The contemporary debate on urban sustainability is marked by a persistent tension. Compact urban form is often defended as a way to reduce sprawl, limit infrastructure costs, and shorten travel distances. Yet density alone does not produce environmental justice, nor does greening automatically generate inclusive urbanism. The effects of urban green interventions depend on their location, scale, function, governance, and articulation with land and housing markets (Rigolon and Németh, 2020).For that reason, the dense and green city should not be treated as a self-evident normative model. Green interventions do not have uniform social effects. Some may improve environmental quality without generating displacement; others may intensify land valorization, exclusionary development, and territorial selectivity. As Rigolon and Németh (2020) note, the outcomes of greening vary according to the kind of green space involved and the socio-spatial conditions in which it is implemented. Green gentrification is therefore a useful analytical category, but it should not be applied automatically to every environmental improvement. What matters is how greening becomes embedded in broader processes of capital accumulation, symbolic distinction, and uneven access to urban benefits (García-Lamarca et al. 2021;García-Lamarca 2022).To understand these dynamics, urban space must be treated not as a neutral container but as a social product (Lefebvre, 1991). From this perspective, nature is reorganized, represented, and circulated within the production of value. This approach is especially relevant when greenery is mobilized as city branding and real-estate assets. In such cases, the issue is who gains access to environmental quality, who bears the costs of urban transformation, and who controls the terms under which "sustainability" is defined. This is also why the idea of nature as a common or collective good requires conceptual precision. Urban green areas do not become commons simply because vegetation is present. Their common character depends on forms of access, use, governance, and collective stewardship (Colding et al., 2013). In Brazil, this discussion has gained force through work on green gentrification and the capitalist production of space, particularly where environmental improvement is intertwined with class differentiation, urban marketing, and unequal state action (Torres et al., 2021). Aracaju's urban trajectory suggests that socio-environmental inequality is neither recent nor external to the city's formation. Founded in 1855, when the capital of Sergipe was transferred from São Cristóvão, Aracaju was laid out according to an orthogonal plan over a landscape of mangroves, lagoons, and wetlands (Loureiro 1983;Porto 1991). From its early decades, urban regulation and the material requirements of formal occupation already imposed differentiated conditions of access to the city. Loureiro (1983) shows that nineteenth-century standards excluded poorer residents from the most regulated sectors, helping to shape early socio-spatial segregation.This unequal logic was reinforced over time. In the second half of the twentieth century, public housing policies and urban expansion reorganized rather than neutralized segregation. Carvalho (2013) demonstrates that the location of social housing projects pushed lower-income groups toward peripheral areas, while better-serviced and more environmentally qualified sectors remained available to higher-income development. More recently, Silva Santos and dos Santos (2022) argue that segregation in the metropolitan region of Aracaju cannot be understood apart from state action and housing policy, since both contributed to the territorial differentiation of infrastructure, services, and opportunity.Academic work on Aracaju also shows that environmental amenities have not been evenly distributed across the city. Santos (2019) observes that parks, promenades, public squares, and other socio-environmental assets remain concentrated in better-off sectors, particularly in the central and southern portions of the city. This background matters because it prevents a naïve reading of greening policies as universally beneficial. Recent discourses on sustainability, urban tree planting, and quality of life should therefore be read in connection with a historically unequal process of urbanization.França and Almeida (2022), in their study of Jabotiana neighborhood, show how the proliferation of closed residential enclaves often built over environmentally sensitive areas, generating severe environmental conflicts and unequal spatial production. Santos et al. (2025) similarly argue that verticalization in Aracaju is shaped by the convergence of state action and real-estate producers as modelers of urban space. These studies widen the frame beyond the two cases discussed here.Hermes Fontes Avenue and Central Garden do not stand for the totality of Aracaju, but they become intelligible as part of a broader urban trajectory marked by selective investment, real-estate valorization, and differentiated environmental quality.In 2026, the municipality of Aracaju celebrated the Tree City of the World title, presenting it as evidence of institutional commitment to urban arborization and environmental management (Prefeitura de Aracaju, 2026). Although recognition requires compliance with technical and administrative criteria, it does not in itself resolve how urban nature is materially governed across the city. That question becomes more acute when this celebratory narrative is read alongside the Hermes Fontes Avenue intervention. In 2019, the municipality announced a major mobility project for one of Aracaju's main arterial roads. The official justification emphasized road modernization, circulation, and technical inadequacies in the existing tree stock, while promising compensatory planting in numbers greater than the trees removed (Prefeitura de Aracaju 2019). Yet the intervention also involved the removal of 256 trees, many of them mature specimens, generating criticism from residents, local media, and professional institutions such as the Council of Architecture and Urbanism of Sergipe (CAU/SE, 2020; Mangue Jornalismo 2023a; 2023b; 2025). The