Date
Abstract
Green infrastructure (GI) has become a panacea for cities working to reach sustainability and resilience goals, appearing across the urban to sub-urban gradient. While the rationale for GI has primarily focused on a multitude of benefits (e.g., ecosystem services), uncertainties remain around when GI delivers these services, to what extent, and for whom. Additionally, many have begun to recognize potential disservices of GI, including the continued shifting of urban hazards onto marginalized communities, and relatedly, green gentrification, whereby the added value of GI leads to community displacement. Building on a novel dataset of 120 documents across 20 cities in the U.S., we analyze the extent to which the dominate GI siting criteria reflects implementation processes in the broader context of the theory and application of urban planning. First we explore how urban GI planning processes interact with, mitigate, or exacerbate existing injustices, reviewing literature on green gentrification, urban planning, and critical race theory in geography, paying particular attention to the dynamic ways cities have organized around race and racism. Second, we explore the dichotomous relationship between stated economic based decision-making criteria from the dataset (such as profit-driven development or cost-sharing), and language that centers equitable decision-making and prioritizes environmental justice communities and residents. We conclude with recommendations for developing GI planning criteria rooted instead in just and sustainable processes.
Presenters
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Fushcia-Ann Hoover
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Fushcia-Ann Hoover is an interdisciplinary researcher specializing in social-ecological urban systems. She employs a range of approaches and perspectives that include environmental justice, green infrastructure performance, and urban planning—engaging racial histories and relationships between people, place, and the environment. In her role as a postdoctoral research fellow at SESYNC, she analyzes the rationale and metrics in city-planning documents involving green infrastructure across 19 U.S. cities. This work is part of a larger effort to build green infrastructure planning framed by...
Image
Fushcia-Ann Hoover
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Fushcia-Ann Hoover is an interdisciplinary researcher specializing in social-ecological urban systems. She employs a range of approaches and perspectives that include environmental justice, green infrastructure performance, and urban planning—engaging racial histories and relationships between people, place, and the environment. In her role as a postdoctoral research fellow at SESYNC, she analyzes the rationale and metrics in city-planning documents involving green infrastructure across 19 U.S. cities. This work is part of a larger effort to build green infrastructure planning framed by race, justice, and place-making. Her most recent publication "Examining privilege and power in US urban parks and open space during the double crises of antiblack racism and COVID-19" was selected as the Editor's choice by Socio-Ecological Practice and Research (SEPR), a Springer publication. Prior to joining SESYNC, Fushcia worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Environmental Protection Agency (Cincinnati), and she is a postdoctoral affiliate with the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Program, part of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Fushcia earned her master's and doctorate degrees from the Interdisciplinary Ecological Sciences and Engineering program in Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University and a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. In the fall of 2021, she will join the University of North Carolina, Charlotte as an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences.
External Links:
https://www.fushciahoover.com
https://twitter.com/EcoGreenQueen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fushciahoover/
Presenters
Time
11:00 a.m. ET
Location
This is a virtual seminar.
This seminar has been recorded.
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