City_Skyline_Squares-08

Miami

MIAMI

Incorporated 1825

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 36.0 sq miles
  • 36.0 sq miles
  • 451,214 Total Population
  • 12,535  People per sq. mile
  • 0.2% Forest cover
  • Tropical and Subtropical Moist Broadleaf Forest Biome
  • 6.8% Developed open space
  • $36,638  Median household income
  • 20.2%  Live below federal poverty level
  • 75.9% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 15.4% Housing units vacant
  • 0.1% Native, 11.3% White, 14.4% Black,  72.7% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 1% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socio-economic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and Land Cover Data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The City of Miami occupies the lands of several Native Nations including its namesake the Mayaimi people and has an important history of successful Seminole resistance to slavery and colonization.  Not to be confused with Miami Beach, this predominantly Latinx city has become a hot spot of climate gentrification and climate justice. Despite increasing climate risks due to sea-level rise and an increasingly chaotic hurricane season, the city continues to experience booms in population and real estate investment with the majority of residents being rent-burdened. In combination, these forces appear to be accelerating the displacement of marginalized communities. 

The city now regularly experiences daytime tidal flooding by ‘King Tides,’ which Miami Dade County, with the help of the federal government, has been addressing through large-scale stormwater programs, which fall outside the scope of this analysis. The city has invested significant resources in its park system to provide a verdant backdrop of the highly urbanized and dense city. 

Green Infrastructure in Miami

In stark contrast to other cities focusing exclusively on stormwater infrastructure, Miami Green Infrastructure plans focus almost exclusively on creating a high quality and city-wide system of parks and urban canopy, through its Parks and Tree Plans.

Both the Parks and Tree Canopy Master plans refer to diverse and networked green spaces, engineered streetscapes, and ecological elements using a landscape concept of GI.

GI is primarily seen as fulfilling social functions, providing opportunities for gatherings, recreation, and building a sense of identity. The benefits of GI in Miami are defined across environmental, technological, and socioeconomic domains.

Plans recognize that GI provides numerous socio-economic benefits, assists with climate adaptation, and functions as a core part of the city’s infrastructure and urban fabric. The Climate Plan references the GI concept, yet it does not provide an explicit definition.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Miami

Key Findings

Miami GI Plans refer to equity and justice and yet fail to meaningfully define either. Despite this omission,  the Parks Plan exemplifies some best practices in procedural equity. All plans are concerned with the distributional aspects of equity. However, weak framings appear to prevent a robust and contextual exploration of current distributional issues and how they could be addressed by planning. 

100%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

66%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

0%

define equity

33%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

33%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

0%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Miami through Maps

The City of Miami is characterized by a dense urban core and a large degree of segregation in income and racial composition, reflected in high vacancy rates in neighborhoods with extensive luxury development. Rent burden is likewise highly unevenly distributed. Greenspaces, predominantly parks, are distributed fairly evenly around the city. Somewhat extensive mangroves and coastal wetlands line the city's southern coastline, and portions of the Miami river, as the coastline is otherwise extensively armored with hard infrastructure.

How does Miami account for Equity in GI Planning?

Miami City plans make admirable commitments to participation and addressing contextual uses of GI. However, no single plan in Miami addresses the dimensions of equity in our analysis, and visions of equity in plans are largely problematic. Mechanisms for procedural equity were inconsistent across plans. Distributional elements are discussed, but not robustly analyzed.

No plans define equity or justice and framings are generally universalist with no mention of potential adverse impacts of proposed activities. 

Planning processes are highly centralized, with appointed commissions and city staff primarily responsible for implementation and evaluation. The exception is the Parks Master Plan which considers the needs of diverse user groups of parks, as well as the contextual value of parks within a city-wide green infrastructure system providing multiple functions and benefits. It also utilizes extensive outreach surveys for planning, design, and evaluation, although this process is overseen by an appointed commission.

Plans inconsistently address distributional aspects of hazards, values, and labor. There is a mixed emphasis on climate-related hazards and the role that GI plays in managing them is not always clear. Like other cities, plans seek volunteer labor to realize GI.

Envisioning Equity

The City’s Parks Master plan robustly frames the contextual value of Parks to diverse urban communities, explicitly addressing the value of parks as part of a city-wide system of green infrastructure that provides diverse functions and benefits. In the Parks Master Plan, like the Urban Tree Plan and the City’s Sustainability Plan, GI is seen as providing universal goods. The plans do not unpack the complex role of public realm investments in housing displacement or other unintended consequences. The Climate Action Plan states that it will address environmental justice through transportation system redesign, but does not elaborate.

Procedural Equity

Mechanisms for community engagement over the planning lifecycle are inconsistent. The Parks Master plan commits to community inclusion throughout the planning lifecycle, including evaluation, but provides limited documentation of what communities were involved, instead relying on new city-wide commission and survey instruments. The Tree Master Plan explicitly relies on input from the same Miami Green Commission and an Urban Forestry Working group, with unclear mechanisms of broader public participation, and no evaluative mechanisms aside from a proposed city-wide tree database. The Climate Plan acknowledges the need for community involvement but has no mechanisms or processes described, despite committing to a framework for tracking plan impacts. 

Distributional Equity

The Climate and Tree Plans acknowledge the immanence of climate hazards, with the former discussing the region’s vulnerability and the latter focusing on tree mortality. The Climate Plan discusses the vulnerability of Southern Florida and sets in motion a process to identify vulnerable areas for use in other city plans. The Climate Plan, however, does not discuss how GI may manage those hazards. Further, the benefits of GI are largely absent from the Climate plan, which focuses on the benefits of transit-oriented development (TOD) and how sustainability benefits regional prosperity. The Climate Plan seeks to engage volunteer labor, especially with regards to managing GI in the face of climate change but does not discuss the inequities that may result from a volunteer-based system of maintenance and adaptation.

The Tree Plan sets in motion an analysis of the multiple values of an urban canopy but only proposes to do so through the City GREEN tool which reduces many values to economic and biophysical indicators. This plan fails to mention labor issues. 

Parks planning seeks to provide contextual value to existing residents as well as a city-wide GI system. 

The Parks Master Plan emphasizes how parks can improve the safety of transportation and improve water quality, but does not appear to address climate-related or other urban hazards. The Parks Plan commits to hiring a volunteer coordinator to enhance the network of ‘Friends of Parks’ groups, specifically targeting the need for more volunteer maintenance and engage in other forms of labor such as evaluating park performance and serving on advisory boards. Although the Parks Plan mentions the need for dedicated funding for these groups, it does not discuss the inequities embedded within such an approach.  

No plans discuss the potential downsides to large investments in urban amenities or how they will be managed, nor do they robustly consider labor issues. 

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Miami Plans provide a basic scaffold for community-led planning of a city-wide green infrastructure network. Given ongoing initiatives to adapt to climate change in the city, especially those operating across federal and county levels, we provide several key recommendations to improve the equity of GI planning in Miami. We offer these in recognition that the most recent climate change adaptation plan fell outside the scope of our formal analysis.

Community Groups

There are numerous social and racial justice organizations working in Miami that can be engaged and supported in organizing communities to proactively lead planning processes addressing the intertwined crises of climate change, housing, and economic justice. While the City appears to have made great strides in connecting with community groups in park system planning and evaluation, much more needs to be done to activate Miami residents to address the intersecting climatic and social challenges faced by their communities.

  1. Rallying around a Just Transition Framework

Current GI plans in Miami generally seek to add amenities and GI features to the urban landscape. They do not acknowledge the processes that have led to the highly inequitable landscape of climate risk and socio-economic conditions. The most recent climate adaptation plan focuses on a broad GI strategy and will appear to have significant financial support from the federal government. Communities can rally around the idea of a Just Transition to make sure these funds support community-led planning and adaptation efforts, including economic transformation for climate change-associated jobs and building community wealth through city-wide GI programs.

Policy Makers & Planners

The City’s existing and emergent approaches focus on a citywide GI network, with the most recent climate plan integrating stormwater systems with the urban canopy. This is an improvement over the existing landscape-focused approaches in the city’s parks and tree plans, though integrating infrastructure systems poses new sets of challenges. There is a risk of omitting the equitable processes developed in the park system plans in the city’s climate adaptation programs.

1. Integrate Emergent Climate Planning With Park’s System Planning

This plan omits the extensive work performed by the City’s Park department and may miss opportunities to expand the park system along with city-wide canopy, stormwater infrastructure, and shoreline projects. Given the enormous pending investments in climate adaptation occurring in the region,  the city could take a more expansive and inclusive approach towards GI system planning.

2. Expand Community Based Evaluation Frameworks

The Parks Plan provides a workable framework for evaluating city initiatives which could be expanded to address the intersecting concerns above. Mandating and funding community engagement through the entire planning lifecycle, and including the lived experience of communities as a key metric of successful adaptation and GI implementation strategies, requires binding commitments from existing decision-making bodies.

3. Address Economic and Racial Justice in GI planning

Given large disparities in income in the city, building community wealth by compensating GI planning, design, and implementation is a viable strategy for supporting greening in place. Given the issues of housing displacement, the city urgently needs to restructure planning to meet the needs of existing communities. Such an approach would need to recognize the intersection between racial justice, housing displacement, and GI investments. This understanding remains absent from the most recent climate adaptation plan.

Foundations and Funders

Miami has a rich ecosystem and history of community organizing that can be supported by local and national foundations and funders. Existing Green Infrastructure plans highlight several areas for consideration.

1. Support Intersectional Organizing

Organizations working on greening and environmental justice, like Catalyst Miami, along with numerous other groups recognize the need to simultaneously address economic and environmental justice. Equitable adaptation and mitigation, pursued simultaneously through a Just Transition framework, require dedicated, and often long-term, funding for community organizing, especially in the face of housing displacement. Given large disparities in income and significant rent burdens in the city, foundations and funders can contribute towards building community wealth by compensating planning, design, and implementation as part of a broader strategy for equitable greening in place. One that enhances existing community strengths and capacities for self-determined and just futures.

2. Building Participatory Governance From the Ground Up

Foundations and funders can invest in community-led planning processes to inform and transform how city agencies plan for city-wide GI and climate adaptation projects. Community-led initiatives to build new institutional processes for giving communities real power in GI and CCA decision-making could benefit from dedicated foundation support. Grassroots initiatives are necessary to balance power within existing large-scale initiatives to address climate resilience including the well-known Southeast Florida Climate compact.

Closing Insights

Miami’s rising climate challenges contrast sharply with its ongoing growth. Massive public and private investments in green infrastructure as part of city-wide adaptation programs can build off of existing processes that involve communities in city-wide parks and green infrastructure planning. Building community wealth will require recognizing communities as experts on the immediate challenges they face.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-04

Chicago

CHICAGO

Incorporated 1789

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 234.2 sq miles
  • 2,718,555 Total Population
  • 11,956  People per sq. mile
  • 0.6% Forest cover
  • Temperate Grasslands, Savannas, and Shrublands
  • 3.4% Developed open space
  • $55,198  Median household income
  • 61.5% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 15.5% Live below the federal poverty level
  • 12.6% Housing units vacant
  • 0.1% Native, 33.3% White, 29.2% Black,  28.8% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 6.5% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socio-economic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and Land Cover Data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The city of Chicago occupies the homelands of numerous Native nations, including Potawatomi,  Peoria, and Miami peoples, and continues to serve as a hub of Native organizing. As the largest metropolis of the midwest, Chicago has been shaped by its role as a hub for regional agricultural and natural resource economies and heavy industrialization. As a major destination for global immigrants and Southern Black folx, Chicago has a high degree of racial and ethnic diversity in an intensely segregated city.

Chicago has also served as a key site of development of social movements and theories on urban transformation and justice. The city famously rerouted the Chicago river to prevent sewage flow into its drinking water source of Lake Michigan, a solution made precarious by climate change. The city faces ongoing challenges around racial disparities and uneven exposure to climate hazards, especially heat waves.

Green Infrastructure in Chicago

Chicago is unique among the cities we examined for differentiating between natural and engineered green infrastructure in its Green Stormwater Infrastructure Strategy. The GSI plan defines natural GI using an integrated concept and engineered GI using a stormwater-focused concept. Neither the cities Sustainability Plan or Adding Green to Urban design plans define GI. GI planning in Chicago is further complicated by the fact that the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago oversees significant portions of the city's sanitary and water supply infrastructure.

Types of GI in Chicago span all three of our major categories and include designed elements such as green roofs, rain gardens, and permeable pavers. However, plan definitions do not consider a diverse set of open space and ecosystem types.

Functionally, GI is managed to provide environmental functions, dominated by a fairly limited set of hydrological services.

Despite the care to differentiate broadly between natural and engineered GI, the benefits of GI remain weakly defined, focusing only on property values and energy conservation.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Chicago

Key Findings

GI plans in Chicago make almost no mention of equity or justice issues and do not define equity or justice. There are some attempts to include affected communities in the planning lifecycle, especially in the Sustainability Plan and the Green Urban Design Plan. While the city has developed an extensive GI based stormwater management program, there does not appear to be a comprehensive or systematic GI planning approach in the city.

25%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

25%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

75%

seek to address climate and other hazards

75%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

0%

define equity

50%

explicitly refer to justice

75%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

0%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Chicago through Maps

Chicago is a highly developed urban area with several large green spaces concentrated along Lake Michigan and a few others dispersed across the city. Population density varies considerably and appears to have an inverse relationship with rent burden and vacancy, which also correlate with racial composition which is segregated throughout the city. These patterns speak to the long histories of urban renewal and disinvestment in marginalized communities. 

How does Chicago account for Equity in GI Planning?

Chicago GI plans are startlingly absent of any substantive mentions of equity but still have significant equity implications. No plans in Chicago addressed all ten dimensions of equity we examined. Across plans, there are weak commitments to participatory planning, with some unspecified commitments to interdepartmental equity in GI implementation, although evaluation remains nascent or problematic. 

There were no definitions of equity or justice across the four plans examined. Framings of equity were weak and general across plans. One exception was found in the sustainability plan which describes a vision of accessible employment and economic development supported by public investments in infrastructure supporting health and cost savings. Considerations of justice were absent across plans.

Chicago GI Plans, and in particular the GSI strategy, intend to use GI to address a range of climatic hazards, (notably heat, flooding, waterborne diseases, and water pollution)  and to add many different types of value to the urban landscape. Yet, they fail to discuss any downsides to these initiatives, or how values may differ between communities. Plans do not link the admirable high level goals of creating meaningful and well-compensated employment opportunities to GI programs and initiatives.

Envisioning Equity

No GI plans from Chicago define equity or justice. Overall framings of equity are also weak. The Sustainability Plan offers a universal vision of development and employment but does not address existing disparities or their historical causes. The GSI plan similarly seeks to modernize infrastructure systems for the public welfare but contains no discussion of disparities in service levels or other social inequalities that such a vision would need to address to be successful. Failing to adequately frame or envision equity in current GI plans is likely to reinforce existing injustices within the city.

Procedural Equity

The procedural equity of GI in Chicago is generally weak. While there is some emphasis on involving diverse stakeholders in implementation, there is no overall framework for meaningful collaboration or consent for GI programs or initiatives. Overall, GI strategies appear driven by top-down decision-making, with community involvement more of an afterthought. The Sustainability and Greening Urban Design Plans extend considerations of involvement in all four procedural dimensions, but involvement is limited to city agencies, despite an emphasis on the need for citizens to lead implementation. Such an approach places the burden of success on city residents without meaningfully including them in the planning and design of programs and initiatives. Chicago’s otherwise well-developed GSI Strategy makes mention of a multi-stakeholder process but it is not clear if and how affected communities were involved in this process. The Sustainability and Green Urban Design Plans reference the involvement of stakeholders and partners, but appear to have input from city agencies and interested professionals exclusively. The MS4 plan covers its regulatory requirements for coordinated implementation but limits community involvement to being targets of outreach. While it lists the 311 complaint process as a means for community evaluation of projects, it is not clear how that information will be used to revise approaches. Lastly, while the GSI strategy creates an interagency process for the review of capital investments and projects, the process is not clearly described or transparent.

