Wiped Out by the “Greenwave”: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability

Abstract

This essay examines the intersection of environmental justice activism and state‐sponsored sustainable urban development—how is environmental justice activism enabled or disabled in the context of rapid urban development, consensual politics and the seemingly a‐political language of sustainability? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, I define a process I refer to as “environmental gentrification,” which builds on the material and discursive successes of the environmental justice movement and appropriates them to serve high‐end development. While it appears as politically‐neutral, consensus‐based planning that is both ecologically and socially sensitive, in practice, environmental gentrification subordinates equity to profit‐minded development. I propose that this process offers a new way of exploring the paradoxes and conundrums facing contemporary urban residents as they fight to challenge the vast economic and ecological disparities that increasingly divide today's cities.