Green Social Work in City Spaces: Greening Urban Cityscapes through Green Social Work Perspectives

Citation

Dominelli L (2019) Green Social Work in City Spaces: Greening Urban Cityscapes through Green Social Work Perspectives. In: Munford R & O’Donoghue K (eds.) New Theories for Social Work Practice: Ethical Practice for Working with Individuals, Families and Communities. London: Jessica Kingsley, pp. 157-176. https://www.jkp.com/uk/new-theories-for-social-work-practice.html

Abstract
First Paragraph: Green social work perspectives are useful in critiquing measures that exploit land and resources with little regard for the health and wellbeing of people, other living things and planet earth. Such exploitation is particularly marked in cities. Cities are becoming concreted over in the interests of maximizing land use, thereby stressing people and the physical ecosystem. Urban developers pressurize the physical environment by squeezing more and more people into small spaces, producing higher and higher apartment blocks and undermining the wellbeing of people, and plants and animals that formerly roamed over green fields before they became concreted land in a hyper-urbanized landscape (Dominelli 2012). The fire in Grenfell Tower in London in the summer of 2017 provides a horrific example of how profit maximization costs lives as well as emitting toxic substances into the atmosphere and local environment when combustible cladding burns. How much did this one fire add to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and other toxic substances emitted into the air and surrounding soil? These costs must be ascertained as they impact on the environment alongside the suffering and grief caused to people whose lives have been devastated.

Keywords
Qualification; CPD; training; health; social care; social work theory; social work practice

People

Professor Lena Dominelli

Professor of Social Work, Social Work