Distributional Equity

Although the overall GSI strategy considers the distributional dimensions of GI value, hazard, and labor, it fails to deeply discuss the uneven distribution of present hazards or value or the potential downsides to using GSI for property value improvements. Discussion of distributional equity in current plans varies considerably, and, as in other cities, completely omits impacts on renters. The Sustainability Plan has a high-level goal of making well-compensated employment available to all city inhabitants but this goal is not linked to GI. While Chicago is somewhat unique in requiring that Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) be written for the maintenance of specific GI projects and facilities,  it is not clear how these agreements between agencies and residents will be enforced.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Chicago has pivoted in 2020 to address equity issues through its ‘We Will Chicago’ planning process. Yet despite a careful articulation of a Green Stormwater Infrastructure planning concept and the elaboration of ‘green design’ principles, Chicago plans do not appear to provide a cohesive framework for integrating diverse ecological and technological elements into a city-wide GI system. Current GI plans have largely failed to even define equity, let alone detail processes of how diverse communities will have meaningful input with city agency initiatives, or how their values and concerns will be addressed in city-led planning. In light of the ongoing demands from a diverse range of community groups for the city to meaningfully address equity and justice in GI planning, Chicago will need to re-examine its planning legacy and its shortcomings in this arena. Below we provide recommendations on how to facilitate this process.

Community Groups

Existing GI initiatives and plans appear to have largely failed to address the needs of disenfranchised and marginalized communities. The current push to include equity in the city’s comprehensive planning process should provide space for community-led planning efforts in diverse domains. While ‘green infrastructure’ as a stormwater planning concept has been extensively applied by city agencies through the City’s green roof and stormwater programs, significant improvements can be made to ensure that the multiple benefits and functions of diverse green elements throughout the city can deliver the benefits that communities need and desire. Fortunately, Chicago has demonstrated a capacity for this type of work through a long history of community organizing, including the formation of the original rainbow coalition, and other social movements within the justice-oriented and class-conscious struggle continuing to this day

1. Framing Equity and Justice Issues

Community groups can and should provide vital contextual definitions and framing of equity and justice issues in Chicago as part of the current push to address equity in planning in the city. These visions for an equitable urban future must be elevated and amplified so they cannot be overlooked by the city agencies and planners who are responsible for implementation  While the ‘We Will Chicago’ process provides formal mechanisms for this process, the degree to which community groups can coordinate their campaigns outside of municipally sanctioned processes will determine the measure to which historically oppressive institutions can be transformed or abolished.

2. Shifting Narratives around Housing, Renewal, and Environmental Justice

Like many cities continuing to transition into a post-industrial economy, the significant rent burden in Chicago continues to be exacerbated by a speculative real estate market overbuilding luxury housing. Combined with narratives on the centrality of entrepreneurship and innovation, longer running struggles for affordable quality housing are obscured by the dominant narrative that focuses solely on increasing incomes. In such cases, Environmental Justice is Housing Justice, as household and neighborhood toxins are primarily sourced from buildings, transportation, and power generation infrastructure. Bringing a broader concept of greening and green infrastructure into discussions on Housing and Environmental Justice allows for a more multi-dimensional concept of Just Transitions to take hold, building momentum for positive change and ‘greening in place.’

3. Building Community Power

Chicago has long served as a testbed for the limits of institutional power structures to meet the needs and demands of communities that are not well represented in the city’s decision-making bodies. While the city continues to debate methods of electoral reform, it is clear that one of the epicenters of ‘machine politics,’ in the USA, will not change without the continued building of community power around issues of structural reform. In this sense, the ‘We will Chicago’ process can be a vehicle for community power building. To do this, it must demand the creation and inclusion of substantive mechanisms for community-led planning. These, in turn,  could translate into new forms of participatory and collaborative governance.

Policy Makers and Planners

The current push for a city-wide plan centering ‘equity, diversity, and resiliency’ must embrace a robust concept of equity and justice if it is to meaningfully address the legacies of systemic racism in the built environment and beyond. While the general principles of equity and justice detailed in our framework page can inform this process, we hope that it is clear that these principles call for the meaningful inclusion of affected communities in the decisions that shape their lives. Policy makers and planners have multiple opportunities to change existing institutions and planning procedures. To aid in this process, we identify several recommendations below. 

1. Opening Planning to Equity and Justice

The current effort to center equity, diversity, and resiliency in the City’s city-wide planning efforts is a welcome change to existing planning practices. However, as we have observed, these words can often be used without any meaning. To avoid using them as simple buzzwords in planning, planners and policy makers should commit to an open dialogue around what equity and justice entail and what they do not. As the city has been the epicenter of numerous community organizing initiatives, there is an opportunity for extremely rich dialogue with community organizations about the meaning of equity and justice in the context of Chicago’s history and current struggles. These dialogues should result in robust and meaningful definitions of equity and justice that guide concrete actions on behalf of city agencies, as well as other means of democratic urban governance described below.

2. Democratizing City Planning and Agencies

Chicago has long struggled with corruption in city agencies and budgeting, which some see as an indication of a deficit of democracy. To make city greening initiatives more equitable and just, they must become more genuinely democratic through genuinely inclusive planning. Given current plans are not inclusive, there is a need to build inclusive processes. Focusing on initiatives that have tangible outcomes, like neighborhood-level budgeting, and those which improve neighborhood environmental quality can give communities faith that democratic planning can improve their lives. 

3. Examining differential vulnerability and exposure to hazards

Despite being well documented, a major gap in Chicago GI plans is a lack of attention to the social distribution of hazards, which has been well documented. The disregard for the distribution of hazards is compounded by the failure to acknowledge the lopsided distribution of the consequences of those same hazards, or what some call differential vulnerability. Planners should address these highly salient issues in collaboration with affected communities.

4. Getting Ahead of Green Gentrification

Chicago has been recognized as a green infrastructure leader, primarily due to the scope and history of its green roof programs and stormwater infrastructure innovations. However, the relationship between green development, GI, and the potential for housing displacement caused by upscale development has not been addressed in Chicago plans. Given the extensive inequalities in housing access and affordability in the city, planners and policymakers have an opportunity and obligation to address housing affordability while solving environmental challenges.

Foundations and Funders

Foundations and funders can play a key role in building community power amidst the dearth of participatory planning practices in Chicago by supporting community organizing in support of community-led planning efforts. Organizations and community-based non-profits have already articulated diverse GI needs, and there is ample space and opportunity for greening given the volume of vacant lots in marginalized neighborhoods. However, existing GI plans do not name many organizations despite an explicit intent to partner with environmental groups and NGOs.  This indicates a need to develop organizational capacity so that community-based organizations can participate in planning processes.  

  1. Addressing Legacies of Injustice through Proactive planning

There is an opportunity to link existing city initiatives like the vacant lots program with the equity-focused Comprehensive Plan. However, doing so will require sustained investment in community organizing, including the creation of venues, space, and support for meaningful community engagement.

Closing Insights

Despite almost a decade of progress in implementing green roofs and a variety of stormwater-focused green infrastructure features throughout the city, Chicago Green Infrastructure Planning remains largely silent on issues of urban equity and environmental justice. Current planning initiatives present multiple opportunities to build community power but will require a restructuring of existing decision-making processes, and dedicated support for diverse and intersecting community organizing initiatives.

Resources

Context and Background

A guide and compilation of materials on the issues related to green infrastructure and equity in the United States including our case study cities.

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Community and Grassroots Groups

A list of grassroots organizations working on equitable GI encountered during the course of the project.

City Led Equity Initiatives

Other organizations and initiatives working on equitable green infrastructure nationally or within study cities.

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-06

Detroit

DETROIT

Incorporated 1701

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 142.9  sq. miles
  • 677,155 Total population
  • 4,881 People per sq. mile
  • 0.6% Forest cover
  • Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests Biome
  • 5.4% Developed open space
  • $29,481 Median household income
  • 31.3%  Live below the federal poverty level
  • 72.4% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 28.5% Housing units vacant
  • 0.3% Native, 10.5% White, 78% Black,  7.7% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 1.7% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and Land Cover Data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The City of Detroit occupies the homelands of Anishinaabeg peoples and continues to serve as a hub of Native culture and organizing. The city continues to be impacted by institutionalized forms of racism and high degrees of segregation and has long served as an epicenter of conversations, movements, and organizing for Indigenous, racial, labor, and environmental justice. Detroit communities continue to create flourishing forms of community-based green infrastructure including vacant lot reclamation and urban agriculture projects under broader goals of transformative justice. 

City government, however, faces profound challenges from the ongoing impacts of racism, globalization, and disinvestment. Budget shortfalls have continued to increase infrastructure cost burdens on marginalized communities. Nearly one out of three households live below the federal poverty line, and the bankrupt city has faced major challenges in maintaining infrastructure, even as the metropolitan area has continued to grow. Climate change further threatens aging infrastructure systems, with increasing heavy rainfall, flooding, and heatwaves intersecting with the city’s existing environmental justice problems. 

 

Green Infrastructure in Detroit

City-led GI plans in Detroit focus on stormwater management exclusively. The city will invest over $50 million in GI over the next decade to solve long-standing issues with surface water quality caused by storm runoff and combined sewer overflows. City-led plans also seek to improve socio-economic conditions with green stormwater infrastructure investments. In addition to extensive stormwater-focused programs, there is some integration of community initiatives to reclaim vacant lots and homes in broader efforts of greening and community revitalization. 

Within city-led stormwater and sewer management plans GI is not defined with precision. The exception is the definition offered in the Upper Rouge GI Plan. However, this definition is somewhat narrow and only mentions trees, bioretention processes, and other stormwater management features, and does not encompass the broad range of community-led GI initiatives. Further, aside from a few narrow stormwater goals, city plans are unclear in how they define the desired goals and functions of these hybrid facilities and ecosystem elements.

Importantly, plans do not seem to analyze the potential social benefits or overall impacts of GI, even though the Upper Rouge Tunnel GI Plan states that part of the rationale for examining GI as a stormwater management strategy was its broader social value. While some community-engaged initiatives, like the Detroit Future City program and the Water Agenda, have broader concepts of GI and equity at play, they do not appear to be binding on city agencies, and so fall outside the scope of this analysis.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Detroit

Key Findings

No city-led GI plans in Detroit define the concepts of equity or justice. They also frame the equity implications of existing GI programs weakly or problematically. While there are attempts to be transparent about inclusion in the planning process itself, these attempts often lack mechanisms for accountability and do not fully carry over into the phases of designing, implementing, or evaluating programs. Similarly, plans are inconsistent in their discussion of how GI will manage hazards, add value, and require new forms of labor to be realized.

25%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

75%

seek to address climate and other hazards

0%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

0%

define equity

0%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

0%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Detroit through Maps

This majority Black city is marked by high degrees of income disparity and racial segregation. The city is characterized by predominantly Black low-income communities facing intense poverty, an affluent and majority White downtown core, and dispersed Black middle-income neighborhoods. Like many midwestern cities in the Great Lakes region, Detroit has very uneven patterns of population density, and high rates of vacancy: 28.5% of housing units are estimated to be vacant. The city is largely impervious with limited forest cover and open space. Incomes are highly skewed, with over 80% of census tracts (as of 2018) having a median income of less than $35,268/yr. The majority of households are rent-burdened, with over 80% of census tracts containing more than 63% rent-burdened households.

How does Detroit account for Equity in GI Planning?

No city-led plans in Detroit define equity or justice, let alone account for equity across all ten equity dimensions. This is striking, given the existence of other community-engaged efforts to create equitable visions for diverse types of GI. While some city-led plans name stakeholders in planning processes, few efforts appear to have been made within current plans to foster community inclusion. Plans have explicit equity implications through their focus on managing combined sewer overflows and surface runoff pollution, as well as some mention of addressing other social values. Labor issues are largely absent or problematically discussed.

Envisioning Equity

In addition to lacking definitions of equity, City of Detroit GI plans weakly frame the relationship between equity and GI. Only the URT GI plan offers any substance and uses a universal good approach focusing on poorly defined social benefits. Other GI plans, such as the Capital Improvement Plan and the Water and Sewerage Master Plan, emphasize the cost of services, cost savings likely due to pursuing GI strategies, and the need to incentivize resource use reductions but do not elaborate on the social benefits of these strategies.

Procedural Equity

Detroit city-led GI plans consistently identify stakeholders deemed relevant by agencies. However, these groups appear largely limited to other city agencies and consulting firms. Aside from the Upper Rouge Tunnel (URT) GI Plan, engagement appears largely limited to the initial stages of planning, with mechanisms to involve affected communities in design, implementation, and evaluation largely absent. The URT GI plan has consistent strategies for outreach but appears to have limited avenues for community inclusion in design, implementation, and evaluation of GI programs and projects. It is noteworthy that as the city seeks to recover from bankruptcy, it has contracted out its overall GI Capital Improvement Process and stormwater programs, essentially privatizing previously public contracts. Official city GI planning in Detroit is largely problematic concerning procedural equity.

Distributional Equity

Plans primarily emphasize mitigating water pollution through improved stormwater management using GI as a hazard management tool and seek to dramatically reduce Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) events. How GI will alter the social distribution of water contamination and CSO events does not appear to be explicitly analyzed in plans. 

The URT GI plan underscores that community labor will be crucial for successful GI implementation and commits to helping affected residents raise funds for these responsibilities through grant writing and technical assistance. While there are potential benefits to this approach, such a model places the burden of labor on communities for successful GI implementation and maintenance as well as raising necessary financing, with the city itself dedicating limited resources to community wealth building. The use of international consulting firms to create these plans means the majority of compensation for the labor of GI planning and implementation will not stay in Detroit.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Current city-led GI plans do not meaningfully address equity issues in the City of Detroit. However, the more holistic process for creating the  Sustainability Plan, which falls outside the scope of our current analysis as it did not explicitly address GI, seeks to integrate equity into all 43 of the city’s sustainability initiatives. The plan includes a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative that may represent an opportunity to operationalize systematic approaches toward greenspace planning that contain equity and justice considerations at their core.

Community Groups

Detroit has numerous community groups working towards racial and environmental justice who have been deeply involved in GI planning in the city. Examples of community engaged planning practices in the city include the Detroit Future City Initiative and Strategic Framework which is referenced by city plans, but not in a binding manner. DFC has also served as an umbrella for numerous community-led greening initiatives, such as the Land and Water Works coalition that explicitly seeks to foster engagement between residents and planning agencies. However, despite years of including them on task forces, such as the Green Task Force, The People’s Water Board, city-led GSI plans appear to have limited mechanisms for direct community input in the design, implementation, and evaluation of GSI initiatives. Additionally, formal plans appear to treat existing community-led plans, like the 2012 Water Agenda, as guidelines and not binding initiatives. There thus appears to be a disconnect between robust community-led GI planning practices, and their inclusion in formal GSI plans led by DWSD. Part of the reason for this absence of community voices in GI planning is likely due to GI being only thought of as a stormwater management strategy. Another major reason is likely that outreach is seen as a voluntary component of city-led planning, which is dominated by technical practices. Given ongoing advocacy by community groups for comprehensive approaches for improving community well-being through a more integrative concept of GI, several areas of opportunity exist for community needs to shape city implemented initiatives. 

