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Cities worldwide are taking action to increase the amount and quality of urban green spaces. However, not all efforts for the greening of cities produce just and inclusive outcomes. For more inclusive urban greening processes, scholars have proposed incentivizing residents’ participation in planning and implementing green initiatives that promote creating and maintaining green spaces. However, further in-depth analysis of the connection between implementing new urban green spaces and environmental (in)justice is needed to understand how unjust outcomes might emerge due to policies aiming to promote the uptake of urban green through citizen engagement. To investigate the justice implications of policies that aim to create new urban green spaces through citizen participation, this article combines GIS analysis and qualitative analysis of 26 semi-structured interviews to evaluate the process and outcomes of the Green Agenda policy in Amsterdam. The Green Agenda (Agenda Groen) is a municipal policy supporting citizens’ initiatives to uptake urban green. Through the analysis of this case study, the article aims to identify factors that create barriers to achieving just outcomes during the implementation of policies for urban greening. Results indicate that although the approach has successfully increased the amount of urban green in Amsterdam, the presence of barriers that impede procedural justice and lack of recognition made the urban greening process less just. The three underlying factors that create barriers in Amsterdam are the centralization of the government, the lack of support for local organizations, and the effect of socioeconomic characteristics on inclusion and participation. The article concludes by discussing the synergies and tradeoffs between identified barriers and suggesting solutions to be integrated into future policies for more successful and just greening processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategies applied by urban policy makers in order to achieve sustainable city development may be in conflict with each other because it crosses many disciplines and policy areas. This research focusses on the dilemma between compact city and urban greenspace policies and their influence on actual land-use change in Amsterdam and Brussels. These cases are selected because of their similar urban growth yet diverse policy and governance contexts. We contend that comparing how urban policies try to address this dilemma can provide a deeper understanding of how policy strategies affect land-use change. The results show that densification indeed decreases the quantity (Amsterdam: −4.7% Brussels: −11.9%), average size (A: −3.1% B: −25.6%) and connectivity of urban greenspaces. Observed land-use changes seem disconnected from purported urban greenspace policies, whereas urban development plans seem to dominate changes in greenspace quantity and form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food production and consumption related environmental challenges have come to the forefront of policy discourse in the past decade. This links primarily to concerns in terms of agriculture fueling climate change, but also in terms of long-term food security and availability for growing populations. A proposed solution to these pressures at the urban scale is Vertical Farming (VF), in the understanding of this article, a high-yield form of controlled environment agriculture, staked on multiple layers, which promises to produce leafy greens and vegetables within cities, with potential to reduce the resource intensity of urban food production and consumption. The particular contextual conditions required for VF to be sustainable have not as of yet been holistically assessed. Accordingly, by analyzing these contextual conditions in the Global North, this research assesses how VF can be up-scaled for the sake of sustainability – particularly climate mitigation – by viewing urban food systems through the Multi-Level Perspective. The article presents three findings in relation to the up-scaling potential of VF. Firstly, singular VF interventions in cities should have further functions integrated at the scale of the farm for the sake of viability. Secondly, VF interventions carry the most potential for climate mitigation if they are viewed through urban-level systemic food planning, which sheds light on the contextual conditions needed for VF to contribute to sustainability. Finally, the globalized dynamics of the neoliberal political economy, and in turn the localized effects for food systems, have implications for VF that need to be taken into consideration in framing up-scaling policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social and institutional context of infrastructure planning has shifted tremendously over recent decades. From top–down implementation, infrastructure planners are now forced to incorporate the demands and wishes of citizens and other external stakeholders. This paper adopts the analytical perspective of institutional work to analyse how a number of Dutch infrastructure planning organisations try to remain in control over these changes in their institutional context. Building on social systems thinking, this paper distinguishes three environments in which this control can play out: the internal environment over which an organisation has complete control, an external environment over which an organisation has little control and a transactional environment where the organisation, through its interactions with other actors, can influence institutional development. The paper concludes that while most forms of institutional work applied by the infrastructure planning organisations under study aim to change the organisations' interactions with stakeholders, the forms of institutional work are predominantly located within the internal environment of planning organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]