‘The Green Areas Are Out of Our Reach’: Racialisation,Erasure and Resistance in UK Urban Greening Initiatives

Abstract

Commitments to Build Back Greener remain prominent in international approaches to post-pandemic economic recovery. Yet, few studies have considered how the associated processes of valuing, preserving and erasing green spaces in urban greening redevelopment projects are inflected by racialised inequalities. Drawing on 29 interviews with policy practitioners and racially minoritised residents in Oldham (North-West England), this article contests discursive framings of greening projects as vehicles of equality and conviviality, by utilising the lens of racial capitalism. In doing so, the article identifies two processes of symbolic and material erasure in urban greening redevelopment strategies: the overwriting of racial signifiers in local imaginaries of place and the vulnerability to development of urban greenery in racialised localities. The article further documents resistance via the reclaiming of green space by racialised residents and sheds lights on the under-explored synergies of ‘race’ and urban greening initiatives.

Keywords

green space race racial capitalism urban development urban greening

Introduction

Strategies of urban greening have remained prominent in international and domestic approaches to post-pandemic recovery, with urban planners urged to reconsider the links between economic recovery and the preservation of the natural environment (United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 2023). The United Kingdom (UK) provides an apt example of governmental ambitions to synthesise urban greening initiatives and post-pandemic recovery efforts, with the UK Prime Minister (PM), affirming the UK’s continued commitment to a green recovery: ‘Protecting the environment is an unequivocal moral good . . . We will drive investment to support green jobs and green growth across the country’ (HM Government, 2023: 4). A number of local authority ‘Green Recovery Funds’ were established and linked to enhancing the local natural environment via job creation, private investment and urban development (HM Government, 2023). The preservation and management of green spaces was thus represented as a ‘moral duty’, offering an example as to how ‘the benign symbolism of nature . . . helps the production of green space proceed in ways that appear unequivocally virtuous’ (Loughran, 2020: 2335).

In announcing the UK’s post-pandemic recovery strategies, the PM discursively linked economic growth with the preservation, enhancement and utilisation of green spaces in urban and rural localities. However, such representations of urban greening also obscure how the associated economic, ecological and social benefits can be unequally distributed, and may indeed exacerbate existing disparities and vulnerabilities (Anguelovski et al., 2019; Scheurenbrand et al., 2024). In this regard, there is a dearth of research that attends to the symbolic and material manifestations of ‘race’ in processes of UK urban greening. We do know, however, that racial inequalities in access to green space have been shown to persist in the UK context (Harrison et al., 2023), with those who are racially minoritised being twice as likely as white residents to live in areas in England with the lowest amount of green space (Zylva et al., 2020).

This article provides an in-depth exploration of the processes of racial extraction and erasure that were identified in contemporary urban greening initiatives. Erasure and extraction, in this instance, are understood as a method through which ‘white places develop, through routine extraction of resources and power, enabled through the devaluation of Black places via seemingly race neutral structures’ (Purifoy and Seamster, 2021: 50). In so doing, the article draws on the framework of racial capitalism, a theory of increased significance in geographical and sociological thought (Danewid, 2020), which attends to how processes of capital accumulation and racism are mutually intertwined. It demonstrates how green recovery approaches to economic and urban development can obscure and extend the racialised inequalities that are interwoven in the valuation, preservation and erasure of green spaces in urban areas. The article consolidates and enhances the growing interest in how greening projects can perpetuate inequalities (Scheurenbrand et al., 2024), including in how urban greening initiatives are frequently premised as a cultural and economic fix, despite the resultant disparities produced (Garcia-Lamarca et al., 2021; Loughran, 2020).

Focusing on the post-industrial borough of Oldham (North-West England), and its recent utilisation of an urban greening development approach, this article identifies and evaluates the racialised inequalities interwoven in such initiatives. In so doing, it considers how (and in what ways) racial disparities in access to, and experiences of, green spaces traverse initiatives of urban greening. Three racialised processes of erasure, extraction and resistance are identified: first, the overwriting of industrial histories and racial signifiers in imaginaries of place; second, the vulnerability to urban development of urban greenery in racialised localities; and, third, residents’ subjective perceptions of symbolic bordering, and their resultant racialised resistances via reclaiming green spaces.

Racial Capitalism and Urban Greening

Urban landscapes are well established as sites within which racialised inequalities, discourses and ideologies are architecturally encoded (Finney and Simpson, 2009; Haycox et al., 2024). Representations of urban spaces have been shown in different contexts to operate as vehicles for narrating ‘race’ (Byrne et al., 2022), leading to pathologised depictions of certain places, and justifications for either institutional regulation or erasure (Rhodes et al., 2019). The theoretical lens of racial capitalism offers a powerful frame for further investigation into how processes of racialised extraction, capital accumulation and the production of differential value operate in contemporary urban development initiatives (Martinez, 2023). Racial capitalism positions racism and capitalism as mutually intertwined historically and in contemporary systems, offering insights into how social and economic value are extracted through the appropriation of specific (racialised) spaces (Robinson, 1983), gains that are disproportionately distributed. For example, strategies of racialised extraction have been shown to function in urban development initiatives by devaluing and remapping existing (racialised) spaces towards ‘white’ middle-class consumer habits, leading to the displacement of racialised residents (Danewid, 2020).

