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The “green city” refers to a strategy for improving urbanized regions’ sustainability. It is a strategy for city planning that focuses on the ecosystem goods and services that green infrastructure could provide. This strategy combines an amalgam of ideas such as the city interacting with nature, restoring urban ecosystems, and minimizing natural resource and energy use. The emergence of green cities may provide a promising venue to address cities’ environmental degradation and citizens’ disengagement with current socio-environmental issues, thus giving rise to the notion of Environmental Citizenship (EC).
- green cities
- environmental citizenship (EC)
- citizens’ engagement
1. The Concept of a “Green City”
The concept of a “Green city” is one of the latest breakthroughs of the diverse efforts and research conducted to address the problems caused by the dispersed model of city development. For Kronsell (2013) a green city is seen as an urban structural model, which ensures the quality of the environment and the quality of life via the implementation of various green policies [1]. The primary goal of implementing green city policies is therefore to improve community life quality and protect the environment, by adopting inclusive and participatory decision-making processes [1].
However, the existence of a wide range of green policies as well as the wide spectrum of environmental and other urban-related challenges within a city has also led to the development of various definitions and approaches for what “green cities” are and what they entail. Some of them incorporate socioeconomic, environmental, and infrastructure components, while yet others primarily concentrate on the environmental aspects [2]. Still others also include policies, resilience, ICT technologies, and strategies like disaster risk planning, etc. [2]. Some researchers have translated the green city concept, into frameworks and indicators assessing environmental and/or sustainability performance [2]. These frameworks aim to support city policymakers in setting environmental or sustainability priorities, as well as areas of action such as green transport, energy efficiency, and resources management [2]. Pace and colleagues (2016) have defined the green city as “…a city that takes responsible political and societal action in order to achieve high environmental quality, which by itself contributes to human well-being” [3] (p. 6). This definition is also adopted in this study as a working definition.
Green cities mainly address key environmental issues, which may also have an influence on social and economic aspects [4]. Green cities aim to achieve a low environmental impact, be resilient against natural disasters, have a low risk of severe infectious disease outbreaks [5], decrease chemical and physical hazards, advance urban environments for all, reduce environmental costs being transferred to places outside the city, and assure progress toward a green economy [6]. In addition, green cities adopt sustainability policies and policies related to transportation, water, climate change, energy efficiency and renewable resources, and pollution and waste management, e.g., Refs. [7][8][9], resulting in healthier living conditions. Overall, green cities encompass regional or local policies and regulations, as well as various urban settings, and are grounded on the involvement of several stakeholders (e.g., organizations or citizens), especially in terms of social or community issues [10]. Focusing on the latter, citizens’ engagement in green cities is of vital importance [10].
2. Citizens’ Engagement in Green Cities
Green cities are perceived as the answer to how cities could become more sustainable, less dispersed, and more habitable. For this to occur, people are considered sources of progress for the city’s social realm and implementers of various green policies. For instance, the literature proposes that public engagement at the decision and implementation levels of green policies is crucial for the effective implementation of such policies [11]. Citizens’ willingness to participate in the green modernization processes is, therefore, critical to all green advancements [12].
Citizens’ engagement entails citizens assisting in the development and implementation of all policies aimed at improving the community’s quality of life, rather than simply identifying the source of a problem [13]. According to Barney (2006), citizens’ engagement has four functions: (a) to apply democratic procedures in policy development, (b) to let citizens increase their awareness with the purpose of diminishing misinformed oppositions, (c) to inform the city administration as to how citizens might react to (green or less green) policies, and (d) to help optimize civil communication strategies related to specific projects and policies [14]. Citizens’ engagement can be therefore deployed to enable valuable participation in public discussions and decision-making, as well as for achieving policy implementation by a larger population of citizens [14].
3. Environmental Citizenship (EC)
Environmental Citizenship (EC) is a broad concept that encompasses pro-environmental activity as well as citizens’ engagement toward environmental protection and socio-environmental transformation. Despite the significance of EC, it is only recently that the concept has gained the traction it deserves and was defined by more than 150 experts in a comprehensive and holistic way by the European Network for Environmental Citizenship [15]. The following excerpt describes the given definition of EC:
“Environmental Citizenship is defined as the responsible pro-environmental behavior of citizens who act and participate in society as agents of change in the private and public sphere on a local, national and global scale, through individual and collective actions in the direction of solving contemporary environmental problems, preventing the creation of new environmental problems, achieving sustainability and developing a healthy relationship with nature.” [15].
