Institutional Breakpoints in Equity-Oriented Green Infrastructure Planning: Ordinal Evidence from 122 U.S. City Plans

Abstract

Urban green infrastructure planning initiatives are becoming increasing likely to include promises related to climate change, stormwater management, urban heat mitigation, ecological restoration, and enhanced quality of public space. The question of the equity effectiveness of these plans hinges upon whether promises translate into institution-building around definition, recognition of disparate vulnerability, transfer of community control into design and implementation, impact assessment, anti-displacement, and just allocation of green jobs. This paper investigates 122 green infrastructure plans across 20 American cities in relation to ten categories of equity practice, namely definition, framing, justice, planning, design, implementation, evaluation, hazard, value, and labor. The research includes development of Ordinal Sufficiency Partitioning as a method of reading five-state plan quality ratings as ordered distributions rather than interval-scale scores. Results show an institutional discontinuity. Value, planning, and hazard practices exhibit the greatest development, characterized by sufficiency ratios of 45.0%, 43.4%, and 41.2%, respectively. Definition and justice exhibit least sufficiency, scoring at 8.8% and 11.9% with non-operative drag above 86%. Design and labor categories have been minimally developed with functional sufficiency at 2.0% and 4.0%, respectively. With respect to life-cycle practice, value has lower sufficiency compared to procedure and distribution; that is, plans often articulate potential benefits while failing to specify a definition of equitable benefit, identify decision makers and provide oversight thereafter. In terms of addressing the fundamental questions asked, the findings speak to themselves, revealing that officially-sanctioned green infrastructure plans lack a cohesive and effective process of building equity-operability.