Environment

The ability to adapt to the challenges of environmental and climate change are important aspects to be considered when investigating urban justice. The City of Vienna is strongly committed to fostering an environmentally friendly context, competitive in the global market but at the same time oriented to social inclusiveness. The need to balance these three dimensions has been recently underlined by the plans for developing a smart-city-oriented approach to urban planning. In this thematic area, we analyse the effects of these transformations in terms of environmental justice, trying to understand how perceptions about the quality of the urban environment have changed in different areas of the city and how this intersects with the accessibility to green areas, to low-carbon transport possibilities and in general higher standards of environmental quality (i.e. air quality, noise pollution, etc.) for different social groups. Although Vienna has been continuously awarded for its high quality of life and its excellent environmental quality in international rankings, sustainability policies might bring unexpected social consequences in terms of unequal distribution of environmental resources and might even bring about processes of ecological-gentrification.