Green Parks Can Displace the Poor—Unless Housing Rules Stop It

Urban green space has long been sold as an unqualified good: parks cool overheated streets, soak up stormwater, clean the air, and give neighbours a reason to talk to one another. But a growing body of research documents a darker side effect known as green gentrification, in which the creation or restoration of parks drives up property values and pushes out the low-income residents the greening was meant to serve. A new comparative study published in Discover Cities by Laura Ricci, Carmela Mariano, and Marsia Marino of Sapienza University of Rome tackles one of the most stubborn gaps in the urban planning literature: while the displacement problem has been described extensively in hindsight, almost no one has specified the governance models, indicators, and thresholds that could prevent it before the bulldozers arrive.

The researchers frame the problem within what they call a new urban welfare paradigm. Twentieth-century planning pursued collective well-being by building new housing, public spaces, and facilities in a culture of quantitative expansion. Today’s challenge, they argue, is different: cities must transform existing fabric, and the measure of social progress is no longer the quantity of provision but its quality, accessibility, and distributive equity. Green spaces sit at the centre of this shift, and also at the centre of the One Health framework promoted by the WHO, FAO, WOAH, and UNEP, which recognises the interdependence of human, animal, and ecosystem health. Yet as the authors note, citing work by Murray and by Anguelovski and colleagues, the benefits of greening are never socially neutral. Anguelovski’s analysis of twenty-eight European and North American cities found a statistically significant relationship between new green spaces and gentrification in the following decades, with marginalised communities, ethnic minorities, and low-income residents disproportionately affected.

The literature’s failure to move from diagnosis to prevention is illustrated by Chicago’s 606 Trail, a 95-million-dollar project that converted a disused elevated railway into a 2.7-kilometre greenway through four Northwest Side neighbourhoods. Research by Rigolon and Németh showed that the non-profit lead partner, The Trust for Public Land, held a mandate limited to park creation and conservation, with no coordination with public bodies on affordable housing. That institutional fragmentation produced a structural disconnect between ecological objectives and anti-displacement instruments, and property values along the corridor rose sharply after the 2015 opening. A related study of 122 municipal green, stormwater, and climate plans across twenty US cities found that only 13 percent explicitly defined equity, fewer than 10 percent identified the causes of unequal environmental benefit, and almost none included mechanisms to prevent displacement. Even the influential ‘just green enough’ concept, introduced by Curran and Hamilton, remains a strategic principle without a system of design-stage indicators, and Rigolon and Németh’s later work showed that neither small park size nor peripheral location reliably protects against gentrification.

To isolate the mechanisms that determine whether greening displaces or protects, the researchers used a Most Similar Systems Design, a comparative method that holds background conditions constant so that a single divergent variable—and its outcome—can be analysed. They screened European repositories of nature-based solutions, including the Urban Nature Atlas, Climate-ADAPT, Oppla, the World Habitat Awards, and the URBiNAT project, applying four criteria: a neighbourhood-scale intervention in a disadvantaged working-class or port-industrial district; completion at least ten years earlier with post-implementation monitoring; availability of neighbourhood-scale public statistics; and divergence in housing governance. A striking finding emerged during selection: fewer than 6 percent of recorded nature-based interventions in the Urban Nature Atlas explicitly address poverty or deprivation, and fewer than 25 percent are integrated into housing or neighbourhood regeneration programmes, leaving an extremely narrow set of eligible cases.

The two cases selected were Ekostaden Augustenborg in Malmö, Sweden, and DakPark in Rotterdam’s Bospolder-Tussendijken neighbourhood in the Netherlands. Both were working-class districts hit by deindustrialisation, both underwent nature-based regeneration in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and both won European recognition. Augustenborg, built between 1948 and 1952 as 1,800 public rental dwellings, had suffered 30 percent unemployment, rising vacancies, and recurrent flooding when Malmö launched its regeneration programme in 1998. The project delivered more than 175 climate-adaptation solutions in nineteen categories, including green roofs covering over 11,000 square metres, biofilters, rain gardens, and retention basins designed to manage 70 percent of rainwater locally, all connected through an open stormwater canal network fed by the roofs.

