Eco-City dream: Urban realities of environmental injustice in Austin and Dallas

Introduction

So remarked a long-time resident of East Austin during fieldwork interviews for this study—a statement that in its quiet precision captures the central paradox this article sets out to examine. It foregrounds a critical question; whether contemporary cities are delivering the benefits of urban development equitably across all their residents. This question has become increasingly urgent as urbanization accelerates globally, with projections indicating that 70% of the global population will reside in urban areas by 2050 (UNDESA, 2018). The rise in urban population poses significant environmental challenges exacerbating issues of resource exploitation, urban heat islands, and a rise in pollution (Shishegar, 2014). These environmental pressures are not confined to city boundaries. Unmanaged urban development and excessive emission from cities in the developed countries have been shown to produce far-reaching ecological consequences in mountain regions (Chhetri et al., 2025). Since the late 1960s, international institutions, policymakers, and academics have become increasingly concerned about social and environmental sustainability along with climate change. Sustainable urban development has emerged as a central framework guiding global development policy (Engwicht, 1992; Tang et al., 2022).

The “Eco-City” concept is rooted to the “Garden City” movement. The term was formally coined by Richard Register in his book Ecocity Berkeley and gained global momentum following the First International Eco-City Conference in 1990 (Register, 1987; Joss and Molella, 2013). The “Green City” concept has emerged in urban planning grounded in sustainability perspectives with the vision to reconcile economic growth along with environmental responsibility. The terms “Eco” and “Green” are often interchangeably used depending on the policy path dependencies and discursive preferences of intellectuals, planners and policy makers. “Green City” or “Eco-City” emphasizes the use of renewable energy, urban forestry, public transportation which shows that cities can demonstrate “resilience” by becoming good responders to climate change in the global scenario. However, critical scholars of urban geography and environmental justice criticize this concept as a superficial technocratic solution (Bibri, 2020), which often fails to answer the question of whether Green City policies genuinely address structural inequalities or instead reproduce racialized and class-based patterns of environmental privilege (Harvey, 1996). Other than issues of inequality in distribution of the green agenda, critical scholarship argues that the Green City concept falls within the mainstream capitalist vision of “ecological modernization approach” towards sustainability that highlights capitalist interest and priorities over ecological concerns (Rapoport, 2015). Using empirical examples of Green City-based governance from Austin and Dallas in Texas, this article hopes to bring out the shortcomings of the Green/Eco-City-based urban planning visions. In probing the ecological intentionality of urban governance, this article interrogates to what extent green governance in Texan cities rooted in Green City approach effectively delivers/deploys ecological change, and whether this green ideology translates into green reality in class and racially just ways. Using qualitative interviews from the local community, we demonstrate how spatial inequality is lived and perceived by residents navigating the promises and failures of the Green City within the recent urban planning framework. We use the cases of the city of Austin and city of Dallas to investigate and analyze how green initiatives are experienced differently across socio-economically diverse neighborhoods. Our field experience reveals gaps between policy discourse and material practice in the deployment of Green City policies, and that such policies have at best become entrepreneurial environmental strategies serving as spectacles of sustainability producing symbolic greenness and city branding that obscure persistent socio-spatial inequalities (Prytherch, 2002).

In explicating the ephemerality of the Eco-City/Green City approach through the case studies of these two post-Fordist Sunbelt cities, we hope to push urban policy beyond ecological modernization approach demanding an urban governance vision that seriously engages with the concept of degrowth. Degrowth theories go beyond the Green City concept arguing that growth-driven environmental strategies mask systemic inequalities and reproduce exploitative class, racial, and colonial patterns of resource extraction, especially, when wealthier cities sustain their green credentials by externalizing environmental costs to the Global South (Foster, 2023). Degrowth theories, therefore, reject that green interventions here and there within the existing paradigm of growth-based economic accumulation can bring fundamental change. Fundamental change requires curtailing economic growth and envisioning an urban-economic system that is centered on downscaling production and consumption to enhance the ecological-social balance of life and wellbeing. Degrowth theory, therefore, aspires to relink human-nature relationships by understanding “growth” as “well-being” for all, thus, enhancing social and environmental justice through a non-production-consumption centric life (Demaria et al., 2013; Saito, 2023).

