Racial Governmentality and Urban Greening: A Critical Review with Nordic Implications

Urban greening research increasingly brings racialised differences in access, participation, and spatial outcomes into view, yet comparatively little attention has been paid to how these differences are produced through planning’s governing rationalities. This article critically reviews how governmentality-informed scholarship conceptualises racialisation across urban greening, spatial planning and urban development. This analytical perspective is relevant in Nordic welfare-state contexts, where racialisation is rendered institutionally muted while governance proceeds through administrative categories that shape spatial governance. The review shows that this body of scholarship has largely developed along separate trajectories, with studies of racialisation and studies of greening only rarely brought together. This review examines 21 studies that apply Foucauldian governmentality to analyse racialisation across spatial planning, urban development, and everyday practices. Synthesising this scholarship, the review identifies two themes: biopolitical rationalities that govern populations and environments through spatial planning, and disciplinary practices that regulate conduct and produce differentiated forms of belonging. The review finds that urban greening is rarely conceptualised as a governing practice, obscuring how greening participates in shaping subjects, norms and spatial conduct. Green space is often treated as an empirical setting rather than as an object of governmental analysis. Positioning Nordic planning within scholarship on racial governmentality, the article argues that welfare-state planning rationalities, administrative classifications and universalist discourses can obscure racialising forms of governance. Rather than governing through explicit racial categories, racialisation is institutionally obscured, with governance operating through administrative and social proxies. Engaging with international debates on racial governmentality clarifies the techniques and power mechanisms through which racialisation persists in planning contexts that present themselves as race-neutral. Rather than replacing justice-oriented approaches, this article introduces racial governmentality as a diagnostic lens for examining how urban greening shapes racialised subjects, norms, and practices in Nordic contexts. It outlines a research agenda for analysing urban greening as a governing practice, tracing welfare-state classifications and planning techniques, and investigating the role of sustainability agendas in racialised subject formation.