Why is it that nature is required to be “financially rewarding” when compared to an obviously destructive development “business as usual”? How is it that the business as usual is not penalized for the destruction of nature and its services when the development is put in place?
There is no doubt that cities, especially since the industrial revolution, have by and large been built overriding local ecologies, obliterating topography, soils, streams, altering soils, ignoring seasons, breezes, sunlight. Nature based solutions, urban ecosystem services, however they are called, have emerged to try to remediate this historical modernist hubris which conceived of cities as technical systems to be placed on landscapes, and their inhabitants as insensate. I am staying in Manchester UK for 6 months investigating the city/region’s goal to become carbon neutral by 2030. A part of the goal is the implementation of the Natural Capital Investment Plan, outlined in 2018.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nature Based Solutions was known as design with nature, a term pioneered by Ian McHarg whose book on such principles was thusly entitled. Landscape architects like Ellen Spirn wrote about how cities needed to be designed/redesigned to take advantage of cooling breezes, sun for heating, vegetation for cooling, and more. But it was not until the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) that it seems such ideas began to take hold. The MEA was also underpinned by the quantification started by ecologists such as Robert Costanza and Gretchen Daily about the value of nature to the economy. This new turn created a fusion between ecology and economic value. Since that time, urban ecological science has been deployed to measure the attributes of natural systems in cities and their functions, such as CO2 sequestration, water retention, cooling by vegetation, and assigning monetary value to those services. Measurement and valuation have become normalized over the past several years. This has been accompanied by a quest to reintroduce nature in cities such that it could mitigate the impacts of the built environment whose construction so ruthlessly ignored place, climate, vegetation, rainfall, soils, and more. And now, the value of nature to cities can additionally be given a financial value to the economy.
Source: The Manchester Climate Change facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/McrClimate
Nature based solutions are being advocated to address multiple environmental and social challenges: biodiversity loss, mitigation of climate change impacts such as flooding, urban heat, improving human welfare, and addressing social inequality. For example, GrowGreen is a project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program for Research and Innovation whose mission is to create climate and water resilient, healthy and livable cities by investing in nature-based solutions. It aims to embed nature-based solutions into long term planning, development, operation and management of cities. The program provides funds for cities to increase NBS by building parks or water retention facilities and other projects.
But, unlike traditional infrastructure—roads, bridges, sewage treatment plants—funding nature-based solutions (NBS) appears to be challenging everywhere, and seems to depend on, in Europe, EU funds. In the UK, there is a turn to attracting equity capital funding for NBS. Greater Manchester, for example, estimates a needed investment of 10 million pounds for a first phase of implementation of NBS. IGNITION is their strategy—Innovative financing and delivery of natural solutions. It calls for investible packages of projects to persuade businesses and organizations to invest in Nature Based Solutions. It defines investment in natural capital as Funding that is intended to provide a return to the investor while also resulting in a positive impact on natural capital (Greater Manchester Natural Capital Investment Plan 2019). The plan outlines key priorities and how the natural capital investment plan can help achieve them, including:
Improving place (making Manchester more attractive and supporting an uplift in property values)
Improving health outcomes by access to the natural environment and also redressing spatial inequalities in access
Building resilience, especially to flooding and climate risks
Supporting the local economy through regeneration toward improving the capacity to supply environmental goods and services
Conserving and enhancing habitat and wildlife
Sustainable travel (walking and cycling)
Climate regulation
Air quality improvements
A map has been generated to target projects and map existing projects. The darker areas show highest opportunities, and they seem to track with the least affluent areas of greater Manchester.
A map of existing and opportunities for natural capital in Manchester. Source: Greater Manchester Natural Capital Investment Plan: Final Report to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). January 2019, p. 4
The plan looks at the roles for different types of investors and identifies the pipeline of potential project types that need investment; finance models to facilitate private sector investment and the role of the public sector, and recommendations to put the plan into practice over the next 5 years. The finance models are vague in the plan, but seem to monetize such things as leasing green and blue infrastructure assets to trusts which could then exploit new revenue opportunities such as through prescribed health activities (e.g. Doctor’s prescribing walking around a lake, and charging the health service for the access). Ironically, this in a country riddled with public and free access walking trails . . . the other potential source of revenue is habitat and carbon banking wherein credits from additional actions that increase biodiversity or stored carbon are sold to organizations whose activities cause unavoidable impacts. A third option outlined is furthering the already established Sustainable Drainage Systems through a reduced water company drainage connection charge for developments. This could then, according to the plan, be turned into a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that would deploy appropriate capital at different project stages, allowing the Sustainable Drainage System to be deployed and the cash flows aggregated to enable investment to be scaled up as part of the Water Resilient Cities Program. The public sector would serve as an investment commissioner, developing a supportive financial environment and business plans for specific investment opportunities. Greater Manchester would also have to create an Investment Readiness Fund that would come from foundations, corporations, Corporate Social Responsibility budgets, High New Worth Individuals, and philanthropists to provide specialist finance, legal and other skills to help develop business plans for natural capital projects to improve their presentation to investors (pages 8-10).
The goal is to increase Greater Manchester’s urban green infrastructure by 10% by 2038 over the 2018 baseline. The University of Salford Campus living lab will demonstrate the potential real world returns that result from such an approach through the development and monitoring of the impact of green infrastructure on buildings. Funding models and finance mechanisms to deliver phase 1 of the Greater Manchester NBS pipeline will be established by April 2020. Tenders for investment by equity capital will be then be offered to build the NBS in Greater Manchester.
At this point, solutions include rain gardens, street trees, green roofs and walls and development of green spaces. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) explains in its official documents, that these technologies can help tackle socio-environmental challenges including increases in flooding events, water security, air quality, biodiversity and human health and wellbeing. But they need to be financed.
Currently the planning project is backed by €4.5 million from the EU’s Urban Innovation Actions initiative, and brings together 12 partners from local government, universities, NGOs and business. The aim is to develop the first model of its kind that enables major investment in large-scale environmental projects which can increase climate resilience. It is all predicated however on successfully attracting investments.
The EU Directorate General for Research and Innovation advocates the use of NBS for urban regeneration to improve the well-being of residents, for coastal resilience, for watershed management. A 2015 EU report of the Expert Group on “Nature-Based Solutions and Re-Naturing Cities” of the Horizon 2020, emphasizes the importance of NBS infrastructure for investment as “it is cost-effective and demonstrates financial advantages due to reducing initial capital and operational expenses” (p. 6). The peculiar thing, if you think about it, is that conventional development—which this is implicitly to remedy—is, of course, not quantified for its costs to NBS, human health and well-being, urban heat, and its other impacts. Why is it that nature must be financially rewarding against an obviously destructive BAU? How is it that the BAU is not penalized for the destruction of the NBS when it is put in place?
Urbanization processes are ever expanding, yet the NBS approach seems content to attempt to retrofit existing urbanized areas cost-effectively and returning profit to investors. If the impacts of contemporary urbanization are as significant as claimed, and they probably are, then the remedy is not cost-effective retrofits of nature in the city alone. Clearly the patterns of urbanization, building materials, and land transformation processes need to change too, but this seems rarely addressed. Rather, these are patches of interventions that must not cost the public sphere any money (as it has none), but indeed, must be profitable and make business sense, just like the original development that caused the destruction of NBS did. At the same time, development must go on to provide economic growth. In fact, Manchester is in the middle of a building boom, high rises underway dot the city, allegedly financed by Chinese capital. Who will occupy the space remains a mystery, but meanwhile, a lot of money is being invested in the built environment that does not seem to reflect any NBS principles.
Cities in the 20th century, as mentioned above, have been built according to modernist engineering guidelines and concerns, and using hydrocarbons to overpower place – cold, heat, rain, wind, natural topographies, rivers and streams. It is amazing what big machinery can do to level mountains, fill in wetlands, and construct new urban areas, heated and cooled with fossil energy. Land use patterns are thus increasingly similar because they are all predicated on the same economic assumptions and power source – fossil energy. We find big box shopping malls, endless single-family suburbs all ribboned together by roads nearly everywhere. In China, single family homes are supplemented by gigantic apartment buildings. But in the end, the land, the place and its specific NBSs, are not integrated into the development. And post hoc remedies must be implemented, at a profit.
NBS should not be an investment opportunity any more than is a sewage treatment plant. If NBS do contribute what is claimed, then clearly land use that impedes them should not be permitted. NBS needs to be infused into building codes, zoning and land use guidelines. Any new building should have to protect and enhance them, de facto, any redevelopment should similarly have to protect, enhance, rehabilitate NBS. This is not a new investment opportunity, it is a matter of health and safety. Just like there are codes for safe electrical wiring in buildings that are not contested (generally!), ensuring that water reinfiltrates into the ground should be a matter of code, or the provision of open space, or trees. That builders must adhere to certain provisions like providing plumbing in their buildings clearly must extend to the creation/recreation/rehabilitation of NBS in the existing urban areas. And the transformation or destruction of NBS must be addressed by regulation, fined, penalized and made illegal. It makes no sense to invest in urban NBS while losing it through careless new land development. No loss of NBS would be one metric. In fact, it maybe that there should be no new land conversion at all. Rebuild, densify, with nature.
Of course, there is the additional question of whether proposed NBS actually produce the services claimed. To truly know if they do requires extensive and expensive monitoring and evaluation. Each site will be different, designs developed that work there, and the NBS will need to be followed over time. NBS is, regretfully, not one size fits all. Slope, soils, hydrology, microclimate, aspect, contamination and more, all matter. And so, while NBS is seen as a relatively inexpensive—or rather cost effective—way to improve the performance of cities and remediate the impacts of land development, the monitoring and evaluation is not integrated into the costs. Nor is the potential of the NBS needing to be changed, or it not working at all. Design with nature is not about cost effectiveness. It is about recognizing the unsubstitutable human reliance on nature and creating the conditions for its success. Such commitment needs to be embedded in urban development and redevelopment, and the private sector which is largely responsible for that activity, must integrate NBS principles as a matter of course. Where they have been damaged, the developer must pay. Ultimately the health of nature is human health though we act as though it is other, outside of our lives on the planet. NBS could be a way to reconnect people to place, cities to their locality, but a mechanism that relies on equity capital to make a return on investment to create them seems desperate indeed.
Renewable Rikers is an opportunity to end an old, but ongoing wrong. For too long, New York City has disproportionately sited its polluting infrastructure in low-income communities and communities of color.
On 29 January 2019, New York City Council held a hearing on a trio of bills collectively known as “Renewable Rikers”. Rikers is currently home to the most infamous prison in New York City—the Rikers Island correctional facility an island penal colony with one lone bridge connecting it to the rest of the City. Introduced by the Council’s Environmental Committee Chair Costa Constantinides, these bills would remove Rikers Island from the jurisdiction of the Department of Corrections, while simultaneously authorizing two feasibility studies: one on the feasibility of locating solar generation and battery storage on Rikers island, and the other on the feasibility of relocating four aging waste water treatment facilities to the island. A New York city council meeting.
The idea behind these three bills is to tie the pending shutdown of the Rikers Island correctional facility to restorative environmental justice in the communities most impacted by incarceration on the island. Calling Rikers Island “a symbol of brutality and inhumanity” for many New Yorkers, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson opened the Renewable Rikers hearing with a full-throated support for the proposal. Not to be outdone, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his intention to issue an executive order detailing a “participatory planning effort” for re-imagining Rikers Island.
The journey to this moment was more than a century in the making.
Rikers Island has been associated with some of the most racially problematic aspects of New York history. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USGS_Rikers_Island.png
Part of the traditional territory of the Rockaway Tribe, the island bears the name of a slaveholding Dutch family (originally Rycken but anglicized to Rikers) who exploited enslaved people to build a fortune, which they then parlayed into social prominence. Yet even as the Rikers socialized with New York’s political elite, their name cast a dark shadow over New York City. Richard Riker, New York City’s first district attorney and City Recorder (the municipal officer in charge of the criminal courts) was infamous for abusing the Fugitive Slave Act and using his position to sell black New Yorkers into slavery.
Abolitionist David Ruggles, head of the New York Vigilance Committee,frequently condemned Recorder Riker for his willingness to find that free New Yorkers were actually slaves, and for his role in returning escaped slaves to the South.
1835 cartoon by Edward Clay. Image Courtesy of Periodyssey.com [Ruggles is the center figure]Riker’s activities were so notorious that he and his police confederates became known as “the kidnapping club”. Even as black New York saw Rikers as “the spider at the center of a web of injustice” his abusive conduct did not put a dent his good name among white New Yorkers. After his death, the New York Times described Riker as a “good, kind-hearted judge,” and in the eyes of his white contemporaries, Riker was a near saintly man.
The parallel between Recorder Rikers’ conduct and the racially-charged abuses of power at the present-day Rikers Island correctional facility are striking. The era of mass incarceration saw black and brown New Yorkers imprisoned and abused at Rikers Island while for too long the white portions of the City largely noticed nothing amiss.
In recent years, Riker’s Island gained notoriety because of the shockingly high levels of violence, abuse, and neglect that inmates suffered there. In 2013, Mother Jones ranked Rikers as one of the ten worst prisons in the United States. Numerous reports and exposes documented gratuitous and excessive patterns of violence at Rikers, with force being used in a fashion “intended to harm rather than restrain and control inmates”.
The tragic case of 16 year old Kalief Browder came to symbolize the Lord of the Flies nature of the “cycle of unchecked violence” at Rikers. Browder was held for three years at Rikers, from 2010 to 2013, awaiting his constitutionally-guaranteed “speedy” trial on a minor theft charge. Browder spent two of those years in solitary confinement. Surveillance footage showed Browder suffering assaults at the hands of prison guards and inmates alike. When the charges against him were dropped, Brower was released. But his Rikers experience had been so traumatizing that Browder later committed suicide. Browder’s experience galvanized public calls for reform, and became a rallying cry for advocates bent on closing Rikers.
The next year, then-US Attorney Preet Bharara issued a scathing report on the “deep-seated culture of violence” among the guards and staff at Rikers Island. Bharara characterized the jail as “broken”, with a pattern and practice that violates constitutional rights. Bharara’s Report gave added impetus to a grass roots movement organized under the banner #CloseRikers.
Closing Rikers became seen as “a moral imperative”. The Report of Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform (the Lippman Report) characterized Riker’s Island as “a stain on our great City,” and recommended permanently ending the use of Rikers Island as a jail facility.
The Commission explicitly acknowledged that racial injustice played a significant role in the harms done at Rikers Island.
In Fall of 2019, New York City Council voted to close Rikers Island and replace it with four smaller jails by 2026. Mayor de Blasio declared “The era of mass incarceration is OVER in New York City.”
The Lippman Report called for any post-prison planning for Rikers Island to take restorative justice into account. The Report also raised the possibility that Rikers Island could contribute to the sustainability of New York City.
Starting from that rather vague suggestion, a coalition of scholars, politicians and advocates developed the Renewable Rikers proposal as a way to promote restorative environmental justice.
The proposal would dedicate Rikers Island to wastewater treatment and sustainable energy generation in order to phase out noxious facilities sited in the environmental justice communities most impacted by incarceration on Rikers.
After two years of work and advocacy, New York City Council held its historic “Renewable Rikers” hearing. Environmental justice groups, formerly incarcerated individuals, and various lawyers and academics testified in favor of the proposal. Nobody testified against it.
Closing Rikers will be a transformative moment for the City. Renewable Rikers could make that moment an environmental justice transformation as well. These proposed laws are a critical first step. By enacting them, City Council will launch a visioning process for truly restorative environmental justice.
Renewable Rikers is a path to a more sustainable, more equitable City. New York State recently committed to 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040. To reach that goal, the City will have to transition away from fossil fuels. Replacing the City’s dirty and aging Peaker plants with clean energy is a good start. Peaker plants are gas-fired power plants that only turn on during peak power demand. They start and shut frequently, rarely running for more than a few hours at a time. Startup and shutdown are the moments in which power plants emissions are the dirtiest. These Peaker plants disproportionately sited in marginalized communities, and their replacement is both an environmental necessity and a public health imperative. Peaker plants contribute to the localized air pollution that harms people’s health in overburdened, frontline communities. Some South Bronx neighborhoods that host Peaker plants have childhood asthma hospitalization rates double the City’s average. For example, pollution-related emergency department visits and asthma hospitalizations in Mott Haven and Melrose are triple the NYC average. Replacing dirty Peaker plants with renewable generation and storage on Rikers would improve air quality in these front-line communities.
Harlem River Yard Peaker plant http://cdn.nycitynewsservice.com/blogs.dir/8/files/2015/09/Harlem-River-Yard-web.jpg
Renewable Rikers is an opportunity to end an old, but ongoing wrong. For too long, New York City has disproportionately sited its polluting infrastructure in low-income communities and communities of color. The 2000 Power Now! Project is a clear example. The New York Power Authority used Enron’s engineered brown outs across California to justify adding 10 peaker plants in New York City on an emergency basis—running roughshod over frontline communities to do so. These plants were all sited in environmental justice communities with no community engagement, virtually no environmental due diligence, and over vociferous community objections. Although these plants were pitched as temporary, a 3-year emergency solution to a manufactured crisis—they are still there. Anyone born the year they were installed is eligible to vote and nearly old enough to drink.
By seizing this opportunity to transform Rikers Island into sustainable infrastructure, New York City can right this old wrong. The Peaker plants could be shuttered and the land currently devoted to energy generation returned to these front-line communities for greenspace, affordable housing, or other locally-determined priorities. A recent Ravenswood power plant project shows that 316 MW of storage can be sited on 7 acres of land. Two such storage sites could provide more capacity than all the Power Now! plants combined.
Image from Ravenswood Energy Storage Project Expanded Environmental Assessment, submitted to the NY Public Service Commission.
By siting battery storage, solar generation, and wastewater treatment facilities on Rikers Island and moving these facilities out of environmental justice communities, Renewable Rikers leverages the transformation of the criminal justice system into wider transformation across multiple axes of justice. It benefits the City as a whole, while specifically benefiting the communities most impacted by mass incarceration, and incarceration at Rikers.