  1. Centering Community Needs in GI Planning

The green infrastructure concept and initiatives can support existing grassroots-based projects like the celebrated urban agriculture projects implemented throughout the city. These projects, which demonstrate that healthy, nutritious food is a priority in many communities, often do not have city government support, unlike the famous city-sponsored garden projects during the Great Depression. If community needs are centered, emerging urban food systems that support transitions to dense and healthy neighborhoods could be assisted by the incorporation of planned, connected, multifunctional green elements using an integrated GI concept. The importance of GI for community well being can be seen in the numerous volunteer initiatives people have taken to maintain and enhance green spaces. However, this labor often goes uncompensated and can become a burden. Communities can advocate for their care practices to be appropriately valued as labor required to sustain the social, ecological, and physical infrastructures of the city. 

2. Pushing the Boundaries of Sustainability

The Office of Sustainability has committed to process and policy improvement to meet the needs of all Detroiters. However, current GI plans, while weakly relying on this  ‘good for all’ rhetoric, do not explicitly recognize the persistent environmental disparities in the city and their relationship with racism and classism. The stated willingness to change by city agencies however, may present an opportunity for community groups to help transform existing city policies and procedures into ones that could begin to remedy the environmental and social harms created by past and present decisions. At a minimum, this would require explicitly defining equity and justice goals within official city policies, and putting procedures in place for inclusive planning.

Policy Makers and Planners

Detroit policy makers and planners should consider a systematic approach towards understanding the distribution of diverse green spaces and their relationships with communities across the city. Existing coalitions for non-profits, community groups, and government agencies could be formally supported in an approach for city-wide greening going beyond the use of Green Infrastructure merely as a stormwater management tool. Alongside a systematic approach to GI, equity and justice issues must be addressed in city plans. Below we provide several recommendations to achieve both high-level needs.

 

  1. Embracing Landscape-Level Green Infrastructure

Vibrant urban agriculture systems, connected green spaces, and food- and heat-resilient communities would all result from a more cohesive planning framework using an integrative concept of GI. Much of this work is already being done by community advocates. This framework could include initiatives like the Joe Louis Greenway, which currently are not considered under the Green Infrastructure concept.  With an integrative GI framework, city policies and plans could more effectively support grassroots initiatives to improve ecological integrity and health and to identify high-priority areas for environmental remediation. The ingredients for a systematic GI approach are present in Detroit but they will need a well-considered conceptual framework to turn them into a successful recipe.

2. Centering Environmental Justice and Equity

Current city plans and emerging initiatives have little to say about deep-seated environmental justice concerns in Detroit. Overall, city plans do not define equity or justice, and only weakly frame equity concerns around the distribution of costs and benefits of GSI programs. City policy makers and planners can proactively address equity issues in GI planning, but doing so would require making community-led planning processes binding on city agencies. As communities continue to organize, policy makers and planners must be receptive to their needs as well as their demands for transformation of the policy making and planning process itself.

3. Building Systems for System Building

Regulatory compliance for both separated and combined sewer system management has been a major driver of GI development in Detroit. These efforts have been aided by a variety of nonprofit actors in the Detroit GI space, and yet no cohesive framework exists for maintaining databases of existing stormwater facilities, never mind the diverse green spaces and parks serving as critical GI. Policy makers and planners should invest resources in building a comprehensive, cohesive, and open planning system for the city’s larger GI network. This system should include a dedicated database with clear ownership of its maintenance and other responsibilities, funding streams for maintaining and enhancing diverse green spaces, and a transparent funding model to ensure the sustainability of urban and streetscape improvements.

Foundations and Funders

Existing nonprofits such as the Sierra Club, Greening of Detroit, The Nature Conservancy, and funders like the Erb Family Foundation have been crucial to promoting blue-green infrastructure initiatives in Detroit and building connections with affected communities. Recognizing that Detroit’s GI system encompasses more than stormwater infrastructure can lead to new opportunities and ways of supporting community organizing efforts as they seek to revitalize communities while preventing housing displacement and making green reparations. These efforts can be combined with existing well-funded racial justice initiatives.

 

1. Transformative Justice through Just Transitions and Appropriate Technology

According to some analysts, Detroit could be poised for economic transformation through the enactment of a municipal level Green New Deal. The Frontline Detroit Coalition has charted a course toward this goal by reframing the needs of Detroit communities around the intersectional issues of climate and social justice. However, specific plans for a just transition and an economic transformation addressing both the causes and outcomes of current decision-making, are lacking. Under the umbrella of an equitable GI framework, funding community-led efforts to plan and design smaller-scale systems for energy, water, food, transportation, and organizing could be a unifying and crucial piece of larger economic transitions. Those types of transitions have historically been driven by the comings and goings of external investors.

2. Building Momentum to Transform Institutions

Numerous community-led initiatives - described above in the community section -  have sought to have greater input in formal city-led planning practices. While some task forces exist to foster community input into city planning, these have room for further development. Foundations and funders can support initiatives with explicit goals to include community organizations and members directly in GSI decision making. At a minimum, this would include having majority representation from intersectional community organizations such as those addressing disability and racial justice. Seeds of such ‘people-centered’ vs organization-focused approaches are present in programs in Detroit, such as the New Economy Initiative and the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan’s Detroit Innovation Fellowship. However, focusing on individuals, instead of community-building, can shift attention away from the political structures and institutions creating racial wealth inequality in the first place. Transforming institutions can be accelerated by supporting movements seeking formal policies for inclusive planning.

 

Closing Insights

Equitable GI planning requires a deep rethinking and restructuring of urban governance. Addressing systemic racism is possible by building community wealth and supporting the self-determination of marginalized communities to confront and rectify historical and ongoing harms. Existing GI approaches in Detroit would benefit from explicitly analyzing and targeting inequalities in exposure to environmental hazards, creating local employment opportunities, fostering inclusive and collaborative planning in order to incorporate numerous community based GI efforts into official city-led initiatives.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-05

Denver

DENVER

Incorporated 1858

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 154.9 sq. miles
  • 693,417 Total population
  • 4523 People per sq. mile
  • 0% Forest cover
  • Temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands
  • 14.2% Developed open space
  • $63,793 Median household income
  • 10%  Live below the federal poverty level
  • 60.1% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 6.3% Housing units vacant
  • 0.5% Native, 54.2% White, 8.9% Black,  29.9% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 3.6% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The City of Denver occupies the homelands of Arapahoe peoples. The city owes its existence to a series of contested treaties and the massacre and forced removal of Native people, who maintain an active presence in the city today and continue to fight for their rights. A small city for much of its early history, Denver has experienced rapid economic and demographic growth since the 1980s. 

While the metropolitan region has become increasingly developed, the urban core faces challenges of uneven investment and the reuse of industrial space, leading to large scale redesign and redevelopment efforts. These include a major revitalization of its river corridor and an emerging city-wide green infrastructure network integrating stormwater facilities with parks and recreation spaces. However, growth has been highly unequal, and there are significant issues around housing affordability and displacement, racial justice, and economic inequality.

Green Infrastructure in Denver

Denver has a diverse set of plans addressing GI. Alongside the dedicated GI Strategy, which largely addresses stormwater management, the concept is employed to guide landscape conservation and integrative planning efforts. The Comprehensive Plan and Neighborhood Planning Initiative lay out a city-wide vision for interconnected parks, green spaces, and stormwater infrastructure systems. All the plans examined in Denver defined GI, aside from the current Capital Improvement Plan, which nevertheless supports a wide range of GI-related programs across the city.

In line with the breadth of concepts at play, Denver plans address the range of categories of GI types, although some specific types, such as wetlands, trails, and green streets are lacking, indicating that more green elements could be included in the city-wide definitions of GI.

Denver plans focus on the environmental and technological functions of GI. These include an emphasis on managing stormwater, in addition to supporting ecological processes, regulating heat, improving air quality, sequestering carbon, and improving the overall functionality of the built environment.

Denver GI definitions emphasize a narrower range of benefits than half the cities we examined and did not appear to frame GI as contributing significantly to urban sustainability. Plans defined benefits according to a range of social functions, including health and livability, along with safer transportation networks and more timely infrastructure development.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Denver

Key Findings

Among all plans in our analysis, Denver plans clearly lead in terms of thinking through equity issues around health disparities and explicitly targeting GI programs.

83%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

17%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

67%

seek to address climate and other hazards

67%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

67%

define equity

17%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

50%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

0%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Denver through Maps

Denver has grown tremendously over the last several decades due to the annexation of a part of Adams County, CO when Denver International Airport was constructed. The city has dense commercial, residential, and industrial development along the central river corridor, with some outlying areas also having a mosaic of high-intensity development. Otherwise, the city is characterized by sprawling, low-density, largely single-family housing. The city is highly segregated between Latinx, Black, and white communities, mirroring patterns of rent burden and income inequality. Vacancy rates appear more idiosyncratic, with overall rates lower than many of the cities examined in this study. Despite having street trees, there are no continuous patches of forest cover within the city proper.

How does Denver account for Equity in GI Planning?

The Denver GI strategy addresses all aspects of equity evaluated using our screen. The city’s GI siting framework centers health disparities connected to environmental hazards; it aims to use GI to mitigate risks that disproportionately harm residents’ health in low-income areas. Many of the plans define equity in relation to GI but only the Comprehensive Plan contains a robust definition addressing procedural and distributional components. Yet, it falls short of the ideal by not explicitly addressing the need for justice. Another strong example is the Parks and Recreation Plan. It touches on 9 of our 10 screening categories and contains current best practices in examining the distributional components of equity. Overall, though, mechanisms for including input from communities are lacking, and a vision for GI that includes a robust consideration of justice is not expressed in any plan. 

While Denver plans emphasize inclusion, they have gaps in how to involve affected communities in design and implementation. In addition, there are considerable absences in how justice is conceptualized and addressed. Thus, despite an attempt to systematically prioritize underserved communities, current methods of siting GI, aside from parks, are problematic.

Envisioning Equity

Denver plans more consistently define equity than many other cities, with a particularly strong emphasis on health equity. However, health is often framed in largely environmental and lifestyle terms, completely omitting the ‘Social Determinants of Health’ framework. While half of Denver’s plans examined frame equity in robust ways, only the GI strategy mentioned justice at all. While the term ‘equity’ may be noted several times, a lack of definition and functional metrics that address justice contribute to difficulties in applying the concept. The Comprehensive Plan is particularly problematic in that environmental justice is absent from the plan, despite having been raised as a concern in the 80x50 stakeholder report.

Procedural Equity

The GI strategy emphasizes inclusive design, but falls short on how it involves communities in other stages of the GI lifecycle. While half of the plans examined in Denver (including the Comprehensive Plan, Neighborhood Planning Initiative, and the Parks and Recreation Plan) contain current best practices for inclusive planning, they problematically or inconsistently involve communities in the design, implementation, and evaluation processes.

Distributional Equity

Every Denver plan seeks to improve the equity of urban land values distribution, although neither the NPI nor the Capital Improvement Plan offered a strong framework to do so. The Parks and Rec Plan consistently used current best practices in identifying how GI could equitably mitigate hazards and add value for urban residents. The Parks and Rec Plan also stood out as one of the best plans we examined in terms of purposefully structuring hiring and recruitment to create a workforce that would be representative of the communities the agency serves. The Comprehensive Plan attempted to robustly and equitably consider hazards. They used current best practices by explicitly seeking to improve the equity of the distribution of multiple GI values. However, the plan does not contain any actionable strategies for addressing labor equity related to GI projects. Thus, as in other cities, GI plans, on the whole, show intent to address equity issues, yet do so in a fragmented and inconsistent manner. Please see below for several key recommendations that offer a systemic approach for improving the GI and equity concerns in Denver planning.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Denver’s strength with equity lies in its formalization of equity criteria in its GI planning efforts. However, these equity-forward approaches are largely ahistorical, fail to recognize justice, and lack mechanisms for transforming planning so that historical injustices are not recreated by current practices. Addressing the shortcomings in procedural justice, the democratization of planning, the distributions of services GI seeks to provide, and the labor required to ultimately realize them, may help to align the diverse efforts of the numerous nonprofits, city agencies, and philanthropic organizations that are active within the city and its planning efforts.

Community Groups

Denver has a rich ecosystem of community groups and statewide organizations working on racial and housing justice. Given the observed relationship between housing displacement, affordability, and green improvements, the implementation of a city-wide green infrastructure strategy will have relevance to advocates for social and racial justice. Organizations like Groundwork Denver have been supporting communities in greening initiatives to address environmental justice issues which are also discussed by city plans. There is a need for sustained community organizing to confront the intersectional issues of housing, environmental hazards, climate resilience, and economic justice. Efforts to address these issues may benefit from the following considerations.

1. Windows of Opportunity for Transformative Change

The current administration of Michael B. Hancock has a strong equity platform. The Agency for Human Rights and Community Partnerships has been tasked with implementing it by educating city agencies and staff about the impacts of their work on racial equity. Such an approach is certainly an improvement over ‘race blind’ approaches, and yet does not address fair and transparent inclusion in decision making. Without transforming processes of city agency decision-making, additional metrics of agency impacts have limited impact on agency behaviors. Transformative planning and governance include direct participation in the prioritization, budgeting, and evaluation of city agency initiatives.

2. Coalitions for Fair Housing and Greening

Within the state of Colorado, several organizations have built coalitions to address housing justice issues. At the core of these campaigns is an effort to repeal the statewide ban on rent control. Advocates for urban greening and environmental justice may benefit from recognizing and organizing for relationships between accessible and affordable housing, urban environmental quality, and labor justice. Given that state and county policy must change to support more equitable development, advocate organizations could support transformative policy platforms, such as comprehensive policy packages reminiscent of a state or county level Green New Deal. 

3. Holding Equity Planning Accountable

Denver has made bold commitments to equity within its Comprehensive, GI, and Parks Plans. However, plans do not transparently operationalize equity. In the case of the ‘Game Plan’ social justice is reduced to a metric of income in basin level prioritization, and then eliminated from sub-basin level prioritization. Community organizations can demand that Denver planners and policy makers provide more meaningful metrics of equity, including processes for robust inclusion of affected communities in city planning and policy.

Policy Makers and Planners

As noted above, Denver plans do not reflect the equity frameworks or aspirations of the current city Administration, and inconsistently define and operationalize equity concerns. We offer our insights to the new city agencies and think tanks tasked with addressing these issues to transform upcoming city planning and greening initiatives. Our framework provides for a robust conceptualization of equity from the creation of plans through their implementation and evaluation, with careful consideration of the multi-dimensional impacts of planned activities on values, hazards, and labor markets. Policy makers and planners concerned with equity issues can utilize this general framework, along with three major arenas for action specific to Denver City and County.

1. Operationalizing Equity in Prioritization and Beyond

Denver plans notably seek to include social equity as a criterion for the siting of GI. However, they only examine social equity as a function of income and health disparities. Plans weakly articulate the underlying social conditions that produce disparities in income and health. Without a more operational framing of what produces inequity, plans attempting to ameliorate environmental disparities will not succeed. Denver has an opportunity to think and act holistically with respect to changing social structures producing inequity, and this should be reflected in more robust criteria for defining social and environmental inequities and prioritizing green infrastructure investments addressing these underlying social disparities. The Denver Game Plan puts forward a workable framework for this type of work. The holistic consideration of how cost effectively GI manages hazards, provides diverse benefits, and provides opportunities for skilled labor development should extend to other green infrastructure assets besides parks and recreation lands.

2. Fitting solutions to Place, Across Scales and Generations

Denver has unique challenges for a major metropolitan area situated in a high altitude and arid environment. While the national land cover database indicates that there is no forest cover within the city limits, the City does have property holdings and influence over a regional ecology that includes forests. However, this larger green infrastructure network, including the city’s western slope water supply system, does not receive attention within its GI plans, and there appears to be limited integration of regional strategies for long-term sustainability within city green infrastructure initiatives. Denver planners and policy makers should consider the intergenerational equity of current decision-making, meaning the long-term consequences of current development strategies. They should also consider how the sprawling growth of Denver and other front-range communities will incur long-term ecological and social debts through distributed and highly costly forms of infrastructure. The City has the opportunity to make decisions about urban form and local resource utilization that may prevent longer-term stresses, especially on water systems. However, given that Colorado water law prevents many rainwater capture initiatives, addressing water sustainability in Denver may also require shifts in state-level policy.

