Contested Urban Green Spaces and Environmental Justice in Northern Europe

Abstract

The chapter provides an overview of the objectives, structure, content and results of this joint volume. Starting from the paradox of well-known green space benefits on the one hand and multiple challenges to their fair provision on the other hand, the book argues to put green space contestations and environmental justice concerns into focus when striving for a sustainable city development. As the edited volume unites interdisciplinary and multi-method studies on green space use and planning, it enriches environmental justice studies by widening the understanding of green space access, critically evaluating cases of procedural injustice and providing in-depth studies on the contexts of injustices in urban greening. Based on the results of these studies, a future research agenda is proposed in this introductory chapter.

Beyond the pale: Fencing off parks for festivals

“…Indeed, while parks are sometimes criticised for the prevalence and pettiness of rules, defining event zones through fencing creates areas which are subject to different regulations – including what can be consumed, worn or displayed (Osborn and Smith, 2015). There is a financial motive for installing fenced festivals, but these are also a product of wider processes, including the securitisation and juridification of public spaces (Smith et al, 2022; Talbot, 2011). Fences are justified as safety measures which are used control the numbers of people who can enter a space and what they can bring in.…”

Social Media Groups in Interaction With Contested Urban Narratives: The Case of Koper/Capodistria, Slovenia

“…Yet, heritage sites are inherently dissonant, often explicitly contested spaces "where conflicts in the form of opposition, confrontation, subversion, and/or resistance engage actors whose social positions are defined by differential control of resources and access to power" (Low & Lawrence-Zuñiga, 2003, p. 18). Contestation can take many forms (G. Jenkins, 2008;Plüschke-Altof & Sooväli-Sepping, 2022), but is especially frequent in multi-ethnic or multicultural contexts, as the urban centres of northern Istria, in Slovenia, clearly show. So, social media can take an inverse role, creating homogenised, exclusive online communities, and co-creating discourses of misrecognition in the politics of heritage (Smith, 2022).…”

Estonian population and regional development during the last 30 years—back to the small town?

“…Regional polarization in Eastern Europe, and the Baltics in particular, has been analyzed by numerous authors (Dzenovska, 2020;Lang et al, 2022, Leetmaa et al, 2013McCollum et al, 2017;Plüschke-Altof et al, 2020;Poci utė-Sereikienė, 2019;Ubarevičienė, 2018). Most of these studies used between 10 and 30 years of statistics showing deepening polarization and painting gloomy pictures of geographic peripheries (Kühn, 2015;Lang et al, 2015;Lang & Görmar, 2019).…”