Enacting Renewable Rikers would be a moment for environmental justice. The proposed bills before the New York City Council would improve air quality for environmental justice communities, which are frequently the same communities most impacted by mass incarceration, and by incarceration at Rikers.
Enacting Renewable Rikers would be a moment for climate justice. The proposed bills would help ensure a just transition that reduces the burdens on frontline communities.
Enacting Renewable Rikers would be a moment for restorative justice. Solar installer and wind turbine technician are the two fastest growing job categories in the United States (albeit from a small base.) Renewable Rikers can create jobs with a pathway to prosperity for everyone—specifically for those most impacted by mass incarceration, and by incarceration at Rikers.
As plans for Rikers’ future mature, appropriate oversight mechanisms will be key to making sure that this project benefits the communities most impacted by Rikers and by environmental racism. Enacting the proposals currently before City Council would help ensure that closing Rikers does not devolve into a privatization land grab. The communities most impacted by incarceration at Rikers, and by environmental racism, must be part of the process. If these communities are consulted early and often, and that their representatives are part of whatever decision-making bodies will ultimately make choices about Renewable Rikers, it might indeed be the dawn of a new day for New York City energy generation.
Nature-Based Solutions can and often do provide an impressively large set of socio-ecological benefits. But the expectations that they can fast-fix, or even mask, the deeper socio-political urban troubles behind desires for eternal and “green” economic growth are largely unfounded and bound to disappoint.
Traditional chinampa cultivation as a way to restore water-stressed ecosystem services in Mexico City’s artificial wetland areas conquered from the sea in Tianjin Harbour … a network of bug-friendly bushes and patches of green along cycling routes in Scotland … an urban forest strategy in Melbourne promoting the plantating of 3,000 trees of diverse species.
You might wonder what these seemingly unrelated programs have in common. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), what these interventions have come to represent, is a term with varied meanings, perhaps still in flux. The European Commission (2015) defines NBS as actions inspired or supported by nature, while IUCN (Cohen-Shacham et al. 2016) delimits NBS to projects that protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems (thus focusing more on biodiversity and social development aspects). NBS mark a surge in planners’ interest in urban greening, especially with the prospect of climate and biodiversity havoc looming close and large (IPBES 2019, IPCC 2014). In a wave of rising demand for urban renaturing, we were part of a team of six universities, located across Europe that conducted an in-depth study of more than fifty NBS in 18 world cities (Kiss et al. 2019). The study attempted to cover a diversity of geographies, and pin down innovative responses to urban sustainability challenges, while noting barriers and contestations along the way (www.naturvation.eu). We have looked into various types of NBS, including diverse plans and strategies for urban greening, comprising: parks, urban forests and greenways; eco-districts; urban gardens; green buildings and roofs; insect-based interventions; water- and river-fronts; and measures dealing with water scarcity. Insights from two years of work are plentiful.
First and foremost, one factor that intersects with the scale and extent of greening in urban areas has to do with the old urban-sprawl-versus-urban-densification conundrum. On the one hand, urban sprawl consumes more undeveloped land (including that used for formal or informal agriculture). Recently built districts with sustainability features such as Leidsche Rijn in Utrecht, Park Marianne in Montpelier, or the Ecocity in Tianjin are “NBS in the sprawl”. Yet urban sprawl consumes rather than produces (more) nature. Densification on the other hand is meant to prevent the extension of urban limits to peripheral pristine and “natural” space. Yet, densification reduces the type and amount of green space and urban nature available for residents and can conflict with land use regulations and priorities. In the case of Leipzig, for example, planting more trees is especially challenging in residential areas where vegetation siting has not been incorporated into the design of existing infrastructure, and clashes with the needs of transport, parking, water sanitation, and the provision of electricity. That said, on the ground many cities strategically opt for “green densification” in combination with “green sprawl”, an agenda fostered by the prevalent logic and imperative of eternal economic (and consumption) growth (Colenbrander 2016).
The green and the grey, how much of each for a just city? Barcelona city from Parc Guell. Photo: Filka Sekulova Tsvetlova
“Green” urban sprawl
Overall, most newly developed sprawling districts that incorporate NBS measures lack comprehensive participation processes. Examples include Utrecht’s Leidsche Rijn neighbourhood, Montpellier’s Parc Marianne building district and Tianjin’s Ecovalley. In the cases of Little France Park in Edinburgh and Two Rivers Urban Park in Cape Town, competing interests (real estate construction versus expansion of greening) resulted in an unsatisfactory or mechanistic participation process for those stakeholders with less institutional power. A perceived sense by citizen groups that proposed urbanization/NBS would go ahead regardless of public consultations has been particularly visible in Newcastle’s public parks planning, the new management plan of Barcelona’s Collserola natural zone, and in Athens’ newly planned Hellenikon Park. Generally, technical plans and (green) strategies tend to reach the public at advanced stages of development, through short-term advice and in formats that are not easy the public to digest. Furthermore, access to participation is often biased toward legally established groups.
Even worse, rather than contributing to climate resilience, biodiversity preservation, air quality, public health, and social justice, NBS interventions might actually facilitate the sprawl of new grey development and infrastructure. In Hellenikon (Athens) and Tolka Valley Park (Dublin), for instance, extensive new real estate development was needed for the NBS to realize their full potential. In addition, the flood alleviation schemes implemented in several of our cases have paved the way for new development, or made existing real estate more sustainable, attractive and thus more expensive (i.e., Newcastle Brunton Park Flood Alleviation Scheme, and Utrecht Leidsche Rijn neighbourhood).
One major concern is the inclusivity of eco-districts. In Montpellier’s Parc Marianne Eco-district, for example, a park-side real estate costs twice as much as similar housing elsewhere. In the Tianjin Eco-district, although 10% of the planned housing is supposed to be “affordable”, there is little prospect for blue collar jobs, as the proposed industries within the eco-city are mainly geared towards the so-called high-tech and creative class.
Gardening in appropriated public gardens, Barcelona, 15 May movement. Photo: Filka Sekulova TsvetlovaCommunity garden L’Illa Dels 3 Horts, part of Empty Spaces project of Barcelona Municipality. Photo: Filka Sekulova Tsvetlova
“Greening” urban densification
One example of the green densification trend is the conversion of former rail corridors within the city core into new parks and greenways. Boston’s Greenway, Winnipeg’s Northeast Pioneers Greenway, and Parkbogen Ost in Leipzig are just a few examples that the Naturvation project examined. Another pattern of NBS in dense urban set-ups are insect-oriented initiatives, such as the John Muir Pollinator Way and the Square Meter for Butterflies in Edinburgh, the bee-keeping practices in Győr’s Audi Factor and in the urban centres of Newcastle and Sofia. Likewise, the role and greening potential of “free” or “derelict” urban spaces and fringes is remarkable, especially in contexts of crises and austerity.
While expanding urban “nature” is fundamental for public health, well-being or/and climate change adaptation, green densification can be expensive, and hence exclusive. Green roofs, for example, often enhance the attractiveness and appeal of buildings. The management and maintenance efforts and costs these entail, however, are high and frequently underestimated. Greened avenues tend to reconfigure local economies, attracting residents with higher purchasing power and associated local businesses (cafes, bars, restaurants). In Boston, waterfront green resilient projects that aim to protect harbour neighbourhoods against the impacts of sea level rise create spaces for business and leisure used by elite residents and consumers for their attractive and “resilient locations”. Here, weak social housing regulations frequently result in waterfronts that reflect privilege and the intersection of social and racial inequalities.
In contrast, the chronic lack of equitably distributed green space and the civil mobilizations for healthy and liveable urban space are often a motor behind community-managed urban gardens and forested areas, such as the Sofia City Forest plan or the initial stages of East Boston Greenway development. Most of the community-initiated gardens or forests areas studied within the Naturvation project emerge through acts of opposition to further construction or to enduring industrial pollution. Even though urban gardens enhance social cohesion and neighbourhood vitality, they tend to lack longstanding municipal support, (examples are the Pla Buits gardens in Barcelona or the Weaver Square gardens in Dublin). They are often rendered mobile or temporary, and implicitly granted a lower status by urban planners and private developers. Overall, combining densification with greening could potentially end up contributing more to social inclusion, conviviality, and cohesion than green-aesthetics or green-fashion urban sprawl, yet when distributed equally, and without aiming on financial returns.
“Okupa y resiste” (occupy and resist). Barcelona. Photo: Hristo Velichkov
Role of public participation
Some of the good NBS governance practices spotted in our research occur and materialize when frequent communication within and between public departments are reported, and collaboration with the local community (citizens and non-for-profit) is genuine and open. Easy-to-set, though less transformative, forms of public participation are those occurring through non-conflictive, online, or educational events and tools, for example the nomination of sites for greening in Melbourne. Our cases demonstrate that the inclusivity of public consultations looks good on paper but is difficult to operationalize, especially when it comes to the participation of vulnerable groups. Lack of trust is a strong impediment for municipalities to openly engage with civil groups in consultation and decision-making processes (as in the example of Montpellier’s Green and Blue Network, among multiple others).
Indeed, including a diversity of voices towards the co-production of NBS implies the representation and negotiation of diverse and conflicting interests, and eventually impossible socio-economic trade-offs. Some large-scale river re-scaping, for example, tend to be riddled with rather narrow techno-visions, where participation often seems tailored toward the needs of the establishment, as in the case of the Leipzig Luppe River re-wilding intervention and the Moson-Danube project in Győr.
Nevertheless, citizen engagement, whenever and however achieved, scales up the social justice component of NBS. This is particularly visible in NBS targeting water scarcity, where concerns with justice and gender have been an imminent feature of their design. The Cape Town Atlantis Aquifer Clearing Pilot Project, for example, is entirely led by community members, mostly women, who have been acting as the main protagonists of water preservation attitudes. In contexts of high inequality, the operationalization of NBS can be, and needs to be, intertwined with sustaining and transforming livelihoods where employment goes hand in hand with enhancing the provisioning and regulating functions of local ecosystems (as in the case of Mexico City Water Forest).
Needless to say, Nature-Based Solutions can and often do provide an impressively large set of socio-ecological benefits. The expectations, though, that they can fast-fix, or even mask the deeper socio-political urban troubles behind desires for, and imaginaries of, eternal and “green” economic growth are largely unfounded and bound to fail or disappoint.
Filka Sekulova, Isabelle Anguelovski, Francesc Baro, and Bernadett Kiss Barcleona, Barcleona, Barcleona, Lund
EC (2015): Nature-Based Solutions & Re-Naturing Cities Final Report of the Horizon 2020 Expert Group on Nature-Based Solutions and Re-Naturing Cities.
Cohen-Shacham, E., Walters, G., Janzen, C. and Maginnis, S. (eds.) (2016). Nature-based Solutions to address global societal challenges. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN.
Colenbrander, Sarah. 2016. Cities as engines of economic growth. The case for providing basic infrastructure and services in urban areas; D’Alisa et al. 2014 Degrowth Vocabulary for a New Era
IPCC, 2014: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change.Contribution of Work-ing Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IPBES, 2019: Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services
Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.
Francesc Baro is a postdoctoral researcher at ICTA/Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and member of the Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice. He is an environmental scientist trained in landscape and urban planning and explores the operationalization of ecosystem services in urban social-ecological systems.
Bernadett Kiss is Lecturer at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics/Lund University. Her main scientific interests include system-wide policy assessment, energy efficient buildings, technology, markets, the role of actors, learning, innovation, and sustainable urban transformation.
The integration of habitat restoration components into traditional shoreline engineering designs is the biggest lesson learned from the Toronto and Region remedial action plan for other areas.
As Toronto grew into Canada’s largest city and a world leader in business, finance, technology, entertainment, and culture, there were unintended consequences such as water pollution and loss of habitat. Today, Toronto and Region are a leader in environmental cleanup and reconnecting people to their waterfront as a part of a city where humans can flourish as part of nature’s beauty and diversity.
It was an early spring day and we were standing on a human-made peninsula called the Leslie Street Spit that extends five kilometers into Lake Ontario. The air temperatures were still biting cold, reflecting the long time it takes Lake Ontario to warm up.
Below: Leslie Street Spit in 1978 before restoration into Tommy Thompson Park. Above: Tommy Thompson Park in 2013. Photos: Toronto and Region Conservation Authority
All of us participating in the Leslie Street Spit tour were thinking how nice it would be to cut the tour short and get out of the cold, with the exception of our tour guide. He was a large and striking figure who could have easily been mistaken for a professional American football player. But what was most memorable was his knowledge of the region and science, and his passion to restore habitats. His passion and enthusiasm were so contagious that by the end of our site visit, despite the biting cold temperatures, all of us were inspired that urban habitat restoration was possible if you had the proper knowledge and the right players involved who have a clear understanding of potential natural resource outcomes and benefits. The tour guide’s name was Gord MacPherson and he spent his early years camping, fishing, trapping, and hunting throughout Ontario. His love for the outdoors led to a 37-year career with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority where he has championed cleanup and restoration as part of an effort to create a new waterfront porch for both wildlife and people. MacPherson understands clearly that habitat restoration is about people management and that he and his partners are playing a critical role in city building.
Pollution
As Toronto and Region grew and became more urbanized, environmental pollution increased. There is probably no better example of historical water pollution in the Toronto region than the Don River. The Don River is a 38km river that stretches from its headwaters on the Oak Ridges Moraine to the Keating Channel where it empties into Lake Ontario. At one time the mouth of the river had one of the largest marshes in all of Lake Ontario. Over time the Don River was straightened for convenience, channelized, paved and built over, and befouled with all kinds of municipal and industrial waste and land runoff to the point that it twice caught on fire. Heavy oil pollution was the cause of a river fire in 1931 that destroyed a bridge crossing the Don River at Keating Street. In 1943, severe oil pollution was the cause of a river fire fronting the British American Oil Company’s property. To no one’s surprise, on July 30, 1958 the Toronto Globe and Mail editorialized that the Don has “waters heavily polluted and laden with scum, its banks littered with all varieties of filth, and the whole sending up foul odors.”
Little wonder that in the fall of 1969, Pollution Probe organized a funeral for the Don River, symbolizing its death. On that November day, a couple of hundred mourners paraded a casket from the University of Toronto campus to the banks of the banks of the river. The cortege included a hearse, a band playing a dirge, a weeping widow in black, and a top-hatted student portraying a greedy capitalist.
Clearly, for many decades environmental protection was not a priority. Commerce and industry were the priorities and pollution was just considered part of the cost of doing business. By 1985, Toronto was suffering from extensive impacts of several centuries of agricultural land use, industrialization, and extensive urbanization, including poor water quality, contaminated sediments, contaminants in fish, loss of wildlife habitat and populations, and beaches that were often closed due to high levels of bacteria.
Harbour cleanup
As citizens awoke to visible damage and invisible dangers of polluted water and toxic residues, stifling local economies and degrading quality of life for all living near these waters, they began to speak out. It was in 1985 that the International Joint Commission identified Toronto and Region as one of 42 pollution hot spots called “Areas of Concern” where water quality and other ecosystem functions were badly impaired and Environment Canada and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment committed to developing and implementing a remedial action plan to clean up the harbor and restore all impaired beneficial uses using an ecosystem approach. An ecosystem approach accounts for the interrelationships among land, air, water, and all living things, including humans, and involves all user groups in comprehensive management. Think of an ecosystem approach as a more holistic way of undertaking integrated planning, research, and management of specific places like Toronto. If there was an ecosystem approach to drivers’ training for four students, the driver training car would have four steering wheels to show how all need to work together.
Identifying Toronto and Region as a Great Lakes Area of Concern elevated the priority for cleanup within the federal and provincial governments and provided laser-like focus to stakeholders and partners to work together to restore health of their ecosystem and its beneficial uses. A unique partnership of federal, provincial, and local stakeholders first came together to develop the remedial action plan and create the framework and conditions for all stakeholder groups to help implement it.
Early efforts focused on preventing pollution through regulations and voluntary initiatives. Since 2003, the City of Toronto has spent $485 million to control stormwater pollution and reduce basement flooding risks, and projects to spend $2.8 billion in 2016-2025 on additional stormwater projects. The Don River and Central Waterfront Project is particularly noteworthy and will capture and treat stormwater discharges and address discharges from combined storm and sanitary sewer outfalls to the Lower Don River, Taylor-Massey Creek, and Toronto’s Inner Harbour—a $2 billion investment over the next 25 years.
More than $80 million has been spent on habitat rehabilitation since 1987. In the last 10 years alone, over 823 ha of habitat and 57 km of shoreline were created or restored in the AOC. At the helm, every step of the way, has been Gord MacPherson collecting data, performing assessments, designing projects with partners, overcoming obstacles, helping secure funding, overseeing construction, and measuring effectiveness. The federal government and Toronto are now creating Canada’s first national urban park: Rouge National Urban Park. Rouge Park is rich in natural, cultural, and agricultural features, including 1,700 species of plants and animals, and some of the rarest and best remaining wetlands, forests, and agricultural lands in the region. Once fully established, it will be 101 km2 in size—nearly 30 times the size of Central Park in New York. Federal investment in Rouge Park will be $100 million. In 2017, federal, provincial, and municipal governments announced $1.25 billion to construct a new naturalized Don River mouth through the Port Lands, creating a new urban island neighborhood called Villiers Island. Continuous and vigorous oversight is needed to maintain these ecosystem gains and ensure long-term sustainability.
