Academic papers by Melissa García-Lamarca
Antipode, 2023
In 2017, it was estimated that over 87,000 families—around 270,000 people—
lived in squatted prop... more In 2017, it was estimated that over 87,000 families—around 270,000 people—
lived in squatted properties in Spain. Such figures, often used by the media to stigmatise residential occupations and generate moral panic, give an ill-defined yet powerful indication of the prevalence of squatting within and outside organised housing movements. From these came the question: How to elevate the “minor knowledges” of precariously housed people in an ethical, engaged, and situated way, in dialogue with a coordinated activist push to reframe squatting as a political strategy? Based on the experience of the first “strategic positivist” survey about squatting in Catalonia, we offer a situated reflection on the tensions and contradictions of militant research in a shifting political terrain. The urgency and ethics that guided our process made it necessary to operate through methodological openness and to consider method as politics, advancing a broader agenda of movement-relevant research supporting non-speculative forms of inhabitation.
Geoforum, 2023
We are currently experiencing a manifold crisis of social reproduction which has seriously affect... more We are currently experiencing a manifold crisis of social reproduction which has seriously affected the capacity of popular access to basic goods such as housing, particularly in urban environments. This article seeks to
contribute to and expand debates around the urban housing commons by looking at decommodified and collectively managed housing alternatives through the lens of the reproductive commons. Through the case of
the Bloc La Bordeta squat and the broader commons ecologies in Barcelona’s Sants district, we explore how complex networks of emancipatory reproductive commons subsist and expand in urban environments, and investigate the role of popular infrastructures in this process. We highlight the reproductive dimension of housing squats in sustaining radical movements in the city. However, popular support is also crucial in defending the housing commons from enclosure and state repression, which creates a mutual interdependence among reproductive commons and urban commons ecologies. In looking at the particular difficulties of reproductive urban commoning, we explore material and subjective challenges of the reproductive urban commons, and we
illustrate the importance of looking into and beyond housing and of grounding housing commons’ connections and (dis)continuities within the wider territorial and socio-political context. These challenges create differential forms of commoning in which participation and engagement are unequal but that, nevertheless, are able to support thriving popular infrastructures that become the pillars of the resistance against capitalist urbanisation processes.
Progress in Human Geography, 2025
Housing has a rich and decades-long body of scholarship, yet geographers have only recently begun... more Housing has a rich and decades-long body of scholarship, yet geographers have only recently begun to dissect environmental and power relations in/through the home, an urgent task due to growing carbon reduction and energy efficiency targets at the heart of climate-related housing action. This paper elaborates four interconnected conceptual pathways to unpack the uneven socionatural power relations unfolding through nature's urbanisation in housing decarbonisation. I bring these pathways together to articulate political ecologies of radical housing repair, a proposal that takes seriously situated lived realities within structurally embedded housing inequalities towards more just housing decarbonisation in theory, policy and practice.
Action Research, 2025
This article examines how piloting a diary method became pivotal in transforming a participatory ... more This article examines how piloting a diary method became pivotal in transforming a participatory ethnography on household debt in Greece and Spain into full-fledged Action Research -driven and shaped by the diary-writing participants themselves. We analyse the evolving dynamics between researchers and diary authors, as an initial phase of solitary diary writing prompted the collaborative development of workshops with drama and theatre methods which, in turn, catalysed dialogue, critical reflection, and collective empowerment. These engagements not only enabled diary authors to articulate previously silenced issues around indebted subjectivity, but also repositioned them as central agents and co-researchers, enabling the research team to fully inhabit the role of situated Action Researchers.
Social Science & Medicine
Research shows mental health is impacted by poor-quality physical and social-environmental condit... more Research shows mental health is impacted by poor-quality physical and social-environmental conditions. Subsequently state-led redevelopment/regeneration schemes focus on improving the physical environment, to provide better social-environmental conditions, addressing spatial and socioeconomic inequities thus improving residents' health. However, recent research suggests that redevelopment/regeneration schemes often trigger gentrification, resulting in new spatial and socioeconomic inequalities that may worsen health outcomes, including mental health, for long-term neighborhood residents. Using the right to the city and situating this within the framework of accumulation by dispossession and capitalist hegemony, this paper explores the potential mechanisms in which poor mental health outcomes may endure in neighborhoods despite the implementation of redevelopment/regeneration projects. To do so, we explored two neighborhoods in the city of Glasgow-North Glasgow and East Endand conducted a strong qualitative study based on 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders. The results show that postindustrial vacant and derelict land spaces and socioeconomic deprivation in North and East Glasgow are potential mechanisms contributing to the poor mental health of its residents. Where redevelopment/regeneration projects prioritize economic goals, it is often at the expense of social(health) outcomes. Instead, economic investment instigates processes of gentrification, where long-term neighborhood residents are excluded from accessing collective urban life and its (health) benefits. Moreover, these residents are continually excluded from participation in decision-making and are unable to shape the urban environment. In summary, we found a number of potential mechanisms that may contribute to enduring poor mental health outcomes despite the existence of redevelopment/regeneration projects. Projects instead have negative consequences for the determinants of mental health, reinforcing existing inequalities, disempowering original longterm neighborhood residents and only providing the "right" to the unhealthy deprived city. We define this as the impossibility to benefit from material opportunities, public spaces, goods and services and the inability to shape city transformations.
