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The duality of urban density and greenness has gained prominence in the debate on urban sustainability because, in a context of climate change, compact urban forms correlate with lower emissions and enable sustainable mobility strategies (IPCC, 2022) . At the same time, health organizations emphasize that access to green spaces has positive effects on physical and mental health, social cohesion, heat island mitigation, and air quality improvement, among others (WHO, 2023). However, both objectives can come into conflict when urban nature ceases to function as a public good and is capitalized in the real estate market.The problem arises when greening projects increase the desirability of the environment and raise property prices, leading to the displacement of current residents. This phenomenon has been defined in the literature as green gentrification, a socio-spatial process through which greening is intertwined with dynamics of exclusion, observing how vulnerable populations can be displaced by higherincome residents who find these areas to be newly attractive places to live (Anguelovski & Connolly, 2024).Green gentrification can be understood as a particular manifestation of the general gentrification process. In a wide theoretical debate, scholars have distinguished between demand-side explanations, which emphasize preferences and consumption patterns (Ley, 1986), and supply-side perspectives, which highlight capital reinvestment cycles and structural market conditions (N. Smith, 1979). Urban greening may operate within both frameworks: it enhances environmental amenities that attract new residents, while simultaneously contributing with phases of reinvestment and real-estate valorization.In a large number of European and North American cities, the creation of new green spaces has been associated with green gentrification processes in a significant proportion of cases (Anguelovski et al., 2022). This is consistent with a recurring mechanism whereby green spaces, when incorporated as localized improvements in tight and high demand housing marked contexts, particularly in compact cities where green space is scarce, tend to generate real estate appreciation and residential pressure. Urban greening is therefore not socially neutral when carried out without safeguards, as it may lead to land values being inflated and to unequal distribution of environmental benefits (Anguelovski et al., 2018).Importantly, the density/greening dilemma is context dependent. It is most salient in compact, highdemand cities with scarce green and tight housing markets, where incremental greening can translate rapidly into price increases and displacement pressure. By contrast, in legacy or shrinking cities with extensive vacancy, greening is often framed as vacant-land reuse and green redevelopment and may not be accompanied by measurable gentrification (Hawes et al., 2022;Safransky, 2014). This article argues that the question of whether a city can be both dense and green cannot be addressed solely from design or environmental performance considerations, but must be understood as a political and distributive challenge, in which green gentrification operates as a revealing mechanism rather than an isolated outcome.Urban density, green gentrification, and governanceUrban density is a key attribute to urban sustainability. Compact, mixed-use development reduces travel distances, encouraging cleaner modes of transport and reducing emissions associated with mobility (IPCC, 2022). From this perspective, it follows that urban densification is a necessary strategy for moving toward more efficient cities in terms of energy, mobility, and climate management (UN-Habitat, 2016).However, in dense urban contexts with tight housing markets, introducing new green infrastructure can have mixed effects (Anguelovski & Connolly, 2024). On the one hand, the creation of parks, gardens, or urban trees improves the environmental quality and livability of the city; on the other hand, it can intensify competition for land and housing by making the area more attractive (Bockarjova et al., 2020).Density alone does not cause green gentrification, but it can act as an amplifier when urban green space is scarce and affordable housing is not ensured (Anguelovski & Connolly, 2024;Bockarjova et al., 2020). In this sense, urban density should not be seen as a neutral background condition but as a spatial arrangement that enhances both environmental value and socioeconomic impacts of greening.Mechanisms of exclusion linked to density operate through both market and policy channels. In compact settings, limited developable land and public green spaces increase the willingness to pay for proximity to green infrastructure that can rapidly translate into higher rents and sales prices (Bockarjova et al., 2020). At the same time, densification and greening are often bundled within redevelopment strategies that attract reinvestment and upscale demand, aligning with both supplyside dynamics of capital revalorization and demand-side shifts in residential preferences (Ley, 1986;N. Smith, 1979).The risk of displacement is accentuated when urban densification is promoted without conscious planning for its social impacts. Unless new developments include a proportion of affordable housing, they tend to become luxury green enclaves accessible only to high-income residents (Haase et al., 2017). It is therefore essential that densification and green renewal strategies are accompanied by affordable housing policies and market regulations that guarantee the permanence of vulnerable residents and prevent socio-spatial inequality (Anguelovski & Connolly, 2024;Rice et al., 2020). Table 1 illustrates the duality of the intended goal and potential unintended effects behind the dimensions of urban sustainability.Rather than being the core problem itself, green gentrification can be read as a diagnostic lens that exposes deeper contradictions in dense-city sustainability strategies. Numerous studies show that green gentrification patterns are repeated in various cities around the world, reflecting structural dynamics of contemporary urbanism (Anguelovski et al., 2019(Anguelovski et al., , 2022;;Gould & Lewis, 2016). Authors such as Anguelovski and Connolly (2024) even warn that urban greening without equity can create "green sacrifice zones", areas where historically marginalized residents are expelled from greener neighborhoods and relegated to lower environmental quality and greater climate vulnerability. Anguelovski et al. (2022), in a comparative analysis of 28 cities in Europe and North America, confirms that the creation or improvement of urban green spaces is often associated with gentrification processes.Greenness has become a rare and highly valued urban resource in compact cities due to the convergence of high demand, limited space, and symbolic environmental improvements. Several factors explain why green infrastructure ends up being a