In This Issue...

Articles
The articles in the January issue present a strong environmental theme: municipal services and management, community and allotment gardening, rural land and property right regulation, climate change narratives, ‘zero-waste neighbourhoods’, solid wastes, mixed-use areas, food justice, ecological and green gentrification, environmental movements, and the climate-friendly city.

First, this issue explores various aspects related to the built environment and nature, such as green space, allotments, agricultural land, solid wastes in cities and circulation across countries, waste-to-energy systems, food and housing.

Second, it examines various narratives and presentations of environmental changes, such as eco-urbanism, food and housing justices, low-carbon lifestyles, apocalyptic narratives of climate change, ‘immunopolitical fantasy’, metabolic transition, non-confrontational ‘alternatives’, and climate-friendly cities.

Third, this issue coheres on governance and politics related to or derived from environmental changes: governance decentralization, counter-neoliberalization, municipal reform, the role of the state, transfer of development rights, local environmental activism, politicization and depoliticization of environmental movements, the political ecology of urbanization, housing justices and urban sustainability.

—Fulong Wu 

Interventions
More than 50 years after the back-to-the-city movement was first recognized to be reshaping certain working-class neighborhoods in London, gentrification remains one of the central concerns in critical and comparative urban studies. The two Interventions pieces in the January issue offer new insights into the phenomenon and continue to deepen our understandings of urban transformation and housing justice in cities around the world. The first piece by Jennifer L. Rice, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Joshua Long, and Jason R. Jurjevich exposes the contradiction that climate-friendly urban policies, including transit-oriented development, pedestrian-friendly streets, and urban densification, may be worsening greenhouse gas emissions by attracting more affluent urban residents with higher levels of consumption and larger carbon footprints. By retaining a focus on gentrification and housing justice in studies of urban sustainability, this essay pushes cities to rethink investments in low‐carbon infrastructure that may lead to the displacement of lower‐income and non‐white urban residents with limited environmental benefits. The second piece by David Ley and Sin Yih Teo uses the study of gentrification to continue to probe the limits of planetary urban studies. Responding to an earlier Interventions collection questioning the relevance of gentrification as a framework for explaining urban transformations in Hong Kong, Ley and Teo attempt to bridge what they characterize as a dualism between universalizing urban theory and an emphasis on regional specificity. Situating gentrification at the centre of this inquiry, this essay continues to push on this fundamental schism in global and comparative urban studies and offers suggestions for how it may be bridged.

—Liza Weinstein