Planning the Dense and Healthy City for All - Access to Green Spaces in Densification Projects

Enhancing access to urban green spaces is crucial for high-density cities to ensure a healthy and safe urban environment. Densification can be a great opportunity for green space provision in already dense environments. However, given the complexity of implementing densification, to ensure inclusive access to green space benefits is challenging. This chapter aims to contribute to a better understanding of how urban greening and densification can be combined to ensure a dense and healthy city for all. I do so by arguing that the conditions of governance of densification affect how access to green spaces is produced and for whom, linking green space development with the power relations and institutions that shape densification. I illustrate my argument based on empirical insights from a case-study in Utrecht, the Netherlands, as a relevant context to analyse the implications of greening and densifying high-density cities. The case-study shows how the exclusionary design of the project’s green spaces was not an unexpected outcome but rather a necessary compromise, related to a context of high land prices and powerful economic interests. While densification shows great potential to advance urban greening in high-density contexts, the prioritization of the economic function of green spaces jeopardizes to what extent the benefits of urban green can be enjoyed by all.