Minneapolis, Minnesota's award-winning greenspaces reflect the city’s longstanding commitment to the civic realm and environmental stewardship. Yet from their founding, these greenspaces were intentionally cultivated by city boosters and real estate developers. The production of greenness in Minneapolis has always been imbricated with processes of racialized dispossession, from settler colonialism to white supremacist real estate practices.
I begin by highlighting the role of park building in the production and legitimation of Minneapolis as a settler city (Hugill, 2021; Dillon, 2021) and show how parks enabled the production of spaces of racial exclusion through the machinations of segregated real estate development (Walker et al., 2022).
Focusing on two developments, the Nokomis Terrace and Walton Hills Additions, I illustrate the ways in which developers worked with civil society organizations and local government agencies to secure public investments in green amenities, including gardens and public parks, while blanketing their developments with racial covenants. To boost property values, developers paired “greenness” and legal guarantees of whiteness, engineering idealized nature while excluding racialized groups. Then, extending this analysis through a quantitative spatial mapping of heat risk, I demonstrate how settler colonialism and white supremacy continue to structure the socio-spatial relationships across Minneapolis's landscape in ways that produce unequal exposure to premature death (Gilmore, 2007).
While white and high-income residents benefit from disproportionate access to spaces of environmental privilege, Minneapolis's minoritized and low-income residents are disproportionately exposed to environmental harms (Walker et al., 2024). I conclude by noting the ways in which these processes continue to shape the politics of greenspace development in Minneapolis today (Parish, 2019; Safransky, 2014).
- Hugill, D. Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis. (U of Minnesota Press, 2021).
- Dillon, L. Civilizing swamps in California: Formations of race, nature, and property in the nineteenth century U.S. West. Environ. Plan. Soc. Space 02637758211026317 (2021) doi:10.1177/02637758211026317.
- Walker, R. H., Ramer, H., Derickson, K. D. & Keeler, B. L. Making the City of Lakes: Whiteness, Nature, and Urban Development in Minneapolis. Ann. Am. Assoc. Geogr. 1–15 (2022).
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- Walker, R. H., Keeler, B. L. & Derickson, K. D. The impacts of racially discriminatory housing policies on the distribution of intra-urban heat and tree canopy: A comparison of racial covenants and redlining in Minneapolis, MN. Landsc. Urban Plan. 245, 105019 (2024).
- Parish, J. Re-wilding Parkdale? Environmental gentrification, settler colonialism, and the reconfiguration of nature in 21st century Toronto. Environ. Plan. E Nat. Space 2514848619868110 (2019).
- Safransky, S. Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in Detroit. Geoforum 56, 237–248 (2014).