Green Improvement Is Never Neutral: Epistemic Justice, Gentrification, Multispecies Public Space and Thermal Visibility (Mohtat, Anguelovski, Quinton, Droste, Fairbairn, Perrelet, Huang) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

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. 

THE EUROPEAN CITY DOES NOT HAVE ONE NATURE: THERMAL FIELDS, ECOLOGICAL SCALES, HEALTH EFFECTS AND PLANNING DEVICES IN MADRID, ROME, PARIS, BERLIN, LONDON AND OSLO · LAPIEZA LAB · ANTO LLOVERAS · SOCIOPLASTICS · 2026

European metropolitan nature becomes legible only when the category “green space” is broken into the spatial, ecological, social and institutional relations that make environmental capacity operative. The ten studies assembled across Madrid, Rome, Paris, Berlin, London and Oslo do not converge on a universal green metric; they progressively dismantle one. Madrid first shows that landscape performance exceeds cadastral boundaries. Aram and colleagues measure the cooling influence of a 125-hectare urban park through mobile observations and perceived thermal comfort, demonstrating that distance from the park is associated with changes in air temperature, physiological equivalent temperature and bodily perception. The park is therefore a thermal field rather than an isolated polygon.