This article investigates the role of urban political economy, private-public property relations, and race and ethnicity in the social production of Milwaukee's urban forest. By integrating urban-forest canopy-cover data from aerial photography, United States Census data, and qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, this analysis suggests that there is an inequitable distribution of urban canopy cover within Milwaukee. Since urban trees positively affect quality of life, the spatially inequitable distribution of urban trees in relation to race and ethnicity is yet another instance of urban environmental inequality that deserves greater consideration in light of contemporary and dynamic property relations within capitalist societies.

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This paper examines the rise of civic participation, a feature of neoliberal privatisation, in the context of Milwaukee's urban green space management. Using in-depth semi-structured interviews and archival research, it presents the argument that civic organisations are not just 'neo-liberal artifacts' that facilitate trends of privatisation and commodification of and state retrenchment from urban environmental resources. Utilising a range of strategies, they simultaneously resist those trends, often ameliorating the socio-environmentally destructive effects of neo-liberal processes. Highlighting some of these strategies, this paper suggests that different kinds of non-profit organisations intersect with neo-liberalism differently to provide a variety of enabling opportunities for counter-neoliberalism.