Landscape ecological enhancement and environmental inequalities in peri-urban areas, using flora as a socio-ecological indicator – The case of the Greater Paris area

The peri-urban areas of European metropolises offer a diversity of vegetated spaces – forests, agricultural land, abandoned or preserved natural areas – that receive ecological attention from city dwellers. This attention varies locally depending on the socio-economic characteristics of the population and raises the question of ecological inequalities in accessing different types of landscapes. Once the target of a green belt project that was never carried out, the peri-urban areas of the Paris region have undergone different trajectories according to local biophysical, social and political characteristics. This article shows how these characteristics interconnect and explain the ecological enhancement or abandonment of landscapes in a complex urban region using flora as an indicator. To do so, (1) we build a landscape analysis at different scales, (2) we collect botanical data at 252 sites and analyse it through statistical multivariate analysis, and (3) we correlate the plant communities’ spatial distribution to socio-economic contexts and planning projects. The results show that the socio-political dimension is decisive for understanding how and why vegetated areas are enhanced or abandoned and helps to correlate ecological preservation and socio-economic contexts locally. Flora reflects these dynamics: the type of management of forest or arable lands, as well as a mixed deprivation/luxury effect on flora. Peri-urban vegetated landscapes are a target for local political projects that may lessen environmental inequalities, or conversely and more insidiously, may perpetuate them.