3. Scaling Equitable Growth

Denver has relatively low poverty levels compared to many similar sized cities. However, the majority of households are rent-burdened within the city, and low vacancy rates indicate that the housing market overall is highly constrained and not currently meeting the demand for affordable housing. At the same time, surrounding counties have developed rapidly, and many reports indicate that significant displacement of lower-income populations has already occurred. Given that cities require workers of many different classes to function, these larger-scale patterns of segregation are also unsustainable. Current efforts to radically transform housing affordability, led by grassroots organizations, are likely required to prevent further displacement of low-income communities from new developments that incorporate green infrastructure.

4. Equitably Tracking Outcomes

In addition to the many metrics of success used by Denver’s GI plans, communities should have direct avenues to evaluate the success of city initiatives and programs. Relying on census and American Community Survey data is too inconsistent and too sparse for real-time tracking of the impacts of particular programs, policies, and projects. By the time significant signals are detected, neighborhood change may be irreversible. The city government should identify procedures to meet communities where they are at and provide resources for their meaningful participation in the evaluation of implemented city programs.

Foundations and Funders

Denver has embarked on promising initiatives to address systemic racism in city government. However, given the extensive displacement of low-income and predominantly POC populations, a primary struggle in Denver is reclaiming areas for affordable housing and protecting other communities from further displacement. Some initiatives, like those led by Groundwork, take a community-first approach for greening to mitigate climate hazards. Yet such programs appear to receive limited support from the city government despite the potential that exists within the neighborhood planning initiative. Other planning processes such as Blueprint Denver, the Neighborhood Planning Initiative, Denver Right, and Denver Moves all center community engagement with city agencies. The success of these initiatives will depend on how effectively organized communities can steer city agency activities and hold them accountable in implementation.

  1. Supporting Community Organizing

While there are nonprofits in Denver working on intersectional racial and environmental justice and housing issues, foundations and funders could strategically invest in grassroots groups and coalitions to build community capacity to steer the aforementioned planning processes. Capacity building is multi-dimensional, and requires care and harm reduction as a first step to free up community energy and attention to build positive futures. Such an approach must overcome the hurdles to successful participation in collaborative planning processes. These include a lack of material support, compensation, and childcare for participants, non-collaborative scheduling, power imbalances, cultural and language barriers, and ongoing structural violence. Working in collaboration with communities and city agencies, funders can be key players in building a care economy and coalitions that enable equitable participation in planning for desirable urban futures.

Closing Insights

Denver has taken a multi-dimensional and integrative approach to green infrastructure planning and is one of the leading cities attempting to incorporate equity into those plans. However, much work remains on how to successfully operationalize equity and justice principles in city programs, address the structural causes of inequity and injustice, and build community capacity to participate in and influence city decision-making and planning. In one of the country’s fastest growing metropolitan areas, the city’s forward-thinking initiatives present an opportunity to further evolve best practices and to build a more sustainable and just city.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-12

Philadelphia

Philadelphia

Incorporated 1682

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 134.2 sq. miles
  • 1,575,522 Total population
  • 11,737 People per sq. mile
  • 7.4% Forest cover
  • Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome
  • 11.7% Developed open space
  • $43,744 Median household income
  • 19.6% Live below federal poverty level
  • 66% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 12.9% Housing units vacant
  • 0.2% Native, 34.5% White, 40.8% Black, 14.7% Latinx , 0.1% Multi-racial/’other,’ 7.2% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

Philadelphia occupies lands of the Lenape Haki-nk (Lenni-Lenape), lands stolen during the founding of the colony of Pennsylvania by William Penn, and subsequent waves of intensive warfare and dispossession that remain largely unacknowledged in the state’s history. The port city grew over time into a center of industrial innovation and wartime manufacturing but has struggled to reinvent itself in the face of US manufacturing decline. However, the City of Brotherly Love has experienced major economic revival and growth since the 1990s. 

Like other cities, growth has been highly uneven, with many communities experiencing significant housing displacement and gentrification. Ambitious redevelopment and environmental programs have reshaped the city’s physical and social landscapes. Persistent segregation and uneven exposure to environmental hazards have been structured by redlining, urban renewal, and flight from the urban core. Like other East Coast cities, sea-level rise, increasing heat waves, and other extreme weather events impose new challenges on aging infrastructure.

Green Infrastructure in Philadelphia

Philadelphia has long been recognized as a green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) leader and innovator through its ‘Green City’ program. The city has sought compliance with combined sewer system regulations through ambitious city-wide GSI programs. These programs have been integrated into numerous area master plans as well as the City Climate Resilience and Sustainability plans. Even with such extensive GSI planning, the city’s GI plans do not robustly articulate an explicit ‘green infrastructure’ concept. When GI is defined, plans emphasize efforts to expand street tree plantings and green streets, alongside efforts to green schoolyards, and expand urban agriculture.

Philadelphia GI plans focus on providing environmental functions and the benefits of improving water quality, livability, the health of residents, and reducing the cost of infrastructure services.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Philadelphia

Key Findings

Despite several plans explicitly referring to the need to address equity in GI planning, plans have numerous gaps. These include the failure to create mechanisms for meaningful public involvement. Plans examined do not generally define equity or justice issues, and often problematically frame and discuss equity issues. The city’s focus on private sector-led implementation is problematic, as the real estate market and property value become the drivers of how GI will rearrange urban hazards and what makes the city a desirable place to live. Finally, labor issues are questionably or incompletely addressed. 

13%

explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

15%

recognize that some people are made more vulnerable than others

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

54%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

8%

define equity

15%

explicitly refer to justice

77%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

23%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Philadelphia Through Maps

Philadelphia is a densely populated city with highly uneven access to larger green spaces. Census tracts with lower incomes, high rent burden, and high housing vacancy cluster together and appear correlated with race, similar to many cities with legacies of systemic disinvestment in communities in the urban core. Dense redevelopment and housing displacement have been concentrated downtown and along the riverfront.

How does Philadelphia account for Equity in GI Planning?

Despite numerous green stormwater infrastructure planning efforts spurred by the need to comply with Clean Water Act regulations, which includes the integration of GSI in several local area master plans, GI plans in Philadelphia do not robustly address equity or justice issues.

Only one plan defined equity and no plans defined justice. Plans weakly or problematically framed equity issues, with several not discussing equity issues at all. 

Despite an admirable emphasis on community inclusion in planning, plans describe limited means for community inclusion through design, implementation, and evaluation, with some notable exceptions.

All GI plans in Philadelphia explicitly seek to rearrange the distribution of urban hazards while adding value. Only half of the plans acknowledge the labor required to do so, often in problematic ways.

Envisioning Equity

The Greenworks Sustainability Plan was the only GI plan in Philadelphia defining equity. The plan seeks to improve the quality of life for all city residents, and intends to use its Greenworks Equity index to “develop programs to support communities that are not currently enjoying the benefits of sustainability.” We found this targeted universalism approach backed by metrics to be admirable, but compared to other cities, it falls short in identifying and addressing the causes of disparities in community well-being and sustainability. Other GI plans in Philadelphia adopt similar framings, generally focusing on improving access to environmental amenities and supporting community revitalization, but do not address the potential risks of relying on private sector-led redevelopment in marginalized communities.

Procedural Equity

Like in many other cities, Philadelphia GI plans frontload community participation in the planning process with limited follow through to design, implementation, and evaluation. The Greenworks Sustainability Plan, Green City Long Term Control Plan, and Comprehensive Plan all claim overwhelming public support and demonstrate current best practices in surveying public opinion. Yet their documentation leaves much to be desired, offering no evidence that those who face the largest risks of plan implementation have had their needs and concerns addressed. Despite the Green City program embracing an adaptive management model, and devoting an entire plan to the evaluation of city-wide green stormwater infrastructure programs, notable gaps remain in how the concerns of communities will be addressed. Area plans contain formulaic GI community engagement mechanisms, with limited documentation of community involvement or outreach, and they operate on timescales that preclude addressing displacement. Furthermore, the comprehensive plan process is largely restricted to participants choosing between projects in resource-limited scenarios. Participants are not typically asked to provide input to frame the needs, goals, and mechanisms of GI planning, implementation, and maintenance.

Distributional Equity

Philadelphia GI plans highlight the pitfalls of primarily focusing on stormwater management to the exclusion of other considerations. While plans generally seek to reduce or eliminate combined sewer overflows, they limit what other hazards can be addressed by GI. On a hopeful note, the Adaptive Management Plan states that city agencies are actively researching the effectiveness of GSI to deliver multiple benefits. 

Area plans deviate from this stormwater focus to some extent by discussing contextual hazards of sea-level rise, flooding, and climate change but they do not discuss the intersectional or social dimensions of why some groups face greater exposure to hazards, or how they have been made more vulnerable to them. One update to the Long Term Control Plan did engage in a public survey exercise to evaluate the perception of GI’s role in reducing a larger range of hazards than those related to stormwater. Unsurprisingly, since multifunctionality does not appear to be a core design concept in Philadelphia GSI, residents did not perceive existing GSI to provide non-stormwater functions. In addition, implying that GSI installations can reduce crime, without addressing the fact that these programs, coupled with redevelopment, may lead to the displacement of oppressed groups is highly problematic. 

Value-wise, GI plans in Philadelphia explicitly engage in rationalizing universalist approaches. They go so far as to say that targeted, need-based investment would lead to the uneven and unfair implementation of the city’s GSI programs, thus preventing restorative approaches. Plans also put forth the demonstrably false idea that universal increases in property value will benefit all residents. The city prioritizes GI installations by areally-weighting impervious cover to select locations. There does not appear to be an effort to understand the social implications of this type of approach. Plans’ reliance on private developers to lead GSI implementation appears to be a misappropriation of equity language with the result of supporting approaches proven to have uneven social consequences. 

GSI programs also appear to be limited by a refusal to consider reducing space for automobiles in the city, as they are framed as conflicting with other green connectivity initiatives. Thus GSI and alternative transit and parks are made to conflict with one another, but not with the grey infrastructure systems that make GI necessary. Philadelphia GI plans lead on examining the administrative issues and benefits of a more flexible GSI approach for managing combined sewer overflow issues. Labor-wise, the Green City program’s Maintenance, Adaptive Management, and Evaluation Plans acknowledge that continued upkeep is crucial for GSI’s successful operation. However, none of the plans propose actively identifying how the various types of labor required by GI and GSI can be leveraged to build community wealth.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Like many cities examined in this set, the plans do not reflect current efforts or initiatives by government agencies, community groups, and funders to address long-standing social and environmental justice issues. Numerous gaps in addressing equity issues in Philadelphia’s GI plans have been identified in this analysis. See below for city-specific recommendations to guide the inclusion of equity and justice considerations in the implementation and improvement of Philadelphia’s GI plans and programs.

Community Groups

Philadelphia has long been a center for oppressed and marginalized communities to positively and collaboratively reimagine urban futures for themselves in the face of historical, continued, and often violent, oppression. The current turn towards addressing equity in city government policies and programs through the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion presents an opportunity to expand the conversation about racial and environmental justice, and to restructure institutions to meet the needs of marginalized communities. Our recommendations provide ways in which GI planning efforts can be positively influenced by, and support, ongoing efforts led by Philadelphia’s diverse grassroots organizations and their initiatives.

1. Make GI planning address community environmental justice

City administration efforts to celebrate environmental justice month bolster a narrative of personal responsibility and accountability that can aggravate inequalities and obscure the systemic causes of environmental harms. While the city’s GSI programs may cost-effectively manage its long-running combined sewer overflow problems (itself an environmental justice issue),  other challenges, related to flooding, heat, sea-level rise, and persistent inequalities in health outcomes and exposure to toxic chemicals and pollution, require a broader transformative approach. Such an approach would utilize a more robust conceptualization of GI that focuses on the relationship between social, ecological, and technological systems. However, this approach must be based on needs articulated by, and for, the community. To that end, community groups can advocate for a transformative approach simultaneously addressing environmental hazards and social justice which will require going beyond storm and sewer system management decisions.

2. Amplify Housing Concerns

While the city needs to address its water pollution and other environmental justice issues, it cannot do so at the cost of current residents, especially those who have already borne the brunt of environmental harms. There is a track record of displacement in Philadelphia following large-scale GSI implementation, especially redevelopment projects led by the private sector; because of this, community groups working on housing issues have a common cause of concern with environmental justice advocates. This shared interest could provide a foundation for community power-building and better outcomes for both housing and environmental justice organizing.

Policy Makers and Planners

Philadelphia green infrastructure planning remains limited in scope by the green stormwater infrastructure concept. The city would benefit from planning across infrastructure systems and incorporating parks and open space planning into a more holistic approach.  As in other cities, there is a need to focus on how to use GSI programs to build community wealth, recognizing that treating communities as experts requires compensating them as such. There is also a need to be more clear about what equity and justice mean in the context of city-wide GI strategies. We elaborate on these recommendations below.

1. Broadening GI and Specifying GSI

Philadelphia has numerous initiatives to improve access to green spaces and environmental amenities somewhat integrated with GSI programs. Yet, these do not appear to have an overall conceptual coherence or shared framing. Planners and policy makers should adopt a broader definition of GI to integrate various elements of the urban ecosystem within a coherent policy and planning framework. An integrated approach, such as the one described on our framework page that is being implemented by some of the cities identified within this project, will allow for a more coherent and balanced approach towards green space, ecological restoration, parks, and GSI planning. This, in turn, will allow planners to meet a much larger number of community needs than with GSI tools alone.

2. Embedding the Triple Bottom Line

A significant analysis of triple bottom line benefits was performed by the Water Department within its long-term control planning process. However, there does not seem to be a framework for evaluating if those benefits will be realized; this is a substantial area for improvement. Directly engaging communities to determine if social equity goals are being met in their experience is the only way to embed a triple bottom line approach. When evaluating city initiatives, relying on a city agency or an appointed commission to make those determinations replicates existing inequalities in whose experiences and voices count.

3. Centering Community-led Planning to Address Housing Displacement

The Model Neighborhood Program has fostered a more community-centered planning approach in Philadelphia’s GSI planning. This program lacks clarity in important ways, in that the many mechanisms for community inclusion are in development. It is also unclear how current agencies will partner with Philadelphians to implement GSI in a cost-effective manner that meets community needs. Adding transparency to these mechanisms is the first step in centering community needs to address the risk of housing displacement occurring in Philadelphia, which appears to be driven by the spatial and social context of GSI projects.

4. Improving Public Evaluation Processes

The City of Philadelphia Water Department’s Green City Evaluation Plan, published in 2016, was preparing a street survey of 'customers' as part of the evaluation of the plan’s effectiveness. However, it is not clear if the ‘customers’ include renters and if they address the broader set of concerns around large-scale GSI implementation, including neighborhood change and housing displacement. 

The Evaluation Plan does not report demographic information. The plan acknowledges this fact as well as the limitations that are created by this exclusion. For example, there is no way of knowing whether feedback solicited from the public is representative of the general population. In addition, the survey has predetermined response bins, not allowing for open text responses, and does not appear to be designed to allow for statistical analysis of how GI is perceived by different types of individuals and communities. 

Future evaluation efforts should be transparent about the demographics involved, and make a concerted effort to include underrepresented groups, including offering compensation for survey completion and participation in more robust evaluation procedures. It should also be made clear that survey results will adjust how the city operates its programs. Additionally, allowing for open form responses provides an avenue for communities to express more comprehensive ideas about the perceived and experienced impacts of GSI programs and other related projects that affect them, such as redevelopment.

