Isabelle Anguelovski
Biographic Data
| ID | 323810 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Isabelle Anguelovski |
| GIVEN NAMES | Isabelle |
| FAMILY NAME | Anguelovski |
| SIGNATURE | ANGUELOVSKI I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6409-5155 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 94 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1372 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 94 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 22 |
Why would you move to a polluted area? Green compromise in Coastal Sydney and Illawarra
Planning in an Era of Polycrisis
Problem, research strategy, and findings Social and climate injustices are deepening as climate disasters, affordable housing emergency, and economic precarity disproportionately affect marginalized communities. Legacies of racialized exclusion and housing financialization in the United States and Canada compound these crises, demanding an evolution in equity planning. We have synthesized research on climate action, urban inequities, and green ge…
Gentrification, short-term rentals, and housing rights
Decoding the 15-Minute City Debate
Science skeptics have spent years attacking climate science, but it has only been recently that post-COVID-19 conspiracy theorists have directed their attention to local city planning, with misinformation campaigns throwing vitriol at the idea of the 15-minute city and denouncing planning best practices as a global form of social engineering with hidden agendas to restrict private freedoms. In this context, urban planners and practitioners need t…
Just urban greening for climate adaptation & health equity planning
Shifting perceptions of green and blue spaces during the Covid ‐19 pandemic in gentrifying neighbourhoods
The COVID‐19 outbreak triggered a combined health, social and economic crisis, imposing multiple restrictions that altered the use and perception of public green and blue spaces (PGBS). In this article, we explored how the different stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic restrictions affected the use and perceptions of public greenspaces and seafront in gentrifying neighbourhoods, focusing specifically on women and non‐binary residents. We conducted a c…
Multi-level finance impacts on participation, inclusion, and equity
We analyze a multi-level ad-hoc emergency fund (MAEF) – the European NextGenerationEU program – as an opportunity to advance ambitious municipal climate action. Presently, MAEF follow a vertical complex governance structure, including strict timelines, evaluations, and competencies spread across policy scales, which condition local aspirations for transformative governance in terms of participation, inclusion, and equity. Drawing on qualitative d…
Exploring ownership of change and health equity implications in neighborhood change processes
Traditional planning processes have perpetuated the exclusion of historically marginalized communities, imposing vulnerability to climate (health) crises. We investigate how ownership of change fosters equitable climate resilience and community well-being through participatory action research. Our study highlights the detrimental effects of climate gentrification on community advocacy for climate security and health, negatively impacting well-bei…
Child-friendly urban practices as emergent place-based neoliberal subjectivation
As city-level decisionmakers generate urban policies and spatial interventions aimed at enhancing children’s environments and increasing their health, wellbeing and participation in urban life, they also impact the types of citizens that cities produce. Yet, despite the increasing ubiquity of city plans targeting the creation of child-friendly environments, child-centred transformations within the urban built fabric have not been a major analytic…
Illuminating radical spatial imaginaries
Urban greening is not a neutral intervention on the social fabric. Critical analyses of the green city often concentrate on greening's top-down, hegemonic, and large-scale manifestations while neglecting the role of social movements. Aiming to address this gap, we ground discussions of "urbanized nature" within discussions of radical spatial imaginaries, concentrating on their performativity. We propose "counter-mapping" as an engaged methodology…
Racial Inequity in Green Infrastructure and Gentrification
This article explores the role that green gentrification plays in exacerbating racial tensions within historically marginalized urban communities benefiting from new environmental amenities such as parks, gardens, waterfront restoration and greenways. Building on extensive qualitative data from three cities in Europe (Amsterdam, Vienna, Lyon) and four cities in the United States (Washington, Austin, Atlanta, Cleveland), we use thematic analysis a…
The notion of justice in funded research on urban sustainability
Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M
Seeking refuge? The potential of urban climate shelters to address intersecting vulnerabilities
