Greening cities while feeding injustices? Discussing the urban greening paradox

Urban greening has become a central pillar of contemporary sustainability agendas, promoted for its contributions to environmental performance, climate resilience and quality of life. Yet critical research shows that these interventions often generate inequitable outcomes: producing exclusions, displacement and affordability pressures that contradict their inclusive sustainability rhetoric. As a conceptual debate contribution, this article offers a framework for understanding what we term the urban greening paradox: a structural tension between the universalist values of sustainability and the neoliberal policy logics through which greening is implemented. Drawing on scholarship in urban political ecology, we identify three dimensions through which the paradox materialises: the universalisation of greening benefits that obscures inequalities; land-use and housing policy practices that reinforce real-estate valorisation; and the power relations embedded in participatory processes and their exclusionary effects. Building on this analysis, the article advances three propositions: (i) the inequities associated with urban greening are endogenous to market-led urban governance rather than implementation failures; (ii) the paradox extends beyond greening to wider climate, smart and sustainability agendas, including climate adaptation and resilience strategies, where ecological goals are pursued through neoliberal instruments; and (iii) addressing these contradictions requires ex-ante, equity-orientated planning tools that embed redistribution and recognition from the outset. By systematising dispersed insights across urban greening and climate debates, the article provides an original conceptualisation of the paradox and argues that anticipating and mitigating it demands justice-sensitive governance frameworks capable of confronting, rather than reproducing, the structural conditions shaping sustainability policy.