5. From Facilitating Redevelopment to Wealth Creation 

Most GI plans in Philadelphia were silent on labor issues. This contrasts sharply with their consistency in framing redevelopment as the primary vehicle of wealth creation associated with GI. However, city GI plans state that they were 'exploring' options for training, upskilling, design, and hiring with local businesses. This signals a major opportunity to create a more cohesive policy around 'green' redevelopment that works across core programs (e.g. through schools into jobs training) and focuses on capturing the value of contracts locally rather than through multinational firms as other cities (e.g. Milwaukee and New Orleans) intend to do - a key area of recommendation.

6. Addressing differential vulnerability

The stated goals and approaches to address equity in Philadelphia GI plans do not include differential vulnerability to multiple hazards which can be remediated through GI and GSI. Policy makers and planners should advance approaches that center the needs of residents and communities who have been made more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and other human-made hazards. An equity-forward GI approach must go beyond targeted universalism and incorporate restorative and transformative justice within a just transition framework.

Foundations and Funders

We recommend the embrace of a broader and more integrative concept of GI. Numerous nonprofit groups have been involved in the creation and implementation of Philadelphia’s GI plans with an emphasis on improving environmental quality. This is reflected by the participation of multiple watershed partnerships, environmental NGOs, and business networks in GI programs. Organizations like the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society have also contributed to GI installations, by incorporating native plants into environmental designs. This constellation of environmental and business advocacy groups should be broadened to include those working on social justice issues, in the spirit of 21st-century conservation approaches that simultaneously address necessary infrastructure improvements and environmental justice. These more integrated efforts provide new opportunities for existing GI project funders, such as the William Penn Foundation. In combination with the above recommendation, we recommend involved organizations adopt an intersectional approach in their relationships with communities and environmental initiatives.

1. Supporting Intersectoral Organizing

Intersectional approaches towards environmental improvement using GI must take into account the totality of a community’s concerns and desires for a better future. It has been a common refrain in watershed associations and environmental groups that housing concerns do not fall within their mandate. At the same time, these groups are often awarded grants because their work is in marginalized communities. What good are environmental interventions and improvements in these communities if long-time or existing residents can no longer afford to live there? This intersectional type of approach is unlikely to succeed without communities themselves being organized as effective advocates. Foundations and nonprofits should support building deeper, more committed relationships in communities and invest in grassroots-based organizations that are best suited to advocate for the needs of their communities. Already, organizations like EcoWURD have documented and amplified grassroots environmental justice efforts, an excellent example of the type of community infrastructure that could be further supported by philanthropic and nonprofit organizations.

Closing Insights

Philadelphia’s GI plans clearly indicate that it is a leader in advancing city-wide approaches to embedded green stormwater infrastructure in the urban landscape and neighborhood-level planning. A shift towards a more integrative GI approach will be needed to address the deeper and persistent injustices and inequalities within the city. This shift must occur in genuine collaboration with grassroots organizations to embed just transition practices within institutional efforts of deep urban greening.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-03

Baltimore

BALTIMORE

Incorporated 1729

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 92.1 sq. miles
  • 614,700 Total population
  • 7,594  People per sq. mile
  • 6.45% Forest cover
  • Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome
  • 18% Developed open space
  • $48,840  Median household income
  • 16.6%  Live below the federal poverty level
  • 64% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 19% Housing units vacant
  • 0.2% Native, 27.5% White, 61.8% Black,  5.3% Latinx , 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 2.6% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

Baltimore occupies the homelands of several bands of Piscataway peoples who were forcibly removed but persist in the region to this day. Currently the city has a thriving Native community and cultural center. “America’s Greatest City” has long served as a flashpoint for numerous social movements for racial and socio-economic equality and justice. These movements offer equitable visions for the future of the city to counter waves of racialized disinvestment, reinvestment, and population decline. The city has lost over a third of its population since 1950, a trend coinciding with steady population growth in the broader metropolitan region. 

Baltimore has made large investments in its waterfront area in the last several decades and seeks to reinvent many of the city's vacant parcels. A key question remains as to how such initiatives will build the wealth of marginalized residents amidst ongoing struggles for justice and large disparities in green space access and environmental quality.

Green Infrastructure in Baltimore

The majority of GI plans in Baltimore deal with stormwater management, although ambitious city-wide efforts, such as the Green Network Plan, supported by the Sustainability Plan, seek to unify a larger number of landscape elements in a broader push for urban redevelopment. Like many other cities, several plans utilizing the GI concept do not define it, including the MS4 and TMDL WIP, Inner Harbor 2.0, and S. Baltimore Gateway Master Plans.

Broadly, plans do not differ substantially in the types of elements considered green infrastructure, although definitions of GI omit the use of green materials and technology, focusing on ecosystems and hybrid facilities. Only plans utilizing landscape concepts include parks and gardens.

GI is primarily managed to provide environmental functions and is often dominated by a diverse array of hydrological services with a lesser emphasis on air quality.

Baltimore plans focus on the socio-economic benefits of GI with a limited focus on environmental and technological benefits. Two plans in particular – the Sustainability Plan and the Healthy Harbor Plan – seek to provide a wide array of social and ecological benefits.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Baltimore

Key Findings

GI Plans in Baltimore commonly refer to the need to address equity and justice concerns, and yet equity remains poorly defined, with few binding mechanisms for equitable design, implementation, and evaluation. GI implementation is widespread and occurs alongside city-wide efforts for greening and urban renewal.

 

Of the plans in our analysis...

82%

explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

9%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

82%

seek to address climate and other hazards

36%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

18%

define equity

63%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

18%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

0%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Baltimore through Maps

Like many older East Coast cities, Baltimore is characterized by high density, a relatively small amount of open space, and a high degree of rent burden. The scars of targeted disinvestment can still be seen in the distributions of vacancy and income. A dense urban core is divided into distinct neighborhoods connected to income level. More affluent neighborhoods are clustered around the Inner Harbor, which has seen extensive redevelopment. Green space is unevenly distributed, with more green found in higher-income suburbs and in larger city parks.

How Does Baltimore Account for Equity in GI Planning?

While many plans make significant commitments to equity and inclusion, few mechanisms exist for community involvement throughout the GI lifecycle. No plan in Baltimore accounts for equity across our ten equity dimensions. 

We only found two definitions of equity across 11 plans, and although the Sustainability Plan seeks to address historical oppression, it only briefly discusses how city policies and programs have contributed to environmental and social injustice.

Mirroring our broader findings, there are significant equity implications for how the city plans to use GI to manage urban hazards and rearrange the value of the urban landscape. Several plans have devoted considerable space to discussing the equity implications of city-wide and neighborhood-specific GI initiatives, though no protocols were put forth to address potential housing displacement.

Envisioning Equity

Only the Sustainability Plan and the MS4 and TMDL WIP define equity. The MS4 plan also applies a frame of universal good to its stormwater-focused GI programs. Across several plans, despite the recurring use of the word justice, we found no real elaboration of the concept, with equity framings preferring to focus on improving current conditions rather than addressing the need for restorative actions. These efforts tend to represent injustices as historical without acknowledging their perpetuation today. The exceptions to this are the Green Network and Sustainability Plans.

Procedural Equity

Despite many commitments to involve communities in GI planning, few substantive mechanisms for including communities through the planning lifecycle could be found. Some exceptions include the Sustainability and Green Network Plans, although the Sustainability Plan lacks sufficient mechanisms for truly equitable implementation. Almost half the plans examined had no procedures for including communities post planning. Several included processes for community engagement that were insufficient, including limited spot surveys, which stood in for more meaningful and comprehensive community input - despite claims to equity elsewhere in the plans. Overall, while plans tout a diverse array of community benefits, their metrics of success are often too simple, if not problematic, and do not include substantive avenues for communities to evaluate plan outcomes.

Distributional Equity

All plans addressing GI in Baltimore seek to improve the value of the urban landscape in multi-dimensional ways. Likewise, almost all plans seek to mitigate urban hazards, despite a limited acknowledgment of the different vulnerabilities to hazards and their uneven spatial distributions. The exceptions are the Disaster Preparedness, Sustainability, and Green Network Plans. In terms of the distribution of labor, many plans expressly and problematically rely on volunteer labor from affected communities for the success of GI programs, although a few underscore the need for workforce development and expanded hiring to meet GI goals.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

There are many opportunities to improve the equity of GI planning in Baltimore especially given an ongoing effort by the City of Baltimore to apply an equity lens to all of its municipal agencies’ activities. While a deeper analysis of implementation equity is ongoing, Baltimore already has a diverse array of non-governmental stakeholders, both nonprofit and private, involved in GI planning and implementation. Like other cities, targeted investments in GI coupled with city incentives to attract real estate capital for urban redevelopment pose significant risks of displacement. Yet the city has a very real need to build community and intergenerational wealth in oppressed communities while improving long-standing environmental hazards.

Community Groups

Baltimore is home to many robust social movements and community organizations that do not appear well represented within current GI planning efforts. While the immediate and pressing concerns that many of these organizations face do not appear closely related to GI, a community’s infrastructure assets form the underlying basis for its material and social well-being. Given the capacity of comprehensive GI planning to address persistent environmental injustices, a greater emphasis could be placed on using public resources and planning efforts to support the intersectional goals of existing community organizations. However, planning fatigue has been noted in Baltimore, so efforts must be focused on those areas where positive impacts can be delivered. 

1. The Need for Substantive and Transparent Community Engagement

Current planning practices in Baltimore have almost no mechanisms for community-based evaluation of the implementation of GI plans, although some updates promise the creation of community forums for evaluation. Given the broader trend towards inclusive planning and the use of an equity lens and ordinance in the city (see below), community groups should advocate and organize actions to create transparent and binding mechanisms.

2. From Increasing Value to Transformative Justice

While Baltimore has a high rate of housing vacancy, it is unclear to what extent this can be addressed through existing and largely speculative market mechanisms. Prior efforts to attract external investment have led to infamous levels of displacement from the Inner Harbor. Existing conversations on alternative means of wealth building and community ownership of land need to translate into transformed institutional procedures to deliver redistributive justice. Community groups should demand new forms of decision-making through which their needs and concerns can be met by city agencies. Part of creating such processes should include dedicated resources for community-led planning and projects.

3. Mechanisms to Hold Planners Accountable

Many communities are experiencing planning fatigue in Baltimore. In this climate, several community-led plans created initiatives seeking to redevelop areas for regional real estate markets in contradiction to significant expressions of concern by members of the affected communities. Such was the case in the Deep Blue Cherry Hill plan. Planners must be held accountable, but the burden of enforcement must not fall to community members. Community advocates must be able to focus organizing efforts on projects and programs that meet their needs.

Policy Makers and Planners

While many nonprofit actors are involved in implementing green stormwater infrastructure facilities, the larger push for GI and associated policy instruments and initiatives has largely come from city policy makers and planners responding to federal and state regulations. With a recent Baltimore City ordinance requiring city agencies to consider their contributions to historical and ongoing patterns of injustice, it would be timely for city actors to initiate changes in standard operating procedures and planning models. 

1. Being Clear on What Equity Is, and Is Not

Despite a prolific use of the word, few city plans concretely define equity and its broader framing remains highly problematic. Following community calls for justice, like those from Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and Black Lives Matter, there is a profound need to clarify and expand the framing of equity with agency planning and policy makers to address the long-standing concerns of city residents. Policy makers can continue to embrace methods of public engagement that do not rely on public meetings while drawing upon established principles of community inclusion (like the Jemez Principles). A greater diversity of voices in formal institutions will allow for more concrete and meaningful framings of equity and justice in city plans.

2. From Words to Action

Similar to many other cities, planners and policy makers need to move beyond discussing equity concerns in plans and move towards creating binding statutory and regulatory mechanisms for community inclusion in plan formulation and evaluation. Given that equity issues run deep, there should be greater emphasis on structural reform (e.g. reorganizing formal decision-making bodies and public financial institutions) rather than focusing only on the distribution of environmental goods and services. Processes for community inclusion in planning must also become more transparent to show whether residents affected by plans had a real say in shaping them. 

3. Redistributing Decision Making Requires Redistributing Labor and Resources

The current equity ordinance enacted in 2018 in Baltimore City tasks each city agency with hiring an Equity Coordinator. The shift towards community involvement and equity in GI programs likewise created limited positions for agencies to liaise with communities in the course of implementing watershed improvement projects. While promising, these tools have fallen short of leading to any structural changes within standard operating procedures and generally have not included binding processes to make such changes. The city should invest in mechanisms for communities to conduct such assessments themselves, including the formulation of equity assessments.

Foundations and Funders

Existing nonprofits have contributed heavily to GI deployment and planning within Baltimore and some mechanisms for dedicated maintenance support and community labor have led to favorable outcomes.  In other cases, poorly tracked outcomes and limited community engagement have led to numerous problems in facility maintenance and inequitable burdens of GI. Importantly, significant opportunities exist to support community-led efforts in developing institutional tools that will embed more equitable procedures and funding in GI and related community revitalization efforts.

1. Supporting Intersectional Organizing

Dedicated funding for community organizing around environmental, housing, and social justice should support community-led initiatives already addressing those intersectional challenges. Piecemeal and project-based funding can contribute to a culture of scarcity and competition, and can undermine more cohesive efforts for community organizing.

2. Seizing Opportunities for Structural Change

Increasing dedicated resources for community-led initiatives working to influence the implementation of Baltimore’s equity ordinance allows organizers an opportunity to contribute to a historic reformulation of how municipal governments operate on a day to day basis. Piecemeal funding models are unlikely to contribute to such a structural and operational shift. In addition, a greater emphasis should be placed on hosting broad community forums and other inclusionary mechanisms.

3. Rethinking and Remaking Urban Form - A Green New Deal for Baltimore?

Paradoxically, Baltimore has a very high vacancy rate and relatively high population density compared to other US cities. While initiatives to ‘green’ vacant lots (and demolish vacant buildings) are fairly well developed, these do not appear to be well integrated into the broader economic transformation required for redistributing wealth to disenfranchised communities. Foundations and funders should collaborate with communities and city agencies for a larger scale rethink around the functions and benefits of green infrastructure in the context of transformative structural economic programs like a municipal 'green new deal' – a concept that other municipalities are contemplating.  Larger scale analyses of runoff, social and environmental inequality, and housing needs may yield insight into how other parts of the city can be redeveloped to improve economic and housing justice while making space for nature and climate resilience solutions.

Closing Insights

Planning for equity in green infrastructure requires a deep rethinking and restructuring of urban governance to build wealth and value for communities while addressing historical and ongoing harms. Baltimore has opportunities to address its long-standing inequalities in exposure to environmental hazards, employment opportunities, policing, and education, but these opportunities require significant structural change in city institutions and agency priorities.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study.

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-07

Louisville

LOUISVILLE

Incorporated 1778

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 275.2 sq miles
  • 617,032 Total Population
  • 2,343 People per sq. mile
  • 8.6% Forest Cover
  • Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests Biome
  • 17.2% Developed Open Space
  • $51,307 Median household income
  • 11.9% Live below federal poverty level
  • 58.5% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 10.6% Housing units vacant
  • 0.1% Native, 65.6% White, 23.3% Black,  5.6% Latinx, 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 2.7% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander

*socio-economic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and Land Cover Data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The original ‘gateway’ to Western expansion, the City of Louisville occupies the homelands of numerous Native Nations, including Shawnee, Osage, and Cherokee peoples displaced by genocidal warfare and aggressive colonialism. Despite serving as a hub of economic opportunity for free Black folx before and after the Civil war, Louisville remains a highly segregated city. Recent waves of infrastructure investment intersect with legacies of urban renewal, highway development, and redlining all continuing to shape the city. In addition, the city has been impacted by numerous historic floods presently exacerbated by watershed development, climate change, and overwhelmed infrastructure systems.

