Environmental justice considerations in urban greenspace planning: Insights from the Netherlands

Abstract

Various scholars suggest urban greening initiatives could exacerbate environmental injustices. Projects aimed at enhancing or creating greenspaces within urban areas may inadvertently displace or exclude the very residents they were intended to benefit. The development of urban greenspaces might perpetuate or worsen existing inequalities. This study seeks to contribute to the ongoing scientific debate by examining how urban planners pursue environmental justice in urban greenspace planning processes, which precede outcomes of greenspaces, shedding light on how urban planners currently try to prevent unjust outcomes of urban greenspace planning. The following research question is leading:

How is environmental justice pursued in urban greenspace planning processes in Dutch cities?

Focusing on two Dutch cities – Utrecht and Rotterdam – the research aims to map out how urban planners conceptualize, prioritize and apply environmental justice in the planning process for greening interventions. By conducting a comparative embedded multiple case study, including interviews and analysis of policy documents on greenspace planning, this research provides insights into how urban planners engage with environmental justice thinking. The study employs an analytical framework centred on environmental justice, utilizing indicators from literature on Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) to operationalize recognitional, distributional, and procedural justice. The research also adopts an exploratory approach by examining additional justice dimensions such as corrective, intersectional, transitional, and multi-scalar justice, exploring their conceptualization and application in planning practice. This includes a focus on how ecological, temporal, and spatial justice are integrated into planning processes. Moreover, the study explores the trade-offs between these justice dimensions, shedding light on how interconnections between justice dimensions occur in practice.

An important finding of this study is that environmental justice considerations in urban greenspace planning are limited, and often implicit rather than explicitly defined. Urban planning approaches tend to incorporate principles of justice without formal acknowledgment, focusing predominantly on distributional aspects of justice. Procedural justice is usually evident at the operational level of specific neighbourhood greening projects. While ecological justice is recognized as important in urban greenspace planning, aspects of recognitional justice are mostly missing from planners' approaches. Additionally, concepts such as corrective, transitional, and intersectional justice were mostly observed in Utrecht, with temporal and spatial perspectives on justice being limited in both cities. This research uncovers new perspectives on how justice is applied in urban greenspace planning. Delving deeper into these findings can provide a better understanding of their implications and potential for shaping more equitable urban environments.