Isabelle Anguelovski

Autonomous University of Barcelona | UAB · Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies (ICTA)

Municipal governments are increasingly promoting green climate-adaptive infrastructure projects to address climate threats and impacts while maximizing multiple socio-environmental benefits. Although these strategies are repeatedly advanced as “win-win” solutions for all, recent literature has drawn attention to numerous negative effects, especiall...

Through climate adaptation planning cities are transforming places and relations, most recently via green climate resilient infrastructure (GRI). Yet, GRI’s incorporation into existing, racialized infrastructure systems of urban development, regeneration and finance has raised questions about the socio-cultural impacts and justice dimensions of rec...

Research shows mental health is impacted by poor-quality physical and social-environmental conditions. Subsequently state-led redevelopment/regeneration schemes focus on improving the physical environment, to provide better social-environmental conditions, addressing spatial and socioeconomic inequities thus improving residents' health. However, re...

Urban greening is critical for human health and climate adaptation and mitigation goals, but its financing tends to prioritize economic growth imperatives. This often results in elite value and rent capture and unjust greening outcomes. We argue that cities can, however, take action to ensure more socially just impacts of green financing. Financing...

This book uses a unique typology of ten core drivers of injustice to explore and question common assumptions around what urban sustainability means, how it can be implemented, and how it is manifested in or driven by urban interventions that hinge on claims of sustainability. Aligned with critical environmental justice studies, the book highlights...

Findings on the relationship between play spaces and childhood overweight and obesity are mixed and scarce. This study aimed to investigate the associations between residential proximity to play spaces and the risk of childhood overweight or obesity and potential effect modifiers. This longitudinal study included children living in the city of Barc...

Introduction: Although cities globally are increasingly mobilizing re-naturing projects to address diverse urban socio-environmental and health challenges, there is mounting evidence that these interventions may also be linked to the phenomenon known as green gentrification. However, to date the empirical evidence on the relationship between greens...

Cities’ increasing vulnerability to the effects of climate change calls for greater attention to urban transformational adaptation as a path towards environmental and social resilience. Through the initial Superblock project in the Poblenou neighbourhood of Barcelona – whereby traffic pacification is combined with new open space and transit network...

In an increasingly urbanized world, where cardiometabolic issues in cities have raised public health concerns, urban greenness is known to be beneficial for some of the most common health issues. However, the examination of the contribution of sex and gender regarding the benefits of urban greenness for people’s cardiometabolic health is lacking. F...

Urban sustainability has often been accused of tending mostly to its environmental and economic dimensions, neglecting or marginalising issues of justice. Simultaneously, the European Union has been increasingly funding research explicitly focused on the intersection of justice, sustainability and the city. The role of such research in furthering o...

Heavily featured over the last few years in global research and policy agreements, Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) remain however exposed to much debate over the ways their current design and ability to achieve both environmental goals and social needs. As they become mainstream climate mitigation and adaptation options, their capacity to deliver expe...

Although urban greening is universally recognized as an essential part of sustainable and climate-responsive cities, a growing literature on green gentrification argues that new green infrastructure, and greenspace in particular, can contribute to gentrification, thus creating social and racial inequalities in access to the benefits of greenspace a...

Green or environmental gentrification has been shown to be directly related to residential physical and socio-cultural displacement and insecure housing conditions among socially or racially underprivileged residents, with clear related health impacts. In this context, those vulnerable groups become unable to benefit from the social, well-being, an...

In the movement towards building greener and more sustainable cities, real estate developers are increasingly embracing not only green building construction but broader strategies and action related to urban greening. To date, their motivations and role in this broader urban greening dynamic remains underexplored, yet essential to dissect how green...

Local governments around the world are formulating different ways to address climate change. However, the compounding and overlapping vulnerabilities of historically marginalized residents are commonly tackled in a fragmented manner by conventional adaptation approaches, even when justice is presented as an overarching goal of these plans. In respo...

Covid-19 is undoubtedly a regional crisis, spatially uneven in its impacts. While it is too soon to talk about a transition ‘from pandemic to recovery’, with attention switching to regional development priorities and the implications of Covid-19 on regional policy, planning and development, increasingly we will need to focus on regions in their rec...

This report provides a compilation of findings on the community-based initiatives (CBIs) studied in the context of the European Research Project TESS. It briefly explains the way in which the partners collected the interview data across 6 countries. It also describes the methodological and participatory process by which the analysis was planned and...