Over the last decade, the city has struggled to reinvent its waterfront and downtown areas and has significantly expanded its highway system. Like many other cities, economic growth has been highly unequal, and current calls for justice center concerns over housing and policing. The city has a long, complex, and problematic history of award-winning parks and open space planning, significantly shaped by Frederick Law Olmsted.

Green Infrastructure in Louisville

Louisville has numerous beautiful green spaces, including the Olmsted-influenced city park system and other parks connected through the Loop plan. The city has made large investments in flood infrastructure near the Ohio river and seeks to address rainfall runoff induced flooding. Yet, the concept of Green Infrastructure does not feature prominently in Louisville plans. City of Louisville plans focus primarily on the health benefits of GI and, in some cases, GI elements were seen as providing ecological functions and improving the performance of the built environment.

Two plans address the GI concept. The Sustainability Plan defines GI as a key part of the city’s infrastructure systems with elements that include trees, bioretention facilities, and green roofs. The Louisville Loop plan refers to integrating GI into plans for trail and path connections but does not define the term Green Infrastructure. The regional Metropolitan Sewer District manages an extensive GI program but the regional utility’s plans and compliance mechanisms were outside the scope of this analysis.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Louisville

Key Findings

Equity is sporadically referenced but not defined in Louisville’s GI plans. While the Louisville Loop and Sustainability Plans seek to incorporate multiple equity concerns framing the visions for GI, there are significant procedural gaps in involving communities in design and evaluation. Further, distributional dimensions of equity are problematically addressed.

50%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

50%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

0%

define equity

50%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

50%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

0%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Louisville through Maps

Louisville remains a highly segregated city by race and class. Most of the city is composed of low-density housing, although some historic neighborhood centers and the urban core have high population density. The impacts of redlining and other forms of targeted disinvestment can still be seen in the distributions of vacancy, income, and rent burden, all of which are highly correlated with race. The low density of the city provides for significant greenspaces, although distributions are highly uneven.

How does Louisville account for Equity in GI Planning?

Louisville plans do not robustly consider equity, with several dimensions completely unaddressed. Like other cities, intentions to involve communities in GI planning often fall short. While plans seek equitable distribution of the benefits of GI, there is room for improvement in how plans address the distributions of hazards and labor.

The Sustainability Plan makes notable efforts to discuss equity issues somewhat comprehensively but omits the procedural dimensions and ongoing demands for justice. Despite the intentions to address equity and justice in the Sustainability Plan, there is limited discussion of what either of those terms mean.

Envisioning Equity

Despite not defining equity explicitly, both the Louisville Sustainability plan and Loop Master Plans describe how their efforts will impact various dimensions of equity. The Sustainability Plan is more multi-faceted and emphasizes disparate access to environmental amenities, and uneven exposure to floods. However, despite hinting at environmental justice issues, there is no robust discussion of the sources of toxic hazards or of the social processes that created the present patterns of injustice. The Loop Plan embraces the need to improve public health and facilitate regional economic growth but largely focuses on marketing Loop initiatives to residents rather than successfully characterizing community needs and concerns.

Procedural Equity

Similar to sustainability plans in other cities, Louisville’s Sustainability Plan claims that, in the early stages of planning, it had multiple avenues of input from community stakeholders and a diverse set of city agencies over a year-long period. However, from the plan itself, it is not clear how this engagement occurred, or how concerns were addressed. The Louisville Loop plan refers to the need for publicly engaged design but does not specify how this will work and did not appear to be created through a robust public engagement process. The plan was written by a consortium of city agencies, environmental groups, and development interests, with no defined mechanisms for input from affected communities. Both plans emphasize outreach but approach this concept as a marketing strategy rather than an opportunity for meaningful inclusion. The implementation of non-city-led initiatives appears to rely on volunteer labor and stewardship without including any mechanisms for public evaluation of plan impacts.

Distributional Equity

The Sustainability Plan acknowledges the uneven distribution of hazards and seeks to use GI to manage heat, flooding, and stormwater concerns. However, there is no mention of the potential unintended consequences of hazard mitigation with GI. The Loop Plan, while stating that GI will reduce negative impacts on health, does not offer a causal connection between GI and hazard mitigation. Both plans seek to realize many values of GI, though offer very limited discussion of how these values must be contextualized with the specific needs of particular communities. The explicit dependency upon volunteerism in support of plan goals and initiatives, with no discussion of how this may be problematic, comprises the sole examination of labor for GI maintenance.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Racial justice issues have gained renewed prominence in Louisville since 2020. The city garnered national attention with the murder of Breonna Taylor in an area of the city that many say is being forcibly gentrified. At the same time, the administration of Greg Fischer has made headline commitments to addressing racial injustice, and as a member of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, the city has made numerous commitments to addressing racism and injustice in plans and policies. Here we provide several recommendations for how community groups, city agencies, and funders could pursue strategies of equitable greening.

Community Groups

For many years, Louisvillians have been persistently working on racial justice and environmental quality issues. Existing campaigns for environmental and racial justice include the long-running efforts of REACT and KFTC. This same type of sustained community engagement will be required to successfully build meaningful inclusion and institutional transformation into current planning efforts for a city-wide green infrastructure network. After locating current gaps in community engagement practices, we identified two opportunities for community groups to shape the future of equitable GI in Louisville.

1. Demand Systemic Approaches to Environmental Issues

While current GI planning efforts do not appear to be a major concern for many community groups, it is clear that environmental hazards and injustice are. Since the city acknowledges that ‘green infrastructure is a critical component of the city’s infrastructure systems, residents can and should demand systematic approaches for greening existing polluting infrastructures and providing high-quality environmental amenities. This requires pushing for city-wide policies that target areas of the highest need for immediate improvements. Given founded concerns over gentrification, these approaches must be community-led and systemic. Community groups can build community-level capacity to effectively govern these types of transitions.

2. Call for Institutional Change

A high-quality environment, which requires investment in GI, is one aspect of environmental justice that mandates transformations in the way the City plans for its environment and infrastructure. The current plans do not provide meaningful mechanisms for the inclusion of impacted residents. Given a renewed national focus on racial justice, citizen groups can call for resources to be made available for the creation of residents’ planning councils that would shape all aspects of city life. 

Policy Makers and Planners

In recent years City Government has committed to several racial justice initiatives, including a review of racism in Planning and Zoning and how the Land Development Code perpetuates racial segregation. 

While the city has received credit for how it has pursued community-based development in the Russell Neighborhood, there are many criticisms within the community from long-standing residents who have felt left out or ignored as the community gentrifies, and who are continuing to fight for the right to emplacement. It is up to planners and policy makers to make space and provide resources for community groups to lead on visioning city redevelopment projects and to actively evaluate and govern outcomes of ongoing initiatives. The city’s legacy of high-quality public infrastructure requires both a guiding vision and accountability to those whom the infrastructure is supposed to serve.

1. Defining Equity and Justice

Current plans do not define equity or justice. A first step forward for city policy makers and planners is to form better connections with community groups working on racial equity and justice issues. Then, with local expertise, contextually define what equity and justice mean for urban planning in Louisville. While policy makers have made public statements and commitments, it is not yet clear how ideas of racial justice will be operationalized within city institutions. Adopting formal definitions of equity and justice that come from the community itself is one small but meaningful statement towards institutional transformation.

2. Equitable Governance of GI

Marginalized communities in Louisville feel they are not being heard and do not have control over city institutions that plan for their futures. The city can rebuild trust and faith by demonstrating that it not only listens to the concerns of residents but acts on them to transform practices and institutions. While many of the community concerns present in Louisville are broader than GI per se, one way that the city can demonstrably commit to wealth building in oppressed communities is by creating resident-based comprehensive planning that is connected to resources for implementation. Following our framework, these planning processes require financial commitments to community groups to lead the planning, subsequent design, implementation, and evaluation of policies, programs, and projects.

Foundations and Funders

Foundations and Funders have a historic opportunity to fund community groups in Louisville to demand restructuring of the city decision-making and funding apparatuses that implement city plans. Such restructuring requires deep deliberation among community members, followed by the experience of being heard and of seeing community concerns and aspirations translated into meaningful institutional change.  Nonprofits and foundations in Louisville have already operationalized new models of funding community-based organizing to focus on within-community leadership. This turn towards increased representation is welcome, and yet, relying on representative forms of governance are inherently competitive and promote a mindset of resource scarcity rather than building collective power.

1. Building Collective Power to Shape Urban Futures

In light of current funding models, there are ongoing opportunities to fund forums to elevate the conversation around what democratic urban planning could be through community visioning and organizing. Knowledge from these forums would inform city programs tasked to help build resident councils. These councils would be designed to mobilize and support communities to engage in participatory planning and revitalize neighborhood-level governance. Already in the Russell Vision initiative, the limitations of a ‘community representative’ model of participation have become apparent, with competition-based resources leading to increased division within the community rather than a deliberative process about the collective future. However, public appetite for a better future remains strong, and if resources were made available for collective forms of decision-making, new strategies and avenues for more desirable urban futures may become apparent. Given the lack of community engagement mechanisms in Louisville plans, these require development from the grassroots.

2. Restructuring without Renewal

City plans for neighborhood renewal must grapple with the legacies and ongoing displacement of current and long-time residents to make way for improved urban environments. At the same time, exposure to toxic chemicals, air pollution, combined sewer flows, and wastewater treatment remain highly uneven and require a transformation of the physical environment. Historic planning pushed certain communities into undesirable areas. Can and should those areas be redeveloped? What do communities in those areas want?

The current combative stance between the administration and community activists indicates that many equity issues need to be addressed. However, without deeply restructuring current institutions, there is no reason to assume that equity and justice will take care of themselves. Further, addressing problem flooding and persistent environmental and social inequality requires restructuring the way that decisions are made within, and outside of, current institutions. Foundations and funders can play an important role in bridging the gap in transforming community-level decision-making in support of larger-scale institutional transformation. 

Closing Insights

Equitable GI planning in Louisville suffers from a lack of clear conceptualization of either green infrastructure, or equity and justice. Numerous community groups are demanding transformative approaches and the beginnings of a funding ecosystem for coalition-based transformative work is emerging. It will take sustained effort on behalf of communities and funders, and sustained openness of those already in positions of power, to restructure urban governance in a way that makes equitable planning possible.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-11

New York City

New York City

Incorporated 1624

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 468.2 sq. miles
  • 8,443,713 Total population
  • 28,110 People per sq. mile
  • 4% Forest cover
  • Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome
  • 5% Developed open space
  • $60,762 Median household income
  • 15.6% Live below federal poverty level
  • 64% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 9.2% Housing units vacant
  • 0.2% Native, 32.1% White, 21.8% Black, 29.1% Latinx , 0.1% Multi-racial/’other,’ 214% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

The City of New York occupies the homelands of the Lenape people who continue to fight for recognition alongside other Indigenous Nations. The city occupies one of the most productive estuarine systems in the world and has long been a global center of trade and finance, which included mass importation of enslaved Africans

Aging infrastructure, high income inequality, and large racial disparities in health outcomes pose significant challenges for a city with a contested municipal budget, increasingly governed through participatory approaches. Since Hurricane Sandy, the city has been the epicenter of federal investments in coastal infrastructure. The city has grown rapidly in the last several decades, regaining and surpassing inhabitants lost in mass emigration that began in the 1960s, with a significant portion of this growth occurring in vulnerable coastal zones.

Green Infrastructure in New York City

New York City has numerous, sizable, and ambitious green stormwater infrastructure programs that are integrated into city-wide tree planting initiatives. While the city also has extensive source water protection areas and programs, these are only tangentially referred to as part of the city's green infrastructure. A central tension in GI planning in NYC is the inclusion of softer coastal defenses, as well as the challenges of rising sea levels and associated extreme weather events. 

These intersecting challenges are reflected in diverse elements of the city’s GI plans, yet plans do not include parks, trails, farms, gardens, waterfronts, parkways, ecosystems more broadly, or blue-green networks. For example, the Staten Island Bluebelt was labeled as a corridor in our analysis. The city’s GI plans primarily deal with controlling combined sewer overflows and regulating many aspects of urban hydrology in addition to supporting carbon sequestration. Despite the limited functional focus of GI in NYC, city plans tout the diverse benefits of GI projects.

Defining Green Infrastructure in New York City

Key Findings

NYC GI plans are largely silent on equity issues, with few definitions, limited mechanisms of community engagement, and weakly developed distributional aspects. Promising exceptions include the public participation mechanisms in the initial stages of the city’s overarching Stormwater Plan and OneNYC. OneNYC, the city’s combined comprehensive and sustainability plan, was one of the few plans that addressed all ten dimensions of equity in our scoring tool.

 

Of the plans in our analysis...

13%

explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

19%

recognize that some people are made more vulnerable than others

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

13%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

13%

define equity

81%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

13%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

New York City through Maps

New York City is the largest and densest city in the United States, and yet retains several large park areas and numerous small open spaces. The city contains multitudes of diverse communities and neighborhoods, and yet remains highly segregated by income, race, and rent burden. Highly varied vacancy rates are associated with both high-rent districts and areas of entrenched poverty.

How Does New York City Account for Equity in GI Planning?

Overall, equity is weakly addressed in plans, with few definitions provided. The city’s numerous plans for compliance with Clean Water Act regulations consistently mention environmental justice communities but in a check-the-box approach. Framings of the social impacts of GI are generally underdeveloped. The OneNYC plan stands out for addressing all 10 dimensions of equity analyzed with our evaluation framework, and yet does not exhibit many best practices. 

Mechanisms of community engagement are largely underdeveloped, with very few opportunities for communities to be involved in the design and evaluation phases of GI programs. Despite consistency in most plans in terms of public outreach during the planning process and in implementation, they do not reflect current best practices.

NYC’s GI plans consistently seek to minimize hazards and add value with GI. However, these approaches do not reflect the concerns or needs of affected communities and, therefore, are largely problematic. Labor issues are also poorly addressed. 

Envisioning Equity

Both OneNYC and the Capital Strategy (2018) define equity, emphasizing the need to improve historically underserved communities and address uneven distributions of environmental hazards. These deficit-oriented definitions, while well-intentioned, do not unpack the causes of socioeconomic marginalization. Furthermore, they do not articulate the need for targeted communities to be involved with and shape the processes of decision-making for resulting projects and programs. Justice considerations are mentioned in most plans but are only addressed with any detail in the City’s GI plan and OneNYC. In both instances, EJ communities (not defined within the plans) are targeted for additional, but unspecified types of engagement and prioritized as targets for GI programs. These types of top-down approaches of community redevelopment and revitalization are at the core of many concerns around GI and need to be addressed.

Procedural Equity

NYC’s OneNYC plan and city-wide Stormwater Plan involved large and multi-pronged processes of public engagement in their formative stages. These processes of public engagement serve as examples of best practices but do not reflect current planning theories. 

OneNYC’s survey, which sets the overall plan priorities, appeared to force respondents to choose among predetermined options rather than begin with open-ended listening sessions or town hall meetings, as in other cities. In addition, the survey methods did not include an analysis of the socioeconomic or demographic composition of the respondents. Lastly, there is limited documentation of the type and content of the engagement meetings held during the plan’s formation. 

The city-wide Stormwater Plan involved extensive public comment periods and sought to inform affected communities of plan activities through various means, but lacked documentation and mechanisms for sustained community engagement. Compliance plans were largely formulaic in their approaches, appearing to follow the templates set by the EPA. NYC’s GI strategy was lacking in specificity and weak on procedural inclusion at all stages. The lone exception was a nod towards the necessity of community engagement for the successful implementation of programs and projects.

Distributional Equity

Despite extensive, ambitious, and well-resourced city-wide programs, the distributional elements of GI planning in NYC remain largely problematic. Except for the OneNYC, city-wide GI strategy, and the 2013 Resilience Strategy, plans focus on a very narrow range of hazards, primarily stormwater management and water quality issues. The aforementioned plans provide a more detailed approach for multiple climate-related hazards but do not acknowledge how the city’s strategies may shift risks or have other unintended consequences. 