Nature Communications
Although urban greening is universally recognized as an essential part of sustainable and climate... more Although urban greening is universally recognized as an essential part of sustainable and climate-responsive cities, a growing literature on green gentrification argues that new green infrastructure, and greenspace in particular, can contribute to gentrification, thus creating social and racial inequalities in access to the benefits of greenspace and further environmental and climate injustice. In response to limited quantitative evidence documenting the temporal relationship between new greenspaces and gentrification across entire cities, let alone across various international contexts, we employ a spatially weighted Bayesian model to test the green gentrification hypothesis across 28 cities in 9 countries in North America and Europe. Here we show a strong positive and relevant relationship for at least one decade between greening in the 1990s–2000s and gentrification that occurred between 2000–2016 in 17 of the 28 cities. Our results also determine whether greening plays a “lead”,...
Nature Communications
Urban greening is critical for human health and climate adaptation and mitigation goals, but its ... more Urban greening is critical for human health and climate adaptation and mitigation goals, but its financing tends to prioritize economic growth imperatives. This often results in elite value and rent capture and unjust greening outcomes. We argue that cities can, however, take action to ensure more socially just impacts of green financing.
Radical Housing Journal, 2021
Esta Conversación surge de la curiosidad y las reflexiones de colaboradoras del Radical Housing J... more Esta Conversación surge de la curiosidad y las reflexiones de colaboradoras del Radical Housing Journal sobre el creciente uso del término vecinas —en inglés, neighbour— en las luchas por la vivienda en Barcelona en los últimos años. Desde nuestra participación en la lucha por el derecho a la vivienda en esta ciudad, quisimos explorar más profundamente la dinámica detrás de la palabra vecina a través de una conversación con tres activistas por la vivienda residentes del barrio de Sant Andreu de Barcelona. A partir de sus vivencias y activismo, nos explican qué significado tiene la palabra vecinas, en qué medida su uso señala un giro discursivo, el motivo de su feminización, las convergencias y divergencias —y también la inclusividad / exclusividad— de su uso entre diferentes grupos y, finalmente, lo que ha significado en el último año durante la pandemia de Covid-19 y el no retorno a la normalidad.
Cities & Health, 2022
Green or environmental gentrification has been shown to be directly related to residential physic... more Green or environmental gentrification has been shown to be directly related to residential physical and socio-cultural displacement and insecure housing conditions among socially or racially underprivileged residents, with clear related health impacts. In this context, those vulnerable groups become unable to benefit from the social, well-being, and overall health benefits of green amenities. To date, despite increasing gentrification and related civic concerns, cities in North America and Europe are still slow to respond. Siloed and reactive planning approaches to (re)development and greening generally do not include housing security and affordability provisions in ways that would be strategic and equitydriven. In this Commentary, we call for further research on the mix of policies and tools that posit multi-sectoral and de-siloed greening agendas in coordination with affordable and stable housing. We open the discussion on four justice-driven policies and tools presented in the Policy Tools for Urban Green Justice (BCNUEJ 2021) report that derives from research conducted in 40 cities, analyzing 480 interviews with key neighborhood stakeholders across Europe and North America. We also call for research that identifies how urban policy developments and anti-gentrification and anti-displacement strategies can be combined with inclusive greening tools to build healthy, green cities for all.