Yet, the extent to which urban greening initiatives are implicated in processes of racial capitalism and value extraction remain hitherto under-explored. In contrast with dominant imaginaries of green spaces as sites of benign conviviality (Loughran, 2020), urban greenery strategies remain located in the intersecting power structures that have been identified to shape (and to be shaped by) urban landscapes (Fernandez et al., 2021). Urban greening initiatives have thus been shown to be entangled with rationales of urban development and processes of racial extraction, including the de-valuing of racialised spaces to facilitate resource extraction and increased land value (Garcia-Lamarca et al., 2021; Martinez, 2023). By means of standard economic planning (Purifoy and Seamster, 2021), the utilisation of an urban green brand has been used as a tool for attracting capital investment (Garcia-Lamarca et al., 2021), with the surplus financial and social benefits generated by urban greening development projects unevenly distributed (Adalet, 2022). In these ways, by drawing on insights from racial capitalism literature, this article centres questions of racial extraction, and discursive and material valuation in understandings of contemporary urban greening initiatives.

Policy Contexts

Located in the North-West of England, Oldham is positioned at the periphery of Manchester City Centre. As a post-industrial town, the area’s historical reliance on cotton production peaked in 1890, and it remains known in contemporary discourse as a former mill town (Rhodes et al., 2019). The town’s industrial history can thus be placed in a broader global colonial economy, in which industrial capitalism drove an expansion in transatlantic slave labour and regimes of exploitation linked to the colonial cotton production (see Harvey, 2019).

In the early 20th century, Oldham became a subsequent destination for postcolonial citizens seeking employment. The newly arrived British South Asian population primarily settled in the localities of Glodwick, Werneth, Coppice and Westwood, due to the proximity of housing to the textile mills (Miah et al., 2020). The continuation of racially exclusionary policies in employment and housing throughout the late 20th century further contributed to the distinct geographies of the borough, with deep racial and class inequalities remaining pronounced in current times (Rhodes et al., 2019). In 2021, 24.6% of Oldham residents self-identified as ‘Asian, Asian British or Asian Welsh’, with 68.1% self-identifying as ‘White’ and 3.4% self-identifying as ‘Black’ (Office for National Statistics (ONS), 2021).

In stark contrast, localities on the outskirts of the Oldham borough such as Saddleworth South contain a low proportion of residents accessing social housing (6.4%), a high proportion of residents identifying as ‘White’ (97.5%) and large, open areas of green space and heather moorland (Oldham Council, 2019). It is in this context that recent initiatives have been introduced to develop Oldham as the ‘greenest borough’, an approach that aims to address local inequality, economic growth and residents’ health, via ‘championing a green recovery . . . where everybody can thrive’ (Oldham Council, 2021a).

The contemporary contexts of housing policy and urban greening initiatives in Oldham are further shaped by broader regional and national approaches. Despite successive Conservative government failures to meet existing targets, a quota of building 300,000 new houses annually was re-introduced in 2019 (Swinney and Breach, 2020). In response to these house building demands, Oldham’s local Council institutionalised a policy that allocated sites of previously developed land (‘brownfield sites’) for new housing, rather than green spaces that are protected from development (‘Green Belt lands’).

In the context of Oldham (North-West England), existing brownfield sites tend to be located primarily in low-income areas with a high proportion of racially minoritised residents, on the periphery of the town centre. In comparison, the Green Belt sites that are removed as sites viable for development in Oldham are in districts such as Saddleworth, which can be described as a demographically ‘white’ and more affluent locality, with competitive, high-demand housing markets. The racialised character of green space distribution, preservation and erasure in the local context of Oldham can be mapped onto broader international systems, in which socially and economically marginalised groups have been evidenced to be more likely to live in denser and less green neighbourhoods (Anguelovski et al., 2019; Scheurenbrand et al., 2024).

Methodological Implications

Contemporary green spaces in the borough of Oldham have long been politicised sites shaped by dynamics of ‘race’, class and coloniality. One such example is the creation of Alexandra Park, a green space situated on the periphery of the town centre, in Glodwick. The park was first developed in 1862 by Oldham Council as part of an initiative to generate employment for local residents working in the mills, due to a depression in the global colonial economy of the textile industry between 1862 and 1863 (see Harvey, 2019). The formation of the park itself was accordingly shaped by power inequalities in relation to residents’ relationship with the space, as either a location of leisure and relaxation, or as a site of labour. Oldham, similarly to many UK towns, has a long history in which local urban geographies are shaped by international processes of racialised extraction and erasure (Miah et al., 2020).

While this article provides an in-depth exploration of racialised processes of urban greening in Oldham, the data analysed were collected as part of a wider project. The original research that this article is based on compared and contrasted the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on racially minoritised residents’ housing experiences in Oldham (England) and Glasgow (Scotland). The two locations were selected due to both the similarities and differences in their housing systems and national contexts. Attention to the symbolic positioning and material inequalities associated with both locations was drawn on in analysis and NVivo coding, to consider how post-pandemic economic recovery ambitions shaped the lived experiences of racially minoritised residents.