The decisive difference lay in institutional architecture. In Malmö, green-space management was institutionally integrated with housing: MKB, a company wholly owned by the city, developed and managed both the dwellings and the open spaces, coordinating the Fosie district with the Department of Technical Services. The Swedish funding programme LIP required demonstrated social benefits, and the Swedish rental regime—open-ended public contracts with collectively negotiated rents based on objective dwelling quality rather than market value—meant that neighbourhood appreciation could not be passed on to tenants as rent increases. With 89 percent of the stock under regulated rents, the core mechanism of green gentrification was neutralised at source. The project also trained forty residents in sustainability practices who were then employed in three new local enterprises, and monitoring over more than two decades records no displacement attributable to the intervention.

Rotterdam’s DakPark, opened in 2013 atop a dyke, underground car park, and commercial platform on land transferred from the Port Authority, is technically impressive—one of Europe’s largest rooftop green infrastructures—and it was won through fifteen years of resident advocacy. But its governance was fragmented. The housing stock was managed independently by housing associations such as Havensteder and Woonstad Rotterdam and by private owners, none formally involved in the park’s governance, while the project actors held no mandate over housing or anti-displacement policy. Dutch housing policy had liberalised since the 1990s, and Rotterdam’s ‘balanced neighbourhoods’ strategy encouraged market-rate dwellings in social-housing areas. The Resilient BoTu 2028 programme defined no binding housing-equity indicators, and employment objectives linked to the energy transition arrived only in 2018, five years after the park opened.

The statistical picture is nuanced and the authors are careful with it. Between 2014 and 2022, the share of residents of non-Western origin fell by 4.2 percentage points in Bospolder and 5.4 in Tussendijken, while private-rental dwellings rose by 5 and 3 points respectively. Yet control neighbourhoods without comparable green interventions, such as Afrikaanderwijk and Spangen, saw similar or larger demographic shifts, so the change cannot be attributed solely to the park. The sharpest exclusion signal is access rather than eviction: the 145 dwellings of the Hudsons complex built beside DakPark remain unaffordable to many long-standing residents of Bospolder—people denied access to the dwellings generated by the intervention in their own neighbourhood. The comparison, the authors conclude, is not between a project that displaces and one that does not, but between one endowed with protective capacity and one that lacks it. Ecological quality alone is never a sufficient condition for equity.

From this comparison the team derived a toolkit for climate-equitable regeneration, built around four outcome indicators aligned with Sustainable Development Goals 3, 10, and 11 and six project parameters, each traceable to a mechanism observed in the case studies. Applied ex ante, the toolkit produces not an aggregate score but a profile: any indicator supported by none of the project’s mechanisms signals exposure to displacement risk before real-estate appreciation occurs. The authors acknowledge limitations—the analysis rests on public documents rather than fieldwork, translations may blur legislative nuance, and Swedish statistics did not permit a within-city control comparison for Augustenborg. They plan to expand the comparative base, add resident surveys, address the under-documented distribution of environmental benefits across income groups, and test the toolkit on Italian cases. Their central conclusion is stark: protecting communities from green displacement depends above all on public ownership of housing stock under regulated rents, and where that condition is absent, ecological regeneration leaves residents exposed.

Subject of Research: Governance models and equity indicators for preventing green gentrification and displacement during urban green space regeneration

Article Title: Assessing equity indicators and anti-displacement governance for urban green spaces as social infrastructure

Article References: Assessing equity indicators and anti-displacement governance for urban green spaces as social infrastructure. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00363-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00363-4

Keywords: green gentrification, urban green spaces, nature-based solutions, social housing, displacement, urban equity, Malmö, Rotterdam, urban governance, climate adaptation, urban planning, SDGs