Building on this conceptualization, Hadjichambis and Hadjichambi (2020) have introduced the Education for Environmental Citizenship (EEC) model, which seeks to provide citizens with a set of competencies and convert them into “environmental change agents” [15]. In this way, EEC is to educate and inspire citizens to appreciate the value and significance of civic engagement as well as the significance of addressing today’s socio-ecological concerns. More specifically, the EEC model consists of three major components: (a) the competencies that an environmental citizen should be equipped with (green cycle); (b) the possible actions that could be undertaken by environmental citizens (in different dimensions, spheres, and scales); and (c) the environmental outcomes of these actions on the environment and the society (orange arrows) (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The EEC model (Adopted from Hadjichambis and Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, 2020).
EC Competences-EC Actions-EEC Outcomes
The EC Competences (illustrated by the green cycle in Figure 1) refer to the needed knowledge, attitudes, skills, values, and behaviors of environmental citizens in relation to socio-ecological issues to be responsible and actively engage in civic and social life, so acting as “environmental agents of change”. Also, citizens’ EC actions are categorized on (a) individual or collective dimensions, (b) private or public spheres, as well as (c) local, national, or global scales. Finally, citizens who possess the EC competences are required to act in a variety of dimensions, on a variety of spheres and scales, in order to achieve specific environmental outcomes and bring about social and environmental change. These environmental outcomes are: (a) the solution of current environmental problems, (b) the prevention of the creation of new environmental problems, (c) the addressing of the structural causes of environmental problems, (d) the development of a healthy relationship with nature, (e) the practice of environmental rights and duties, (f) the achievement of critical and active engagement and civic participation, (g) the promotion of inter/intra-generational justice, and (h) the achievement of sustainability.
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su142316223
References
- Kronsell, A. Legitimacy for climate policies: Politics and participation in the Green City of Freiburg. Local Environ. 2013, 18, 965–982.
- Roseland, M. Toward Sustainable Communities: Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments, 4th ed.; New Society Publishers: New York, NY, USA, 2012.
- Pace, R.; Churkina, G.; Rivera, M. How Green is a “Green City”? A Review of Existing Indicators and Approaches; IASS Working Paper; December 2016.
- Brilhante, O.; Klaas, J. Green city concept and a method to measure green city performance over time applied to fifty cities globally: Influence of GDP, population size and energy efficiency. Sustainability 2018, 10, 2031.
- Kahn, M.E. Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment; Brookings Institution Press: Washington, DC, USA, 2006; Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt6wpfq3 (accessed on 15 March 2022).
- United Nations Environment Programme UNEP Annual Report 2011, UNEP Division of Communications and Public Information. 2012. Available online: http://www.unep.org/annualreport (accessed on 15 March 2022).
- Bibri, S.E. Advances in the Leading Paradigms of Urbanism and their Amalgamation Compact Cities, Eco–Cities, and Data–Driven Smart Cities, 1st ed.; Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2020.
- Flynn, A.; Yu, L.; Feindt, P.; Chen, C. Eco-cities, governance and sustainable lifestyles: The case of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City. Habitat Int. 2016, 53, 78–86.
- van Dijk, M.P. Measuring eco cities, comparing European and Asian experiences: Rotterdam versus Beijing. Asia Eur. J. 2015, 13, 75–94.
- Joss, S.; Tomozeiu, D.; Cowley, R. Eco-city indicators: Governance challenges. In Sustainable City VII; WIT Press: Rome, Italy, 2017; Volume 155.
- Hu, S.; Chen, J. Place-based inter-generational communication on local climate improves adolescents’ perceptions and willingness to mitigate climate change. Clim. Chang. 2016, 138, 425–438.
- Wamsler, C.; Alkan-Olsson, J.; Björn, H.; Falck, H.; Hanson, H.; Oskarsson, T.; Simonsson, E.; Zelmerlow, F. Beyond participation: When citizen engagement leads to undesirable outcomes for nature-based solutions and climate change adaptation. Clim. Chang. 2020, 158, 235–254.
- Stamm, L. Civic Engagement in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices. J. Coll. Character 2009, 10, 4.
- Barney, D. The morning after: Citizen engagement in technological society. Techné Res. Philos. Technol. 2006, 9, 23–31.
- Hadjichambis, A.C.; Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, D. Education for Environmental Citizenship: The Pedagogical Approach. In Con-Ceptualizing Environmental Citizenship for 21st Century Education; Hadjichambis, A.C., Reis, P., Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, D., Činčera, J., Boeve-de Pauw, J., Gericke, N., Knippels, M.-C., Eds.; Environmental Discourses in Science Education; Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2020; Volume 4, pp. 237–261.
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