Social sustainability in eco-urban neighbourhoods

Holden, Meg; Airas, Annika; Larsen, Majken Toftager

doi:10.4324/9781315115740-8

Cited by 4 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…I originally started researching the large-scale, new-build Nordhavn project in Copenhagen due to it being steeped in sustainability planning rhetoric, and particularly from an interest in the comparative urban politics of climate risks across East Asia and Europe (see Blok, 2012, for details). Initiated in 2005 by the Danish government and the Municipality of Copenhagen, Nordhavn designs were timed to coincide with Copenhagen hosting the United Nations’ COP15 climate conference, so that the district would serve to strengthen the city’s claim as a green capital (Holden et al, 2019: 161). When I interviewed architectural and engineering consultants some years later, they were clear that COP15 had provided them a window of opportunity vis-a-vis the landowning public partnership, City and Port Development, to raise low-carbon ambitions well above the usual norm.…”

Section: Nordhavn Copenhagen: the Making Of Low-carbon Privilegementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This relative dearth of socio-ecological justice concerns is noteworthy given the commonsensical observation, notable to everyone in the city, that this district is becoming a low-carbon enclave for the wealthy. Readily available sources document that home prices in Nordhavn are higher than for Copenhagen as a whole (Holden et al, 2019: 163), in a district provisioned with energy-efficient housing and ample public transit options. As I will detail further on, rather than green gentrification per se, the Nordhavn case might then be better conceptualised as one of ‘low-carbon gentrification’ (Bouzarovski et al, 2018).…”

Section: Nordhavn Copenhagen: the Making Of Low-carbon Privilegementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Known in former times as ‘the city of welfare’ (Andersen and Winther, 2010), Nordhavn embodies the latest step in Copenhagen’s transformation not only towards a purportedly green capital, but also in the direction of infusing more neoliberal policy agendas into a traditionally equality- and social rights-oriented urban model characteristic of the Nordic countries (Anderberg and Clark, 2013; Holden et al, 2019). As a post-industrial waterfront site long since abandoned by harbour and production activities, Nordhavn thus inscribes itself into the city’s remarkable post-1990s recovery from economic downturn, emerging as a hub of new service and knowledge economies.…”

Section: Nordhavn Copenhagen: the Making Of Low-carbon Privilegementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, the project inherits its core institutional rules, conditions and strategies directly from the wider trajectory of state-led gentrification embodied in the neoliberally infused City and Port Development agency. This agency lies behind the so-called Ørestad district (Anderberg and Clark, 2013), as well as wider harbour re-developments, new metro construction and associated growth strategies enacted over the past decades – all under the rubric of ‘sustainability’ (Holden et al, 2019).…”

Section: Nordhavn Copenhagen: the Making Of Low-carbon Privilegementioning

confidence: 99%

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Urban green gentrification in an unequal world of climate change

Blok

2020

Urban Studies

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Over the past few decades, notions of environmental, ecological or green gentrification in cities have entered the lexicon of critical urban scholars and activists alike, not least in North American and European settings. This happens amidst growing concerns that the current policy and planning emphasis on making cities more sustainable serves in some cases to exacerbate socio-material inequalities in the city via forms of residential displacement. In this critical commentary, I respond to recent calls for expanding the socio-geographical parameters of green gentrification research, and for enriching the agenda via new theoretical approaches, by highlighting one particular avenue of problematisation that seems so far conspicuously lacking. This is the realisation that, in an unequal world of anthropogenic climate change, green gentrification must be grasped not only at local but also, simultaneously, at transnational scales of risk-induced socio-spatial restructuring. My suggested approach to a more multi-scalar and climate-sensitive notion of green gentrification proceeds via sociologist Ulrich Beck’s theorising of the intensifying socio-material inequalities of climate change in ‘world risk society’, along with ethnographic work on urban climate politics in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, and in the North-West Indian city of Surat. While allowing us to analyse the many local ambivalences wedded with urban sustainability politics in the global North and global South alike, Beck helpfully insists that we keep their unequal trans-local interconnectedness in view, yielding a radicalised notion of green gentrification as set in-between and connecting localised and globalised frames of inequality in new ways.

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Section: Nordhavn Copenhagen: the Making Of Low-carbon Privilegementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nordhavn Copenhagen: the Making Of Low-carbon Privilegementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nordhavn Copenhagen: the Making Of Low-carbon Privilegementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nordhavn Copenhagen: the Making Of Low-carbon Privilegementioning

confidence: 99%

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Urban green gentrification in an unequal world of climate change

Blok

2020

Urban Studies

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“…Harms, 2014; Checker, 2011; Isenhour et al. , 2015; Blok and Meilvang, 2015; Holden et al. , 2019; Laage-Thomsen and Blok, 2020a, b).…”

Section: Introduction: the Politics Of Urban Climate Change Mitigatio...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The missing builders: craftwork and crafty resistance in the “eco-metropolis” of Copenhagen

Ebsen

2022

JOE

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PurposeThe paper ethnographically explores modes of urban resistance emerging in tandem with climate change mitigation programs in Copenhagen.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on 11 months of fieldwork with a Danish construction enterprise, the paper examines the politics of urban climate change mitigation programs through the lens of a group of builders' struggles to rethink and resolve dilemmas related to environmental concerns in construction and urban development.FindingsBased on an analysis of a specific construction project connected to a larger urban climate change mitigation program in Copenhagen, the paper shows how the builders deliberately move between different perspectives and positions as they navigate the shifting power relations of urban planning. The paper argues that this form of crafty resistance enables the builders to maneuver the political landscape of urban planning as they seek to appropriate the role of “urban planners” themselves.Originality/valueTaking up recent discussions of “resistance” in anthropology and cognate disciplines (e.g. Theodossopoulos, 2014; Bhungalia, 2020; Prasse-Freeman, 2020), the paper contributes an ethnographic analysis of struggles between diverging and, at times, competing modes of engagement in urban climate change mitigation programs and thus sheds light on how professional actors negotiate the ambiguity of “sustainability” in urban planning.

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Translanguaging for more-than-English sustainability transitions

Holden,

Airas

2024

Local Environment

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Social sustainability in eco-urban neighbourhoods

Cited by 4 publications

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Urban green gentrification in an unequal world of climate change

Urban green gentrification in an unequal world of climate change

The missing builders: craftwork and crafty resistance in the “eco-metropolis” of Copenhagen

Translanguaging for more-than-English sustainability transitions

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