Ecological improvement is one of the most unstable categories in contemporary urbanism because every gain arrives inside a field already structured by property, governance, species, infrastructure and unequal exposure. A new park may increase thermal comfort and land value at the same time; a flood-adaptive landscape may reduce runoff while excluding the experiential knowledge of residents most exposed to flooding; a highly planted square may support some taxa while displacing others; a green retrofit may increase biodiversity while accelerating real-estate investment. The green city is therefore not a city in which environmental benefits accumulate linearly but one in which ecological consequences are redistributed. Quinton and Nesbitt’s review of green, environmental, ecological, climate, carbon and resilience gentrification is revealing precisely because the proliferation of terms points to a common political difficulty: sustainability agendas can participate in the production of space for progressively more affluent users even when their declared objectives are public benefit. Their classificatory proposal of “sustainability gentrification” exposes the structural continuity behind fragmented disciplinary vocabularies.
Anguelovski and colleagues provide the comparative correction to any deterministic reading. Across twenty-six North American and European cities, greening increasingly attracts new residential development, but the social effects depend on housing institutions and historical urban structures. Amsterdam’s housing protections moderate exclusionary effects, while Atlanta’s history of racial segregation allows green investment to intensify existing inequities. Ecological intervention therefore operates through institutional context rather than outside it. Droste and Gianoli reach a parallel conclusion in Berlin through fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. No single park morphology, transport condition or greening type consistently generates gentrification. Outcomes emerge through combinations of neighbourhood characteristics, especially pre-existing green availability. What appears from a design perspective as a bounded intervention is politically a relational event. Mohtat and Khirfan push this argument upstream into the production of knowledge itself. In Thorncliffe Park, flood-adaptive green infrastructure is shaped by technical and economic rationales that systematically fail to recognise residents’ experiential knowledge of vulnerability, runoff and climate risk. Epistemic injustice becomes spatial because those whose knowledge is discredited are also those whose environments are governed without them. The planning problem is therefore not only who receives green infrastructure but whose account of the city is admitted before siting and investment decisions are fixed. Huang and colleagues expose a different but related epistemic instability through sensing. Their Guangzhou study compares satellite NDVI with street-level Green View Index and shows that the urban environment changes according to the observational apparatus used to represent it. Aerial sensing captures canopy and vegetation density; street imagery captures greenery encountered at pedestrian level, including shrubs and green walls. Both correlate with lower land-surface temperature, yet they reveal different spatial patterns. Urban nature is thus partly produced by its measurement regime. The city seen from above is not the city experienced from the street, and neither can substitute for the other without loss. The same problem becomes multispecies in Fairbairn and colleagues’ analysis of 103 Munich squares. Public space, usually described through human programme, access or morphology, is shown to be a set of habitat decisions affecting birds, pollinators, arthropods, bats, mammals, bryophytes and spontaneous vegetation. Different taxa respond to different combinations of lawns, shrubs, trees, people, pets and artificial light. “Greenness” is insufficient as an ecological descriptor because species perceive and use the designed city through distinct environmental requirements. Perrelet and colleagues consequently propose a more radical formulation for blue-green infrastructure: engineering both for biodiversity and with biodiversity. The shift refuses the conventional hierarchy in which living systems are valued because they improve stormwater treatment, cooling or resilience for humans. Biodiversity becomes simultaneously an agent of infrastructural performance and an objective with its own spatial requirements. Trade-offs become unavoidable and therefore designable. Leaf litter can support organisms while obstructing drainage; pollutant capture can improve water treatment while introducing ecological toxicity. A multispecies infrastructure is not harmonious by definition. It is a negotiated technical ecology. These papers collectively destroy the innocence of green improvement. Environmental value cannot be understood before asking which observer, institution, species, resident or market defines the improvement and which consequence is being measured.