Cities are projected to hold two-thirds of the world's population by 2050 under a period of intensifying climate change. Ensuring sustainable, climate-resilient, and equitable cities will require moving beyond incremental adaptation to transformative adaptation. What does transformative adaptation mean for cities, and how can it be achieved, partic...

As global cities grapple with the increasing challenge of gentrification and displacement, research in public health and urban geography has presented growing evidence about the negative impacts of those unequal urban changes on the health of historically marginalized groups. Yet, to date comprehensive research about the variety of health impacts a...

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has compromised the ‘healthy cities’ vision, as it has unveiled the need to give more prominence to caring tasks while addressing intersectional social inequities and environmental injustices. However, much-needed transdisciplinary approaches to study and address post-COVID-19 healthy cities challenges and agendas have...

The concept of ecosystem services (ES) has mainstreamed as an interdisciplinary framework in the urban sustainability and resilience agenda. While the uptake of ES in urban areas is deeply entangled with multiple values, trade-offs, institutions, management and planning approaches, there is still a lack of a comprehensive and systematic framework t...

As cities strive to protect vulnerable residents from climate risks and impacts, recent studies have identified a challenging link between these measures and gentrification processes that reconfigure, but do not necessarily eliminate, climate insecurities. Green resilient infrastructure (GRI) may especially increase the vulnerability of lower incom...

Greenspace is widely related to mental health benefits, but this relationship may vary by social group. Gentrification, as linked to processes of unequal urban development and conflict, potentially impacts health outcomes. This study explores the relationships between greenspace and mental health and between gentrification and mental health associa...

Parks are potential key urban assets for improved population health; however, their use is not equal among all social groups. Individual and contextual factors could influence residents' perceptions of parks and how they interact with and, eventually, benefit from them. The use of complementary methodologies provides a deeper understanding of the r...

Background Intraurban sociodemographic risk factors for COVID-19 have yet to be fully understood. We investigated the relationship between COVID-19 incidence and sociodemographic factors in Barcelona at a fine-grained geography. Methods This cross-sectional ecological study is based on 10 550 confirmed cases of COVID-19 registered during the first...

Background Cities are restoring existing natural outdoor environments (NOE) or creating new ones to address diverse socio-environmental and health challenges. The idea that NOE provide health benefits is supported by the therapeutic landscapes concept. However, several scholars suggest that NOE interventions may not equitably serve all urban reside...

Background To control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, countries around the world implemented lockdowns with varying intensities. Lockdowns, however, have been associated with a deterioration of mental health, including post-traumatic stress symptoms, anger and anxiety. Exposure to nature might reduce stress and provide relaxation opportunities....

The expanding reach of urban greening across the United States and beyond often materially and immaterially impacts communities of color, leading to displacement and decreased access to new urban amenities. While many scholars point to the persistence of racial inequality, we observe the urban greening orthodoxy in urban planning and development as...

With urban greening projects increasingly sparking conflicts with environmental and social activists, rail-to-park transformations reveal how ideas of modernity in urban planning enable the perfect “green growth machine.” Here, trains and connectivity—powerful symbols of Modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries—are interlaced with greening and sust...

On the one hand the Special Issue provides a diagnosis of the justice implications embedded in recent efforts to renature cities. Placed in the breadth of existing scholarship, it aims to explore the type of socio-environmental contradictions and contestations emerging through the deployment of nature-based solutions in a range of geographies. On t...

Urban outdoor play spaces are reported to improve children's health. However, there is little empirical evidence on the impact of outdoor play spaces on childhood mental and behavioral health. To fill this gap, we investigated the associations between residential proximity to outdoor play spaces and the prevalence of diagnosed mental and behavioral...

Theories of epidemiologic transition analyze the shift in causes of mortality due to changes in risk factors over time, and through processes of urbanization and development by comparing risk factors between countries or over time. These theories do not account for health inequities such as those resulting from environmental injustice, in which min...

How has urban greening related to the degree of whiteness in neighborhoods? The answer to this question provides an essential “historical diagnostic” that can be used to develop an approach to urban ecology which integrates racial and ethnic change into the planning for proposed interventions. In this paper we employ state sequence analysis to anal...

Goals and pathways to achieve sustainable urban development have multiple interlinkages with human health and wellbeing. However, these interlinkages have not been examined in depth in recent discussions on urban sustainability and global urban science. This paper fills that gap by elaborating in detail the multiple links between urban sustainabili...

A mounting body of research shows strong positive associations between urban nature and child well-being, including benefits related to mental and physical health. However, there is also evidence that children are spending less time in natural environments than previous generations, especially those living in deprived neighborhoods. To date, most s...