The empirical data drawn on in the broader project were based on qualitative interviews with two groups: local policy practitioners and racially minoritised residents. Data collection occurred between August 2021 and February 2022 and purposive snowball sampling was utilised to target expert practitioners and local residents. Interviews were conducted with expert housing practitioners at multiple levels, including those based in statutory authorities, non-governmental specialist housing organisations, anti-racist activist groups and private housing management companies. Such individuals were involved (to different extents and purposes), in designing and implementing housing policy. A total of 47 interviews (with 51 adult individuals) were undertaken as part of the larger project (18 interviews in Glasgow East/North-East; 29 interviews in Oldham). The duration of interviews varied from 35 minutes to two hours, but the majority of interviews lasted for approximately one hour, and all in-depth interviews were audio-recorded.

This article draws exclusively on data developed from the 29 semi-structured interviews in Oldham. A total of 17 interviews were conducted with racially minoritised residents living in Oldham, and 12 interviews were undertaken with expert housing practitioners working in the borough. The racially minoritised residents interviewed were primarily based on the periphery of Oldham city centre and resided in localities identified as brownfield sites. The age of the racially minoritised participants that were interviewed ranged from 19–56. A large majority of expert practitioner interviewees self-identified as ‘White’, and also lived in Oldham. The method of thematic analysis was utilised to examine interview data on the housing experiences of racially minoritised residents (see Strauss and Corbin, 1990), and a coding matrix was developed using NVivo12. Interview data were further supplemented by an extensive desk-based analysis of grey literature to evaluate the policy contexts of regeneration and urban greening initiatives in both Oldham and Glasgow. Interview participants were all adults and the research received full ethical approval from the University Ethics Committee.

Findings and Discussion

Constructing a ‘Green Brand’: Racialised Imaginaries of Place

This section identifies and evaluates the use of urban greening initiatives as a source of place-based rebranding in Oldham. It begins with an overview of the new ‘green’ brand that is being utilised to distance Oldham from stigmatising ascriptions of the borough as a site of racial conflict and deprivation. Histories of local industry in inner urban areas are shown to be concealed in these strategic imaginaries, and are inadvertently replaced with racialised representations of green spaces in primarily ‘white’ localities. Narratives of ‘greening’ in Oldham are thus interrogated as shaped by whiteness, due to the de-emphasising of racialised and minoritised neighbourhoods, and the simultaneous hyper-visibility of ‘white’, upper-middle-class localities. This section then turns to map the material consequences that result from such strategies, whereby policies are institutionalised to preserve the highly valued green spaces based in ‘white’ localities, with industrial heritage brownfield sites (primarily consisting of mill buildings in inner urban areas) allocated instead for urban development. The concealment of histories of local industry in imaginaries of place are shown to de-emphasise narratives of ‘race’ in descriptions of contemporary Oldham, strategies that are reinforced by the removal of the racialised signifiers of historical mill buildings from the landscape. The discussion elaborates on how the construction of an urban green brand is inflected by structures of whiteness (Garcia-Lamarca et al., 2021), processes that are shown to lead to material consequences in the form of the erasure of both histories of local mill industry and the architecture itself.

Oldham has long been represented as a space of racial and class conflict in media and political discourse. Practitioners operating within the borough are therefore required to navigate such externally imposed labels in their access to funding initiatives and in institutional responses (Haycox, 2023; Miah et al., 2020). The practitioners interviewed consistently perceived processes of rebranding as within their institutional remit, as demonstrated by Stephen’s own experience as a local housing practitioner: ‘Since the riots, Oldham has got this really bad name. To shift that name, it didn’t come overnight’ (Stephen, 2021, Housing Practitioner). Racialised neighbourhoods situated on the periphery of the town were primarily identified by both practitioners and residents as targeted by stigmatising representations:

People say Oldham, you’re thinking ‘Oh, f*cking hell . . . it’s rough in Oldham, [in racialised neighbourhoods]’ . . . That stigma’s still there, isn’t it? . . . And to be honest with you, the nicest people, the richest people, live in Oldham. You won’t believe it. (Mustafa, 2021, Resident)

Stories of place have been shown to often operate as vehicles for narratives of ‘race’, endowing sites with particular identities and racialised ideas, and shaping how practitioners respond to (or erase) perceived social problems (Byrne et al., 2022; Donnelly and Gamsu, 2022). James worked as a social housing practitioner and summarised such sentiments in the following manner: ‘People need to understand that, certainly in Oldham, race, ethnicity, it’s not the common denominator in everything that we have to talk about’ (James, 2021, Housing Practitioner).

