Step on and feel the land in the city: neighbors who mobilize for the right to nature

In the urban garden of Parc Can Batlló, in the Sants-Montjuïc district (Barcelona), its participants work “not only for the need to have more green spaces in cities, but also to recover contact with the earth.” The garden is maintained by approximately fifteen people who, organized in shifts of about three hours, come two days a week in the morning and afternoon.

Added to these are those people who come punctually: boys and girls from schools, supervised centers, or people with disabilities who come through associations. The participants say that, for them, the benefits of the garden go beyond the environmental and that, without a doubt, they are also felt in the psychological and social spheres.

Some of those who go know how to work the land; and others learn there. Some come from farming families and long for the fields where they grew up; and others, were born in Barcelona city, and have never had contact with agriculture beyond this. The common point, as they explain, is the pleasure of seeing the earth, of stepping on it and of feeling it.

This neighborhood and self-managed garden measures 1,200 m² and in addition to the vegetables – which occupy the center of the space – there are also flowers that “smell like honey”, fruit trees and even an insect “hotel”, on whose door hangs a poster in which you can read that it is “Free”; and although the ownership of the land belongs to the City Council, it gave them the space.

Participants believe that what they do is important, but they also believe that in cities we still need more green spaces. “Many people are involved in creating them; In Barcelona, ??there are about 190 urban gardens, but there is still a lot to do, a lot to create,” they conclude in Can Batlló.

These types of initiatives constitute a model of renaturalization of cities that is different from those carried out through other public administration projects, such as the “superilles” of Barcelona or the “Madrid Río” in Madrid, which, currently, They aggravate existing inequalities due to socioeconomic issues, according to organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the Federation of Consumers and Users (CECU).

Renaturalization involves the reintroduction of natural elements such as green areas, trees, rivers and wildlife habitats in urban areas; and firstly, this helps balance urban development with the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem benefits.

But beyond that, the renaturalization of cities is one of the measures that cities can undertake to promote both adaptation and mitigation of climate change (they are thermal shelters), as well as to improve air quality levels.

For this reason, these organizations demand “the urgent need to transform our cities and green them, but without aggravating existing inequalities” and argue that in Spain, a country where high temperatures cause more than 4,700 deaths a year, the creation of these spaces in Cities are key. “However, we observe that although there is a lot of emphasis on the need to renaturalize, there is little on how to do it in a fair way,” introduces Miguel Díaz, head of Biodiversity and Territory at Friends of the Earth.

In a report recently carried out by this NGO and CECU, researchers have confirmed that high-income neighborhoods have a greater amount of green areas than low-income neighborhoods, and they cite the case of Madrid as an example. In this city, a study on the impacts of heat waves previously carried out by the Polytechnic University of Madrid, showed that low-income districts suffer temperatures up to 8ºC higher than in areas with greater purchasing power.

“Despite the importance of nature for human life, we see great differences in access to green areas due to income issues, which must be corrected immediately,” argues Díaz. “We propose that the right to nature be placed at the center, and that renaturalization be carried out because of its importance for people and not only to lower temperatures or improve air quality, although these applications are also important,” continues the expert.

The right to nature that Díaz mentions was specified by the United Nations (UN) in the universal human right to a “clean, healthy and sustainable environment” in 2017. However, the UN itself recognizes the aforementioned difference in the access experienced in cities, since “disadvantaged groups usually live in neighborhoods with little green space available.”

To explain this inequality, Clara Vázquez, head of sustainability at CECU, uses the term “green gentrification” and explains that in urban areas, the greater the number and quality of green spaces in a neighborhood, the more desirable it becomes. , which increases the price of housing.

“In these cases in which parks are installed in neighborhoods with lower levels of nature, what we are observing is that rental prices increase; which leads the population to look for lower prices and to move, again, to an area without access to nature,” Díaz illustrates.

Again, the organizations use the case of the city of Madrid as an example. Although the Madrid Río project – which buried the M30 and turned the banks of the Manzanares into a large park – improved the quality of life of the residents, this improvement has brought an added increase in rental prices in the area. “In the period between 2015 and 2021, rent in other districts such as Vallecas rose by 24%, while in the area near Madrid Río it rose by 29%,” explains Vázquez.

In this sense, experts argue that “one hundred green areas of one hectare each are better than a single area of ??one hundred hectares” and that cities should pursue, in each neighborhood, compliance with the criteria established by the World Organization. Health (WHO): at least 30% vegetation cover and that all homes are located a maximum of 300m from a green area.

Likewise, the organizations advocate that the communities of each neighborhood be the ones to design their green areas. “The neighborhood itself is the one that has to have the say because it knows itself and its needs; because if our goal is for children to play, the design of the space will be different than if we want, for example, for older people to be there,” Díaz defends.

“There are already a multitude of movements that are experimenting with this model of spaces designed by the neighborhood: eco-neighborhoods, urban gardens or self-managed climate shelters, which can serve as a guide for us to think about new initiatives,” they conclude in their report. In this context, initiatives such as those of the Parc de Can Batlló garden stand out, and Vázquez emphasizes: “these initiatives show us the importance of recognizing the responses that residents are already building and that public institutions can support and ease”.