Date of Award

August 2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Urban Studies

First Advisor

Ryan Holifield

Committee Members

Anne Bonds, Arijit Sen, Kristin Sziarto

Abstract

This dissertation research draws attention to urban rail-trail projects as issues of social (in)justice. Like urban greenspace, rail-trails are not an unproblematic environmental good. Large, high-profile urban rail-trails like New York City’s High Line, Chicago’s 606 Bloomingdale Trail and Atlanta’s Beltline have all received criticism for accelerating gentrification in surrounding communities, most often displacing historically excluded communities adjacent to the trail. Less research has explored relationships between urban rail-trail development and cultural displacement. This research aims to fill that gap by understanding how contemporary urban rail-trail projects are incorporating equity into their planning processes and whether urban rail-trails can be socially just spaces that mitigate cultural displacement rather than accelerate it. First, I develop an equity index to analyze the development plans of 11 urban rail-trails across the United States to explore how plans are integrating distributive, procedural and recognitional forms of justice. I find that many rail-trails have begun including strategies that address all three conceptions of justice, however I also find that some criteria are not as universally applied, including strategies for mitigating physical displacement, efforts to encourage shared governance, efforts to gain representative participation from historically excluded residents, and efforts to recognize the identities and histories of excluded groups adjacent to the trail. These findings reveal that some urban rail-trail plans can do more to ensure that planning processes are equitable. To understand challenges to equitable urban rail-trail planning more clearly, I use the Beerline Trail Neighborhood Development Project in Milwaukee, WI as a case study. Beerline Trail practitioner perspectives reveal obstacles to equity in urban rail-trail development, including challenges to cultivating belonging and mitigating cultural displacement in the trail’s development process. I discuss two components of equity related to the Beerline Trail, including 1) the challenges related to creative placemaking on the Beerline Trail and opportunities for distributive and procedural justice; and 2) the challenges related to the Beerline Trail’s different landscapes and residents’ sense of belonging as an opportunity for recognition justice. This dissertation expands research on green gentrification by arguing that it is not enough to characterize urban rail-trail projects as top-down or bottom-up efforts. Instead, I find that there are other elements that may lead to residents’ sense of belonging or cultural displacement.

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