While urban greening initiatives are frequently presented as a win–win situation for all, these processes can also exacerbate existing inequalities (Loughran, 2020). In the case of Oldham, the strategy of rebranding the borough often sought to redirect attention from inner urban areas associated with racialised minorities, and the linked histories of local industry. Jake has lived in Oldham for the majority of his life, and worked for a housing non-governmental organisation (NGO) that provided regional support to residents based in the North-West. His discussion emphasised how processes of rebranding Oldham fixated on outlying, green spaces, home to more affluent, predominantly ‘white’ communities:

I don’t think [Oldham] promotes itself . . . There’s nothing in the town centre which shows that . . . Oldham was the biggest mill town on the planet for a generation . . . [People] don’t know the history of it all . . . Oldham tries to market itself massively on Saddleworth because it’s the Peak District, it’s very affluent, it’s very green. (Jake, 2021, Housing Practitioner)

The utilisation of a green urban brand has been shown in different international contexts to operate as a tool of place-based rebranding and regeneration (Garcia-Lamarca et al., 2021), as well as a method to develop a competitive housing market (Anguelovski et al., 2019). However, the erasure of stories of local industry in re-imaginings of Oldham pose interesting questions about how narratives of ‘race’ fit within descriptions of the borough. Racialised spaces are often subject to flattened depictions of criminality and cultural dysfunction (Byrne et al., 2022), and practitioners and local residents consistently resisted such representations, by drawing in part on the urban green brand. In parallel with Jake’s narrative of how localised histories of postcolonial migration are often obscured, another resident, Richard, concurred with this assessment:

With all the walking . . . I don’t have to go to the Lake District because I have it under my nose . . . It’s a tourist area, but we fail to promote that or propagate it properly, to show people Oldham . . . People don’t know Oldham . . . It was mill industry, you see, because Oldham contributed in the world economically, which people don’t know much about. (Richard, 2022, Resident)

As Park and Pellow (2011) illustrate in the US context, presentations of pristine landscapes suitable for tourism are, in part, reliant on the concealing of inequalities and local racialised labour. The promotion of urban greenery in practitioners’ narrations of Oldham tended to render green spaces in particular (‘white’) localities such as Saddleworth as hyper-visible, while de-emphasising racialised sites on the periphery of the town centre.

Narratives of urban greening in Oldham, and the associated high valuation of green spaces, manifested in material consequences in urban planning strategies. Owing to the aforementioned requirements of local councils to meet central government housing targets, and following consultations with residents across the borough, Oldham Council institutionalised an approach that prioritised preserving Green Belt land above brownfield sites:

We’re given a government target, which has recently been substantially increased, which is why we’ve got this problem with the Green Belt . . . So, we made a political decision that we will seek to build on . . . brownfield sites in Oldham town centre, as opposed to building on Green Belt. (Sarah, 2021, Practitioner)

While decisions to preserve Green Belt land were articulated in forms avoiding reference to ‘race’, these urban planning initiatives are shaped by prevailing material and symbolic geographies of place, in which such greenery is disproportionately based in ‘white’, economically privileged localities on the outlying areas of Oldham. As one resident explained: ‘In the centre of Oldham . . . you have a very different [racial] make-up to the outer ring, which is seen as the wealthier ring . . . Those outer wealthier rings . . . are almost totally white’ (Geoff, 2022, Practitioner).

The concealment of histories of local industry in imaginaries of place also manifested in strategies of urban planning. One example of such material erasure of local inner urban histories is the targeting of former industrial mill sites for demolition to facilitate urban development. Rationale for such erasure in urban planning decisions included the protection of the Green Belt land in primarily ‘white’ localities. As the strategy articulates: ‘The mill stock forms a fundamental part of Oldham’s historic environment . . . However . . . repurposed mill sites can potentially play an important role in accommodating future housing and . . . minimising the release of Green Belt land’ (Oldham Council, 2021b: 4). As Brahinsky et al. (2014: 1142) argue: ‘People of color must be written out of the landscape in order for the symbolic ideas of untouched nature to hold up.’ Rather than presenting a romanticised representation of colonial histories of the industrial cotton mills, our focus is on mapping the material consequences of developing an urban green brand, including the potential risks of removing racial signifiers from the landscape:

So the biggest thing now is more about preserving the green space, so you’ve got the Green Belt . . . but it’s always that way of we need more . . . affordable housing, we also need our green spaces . . . I think that strategy will be a government and a local council strategy where they’ll probably need to demolish urban areas and then rebuild on that area rather than saying: ‘OK, we’ll extend out into green areas.’ (Kate, 2022, Resident)

The identified strategy of demolishing ‘urban’ areas can be interpreted as a euphemism for the racialised neighbourhoods on the periphery of the town centre, geographies that have been targeted for development. The erasure of racialised localities to facilitate the preservation of Green Belt land in ‘white’ neighbourhoods can thus be contextualised in the broader operation of racial capitalism, in which urban greening initiatives risk erasing racialised places and residents in the pursuit of their goals (Martinez, 2023).

For Whom Are the ‘Green Spaces?’: Access to Green Spaces during COVID-19

This section identifies and evaluates racially minoritised residents’ perception of their access to, and experiences of, green spaces in Oldham. It demonstrates residents’ perceptions of their restricted access to large, well-maintained Green Belt land, and explores the resulting consequences in a COVID-19 context. Residents are shown to primarily access ‘patches’ of greenery in racialised and minoritised neighbourhoods, which are highly valued by locals, but are perceived as at risk of neglect, erasure and urban development in strategic planning initiatives. In so doing, we examine the perceived vulnerability of green spaces in inner urban areas to decline and potential erasure, in contrast with the protected Green Belt sites that are primarily located in ‘white’ upper-middle-class sites.

