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Urban green and blue space interventions may bring about unintended consequences, involving trade-offs between the different land uses, and indeed, between the needs of different urban inhabitants, land users, and owners. Such trade-offs include choices between green/blue and non-green/blue projects, between broader land sparing vs. land sharing patterns, between satisfying the needs of the different inhabitants, but also between different ways of arranging the green and blue spaces. We analyze investment and planning initiatives in six case-study cities related to green and blue infrastructure (GBI) through the lens of a predefined set of questions-an analytical framework based on the assumption that the flows of benefits from GBI to urban inhabitants and other stakeholders are mediated by three filters: infrastructures, institutions, and perceptions. The paper builds on the authors' own knowledge and experience with the analyzed case-study cities and beyond, a literature overview, a review of the relevant city documents, and interviews with key informants. The case studies indicate examples of initiatives that were intended to make GBI benefits available and accessible to urban inhabitants, in recognition of GBI as spaces with diverse functionality. Some case studies provide examples of trade-offs in trying to plan and design a green space for multiple private and public interests in densely built-up areas. The unintended consequences most typically resulted from the underappreciation of the complexity of social-ecological systems and-more specifically-the complexity of the involved infrastructures, institutions, and perceptions. The most important challenges addressed in the paper include trade-offs between the different ways of satisfying the residents' different needs related to the benefits from ecosystem services, ensuring proper recognition of the inhabitants' needs and perceptions, ecogentrification, caveats related to the formalization of informal spaces, and the need to consider temporal dynamics and cross-scale approaches that compromise different goals at different geographical scales.

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Environmental justice is a term that includes both exposure to environmental ‘bads’ as well as access to environmental ‘goods’ which might be unequally experienced by different socio‑economic groups. In other words, environmental justice scholars study whether everybody can have an equal right to a healthy, nurturing environment which supports their development and well‑being. The environmental justice movement arose in response to the so‑called ‘environmental racism’ in the USA which affected communities of blue‑collar workers, people with lower income and of Afro‑American, Asian, Latin or native origins. Although initially environmental (in)justice was rooted in racial discrimination in the USA, nowadays it encompasses a wider range of issues, including problems at the local and global level, from degradation and pollution of natural resources to aspects related to spatial planning. Unequal access to environmental amenities – such as green spaces – was not the main focus of the discourse, however, it is gaining attention nowadays, especially in the context of urban environment. Urban green spaces influence health and well‑being of urban residents, but access to them can be uneven in terms of socio‑spatial heterogeneity. Growing challenges of living in cities, related to, among others, climate change, densification or sprawling of developments, urban heat islands, and other nuisances, require sustainable management of green spaces and provision of equal (socially just) access to benefits provided by these areas. Moreover, another important aspect of the discussion is linked to potentially beneficial planning decisions (e.g. increasing availability of urban green spaces) and their long‑term consequences, which may eventually lead to gentrification and increased social inequalities (environmental injustice). Complexity of the problem related to availability of green spaces in cities needs an interdisciplinary approach which combines ecological, spatial and socio‑economic aspects. The article reviews the current state‑of‑the‑art literature in the field of environmental justice, with particular emphasis on green space availability in the context of urban environment.