Climate shelters are critical urban infrastructures to support adaptation to extreme weather. They offer spaces – e.g., parks, libraries, and civic centers – where residents can take refuge during episodes of extreme temperatures. With over 200 public spaces designated as “Climate Shelters”, Barcelona (Spain) serves as an emblematic example of whether these emerging spaces are meeting the needs, expectations, and everyday experiences of the most …
Pluralizing environmental values for urban planning
Cities have pushed forward re‐naturing initiatives in local planning agendas. Discourses and rationales for such interventions tend to follow instrumental framings often narrowed down to the economic, health and ecological benefits of nature's contributions to people (NCP). Yet, diverse urban residents often connect to other socio‐nature framings that are associated with a plurality of values held for nature, including relational, intrinsic, and …
The trauma machine expands faster than our services”
Grassroots mobilization for a just, green urban future
Municipal climate resiliency and re-naturing plans are promoting greening and green (re)development, such as the inclusion of new parks, greenways, or rehabilitated shorelines, frequently as a-political, win-win solutions for all residents. Greenwashing and (re)development of green amenities in vulnerable neighborhoods-those often most in need of support toward resilience and adaptation-expose residents to the impacts of green gentrification, suc…
Integrating justice in Nature-Based Solutions to avoid nature-enabled dispossession
Heavily featured over the last few years in global research and policy agreements, Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) remain however exposed to much debate over the ways their current design and ability to achieve both environmental goals and social needs. As they become mainstream climate mitigation and adaptation options, their capacity to deliver expected benefits, especially when contemplating equity and justice, is at least uncertain. Through a cr…
(Mis-)belonging to the climate-resilient city
Through climate adaptation planning cities are transforming places and relations, most recently via green climate resilient infrastructure (GRI). Yet, GRI's incorporation into existing, racialized infrastructure systems of urban development, regeneration and finance has raised questions about the socio-cultural impacts and justice dimensions of recent directions in climate adaptation planning and urbanism. While critical scholars highlight the ex…
Redefining success in organizing towards degrowth
The right to the unhealthy deprived city
Research shows mental health is impacted by poor-quality physical and social-environmental conditions. Subsequently state-led redevelopment/regeneration schemes focus on improving the physical environment, to provide better social-environmental conditions, addressing spatial and socioeconomic inequities thus improving residents' health. However, recent research suggests that redevelopment/regeneration schemes often trigger gentrification, resulti…
Green gentrification in European and North American cities
Although urban greening is universally recognized as an essential part of sustainable and climate-responsive cities, a growing literature on green gentrification argues that new green infrastructure, and greenspace in particular, can contribute to gentrification, thus creating social and racial inequalities in access to the benefits of greenspace and further environmental and climate injustice. In response to limited quantitative evidence documen…
Injustice in Urban Sustainability
This book uses a unique typology of ten core drivers of injustice to explore and question common assumptions around what urban sustainability means, how it can be implemented, and how it is manifested in or driven by urban interventions that hinge on claims of sustainability. Aligned with critical environmental justice studies, the book highlights the contradictions of urban sustainability in relation to justice. It argues that urban neighbourhoo…
Exploring green gentrification in 28 global North cities
Although cities globally are increasingly mobilizing re-naturing projects to address diverse urban socio-environmental and health challenges, there is mounting evidence that these interventions may also be linked to the phenomenon known as green gentrification. However, to date the empirical evidence on the relationship between greenspaces and gentrification regarding associations with different greenspace types remains scarce. This study focused…
Residential Proximity to Urban Play Spaces and Childhood Overweight and Obesity in Barcelona, Spain
Findings on the relationship between play spaces and childhood overweight and obesity are mixed and scarce. This study aimed to investigate the associations between residential proximity to play spaces and the risk of childhood overweight or obesity and potential effect modifiers. This longitudinal study included children living in the city of Barcelona identified in an electronic primary healthcare record database between 2011 and 2018 (N = 75,6…
Gender and sex differences in urban greenness’ mental health benefits
Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation
A growing number of cities are preparing for climate change impacts by developing adaptation plans. However, little is known about how these plans and their implementation affect the vulnerability of the urban poor. We critically assess initiatives in eight cities worldwide and find that land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities across diverse developmental and environmental conditions. We argue that urban…
New scholarly pathways on green gentrification
Scholars in urban political ecology, urban geography, and planning have suggested that urban greening interventions can create elite enclaves of environmental privilege and green gentrification, and exclude lower-income and minority residents from their benefits. Yet, much remains to be understood in regard to the magnitude, scope, and manifestations of green gentrification and the forms of contestation and resistance articulated against it. In t…
Assessing green gentrification in historically disenfranchised neighborhoods
To date, little is known about the extent to which the creation of new municipal green spaces over an entire city addresses social or racial inequalities in the distribution of environmental amenities - or whether such an agenda creates new socio-spatial inequities through processes of green gentrification. In this study, we evaluate the effects of creating 18 green spaces in socially vulnerable neighborhoods of Barcelona during the 1990s and ear…
From landscapes of utopia to the margins of the green urban life
Today, municipal decision-makers, planners, and investors rely on valuation studies of ecosystem services, public health assessments, and real estate projections to promote a consensual view of urban greening interventions such as new parks, greenways, or greenbelts as a public good with widespread benefits for all residents. However, as new green projects often anchor major investment and high-end development, we ask: Does the green city fulfil …
Something borrowed, everything new
Urban Climate Adaptation in the Global South
Cities throughout the world face the challenge of preparing for climate change impacts. Since urban climate adaptation is an emerging policy domain, however, few institutions exist to guide cities among the first to take action. Drawing on institutional theory and case study research, this article examines the initiation and development of adaptation planning in two cities in the global south: Durban and Quito. The cases suggest that action in na…
Academia in the Time of Covid-19
The global COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people's work-life balance across the world. For academics, confinement policies enacted by most countries have implied a sudden switch to home-work, a transition to online teaching and mentoring, and an adjustment of research activities. In this article we discuss how the COVID-19 crisis is affecting our profession and how it may change it in the future. We argue that academia must foster a culture of ca…
The ‘Environmentalism of the Poor’ revisited
Alternative food provision conflicts in cities
Grabbed Urban Landscapes
Cities confronted with unsustainable development and climatic changes are increasingly turning to green infrastructure as an approach for growth and climate risk management. In this context, recent scholarly attention has been paid to gentrification, real-estate speculation and resident displacement in the context of sustainability and green planning in the global North. Yet we know little about the environmental-justice implications of green inf…
Urban green boosterism and city affordability
Increasingly, greening in cities across the Global North is enmeshed in strategies for attracting capital investment, raising the question: for whom is the future green city? Through exploring the relationship between cities’ green boosterist rhetoric, affordability and social equity considerations within greening programmes, this paper examines the extent to which, and why, the degree of green branding – that is, urban green boosterism – predict…
Power and privilege in alternative civic practices
Contesting and Resisting Environmental Gentrification
This paper analyzes environmental gentrification (EG), or the exclusion, marginalization, and displacement of long-term residents associated with sustainability planning or green developments and amenities, such as smart growth, public park renovations, and healthy food stores. We consider how activists, communities, and urban planners address these unjust processes and outcomes associated with EG and how these strategies compare to those used by…
Healthy Food Stores, Greenlining and Food Gentrification
Local activists engaged in contemporary environmental justice struggles not only fight against traditional forms of hazardous locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), they also organize to make their neighborhoods livable and green. However, urban environmental justice activism is at a crossroads: as marginalized neighborhoods become revitalized, outside investors start to value them again and they themselves invest in green amenities. Yet vulnerable …
New Directions in Urban Environmental Justice