Restoration of the Don River mouth on Toronto’s eastern waterfront. Photo: Don Ford, Toronto and Region Conservation Authority
Cleanup leads to reconnecting people to the waterfront that leads to waterfront revitalization
Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (now called Waterfront Toronto) was established in 2001 by the federal and provincial governments and the City of Toronto to redefine its waterfront as a public asset for everyone. Working with public and private partners, Waterfront Toronto creates complete neighborhoods anchored by parks and public spaces, and diverse, sustainable, mixed-use communities that offer a high quality-of-life for residents and visitors alike. Waterfront Toronto has worked with MacPherson and the remedial action plan team to restore over 26 ha of wetland and aquatic habitats and 6.4 km of shoreline habitat in prominent locations like Tommy Thompson Park, Toronto Island, Port Union, Mimico Waterfront Park, and others.
As part of an effort to measure economic effectiveness, Waterfront Toronto commissioned studies of the economic benefits stimulated by its waterfront investments. Between 2001 and March of 2017 a total of $1.6 billion was invested in waterfront redevelopment to establish unique gathering places that foster a sense of authentic human attachment.
Economists have estimated that this $1.6 billion investment, adjusted for inflation, will: generate approximately 14,100 full-time years of employment, of which approximately 88.5% were in the City of Toronto; stimulate $4.1 billion in total economic output to the Canadian economy (the majority in Toronto); and generate total government revenues of approximately $848 million. Although Toronto Waterfront’s expenditures are significant, they are relatively small compared to the recurring benefits, like permanent jobs, property taxes, income taxes, and tourism spending that occur with continued development of new office, residential, retail/service, cultural, and entertainment uses along the waterfront which would not occur without the initial Waterfront Toronto investments.
The Simcoe Wavedeck next to the Martin Goodman Trail and Queens Quay Boulevard. Photo: Waterfront Toronto
While these impacts relate to Waterfront Toronto’s direct spending on planning and infrastructure, economists have also quantified benefits accruing to private- and public-sector real estate projects both on lands controlled by Waterfront Toronto and other privately-owned land on the waterfront. For example, the combined development on East Bayfront and West Don lands, and the adjoining neighborhoods, will generate nearly 207,900 years of employment, add $13.8 billion to the Canadian economy, and provide $7.5 billion in tax revenues to the three levels of government.
The next challenge
MacPherson believes that the biggest challenge facing the Toronto and Region RAP is how to fight public apathy surrounding the environment. Public concern has now shifted to the climate change crisis, but the concern has not yet become a catalyst for local solutions. Torontonians need to think globally but act locally. MacPherson feels that people now need to channel their concern for climate change into concrete actions that both demonstrate adaptation to climate change and achieve huge conservation benefits, like restoring wetlands, building green infrastructure, naturalizing shorelines, planting trees, and more.
MacPherson’s advice for the next generation of people who care about Toronto Harbour and the Great Lakes is simple: Be Bold! He is adamant that right now the environmental movement, the Great Lakes, and the planet need bold leaders. Improving habitat is a simple and effective method of engaging the public and educating them on the economic, social, and environmental benefits of looking after our communities as our home. MacPherson has always been struck at how the need to improve our environment is universally accepted, how restoration can be easily explained, and how involvement in restoration can foster a stewardship ethic and lead to advocacy. “We need to be bold and aggressively show the significance, importance, and function of restoring our waterfront to a greater percentage of the population,” notes MacPherson.
View of downtown Toronto through constructed habitat at Tommy Thompson Park. Photo: Toronto and Region Conservation Authority
MacPherson feels that the integration of habitat restoration components into traditional shoreline engineering designs is the biggest lesson learned from the Toronto and Region remedial action plan for other areas. These ecological concepts are universal and are the cornerstone of Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s habitat restoration projects and have application and benefits throughout the Great lakes and beyond.
Clearly, Toronto has become a North American leader in harbor cleanup, revitalizing its waterfront and reaping economic benefits, and creating waterfront destination of choice that is accessible and welcoming to all. For more information on other Great Lakes case studies about how cleanup leads to reconnecting people to waterways that leads to community and economic revitalization, and how to sustain momentum for restoration over many decades, visit: http://iaglr.org/aocdocs/GreatLakesRevival-2019.pdf.
In the future, I could imagine a whole series of exhibitions—Who Takes Care of Paris? Who Takes Care of Cairo? Who Takes Care of Delhi?—featuring the faces and actions of stewards in each of these places combined with artistic perspectives on that work.
Civic leaders and community members regularly put time and energy into caring and advocating for the environment. We call these acts of care stewardship. Beyond improving green and blue spaces, stewardship can also lead to other types of civic action. Local stewardship groups can strengthen social trust within a neighborhood. People who come together around the shared love of a garden or park steward not just that space, but also their relationships to one another—making them poised to organize around any number of issues affecting their community.
It drew upon the USDA Forest Service’s Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP), which is a dataset of thousands of civic stewardship groups’ organizational capacity, geographic territories, and social networks. STEW-MAP has been implemented in approximately a dozen global locations; it was piloted first in New York City in 2007 and then updated in 2017, which was the source of the data that were used in this exhibit.
The show featured artists whose work aligns with the themes of community-based stewardship, civic engagement, and social infrastructure: Magali Duzant, Matthew Jensen, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, and Julia Oldham. Through photography, drawing, book arts, and performance, these artists reflected upon, amplified, and interpreted the work of stewards and the landscapes and neighborhoods with which they work.
This essay excerpts content taken from exhibition wall text, data visualizations, and artists’ work—interspersed with comments from the curator. The video below is a virtual tour of the exhibition.
What is stewardship?
When you take care of a place you love, you are engaging in stewardship. Whether you pick up trash that you see in your park, band together with a few neighbors to tend to the trees in front of your building, or teach the next generation about the importance of biodiversity, you are joining a network of care that keeps cities like New York green and flourishing. Caring for the environment happens at different scales, and there are roles for all sectors: public, private, and civic. Most often, civic environmental stewardship happens in groups—from a couple of friends, to small informal associations, to citywide or even international nonprofits. But sometimes the important work of these civic groups can go unrecognized. This exhibition aims to make these groups more visible.
The first artist perspective that I will highlight here is Matthew Jensen. Training his eye on the street tree, he reveals the incredible diversity and resilience of this form of nearby nature that is for many New Yorkers (including me) and for many urban dwellers around the world—their first entry point into stewardship action. As a qualitative social scientist interested in place meanings, I found many resonances with Matthew’s multi-modal approach to research (photo documentation, interview, mapping, archives). His process of walking and observing the landscape has taught me a great deal about the porous and blurry line between art and science. He is not only an observer, however, he is also a participant, as he trains himself in the practices and tactics of his subjects, such as becoming a Citizen Pruner to better engage in the care of trees.
Matthew Jensen
Selection from The Forest Between: Street Trees and Stewardship in New York City, 2019. Courtesy Matthew Jensen.
This photographic series celebrates the myriad of ways city residents care for street trees and the spaces surrounding them. Jensen is especially taken with what he refers to as New York’s amazing trees— distinctive for their impressive size, ability to thrive in unexpected locations and defy such obstacles as, extreme damage or abnormal habitat. Jensen’s project recognizes a diversity of practices—from homemade tree guards and creative support systems, to ornate gardens. Through the process of documenting, the artist also participates in his own form of tree stewardship.
Matthew Jensen is a Bronx-based interdisciplinary artist whose rigorous explorations of landscape combine walking, collecting, photography, mapping and extensive research. During his 2017/2018 artist residency at the NYC Urban Field Station he developed his current project The Forest Between: Street Trees and Stewardship in New York City.
Stewardship comes in all shapes and sizes
Stewardship territory reflects each group’s claim on space; it is their basis of power and their landscape of care and concern. Territory ranges in scale from a single tree, to a watershed, to an entire region. It varies in shape and can include rectangular lots, linear strips, curving shorelines, and blocky political districts. For some stewards, such as community gardeners, territory is the specific site where physical land management occurs. Other groups focus on advocacy across wider spatial scales, such as environmental justice groups running neighborhood air quality or green job campaigns. Finally, some groups focus on transformation of waste, food, or energy systems, and therefore have multiple sites across the city.
Stewardship territories. Image created by Pratt SAVI using USDA Forest Service STEW-MAP NYC 2017 data.
Stewards respond to disturbance
Stewardship is one of the ways that communities respond to social-ecological disturbances and stressors, including both disinvestment and gentrification, as well as climate change and its attendant weather extremes. This pattern has repeated over time here in New York City, with stewardship groups forming in response to the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, September 11th, and Hurricane Sandy. The act of caring for local places can transform not only the physical environment, but also our relationships to those places, and, perhaps most importantly, our relationship to each other. It is this shared sense of trust and reciprocity that serves as a building block for the radical changes that are required to steer our cities toward a more just and sustainable future.
New York City is facing a housing affordability crisis. Debates center on concerns around “green gentrification,” rezonings, and whether and how stewardship groups can be part of efforts to both stabilize communities in place and improve local environmental quality with and for residents.
Our changing climate has multiple impacts, including more intense coastal flooding and an increase in the heat island effect. Stewardship groups are on the front lines of observing these impacts, adapting to change, and enhancing the ecological function of sites. Map created by Pratt SAVI using USDA Forest Service STEW-MAP NYC 2017 data.
New York City is facing a housing affordability crisis. Debates center on concerns around “green gentrification,” rezonings, and whether and how stewardship groups can be part of efforts to both stabilize communities in place and improve local environmental quality with and for residents.
Julia Oldham’s artistic work helps us think through stewardship and connections to nature in the era of climate change. Across Julia’s body of work, she imagines both dystopian and more hopeful renderings of our future. She also points out spaces that are often neglected by humans—where human/nature/animal relations have undergone a radical reworking—as with her video “Fallout Dogs” about the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
I was excited to see what sorts of spaces or futures Julia might envision for New York City. At the same time, these futures are rooted very much in the embodied experience of being there—Julia is an intrepid explorer of wildernesses both urban and rural and never travels without her wellies. It also reflects the importance of talk. She interviewed dozens of government workers and volunteer stewards to find both their favorite wild places and to understand their hopes for the future of those places. In particular, Beaver Village reflects Julia’s truly inter-species affection for living things, and playfully imagines a different way in which we might cohabit with non-human others.
Julia Oldham
Beaver Village from Undiscovered City, 2018- ongoing. Courtesy Julia Oldham.
Oldham’s series presents an amalgamated vision of New York City’s future, inspired by conversations with those most intimately connected to its wilderness. During her New York City Urban Field Station residency, the artist used the STEW-MAP database, to connect with nearly 40 stewards of the city’s natural areas. Asking scientists, park rangers, gardeners, beekeepers, educators and volunteers to share their views—especially in regard to nature and climate change—Oldham collected projections ranging from the utopian to the less optimistic.
The visual narratives here are a combination of Oldham’s own methodical documentation to create a unique 360-degree photograph, followed by a process of digital collaging with satellite images, drawings, and found photographs. Julia Oldham’s work expresses moments of hope in a world on the edge of environmental collapse. Working in a range of media including video, animation and photography, she explores potential in places where human civilization and nature have collided uneasily.
STEW-MAP includes 720 groups with a combined budget of $5,301,875,991 and a total of approximately 633,000 people engaged as staff, volunteers, and members.
Stewards are agents of change
The power of civic environmental stewardship groups comes from their ability to create lasting change through direct action, management, education, and advocacy. Beyond environmental benefits, civic environmental stewardship groups provide opportunities for people to get to know one another and beautify their community in the process. These actions create a sense of social connection and a feeling of ownership and place attachment. Stewardship groups work on everything from restoring New York City’s oyster population, to protecting natural areas from development, to helping women get outside to exercise and form empowering friendships and civic ties. Taken together, these efforts can collectively transform our environment and communities.
How can we understand both the collective impact and individual experiences of these thousands of stewards? Magali Duzant’s work takes a deeper dive into the knowledge, practices, and actions of Queens, NY-based stewards, revealing that each of these dots on a map is comprised of important (and even sometimes humorous!) lifeways and histories. In order to uncover these stories, she queried the STEW-MAP database, scoured the internet, and talked with stewards. A self-professed outsider to the world of environmentalism, Magali shared that she found surprising resonances between the network of stewards and her existing world of artists and arts organizations. Everyone was just a few links from each other, and was happy to pass on another recommendation, a site to visit, and event to participate in. Magali navigated that network of relationships to create a new publication that could serve as a sort of “starter kit” for an interested novice to get involved in stewardship work (and play) in Queens and beyond.
Magali Duzant
A page from Whole Queens Catalog, 2019. Courtesy Magali Duzant.
Whole Queens Catalog is a free (limited run) publication commissioned for Who Takes Care of New York? Magali Duzant’s new commission, Whole Queens Catalog, takes inspiration from Stewart Brand’s 1960’s American counterculture magazine and product catalog (Whole Earth Catalog). Duzant has gathered anecdotes, recipes, disaster survival techniques, and other wisdom from stewardship groups throughout Queens that she identified from the STEW-MAP database and additional research.
Magali Duzant is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her work spans photography, books, installation, and text. In collaborative and participatory approaches to projects, she couples research-based practices with a poetic knack for capturing where public and private experiences converge.
A page from Whole Queens Catalog, 2019. Courtesy Magali Duzant.
Stewards work together
Civic stewardship groups collaborate across a broad constellation of stakeholders. Whether they need more volunteers for an event they are holding, a bag of compost for their garden, or information about how to build their own tree guards, the larger stewardship network provides. STEW-MAP asked groups who they work with in order to visualize these vital connections of ideas, materials, labor, and capital. Over time, these relationships shape governance across civic, public, and private sectors, and influence the policy agenda and the form of the city.
NYC Parks, the largest land manager in the city, is also the most connected broker in the entire stewardship network. Partnerships for Parks is the central broker in New York City’s civic stewardship system. Working with hundreds of “Friends of Parks” groups across the city, they were removed from this visualization in order to see other connections between groups:
This diagram focuses on the civic-to-civic component of the STEW-MAP respondent network. Dots represent individual groups and lines represent collaborative ties between them. The network is organized by the types of places where groups work (athletic fields, urban farms) and their issues of concern (employment, seniors). Image created by Pratt SAVI using USDA Forest Service STEW-MAP NYC 2017 data.
Visualizing the power of sometimes subtle forces is not easy. How do we show the strength of a network? Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s work uses a patchwork dress, a picnic, a participatory performance—each of these forms demonstrate the way in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Lyn-Kee-Chow has created a series of picnic performances staged in various locations of the public realm of New York City—including streets, parks, and museums. While the artist herself anchors and orchestrates these performances, she engages others both as co-performers and as participants. For this piece, Lyn-Kee-Chow invited stewardship groups focusing on food justice work to share their wisdom, their harvests, and their relationships in a conversation and celebration on the outstretched dress-as-gathering-space. Throughout the rest of the show, a similar dress hung as a symbol of this gathering.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow
The Picnic: Harvest of the STEW, 2019. Photo: Christina Freeman
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s participatory performance on September 15, 2019 honored stewardship groups in the five boroughs whose work centers around food justice issues. Lyn-Kee-Chow was joined by representatives from Edible Schoolyard NYC, Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center, Smiling Hogshead Ranch, and Sunnyside CSA, groups she learned about through the STEW-MAP database. These organizations serving The Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, and Queens were highlighted for their projects organized by and supporting New York City’s communities of color and immigrant populations.
Since 2010, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow has created a series of picnic performances that set up space for the public to have conversations. Inspired by the kitchen tablecloths of her grandmother, she sews together vinyl tablecloths from bargain stores, creating elaborate dresses that double as picnic blankets. Embracing her mixed Chinese and Jamaican heritage, her projects reflect on multiculturalism, food migration and the colonial food trade. Hailing from a lineage of farmers on both maternal and paternal sides of her family, food justice has a particularly personal connection for the artist.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow is a 1.5 generation Jamaican-American interdisciplinary artist living and working in Queens, NY. Her work often explores performance and installation art, drawing from the nostalgia of her homeland, Caribbean folklore, fantasy, globalism, spirituality, and migration.
Stewardship timeline
Stewardship groups not only exist, they persist. They have evolved along with the social, political, economic, and environmental histories of our city.
This animation shows the emergence of stewardship groups by year founded, including the proliferation of groups after the 1970s.
Stewardship animation. Video created by Pratt SAVI using USDA Forest Service STEW-MAP NYC 2017 data.
The timeline calls out selected key moments and turning points in New York City’s stewardship history.
Stewardship timeline. Image created by Pratt SAVI using USDA Forest Service STEW-MAP NYC 2017 data.
Stewards in their own words
Quotes were collected from interviews with a subset of stewardship groups. USDA Forest Service researchers asked stewards to share their definition of stewardship, stories of ways in which they helped to take care of the environment, and their vision for the future of stewardship work in NYC.
Stewardship stories. Image created by Pratt SAVI using USDA Forest Service STEW-MAP NYC 2017 data.
Finally, we have been gathering personal accounts of people’s stewardship stories from all over the world. These narratives range from cherished memories, to everyday occurrences, to sparks that started social movements. To add your own story to the map, go here!
In the future, I could imagine a whole series of exhibitions—Who Takes Care of Paris? Who Takes Care of Cairo? Who Takes Care of Delhi?—featuring the faces and actions of stewards in each of these places combined with artistic perspectives on that work. Not only global cities across the world, but also mid-size cities, smaller towns, and rural areas have their own stewardship stories to tell. Perhaps we can begin to see more clearly the ties of care and connection that bind us all.
Acknowledgments:Who Takes Care of New York? was organized by the NYC Urban Field Station, a partnership between USDA Forest Service researchers (Lindsay Campbell; Michelle Johnson; Laura Landau; Erika Svendsen), NYC Parks (Caitlin Boas), and the Natural Areas Conservancy, with a mission to improve quality of life in urban areas by conducting, supporting, and communicating research about social-ecological systems and natural resource management; Pratt Institute’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative, SAVI (Jessie Braden; Can Sucuoğlu; Case Wyse; Josephina Matteson; Zachary Walker; Lidia Henderson), a multi-disciplinary mapping research lab and service center within Pratt Institute that focuses on using geospatial analysis and data visualization to understand NYC communities; and Independent Curator, Christina Freeman. Thank you to the thousands of stewards across this city whose work we aimed to amplify in this exhibition.