The value of GI is discussed primarily in terms of improving the cost-effectiveness of the city’s infrastructure investments, with some minor descriptions of the multiple values provided by GI systems. It is not clear how the city’s limited types of GI will reflect the desired values, or how the city will address potential housing displacement from targeted community improvements. 

Plans are mostly silent on labor issues. The LTCPs and the city-wide GI strategy embrace a logic of enabling groups to pursue grant funding, without making concrete commitments to hiring goals or specific labor practices. Non-compliance plans emphasize the role of volunteers in facility maintenance, with the 2013 Resilience Strategy going so far as to create a volunteer-to-wage employee pipeline. The OneNYC plan provides the most detailed description of labor requirements of the city’s GI programs, going so far as to explicitly state the need to hire an estimated 360 individuals for non-union and minimum wage entry-level positions, albeit with some opportunity for climbing the career ladder. At the same time, most high-value design and construction work will benefit existing city contractors and private sector companies. These approaches stand in stark contrast to other city programs that provide targeted training and unionized labor (e.g. the City’s energy efficiency programs). There was reason for hope in OneNYC because the city recognized the stagnancy of wage growth outside of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) industries, and the need to address structural economic inequality through public sector programs and legislation. However, these acknowledgments were not reflected in the plan’s descriptions of the city’s GI programs.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

New York City is in many ways an equity enigma. The Office of Citywide Equity and Inclusion has been in existence in some form for over 30 years. Prior and current administrations have promised to increase equitable opportunities for economic advancement and in mitigating climate hazards, especially in the post-Sandy, post-2008 financial crisis, and the looming post-Covid-19 era. Despite these high-level,  institutionalized commitments, there are opportunities to improve upon equity concepts and practices in NYC’s GI planning. Based on our findings, we identify several key areas for advancement below.

Community Groups

New York City is a major urban center of social justice organizing. Current movements emphasize the need for economic and racial justice. They also call for a just transition, which would include revitalizing green manufacturing and addressing long-standing environmental justice issues. The city’s reform planning history is evident in its parks system, with organizations like the Central Park Conservancy grappling with the racist histories of park creation and current issues of violent policing. Ongoing green revitalization, such as the High Line project, has also faced criticism for contributing to housing displacement and has led to an evolved conversation on the relationship between urban revitalization and community stabilization. Organizations like WeACT for Environmental Justice have led the charge to responsibly remediate brownfields, address intersecting concerns around housing, and support affordable and accessible housing. Below we provide several recommendations for how community groups can advocate for greater control over city-wide greening initiatives.

1. Treating GI as a City-wide System Supporting Community Well Being

New York communities face incredible disparities in exposure to climate-related hazards and pollution which require proactive approaches to transforming technological systems and greening the urban environment. The city’s current GI programs are limited in scope and are not conceptually robust enough to support the type of transformative thinking required to provide solutions at scale. 

Community groups can advocate for a more systematic approach to urban greening that does not fetishize particular GI installations or parks, instead, focusing on providing GI as a public good while also prioritizing those communities most in need. Since the city has already adopted this approach with regards to green stormwater infrastructure and park planning independently, communities can advocate for joint city-wide planning that would include other currently siloed initiatives such as the city’s nascent citywide bike plan (which currently does not mention GI). Only through creating comprehensive green space networks of diverse GI elements in combination with massive reductions in pollution from transportation, manufacturing, and power generation (greening industrial infrastructure) can the EJ concerns of communities be comprehensively addressed.

2. Embedding Equity in Planning

New York City GI Plans have a long way to go to build the means for effective and substantial community engagement and control. A more expansive conception of GI will lend itself to GI becoming more relevant in existing efforts to achieve environmental justice in the city. A substantive evolution of mechanisms for communities to guide planning efforts will also be required. 

Drawing upon principles in equity planning theories, communities should advocate for binding mechanisms that enable communities to control city agency activities, compensation for the labor required to have oversight over city agencies, diverse, accessible, and inclusive engagement meetings, and the building of technical expertise within affected communities. The acquisition of such expertise is part of wealth-building as the skilled labor practices required for successful and effective GI systems are recruited from the ranks of community members. Existing participatory budgeting processes are a promising vehicle to begin this transformative approach towards planning, and should be more deeply embedded in the community forums and decision-making processes that allocate the city’s tremendous resources to provide for the general welfare of its residents.

Policy Makers and Planners

Current calls to address systemic racism and injustice in city decision-making and policy, primarily through the standing Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equality and the Racial Justice Commission,  should extend to the city’s extensive green infrastructure programs. Given that both the Taskforce and Commission are in their formative stages, we offer several considerations for these bodies and existing city agencies involved in the city’s green infrastructure programs. Below we elaborate on how current plans could address issues in their implementation and outline considerations for the evolution of city-level green infrastructure policy.

1. From “Planning For” to “Planning With”

NYC plans have an admirable focus on centering environmental justice communities as the targets of GI programs. Yet, mechanisms for substantive engagement over the lifecycle of GI policies and programs are not built into current planning practices. Policy makers and planners should engage and collaborate with affected communities throughout the entire planning process. Collaborative actions should include: accepting open-ended public comment in the earliest stages of planning, creating accessible meeting spaces, establishing implementation safeguards, and designating communities as the ultimate evaluators of GI program effectiveness.

2. From Ecological Security to Community Well-being Through Citywide GI

New York City’s GI plans have largely been balancing the needs of stormwater management against climate adaptation and sea-level rise. These necessary activities should be put in a larger context that addresses the overall quality of life for city residents. This systematic city-wide green infrastructure approach goes beyond coastal defense and stormwater systems. It includes redesigning roadways, park systems, green networks, urban agriculture, and trail systems and embedding ecological elements much more firmly into the urban landscape, while still providing the proposed benefits in current plans.

3. Defining Equity and Justice

New York City GI plans do not adequately define equity or justice issues. Existing definitions need to be updated to reflect the legacies and ongoing practices of dispossession and marginalization. A deeper understanding of ecological justice in the city requires addressing the city’s dispossession of Native people’s lands, the role of racism in structuring urban space and city policies, and the transformation of existing decision-making processes to give voice and power to those who have been, and continue to be, marginalized by current practices.

Foundations and Funders

Many foundations and nonprofits are active in addressing the city’s long-standing environmental and social justice issues, including many that focus on building grassroots power and organizing capacity. These efforts intersect with the city’s green infrastructure policies in several ways, especially with regard to how GI policy supports redevelopment, brownfield remediation, climate resilience, and access to environmental amenities. Current large-scale social movements and grassroots political pressure present opportunities to significantly advance discourse and organizing so that the root causes of environmental degradation and injustice can be addressed. This includes advancing long-standing efforts of the Lenape community to recognize and restore their cultural relationship with local land and water systems.

1. Centering Governance and Right Relations in Discussions on Indigeneity

Despite increased awareness about the Indigenous history of the area now called New York City, public discussion on the role of Native peoples has been largely relegated to the problematic narrative of ‘cultural heritage.’ As many Indigenous peoples and leaders have made clear, recognizing Native relationships with land requires recognizing Native governance over land, and the ways that governance was illegally usurped through militant dispossession and/or negotiated by treaty. Given that there is no definitive account of rightful treaty negotiation, New York City must be considered to be on unceded and unsurrendered territory. At a minimum, this fundamental injustice must be addressed with the Lenape who have never accepted the loss of their lands. Given the extreme uphill battle such recognition entails, foundations and funders can support a grounded approach towards ecological justice by supporting Indigenous organizations seeking this transformative justice.

2. Intersectional Green Infrastructure in a Just Transition

Building a solid foundation for addressing equity work in cooperation with grassroots organizations requires overcoming the siloing often present in environmental justice work. Disparate groups working on accessibility of parks, addressing legacies and present realities of structural racism, and housing and labor justice, could find common ground in seeking deeper transformations in city decision-making systems and the nature of the built environment. A Just Transition framework contains guidance for funding coalitions that are endeavoring to address intersecting concerns. Green infrastructure is a vital component of this aim.

Closing Insights

New York City’s extensive GI programs present many opportunities to address ecological justice and equity. Still, current approaches in city-led plans omit key aspects of equity. There is much work to be done to address this incomplete conception of GI. Our recommendations to focus on systemic and intersectional issues have the potential to dramatically reshape the city’s GI programs so that transformational approaches are centered. However, this will require a willingness and sustained effort by city agencies and policy makers to shift towards a community-led planning model, supported materially by the city, to realize the potential benefits of a city-wide Green Infrastructure system.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-02

Austin

AUSTIN

Incorporated 1835

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 327.4 sq. miles
  • 935,755 Total population
  • 2917  People per sq. mile
  • 24.2% Forest cover
  • Temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands
  • 17.4% Developed open space
  • $67,462  Median household income
  • 9.6%  Live below the federal poverty level
  • 61.3% Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 8.5% Housing units vacant
  • 0.2% Native, 48.3% White, 7.4% Black,  33.9% Latinx , 0.1%  Multi-racial/’other,’ 7.5% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socioeconomic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

Austin occupies lands of several Native Nations including Apache and Comanche peoples who were forcibly removed from their homelands without compensation. Since its incorporation in 1835, Austin has experienced continuous growth of settler populations and has rapidly grown in recent years. Austinites enjoy a city with an abundance of open spaces that are relatively well connected.

Rapid growth has come with its costs, skyrocketing housing costs cause a majority of renters to face severe rent burden. Floodplain development and climate change pose challenges for equitable risk management of floods, heatwaves, fires, and drought. Overall, the city seeks more equitable access to green space and labor markets rooted in its creative economy.

Green Infrastructure in Austin

Austin utilizes a diverse array of GI concepts, especially in the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan, which provides an overarching framework for other plans including those addressing stormwater management, the urban trails network, the urban forest, and capital investments. However, GI is defined only in the Climate and Forest Plans.

Functionally, stormwater-related hydrological and built environment functions dominate the plans. However, the role that GI plays in the urban ecosystem, its ability to mitigate the urban heat island, and reshape transportation networks and options are also present within definitions.

Beyond those definitions, there are a variety of concepts reflected in a large diversity of GI types, which prioritize connecting ecosystems, farms, waterbodies, parks, trails, the urban forest, and river networks with several other GI elements.

Austin plans define the benefits of GI broadly, emphasizing its role in providing recreation, livability, and outdoor experiences while allowing for regulatory compliance, improving the design and performance of the built environment, and providing a range of environmental benefits.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Austin

Key Findings

Austin plans emphasize collaboration with residents, although affected communities have limited mechanisms to influence design, implementation, and evaluation. Most plans lack visions that extensively define equity and address justice except for the Comprehensive and Forest plans. The majority of plans address urban hazards and value but are mixed in if, and how, they consider the labor needs and opportunities of GI.

17%

explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

14%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

14%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

14%

define equity

14%

explicitly refer to justice

100%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

0%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

0%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Austin through Maps

Austin has a complex and distributed urban form with a relatively low population density. Vacancy rates cluster in the center and south of the city, displaying an uneven relationship to the distribution of rent burden, which is generally high throughout the city and very high in some areas. Incomes are unevenly distributed, with western portions of the city having median incomes that often double those in predominantly Latinx neighborhoods in the eastern city.

How does Austin account for Equity in GI Planning?

With an emphasis on GI connectivity and values embedded within the planning system, Austin plans exemplify several best practices of inclusive planning processes,  including specifying toolkits and assessment mechanisms for the multiple values of GI. 

However, despite this emphasis on inclusive planning, evaluation mechanisms remain sparse, and the overall framing of equity concerns in plans has much room for improvement.

The City’s commitments to inclusive planning offer a strong foundation for process improvement and for collecting diverse perspectives on what would constitute equitable processes, visions, and resultant distributions of labor for the city as a whole.

Envisioning Equity

Only the Comprehensive Plan defines equity and does so in a universalist fashion that focuses on equality under the law and access to goods and services. It fails to address uneven risks, structural barriers, or variations in desired goods and services of different communities. The Plan addresses some historical injustices resultant from how the city has grown but lacks specifics. Otherwise, Austin’s plans provide weak framings of equity.

Procedural Equity

All plans examined contain some mechanisms for inclusive planning, with the Comprehensive and Forest plans committing to multiple avenues of community engagement. However, soliciting community input is inhibited by the current decision-making system which favors agency-led procedures and task forces. Communities have limited means for involvement in design and implementation, and even fewer for evaluating the impacts of plans. The Forest Plan is the exception to those conditions. It applies a community forestry framework that lists over 30 evaluation criteria, subject to annual review. It is unclear, however, how to raise social concerns not present in the existing framework.

Distributional Equity

Comparable to other cities, GI is understood as a means of addressing the distribution of hazards and values of the urban landscape. Most often, values are regarded universally and GI plans do not consider how they may differ between communities. Similarly, while a number of climate-related hazards are addressed by plans, limited work appears to have been done on their uneven social and spatial distributions. The Capital Improvement Plan seeks to study how improvements can be implemented in ways that do not disproportionately impact marginalized communities within the broader process of understanding the distribution of program costs and benefits. In terms of the distribution of labor, the Comprehensive Plan acknowledges that more equitable labor markets and economic structures are required to build intergenerational wealth. In other cases, volunteer and free labor appear to be vital to the realization of GI maintenance. Elsewhere, labor considerations of GI are absent.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Austin has a strong foundation of inclusive planning that can be readily built upon to improve the equity of GI plans and programs. Additionally, the diversity of elements considered within GI plans allow for a networked and city-wide planning approach delivering benefits and hazard reduction appropriate to the context. Delivering these services equitably will require more substantive mechanisms for community-led design, implementation, and evaluation.  Given Austin’s sophistication in GI planning, it can improve upon its framing of equity concerns and address other historical and ongoing injustices in the city. Additional opportunities for supporting community wealth building center on the need to think creatively about built environment improvements, and fostering place-based industries that incorporate green technologies alongside improvements to the urban ecosystem. We expand on these themes below.

Community Groups

Many groups in Austin have rallied around social, economic, and environmental justice. Current GI plans seem open to their involvement during plan development, yet aside from the CodeNEXT revision process, mechanisms are lacking to meaningfully include communities in the design, implementation, and evaluation of GI programs and projects. Improving procedural equity in the city may be the way forward to tackle a host of intersecting social and environmental challenges. It is concerning that the potential for displacement from large GI investments is not discussed within city plans. 

1. From Engaged Planning to Co-Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

Currently, plans addressing GI in Austin have limited means for community involvement in their design, implementation, and evaluation. Existing task forces and working groups, like the Code Next Task Force, the Flood Mitigation Task Force, and the Watershed Protection Ordinance stakeholder group provide a framework for limited citizen involvement, largely in an advising capacity. More robust and open mechanisms of place-based planning should guide such higher-level institutionalized efforts. There is a  larger, more general need to move participatory planning from processes based on non-transparent mechanisms of garnering public opinion (e.g. surveys) towards more genuinely democratic models. Models that incorporate meaningful input from community members in the visioning and decision-making stages of urban futures planning.

2. Daylighting the Housing Affordability and Infrastructure Relationships

The Capital Improvement Plan’s proposed study on the distribution of costs and benefits of existing programs and procedures represents a unique opportunity to daylight the relationship between infrastructure expenditures and the cost of different types of urban form. Community groups can rally around such a process to demand better fundamental infrastructure and push for a broader accounting of how public monies affect the distribution of urban amenities, land value, and the distribution of hazards.

3. Emphasizing Labor Equity Amidst Rapid urban change and systemic challenges

Currently, GI plans have limited appreciation of the role that large-scale greening efforts can play in generating well-paying jobs. Framing climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies in the context of rapidly rising housing costs can center the need for workforce development and upskilling that supports intergenerational wealth building.

