Abstract
The premise of this chapter is that human engagement of city dwellers in acts of urban greening, or environmental stewardship, collectively constitutes a social movement for greater access to the natural environment. The power of urban greening as a social movement is particularly salient for disadvantaged communities in promoting greater resilience, health, and well-being. Grounded in the geographies of urban greening associated with Buffalo and New York City, we consider how some civic environmental stewardship programs positively impact youth. More specifically, we contend that such programs provide vulnerable populations such as adolescents with opportunities for social interaction that include intergenerational bridges and mentoring relationships that confer the psychological resilience needed to sustain such local activism. We develop a systems perspective illustrating how participants in successful civic environmental stewardship programs develop an enhanced sense of control and belonging to a community. The connections that individual residents feel to their surrounding community manifest in a heightened concern for others and increased activism promoting public access to green space.
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Notes
- 1.
The website for the Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP) is: http://www.mass-ave.org. This non-profit organization engages youth in urban greening and has been studied as part of Buffalo’s local food movement (Metcalf and Widener 2011; Metcalf 2012).
- 2.
The STEW-MAP NYC homepage: http://www.stewmap.net/stew-map-cities/new-york-city/
- 3.
Figure 15.2 was created using the publicly available online database from STEW-MAP NYC: http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/oasis/map.aspx
- 4.
The maps in Fig. 15.3 were created using the publicly available online database from STEW-MAP NYC: http://www.oasisnyc.net/stewardship/stewardshipsearch.aspx
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Acknowledgments
Work on this chapter was supported in part by the USDA Forest Service (Integrating Grey and Green Infrastructure to Improve Health and Well-Being for Urban Populations, award 12-JV-11242309-095) and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research of the US National Institutes of Health (Integrating Social and Systems Science Approaches to Promote Oral Health Equity, award R01DE023072).
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Metcalf, S.S., Svendsen, E.S., Knigge, L., Wang, H., Palmer, H.D., Northridge, M.E. (2016). Urban Greening as a Social Movement. In: Gatrell, J., Jensen, R., Patterson, M., Hoalst-Pullen, N. (eds) Urban Sustainability: Policy and Praxis. Geotechnologies and the Environment, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26218-5_15
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