Traditionally, environmental justice studies have examined the disproportionate burden suffered by marginalized populations in regards to contamination or resource extraction. However, to date little is known about how complex underlying goals shape community organization for long-term environmental quality in different cities around the world, and how concerns for health play out in projects such as park creation, gardens, or playground construc…
Expanding the Boundaries of Justice in Urban Greening Scholarship
Supported by a large body of scholarship, it is increasingly orthodox practice for cities to deploy urban greening interventions to address diverse socioenvironmental challenges, from protecting urban ecosystems to enhancing built environments and climate resilience or improving health outcomes. In this article, we expand the theoretical boundaries used to challenge this growing orthodoxy by laying out a nuanced framework that advances critical u…
Elucidating the changing roles of civil society in urban sustainability transitions
Variations in approaches to urban climate adaptation
Determining the health benefits of green space
From Environmental Trauma to Safe Haven
In recent years, local activists in the Global North and South have been organizing to improve degraded and abandoned spaces in marginalized neighborhoods by creating parks, playgrounds, urban farms, or community gardens. This paper integrates existing knowledge on urban place attachment and sense of community with scholarship on environmental justice in order to understand the role of place attachment in environmental mobilization in distressed …
Whose city? Whose nature? Towards inclusive nature-based solution governance
Climate adaptation as strategic urbanism
Urban green grabbing
In the movement towards building greener and more sustainable cities, real estate developers are increasingly embracing not only green building construction but broader strategies and action related to urban greening. To date, their motivations and role in this broader urban greening dynamic remains underexplored, yet essential to dissect how greening is sustained and real estate development legitimized in revitalizing neighborhoods. With an eye …
Gentrification pathways and their health impacts on historically marginalized residents in Europe and North America
Regions in Covid-19 recovery
Covid-19 is undoubtedly a regional crisis, spatially uneven in its impacts. While it is too soon to talk about a transition ‘from pandemic to recovery’, with attention switching to regional development priorities and the implications of Covid-19 on regional policy, planning and development, increasingly we will need to focus on regions in their recovery phase. In this article we ask four leading researchers what this recovery phase will mean for …
Indigenous Resistance to Oil Extraction in Southern Ecuador
Something borrowed, everything new
Understanding the Dynamics of Community Engagement of Corporations in Communities
Corporate social responsibility refers to businesses' efforts to improve their social and environmental performance. Generally, corporations implement universal standards and codes of conduct or publish reports on their activities. However, in controversial instances, such as environmental conflicts between corporations and communities, some companies have engaged communities and NGOs through deliberative processes. Despite the goal of achieving …
Urban Climate Adaptation in the Global South
Cities throughout the world face the challenge of preparing for climate change impacts. Since urban climate adaptation is an emerging policy domain, however, few institutions exist to guide cities among the first to take action. Drawing on institutional theory and case study research, this article examines the initiation and development of adaptation planning in two cities in the global south: Durban and Quito. The cases suggest that action in na…
From Environmental Trauma to Safe Haven
In recent years, local activists in the Global North and South have been organizing to improve degraded and abandoned spaces in marginalized neighborhoods by creating parks, playgrounds, urban farms, or community gardens. This paper integrates existing knowledge on urban place attachment and sense of community with scholarship on environmental justice in order to understand the role of place attachment in environmental mobilization in distressed …
New Directions in Urban Environmental Justice
Traditionally, environmental justice studies have examined the disproportionate burden suffered by marginalized populations in regards to contamination or resource extraction. However, to date little is known about how complex underlying goals shape community organization for long-term environmental quality in different cities around the world, and how concerns for health play out in projects such as park creation, gardens, or playground construc…
Beyond a Livable and Green Neighborhood
During the past 15 years, the Casc Antic, a traditionally low-income and immigrant neighborhood in Barcelona, has been the site of community-based mobilization to revitalize abandoned areas and improve local environmental conditions. The organization of residents and their supporters is situated within a broader context of urban political and socioeconomic change - the transformation of the urban economy into a decentralized, global and technolog…
Neighborhood as Refuge