Policy Makers and Planners

Austin has a robust and cohesive planning framework that includes a diverse array of green infrastructure types across the city Further, these elements are coordinated within the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan. The implementation of Austin’s planning projects appear to be supported by a large number of city agencies and coordinating task forces, but mostly lacks mechanisms for substantive public input. These formal coordinating bodies have the potential to significantly improve communication and joint implementation among city departments and appear guided by the city's comprehensive planning. However, equity concerns remain poorly articulated and framed, and this is reflected in incomplete mechanisms for community involvement in the processes of creating and enacting plans.

1. Thinking Deeply about Equity

Austin’s GI plans do not define equity or justice in meaningful ways. Additionally, the overall framing of equity is nascent or problematic, if not wholly absent. While the Comp Plan and Forest Plan have robust inclusion mechanisms, there appears to be a limited understanding of equity issues within the plans, overall. For example, despite acknowledging that the “...way Austin has grown has increased alienation and unevenness”, the current Trails Plan focuses on connecting existing destinations. Other areas do not receive attention under this plan. Importantly, community input is factored in as only 12% of the overall weighting criteria for new trail creation. However, much can be done to think through what equity means in the context of GI planning using existing toolkits and other sources references (including this study). 

2. Power Sharing

Austin should be commended for assigning clear responsibilities to city agencies responsible for GI implementation. However, implementation rarely involves affected communities. There are few, if any, mechanisms for community input on evaluating and course-correcting GI programs that may bring negative impacts to residents. Ceding power to affected communities outside of the normal electoral process is an important and necessary step for policymakers. GI programs are often long-term and spanning multiple administrations. Thus putting procedures in place that grant affected communities input and control over city agency programs and projects should be a priority. 

3. Embracing Labor Innovation

There are significant opportunities to more explicitly examine the distribution of labor required for the urban transformations outlined by Austin’s GI plans. While the Comprehensive Plan lays out a framework for building wealth in marginalized neighborhoods through more equitable distributions of high-value labor, it does not link this goal to the city's green infrastructure programs. Perhaps this is not surprising, as both the Watershed Protection Plan and Urban Forest Plan explicitly seek to use volunteer labor for GI installations and maintenance as a way of keeping costs down. 

Foundations and Funders

Austin’s Comprehensive Plan borrows a robust Green Infrastructure definition from the Conservation Fund (p 151) and thus appears to rely on non-profits for core aspects of its GI programs. However, non-profit or foundation support appears to be limited in city initiatives. The Urban Forest Plan in particular outlines a strategy of assigning a monetary value to GI to make the case for its expanded implementation. However, how monetary values are arrived at remains poorly specified, with limited means of accruing to residents or public budgets. In collaboration with existing partners, such as the Trust for Public Land, more nuanced evaluations of value recapture may be necessary to influence the overall austerity mindset presented in Austin’s GI plans. We recommend three concrete avenues to do so.

1. Support Research on Transformative Funding Mechanisms

There is no reason a city growing as quickly as Austin needs to have an austerity mindset. Real estate values have been skyrocketing, and the city continues to experience vibrant growth in population and economic activity. The principal challenge is to translate this growth into more equitable city government expenditures. If the city government is unwilling to explore creative and transformative solutions to GI funding, private and non-profit funders can fill this gap temporarily by investing in community capacity to articulate and plan for transformative funding mechanisms such as public banks, cooperative housing institutions, and neighborhood-level value recapture of GI improvements.

2. From Opportunities to Community-Led Programs for Redesign

The Austin Comprehensive plan explicitly states that it will seek opportunities to align water, waste, and energy conservation initiatives. This type of integrative thinking is noteworthy and offers a path to link siloed areas leading to greater sustainability. Water and stormwater, waste, energy, food, and transportation can be integrated through urban redesign. Integrating such diverse program areas will require empowering communities to make holistic and transformative shifts in these core urban systems. Thus city agencies could and should partner with funders to explore opportunities to create community-led deep redesign efforts that tie together these transformations rather than leaving them as top-down initiatives to be decided by city agencies.

Closing Insights

Equitable Green Infrastructure in Austin will require enacting the visionary and transformative concepts of GI in Austin’s plans through a more elaborated planning life cycle that allows for community-based implementation and evaluation. Austin has emerged as a leader in conceptualizing GI, and yet, foundational work remains in building community capacity to steer the future of the city through existing planning processes.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.

City_Skyline_Squares-01

Atlanta

ATLANTA

Incorporated 1837

CITY DEMOGRAPHICS

  • 135.6 sq. miles
  • 498,000 Total population
  • 3,673 People per sq. mile
  • 26% Forest cover
  • Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome
  • 26% Developed open space
  • $55,279 Median household income
  • 21.6% Live below the federal poverty level
  • 63% - Estimated rent-burdened households
  • 17.7% Housing units vacant
  • 0.1% Native, 38.3% White, 50.5 % Black, 4.3% Latinx , 0.1% Multi-racial/’other,’ 4.4% Asian, <0.1% Pacific Islander

*socio-economic data estimates are from 5-year ACS data from 2018, racial composition from ACS 2019, and land cover data from 2016 NLCD

CITY CONTEXT

Atlanta has experienced rapid economic and population growth over the last several decades. The city was formed in the tumultuous period of forced removal of Natives across the SE, including the Muscogee Creek and Cherokee peoples whose homelands the city occupies. An epicenter of the 20th century Civil Rights Movement, the city has become internationally recognized as a Black cultural hub. The only major Southeastern city emerging from the Civil war with its infrastructure intact, this crossroads city serves as a regional economic beacon.

However,  growth has been highly unequal. Mirroring legacies of urban renewal, ambitious plans for urban expansion, redevelopment, and redesign, have not benefited many families, who instead face significant risks of housing displacement. Increasing climate hazards of floods, droughts, and heatwaves further threaten marginalized communities.

Green Infrastructure in Atlanta

GI planning in Atlanta encompasses stormwater management and planning for landscape connectivity in the context of large-scale urban development. Examples include the large number of regulatory plans implementing stormwater-focused GI in specific subbasins, the Atlanta Comprehensive and Resilience plans utilizing landscape and integrative concepts of GI, and the Atlanta Beltway plan which refers to GI but does not define it.

Plans utilizing landscape GI concepts focus on larger landscape elements (e.g. parks, the urban tree canopy, and trail networks) while stormwater-focused plans, including those using integrative concepts, focus more on hybrid facilities and green materials.

Functionally, plans use GI to manage urban hydrology, though some plans utilizing landscape concepts see it as a tool for supplying transportation and thermal regulation services.

Mirroring this functional focus, most benefits associated with GI relate to improved environmental conditions (largely water quality). However, stormwater-focused plans emphasize the reduced costs of infrastructure services, increasing property values, and a number of other economic and social benefits.

Defining Green Infrastructure in Atlanta

Key Findings

Atlanta has embraced an equity lens in its current Strategic GI Plan and Comprehensive Plan updates and has recognized the need to address gentrification within green urban redevelopment projects. However, mechanisms to do so remain under development. Opportunities exist to better integrate city-wide greening efforts, green stormwater infrastructure programs, and housing justice concerns.

18%

Explicitly refer to equity, 100% have equity implications

45%

attempt to integrate landscape and stormwater concepts

100%

seek to address climate and other hazards

18%

apply a lens of universal good to GI

9%

define equity

27%

explicitly refer to justice

45%

claim engagement with affected communities in planning

18%

recognize that some people are more vulnerable than others

27%

mention Native peoples or relationships with land

Atlanta through Maps

The City of Atlanta sits within a large metropolitan region characterized by a network of densely developed areas overlain by sharp lines of residential segregation. Stark differences in incomes, population density, vacancy rates, rent burden, and forest cover can be seen between the Southern and Eastern portions of the city as compared to the more densely populated Downtown and more affluent Northern Suburbs.

How does Atlanta account for Equity in GI Planning?

Overall, no Atlanta plans cover all 10 of our equity dimensions despite addressing at least some equity concerns. In a few key areas, they represent current best practices across our study cities, namely in understanding the contextual value of GI and the hazards that GI-related redevelopment poses.

There is a promising trend in the most current plans to center equity concerns. However, most plans don’t define equity or address justice. A major need exists for procedures to involve communities in the evaluation of existing planning efforts.

Envisioning Equity

No plans besides the GI Strategic Action Plan define equity. The most complete framings of equity are found in the Comp and Resilience plans, which include the idea of building intergenerational wealth as a way to move Atlanta out of the top 10 most income unequal cities.  Mentions of justice are rare, and while acknowledging historical struggles, they largely do not acknowledge their continuation in the present or the capacity of city agencies and government to address them. Overall, framings revolve around using GI to provide universal benefits for all Atlantans.

Procedural Equity

With few exceptions, many of the mechanisms for community inclusion remain unspecified, and there are extremely limited avenues for affected communities to evaluate planned outcomes. For example, while Atlanta’s updated Comprehensive Plan sought community input, participation in design and implementation is largely limited to public agencies. While the Comp plan is the only plan that specifies mechanisms for community evaluation, means to do so remain limited, namely, a livability index and the Department of Parks and Recreation ongoing needs assessments. The Resilience strategy sought extensive public input through a number of avenues, representing one of the more inclusive planning processes we examined. However, the plan does not demonstrate how this engagement included all of Atlanta’s diverse communities.

Distributional Equity

All Atlanta plans use GI to reduce urban hazards and add value to the urban landscape.  The dominant concerns around equity in the GI strategic plan revolve around historical and ongoing uneven distributions of flooding hazards and green redevelopment’s association with gentrification. Plans acknowledge the risks of gentrification associated with urban redevelopment projects catalyzed by large public investments in GI, in particular around parks. Both the Comp plan and GI Action Plan acknowledge the added need for labor to maintain GI, and many stormwater plans actively seek volunteer labor from communities where GI is implemented but do not discuss compensation. The resilience plan acknowledges the need for increasing access of marginalized communities to higher-value labor to build community wealth but does not specify any mechanisms to do so through GI.

Recommendations for Stakeholders

Atlanta has numerous opportunities for improving equity in its GI planning and programs. As the city continues to grow in population and economic activity, a core issue is who benefits and who pays for ongoing redevelopment projects. Like many redeveloping cities, new forms of decision-making are likely required to guide investments in public services, infrastructure, and housing that benefit current residents without displacing them. Like many other cities we examined, Atlanta struggles with implementing creative drainage solutions to meet regulatory requirements while meeting other interdependent social, environmental, and infrastructural objectives in the context of extreme income and housing inequality. To that end, we provide concrete recommendations for communities, city policy makers, and non-government entities involved in Green Infrastructure in Atlanta.

Community Groups

Atlanta has numerous communities that have long fought for their right to thrive within the city, and unfortunately current plans only rarely discuss their ongoing struggles. Some headway has been made with community-based planning practices that sought to create binding visions for neighborhood planning and guiding city investments in public infrastructure, as evidenced within the Proctor Creek and Sugar and Intrenchment creek WIPS (which reference community-led visions from plans not authored by city agencies).

1. The Need for Substantive and Transparent Community Engagement

Current planning practices in Atlanta have almost no mechanisms for community-based evaluation of the implementation of GI plans aside from Parks and Recreation needs assessments. However, the current administration has centered equity concerns within the current GI plan, and this may present an opportunity for community groups to demand such mechanisms, alongside the creation of mechanisms for preventing housing displacement from urban redevelopment projects and GI programs.

2. Reclaiming the Value of GI = Reclaiming the Value Of Urban Land

Communities must continue to find alternative means of owning and valuing land outside of the speculative real estate market; in other cities, these have taken the forms of limited equity housing co-ops, and a national conversation around public banking and the right to housing. Such mechanisms may require a deep restructuring of city budgets and revenue generation mechanisms, as well as approaches to build community wealth that are not solely based on property value.

3. Building Community Cohesion Through Community Organizing

Strong internal community organizing forms the foundation of strong community-led planning. Community groups must continue to organize around their collective interest and should be supported by city agencies and NGOs. However, when partnering with NGOs, CDCs, and city agencies, strong community organizing will be required so external influences and funding do not cause or exacerbate divisions within the community.

Policy Makers and Planners

A diverse array of city agencies and government entities are involved in GI planning in Atlanta and the GI Strategic Plan has a welcome focus on equity issues. However, the Atlanta plans at large are contradictory about what GI is and what it does and contain limited processes for public engagement and participation from planning through evaluation.

1. Rooting GI in the urban landscape for community needs

Planners and policy makers should acknowledge that the GI concept must integrate a diverse array of private and public green spaces. While current plans focus on stormwater and flooding, other emergent approaches seek to create functional alternative transit networks, including pedestrian, bicycle, light electric vehicle, and environmentally friendly mass transit. These linkages should be more clearly identified and strengthened to provide a more sound social, environmental, and infrastructural basis for integrative planning efforts.

2. From Words to Action

Planners and policy makers need to move beyond discussing equity concerns in plans and move towards creating binding statutory and regulatory mechanisms for community inclusion in plan formulation and evaluation. These include specific mechanisms for community inclusion in shaping city policies prioritizing building property value over community incomes. Existing processes for community inclusion (as in the GI Strategic Plan and Resilience Plans) must become more transparent of what demographics in the city participated in plan creation.

3. Clarifying Definitions and Making them Count

One cannot plan for and cannot measure what one has not defined. Policy makers and planners must draw on strong public engagement mechanisms to articulate robust definitions of equity that can become encoded in city policies and plans.

Foundations and Funders

Foundations and funders in Atlanta have contributed to community-engaged planning processes dealing with Green Infrastructure. However, these plans are not binding upon city agencies. While policy makers and planners should build in such mechanisms, funders can support community organizing which forms the foundation of effective and just urban environmental governance.

1. Support Intersectional Organizing

Dedicated funding for community organizing around environmental, housing, and social justice needs to support existing community-led initiatives to address those intersectional challenges. Like many other cities, open forums to discuss and strategize around these intersecting issues are lacking. Creating new mechanisms to facilitate collaboration and joint planning between disparate groups is necessary.

2. From the Grassroots to City Hall

Community-based initiatives need to find concrete avenues for translating into binding mechanisms for city agencies when enacting and evaluating programs. Community-led plans without follow-through can undermine public appetite for engagement in future planning efforts, and yet, planning is required to address intersecting challenges around urban stormwater, flooding, and housing. So while many of the most disaffected communities may abandon planning processes, theirs are the voices most needed to formulate alternative visions and futures in city plans. Funders should prioritize efforts that support organizing on the frontlines of displacement and climate hazards and seek to create lasting structural and institutional change.

3. Rethinking and Remaking Urban Form

Foundations and funders should also collaborate with communities and city agencies for a larger scale rethink around the functions and benefits of GI. For example, it may be necessary to eliminate further development within flood-prone areas and build more affordable housing outside of hazard-prone areas rather than facilitating redevelopment with GI. Larger scale analyses of runoff, social and environmental inequality, and housing needs may yield insight into how other parts of the city can be redeveloped to improve economic and housing justice while making space for nature and improving climate resilience.

Closing Insights

Planning for equity in Green Infrastructure requires a deep rethinking and restructuring of urban governance to build wealth and value for communities while reshaping the city to be more socially just and environmentally resilient. GI, like other public realm investments, has long-term impacts on the quality of the built environment, and with appropriate social decision-making processes, can provide valuable public services for generations to come. Atlanta has opportunities to address its long-standing inequalities in wealth and exposure to environmental hazards,  but these opportunities require changing the status quo around redevelopment.

Resources

City Plans

A public access repository of all the 122 Urban plans from 20 US cities analyzed, along with key metrics for each plan organized in a spreadsheet.

Other Project Outputs

Peer-reviewed publications, blog articles, and other writing produced by the team related to this study

Glossary

Definitions for terms commonly used on this website and throughout the project.