When we consider the contribution of urban greening to cities, our minds often turn to the myriad benefits. Open space, recreation and health, improved ecologies and cooler neighourboods. Yet, who is it that reaps these benefits? Who misses out? As authors Kenneth Gould and Tammy Lewis reveal in Green Gentrification: Urban Sustainability and the Struggle for Environmental Justice, equity considerations rarely feature in stories of the sustainable city.

Focused entirely on greening projects in Brooklyn, New York, the book quickly introduces us to an alliance of political actors, property developers, and wealthy residents called ‘green growth coalitions’. These coalitions use green amenity to drive economic growth through property development and increased property prices — a practice that has long been a motivation for creating urban parks in the first place, with Prospect Park being a prescient Brooklyn example. The early engagement with political economy and environmental justice considerations helps to establish the vital point that green gentrification is not just an unintended consequence, it is also a deliberate urban regeneration strategy. In this way, the authors position green gentrification as a subset of urban gentrification — the making of ‘environmental amenities (that) draw in wealthier groups of residents and push out lower-income residents’ (p. 23). This book aims to help communities to defend against green gentrification, while exploring ways to make greening more equitable in global cities.

Following the conceptualisation of green gentrification, Gould and Lewis explore how greening benefits are unevenly shared across different neighbourhoods in Brooklyn. Chapter 3 shows how the regeneration of Prospect Park has whitened and enriched the nearby neighbourhoods that enjoy the easiest access, displacing working-class people and people of colour. It was efforts to ‘revitalise’ Prospect Park in the late 1980s — a project that was supported by a local green growth coalition — that shifted its status from a ‘social hazard’ to a thriving environmental amenity that drew in middle- and upper-class residents. Here we see the strong class consciousness of Gould and Lewis's work, with the astute observation that for lower- and working-class communities, the regeneration of urban parklands can actually serve as a ‘greater threat to community stability than the siting of some locally unwanted land uses’ (p. 59), such as polluting industries, for example. It is through this case that the environmental justice sensitivities of the book are established — environmental improvement and economic growth at the expense of social equity does not count as urban sustainability.

The environmental justice focus continues with Chapter 4, delving into the case of Brooklyn Bridge Park. The way that green amenity can be leveraged in already wealthy neighbourhoods ‘whereby nicer places become even nicer’ (p. 71) is not only disconcerting, but reveals how private capital shapes greening outcomes. Through their connections, the wealthy residents of Brooklyn Bridge Park have managed to resist social/affordable housing that was mooted as part of residential development in the park. Moreover, Brooklyn Bridge Park reflects a wider trend whereby wealthy residents are donating to park-specific ‘conservancies’ that are used to fund park maintenance in lieu of declining public funding. Here we see how the privatisation of park funding means that green spaces in wealthy neighbourhoods can thrive, while those in less wealthy neighbourhoods suffer. A further consequence of this ‘two-tiered’ park system is that wealthy and influential citizens who continue to enjoy high quality parks are less likely to advocate for more park funding, as their local green space is flourishing. At the conclusion of this chapter we see our first major example of how the insidiousness of green gentrification can be addressed. The election of Bill de Blasio in 2014 has resulted in the establishment of a dedicated capital improvement program for under-serviced parks, laws relating to the transparent reporting of park expenditure, and the redistribution of funds from wealthy park conservancies to less well-serviced parks. Public policy for urban greening is thus shown to be vital for putting social equity at the core of sustainability.

In Chapter 5 we see how green gentrification is playing out in the Gowanus Canal. Gowanus is a particularly revealing and detailed example of the complex workings and global entanglements of green growth coalitions. Through deindustrialisation, artist-led gentrification, real-estate development and compliant legislation, we see how private and state apparatus work together to produce a new ‘sustainability class’ that displaces working-class communities. The detailed history of Gowanus as a site of industry and environmental hazard helps to position contemporary urban transformation within a wider trajectory of change. Perhaps missing from this chapter though is a clear articulation of what types of greening are being generated through the new residential projects in Gowanus — a point reinforced when the next chapter immediately identifies energy efficiency, alternative transport and bike lanes sitting alongside green public space as components of green gentrification.

This sixth chapter on two different resident development projects on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront is the strongest and most interesting in the book. The differing fortunes of the two developments presents a comparative case from which important observations about resisting urban gentrification can be made. The case of the Bushwick Inlet Park development shows how a just process for negotiating community demands for new development is insufficient without clear mechanisms for securing just outcomes. Gould and Lewis show how unfulfilled promises regarding the delivery of green open space and affordable housing have led to strong community resentment and displacement as luxury apartment complexes take shape. Yet, a project at Bush Terminal Park suggested a different form of development might be possible. Through concerted community organising that mobilised early, an alternative vision to neoliberal greening has been articulated. Here we see how affordable housing and green space need to be secured before any luxury developments are built. Without this sequence, existing residents are displaced before new affordable accommodation is established, and green space promises often fail to materialise. To conclude, Gould and Lewis are sure to reiterate that not all hope is lost for communities in global cities wanting to green their neighbourhoods. Green gentrification is not presented as inevitable if communities are able to frame green gentrification as an environmental justice issue, and non-market actors and regulation are leveraged to support social equity outcomes.

Green Gentrification provides an extremely thoughtful and detailed account of greening challenges in global cities, with lessons and insights that stretch beyond Brooklyn. While touched on briefly, there may have been room to reflect on the place of First Nations in the past, present and future of Brooklyn. Readers from settler-colonial nations who are familiar with active struggles for Indigenous land rights in cities may notice this absence in the stories of changing occupation over time. The same might be said of the non-humans that are part of green gentrification. For example, the ways that different tree and plant species can be used to shift, retain, or challenge the identity of urban places may have given more life to the ‘green’ in green gentrification. While it is important to remember that not all cities are global cities, this book is excellent for showing how greening must serve communities first and foremost. When it serves to simply greenwash an economic growth and development strategy that consolidates wealth, it exacerbates the issues that urban sustainability should be seeking to address.