Geoforum, 2022
In the movement towards building greener and more sustainable cities, real estate developers are ... more In the movement towards building greener and more sustainable cities, real estate developers are increasingly embracing not only green building construction but broader strategies and action related to urban greening. To date, their motivations and role in this broader urban greening dynamic remains underexplored, yet essential to dissect how greening is sustained and real estate development legitimized in revitalizing neighborhoods. With an eye to better understand green urban capitalist development processes underway amidst financialized nature and urban growth, and the equity impacts they entail, we explore residential real estate developers urban greening
discourses and practices. Through a novel dataset of 42 interviews with private and non-profit residential real estate developers in 15 mid-sized American, Western European and Canadian cities, we uncover three differentiated but interconnected discourses around (i) financial benefits, (ii) consumer- or investor-driven demand and (iii) social dimensions behind developers’ interest in urban greening. We argue that developers embark on
urban green grabbing through “green” discursive and material value appropriation and rent extraction strategies. Urban green grabbing is conceptually useful in depicting who benefits and how/when developers extract additional rent, surplus value, social capital and/or prestige from locating new residential projects adjacent to new or up-and-coming green amenities. Our work contributes to debates about urban greening’s perceived
position as a value-producing and rent-extracting good from both a political economy and political ecology perspective.
Urban Studies, 2021
Increasingly, greening in cities across the Global North is enmeshed in strategies for attracting... more Increasingly, greening in cities across the Global North is enmeshed in strategies for attracting capital investment, raising the question: for whom is the future green city? Through exploring the relationship between cities’ green boosterist rhetoric, affordability and social equity considerations within greening programmes, this paper examines the extent to which, and why, the degree of green branding – that is, urban green boosterism – predicts the variation in city affordability. We present the results of a mixed methods, macroscale analysis of the greening trajectories of 99 cities in Western Europe, the USA and Canada. Our regression analysis of green rhetoric shows a trend toward higher cost of living among cities with the longest duration and highest intensity green rhetoric. We then use qualitative findings from Nantes, France, and Austin, USA, as two cases to unpack why green boosterism correlates with lower affordability. Key factors determining the relation between urban...
Progress in Human Geography, 2018
Scholars in urban political ecology, urban geography, and planning have suggested that urban gree... more Scholars in urban political ecology, urban geography, and planning have suggested that urban greening interventions can create elite enclaves of environmental privilege and green gentrification, and exclude lower-income and minority residents from their benefits. Yet, much remains to be understood in regard to the magnitude, scope, and manifestations of green gentrification and the forms of contestation and resistance articulated against it. In this paper, we propose new questions, theoretical approaches, and research design approaches to examine the socio-spatial dynamics and ramifications of green gentrification and parse out why, how, where, and when green gentrification takes place.
Expanding the Boundaries of Justice in Urban Greening Scholarship: Toward an Emancipatory, Antisubordination, Intersectional, and Relational Approach
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020
Supported by a large body of scholarship, it is increasingly orthodox practice for cities to depl... more Supported by a large body of scholarship, it is increasingly orthodox practice for cities to deploy urban greening interventions to address diverse socioenvironmental challenges, from protecting urban ecosystems to enhancing built environments and climate resilience or improving health outcomes. In this article, we expand the theoretical boundaries used to challenge this growing orthodoxy by laying out a nuanced framework that advances critical urban environmental justice scholarship. Beginning from the now well-supported assumption that urban greening is a deeply political project often framed by technocratic principles and promotional claims that this project will result in more just and prosperous cities, we identify existing contributions and limits when examining urban green inequities through the traditional lenses of distributional, recognition, and procedural justice. We then advocate for and lay out a different analytical framework for analyzing justice in urban greening. We argue that new research must uncover how persistent domination and subordination prevent green interventions from becoming an emancipatory antisubordination, intersectional, and relational project that considers the needs, identities, and everyday lives of marginalized groups. Finally, we illustrate our framework’s usefulness by applying it to the analysis of urban residents’ (lack of) access to urban greening and by operationalizing it for two different planning and policy domains: (1) greening for well-being, care, and health and (2) greening for recreation and play. This final analysis serves to provide critical questions and strategies that can hopefully guide new urban green planning and practice approaches.
Housing Studies, 2020
This paper explores the development of residential Spanish Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs, ... more This paper explores the development of residential Spanish Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs, known as SOCIMIs) in the country’s growing rental market, unpacking their connection with the resolu...
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022
As more cities seek to address environmental and climate change woes, the issuance of municipal g... more As more cities seek to address environmental and climate change woes, the issuance of municipal green bonds to finance such initiatives is growing. But how do issuers and investors conceptualise and enact green bonds in relation to building a more sustainable society? What socionatures are produced with these bonds, and for whom? Based on fieldwork in Gothenburg, the first municipality in the world to issue green bonds, we bring together the literature on green finance, post-politics and affect through an urban political ecology lens to unpack the processes, practices and discourses underlying green bonds. We argue that green bonds ultimately serve as a new path to attract and circulate capital within the consensual, non-antagonistic sustainable order, where claims of doing good and building a good conscience are affective mechanisms that play an important, yet underexplored, role. In the conclusion, we reflect on the broader role of green finance and the possibility of harnessing a...
