Saving the “lungs of the city”: emerging civic action in urban environmental policy: case studies from Tampere, Finland and Worcester, Massachusetts

Abstract

We have long witnessed conservation movements emerging in tandem with industrial expansion and urbanisation, but such impetus took a new turn in the 1960s and 1970s with the global birth of a new kind of urban environmental policy. In this comparative case study, we provide a close examination of two urban movements at the forefront of a new era of environmentalism, movements that bore lasting environmental policy agendas in their respective cities. Through an in-depth assessment of civic resistance to a freeway planned to cut through a town forest in Tampere, Finland as well as a deep analysis of protests against large-scale open pit waste burning in Worcester, Massachusetts, we document the development of civic claims and local leaders’ counterclaims surrounding urban orientations and responsibilities to the local environment. We demonstrate how new movement ideals of health, quality of life, and nature conservation came up against entrenched governance commitments to progress, technocratic authority, and a tacit acceptance of human modification of the natural world. Through a close examination of these early movements, we seek to illuminate the path dependencies urban environmental policy contentions have followed from the 1960s to the present.