Texas has experienced rapid economic growth and urbanization in recent decades and is among the fastest-growing U.S. states, with a population increase of 1.6% between 2021 and 2022 (US Census Bureau, 2022). This growth makes Texan cities an appropriate context for examining contemporary green urban policy. This study focuses on Austin and Dallas as comparative cases to analyze green agendas, sustainability frameworks, and Eco-City initiatives. Austin is widely recognized for its progressive environmental orientation; Dallas is shaped more strongly by late-capitalist, growth-driven urbanism. Despite these differences, both post-industrial cities are actively engaged in “new age” sustainability politics making them suitable cases for examining how green policies are articulated and enacted in practice. Being a politically conservative state, Texan cities move towards an Eco-City agenda, if empirically substantiated, is particularly pertinent in demonstrating that environmental crises are here and dire, and that even the most ecologically resistant urban politics must now reconcile with environmental nurturing if not for environment's sake, at least from late-capitalist entrepreneurialism's sake. Since Texas is economically open to big corporate-entrepreneurialism, growth led expansion and so-called trickle-down economics, Austin and Dallas make interesting case studies bringing out place-based/city level textures of differences in policy discourse and material conditions between a more environmentally progressive Austin and more economically-growth focused Dallas. Cities of Texas could be assumed as templates that are furthest from ecological nurturing and closest to capitalist accumulation owing to their environmentally averse and pro-entrepreneurial politics. In that context, any class-racial and environmental injustice explored in Texan cities would be able to provide a watertight rationale for pushing urban dialectics towards degrowth approaches. Our intellectual intention here is a rethinking of green urbanism beyond ecological-modernist growth paradigms toward urban fundamental transformation grounded in a fundamental alteration between human-nature-governance relationships that is based on degrowth, justice, participation, and reparative redistribution.

From Green City/Eco-City alternatives to degrowth options?

In exploring the above issues, we first discuss the main conceptual thrust of our article, that is, critically interrogating the Green City/Eco-City visons in urban governance, and then, we provide a brief interlude to the more contemporary degrowth theory as a possible conceptual improvement on the green city/eco-city agenda.

Green cities of the sunbelt: Case studies of Austin and Dallas, Texas

Austin and Dallas offer a good example to test the Green City theory under conditions of capitalist growth and political adversity. Both cities have advanced ambitious green and climate equity frameworks while operating within a state government actively dismantling local environmental authority. For instance, House Bill 2127 nullified Austin's 2010 and Dallas's 2015 heat-protection ordinances and barred all Texas cities from enacting similar measures in the future. Despite that these two cities also represent distinct stages in the evolution of green urbanism, Austin as a mature and contradictory case where environmental branding has fueled gentrification (Wolch et al., 2014), and Dallas as an emergent case where these contradictions are still taking form. Both anchor two of the fastest-growing metropolitan regions in the USA making them key sites for examining how green urbanism operates under the pressures of rapid growth. Together, they allow this analysis to ask not only whether Green City policy is superficial, but also whether that superficiality deepens or transforms when urban governance confronts a hostile state context.