A sustainable ecology of cities is possible when we successfully combine environmental and socio-economic dimensions equally in our plans and actions. In fact, it is the extent of their integration and inclusion that should form a criterion by which we evaluate our success.
If there is one thing that I have to state as being the most important learning from my living and working in Mumbai, it is the need for collective intervention to combat the current trend of exclusionary urban development with an objective of achieving social and environmental equity and justice for all. Also, as a necessary condition, each individual intervention should have to be linked to other larger democratic rights struggles, thereby building networks of interventions towards evolving an alternate vision of the city.
It is with this objective that I consider building relationships collectively between people and with nature as an important mission. This mission includes an understanding of such relationships and networks of interactions, particularly those that develop in the process of collective interventions by citizens on demands pertaining to social and environmental justice and how they contribute to the larger interest of sustainability of cities.
I would like to view cities from social and environmental perspective and understand how the two together constitute a necessary condition, and what their union means for the achievement of a higher state of sustainability. The two are inextricably entwined and neither is exclusive. Thus, a sustainable ecology of cities is possible when we can successfully combine environmental and socio-economic dimensions equally in the plans and actions that we pursue. As a matter of fact, it is the extent of their integration and inclusion that form a criterion by which we evaluate the value of our work and engagements.
Very often we find ourselves absorbed into zones of comfort and complacence, engaging in issues and places that have already been developed or achieved exclusivity. But to get out and engage with situations of instability and discomfort, dealing with the invisible yet perceived barriers across city landscapes, and their unification, is indeed challenging.
After all, what can be more equal between nations, influenced by neo-liberal globalisation, than the question of land mis-utilisation, exclusionary city planning, and the deplorable state of the environment in which vast numbers of people are discriminated and subject to climate change risk. It is for these reasons that the local struggles of the marginalised and discriminated people for equality and sustainability, across borders and nation states, are indeed global in their essence and spirit.
What we are deeply concerned about is the constant division of our cities into disparate fragments, both in social and spatial terms. Polarisation of people and communities in terms of their religion, race, caste, class, faith, gender, nationality is leading to social instability and tension. Indeed, our cities are producing and reproducing backyards of exclusion, discrimination, hatred, neglect and abuse; even natural habitats are being systematically destroyed leading to increasing levels of social intolerance and climate catastrophe, thus undermining the very idea of cities and their sustainability.
As these conflicts begin to dominate the city landscape, we are compelled to intervene, particularly on behalf of the excluded, discriminated, and much abused backyards of people and places that are, in most instances, situated in the borders, edges, peripheries, and margins.
Our discourses on cities have relied on the understanding of social relationships and how the modes of production have influenced their formation. In support this statement, I would like to refer to David Harvey and his book Social Justice and the City, when he quotes from Karl Marx: “The totality of these relationship of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life, conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. In terms of Marxist terminology, the urban and the process of urbanization are simple superstructures of the mode of production (capitalist or socialist)”.
Further, in the same book, Harvey has analysed social relations, built form and environment and how each influences the other, but his reference to environment is restricted to built-environment and does not include the natural ecosystems. I quote: “Urbanism may be regarded as a particular form or patterning of the social process. This process unfolds in a spatially structured environment created by man. The city can, therefore, be regarded as a tangible, built-environment- an environment which is a social product.”
Interestingly, Pickett, Cadenasso and McGrath in their book, Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design, quoting McGranahan and Satterthwaite, present a much wider understanding of the environment. I quote: “A great deal of the urban sustainability literature tends to promote the so-called ‘brown agenda’ of environmentalism, which emphasizes the need to solve immediate needs of the billions of people who live in degraded, unsanitary conditions and grueling poverty, while the ‘green agenda’ emphasizes protection and enhancement of ecosystems to support future generations and other species. Reconciling green with brown agenda issues, however, is at the heart of more encompassing viewpoints on sustainability, recognizing that poverty and environment conservation are inextricably entwined (McGranahan and Satterthwaite 2002)”.
Such reconciliation is indeed the essence of the Irla movement, of which I am a part.
This phenomenon is realized in many world cities, more critically experienced in the cities of developing nations. While cities are expanding, public spaces are rapidly shrinking, in both physical and democratic terms. The democratic “space” that ensures accountability and enables dissent is also shrinking—very subtly but surely. This means space for wider public participation and dialogue are shrinking. It is in these prevailing conditions that we are compelled to pursue the idea of public spaces as being the foundation of city planning. Public spaces ensure physical, social and democratic well-being of all. The city’s shrinking open spaces are of course the most visible manifestation, as they directly and adversely affect our very quality of life.
It is in this context, I consider our struggles to pursue the idea of unification of cities through architectural and design endeavors as being important; while engaging closely with social and environmental movements. Our priority has to be to establish close relationship between architecture and people, placing strong emphasis on participatory planning from the very beginning and at every stage.
A Mumbai example, with active participation of the author.
A review of “Epitomes,” an exhibition by Yumiko Ono, on view at Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei through 2 February 2020.
Not antagonistic of city versus nature, Ono’s drawings come across like peaceful meetings between two forces that we so often see as opposites. Here, city and nature create form together.
Situated a few blocks from Taipei’s central train station in an old school building, MOCA Taipei is currently hosting a large exhibition of catastrophic visions of past, present, and future. As large, loud, and exciting as the exhibition is, it is ultimately the most simple of works in the museum that wins the viewer’s eye and mind.
Tucked into a corner of the first floor of the MOCA building, away from the catastrophes represented in the main show, Yumiko Ono’s Epitomes offers us subtle, yet vital reflections on our urban structures, and the cultures and natures that form them.
Pencil drawings from Yumiko Ono’s “Cloud City” series at MOCA Taipei. Photo: CC BY/SA, Patrick M. Lydon
The central works of Ono’s exhibition are her Cloud City series. These simply presented works of pencil on tracing paper are unassuming at first glance, however in both their content and context, they stand out as some of the most deeply moving pieces in the museum.
Within Ono’s drawings, varied architectural elements from Taiwan are pieced together in pleasantly delirious sequence. From afar, they appear truly as a floating cloud cities, urban worlds suspended in space with no roots, cities as inverted caves, spires poking out top and bottom, stalactite, stalagmite.
The works come across like a marriage of Escher’s etchings and the words of Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
These Cloud Cities of Ono’s are not simply a hodgepodge of architectural forms. The matter of the buildings tells the tale of the environment. On close inspection, wall faces here reveal subtle natural motifs. These motifs seem to offer suggestions of Taiwan’s leaves, rivers, winds, mountains, and waters, coalescing to form the walls. Interestingly, the motifs Ono chooses seem to act not as murals on the walls, but as the walls themselves.
There is no solidity to these cities of Ono’s. Instead there are ever-changing cycles — patterns of nature, framed in the architectural styles and structures of humanity.
Detail view of pencil drawings from Yumiko Ono’s “Cloud City” series at MOCA Taipei. Photo: CC BY/SA, Patrick M. Lydon
Not antagonistic of city versus nature, Ono’s drawings come across like peaceful meetings between two forces that we so often see as opposites. Here, city and nature create form together.
Also on view in this exhibition are Ono’s Pan-City 10 porcelain sculptures, products of the artist’s experience living in Russia and the United States, among brutalist architecture.
Ono’s shiny, urbanesque objects give a softness and lightness to typical brutalist form, appearing something like blocks of white butter, stacked atop each other on a summer afternoon. Their weight is made cunningly visible by Ono, as the blocky sculptures seem to slope and cave inward. One might imagine these sculptures as representations of human logic, utilitarian apartment blocks and office buildings given form, and then melting into lumpy puddles of toilet-bowl-white sameness.
Porcelain sculpture from Yumiko Ono’s “Pan-City 10” series at MOCA Taipei. Photo: CC BY/SA, Patrick M. Lydon
The porcelain works—bleak, characterless visions of cities as structures of anthropocentricism—are powerful, yet here they seem purposefully outwitted here by the quietly incisive power of Ono’s simple pencil drawings.
In simplicity of material, the delicate drawings offer a vision of cities as a melding of human ingenuity with nature’s rhythms. Within each drawing, one can find the cycle of life and death as a city, floating in space, along with the clouds.
Detail view of pencil drawings from Yumiko Ono’s “Cloud City” series at MOCA Taipei. Photo: CC BY/SA, Patrick M. Lydon
The juxtaposition of the porcelain sculptures with the pencil drawings in the same space is a good thing. If one provides form and fluidity, the other gives character and context. If one offers subtle critique of the gross, the other offers subtle idolization of the sublime.
It reminds one of the strong Taoist influences here Taiwan, and of the saying by the ancient philosopher Chuang Tzu, that “One who wants to have right without wrong, order without disorder, does not understand the principles of nature … to refuse one is to refuse both.”
Ono reminds us here, not only that there is merit to both sides, but that to follow nature in a city means to accept both the hard and the soft, the solid and the flowing, the growing and the decaying, all in their turn.
As any truly resilient city knows, all forms have their roles.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Elisa Silva, CaracasDespite some successful public space interventions in Caracas, we realized there was a larger challenge of overcoming prejudices and recognizing the barrio as part of the city. We began an initiative that would address changes in the urban culture, addressing the language used to talk about informal settlements and urban symbolic gestures in the city. It was a point of departure to educate people about the city and the political and social cost of such lingering prejudices.
David Simon, LondonThe nature of cities can be interpreted in different ways, and “living space” has two complementary meanings. One is space for living, rethinking land use, density, and sustainability. Another is space that is living, nature and nature-based solutions that are part of the cityscape. Both concepts are essential to address challenges in pubic and shared space in cities.
Fish Yu, ShenzhenOn the opening day of our rooftop community space, we invited politicians, media, designers and experts from different sectors to bear witness. We found this place has become more than just a Living Space of Nature, but a real living space to we try to talk about the ideas of today—a cultural hotspot.
Samarth Das is an Urban Designer and Architect based in Mumbai. Having practiced professionally in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and subsequently in New York City, his work focuses on engaging actively in both public as well as private sectors—to design articulate shared spaces within cities that promote participation and interaction amongst people.
Introduction
How can we create living space in cities? This was the theme of one of the Dialogues at The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris, with architect Elisa Silva (Caracas), social scientist David Simon (London), and urbanist and non-profit campaigner Xin (aka Fish) Yu (Shenzhen), and moderated by architect Samarth Das (Mumbai). Public spaces within cities commonly take on various forms: squares, parks, sidewalks, and even rooftops in dense conditions. How can we build space in the public realm that creates accessible areas that are both alive and for living? What makes them “work”? How are they negotiated among stakeholders?
There were two common themes among the three diverse responses. One is the key idea of shared space, both in terms of use, but also creation. When we build cities, we need to consider not just not public space, narrowly conceived, but shared space that may take many forms and emerge from various sources. Shared spaces must facilitate uses by and interactions among all types of users. We might seek out new uses for familiar spaces—a parking lot to a playground, for example, a shared rooftop to a garden.
A second theme is the idea that engagement among stakeholders—residents, government, business, civil society—is a critical part of every successful shared space. This process of engagement builds on shared experience. It contributes to overall improvement of the project itself, and most importantly ensures that it thrives on people’s emotional connection to the space upon completion. Engagement cultivates broader acceptance of modified land uses, but also curate new ideas about how land could and should be used.
This is an output of The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris.
At TNOC Summit, we largely avoided long presentations in plenary—i.e. “Keynotes”. Rather, even when we gathered in our largest group, we met for “Dialogues”, similar to the Roundtable format at TNOC. For each dialogue there was a core question or prompt, such as the one in this Roundtable. We invited three people to participate, striving for a multi-disciplinary group, with diverse points of view, perspectives, and approaches. Each of the three delivered a short intervention (about 8 minutes), and then sat together for a longer conversation. We are publishing all of the Summit dialogues in oder to make the ideas widely available and keep the conversations going beyond the Summit itself.
In this Roundtable, we present both their written texts (essentially a transcription of their presentations) and video of their presentations. Also you can find a transcription and video of the conversation below.
A transcription of the conversation
Samarth Das (moderator): Thank you all for very exciting set of presentations and thoughts. Before we jump into the first question, I want to string through all three of your dialogues. The one common theme that definitely comes out is the idea of shared space. I think it builds on the earlier discussion we had this morning about shared urban squares—it’s not public it’s shared. And the idea that engagement is a key asset is a key part of each of those discussions, so building on the shared experience. David (Simon), I’d like to take you up on the idea of the living and the livable, you know something that we had discussed. So how do we develop Living Spaces that are at the same time accessible to make them livable? Spaces in that sense. There’s always a tension between experts and locals and their thoughts about this. So, what are your thoughts?
David Simon: Well that comes back to my point about bringing together the different stakeholders living in a particular existing urban area or who are the intended residents of a new area in the process of being developed. The crucial thing about livability is both the physical environment meeting the needs both in a material sense, but also, as I said in my introductory comments in terms of social and cultural values. One can highlight this for example, in terms of the difference: If you look at indigenous cultures in different parts of the world, the way in which space is used socially is often very different. In some cultures and societies traditionally there were spaces for men and women to use together. There are spaces reserved for women and for men both domestically within the domestic sphere but even in public space and these are kind of superimposed layers.
In the conventional modern—as in driven by town planning since the late 19th century in a very sort of Western technocratic sense—the division between public and private is seem as a simple binary division. There’s something called public which belongs to one or other of the public governmental bodies and there’s something called private which belongs to individual people, individual households, individual firms, or other entities. So, in many societies, it’s much more complex and, without necessarily passing a value judgment about whether this is good or bad, the point is simply that if you going to have livable space it has to be culturally appropriate for the people and the values who are going to inhabit them. Otherwise, it becomes part of the challenge of alienation, of dysfunctional space, of anomie, and then we find that all sorts of other social problems relating to unemployment, individual alienation, substance abuse, violence of different sorts become much more prominent and that’s why some of the initiatives that Elisa Illustrated working with children, with youth, with other groups, and getting them to understand and to use and to make the spaces that already exist more expressive of themselves is a crucial part of all of those livability strategies.
Samarth Das: So Elisa, building on what David just said, you did demonstrate how children have been included in the process, the young adults. Tell us a little bit about how that promotes the building of a better Community.
Elisa Silva: These communities where I work and the country in general is very polarized politically. Very much so, and that’s something that is a challenge to work with. Children end up being an amazing tool to overcome that and by engaging them in these conversations and in the end somehow, it’s been a first sort of way to enter. They are as a community very aware that children don’t have safe spaces for play, places for them to really claim as their own, so because of all the obstacles and the difficulties and resources etcetera, we found that that was a way that made it easier to enter into this conversation with the communities and their enthusiasm of children. Because what we quickly picked up on is that we needed to make this fun, as Fish was saying, so every activity we’re doing with them was already somehow occupying and using that public space or that future public space that hadn’t yet been intervened by them or through the design process with them, but that they could already envision it as being something different. And then because they of their low resistance and willingness to play, it created a buy-in from the rest of the community, the adults who might have been more skeptical and those who don’t speak to each other because they’re on different sides of the political fence.
Samarth Das: So essentially it’s about building trust in within communities. So Fish, through your very specific example, how did that project really help build that trust that really opens up many avenues?
Fish Yu: Yeah. That was difficult. In the most of the preparing time we were kind of worrying about if this can be done in that special area, because that’s where Governments try not to really put lots of research resources in there. And so we try to do something but without any available regulation and so the people come to ask for permission, if you are allowed to do such project there, we didn’t know, we didn’t have that, and nobody has that. There is no current procedure of applying for such a permit. So, we were spending lots of time working on that and we try to involve the local residents to talk about the project and to talk about their needs and what do they want in the future for the space?
But there is particularly difficult to conduct in China since we have a very limited sense of community. So you’re you’re not really able to find those people, where those people are in the community. It’s really challenging. So eventually we talked some of those representatives from the Iresidents, from one building alone, but we failed to find so many from the buildings around them. So, I think the trust building is a gradual growing process. You might not be able to do, at the very first place, for the entire whole process, but we found happiness that we keep learning. We still keep this experience getting more and more for the future development. So, we would like to share those local groups in the city and we try to engage more civil organizations to join us to build this part of trust-building process
Samarth Dad 1: You mentioned these processes take time. And then you also showed us a slide where in a matter of years landscape is completely transformed into something absolutely unrecognizable. And you know Elisa, we have time as a factor of scale that we talk about. You have different processes that have their own timelines and yet they all need to come together to somehow contribute towards that larger process. That must be challenging to deal with if not the most challenging aspect but one of the most challenging aspects about this. What are your thoughts about dealing with time and managing timelines for these kinds of processes?
Elisa Silva: Well difficult and indeed challenging what we’re doing and in both of the examples that I showed in the case of Venezuela I think it’s a situation where it’s pretty much impossible to get all of the different actors that you would need involved, especially government and local government. So, there’s a little bit of faith that somehow we might be leading the time in this process and also as a way of resistance against or resistance towards survival. Resistance of a desire to continue to create livable situations, even though we’re very much going against the current. So in that sense, I think it’s a sort of an obstinate way of resistance. The one that has to do with so many other systems and landscapes. It is a challenge. I think most important is to map it, and show it, and make it visible, which has not really been done very clearly, neither for the stakeholders nor for the community itself.
Samarth Das: All right before we just move on to a few questions from the crowd, David that aspect of time relates very directly to some of the challenges that you face in co-production and co-creation. I like that you use those words. It’s recurring again with a theme of shared spaces. So how are those tackled?
David Simon: Well, I think it’s exactly as Fish just said, a case of building trust and confidence which is slow, it’s step by step, and it’s also very easy to break or to lose trust and confidence very quickly. So it’s an asymmetrical process and that’s why one has to be so careful that you don’t have a cross cutting or a contradictory intervention from one other stakeholder that undermines the whole process. But I also, just in the broader context of what we’re discussing, want to draw attention to the fact that there is also a challenge between the permanence, at least in terms of a number of decades, of the urban fabric as we design and build it out of these permanent materials of steel concrete glass metal wood, whatever, and the rapidity and the speed of technological change of demographic and social change, which means that today’s reality is often trying to figure out how to live in inflexible spaces, but where the needs have become very different.