market value. First, interventions such as new parks or ecological corridors can trigger real estate revaluations and socio-spatial transformations that mainly affect low-income residents (Anguelovski et al., 2019). Secondly, private developers and investment funds direct their capital towards high-end green developments, incorporating sustainability certifications and proximity to natural areas as selling points, so that urban nature translates into market rents (Anguelovski et al., 2022). Thirdly, many urban sustainability projects end up pitting ecological benefits against social equity, benefiting affluent groups while excluding vulnerable communities (Gould & Lewis, 2016).Compatibility between urban density and greening emerges not as a technical question of design, but as a governance and redistributive issue. Green planning can act as an instrument for correcting inequalities or, conversely, as a factor that deepens them. The difference lies in the existence or absence of explicit policies aimed at guaranteeing social justice and the right to the city. When such policies are weak, fragmented, or implemented too late, green planning may not only fail to prevent exclusion, but accelerate green gentrification by reinforcing market dynamics in dense and competitive urban contexts.From this perspective, various authors advocate a move toward fair green planning, understood as planning that integrates environmental objectives with social safeguards from the initial stages of urban design (Anguelovski & Connolly, 2024). This involves, among other measures, ensuring affordable housing in renaturalized areas, implementing rent control or capital gains mechanisms, promoting community participation in project definition, and distributing green investments equitably throughout the urban territory.In this regard, the use of open indicators and spatial monitoring tools that integrate remote sensing and time series such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) allows for the quantification and tracking of changes in green infrastructure over time (Sharifi et al., 2021;Uchida et al., 2024). And when this environmental monitoring is combined with socioeconomic variables, it is possible to compare the evolution of indicators such as income, average housing prices, educational attainment, nationality, or the proportion of older people living alone, providing evidence for a more transparent assessment of the social and environmental effects of urban policies (Díaz Parra & Apaolaza, 2020;Freeman, 2005;S. Smith et al., 2024). Although these indicators do not replace political decision-making, they do allow for the early detection of inequality dynamics and the adjustment of interventions before processes of displacement of the resident population become entrenched. However, NDVI primarily captures the amount of vegetation and may only partially reflect how urban nature is perceived and used, so qualitative indicators can be relevant complements in green gentrification assessments (Teeuwen et al., 2024).Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the gentrification effects of greening depend on the type, design, and function of urban nature. In New York City, newly added green spaces were associated with gentrification dynamics, with particularly strong effects observed for passive, natural, mediumsized green spaces (Kim & Wu, 2022). Across 28 Global North cities, parks were more consistently positively associated with gentrification; instead, newly designated nature reserves tended to show negative associations, while gardens, recreational spaces and greenways showed mixed results (Triguero-Mas et al., 2022). This supports complementing NDVI-based monitoring with a typology of greening interventions and qualitative measures, such as resident perceptions, patterns of use and locally valued meaning of nature, collected through surveys, interviews or participatory mapping.The articulation of urban density, green infrastructure, and social justice is essentially a challenge of urban governance. The debate is often framed as a dilemma between density and greenness, when it could also be approached as the tension of how environmental improvements interact with housing markets and social regulation in dense urban contexts. It has been shown that compatibility between a dense city and a green city does not occur automatically, but rather depends on the policies and measures that accompany these processes.Densification and greening bring significant benefits such as lower emissions, better quality of life, and healthier environments. However, they can also entail social costs if implemented without safeguards. In dense and highly competitive housing markets, the same greening interventions that enhance environmental quality can intensify residential pressure and accelerate exclusionary dynamics. So how can density and greenery go hand in hand without sacrificing equity? This question drives the increasing focus on green gentrification as an unintended consequence of wellintentioned environmental policies and is at the center of current discussions on sustainable urbanism.The lesson is that density alone does not lead to exclusion, nor does green infrastructure alone create green gentrification; it is the combination of interventions without redistributive policies what produces unequal urban outcomes. Green gentrification adds the explicit environmental pathway to the classical gentrification debate, whereby green infrastructure interventions become a mechanism through which exclusionary dynamics are accelerated, producing unequal access to environmental benefits and climate protection (Anguelovski & Connolly, 2024;Gould & Lewis, 2016). Therefore, density should be viewed as a spatial condition that intensifies the benefits and drawbacks of urban greening, especially in areas with limited green space and high land values, rather than as a neutral background.Arguing that a city can be both dense and green requires recognizing that such compatibility is not automatic, but conditional. Only through urban governance that treats green infrastructure as an essential public good, rather than as an asset for real estate development, will it be possible to reconcile the objectives of climate mitigation, urban livability, and social justice. This means moving away from the notion of sustainability understood solely as ecological efficiency or aesthetic appeal, and adopting a vision of comprehensive sustainability, where environmental well-being, social equity, and inclusive governance advance together.Only through inclusive governance will we achieve compact, green cities that are, above all, cities to live in, where climate mitigation and livability are not achieved at the expense of social justice, but in partnership with it. In this sense, greenness must be treated as a redistributive urban infrastructure rather than as a catalyst for land valorization if dense cities are to reconcile environmental goals with social inclusion.