Methodology: Interrogating green

As discussed in the introduction, our aim in this article is to use the urban governance strategies of these to Texan cities in the heart of expansionary post-Fordist capitalism to demonstrate if: (a) nature or green agenda at all finds its way within urban policy, and to what extent the discourses of greenness materialize in practice; (b) if the green practices are distributed in socio-spatially just ways given that race and class inequality infuse Green City agenda with various forms of environmental injustices. The larger conceptual-empirical purpose is to learn from (a) and (b) in Austin and Dallas specific instances to see if indeed, Green City/Eco-City perspectives tend to be superficial and unequal in practice for local inhabitants, inhabitants of color, migrants and class poor as the critical literature suggests. In grounding the larger conceptual questions posed above, we more specifically ask from our case studies, the following: Are the environmental parameters adopted by urban policy in order to qualify as a “Green City/Eco-City” evenly distributed across the city-spaces? What is the experience/perception of local people towards different environmental programs across different areas of the city? To answer the above, this article uses both discourse analysis of policies along with semi-structured interviews of residents across cities. This dual methodology helps deconstruct the intentionality behind the policy rhetoric of urban sustainability and reveal the embodied inequities in the cities thus showing the contradictions between theory and practice and the realities obscured by the technocracy of “Green City” narratives.

Understanding the language of green policy

We chose three major policy documents from each city that the city governments highlighted as flagship green projects serving as empirical sites for discourse analyses to interrogate the green imaginary in the heart of economically growth-centric and politically conservative Texas. Tables 1 and 2 list and summarize the primary foci of these document-discourses.

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Table 1.

Austin's green focus.

Policy document	Primary focus
Climate Equity Plan (2020)	Aims to achieve net-zero community-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, with a strong focus on equity and social justice. Works across multiple sectors including buildings, transportation and land use, energy, food systems, and natural resources, while integrating measurable goals and strategies to ensure that environmental benefits are distributed fairly across communities.
Urban Forest Plan: A Master Plan for Public Property	Provides a long-term strategy for the care, preservation, and expansion of the city's urban forest on public lands. Focuses on coordinating city departments, implementing canopy expansion goals, monitoring tree health, and promoting sustainable management practices to enhance ecosystem services, improve urban livability, and increase community access to green spaces.
One Austin: Our Resilience Framework for Action	Guides the city's efforts to build resilience in the face of climate change, social inequities, housing challenges, and infrastructure vulnerabilities. Promotes collaborative action across city departments, community organizations, and other stakeholders to create equitable, safe, and healthy neighborhoods while addressing systemic disparities in vulnerable communities.

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Table 2.

Dallas's green focus.

Policy document	Primary focus
Comprehensive Environmental and Climate Action Plan (CECAP)	Sets the city's path to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Includes strategies for energy efficiency, renewable energy adoption, sustainable transportation, waste management, water protection, and urban ecosystem conservation. Aligns city actions with global climate commitments while building local resilience to climate impacts.
Racial Equity Plan (REP)	Aims to reduce racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities through actionable strategies. Focuses on increasing economic opportunities, improving housing access and affordability, promoting environmental justice, strengthening infrastructure, and enhancing public safety. Includes measurable benchmarks and long-term goals to track progress over 15–20 years.
Urban Forestry Master Plan	Provides guiding principles, priorities, and implementation pathways for sustaining and expanding Dallas's urban forest. Focuses on equitable distribution of trees, improving canopy coverage, enhancing ecological benefits, and fostering community engagement in tree planting, maintenance, and long-term forest management.

The policy initiatives explored in Tables 1 and 2 indicate that both the cities of Dallas and Austin have demonstrated commitments towards mitigation of the impacts of climate change focusing on increasing the distributional equity of natural resources and urban resilience programs. Both cities have produced different policy documents under multiple civic departments to address the above. The overall goal is to work on long-term environmental sustainability and equity issues along with a community-driven implementation process. Both cities have set ambitious goals of carbon neutrality as a long-term vision in their documents including climate, housing, and social equity as pillars in framing the carbon neutrality objective. In addition, both cities have a good environmental program in the policy to work on environmental health, racial justice, and socioeconomic well-being. The Urban Forest Plan was produced by the Parks and Recreation Department in coordination with the Office of Sustainability. Dallas's Comprehensive Environmental and Climate Action Plan was led by the Office of Environmental Quality and Sustainability under Mayor Eric Johnson with an initial implementation budget of approximately $1 million—a figure, critics argued, was modest relative to the city's stated ambitions. Dallas's Racial Equity Plan (2021) emerged in direct response to advocacy pressure following the 2020 racial justice movement and was developed with input from community organizations including the Dallas Truth, and Racial Healing and Transformation initiative. Both cities’ documents thus reflect a specific political moment—progressive mayoral administrations navigating pressure from communities of color while operating within a conservative state government that actively undermined local environmental authority (e.g., through House Bill 2127 in 2023). These political constraints help explain the gap between ambitious policy language and limited implementation.