In the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Oldham Council have positioned strategies of urban greening as a key approach to post-pandemic recovery. A range of socio-economic and health benefits have been linked to this strategy, with the local Council emphasising their nuanced approach to greening initiatives:

Our plan [is] to make Oldham the greenest borough in Greater Manchester . . . We want cleaner air . . . This won’t be a one-size fits all strategy, we’ll adapt policies to suit different areas within the borough to benefit the people who live there. (Fifield, 2023)

However, for those living on the periphery of the town centre, racialised and classed barriers were consistently identified by residents as limiting their access to the well-maintained, larger spaces of Green Belt land within the borough. One resident, Mohammed, has lived in Oldham his entire life, and has occupied several senior positions in specialist housing organisations. Within the extract below he succinctly captures the racialised barriers whereby green spaces are ‘out of reach’ for minoritised residents, due to existing perceptions of community and geographical location:

The ‘green areas’ are out of our reach . . . if you go there, only far and few Asian people or Indian people you will find there. All will be host community people there or the rich people will be there . . . We take the dirty air in our lungs and they take the clean air in their lungs . . . If you [live in a racialised minority locality] . . . Do you think we don’t want clear air? . . . You can’t find a place which we in [racialised locality] have the so-called ‘green areas’. (Mohammed, 2021, Resident)

There has been limited engagement in the broader literature with how racialised geographies map minoritised residents’ access to green space in the UK, specifically, large, well-maintained, green spaces. However, as Gaber (2021) illustrates, racially discriminatory policies can proliferate through natural resources, even when articulated in de-racialised forms. Access to Green Belt land was shown in residents’ narratives to be demarcated racially, with associated health inequalities identified as perpetuated as a result.

While this topic is frequently neglected in UK contexts, the premise of COVID-19 has illuminated the racial inequalities inhering within access to green spaces (Harrison et al., 2023). Local housing practitioners emphasised the disparities experienced by those racially minoritised residents who are based on the periphery of the town centre, including both economic inequalities and the limited availability of green spaces within local vicinities. They acknowledged that the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 among those racialised and minoritised was partly due to a lack of access to outdoor space within the home, as well as in the local area. The limited physical access to green spaces locally was identified as of central importance in the context of COVID-19, given the levels of overcrowding facing many minoritised communities:

One of the biggest problems was that, especially in quite a densely populated area such as [locality] . . . If you don’t have an outdoor space where you can say: ‘Oh, you know, I’m going to get some fresh air’ . . . Not everybody can have that. (Mark, 2022, Resident and Housing Practitioner)

Other practitioners shared Mark’s sentiments of how limited access to green spaces contributed to racially minoritised residents’ disproportionate vulnerability to COVID-19 exposure. Kevin works for a housing association that operates in racialised neighbourhoods. In discussing the impact of COVID-19 on residents, he drew parallels between the different localities within the borough and experiences of overcrowding and limited access to outdoor green spaces:

When I go and look at the pandemic . . . people are dying who are coming from communities that are probably less well off than other communities, what’s the disproportionate effect on BME [black and minority ethnic] communities? [Saddleworth] . . . had like one case per 100. But it’s just full of farmers and green fields. (Kevin, 2021, Practitioner)

While the differential distribution of green spaces in contemporary contexts results from a series of factors (including structural inequalities, colonial legacies, the economic value of land and localised histories), access to green spaces was not equally allocated; it is frequently structured by ‘race’, ‘class’ and gender (Nayak, 2017).

Owing to constraints on their physical access to Green Belt sites, residents’ experiences of green spaces tended to involve engagement with ‘patches’ of greenery in their local neighbourhoods. As one resident living on the periphery of Oldham town centre shares: ‘We did have more green spaces [in racialised locality] but right now there’s not very many green spaces . . . There is a lot of green space in Saddleworth’ (Tom, 2021, Resident). Another resident, Bill, concurred with Tom’s assessment of a ‘patchwork’ of green spaces in inner urban areas, describing how in his neighbourhood: ‘There’s a green area, so you’ve got a few patches here and there.’ Existing sites of greenery were understood to be spread unevenly throughout inner urban areas, with residents emphasising the racialised inequalities in physical access to green spaces throughout the borough. However, within such limited access to greenery in inner urban areas, residents also shared the vulnerability of such patches to erasure. One resident, Sean, shared the historical erasure of the green spaces he accessed as a child. Over the duration of his life, Sean shared how these patches of greenery have been used as sites of urban development, and replaced by commercial shopping centres:

We lived next to a dual carriageway. It didn’t feel as though it was that busy, because there was a massive forest type area, just greenery, so we spent all our time building treehouses and playing there . . . But that doesn’t exist anymore now, so it’s all built now. (Sean, 2021, Resident)

Structures of whiteness have been defined as ‘a spatial and temporal orientation that narrates (while also erasing) history, rationalises ongoing and expanded privilege(s) and directs us toward specific and unquestioned geographic futures’ (Brand, 2022: 277). Our concern in this article is with how and in what ways the norms and practices embedded in policies of urban greening (including the preservation of Green Belt land) continue to pose risks of perpetuating racialised disparities, and compounding processes of racialised erasure, in access to green spaces.