issue is the replacement of mature canopy trees with young saplings is not environmentally equivalent in the short or medium term. Mature trees provide shade, thermal regulation, and established ecological functions that newly planted vegetation cannot immediately reproduce. In a hot coastal city, this distinction is not secondary. Research in Aracaju has already shown the relevance of vegetation and urban form for local thermal conditions and microclimates (Anjos and Lopes 2017;Teixeira et al. 2010).The controversy surrounding Hermes Fontes sharpened precisely this mismatch between environmental discourse and lived urban experience. Journalistic reports emphasized thermal discomfort, loss of shade, and deterioration in pedestrian and cyclist conditions after the intervention, while the Public Prosecutor's Office later challenged the project in court (Mangue Jornalismo, 2023aJornalismo, , 2025)). The episode reveals an important asymmetry: mature public greenery may become expendable when it obstructs circulation and infrastructure, while compensatory planting is mobilized discursively as sufficient environmental offset. Under these conditions, greening operates less as a stable public principle than as a selective management tool. The contradiction is therefore political, not merely technical. The same city that celebrates an international arborization title can also normalize the removal of established urban trees in the name of modernization. This does not invalidate the Tree City recognition. It does, however, require that such recognition be read critically, as part of a field of environmental governance in which symbolic achievement and uneven material outcomes may coexist.The Central Garden neighborhood project reveals a different movement: the conversion of green discourse into a premium urban commodity. In CELI's corporate materials, the development and its surroundings are described through expressions such as "planned area," "botanical garden,"walkability, biophilic architecture, tree-lined streets, fresh air, sophistication, and quality of life. Specific materials present Garden Village as a high-end gated development with exclusive lots, while Arbo Residence is promoted as the first vertical condominium in the area, with strong appreciation potential (CELI 2023;CELI 2024a;CELI 2024b;CELI 2025). The analytical interest of these sources lies in showing how nature is converted into a language of distinction, comfort, and investment. These materials show how green space is narrated and commodified. The argument is not that every landscaped development constitutes green gentrification, nor that the Central Garden case alone proves displacement in the strict sense. Such a claim would require longitudinal housing and demographic data beyond the scope of this opinion article. The narrower point is that the project illustrates a discursive and material alignment between urban green imagery, exclusivity, and realestate accumulation. In that sense, it resonates with critiques of urban green boosterism, in which environmental vocabulary becomes a tool for market differentiation rather than an instrument of spatial justice García-Lamarca et al. 2021;García-Lamarca 2022).This case is not the first. Silva (2003) showed that the Jardins neighborhood had already consolidated forms of selective urbanization in which gardens, landscape, security, and privatized residential environments were closely associated with social distinction. Machado (2010) likewise analyzed Jardins as a privileged sector produced through the articulation of infrastructure, symbolic image, and socio-economic stratification. Central Garden does not simply repeat that trajectory, but updates it in the language of contemporary sustainability, biophilia, and branded urbanism. Santos et al. (2025) reinforce this picture by showing how verticalization in Aracaju is structured by the combined action of state planning and private real-estate producers. Against this background, Central Garden should not be treated as an isolated innovation. It is better understood as part of a wider urban logic in which green amenities and environmental imagery support the production of differentiated land values. This also complicates the notion of nature as collective good. In the private sphere, green discourse may promise urban improvement while organizing access through price, enclosure, and residential selectivity.The cases discussed in this article do not allow us to claim, in causal or generalizable terms, the full logic of Aracaju's urbanization. They do, however, support an interpretive conclusion: public and private discourses on tree planting, mobility, and environmental quality participate in the selective production of urban space when read against the city's long trajectory of socio-spatial inequality. The Hermes Fontes and Central Garden cases reveal how green discourse is differentially mobilized by public and private actors. In the public sphere, mature trees may be treated as disposable when they obstruct mobility and infrastructure agendas, even in a city that celebrates international recognition for urban arborization. In the private sphere, greenery is increasingly presented as a premium amenity associated with exclusivity, security, and appreciation in already selective or valorizing sectors.In practical terms, the argument suggests that urban policies committed to sustainability in Aracaju should combine stricter criteria for tree compensation, better integration between mobility, climatic comfort, and accessibility, greater transparency in urban interventions, and instruments capable of limiting the exclusionary appropriation of environmental amenities. As a research agenda, the next step is not simply to restate that green space should function as a collective good, but to investigate empirically the material distribution of tree cover, public equipment, accessibility, and real-estate valorization across neighborhoods through comparative and spatialized methods.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.Author 1: Conceptualization and Writing -original draft, review & editing.Author 2: Project administration and Validation.
Fontes et al. (2026) studied this question.