However, both cities prioritize economic growth embedding a strong green growth discourse within planning practices, which align them with the technocratic dimensions of Green City/Eco-City imaginaries and keep them outside the rubric of degrowth perspectives discussed above. The policies of Austin and Dallas are like green policies adopted elsewhere, for example, in Södertälje municipality of Sweden, planning documents emphasize promoting growth through the expansion of housing, schools and workplaces along with the aim of maintaining a long-term sustainability vision (Tahvilzadeh et al., 2017). Here, nature is a commodity for aestheticization of the city spliced with business-as-usual planning practices that include single-family housing developments in peripheral areas, large industrial expansions erasing forest or arable land, and creating new road infrastructure that eats away natural habitats (Ruiz-Alejos and Prats, 2022). The policy discourses of the two Texan cities substantiate a vision for conventional development practices while at the same time, setting ambitious ecological goals thus, conforming to the Eco-City/Green City approaches. If Texas cities are templates that are furthest from ecological nurturing and closest to capitalist accumulation owing to their environmentally averse and pro-entrepreneurial politics, class-racial and environmental injustice stories studied here should be able to provide the deepest/richest rationale for pushing urban dialectics towards degrowth. Real estate data support this concern in the Trinity River Corridor Project, since its approval in 1998 and the acceleration of construction post-2012. The median home values in adjacent West Dallas and Trinity Groves neighborhoods have risen sharply as developers have capitalized on historically cheap land near the corridor to attract wealthier residents (Krupala, 2019). Displacement of lower-income Black and Hispanic households from Oak Cliff and West Dallas has accelerated during this same period (Krupala, 2019). This illustrates a key tension between the rhetoric of equity in policy discourse and the material outcomes experienced by local communities.

Beyond the green growth nightmare: Toward degrowth-oriented planning

Our analysis suggests that the policies of cities present an ambitious narrative of sustainability, equity, and urban resilience but often lack a clear and concrete plan to achieve these goals. There is a noticeable gap between policy rhetoric and implementation reflecting the weak integration of sustainability principles within city planning practices. In many planning documents, sustainability is framed through urban ecology and environmental aesthetics narratives emphasizing visible greening initiatives and technological solutions rather than addressing the structural drivers of ecological degradation and inequality. Latouche (2004) discussed that such framing often results in superficial end-of-pipe solutions while allowing conventional development practices to continue largely unchanged.

Similarly, in cities such as Austin and Dallas, policy frameworks including climate action plans, racial equity strategies, and urban forestry master plans highlight ambitious objectives such as carbon neutrality, equitable tree canopy distribution, and community engagement. However, evidence from semi-structured interviews indicates that low-income and historically marginalized neighborhoods continue to experience inadequate green infrastructure, limited public transit access, and exclusion from major “green” investments, which are often perceived as drivers of green gentrification rather than instruments of environmental justice. In contrast, residents in wealthier areas tend to report satisfactory environmental amenities and tree planting, but frame their concerns primarily around lifestyle disruptions, congestion, or preservation of neighborhood character, rarely engaging with the deeper structural processes that produce unequal environmental conditions.

Although both cities demonstrate strong formal commitments to climate mitigation, resilience, and racial equity, these commitments remain embedded within a development paradigm that prioritizes economic expansion and urban competitiveness. This contradiction illustrates the inherent limitations of the green growth model, which assumes that technological innovation and efficiency can reconcile environmental protection with continuous economic growth without confronting systemic inequalities and ecological limits. The experiences of marginalized communities highlight that sustainability initiatives frequently function as tools of spatial valorization rather than mechanisms of justice. At its core, environmental justice seeks to guarantee equitable access to environmental benefits regardless of socioeconomic background, yet in practice such principles often lack redistributive force.