Paralleling the relative susceptibility of these green ‘patches’ in racialised neighbourhoods to urban development, residents echoed the continuation of a perceived sense of vulnerability. Mark who lives on the periphery of the town centre, summarises the processes of racialised impacts and resistances that develop in response to the erasure of urban green space in inner urban areas:

There’s only a few green spaces there. [A private developer] tried to petition for more house-building . . . I’m like: ‘Get out of here, man, have you seen the state of the area? You have that – it’s already booming anywhere there – and you want more housing being built? Get out.’ (Mark, 2021, Resident and Housing Practitioner)

Drawing on Adalet’s (2022: 978) evaluation of green industrial policies, the disproportionate erasure of green spaces in racialised localities, and simultaneous protection of Green Belt land based in ‘white’ sites, can be understood as ‘part of [a] history of racialised state-making . . . accumulation and . . . racial dispossession’. In describing the valued ‘small patches’ of green spaces in her local housing estate, Maya also shared her fear of how local government neglect of greenery in inner urban areas may work to rationalise the continued erasure of these sites. As she summarises:

[The green] patch in front of me . . . I hope [local government] don’t get rid of because they could do so much with that . . . it is quite neglected . . . the high establishment, they kind of neglect it . . . it’s not being looked after. That’s the sad part which makes it not nice. And then they’re going to have an excuse, I’m guessing, to say: ‘Oh, let’s shut it down or get rid of this because it’s not nice and nobody cares’ . . . I overheard someone mention that that’s something they’ll probably get rid of [the green patch], but that would be such a shame because literally where would the kids play? (Maya, 2021, Resident)

Urban greening initiatives can thus parallel processes of racialised erasure and extraction that have been shown to be embedded in urban development projects and racial capitalism, including in relation to the de-valuing of specific (racialised) places (Martinez, 2023).

Social and Symbolic Boundaries of Green Spaces: Spatial Imaginaries and Reclaiming Green Space

This section will identify and evaluate the processes of symbolic boundary making and bordering to which minoritised residents are subjected, and to which they resist. Although existing research has identified spatial clustering as an element of community building in response to racism, and residents reporting high valuation of their local neighbourhoods (Byrne et al., 2022, Harrison et al., 2023), our focus here is on how urban green spaces are implicated in experiences of racism, and the processes of reclaiming space in response. This section will thus demonstrate how green spaces remain inflected with racialised bordering practices, and how minoritised residents reclaim and respond to such processes in complex and varied forms.

The site of Oldham has long been subject to assertions of ‘no-go’ areas, representations that have been disputed both by practitioners and local residents (Miah et al., 2020). However, green spaces in racialised neighbourhoods in Oldham have also recently been the focus of such symbolic boundary making. One Councillor in Oldham Council recently identified how:

Alexandra Park is our flagship park . . . I grow increasingly concerned that it will become a no-go area for families scared to use its facilities . . . The park appears to be where groups go to sort out their differences, run riot and I fear the council is losing control of it. (Green, 2021)

Such depictions demonstrate how green spaces (and the bodies permitted within them) are politicised sites, as Alexandra Park is based in an area with a majority British South-Asian population. Assertions of public green spaces such as parks have been previously demonstrated in different international contexts as shaped by racialised identities as ‘spaces of nature and white leisure’, with disruptions to ‘existing norms of racialised park use . . . le[ading] to violent reprisals by whites’ (Loughran, 2017: 1954). For one resident, Mark, processes of racialised bordering continued to shape which green spaces were perceived as safe and accessible among racially minoritised residents. Mark has lived in Oldham his entire life, and currently resides in a neighbourhood on the periphery of the town centre. In outlining the green spaces available in his local area, he shares how certain parks demarcate the boundaries of racialised and ‘white’ neighbourhoods, with residents tending to access those within such borders. As he explains:

In the sense of large green spaces, there’s not really much large places, but there are small patches dotted about which isn’t really bad. It kind of separates – I know this sounds bad – but it apparently separates each area, if you know what I’m trying to say? (Mark, 2021, Resident and Housing Practitioner)

As Donnelly and Gamsu (2022) evidence, racialised imaginaries of who belongs in a particular space exert material consequences. Mark’s identification of the ‘small patches’ that separate each area was understood to operate as a euphemism for the racialised borders that shape who feels safe and welcome within particular green spaces. This sits in comparison with studies that present green spaces as de-racialised sites of conviviality, or processes of ‘greening’ as possessing a form of ‘moral authority’ (Anguelovski et al., 2019; Garcia-Lamarca et al., 2021). Processes of racial banishment from both well-maintained and small ‘patches’ of public green spaces based in neighbourhoods racialised as ‘white’ thus illuminate how nature is not a deracialised entity that exclusively facilitates conviviality (Loughran, 2020). Rather, minoritised residents are subjected to symbolic bordering practices even in the patchwork of green spaces that they have access to, as well as in their uses of (and presence within) such spaces.

