Understanding Variation in Neighbourhood Environmental Inequalities: The Influence of Residential Segregation, Gentrification, and other City-Level Factors

Exposure to environmental burdens, such air and noise pollution or the lack of available green spaces, has been linked to a multitude of detrimental outcomes. Previous evidence indicates that poor residents and foreign minorities in European cities are disproportionately exposed to environmental burdens. However, there are substantial but ill-understood differences between European countries and between cities within countries. To address this limitation, we utilise fine-grained 1km-by-1km neighbourhood grid data on objective air and noise pollution as well as green space availability, enriched with administrative data on poverty rates and foreign minority shares from all German cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants in 2017. We examine whether poor residents and foreign minorities are more often affected by environmental burdens, how their exposure to environmental burdens differs between cities, and what city-specific contextual factors contribute to these between-city differences. We find evidence that foreign minorities are more likely to be exposed to environmental burdens, but poor residents are predominantly not. However, there is considerable variation between cities. The strongest explanatory factor for this variation is the extent to which disadvantaged groups live in central neighbourhoods, less so residential segregation of poor and foreign residents, or the scarcity of ‘clean and healthy’ neighbourhoods in a city. Against these results, we further explore empirically how the current wave of inner-city gentrification might ease environmental inequality in German cities.