations over citizenship. Based on three months of fieldwork in Prague, this thesis describes how processes of green urbanism occur in the boroughs of Letná, Bubeneč, Holešovice, and Libeň. The anthropological methods of participant observation, (semi-) structured interviews, online ethnography, and walking ethnography are followed to answer the main question, which is: How are residents of the boroughs of Letná, Bubeneč, Holešovice, and Libeň engaging with, and are affected by, processes of green urbanism, and what forms of citizenship are engendered by these? I argue that six different forms of citizenship emerge from the inclusion and exclusion of greening projects, which are green, educative, self-caring, and inclusive citizenship for the people who engage in greening projects, and marginalized and protective citizenship for the people who are affected by green urbanism.