An examination of environmental revitalization efforts in low-income communities in Boston, Barcelona, and Havana that help heal traumatized urban neighborhoods. Environmental justice as studied in a variety of disciplines is most often associated with redressing disproportionate exposure to pollution, contamination, and toxic sites. In Neighborhood as Refuge, Isabelle Anguelovski takes a broader view of environmental justice, examining wide-rang…
Variations in approaches to urban climate adaptation
The ‘Environmentalism of the Poor’ revisited
Alternative food provision conflicts in cities
Resolving differing stakeholder perceptions of urban rooftop farming in Mediterranean cities
Healthy Food Stores, Greenlining and Food Gentrification
Local activists engaged in contemporary environmental justice struggles not only fight against traditional forms of hazardous locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), they also organize to make their neighborhoods livable and green. However, urban environmental justice activism is at a crossroads: as marginalized neighborhoods become revitalized, outside investors start to value them again and they themselves invest in green amenities. Yet vulnerable …
From Toxic Sites to Parks as (Green) Lulus? New Challenges of Inequity, Privilege, Gentrification, and Exclusion for Urban Environmental Justice
As marginalized neighborhoods benefit from cleanup and environmental amenities often brought by municipal sustainability planning, recent trends of land revaluation, investments, and gentrification are posing a conundrum and paradox for environmental justice (EJ) activists. In this article, I examine the progression of the urban EJ agenda—from fighting contamination to mobilizing for environmental goods and resisting environmental gentrification—…
Inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation in the Global South
As cities increasingly engage in climate adaptation planning, many are seeking to promote public participation and facilitate the engagement of different civil society actors. Still, the variations that exist among participatory approaches and the merits and tradeoffs associated with each are not well understood. This article examines the experiences of Quito (Ecuador) and Surat (India) to assess how civil society actors contribute to adaptation …
Roadmap towards justice in urban climate adaptation research
Elucidating the changing roles of civil society in urban sustainability transitions
Retracted
At the request of the Editor, the following article has been retracted. Isabelle Anguelovski, “Urban greening as the ultimate urban environmental justice tragedy?” Planning Theory first published on June 29, 2016 as doi:10.1177/1473095216654448
Contesting and Resisting Environmental Gentrification
This paper analyzes environmental gentrification (EG), or the exclusion, marginalization, and displacement of long-term residents associated with sustainability planning or green developments and amenities, such as smart growth, public park renovations, and healthy food stores. We consider how activists, communities, and urban planners address these unjust processes and outcomes associated with EG and how these strategies compare to those used by…
The influence of urban development dynamics on community resilience practice in New York City after Superstorm Sandy
Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation
A growing number of cities are preparing for climate change impacts by developing adaptation plans. However, little is known about how these plans and their implementation affect the vulnerability of the urban poor. We critically assess initiatives in eight cities worldwide and find that land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities across diverse developmental and environmental conditions. We argue that urban…
Planning for sustainable mobility in transition cities
Urban planning, community (re)development and environmental gentrification
This chapter examines how so-called urban greening and sustainability approaches can produce or exacerbate environmental inequities and how select urban communities are beginning to organize against new injustices. It focuses on the US and examines diverse examples of urban environmental inequity produced in the context of neighborhood greening and community (re)development. In the analysis of community-based environmental revitalization in Bosto…
Assessing green gentrification in historically disenfranchised neighborhoods
To date, little is known about the extent to which the creation of new municipal green spaces over an entire city addresses social or racial inequalities in the distribution of environmental amenities - or whether such an agenda creates new socio-spatial inequities through processes of green gentrification. In this study, we evaluate the effects of creating 18 green spaces in socially vulnerable neighborhoods of Barcelona during the 1990s and ear…
Climate adaptation as strategic urbanism
Political science (64 works) · Sociology (62 works) · Geography (61 works) · Economics (49 works) · Economic growth (42 works) · Urban Green Space and Health (39 works) · Environmental planning (31 works) · Law (31 works) · Gentrification (30 works) · Urban Agriculture and Sustainability (29 works)