Resident Retention in Green Climate Adaptation: Ordinal Civic Evidence from Boston, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Barcelona

Abstract

Now that the greening of climate infrastructure is firmly established as part of urban adaptation, however, civic effectiveness is more complicated than hydrology, cooling capacity, plant cover or space design alone. Socially fragile adaptation occurs where greening brings local benefits to people who face displacement pressure, selective redevelopment, access restrictions and weakened local identity. In this study, Resident Retention Gate Analysis (RRGA) is introduced as an ordinal civic calculation of the likelihood that socio-environmental benefits are usable by marginalized residents. Applying the calculation involves mapping a civic record of each of four neighborhoods in Boston, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Barcelona: their histories, their climate/environmental problems, their greening interventions, their redevelopment pressures, their distribution of civic interviews and the order magnitude of their benefits in terms of recognition, displacement experience, displacement threat, development, dissatisfaction, green gentrification fears, unequal access and social cohesion disruption. RRGA turns those order-magnitudes into civic gates based on three civic criteria: tenure stability, public development orientation and continuity of access/belonging. It calculates the retained benefit score by multiplying recognized benefit with the average of the two constraints and the dominant one. The retention deficits are worst in East Boston due to high tenure pressure and greening associated with the marketization of waterfront amenities, where only a small civic gate makes room for benefits that are already recognized to be moderate. The retained benefit score is highest in Hunting Park, whose high greening need has been coupled with low marketization pressure, despite green gentrification fears being very real there. The Amsterdam Noord case features a bottleneck situation caused by investment-led greening and creative redevelopment, as well as waterfront amenities. The most exclusionary and protection-focused tension between benefits and constraints emerges in Poblenou, where high need for greening is compounded by strong displacement and redevelopment pressures. Conclusion: Climate-adaptive greening should be evaluated in terms of resident retention – the crucial question here being whether the affected community will remain nearby, able to govern, access and take ownership of their environmental improvement.