David Harvey (1996) warns that urban environmentalism operating within capitalist growth frameworks may reproduce rather than dismantle spatial segregation, environmental racism, and social injustice. Therefore, mitigation strategies focused solely on emissions reductions or greening initiatives are insufficient; cities must move beyond carbon targets and technocratic solutions toward confronting the structural inequalities that allow wealthier, often disproportionately white communities to enjoy superior environmental conditions while marginalized neighborhoods continue to face environmental burdens. Despite the widespread rhetoric of equity and sustainability in urban policy discourses, the cases of Austin and Dallas reveal limited political willingness to challenge entrenched class and racial disparities in environmental access, underscoring the need for more transformative planning approaches that directly address the root causes of environmental injustice. Our case studies prove that “Green urbanism” enframed within a growth-oriented, capitalist model is unlikely to be “green” as it never even in the first instance aspires to interrogate our flawed relationship to nature. Environmental concerns mediated by a techno-economic system that works to keep every systemic inequality (class, race, age, gender, sexuality) intact in order to aid the consumption process are not, and will never be, nature-based. In that context, Dallas and Austin are perhaps not different in their greenwashed ephemerality and manifested environmental injustices than many other post-industrial cities, but they are perhaps more unique as they sit in the heart of a very political-economic conservative state and therefore, make the conservative aspirations for environmental conservation, preservation and expansion all the more ironic, desperate and even, grotesque. Identity differences between the more progressive, more cool, more environmentally attuned Austin and the “true-blue” (or red) growth machine of Dallas ebb, flow and melt away without making a stark difference in the life of the urban poor or minority poor. Irrespective of whether they live in Dallas or Austin, our interviewees tell us that predatory capitalism manufactures Green City/Eco-City agenda for capital and not people. A people's agenda, we claim therefore, must learn from these case studies and rethink green urbanism beyond the Green City agenda towards more radical alternatives that integrate environmental justice directly into land-use decisions, infrastructure investment, and housing policies, ensuring that green infrastructure, transit access, and environmental amenities are equitably distributed across neighborhoods.

Degrowth movements are the starting points of a more radical agenda advocating for the deliberate reduction of production and consumption, particularly in affluent regions, while redefining prosperity around equity, care, and ecological stewardship (Demaria et al., 2013). Integrating degrowth principles into urban planning would require community-led resource management, the redistribution of environmental investments, and economic models that prioritize public goods and collective well-being over corporate accumulation. From a planning perspective, this approach implies conditioning urban development within ecological and social limits where projects are evaluated at early stages for their impact on carbon emissions, ecosystem services, and social equity. Developments that exceed ecological thresholds or deepen inequalities should therefore be reconsidered or rejected, ensuring that planning decisions are guided by environmental protection and social justice rather than market imperatives. Furthermore, goal-oriented back-casting scenarios can assist cities in envisioning development pathways that align with ecological ceilings and social foundations. Instead of forecasting future growth trends, back casting begins with sustainability and justice goals and works backward to design planning strategies capable of achieving those outcomes. Dallas and Austin cases are exemplary that deeper transformation is required.

Conclusion

This article contributes to critical debates on urban sustainability by examining the Green City/Eco-City perspectives through a comparative analysis of Dallas and Austin. By integrating policy analysis and residents’ perceptions, the study reveals the contradiction between green policy aspirations and the realities of their implementation. The findings also demonstrate that under capitalist urban regimes, sustainability initiatives around canopy expansion, tree planting, green transportation initiatives often reproduce and intensify existing social and spatial inequalities rather than addressing them.