Nature-based solutions have recently been embraced as one route towards simultaneously addressing urban environmental and social problems, but an emerging agenda has sought to ask whether and how the ‘greening’ of cities may actually reinforce inequalities or lead to new forms of social exclusion. Using comparative case-study analysis, this paper e...

Urban gardens, consolidating spaces as new urban commons, are faced with the contradiction and challenge of being embedded in neoliberal landscapes of urban governance. While their transformative and justice potential has often, and rightly, been celebrated –offering new pathways towards food security and sovereignty; serving social empowerment and...

Background: The number of urban community gardens, including those on rooftops, is increasing. However, few studies have explored the benefits of these gardens for people with intellectual disabilities or mental health disorders. We evaluated the association between urban rooftop gardening and quality of life of individuals with moderate to very m...

The extent to which new greening initiatives contribute to gentrification processes in urban areas is of rising interest to researchers and policymakers, but the precise (and often intangible) aspects of green spaces that embed them within gentrification processes are not well understood. The Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) literature offers new...

Restrictions on the use of public space and physical distancing have been key policy measures to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 and protect public health. At the time of writing, one half of the world’s population has been asked to stay home and avoid many public places. What will be the long term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on public spa...

Planetary urbanization exacerbates the spread of infectious disease and the emergence of pandemics. As COVID-19 cases continue to swell in cities around the world, the pandemic has visibilized urban health inequities. In the Global North, emerging trends show that lower income residents are often at greater risk for infection and death due to COVID...

The global COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people’s work-life balance across the world. For academics, confinement policies enacted by most countries have implied a sudden switch to home-work, a transition to online teaching and mentoring, and an adjustment of research activities. In this article we discuss how the COVID-19 crisis is affecting our p...

Supported by a large body of scholarship, it is increasingly orthodox practice for cities to deploy urban greening interventions to address diverse socioenvironmental challenges, from protecting urban ecosystems to enhancing built environments and climate resilience or improving health outcomes. In this article, we expand the theoretical boundaries...

Restrictions on the use of public space and social distancing have been key policy measures to reduce the transmission of SAR-CoV-2 and protect public health. At the time of writing, one half of the world's population has been asked to stay home and avoid many public places. What will be the long term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on public spac...

As the vulnerability of cities to the effects of climate change increases, so does the urgency of and interest in urban transformational adaptation. To date, however, research has not looked empirically at how "everyday" urban politics shape the multi-scalar political constraints that prevent municipalities from implementing transformational adapta...

‘Nature-based solutions’ is the new jargon used to promote ideas of urban sustainability, which is gaining traction in both academic and policy circles, especially in the European Union. Through an analysis of the definitions and discourse around nature-based solutions, we discern a number of assumptions stemming from positivist science that are em...

This paper examines recent urban green amenities directed toward children and families and develops a novel understanding of the ways in which children's socio-natures are made/unmade through such interventions. We employ ethnographic and archival analysis in two new parks – Poble Nou and Nou Barris – in Barcelona to examine how a particular type o...

Increasingly, greening in cities across the Global North is enmeshed in strategies for attracting capital investment, raising the question: for whom is the future green city? Through exploring the relationship between cities’ green boosterist rhetoric, affordability and social equity considerations within greening programmes, this paper examines th...

While recent scholarship on place attachment has focused on the social construction of the people-place relationship, few studies to date have examined the role that (1) processes for neighborhood reconstruction and designing public space and (2) the configuration of the public space itself play in generating community identity and place attachment...

This paper explores how to push the field of regional studies beyond its present institutional, conceptual and methodological borders. It does this from five perspectives: innovation and competitiveness; globalization and urbanization; social and environmental justice; local and regional development; and industrial policy. It argues that the future...

As resilience strategies become a prominent orthodoxy in city planning, green infrastructure is increasingly deployed to enhance protection from climate risks and impacts. Yet, little is known about the social and racial impacts of such interventions citywide. In response, our study uses a quantitative and spatial analytical approach to assess whet...

In global cities, the impacts of gentrification on the lives and well-being of socially vulnerable residents have occupied political agendas. Yet to date, research on how gentrification affects a multiplicity of health outcomes has remained scarce. While much of the nascent quantitative research helps to identify associations between gentrification...

Urban green space is demonstrated to benefit human health. We evaluated whether neighborhood gentrification status matters when considering the health benefits of green space, and whether the benefits are received equitably across racial and socioeconomic groups. Greater exposure to active green space was significantly associated with lower odds of...