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

The intervention, known by its Dutch wordplay name that translates roughly as “They Are Not Mental?!” (TANM), was designed to strengthen the resilience of informal caregivers with a migration background whose loved ones live with a suspected mental illness. It pursued three short-term goals: encouraging open conversations about mental health taboos, improving understanding of mental illnesses and available support, and fostering trust between migrant families and the healthcare sector. The program unfolded in three phases. First, four coordinating organizations recruited and trained voluntary “ambassadors”—peer educators who shared participants’ migration backgrounds and, in some cases, their caregiving experiences. Second, ambassadors facilitated three peer education sessions, delivered in the dominant language of each group, covering mental health and the role of culture, specific conditions such as schizophrenia and depression, and the role of family alongside formal support options. Third, caregivers identified during the sessions could be referred for tailored follow-up support, either in group training or one-on-one consultations with a Family-Experience-Expert, a professional who draws on personal lived experience of caring for someone with mental illness.

What makes the new study methodologically interesting is its realist evaluation design. Rather than simply asking whether TANM succeeded, the researchers, led by Malin H. L. Hollaar of Erasmus University Rotterdam, asked how, for whom, and under what circumstances it worked. Realist evaluation, developed by Pawson and Tilley, models outcomes as the product of Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) configurations: specific contextual conditions activate specific mechanisms, which in turn generate outcomes. The team began with an Initial Program Theory built from twelve interviews and a focus group, then tested and refined it during the 2024–2025 implementation period using 27 semi-structured interviews with ambassadors, participants, and program staff, 10 observations of peer education sessions, and 76 anonymous post-session questionnaires. During this cycle, 11 ambassadors facilitated 11 groups attended by 138 participants, most of them women, with considerable variation in age, cultural background, and caregiving experience. Abductive and retroductive reasoning moved the analysis back and forth between the data, the initial theory, and concepts such as social learning, ultimately producing ten refined CMO-configurations validated in a focus group with the coordinating organizations.

The first cluster of findings concerns the taboo on mental illness itself. Nearly half of the participants—47.3 percent—reported experiencing a taboo around mental illness, with no significant differences between cultural groups, suggesting that shame and silence are not the property of any single community. Yet the degree to which groups became more open varied substantially, and the explanation lay in context. Groups whose ambassadors were already acquainted with participants, shared their language and cultural background, and remained available beyond the formal sessions were noticeably more open and engaged. In unfamiliar groups, conversations stayed reserved. Questionnaire analyses confirmed significant associations between prior acquaintance and the sharing of personal experiences, reinforcing that familiarity is not a soft nicety but a structural condition of disclosure.

The mechanisms behind this openness were fundamentally relational. Ambassadors worked as trusted peers, sharing reliable information while acknowledging alternative explanations for mental illness—including attributions to black magic, divine punishment, or the evil eye—rather than dismissing them. Trust emerged as the prerequisite for everything else, a point program staff emphasized by noting that shame and taboo exist in all cultures, and that the only way around them is building enough comfort for people to speak. Ambassadors deliberately engineered safety: setting explicit confidentiality rules, or encouraging indirect sharing. One ambassador described a participant who asked questions “on behalf of a friend” for two full sessions before revealing in the third that the friend was herself. Another described modeling vulnerability—sharing her own experiences or relatable anecdotes—which could trigger a domino effect of disclosures across the group, provided a basic level of trust was already in place.

The second cluster of findings addressed the bridge between informal family care networks and formal healthcare services. Ambassadors recruited participants through their peer role, enabled by their social capital and connections in both formal and informal networks. Recruitment strategies mattered enormously: ambassadors who drew on their own existing community groups or used one-to-one invitations generated many more referrals to the follow-up support phase than ambassadors who appeared as guest speakers in unfamiliar groups. Cultural alignment even shaped how the intervention was introduced. Some ambassadors framed the sessions as discussions about “taboos” rather than naming mental illness upfront, given the cautiousness such topics provoke. The researchers also found that TANM’s Dutch title lost its stigmatizing-ironic wordplay among non-native speakers—its primary target audience—an unexpected barrier to communication.

Clusters three and four traced the path to actual help-seeking and the unexpected role of social support. Before participants could seek help, many first had to recognize themselves as informal caregivers at all, since in many cultures caregiving is framed as a natural family duty rather than a distinct role, and seeking outside help can feel like failing that duty. Overcoming fear and distrust toward formal institutions—including fear that a child might be removed from the home, or wariness rooted in earlier negative encounters with providers—required trusted, independent-seeming guides such as ambassadors and the Family-Experience-Expert. Knowledge of the Dutch care system was transmitted through shared frames of reference, allowing ambassadors to contextualize advice in culturally recognizable terms; one ambassador explained how she could understand a participant consulting an imam or receiving ruqya, a form of spiritual healing involving Quranic recitation, and build on it rather than dismissing it. Strikingly, the researchers discovered that some participants joined primarily for social connection and emotional support rather than information, revealing a psychosocial spillover effect the intervention’s designers had not anticipated. In some cases, peer contact continued long after the formal sessions ended.

The study’s implications cut two ways. On one hand, the findings demonstrate that “being a peer” is not a fixed identity but a relational position constructed through shared culture, language, religion, or lived experience—which explains why the Family-Experience-Expert, whose similarity to participants was experiential rather than cultural, could build trust just as effectively. The ambassadors’ role modeling aligns closely with Bandura’s social learning theory: participants adopt behaviors when demonstrated by someone perceived as similar to themselves, and continued availability reinforces that change over time. On the other hand, this centrality exposed a structural vulnerability. Ambassadors described their roles as demanding, emotionally taxing, and extending well beyond the intervention period without supervision, structural support, or adequate compensation—a pattern documented previously among peer educators in HIV/AIDS prevention and workplace mental health. The researchers recommend structured support and fair compensation for ambassadors, mechanisms for transferring the Family-Experience-Expert’s experiential knowledge rather than concentrating it in a single person, and recruitment through ambassadors’ own groups or individual invitations rather than guest-speaking arrangements.

Perhaps the most sobering conclusion is that even a well-designed, culturally sensitive intervention cannot close the gap alone. Persistent structural barriers—language difficulties, jargon-heavy communication, culturally insensitive practices, and negative past experiences with care professionals—continued to shape participants’ trust and help-seeking, and these lie largely beyond the scope of any peer education program. The authors are explicit that interventions like TANM are a necessary but partial response, effective only when accompanied by system-level investment in culturally sensitive communication and care practices. Future evaluations, they argue, should track longer-term outcomes such as resilience and sustained help-seeking, and researchers working with underserved groups should ask whether the barriers lie within communities or within the research approaches themselves. For migrant caregivers navigating stigma, fear, and family expectations, the study suggests that the most powerful lever remains deceptively simple: someone like them, available over time, who understands both languages—the literal one and the cultural one.

Subject of Research: Realist evaluation of a peer education intervention supporting migrant informal caregivers of people with mental illness in Rotterdam.

Article Title: Navigating Stigma and Support: Realist Evaluation of Support for Migrant Informal Caregivers of Loved Ones with Mental Illness

Article References: Hollaar, M. H. L., Buis, P., Smedts, M., Uysal-Bozkir, Ö., Kocken, P. L., & Denktaş, S. (2026). Navigating Stigma and Support: Realist Evaluation of Support for Migrant Informal Caregivers of Loved Ones with Mental Illness. Community Mental Health Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-026-01728-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10597-026-01728-0

Keywords: informal caregivers, migration background, mental illness, peer education, realist evaluation, stigma, trust, resilience, help-seeking, culturally sensitive care, social support, Rotterdam