Adapting the environmental risk transition theory for urban health inequities: An observational study examining complex environmental riskscapes in seven neighborhoods in Global North cities
Social Science & Medicine
Cities & Health
Planetary urbanization exacerbates the spread of infectious disease and the emergence of pandemic... more Planetary urbanization exacerbates the spread of infectious disease and the emergence of pandemics. As COVID-19 cases continue to swell in cities around the world, the pandemic has visibilized urban health inequities. In the Global North, emerging trends show that lower income residents are often at greater risk for infection and death due to COVID-19, due in part to inequitable living, working and environmental conditions. We explore the underlying causes and potential long-term implications of the health inequities exemplified by outbreaks of COVID-19 in the context of evolving patterns of urban development, drawing from theories of urban environmental justice and gentrification.
Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2017
This paper aims to redress the under-appreciated significance of rent for political ecological an... more This paper aims to redress the under-appreciated significance of rent for political ecological analysis. We introduce the notion of value grabbing, defined as the appropriation of (surplus) value through rent. A concept that is analytically distinct from accumulation, rent is both a social relation and a distributional process that is increasingly central to the reproduction of contemporary capitalism. Emphasis is placed on the 'grabbing' of value in order to shed light on the processes at work by which surplus value is distributed unevenly between different classes and fractions of classes. A focus on rent within political ecology, we argue, can help us distinguish between two organically related but analytically distinct 'moments': a) the creation of property rights that establish rent relations and b) the struggle over the appropriation and distribution of surplus value generated by the rent relation itself. We explore some of the implications of this perspective for understanding new forms of socio-ecological struggles, and in turn their varied relations to the state. We maintain that a value-grabbing perspective has far-reaching consequences for political ecology, as it provides a sharp conceptual tool for situating a wide range of socio-ecological conflicts and movements as class struggles over value appropriation and distribution.
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Academic papers by Melissa García-Lamarca
lived in squatted properties in Spain. Such figures, often used by the media to stigmatise residential occupations and generate moral panic, give an ill-defined yet powerful indication of the prevalence of squatting within and outside organised housing movements. From these came the question: How to elevate the “minor knowledges” of precariously housed people in an ethical, engaged, and situated way, in dialogue with a coordinated activist push to reframe squatting as a political strategy? Based on the experience of the first “strategic positivist” survey about squatting in Catalonia, we offer a situated reflection on the tensions and contradictions of militant research in a shifting political terrain. The urgency and ethics that guided our process made it necessary to operate through methodological openness and to consider method as politics, advancing a broader agenda of movement-relevant research supporting non-speculative forms of inhabitation.
contribute to and expand debates around the urban housing commons by looking at decommodified and collectively managed housing alternatives through the lens of the reproductive commons. Through the case of
the Bloc La Bordeta squat and the broader commons ecologies in Barcelona’s Sants district, we explore how complex networks of emancipatory reproductive commons subsist and expand in urban environments, and investigate the role of popular infrastructures in this process. We highlight the reproductive dimension of housing squats in sustaining radical movements in the city. However, popular support is also crucial in defending the housing commons from enclosure and state repression, which creates a mutual interdependence among reproductive commons and urban commons ecologies. In looking at the particular difficulties of reproductive urban commoning, we explore material and subjective challenges of the reproductive urban commons, and we
illustrate the importance of looking into and beyond housing and of grounding housing commons’ connections and (dis)continuities within the wider territorial and socio-political context. These challenges create differential forms of commoning in which participation and engagement are unequal but that, nevertheless, are able to support thriving popular infrastructures that become the pillars of the resistance against capitalist urbanisation processes.
discourses and practices. Through a novel dataset of 42 interviews with private and non-profit residential real estate developers in 15 mid-sized American, Western European and Canadian cities, we uncover three differentiated but interconnected discourses around (i) financial benefits, (ii) consumer- or investor-driven demand and (iii) social dimensions behind developers’ interest in urban greening. We argue that developers embark on
urban green grabbing through “green” discursive and material value appropriation and rent extraction strategies. Urban green grabbing is conceptually useful in depicting who benefits and how/when developers extract additional rent, surplus value, social capital and/or prestige from locating new residential projects adjacent to new or up-and-coming green amenities. Our work contributes to debates about urban greening’s perceived
position as a value-producing and rent-extracting good from both a political economy and political ecology perspective.