The operative consequence is to treat the urban ecological archive as a system for tracing distributions rather than collecting virtues. A conventional corpus would place these studies under separate headings—green gentrification, climate adaptation, remote sensing, biodiversity, blue-green infrastructure—and thereby reproduce the disciplinary divisions that hide their common operation. What joins them is the conversion of ecological intervention into uneven consequence. In Socioplastics, each source can therefore be understood as documenting a transformation between regimes: green amenity becomes property value; experiential knowledge becomes excluded testimony or planning evidence; vegetation becomes NDVI or Green View Index; square morphology becomes habitat; biodiversity becomes engineering performance; flood adaptation becomes a struggle over credibility. The archive should preserve these transformations as first-class relations. Such a structure would distinguish an intervention’s declared function from its distributed effects and would allow the same urban object to be followed across ecological, political, economic and epistemic domains. A park could appear simultaneously as cooling infrastructure, biodiversity habitat, speculative amenity, social refuge and displacement pressure without forcing those realities into a single judgement. This is not relativism. It is greater causal precision. The city becomes legible as a field in which effects travel across systems that use different metrics and possess different powers. The distinction also changes what counts as evidence. Mohtat and Khirfan show that testimony and participatory mapping can reveal vulnerabilities absent from technocratic valuation. Huang demonstrates that sensing position alters the measurable environment. Fairbairn makes nonhuman presence visible through taxon-specific sampling. Anguelovski combines city-wide quantitative relationships with qualitative fieldwork because neither scale is sufficient alone. Droste uses configurational analysis because linear causality cannot describe conjunctural urban outcomes. Method follows ontology: a heterogeneous city requires multiple ways of knowing because no single epistemic apparatus can contain all the relations through which ecological change becomes consequential. Socioplastics can make this multiplicity operational without dissolving distinctions by indexing provenance, method, scale, affected agents, spatial mechanism and downstream consequence. The political strength of such an archive lies in making reversibility possible. A claim about “successful greening” could be traced back to the metric that defines success; a biodiversity gain could be checked against the taxa measured; a cooling claim could be distinguished between aerial and pedestrian greenery; a justice claim could be connected to housing protections or resident participation; a blue-green intervention could be examined for ecological trade-offs hidden by engineering performance. Public legibility would then mean access not only to conclusions but to the conditions under which conclusions were produced. This is especially important because the language of sustainability routinely compresses conflict into universal benefit. The archive must do the opposite: preserve the fractures through which ecological value becomes contested. The most useful urban ecological knowledge is therefore not a catalogue of solutions but a map of consequences, showing how improvement can simultaneously repair one relation and extract from another. In Socioplastics, that movement condenses as ExtractionDrift.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher working across urbanism, spatial epistemology, ecological infrastructure and public knowledge systems through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
Anguelovski, I. et al. (2024) ‘Does greening generate exclusive residential real estate development? Contrasting experiences from North America and Europe’, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 101, 128376. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2024.128376.
Droste, J. and Gianoli, A. (2025) ‘Green gentrification: a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of greened neighbourhoods in Berlin’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 68(13), pp. 3193–3218. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2024.2343059.
Fairbairn, A.J. et al. (2024) ‘Urban biodiversity is affected by human-designed features of public squares’, Nature Cities, 1, pp. 706–715. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00126-5.
Huang, Z. et al. (2025) ‘Exploring the influence of urban green space and urban morphology on urban heat islands using street view and satellite imagery’, Scientific Reports, 15, 23759. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-07904-8.
Mohtat, N. and Khirfan, L. (2023) ‘Epistemic justice in flood-adaptive green infrastructure planning: The recognition of local experiential knowledge in Thorncliffe Park, Toronto’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 238, 104834. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104834.
Perrelet, K., Moretti, M., Dietzel, A., Altermatt, F. and Cook, L.M. (2024) ‘Engineering blue-green infrastructure for and with biodiversity in cities’, npj Urban Sustainability, 4, 27. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-024-00163-y.
Quinton, J. and Nesbitt, L. (2024) ‘Different names for the same thing? A systematic review of green, environmental, eco-, ecological, climate, carbon, and resilience gentrification’, Cities, 151, 105107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2024.105107.