Residents thus frequently identified how their presence even within the small patches of green spaces in their neighbourhoods was fraught with experiences of everyday racism, contrasting with the idyllic representations of nature in dominant discourse (Nayak, 2017). While minoritised residents were subject to processes of racialised bordering and exclusion in green spaces, these barriers were negotiated in complex ways, with myriad defensive forms of community utilised. One such resident, Fatima, shared her own experiences of anti-Muslim racism when alone in green spaces, resulting in her avoidance of local parks and larger green sites, a process that was both racialised and gendered: ‘The countryside sounds nice but I think I’ve watched too much serial killer documentaries. I think: “Someone’s going to come and kill me.” I’m paranoid’ (Fatima, 2022, Resident). As Fatima further identifies in the extract below, access to green spaces is partly reliant on a reclaiming of such sites. Her navigation of such exclusions includes either remaining within green spaces and parks near racialised neighbourhoods, or accessing such spaces in larger groups as a defensive form of community:

If I go to the park, I feel a bit scared . . . us that wear hijab . . . I went for a jog in a field and a car stopped and said not nice things to us, like dodgy things . . . it put me off, I never went jogging again. But it’s in a field though! You would think like leave me alone! I’m not jogging on the street . . . if I’m in a group, we like to go for walks in the park, but if I’m on my own I just try to go in and out of streets. But it’s not nice, it’s not pretty. (Fatima, 2022, Resident)

As Nayak (2017) argues, green spaces cannot be assumed to instigate forms of conviviality and safety; they have long been associated with racially coded images of whiteness in the British national imaginary. While the significance of ‘race’ has arguably been continually dismissed as an irrelevant policy concern in UK discourses of ‘greening’ and ‘green’ space (Anguelovski et al., 2019; Garcia-Lamarca et al., 2021), racialised residents consistently emphasised how green spaces are not always sites of safety, particularly when accessed alone.

Furthermore, green spaces are often presumed to be self-contained and fixed sites, obscuring how such entities are fluid and contested socio-spatial localities (Garcia-Lamarca et al., 2021; Kavanagh and Lewis, 2024). Residents therefore identified opportunities for moments of resistance against such racialised inequalities in access to green spaces. Of recurring significance were residents’ access to, and utilisation of, these patches of green spaces that had developed in local housing estates and within racialised neighbourhoods. For most locals, the patchwork of green spaces developed in the architectural ‘gaps’ of the built environment were highly valued: ‘I feel like [with the small patches], we have a connection with my childhood because it’s so rare to have children play outside right now’ (Maya, 2021, Resident). Aisha lives in a housing estate with her daughter, and shared her own valuing of green patches:

I’m so blessed to have a little bit of patch in front of me . . . a lot of kids from the neighbourhood come and play on this patch . . . It’s a pathway, there’s some stairs and people pass through to go to the other part of the estate but it’s just a patch of green and there’s a couple of trees surrounding the area, just playing. (Aisha, Resident, 2021)

Such experiences further reflect the conviviality that is often discussed in relation to green spaces, with residents of Aisha’s housing estate forming a sense of community in the crevices of accessible green spaces. Within the racialised geographies discussed in this article, minoritised residents expressed high levels of localised belonging and value in the patches of green space, in a broader context of limited access to well-maintained, larger green spaces (Byrne et al., 2022). However, the production and utilisation of green space in itself can be a political project, particularly in a landscape whereby such sites are structured by broader power inequalities and dominance (Adalet, 2022). As illustrated in the extract below, racially minoritised residents rejected narrations of their local green spaces as lacking value:

Everybody’s all about, oh, let’s go to a nice area. Honestly, most of my friends . . . they’ll go to places like [Green Belt land] and stuff like that, but I’m like why drive out? [Racialised neighbourhood] is a nice urban . . . we’ve got green areas as well. (Sean, 2021, Resident)

Residents’ high valuation of existing green spaces worked to counter-map the white imaginaries of which green spaces are valued, with new spaces of safety developed in response to practices of racial bordering. Sean further emphasised the highly-valued green spaces in close proximity to his own house, in a context where local green sites in which he used to play as a child were erased:

I actually still live there . . . It’s really nostalgic and I have a real value for the area . . . I’ve got some built-up green area . . . A bit of a gem, because all my friends live locally, they’re like: ‘Oh, no one has that’ . . . It’s just by luck, it’s just a patch of green land where they can’t really build anything . . . It’s just really nice. (Sean, 2021, Resident)

Further forms of resistance to processes of racial exclusion from green spaces were also identified by other residents, such as Matthew, who described his own experiences of reclaiming the green spaces from which he picked fruit as a child, and from which he was barred. Matthew shared his lack of access to green spaces during childhood, resulting in his attempt to access apples in a private garden in a (‘white’) neighbour’s backyard. Located in a surrounding area distinct from his own street, Matthew was forced to watch as his neighbour cut down the beloved apple tree as a punishment for the children’s transgressions into the garden. In response to such forms of bordering, Matthew sought to gain access by purchasing the property and green space, a method that has been used elsewhere in relation to reclaiming green spaces (Anguelovski et al., 2019). In this instance, Matthew reclaims access to the green space from which he was previously banned and plans to facilitate public access for local racially minoritised children. However, such initiatives of privatisation as a viable solution remain beyond the financial capability of many of those who are subject to racialised inequalities in their access to green space. As demonstrated by Brand (2018: 16), racially minoritised residents rejected the de-valuing of their neighbourhoods in dominant perceptions, critiquing how while racialised spaces are rendered vulnerable, they also offer functions as sites of ‘beauty and emplaced community’:

