From Five Angry Women to Kick-ass Community: Gentrification and Environmental Activism in Brooklyn and Beyond

In this article, a new conceptual framework is advocated to evaluate the range of environmental activism in already-gentrifying neighbourhoods and to recognise the agency and resilience of long-term residents. The category of gentrifier-enhanced environmental activism is meant to account for attempts to forge coalitions (however uneasy they may turn out to be) between long-term residents and gentrifiers. This includes attempts by long-term residents to mitigate environmental gentrification by 'schooling' gentrifiers in communities' longstanding concerns and needs, framing these concerns as a common cause rather than allowing for the takeover of local environmental politics often associated with environmental gentrification. The example is used of the fight to clean up Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as a case study in how environmental veterans made strategic alliances with gentrifiers who brought new resources to the area in order to achieve political pressure for change and to promote more just sustainabilities.