The empirical findings show clear spatial disparities in the distribution of green infrastructure and environmental amenities across both cities. In Austin, which is frequently branded as a leading “Green City,” environmental resources and green spaces are concentrated in downtown-affluent areas, while poor neighborhoods, which are also predominantly Hispanic continue to experience limited access to green cover and environmental amenities. Similarly, in Dallas, many green initiatives are concentrated in downtown and wealthier northern neighborhoods, while historically class and racially marginalized communities in south Dallas receive comparatively limited investment in environmental infrastructure. These patterns indicate that urban sustainability initiatives often function within a broader system of capitalist urban development that prioritizes economic growth, land value enhancement, and city branding. We argue that the people's agenda must move beyond the Green city framework instead of embracing more radical alternatives that integrate environmental justice directly into land-use decisions, infrastructure investment, and equitable housing and public transport access.

The findings also reveal that current sustainability policies in both cities are insufficient to produce meaningful structural change. Although policy documents emphasize environmental sustainability, they rarely address the historical and structural inequalities embedded in urban development processes. In practice, green initiatives frequently operate as a form of ecological modernization or “sustainability fix,” where environmental improvements are selectively implemented in ways that support entrepreneurial urban governance and capital accumulation. As a result, sustainability becomes a branding strategy rather than a transformative framework for achieving environmental justice. The case studies act as templates of post-industrial sunbelt spaces and moments that are deeply cleaved around class and race while at the same time, being seats of impossibly affluent lifestyle, growth-centered accumulation and thriving economic and political conservatism. On top of these cleaved layers of segregated socio-spatial experiences, a tentative yet robust, socially-blind, and yet environmentally progressive policy agenda is being secreted through “cut and paste” green policy invested in quantitative thresholds and performance targets. The result is a hack-job of a patchworked life cobbled together with slapped-on green river projects and tree planting initiatives that barely make a difference for the environment, let alone the racialized poor. We therefore argue for a fundamental systemic overhaul that go against the popular local adage, “Don’t mess with Texas!” and instead proclaim, “Mess it all up” by demanding that conservative politics should “conserve,” that is, this time, it should “conserve nature” by re-vivifying the nostalgia of a glorious America where saving and living within means was the essence of good life, and “consumption” originally meant, “consumption disease” or Tuberculosis.

The evidence from Austin and Dallas substantiates Harvey's (1996) warning that urban environmentalism embedded within capitalist growth frameworks tends to reproduce rather than dismantle the spatial and racial inequalities it claims to address. Yet Harvey's critique, while powerful, requires supplementation with a positive politics of transformation. Here, Peet and Watts’ (1996, 2004) ecological liberation framework proves indispensable as it directs us towards the place-based, community-rooted forms of resistance and knowledge production that alone can ground a genuinely transformative environmental politics. The testimonies of East Austin and South Dallas residents in their insistence on equitable access, material redistribution, and recognition of historical harm are not peripheral to this framework but are empirical and political core. Here are some possibilities for real change; First, reparative justice should play a central role in urban environmental policy. Both cities have histories of spatial injustice, including racial zoning, discriminatory investment patterns, and environmental marginalization. Addressing these legacies requires policies that recognize historical harm while promoting material redistribution and spatial transformation in historically underserved neighborhoods. In addition, community-led planning should be strengthened to ensure that marginalized communities have a meaningful role in shaping environmental policies and urban development decisions. Residents in underserved neighborhoods often possess valuable local knowledge about environmental conditions and community needs. Greater decentralization and participatory governance mechanisms can enable communities to actively participate in planning processes and ensure that environmental initiatives reflect local priorities. Furthermore, degrowth-oriented planning strategies could help cities move beyond growth-centered sustainability models. Integrating degrowth principles with environmental justice frameworks can support the development of urban policies that prioritize ecological health, equitable resource distribution, and community well-being rather than market-driven development.

Ultimately, the spatial inequalities identified in this study reflect broader patterns present in many urban areas across the United States. By embracing transformative approaches grounded in justice and ecological responsibility, cities can become liberating sites for deepening community ties through authentic (not technocratic) connections with nature.