I always liked playing there . . . the house that I live at right now was the house that we used to steal apples from . . . One summer [the neighbour] waited for everyone to . . . watch, and then he chain-sawed his tree down. He made everyone watch. Honestly! . . . I actually told my missus that story and she goes: ‘So, why didn’t you just plant an apple tree and then let it grow and then maybe, when we’re older, we could have said that: “Oh, you can take apples and stuff.”’ So, I said: ‘That’s an idea!’ (Matthew, 2021, Resident)

Conclusion

This article has provided novel insights into the racialised logics and impacts interwoven in contemporary processes of urban greening, a subject that is vastly under-explored in prior research. It argues that racially minoritised residents are subject to processes of material and symbolic erasure and extraction in their experiences of greenery, both in terms of their access to open, well-protected Green Belt land, and in the ‘patches’ of greenery in inner urban areas. Three central dynamics of these racialised processes of erasure are identified to pervade urban greening projects. First, the erasure of racial signifiers in the development of the urban ‘green brand’ are shown to manifest materially, via the demolition of industrial sites, posing a continued risk in perpetuating racial disparities in access to green spaces. Second, the decline and potential erasure of green spaces in inner urban areas is demonstrated, whereby the highly valued small ‘patches’ of green space in racialised neighbourhoods remain unprotected, relative to the Green Belt land located in ‘white’ upper-middle class sites. Third, the article illustrates the normative view of green spaces as ‘white’ spaces, representations that foster forms of exclusion and result in processes of reclaiming small ‘patches’ of greenery to resist such symbolic bordering.

The insights generated from this article shed light on greening initiatives in three ways: first, by challenging dominant narratives of green spaces in existing literature as sites of conviviality; second, by attending to an extensively under-explored area of research in the form of racialised exclusion with regard to green spaces, and; third, by mapping the racialised assertions in representations and urban governance that continue to result in disproportionate access to green spaces. While the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the structural inequalities that permeate racialised minorities’ access to green space into sharp relief, this article asserts that green spaces are not simply ‘natural’ sites; they mirror dynamic power struggles that are replicated in contemporary urban governance. The absence of existing studies in the UK poses a challenge to further research, in a context where a policy rhetoric of ‘Build Back Greener’ continues to situate the marketisation and exploitation of green spaces as a method of post-pandemic economic recovery.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues at the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) for their insights and continual support.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: this work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council for the project ‘Exploring racial and ethnic inequality in a time of crisis’ (ES/V013475/1) and ‘The social, cultural and economic impacts of the pandemic on ethnic and racialised groups in the UK’ (ES/W000849/1).

Ethics Statement

This research has been subject to full ethical review at The University of St Andrews.

Hannah Haycox is a Research Fellow based at the Sociology department at The University of Manchester. She has been the recipient of several prestigious awards and prizes, including the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022), the Presidential Doctoral Scholar Award (2017–2020) and the Research Staff Excellence Award (2022). Her research expertise spans UK resettlement programmes, housing inequalities, ‘race’ and migration, with recent publications including Policy Paradoxes and the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme: How Welfare Policies Impact Resettlement Support (2022). She has disseminated policy recommendations on various platforms, including to UNHCR, the BBC regional news, cross-parliamentary groups and non-governmental organisations.

Nasar Meer is Professor at The University of Glasgow, and his publications include: The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (2021); Whiteness and Nationalism (ed., 2020); The Impact Agenda: Challenges and Controversies (co-authored, 2020) and Islam and Modernity (4 volumes) (ed., 2017). He is co-editor of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and was a Commissioner on the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s (RSE) (2020–2021) Post-COVID-19 Futures Inquiry, and a Member of the Scottish Government COVID-19 and Ethnicity Expert Reference Group.

Nissa Finney is Professor of Human Geography at the University of St Andrews. She has published and taught widely on ethnic inequalities, residential mobility and housing, neighbourhood change and segregation. Nissa is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, former Chair of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Population Geography Research Group, member of the ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC) and founding member of the ESRC Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE). On ethnic inequalities, Nissa’s work has brought new understandings in population scholarship, evidencing differential opportunities and experiences of ethnic groups in residential choices.

James Rhodes is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hiram College, Ohio, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester. His research interests focus on race, inequality, urban studies and deindustrialisation. His work has been published in journals including Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Urban Studies and Urban Geography.

Emma Hill is a Research Fellow in Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, working on an ESRC-funded project on the racialised dynamics of post-pandemic housing practices in the UK. She was previously a Research Fellow on the JPI ERA Net/Horizon 2020 GLIMER (Governance and Local Integration of Migrants and Europe’s Refugees) Project in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and completed her PhD in Cultural Research at Heriot-Watt University, for which her doctoral thesis was awarded the 2017 MacFarlane Prize. Her research interests include the postcolonial dynamics of South–North migration in former colonial centres.

Sharon Leahy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development at The University of Andrews. She is a social geographer with a particular interest in ethnicity, belonging and geographies of the border. She has published extensively in internally renowned journals, including Antipode, and has taught widely on bordering, marginalisation and inequality.

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