Lecture #8 | Margarita TRIGUERO-MAS | "From the right to unhealthy ungreen deprived cities to the right to healthy, sustainable and just cities"
In the last years, there has been a growing understanding of green spaces importance to face the anthropocene challenges. Accordingly, the concept of “healthy green cities” has been proliferating in the last decade, in parallel to a growing body of evidence on how and to what extend nature benefits our health. However, not everybody experiences, perceives and benefits from nature at the same degree, creating new types of social injustice for some and environmental privilege for others. This green divide has become more evident in the last few years, with the proliferation of green gentrification. So, in this context, greenspaces become green LULUs or disruptive green landscapes where underprivileged residents are left with the only right to the unhealthy ungreen deprived city. In this talk, drawing on research conducted over the last five years in North America and Europe, I identify the scope and magnitude of injustice in urban greening projects and point to pathways towards “healthy, sustainable and just cities” presenting some policy and planning alternatives.
Part of the 2022/23 StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series 'moving cities forward, leaving no one behind. toward fair & sustainable transitions'. Full programme available here.
Lectures will be streamed on this channel!
Dr. Margarita Triguero-Mas (PhD in biomedicine, 2017) is an environmental scientist working at the intersection of public health, urban planning and environmental justice and a world expert on the health impacts of urban nature, with a particular focus on health equity. Currently she is a research fellow at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and an associated researcher at ISGlobal (Barcelona Institute for Global Health) and the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ, a research group that is part of ICTA-UAB). Her work has informed the US and the European Environmental Protection Agencies and the World Health Organization. In the last years, she has been consistently among the most cited and influential scientists in the world. She has been recently awarded the coordination of a four-year Horizon Europe project (GreenME) that focuses on nature-based therapies and adult mental health equity.