Sustainability Policy, Planning and Gentrification in Cities

This book explores the regulatory, socio-cultural, and socio-environmental practices that underlie the convergences between urban sustainability policy and planning and gentrification, and the practices of social exclusion resulting from the connection of these processes. It integrates global examples from Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, New York City, London, Paris, and Freiburg to illustrate how sustainability policies and plans connect with gentrification processes at the city scale and, specifically, at the scale of the urban neighbourhood.

The book examines both institutional and organizational forms of planning for sustainability in cities through formalized policy and planning strategies to create sustainable urban infrastructure, such as urban intensification and the master planning of new sustainable communities, and the convergences of these sustainability approaches with gentrification. Further, it looks at the micro-political, everyday life practices of socio-cultural lifestyle production in urban neighbourhoods with sustainability characteristics. It examines exclusionary practices of sustainability as an increasing component of gentrification that occurs in everyday life, such as the social regulation of park and other ecological spaces in gentrifying or gentrified urban neighbourhoods. It also explores the politics of whose interpretations of sustainability and sustainable urban neighbourhoods influence decision-making, why and how such decisions are formed and at which scales, and the level of inclusive participation in decision-making and planning implementation. In addition to the use of critical examples of exclusionary practices, the book highlights examples of progressive sustainability policy and planning practice, as well as community-based activism, that attempts to dismantle exclusionary practices and instead encourage urban sustainability with equity and justice emphases.

This is a timely book for researchers and students in urban studies, environmental studies and geography with a particular interest in the convergences between urban sustainability policy, planning, and gentrification in cities on an international scale.

Susannah Bunce is Assistant Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto, Canada.