The Green Divide : A Spatial Analysis of Environmental Inequality in Vienna

Cities as the human habitat of the 21st century will have to face an increasingly amount of climate change related risks. More extreme weather events, hot spells and increasing air pollution already have widespread impacts on people, their health and their well-being. Urban vegetation is one proposed nature-based solution to this. Vegetation, however, is not always equitably distributed. This study, therefore, investigates the existence of environmental inequalities related to urban vegetation for the case of Vienna. The study applies two innovative segregation-based inequality indices, recently developed by Schaeffer & Tivadar (2019), which references to the residential segregation literature as a source of insight for the measurement of environmental inequalities within urban areas. Using high-resolution satellite data and demographic data on a 250 m2 grid level, this study is able to deliver robust evidence on the existence of environmental inequalities with respect to ethnic minorities and urban vegetation. Minorities are always more segregated from urban vegetation than non-minorities, even when controlling for interactions with wider neighbourhoods. The application of a Jackknife simulation provides, additionally, insights for local policy interventions, mapping hotspots of urban inequalities and thereby delivering a solid starting point to tackle these on the ground