So one example is how in the space of a few decades in many societies—and that number is fewer in the rapidly urbanizing parts of the world–we’ve moved from a situation where extended families are the social norm. However, they are constructed in different cultural contexts to a situation where the nuclear family of two parents and two children or whatever was regarded as the norm to a situation today where in most of the major cities in western Europe and North America between 1/4 and 1/3 of households comprise one adult often living alone, single person households. So, if one thinks about the challenges and those of course are at different stages of the life stage could be separation divorce never partnered—but increasingly it’s the elderly who have lost their life partner in one sense or another—so there is a huge challenge of making today’s urban fabric in the temperate zones, if you like of the world appropriate to the needs of single-person households of different demographic ages and stages.
Samarth Das: Localized approaches, right? That’s basically what it is. All right. Do we have any questions?
Audience member: I’m used to Mediterranean hilltop towns and I figure they probably grew up like the barios. So I’m wondering you know, is there a chance that today’s barrios will become the desirable places to live of the future?
Audience member: Hi, very very interesting session. And I’m glad that David Simon asked or mentioned about different demographics and different kind of households. I just wanted to go through give me a couple of minutes a couple of thoughts where you spoke about private and public spaces and then move say compound idea of private semi-private and public which is what courtyards or corridors outside of houses are considered and then moving into the modern society where you actually can have pockets of private in public spaces and pockets of public on your phone in very very private spaces. So what I just wanted to highlight is that in each of these contexts I think safety is one aspect which was spoken about by the group, but then also maybe legitimacy of doing what we can can do in different kinds of spaces and transparency as well as viewership. So how much of what you do in a private space is actually visible to the outside and how much that you can do in a public space is actually not visible to the public around you and especially because I have lived in three cities in the global South Delhic Cape Town and Bangalore. My one question is often our solutions are for the communities which seem to not have public space to call their own and nature is called upon to bring people together, especially the youth. There is also in a city such as Cape Town where apartheid is well not rife, but there are consequences of it that are still there in the urban fabric and you have families which are and households which actually are completely isolated from each other. Sorry. I’m going on too long, but I just wanted to know if there are examples of people here working with non-vulnerable social groups to bring them in a more public open space. Thanks.
Elisa Silva: Regarding the first question, I’ve thought about that a lot. Yes, I think barrios are a medieval village basically just built in the 20th century. And even though our approach has been very much thinking that public space can be a way to integrate them, I’m very keen right now actually on resignifying existing spaces as their as they are in their public dimension, or their common dimension, or their shared dimension, to recognize the values of those kinds of spaces, which organically were constructed by the people and represented them somehow to the rest of the city in a different light, so that they might find them as valuable as they in fact are. And another kind of really interesting thing that I would like to be able to learn from comparing medieval towns and how they grew for example, the gothic Barrio Barcelona and its expansion is just exactly in that moment where you go from a transition of a planned, gridded area and a medieval fabric—in Barcelona there different, but you just reverse them without ever feeling like you’re going through some gigantic threshold, which is not the case. In Barrios such as Caracas people have in their mind that they’re going into some other world and that’s really where I think there’s an opportunity there to be more specific, to be more mindful of what that can mean. I was in Amalfi on the coast and just in this amazing setting with Gucci stores and Chanel and I realized this boulevard is a creek. I’m certain that it’s a creek and as I walked up to the very end, of course, it had been covered and now it’s clean water that comes out into the ocean. But that’s essentially how barrios have emerged in the fabric of Caracas. They often occupied creeks. And so to be able to imagine that that same transformation would happen seems very logical.
David Simon: Let me pick up the question about different categories of public space and semi-private and private and how you identify them. This was a profound challenge that we faced during the campaign to create the urban sustainable development goal, which is now goalie 11. Where as you probably know there is a target and there are indicators about the extent of public space and the challenge was very simply that it was almost impossible to find an indicator that would work in all countries and all urban contexts because—precisely the point you made—that how open space, and that’s why it’s eventually defined as open space, is controlled very so much between local authorities different categories of private entity, regional, states institutions, and the national state as well as all the other planning issues… so it became impossible to find a sort of single indicator of public open space.
So, the definition shifted towards the open, and even there we’ve had to rely increasingly on remote sensing and other techniques that need ground-truthing to test the accessibility because there are different gatekeeping rules regulations fences boundaries financial disincentives and all the rest.
Samarth Das: Any last thoughts from you Fish before we close?
Fish Yu: I’ll probably just share a little story how we managed to communicate about this specific project. And once we found people having trouble with understanding this idea, then we actually put stuff over the window to stop try to stop the construction. We found a way, we actually put up of plants to show them what’s going on there, that they see the color change. They see there’s something else going on with the nature of the environment. So, they stop doing that. They start smiling with us. So that’s just the real change we sensed that then we can do practically to change people’s idea. I think that’s something to think about. Maybe we can find different ways of communication, different manners to make people understand what’s going on with urban environment
Samarth Das: So, lots of takeaways for what makes public spaces and shared spaces work. Thank you all for joining us here this morning, and thank you to the audience. Thank you.
Elisa Silva is director and founder of Enlace Arquitectura 2007 and Enlace Foundation 2017, established in Caracas, Venezuela. Projects focus on raising awareness of spatial inequality and the urban environment through public space, the integration of informal settlements and community engagement in rural landscapes.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Xin Yu (aka Fish) is Shenzhen Conservation Director and Youth Engagement Director of The Nature Conservancy China Program. Since 2017, he has overseen TNC’s first City project in Shenzhen, China, focusing on Sponge City
Elisa Silva is director and founder of Enlace Arquitectura 2007 and Enlace Foundation 2017, established in Caracas, Venezuela. Projects focus on raising awareness of spatial inequality and the urban environment through public space, the integration of informal settlements and community engagement in rural landscapes.
Elisa Silva
In spite of some successful public space interventions in Caracas, we realized there was a larger challenge of overcoming prejudices and recognizing the barrio as part of the city. We began an initiative that would address changes in the urban culture, addressing the language used to talk about informal settlements and urban symbolic gestures in the city. It was a point of departure to educate people about the city and the political and social cost of such lingering prejudices.
Thank you, David, for this fantastic invitation and to the organizing committee. We are going to talk about how spaces are made for people. I will start by introducing where I work which is Caracas, Venezuela, a city of three million, except when you include its surrounding satellite cities it comes to about 4 million. I’ve lived and worked there for 13 years now.
In 2012, we began a mapping exercise of the informal settlements and how they grew in a 60-year period. Informal settlements are the home of half of the population. That is, half of the city’s population lives in informal settlements. This was a key finding from this study.
Within the discipline of architecture, the discourse focused on social housing, which isn´t a bad thing, except that several open questions remain. For example, what about the people living in existing settlements? And what about those who are still migrating from rural areas?
In 2012, I had the opportunity to do research and visit many informal settlements throughout Latin America. Time and time again, what I witnessed proved that public space had a unique ability to increase social cohesion and integrate these territories into the rest of the urban fabric. At the time of my research, neither Venezuelan local governments nor the State were investing in informal settlement projects. The opportunity to test the effects of public space interventions eventually presented itself through civil society initiatives. One example of work we did is an open-air waste dump sites such as one in La Paloma, where we were able to work with the community and change the space into a small public plaza together with a local NGO and the financial support of Citibank.
Part of the project also focused on engaging neighborhood children, through playful activities to think about and reflect on these spaces and their surroundings. For example, through a theater production, the children acted out the roles of various public space elements such as the sun, trees, cars and shade.
We were subsequently invited, because of this work, to be parts of an initiative with the Swiss Embassy and another NGO. We had the opportunity to help the community of barrio Chapellin recover a deteriorated public square. A curious anecdote is that they were resistant to include green areas within their public space and we were able to overcome this by creating an alliance with local schools, where the children were directly responsible for the upkeep of plants in the plaza’s planters.
A use changed from parking lot to playground.
We were also able to create public space in an informal settlement used to park cars, by talking with the community of Las Brisas in La Palomera about transforming it into a public space. After negotiations with the car owners, a very modest children’s playground was built.
In spite of these public space interventions, we realized there was a larger challenge of overcoming prejudices and recognizing the barrio as part of the city. For example, streets signs indicate were formal neighborhoods are located. But, even if a barrio is right next to a street sign, it will not include the name of the informal settlement. Another example is that the quality of waste management services is very different for formal and informal city sectors. And so we decided to begin an initiative that would address changes in the urban culture. Addressing the language used to talk about informal settlements and urban symbolic gestures in the city, could be a point of departure to educate people about the city and the political and social cost of such lingering prejudices.
The program we started is called Integration Process Caracas. It began with a Manifesto to the Complete City, somewhat like the Dada Manifesto. It was read in public squares and published on online journals. It has inspired the lyrics of traditional music called decimas, which are rhymes, describing a city that includes all of its parts that we hope will sound on radio stations and become jingles people remember. We have printed fragments of it on T-shirts we use at our events. One form of recognition has been to acknowledge, for instance, the presence of bocce (or la pétanque in France) courts in the barrio. To celebrate them, have organized bocce games there, creating a setting were people play and share a space together, regardless of its location.
The initiative has amalgamated a constellation of artists and people from the community that allow us to spread the message further. One important event occurred May 25th, 2019. We celebrated the Cross of May, which is a festival or a traditional celebration. We combined it with a Mobile Museum, a procession through the settlement from the formal sector into the informal settlement, and an ambitious program of events and elements, including a large-scale model that allowed inhabitants of La Palomera to recognize themselves within their territory. There were performances by dancers and artists who worked with children from the barrio. And there were exhibitions such as a mapping and photographs of the barrio’s green spaces. Other artists led the celebration of the May Cross, and the San Juan procession with children from nearby schools. Celebrations that include music and dance, are an important way of creating cohesion among people. The community’s participation in the event was massive, as well as that of outside visitors. The celebrations and a long series of events with the community planned over the course of the previous seven months, have created a process that invites people to question perceived city boundaries between formal and informal sectors, and to expand their mental map of the city into one that is complete.
The stages of mescal production.
I would also like to introduce another question. What about the people that live in villages that still believe moving to a city is a way to improve their livelihood, or a way to send remittances home for their family’s benefit? For the past three years we have been working on a project in the southern part of Mexico in the State of Oaxaca. It is a region with a very important migrant population: 30% of its inhabitants live and work in larger cities or the United States.Mescal is today a spirit sold worldwide. I won’t go into details of how it is produced, which is fascinating, but what we know is that due to rising demand, production will have to increase tenfold over the next 10 years. In order to better understand how the resources used to make mezcal, (water, agave and wood) can be supplied without depleting natural resources, and how to mitigate the effects of waste byproducts, we have been working with three communities in the area of Ejutla, south of Oaxaca city. Deforestation and water shortage are already serious problems in areas where mezcal is made.
Félix González-Torres’ “Perfect Lovers”. In synch.
They also have an interesting land use structure where much of the land in these municipalities is communal, due to agreements made after Spanish presence dissipated and as a result of an agrarian reform in the early 20th century. In the fall 2018 I led a design studio at Harvard University with students mostly in the landscape department. Findings led to understanding that the communal areas, which are underutilized (mainly for grazing and wood supply), but could become a very valuable asset for reforestation, wood and agave production, as well as water harvesting opportunities. Instead of thinking of these fields the way tequila production has, as extensive monocultures of blue agave, proposals pointed to a mixture or species in the form of forests, wood harvesting, agave and crops. As complex and simultaneous systems, the landscape becomes a has happened simultaneously and their complex and in and showing how people land and all of the systems that are productive within them need to somehow enter into synchronicity.
I end with an image of a piece by Félix González-Torres titled “Perfect Lovers”, two wall clocks perfectly in sync with one another. Synchronicity is what makes them perfect. Synchronicity can happen between the land and the people, between city fragments in the city, as well as between people.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
David Simon
The nature of cities can be interpreted in different ways, and “living space” has two complementary meanings. One is space for living, rethinking land use, density, and sustainability. Another is space that is living, nature and nature-based solutions that are part of the cityscape. Both concepts are essential to address challenges in pubic and shared space in cities.
It is indeed both a pleasure and a privilege to be part of this wonderful urban experiment and so my answer to the question of how to produce living space for people in cities has many parts. Being here right here right now is the first part of that answer, precisely because this is an experimental transdisciplinary event in the sense of bringing together people from different communities of practice, different parts of the world and different lived experiences to share and to learn. It is a metaphor for the answer to the question of this dialogue. But so too is the way in which the international research center that I head, namely Mistra Urban Futures, works through transdisciplinary practice in several formal city-based partnerships of different stakeholders and institutions.
There we work together to bring together people who are often on opposite sides—and there can be many opposing sides of urban conflicts—to work through the entire process of producing new knowledge and research and thereby to understand that basically wherever you are within the urban fabric, whatever role you play, whatever livelihood activities you undertake, what unites us is greater and more important than that which divides and separates us. That is the basic idea of co-design, co-creation or co-production. These processes are called different things in different contexts, but we use them interchangeably. They are all about building that shared experience—which we find really important. It is innovative. It is experimental and in some of the independent evaluation studies that have been done of our work, those terms keep coming up.
Moreover, participants in the individual research projects and in the governance of the process as a whole often articulate the idea of the Centre’s offices being a safe and experimental space, since the Centre is a boundary crossing organization, if you like, where people are able to step outside their normal work environments and speak and think and study and reflect more freely. So that’s another part of the answer. We have many different examples of this from our different city platforms and, similarly, at each stage of this conference, about how people are using and reinventing their existing urban space to make it more habitable and more livable.
However, I should also flag that over the next 30 or 40 years more urban areas in terms of number of inhabitants and number of hectares that will be built up, will be constructed through the ongoing processes of urbanization worldwide, particularly in parts of the world outside North America and Europe, than have been built in the history of urbanism to date. That is absolutely crucial in terms of the global sustainability equations. The underscores the points that the Peter Head was making in the first dialogue this morning about rethinking use of resources and thinking about Integrated systems approaches and the use of new technologies.
It’s also important in terms of how we imagine new urban spaces and places and build them to reflect our cultures, our environments and so on in a way that most existing spaces at least in the 20th and early 21st centuries have not done. That too is part of sustainability and livability. And in that sense, I should also draw attention to the title of “living space”.
That’s because—rather as was pointed out earlier on—the nature of cities can be interpreted in different ways. To me, “living space” has two complementary meanings. The one is space for living in terms of rethinking densities, rethinking land use mix and ultimately sustainability, requiring that we redesign cities in more compact neighborhoods where we require less personal mobility and travel.
Even the discussions about new technologies, electric cars and all the rest, seem implicitly very often to operate from the assumption that more mobility is both necessary and good but actually, in terms of a more radical approach to urban resilience and sustainability, one could argue in certain contexts, at least, that less mobility is both necessary and good—so we need to have multifunctional neighborhoods in which we can walk or cycle. By other non-technologically intensive means of mobility, more of the facilities and income earning opportunities and neighborhoods and social networks and other resources that we rely on and we utilize within the urban fabric should be reachable.
But the second meaning of the term “living space” is again back to nature and nature-based solutions, not as an alternative to steel, glass, concrete, tarmac, wood, plastic and all the other conventional and unconventional building materials, but very much as part of it. In other words, it is space that is living, and a number of the slides that Eliza just shown and that we’ve had in other sessions and will do for the rest of the conference illustrate that very well.
Hence we need constantly not only to think about the design of new spaces, but how we can retrofit, how we can redesign and repurpose elements of the existing urban fabric that have either outlived their usefulness—through technological redundancy, for example—or are not socially and culturally appropriate to the needs and the priorities of different categories of often quite heterogeneous communities inhabiting not just individual cities, but the numerous neighborhoods or areas that make up the cities.
I’m sure we can pick up some of these points in the discussion. Thanks very much.
Xin Yu (aka Fish) is Shenzhen Conservation Director and Youth Engagement Director of The Nature Conservancy China Program. Since 2017, he has overseen TNC’s first City project in Shenzhen, China, focusing on Sponge City
Fish Yu
On the opening day of our rooftop community space, we invited politicians, media, designers and experts from different sectors to bear witness. We found this place has become more than just a Living Space of Nature, but a real living space to we try to talk about the ideas of today—a cultural hotspot.
Hi everyone. My name is Fish. I work for The Nature Conservancy in China. This is really my honor today to present a story from Shenzhen with the title of Living Sponge or Space for the people in the local area. So how many of you have heard of the name of Shenzhen raise your hand please, and how many of you have heard about Sponge City?
Wow, that’s big crowd. Thank you. Well, I’m not surprised if you have ever heard of name of Shenzhen since the city’s so young. This is a photo taken 40 years ago from the New Territory of Hong Kong to those who know. You can see in just 35 years there is a big change took place in that area. Now we have this city with a population around 20 million.
You might be surprised that I’m telling you half of the city’s population now living in the area we call Urban Village. Take a close look. You can sense the density and the distance between those buildings. This is a main street in this urban village of Gangxia. You can tell the living condition there looks convenient. Residents can find pretty much everything from stores, restaurants to mini Banks…
But when you look up, the sky becomes narrow and you can feel the pressure from this built environment and people from Village. People can gather in very little options of space in those urban village areas to have fun and even find a job. This is where we start our project where is on a kind of unique building roof in this area.
It is one of the oldest buildings in the village and it is smaller than the normal size in the area. We try to use the simplest structure and to make it capable to hold as much water as possible. A 65% of run-off control rate is in this case. The green color on the screen is representing the plants. We also have a name for this project called Green Cloud for people to understand what’s going on in the future days possibly starting from this little building.
With this steel structure and rain bucket, we made this place become looking like this, from different angles, and with those local species you choose. This was taken in its three months’ time. It really became a very green and functional place.
