Greening Post-Industrial Cities

Book excerpt: City greening has been heralded for contributing to environmental governance and critiqued for exacerbating displacement and inequality. Bringing these two disparate analyses into conversation, this book offers a comparative understanding of how tensions between growth, environmental protection, and social equity are playing out in practice. Examining Chicago, USA, Birmingham, UK, and Vancouver, Canada, McKendry argues that city greening efforts were closely connected to processes of post-industrial branding in the neoliberal economy. While this brought some benefits, concerns about the unequal distribution of these benefits and greening’s limited environmental impact challenged its legitimacy. In response, city leaders have moved toward initiatives that strive to better address environmental effectiveness and social equity while still spurring growth. Through an analysis that highlights how different varieties of liberal environmentalism are manifested in each case, this book illustrates that cities, though constrained by inconsistent political will and broader political and economic contexts, are making contributions to more effective, socially just environmental governance. Both critical and hopeful, McKendry’s work will interest scholars of city greening, environmental governance, and comparative urban politics.