But there are also stories about people. In the very first two weeks, people living around this building gave lots of complaints because they thought that we were trying to build another floor of the building and local executors came to stop us. We did a lot of communication with the local authorities to let them understand what’s going on. Finally they gave us a green light. And then we try to engage as many participants as possible from universities and also from it residents. Young people come together to help some of the construction work.
On the opening day, we invited politicians, media, designers and experts from different sectors of the city to bear the witness. And later on we found this place has become more than just a Living Space of Nature, but a real living space to we try to talk about today. It becomes a cultural hotspot for people to do different types of activities over there. We invited student volunteers to come to have a classical music concert for people living there who rarely have a chance to go to the Music Hall and more importantly we find this distance between those buildings become an advantage for people to be able to stand in front of the window to listen to the music and eventually this area turns out to be now a nature education classroom for the kids in the village to come and learn some science and nature.
This is the story from Shenzhen about a living Sponge Space. It is fun and beautiful. We will continue to work towards building healthy cities through the integration of green infrastructure and people’s engagement. Thank you very much!
Scale tension in common in many large cities, where solutions to problems at one scale are considered the cause of problems at another. At what scale should cities then be governed? The answer is simple without being obvious. A city should be governed at the scale of its most painful problem and highest priority.
Could we construct a new image of what the political boundaries of an urban landscape could take shape as? Instead of the hierarchical approach that is commonplace, with cities governed by layers of neighborhood, urban, regional, and state-provincial levels through different electoral or appointed bodies, I propose to approach the problem geometrically, by using the principles of scaling and iteration to demonstrate how fractal geometries can provide solutions to urban scaling politics that layers of governance fail to provide. We will explore a way to resolve political tensions at the municipal level by applying natural, fractal geometry to city boundaries, and that this geometry provides a natural way to govern cities of millions with historical roots of many centuries.
The most significant event in North American urban planning of the past century is the challenge organized against Robert Moses’ plan to build a highway through Greenwich Village in Manhattan. The conflict put a halt to a half-century (or more) of automobile-scale modernisation in cities and started a trend of scaling down government to the neighborhood. Two books on the outcome of this event have massive influence on our perspective of city planning to this day: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, documents the complexity and liveliness of urban relationships at the small scale, while The Power Broker, by Robert Caro, documents the byzantine system of management and influence that had been constructed by Robert Moses to plan and transform New York City at its largest scale.
I suspect the reason why these books could become so influential, and the conflict of Greenwich Village so widely known, is that the same tensions and conflicts arise in every large city. While the sample size is admittedly small, there is a visible trend in cities that achieve the multi-million population scale to struggle with issues that are scale problems expressing themselves as political conflicts.
Many of these cities suffer, for instance, severe home affordability issues. As an extreme case, the San Francisco Bay Area is governed as a patchwork of small regional hubs and country towns, not the sprawling world metropolis it has become. For the past decade it has received billions, perhaps trillions of dollars of capital flows to its technology companies. As a result, a class of technology professional has become so wealthy that the housing market of San Francisco is becoming exclusive to cash buyers. The traditional wealth-building instrument of mortgages, such as the one that made the wealth of Steve Jobs’ adoptive middle-class parents, has become irrelevant to people whose wealth comes from selling companies to global investors. Large corporations now erect pharaonicnew headquarters where they once occupied Jane Jacobsean repurposed office and industrial buildings. The patchwork of municipalities, and the city of San Francisco itself, are fighting tooth-and-nail to preserve by regulatory powers their suburban single-family housing originally intended for a mortgage-driven market, and in the garage spaces of which many of the now gigantic corporations were founded, against the waves of investment capital flowing to them. As a consequence, regional home prices are increasing at an even greater pace, and a counter-intervention against those preservationist regulations are being proposed at larger levels of government to increase regional supply of homes and hopefully break the cycle.
The tension between neighborhood preservation and home affordability is in multiple metropolises creating a cycle where regional powers are reasserting themselves through grassroots influence groups such as the various YIMBY movements. Nearly all of them propose, as a solution to the housing development pipeline running dry, a return to regional-scale planning. This takes the form of coercive constraints on the powers of neighborhoods to regulate home building rights, or direct mandates to add more affordable homes in proportion to a neighborhood’s size within the region, with penalties attached for failure. The prototypes for these are the European capital cities of London, then Paris, which struggled with the conflict between local preservation and home affordability decades before North American cities. They have unfortunately not found a successful resolution so far, despite multiple attempts to scale planning up, up to outright nationalization of planning codes.
Scale tension pervades these problems, where solutions to problems at one scale are considered the cause of problems at another. It’s evident that applying more power at one end of the scale produces a balancing reaction at the other end to neutralize that power, and everyone ends up wasting their energies in a cycle that produces no beneficial resolution. Unfortunately there is no political resolution because both positions are correct at their respective scales, and well worth taking a stand for.
The question that should concern us is thus at what scale cities should be governed. The answer is simple without being obvious. A city should be governed at the scale of its most painful problem and highest priority. What makes this simple question create so much complexity is the enormous variation of what constitutes the most painful problem over the landscape, especially large metropolitan world capital landscapes.
Biological systems have no trouble solving for complex landscapes, for instance by repairing small errors in cellular divisions or fighting infections by viruses before they become generalized, while simultaneously the larger animal flourishes in its ecosystem by complex adaptation and cooperation. Fractal geometries and boundaries are essential to this success. Could we imagine such a geometry for a city?
The problem to be solved is to create a geometry of the metropolis that is simultaneously local and regional, that allows local communities to grow through their own specific urban generators while it remains simple to launch and plan projects at the regional scale. The divisions have to be clear enough internally that people can easily understand how they work, thus excluding the layering of levels of governance and bureaucracies.
The Sierpinski carpet is a fractal construct that has structure at infinite levels of scale and can therefore solve problems that occur at the biggest and smallest scales, providing unusual applications with devices such as antennas. Could this be applicable within a large modern metropolis? It could suggest that a regional metropolis has grown around smaller existing communities and towns, each with their own separate and contrasting scale, and harmonizes them into a coherent whole at their boundaries. It would be a fractal, perforated city.
Let’s consider the intuition behind this. We are familiar with hierarchies in cities’ networks, such as arterial roads and access roads, or regional transit lines fed by collector networks. This makes the centrality of cities fractal, since time and distance to reach any given point depends on the shape and hierarchy of the network and not the abstract geometric distance of bird flight. We know the feeling of being in the center of a large nature preserve and feeling the city fading away, despite perhaps having walked from downtown. The shape of networks shapes our experience of urban space, and these networks are fractal.
Has there ever been an experiment with this kind of fractal landscape? I believe all unresolved local-regional standoffs are instances of such an experiment. For my last assignment as a graduate student of urban planning in Paris I was fortunate to serve as an intern on the planning staff of one Paul Delouvrier’s (planner of the regional express system, the Robert Moses of Paris) great projects for the Paris region, the New Town of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. The city has since its founding been a microcosm of the local-regional conflict.
Local government in France is notoriously entrenched, the Ile-de-France region being divided into over 1200 communities, roughly one third of them creating the 10,000,000 people Paris metropolis. Planning a world capital with 1200 mayors, all out to protect their local community and thousand-year-old identity, has to this day been achieved by layering multiple superimposed regional authorities, some elected, some administered by boards, that have fought each other in party-line turf wars and become an abstraction to the citizens they are remotely accountable to. Whenever things achieve complete irrationality the national state under the president, or sometimes Emperor, directly intervenes and bypasses local administration to resolve scale issues.
The city of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines was a response to the post-war housing affordability crisis of France’s capital. The original territory, on the outskirts of the urban area just south of Versailles, was a sleepy agricultural country with one small town and a handful of villages surrounded by large farming estates until the state launched its program of new towns in the late 1960’s. Because the farming estates were concentrated in the hands of a few large landlords, the state considered them easy to acquire and develop into a city with a population that could act as a political balance to the Parisian core (it was planned for as many as half a million residents). A state-owned developer, EPASQY, was created to develop and commercialize the new town, and a special regime of planning regulations was imposed by the state around the existing town and villages, while preserving the local building codes within them. This territorial organization had the form depicted below.
“New Agglomeration Zone” of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Source unknown.
The gray area was the territory controlled by the development company. The white pockets were the town of Trappes and the other villages and hamlets of the area, which maintained nominal political autonomy. The tragic aspect of this organization is the superposition of the historical community boundaries through the structure. The commune is the basic element of local governance in France, defined and delimited during the French revolution and static ever since.
Instead of creating a new commune for the new town, the suburban commuters resettling from Paris became citizens of the existing town and villages, outnumbering the existing citizens with which they had no shared historical interests. In one fateful election year every mayor was swept from office and replaced with more politically-savvy migrants from Paris, who quickly acted to block the plans of the state developer and scale them down to what it is today, a suburban city of around 150,000 made up of 7 semi-autonomous and politically antagonistic communities now struggling to solve integration problems that were to be resolved by the development company.
Because the boundaries of the cities did not match the boundaries of the communities that lived in them, some very ancient (though quite small) communities disappeared, the metropolitan community did not achieve its goal of resolving demand for homes and decentralizing the capital, and a new system of antagonistic suburban towns rose in its place.
The nature of fractals suggests that we should see the same pattern across the territory as we decrease the resolution of our observations. In fact, a visitor to the Paris region could be easily persuaded by the necessity of preserving its local communities, some of which have had a distinct existence since before the middle ages (one town, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, has the claim of being the birthplace of the French kings, with castle and cathedral to go along), from regional growth demands.
A view of the roof of La Défense’s rail transit hub, on the edge of two communes. Photo: Mathieu Hélie
Some tourist-favorite neighborhoods are outright alien, such as the skyscraper district of La Défense, an attempt by the state to create a business cluster decked on top of a three-story rail station and which landed like a UFO on the boundary between two existing communities. That neighborhood has grown in a legal gray area under exceptional administrative status granted to it by presidential decree.
Village of Montmartre, an enclave within Paris. Photo: Mathieu Hélie
Other communities have not enjoyed political autonomy since Haussmann’s reforms, but continue to exist in fact and as special planning zones. The village of Montmartre is physically remote by rising above the center city in height, not only by being hard to access by road. These distinct planning processes are sometimes abolished, sometimes brought back, but as with any exception they make governing a more difficult and conflict-prone task.
The solution to tension within Greater Paris and its many communities would be to create a perforated fractal metropolis, with special historical communities and their distinct planning processes existing autonomously within it, but not concerned with regional-scale issues such as infrastructure, economic competition or home affordability, that being solved by the metropolitan-scale community.
Historic Paris, the world’s most attractive tourist destination. Photo: Mathieu Hélie
The most important of these inner communities, and the one most people recognize as Paris, is the historic core of boroughs 1-12, where all the landmarks and iconic architecture are found. This area has developed a tourism-centric economy that requires a planning process focused on strict preservation of the urban fabric, or as Parisians call it, a museum-city. Quality of life and reducing the impact of traffic and tourist activity dominate its politics.
Metropolitan Paris, home to millions of people and a landscape of dubious architectural and historical value. Photos: Mathieu Hélie
Beyond that circle begins metropolitan Paris, a space centered along the two ring expressways, whose community faces entirely different challenges and priorities. Scalability, not historical preservation, is the major concern, with transportation, home affordability and ecological harmony of residential development as the major problems to be resolved.
If Greater Paris were redrawn as a fractal, then alongside major historic towns such as Cultural Paris, Versailles, and St-Denis, the territory could be perforated by a constellation of villages and perhaps some entirely artificial and experimental communities. At the fractal boundaries of the metropolitan city of Paris would exist preserved historic communities as well as special-purpose mission-based cities, such as La Défense or the community of Eurodisney, whose unconventional urbanism and unorthodox governing institutions preserve the economic vitality of the region.
A fractal territorial structure of thousands of communities cannot be made by legislative act (the debates alone would be endless), it must be an emergent outcome of autonomous communities exchanging parts of their territory until they have achieved an equilibrium. For this the legislators must give up defining the boundaries and instead define a process by which communities are formed and grow out of other communities. Dividing a community from a city must be as quick and expedient as extending a city to a new boundary reflecting its greater scale. Preserving a quiet community from a booming residential market must be as accepted as constructing whole new neighborhoods for hundreds of thousands of new households on reclaimed industrial or commercial zones.
With Paris serving as a model of regional complexity fitting the proposed geometry, we can easily project the same geometry onto Toronto and New York and arrive at similar conclusions. Had Greenwich Village remained an autonomous community (it has an urban grid oriented differently from Manhattan’s because of its autonomous past) then Robert Moses would have gone around it, and perhaps a political operative such as him would not need to exist if New York’s city government had scaled large enough to lead regional capital spending projects. Toronto’s suburban Edge City would be empowered to deal with the consequences of its automobile-centric path without clashing with the preservationist and localist culture of the center city.
Institutional health can come from specializing on a shorter list of priorities, but regional complexity itself cannot be simplified or shortened. It requires complex pattern formation to resolve, and we now know that complex patterns can be produced through the iteration of simple geometric rules that produce fractals. The political landscape can itself be fractal if this geometry becomes part of our common knowledge. With each fractal city able to focus on its unique priorities the friction generated by scale conflict would no longer hold back necessary policies, from preservation of historic or cultural identities at one end of the scale, to resolution of demographic, ecological and technological pressure at the other end. If we could perceive the fractal boundaries of the landscape, then energies that we invest today in debates, public activism and moral arguments over issues that are defensible on different sides of these boundaries could be redirected to improving our communities.
In urban greening, ecological/environmental and social goals of urban sustainability should be “natural” allies but under current common neoliberal conditions, greening runs the risk to become an instrument of (re)production of inequalities and injustices.
Equity and Sustainability: a history of ideological convergence vs. practiced indifference
The idea that equity is an important and indispensable part of sustainable development has been there from the early days. The intellectual basic for and actions taken towards sustainability are thought to be fundamentally fair and just—a world in which all have access and means to the resources needed for their wellbeing. However, as soon as we get down to the operationalization of the concept of sustainable development, these ideal visions largely disappear or become second rank to a focus on technology, green or smart solutions, and market-driven green solutions that serve for only a few. Hence, we are left with is the notion of the great importance of the concept of equity and fairness that has not much to do with the reality of sustainability interventions.
The reasons for this are well understood. Compelling as it is, the notion of equity is antithetical to a global socio-economic system rooted in market-based exploitation of natural and human resources. The notion of sustainable development in the form of global growth-based capitalism—namely knowledge transfer, technological optimism, consumption etc.—is (literally) melting under our feet with every passing day as we watch “global capital” stall and play for time on the most fundamental issue of our time: climate change. Sustainable development as a concept carries the inconsistencies between global(ized) capitalism, telecoupling, and liberal values and human rights that have been the mark of 20th and early 21st centuries’ international politics.
Leipzig’s Lene-Voigt-Park. Photo: Annegret Haase
Social inequality as it relates to sustainability exists across scales from global to local. In this context, we can identify—at least—a “threefold unfairness” of inequities: (a) the day by day unfairness in access to environmental (recreational, clean air and water) and social (education, good housing, health care) resources; (b) the risk of being affected by the consequences of climate change and other environmental hazards; (c) inequitable access to decision making, including decisions that the first two points in the list, through systematic or inadvertent lack of participatory process.
Economic inequality reduces the chances of the disadvantaged to benefit from global economic upswings. Poor and minority communities suffer, in an intersectional manner, because disadvantages commonly co-occur in a way that compounds vulnerability. For example, low income communities are more likely to be located in proximity to natural and industrial hazards which compounds poverty by placing additional health and safety expenses as well as the physical and mental impacts of coping with hazardous events. Poor and minority communities rarely benefit from the advantaged of new “green cities and neighborhoods”, from smart technologies, or other sustainability strategies, and in fact are sometimes displaced from them through processes of gentrification. Sometimes it seems as if the sustainability debate and related strategies of “smarter”, “greener”, and “healthier” orientates too much towards middle and higher class communities and almost completely overlooks the many who are poor or working class.
Global trends in urbanization mean that the tensions around sustainability are most pronounced in and around cities and will become more problematic within the next decades. Cities around the globe are show rising polarization between rich and poor, more and less vulnerable, advantaged versus disadvantaged, included and excluded people living in close proximity. Making progress towards urban sustainability is an essential part of a global sustainability agenda and has been finally recognized international by goal 11 of the SDGs.
A community garden in Berlin. Photo: Anna Dankowska.
In a recent special issue in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society, we explored the notion that approaches to urban sustainability originate from a multitude of perspectives that influence (and often determine) the outcomes. We found that comprehensive conceptualizations of sustainability, relating social-environmental-technical aspects of sustainability, usually occur in in the context of assessment research rather than in theory or application of sustainability. Concepts of equity are tangent or not at all addressed unless the research is framed from that particular perspective.
In order to fulfill the ideological call in sustainable development to further human wellbeing of all, equity—in terms of fairness, participation, mutual recognition and realization of capabilities—should be an explicit, functional goal, placed at the center of sustainability interventions and particularly at the center of the sustainable urbanization agenda. The long-term provision of social and physical infrastructure, goods and services needed to ensure the wellbeing of all, should be the organizing principle for all levels of governance. Indeed, much guidance already exist in the literature. The equity-based approach to environmental sustainability has deep roots in the environmental justice discussion and requires a focus on fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, a meaningful integration of underrepresented and vulnerable groups in decision making and the recognition of different values, wants and needs with respect to benefitting from and engaging with nature and environment. Authors such as Walker and Agyeman demonstrate how equity, social, and environmental justice relate to sustainability. Evans et al. (2019, p. 58) argues that today “smart cities risk marginalizing citizens, prioritizing end-of-pipe-solutions, and driving further economic development that runs counter the stated environmental and social objectives”. In our recent special issue, concerning the use of technology should be guided by socially determined values, goals and policies, Michalec et al. offer that the wealth of data now collected in “smart city” designs, can be used to derive more effective and nuanced sustainability plans and policies. And second, Trudeau argues that programs successful in integrating social equity goals derive buy-in and support from stakeholders by offering clear conceptualization of the relationship between social equity and livability concerns.
Equity-based approach to urban greening—what does it look like?
To the extent that there is potential of urban nature and green spaces to contribute to cities and societies that are more equitable, it has to be carefully planned, crafted, and cared for. Recent experience with plethora of greening initiatives stemming out of urban sustainability plans show that the act of greening itself does not inherently entail equitable outcomes in access or distribution of benefits. Equity-centered greening has to be set up as a policy and planning priority, all the more since our existing cities are full of inequities despite the global debate on Sustainable Development Goals and many local greening programs and strategies. What is described today, for example, as “eco-gentrification” or “social-ecological conflict” relates to historical and current processes of distribution of neoliberal housing market mechanisms. To avoid displacement by greening we now need ideas such as such as those proposed in Just Green Enough, but, at the same time, avoiding upgrading and displacement. What seems to be a social-ecological conflict at the surface, is, at its heart, a conflict based on unequal distribution of power and resources. To deny this context and the fact that any greening of cities happens under conditions of real-world capitalism and real-existing inequalities would mean to play off the social and the ecological against each other.
In a recent paper based on discussion between urban scholars from different parts of the Europe and North America, we focused on trade-offs between social and ecological developments in cities that are initiated and/or come along with greening measures—the rise of housing prices, displacement of low(er) income groups, exclusiveness—which are crucial for the future debate on sustainable cities and a socially balanced and inclusive way of developing our cities for all existing groups of urban dwellers. We believe to achieve equity-based greening the following reflections are necessary:
Consider the social effects of green sustainability strategies and existing trade-offs
Under current conditions, it is indispensable to make interactions between greening and existing market-driven distribution social power relations as well as practices of exclusion more explicit and consider them before setting up greening strategies. As described by the eco-gentrification debate, greening as such is not the problem but its realization under market conditions might lead to undesirable or at least socially non-sustainable results (e.g. displacement of the vulnerable). We must acknowledge that greening programs can be a trigger for decreased social sustainability if context factors are not considered. Especially forms of capitalist, market-driven or technological optimism “sustainability-fixes” should be thoroughly scrutinized. Instead, social goals should become more important as criteria for assessment of “green” measures. Some approaches to mitigate this risk are in connecting green and social housing plans or considering “just green enough” approaches to avoid negative social consequences.
Welcome potential conflict resulting from heterogeneous ideas, wants, and needs
Hitherto participation and “co-production” experiences show that results of such processes do not automatically lead to more inclusion or justice; under these circumstances, they can also reinforce existing social power relations and patterns of exclusion. If social sustainability is to be realized, a recognition of different wants and needs, values and practices—for example, of using public green spaces and ideas of shaping such spaces—should be the basis of action. Conflicts resulting from “true” participation must be constantly negotiated and re-negotiated; conflicts and opposite opinions should be acknowledged as a part of a heterogeneous urban society and a fundamental and ongoing condition for social change.
Include various types and sources of expertise
For equity-based process and results we need to recognize the different types of expertise, including different types of knowledge, which are needed and available. Academic and stakeholder expertise should be coupled with civic society expertise, first and foremost hitherto hidden or neglected knowledge (for example, by marginal groups) must be included. We, as academic experts in this field, recognize our responsibility to develop and express a critical view towards the context-driven and context-sensitive role of greening strategies and policies.
Social sustainability includes questioning current power relations within governance and decision-making
Greening happens not in a power-free vacuum but in an urban space that is determined by political and ownership power hierarchies and their respective impacts. Power impacts may reinforce inequities, for example. of green space accessibility, housing in newly greened areas, participation in greening projects/processes. Research and knowledge-building for social sustainability thus has to develop a critical standpoint to real-world inequalities in cities and their economic and power relations context. Social sustainability will only be realizable when we deliberately embed our research into context and critically scrutinize if not question current power mechanisms and real-world practices of social exclusion.
Finally, achieving equity in future sustainability is deeply connected to global political processes and the actors involved. As we experience political push and pull between ideas of liberal and illiberal democracy, between cosmopolitan and republican understanding of society and place, and the questioning of the idea of democracy itself, the debate about equity in sustainable development hangs in the balance.
The concept of sustainable equity assumes that we view pluralism, cultural and lifestyle diversity, multiculturalism, collaboration, flexibility, care about the most vulnerable in society as necessary and desirable. And it also means questioning some basic logics of market-based, neoliberal capitalism determining the fate of our cities. Social sustainability will not be created by market forces, here we need a balance created by government policy and co-produced steering. Thus, seeking an integrative kind of sustainability is intricately connected to the resistance to any kind of authoritarian, illiberal, non-democratic and anti-cosmopolitan waves rising around the whole globe at the moment.
We need more “commons thinking” in our cities and urban societies with respect to a fair distribution of goods and burdens and a real chance for participation and recognition of all. “Socially attentive greening” could be an avenue to trigger and foster more social equity and inclusiveness where urban nature, urban ecosystems and the services they provide play a role in making our cities more sustainable. In order to achieve more equity and inclusiveness in our urban systems we must reinforce our belief in these values and start to adapt now.
Peleg Kremer, Annegret Haase, and Dagmar Haase
Princeton, Leipzig, and Berlin
Dr. Annegret Haase is a senior researcher at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ in Leipzig, Germany, at the Dept. of Urban and Environmental Sociology. Her research is focused on sustainable urban development, urban transformations and social-environmental processes in cities.
Dagmar Haase is a professor in urban ecology and urban land use modelling. Her main interests are in the integration of land-use change modelling and the assessment of ecosystem services, disservices and socio-environmental justice issues in cities, including urban land teleconnections.
Those last few days in June, we could see Barcelona’s shape in the distance. The three chimneys from the old power plant. The slanted roof of the Forum. The towers from the Olympic village. The long stretch of beach reaching to the glass sail that is the W hotel. The blue of the Mediterranean that always stirs a “Come to me” invitation somewhere deep in my being.
This very long walk—16,000km—has changed my nature, once defined by the rhythm of cities, hurrying from Point A to Point B, barely noticing the beauty around me. I need to pull away from cities, and all their urban-ness. To engage with nature, and a certain slower approach.
We approached these icons with excitement, a sense of accomplishment, a sadness, and a growing feeling of uncertainty.
Our long walk home, which started on 16 January 2016, ended on 29 June 2019. After about 955 days en route (not including three extended breaks)—walking on roads, next to farmlands and rice paddies, in mountain forests, alongside different seas, through desert nothingness, and across chaotic overpopulated cities and tiny quaint villages—we finally put down our 22-kilo backpacks and looked at our lives, once again, with appreciation and gratitude. We had a crazy idea that took seed in 2013, and now, with lots of determination, persistence, patience, and open-mindedness we crossed some 16,000 kilometers and 21 nation/states in Asia and Europe.
Barcelona, along with about 25 friends and family, greeted us with all of her wonder, diversity, and style. We slipped into the familiar back alleys of the Born and Barri Gotic neighborhoods and enjoyed the wide sidewalks of the Eixample, stretching our arms with the satisfaction, embracing a feeling of welcomed back into a city we love.Ten days later, I left Barcelona. While the blaring sirens and constant churning of bus engines, revving mopeds and whirring garbage trucks were enough reason for my escape, I had long-awaited reunions with other friends in family in New York City, New Jersey, and San Francisco, places I grew up in, lived in, and previously worked in.
Walking through those shadows of my past, however, hit me differently than I expected it would. Looping through the concrete caverns, I saw an urban grayness I hadn’t fully noticed before. I missed the sounds of birds singing, something I had tuned into consistently for nearly three years. The faint stench of urine and the unpleasant odor of grit and grime turned my stomach. I pulled out my little bottle of hand sanitizer and wiped away unknown microbes more frequently, something I only did once in a while when I went unshowered for days during our walking journey.
In a rush I could never have anticipated, I needed to pull away from cities, and all their urban-ness. Instead, I sought the protection of redwoods and pine trees and fog horns. I sat in a park and admired sparrows hopping from branch to branch. I sat in a friend’s kitchen and watched with utter awe caterpillars begin their chrysalis metamorphosis, and considered changing my flight so I could see them turn into butterflies.
This long walk has changed my nature, once defined by the rhythm of cities, hurrying from Point A to Point B, barely noticing the beauty around me. Now, I enthusiastically touch and hug trees. I feed wounded animals and talk to stray dogs who follow us. I danceunder the full moon, unafraid of what people think. I learned to listen to the natural sounds around me that went unnoticed a few years ago: a little bird chirping, a big dog barking, a crow stepping on a hard plastic sunroof, the moment crickets and frogs stop singing in the middle of the night and the profound silence that comes in exactly that moment.
Months later, with leaves falling and signs of winter approaching, I’m still trying to make sense of what my footprints have cast on my own life.
I’m haunted by the challenging question, “And, now what?”
For now, I have three manageable goals:
Seek out quieter places
Nurture my relationships with birds
Continue exploring and sharing what I have learned
To the first point, Lluís, my life and walking partner, and I have chosen to move away from Barcelona, his native city and my adopted one. The negative impact noise has on us post-walk continues to surprise us. It’s like our bodies no longer can bear the vibration of millions of people and machines. The nature of cities has darkened our willingness to be a part of them, at least for now.
Today, we are growing accustomed to a more serene lifestyle about an hour away from the city, in a town of 40,000 people. We walk through vineyards a few hundred meters from our house, and buy vegetables from nearby farmers who haul their goods in for Saturday’s vibrant market. I will soon have a few liters of olive oil made by a neighbor who after spending hours teaching children cares for her grove of old olive trees.
In our corner of the world, a few weeks ago, I dashed out to our backyard to watch swallows and bats dive at dusk; I set an alarm on my computer to make sure I didn’t miss those best moments of the day. A few minutes ago, I stood at one of our windows, sipping tea, fascinated by sparrows and magpies, the ones who stay for winter. I feed them sunflower seeds, corn meal, oats and other seeds I bought from the local seed shop. I’m reading about their habits, and am eager to make my yard a place where they want to stay, a place where they feel comfortable, and safe.
To have a justifiable reason to breakaway from the monotonous task of sitting (or often in my case, standing) behind a computer screen for hours on end, I have signed up for an online sketching class so I can begin to draw birds, trees and flowers, things that now matter a great deal to me. When I tell people I want to have a deeper relationship with birds, they chuckle in that curious way they do when they find something strange but interesting. I try to impress on them that we all need to start having deeper relationships with birds to heal ourselves and the planet. They nod, but I don’t think they fully understand. I get it. I didn’t feel so strongly about this years ago before our walk. Our version of a pilgrimage for thousands of kilometers for months and years created this responsibility in me, and now compels to actively seek comfort from our animal and plant friends. I don’t know why. It just does.
Discovering and sharing the lessons we have consciously and unconsciously learned during this rather unique foot journey is still part of our work. It’s a different kind of journey, and conversation we hope to lead or, at least, encourage. To that end, as we ponder the idea of writing a book or taking on some other creative venture, we have sought out and have been invited to speak at libraries, social centers and university classrooms. Our story was picked up by local newspapers, television programs and radio shows. Individuals have come up to us while we were walking down the street of our friendly town, asked us to sit down with them, and, over a coffee, explain the highs and lows of traveling as a couple for such an extended amount of time through parts of the world they didn’t know anything about. It’s flattering, but more, it seems to point to the hope that people so desperately want to have.
In a world where people are becoming increasingly afraid and hateful of “those other people” and the political objective in most places seems to be a deliberate attempt to keep people divided, Lluís and I offer a different perspective: All those years ago, we set out to find goodness in the world, and we found so much of it everywhere. The best thing is that we didn’t have to look so hard to find it. It’s often right there, if you’re willing to see it.
On this note, with a heartful of gratitude, I thank each of you, readers and supporters of The Nature of Cities, for following our journey. Thank you, David Maddox, TNOC founder and editor, for believing in our trek through cities we had never before heard of until we walked through them and for giving us a space to share our evolution from city dwellers to Earth dwellers.
Although the actual walking part of the adventure has ended, we are still writing stories on our blog, http://bangkokbarcelonaonfoot.com/, and posting occasionally on Instagram, @bangkokbarcelonaonfoot.
Like many great Tree for All projects, the Paseos Verdes program began with a conversation about what the community wanted and how we could work together to achieve it.
Since its beginning fifteen years ago, the landscape conservation program called Tree for All (TFA) has found a home for more than 10 million native plants in the 750 square mile Tualatin River Watershed of Northwestern Oregon. Over 700 projects have been completed along 140 river miles across 30,000 acres.
The Tualatin River Watershed
TFA owes its success to more than 30 partners who have recognized the importance of creating a healthy and resilient watershed for humans and wildlife. Key to this success is the notion that solving wicked problems like climate change and rapid urbanization is dependent on our ability to create diverse transformational partnerships. These transformational partnerships bring with them the human and financial resources needed for solving some of our most challenging and complex problems. Reflecting on these 15 past years, I have witnessed many great stories where partners have come together to create transformational projects that feed this landscape conservation program. For me, new programs often start with a walk in the woods with my friend Kirby.
Quiet reflection and connecting with nature
It is an hour before sunrise on a cool fall morning in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. My alarm clock is going off with the usual thump, thump, scratch, scratch outside my bedroom door. Yep, Kirby the rescue dog is letting me know it’s time for our daily “Paseo Verde” (“Green Walk”). The hour before dawn is a very special time for both of us as we stretch our legs and clear our minds. A few humans are stirring but it’s the local wildlife and natural world that inspires us.
Kirby ready for his walk. Photo: Bruce Roll
Our walk begins in a typical suburban neighborhood, with cul-de-sacs, quiet sleepy streets and dark houses. Soon, however, I take a footpath that travels a mile along an urban stream planted with native vegetation. It’s dark, but we find our way with the help of my trusty headlamp and it’s not long before Kirby is saying hello to four sets of glowing eyes as we watch a mother raccoon herd her children home along this wildlife corridor. They look well fed as Kirby sniffs remnants of last night’s dinner, looks like crayfish was on the menu. It’s not long before we reach a local high school ball field where hundreds of Canadian geese spent the night. It is a safe stopover on their way south and they will be gone before sun up, leaving behind nourishment for the grass.
We are now three miles into our Paseo Verde when we enter the last segment of our journey, a 30 acre natural area with abundant foot paths and another opportunity to say good morning to Mother Nature. This time it’s 80 foot Douglas Firs and Red Cedars, with large Sword Ferns covering the forest floor. Owls and coyotes have left their calling cards beneath trees and along the trail. This stand of trees was here long before the surrounding houses. I wonder how many generations of wildlife have spent time in this forest. I have visited this park many times in the hour before dawn when it’s just me and nature. I wonder how many people are connecting with nature in this park.
Photo: Michael Nipper, 2015
Upon leaving the park, my walk is soon over and the sun is rising as I prepare for work. I saw some interesting wildlife, and, like me and Kirby, they appear to be well fed and happy. Clean air, water, and native vegetation seems to make us both happy. My mental health and moments of quiet reflection are tied directly to this daily Paseo Verde. It’s not the idea of lowering blood pressure and weight that stimulates my interest in these daily walks, but rather the experience I have of walking with a good friend and witnessing Mother Nature just before dawn.
I am fortunate to live in an area where Mother Nature is a few steps away from my home. Having worked throughout Washington County, Oregon, I also know that not everyone has this same opportunity. When I think about underserved communities, I often ponder how my job with a public utility might provide opportunities and access to nature. Creating such connections is not that difficult when we are able to step back and rethink how we connect our clean water regulatory requirements to a broader set of community values. Values like human health and wellness, access to nature, clean water, and sense of place. By pairing utility needs with the needs of local non-profits and governments, a broader set of values can be addressed and a richer outcome is achieved.
The creation of Paseos Verdes
A dozen plus years ago I was fortunate to join forces with the Audubon Society of Portland and Bienestar, a local community development corporation that provides affordable housing for Latino farmworkers and lower income families, on a program called Explorador Camp. The Explorador Camp program provides summer nature-camp activities and field trips to school-age residents of Bienestar housing. At the same time, the Tree for All program was busy restoring thousands of acres of public lands in the Tualatin River Watershed. We had a target audience and many great places to visit and learn about watershed health and stewardship. As the program flourished, we began to ponder how to expand upon the program and this partnership with the local Latino community.
In 2017, amid the burgeoning research linking nature with improved health outcomes, we were inspired to create a program that harnessed our existing partnerships to enhance human health outcomes alongside all of our efforts to enhance the health of the Tualatin watershed.
This seed of an idea was planted into the existing partnership with Bienestar and the Audubon Society of Portland, and the result was Paseos Verdes (Green Walks). The program, now in its fourth year, connects underserved community members to natural areas in Washington County through guided walks in the Tualatin Watershed. The walks engage families to learn about watershed health, water management, and wildlife. These experiences promote environmental stewardship while providing the health benefits of being active in nature and the outdoors.
The Paseos Verdes program began with a dialogue about what the community wanted and how we could work together to achieve it. We learned about the barriers that many community members face to accessing our local natural areas, and followed their lead in designing a culturally relevant program. Community members told us that they wanted a multi-generational, family-friendly program that accommodates the full spectrum of bilingualism. We also learned that transportation is a significant barrier to accessing local natural areas for many community members. Working with Bienestar, we developed Paseos Verdes and piloted the program in the summer of 2017.
A Paseos Verdes walk in action. Photo: Lorena O’Neill, 2019
The first year of Paseos Verdes, we started with three partners and one walk location. The program was a great success, and the response from the Bienestar community was overwhelmingly positive. Program participation exceeded our expectations and families were eager to sign up again and again. Walks were held at the Fernhill Wetlands, a cutting-edge natural treatment system and natural area. Along the trail, participants could often be heard exclaiming “I live nearby and I have never been here before!” while planning their next visit together. On one walk, children lined up excitedly to observe great blue herons and bullfrogs through a bird-spotting scope while marveling over the fact that their bathwater could end up in such a beautiful place. On another occasion, a delighted grandmother spotted wild chamomile growing alongside the trail and taught the group about the plant’s various uses in her native Mexico. This two-way teaching and learning model, in which both participants and naturalists learn from each other, is an important part of the program. Participants often teach the naturalists and the rest of the group about cultural uses for plants or alternate names for migratory birds they encounter on the walks.
A Paseos Verdes participant teaches the group about how this plant is used in basket weaving.Photo: Lorena O’Neill, 2019
In 2018, we brought on another partner, the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District, and joined forces with Hillsboro Parks and Recreation District to hold walks at the Jackson Bottom Wetlands Preserve. We also developed a Bilingual Naturalist Training Program. A cohort of five Washington County residents was recruited to participate in trainings and lead the walks. Participants learned about plants, animals, and habitats through classroom learning and field practice, while developing organizational and leadership skills.
The excitement of spotting a barred owl eating its prey. Photo credit: Lorena O’Neill, 2019
Paseos Verdes post-walk evaluations consistently tell us the same story: participants feel happier, less stressed, and more relaxed that they did before the walk. The children become fast friends as they walk the trails and marvel over a barred owl eating prey and families make plans to come back together the following weekend. By providing culturally competent and engaging opportunities for Washington County residents to connect with the Tualatin Watershed, Paseos Verdes is improving community health while fostering the river stewards of tomorrow.
Like so many TFA partnerships, Paseos Verdes started with a conversation between local governments and non-profits wanting to engage in a new partnership. In this case, it was the local Latino community and a walking adventure that brought together health care providers, parks districts, local cities, non-profits and a utility that was able to work within a broader set of community values. As we watch local health organizations join the program, we see new wellness investors joining forces with local restoration efforts. For me, helping create Paseos Verdes was one of the richest and most rewarding experiences of my career. I learned so many new things watching and listening to our new partners. Partners who add a sense of place and a cultural heritage that strengthens our community.
Today’s post celebrates some of the highlights from TNOC writing in 2019. These contributions—originating around the world—were one or more of widely read, offering novel points of view, and/or somehow disruptive in a useful way. All 1000+ TNOC essays and roundtables are worthwhile reads, of course, but what follows will give you a taste of 2019’s key and diverse content.
The Nature of Cities advanced in a number of ways in 2019. The number of contributors has grown to almost 800, and we published 150+ long-form essays, reviews, and global roundtables.
A key event for TNOC in 2019 was The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris. Attended by almost 400 people from 60 countries, TNOC Summit was a major undertaking to model a new collaborative spirit in urbanism. We continue to publish outputs from Summit. You can see them here, along with the Summit report. Planning for the next Summit is underway, and will be announced soon.
The Stories of the Nature of Cities 2099 prize for Flash Fiction attracted 1200 entries from 116 countries. We awarded seven top prizes—women from the U.S., Canada, and India—and in May 2019 we published a book of 57 stories from 21 countries: A Flash of Silver Green. The 2020 version of the prize has just completed accepting submissions—over 1,000 from 99 countries—and we will produce a new book of collected stories early in 2021.
In essays, roundtables, and reviews we continue to seek the frontiers of thought found at the boundaries of urban ecology, community, design, planning, and art. Importantly, we’ve attracted more and more readers: over a million people have visited TNOC. and in 2019 we had readers from 3,500+ cities in 150+ countries.
Thank you. We hope to see you again in 2020.
(Banner photo is by Paris architect Vincent Callibaut.)
Donate to TNOC
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The Nature of Cities Summit
The Nature of Cities (TNOC) Summit, held in Paris from 4-7 June 2019, brought together a unique diversity of thought- leaders and practitioners to catalyze a cross- disciplinary movement for collaborative green cities. The Summit convened diverse voices and actors, designing interactive sessions to build new connections and propel change—both on an individual and organizational level. Participants ranged from artists, writers, and activists to people working in academia, urban planning, policy, and practice.
A Flash of Silver Green
We asked people to imagine future cities, in the form of a flash or short fiction contest. Our original prompt read like this: What are the stories of people and nature in cities in 2099? What will cities be like to live in?
Of 1,200 submissions from 116 countries, 57 from 21 countries were collected in this book, including the seven that we judged to be prize-winners, authored by women from the United States, Canada, and India. You can get a copy of A Flash of Silver Green directly from the publisher.
This roundtable was inspired by “seed session” workshop “Talk, Map, Act” at the TNOC Summit where we gathered diverse stories of engagement with stewardship from all around the world. To continue this journey we explore the words people use for the constellation of activities suggested by the English word “stewardship”. So, we asked 25 practitioners—scientists, activists, artists, planners, practitioners—from five continents: in your context and experience, what is the word or phrase used for the concept of “actively taking care of things, such as the environment”? The answers are all over the map. In many languages, there is no direct translation to the English word “stewardship”. But there are many phrases that convey the activity of care—activities that in many countries are newly developing and advancing.
This Roundtable was curated by Lindsay Campbell, Erika Svendsen, and Michelle Johnson of the U.S. Forest Service.
With contributions from: Nathalie Blanc, Paris; Lindsay Campbell, New York; Zorina Colasero, Puerto Princesa City; Kirk Deitschman, Waimānalo; Johan Enqvist, Cape Town; Emilio Fantin, Bologna; Artur Jerzy Filip, Warsaw; Carlo Beneitez Gomez, Puerto Princesa City; Cecilia Herzog, Rio de Janeiro; Michelle Johnson, New York; Kevin Lunzalu, Nairobi; Patrick Lydon, Osaka; Romina Magtanong, Puerto Princesa City; Heather McMillen, Honolulu; Ranjini Murali, Bangalore; Harini Nagendra, Bangalore; Jean Ferus Niyomwungeri, Kigali; Jean Palma, Manila; Beatriz Ruizpalacios, Mexico City; Huda Shaka, Dubai; Erika Svendsen, New York; Abdallah Tawfic, Cairo; Diana Wiesner, Bogotá; Fish Yu, Shenzhen
There is a feeling among many that in broad brush, at least, we know what we need to do to make cities better for people and nature. Yet, cities often, even typically, lag in their efforts to be more resilient, sustainable, livable, and just through greening. Why?
There are four threads in the responses: (1) research and data, and perhaps even “knowledge” is, by itself, insufficient; (2) while we mostly have enough research knowledge to act, it doesn’t necessarily apply everywhere, as we lack knowledge applicable to the global south; (3) we all, including scientists, have to become activists for change toward better cities; (4) we need transparency and engagement across sectors of the public realm.
With contributions from: Adrian Benepe, New York; Paul Downton, Melbourne; Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires; Sumetee Gajjar, Cape Town; Russell Galt, Edinburgh; Rob McDonald, Washington; Huda Shaka, Dubai; Vivek Shandas, Portland; Phil Silva, New York; Naomi Tsur, Jerusalem
When I first encountered “urban ecology”, and urbanism generally, what attracted me was the essential collaborativeness of cities and their design—that cities are, or at least should be, collaborative creations. Indeed, this is the fundamental (and ideally fun) and foundational idea of TNOC: let’s put different types of people into the same space and see what emerges. So, we asked a collection of TNOC contributors—scientists, artists, planners, designers, engineers, policy makers—about their own experience with collaboration. It is a rich vein of response, and some threads stand out about the collaborative experience: It challenges us to trust. It is often surprising. It is often difficult. Sometimes there is tension. It takes time. It demands personal growth. It requires acknowledgment of others. It asks us to question our own points of view. It thrives in the in-between spaces. There is no one way. It is an act of transformation.
With contributions from: Pippin Anderson, Cape Town; Carmen Bouyer, Paris; Lindsay Campbell, New York; Gillian Dick, Glasgow; Lonny Grafman, Arcata; Eduardo Guerrero, Bogotá; Britt Gwinner, Washington; Keitaro Ito, Kyushu; Madhusudan Katti, Raleigh; Jessica Kavonic, Cape Town; Yvonne Lynch, San Sebastian; Mary Mattingly, New York; Brian McGrath, New York; Tischa Muñoz-Erikson, Río Piedras; Jean Palma, Manila; Diane Pataki, Salt Lake City; Bruce Roll, Portland; Wilson Ramirez, Bogotá; David Simon, Gothenburg; Tomomi Sudo, Kyushu; Dimitra Xidous, Dublin
London’s communities have recognized and celebrated the role of the network of green and blue spaces in the life of the city in the form of a grassroots campaign to make London the first National Park City. The six year campaign saw London National Park City launched in 2019. Other cities will follow. Can this idea be applied in other cities? How? We asked a variety of people involved in parks and open space around the world. Some are in cities actively contemplating such a national park city approach. For others, it was a new idea. The London National Park City idea is both a formal recognition of the scope and benefits of the macro-park that is all London’s open spaces, and also a call for London’s population to see and get engaged with their myriad green spaces.
This Roundtable was curated by Daniel Ravel-Ellison and Alison Barnes.
With contributions from: Méliné Baronian, Versailles; Maud Bernard-Verdier, Berlin; Ioana Biris, Amsterdam; Timothy Blatch, Cape Town; Aletta Bonn, Berlin; Geoff Canham, Tauranga; Samarth Das, Mumbai; Gillian Dick, Glasgow; Luis Antonio Romahn Diez, Merida; Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires; Eduardo Guerrero, Bogotá; Sue Hilder, Glasgow; Mike Houck, Portland; Sophie Lokatis, Berlin; Scott Martin, Louisville; Sebastian Miguel, Buenos Aires; Gareth Moore-Jones, Ohope Beach; Rob Pirani, New York; Julie Procter, Stirling; Tom Rozendal, Breda; Snorri Sigurdsson, Reykjavík; Lynn Wilson, Victoria
Essays
Ecological City, one of many imaginative designs by this Paris architect. Image: Vincent Callibaut
Vision A—The Smart City: The city is an intricate network of digital communications, computations, and connections. Vision B—The Ecological City: The city is an intricate network of living systems interacting with one another, with built structures, and flows of water, materials, organisms, and information. These alternative visions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, of course, but in my experience they are rarely combined in the same conversation or planning process.
A biosolar roof in full bloom. Photo: Stuart Connop
As we homogenise and sterilise our rural landscapes with intensive agriculture, and disconnect our populations from nature in shining metropolises, it is more pressing than ever to maximize the potential for urban areas to support wildlife. Innovative urban greenspace design also needs innovative management if our nature-based solutions are to sustain diverse populations of biodiversity in urban areas.
While the suburban mega city is largely the product of unbridled real estate speculation, their existence establishes a new starting point for urban design—hopefully one that produces cities by nature. “Form follows performance” may replace the industrial preoccupation of the twentieth century and its priority for “function” that is damaging to the environment. It will take the effort of many, if not everyone’s, hands to get a grip on all the solutions that are needed. It is a purpose and priority on which all should agree.
Urban metabolism is not only a powerful metaphor for better understanding our urban systems, but also the fundamental framework we need for accelerating the transition to sustainable cities. Like human bodies, cities require resources to function. They import or stock up on what they need, consume the resource, and then dispose of what is left over in the form of different types of waste. But one widely accepted definition of urban metabolism does not (yet) exist. Over the course of several generations, different disciplines and schools of thought have used this term to frame a range of findings.
It’s possible that many planners and civic leaders continue to undervalue parks as key pieces of a city’s ecological and social fabric. This is evidenced by how one in three in the United States lack access to a park within a 10-minute walk, leaving more than 100 million Americans deprived of easily accessed green space, creating a cascade of impacts on mental and physical health, and even economic opportunities for these cities. This is why The Trust for Public Land, in partnership with the Urban Land Institute, and the National Recreation and Parks Association, launched the 10-Minute Walk to a Park Campaign.
Campaigning and working for sustainability is a difficult and dangerous job. While various challenges already seem burdensome in the Philippines, especially for a developing country, we continue to face environmentally-damaging threats from “done deal” projects between our government and the Chinese government. As an environmental planner, I am very concerned about sustainability of our resources. Three advances are needed: more effort on environmental assessments, improved legislation, and inclusive planning.
Floating cities. Flying cities. Domed cities. Drowned cities. Cities that flip over once a day to expose different populations to sunlight. Cities underground, in the oceans, or in orbit. Cities on moons, asteroids, or other planets. Cities of memory, of surveillance, or of violence. Speculative fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has offered an enormous range of urban visions of the future, many of them dystopian, a few utopian, and quite a few somewhere in between. For good reason: Cities have taken on a new centrality for human futures. This essay is the Introduction from TNOC’s new book—A Flash of Silver Green—on very short fiction about future cities.
This story begins on a grey afternoon in January 2018. Twenty-six 9 and 10 year-olds were nervously wobbling on their chairs in their classroom on the 1st floor of a primary school in the town of Ede the Netherlands. The sound of low whispers and hushed giggles, heads curiously turning to the door. We have come to realize that a greener, safer and healthier world starts at a young age and that the schoolyard is the perfect place to provide urban nature for everyone, regardless of any children’s home situation. The movement for green schoolyards is on!
Despite the success of some of these pioneering projects, the rise in popularity of lightweight green roofs in Europe and North America and the podium gardens of the high-rise cities of the Far East, the practice of establishing trees on taller buildings remains a curiosity and is still unusual. But that may be changing. Although there are some difficulties associated with growing trees and certain vegetation types on tall buildings, the success enjoyed by Hancock, Hundertwasser, and Boeri highlighted in this essay, shows that it is possible.
The May Tree, by Jean-Baptiste Pater, early 18th century / Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
Any exhibition that starts with an 18th century tree hugger has me on a hook. If we learn anything from an exhibition such as “Masterpieces of French Landscape Paintings”, it might be that French landscape painters have a thing or two to teach us about urban nature over the centuries. Despite their lush depictions of natural scenery, French landscape painters were primarily Parisian urban dwellers. Biophiles, the lot of them too.
Melbourne has long been at the forefront of sustainable stormwater management through WSUD. WSUD, in formal definition, is “the design of subdivisions, buildings and landscapes that enhances opportunities for at source conservation of water, rainfall detention and use, infiltration, and interception of pollutants in surface runoff from the block”.
This story won 1st prize in TNOC’s flash fiction contest., It begins: A flash of silver-green in the water. That is all Hasan sees, but it is enough. He runs after, alongside, his small legs propelling him across the planks and platforms that crisscross the city. The wood once scratched underfoot, but it has gone smooth with time and wear, just as the soles of Hasan’s feet have grown thick and hearty, able to withstand all but the sharpest of splinters…
Cairo’s share per capita of green spaces—1.7 m2/capita—is much lower than the international norms and standards. More than half of the city’s population only have 0.5 m2/capita; 70% of the population experience less than the city average of 1.7 m2/capita. In other words, the little green and open space there is concentrated in just a few neighborhoods. New ideas such as green roofs could add a decent amount to Cairo’s green spaces, given the huge amount of abundant flat concrete roofs. The idea has triggered the government’s attention in the form of two national campaigns.
Behind the two fracture points of modern planning, NIMBYs and gentrification, is one fundamental question: should neighborhoods change? NIMBYs and anti-gentrification activists agree that they should not. The modern planning system was invented to enforce that agreement. If you wonder whether a struggle to add a few permissions allowing property owners to build studio rentals on their properties is worth the pain, realize what this change implies; it shifts the fundamental question of planning from should our neighborhood change to how should our neighborhood change.
Less than an hour cycling out of central Manchester along the Bridgewater Canal takes you into a green and blue landscape. It only becomes clear that this is a post-industrial area when the infrastructure of a coalfield pithead rises up behind the trees. The vision for the Carbon Landscape? “It would have to be a thriving place, a green place, a place for people, for wildlife, for recreation, for health, all of those things.”
The TNOC content most read in 2019 was from 2016
(TNOC’s content tends to have a long shelf-life, and many older essays remain actively read.)
In many cities, graffiti is associated with decay, with communities out of control, and so it is outlawed. In some cities, it is legal, within limits, and valued as a form of social expression. “Street art”, graffiti’s more formal cousin, which is often commissioned and sanctioned, has a firmer place in communities, but can still be an important form of “outsider” expression. Interest in these art forms as social expression is broad, and the work itself takes many shapes—from simple tags of identity, to scrawled expressions of protest and politics, to complex and beautiful scenes that virtually everyone would say are “art”, despite their sometimes rough locations. What are examples of graffiti as beneficial influences in communities, as propellants of expression and dialog? Where are they? How can they be nurtured? Can they be nurtured without undermining their essentially outsider qualities?
With contributions from: Pauline Bullen, Harare; Paul Downton, Adelaide; Emilio Fantin, Bologna; Ganzeer, Los Angeles; Germán Eliecer Gómez, Bogotá; Sidd Joag, New York City; Patrick Lydon, San Jose & Seoul; Patrice Milillo, Los Angeles; Laura Shillington, Montreal
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Isabelle Anguelovski, BarcelonaUrban greening and green spaces are vital to ecological and human health. However, achieving equity in urban health and reducing health inequalities requires a more complex approach than simply claiming that urban greening contributes to better health or livability.
Adrian Benepe, New YorkAs we demand and proclaim the right to parks and open space, we can ground the abstract in the tangible by introducing a metric for park access: everyone within a 10-minute walk to a park.
Samarth Das, MumbaiA “nullah” watercourse weaves through various neighbourhoods. What better way to connect and integrate our various disparate communities within cities than to develop a string of linear parks and shared spaces along such watercourses —which provides easy access from every neighbourhood adjacent to them?
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
What are the fault lines of making sure everyone has access to the benefits green space? How do we ensure such access is provided?
Do we truly believe in the benefits and value of urban nature and greening infrastructure? If we do, then we must ask ourselves: who should have access to and enjoy these benefits?
Everyone, no?
But not everyone has access to the myriad benefits of green. The world over, north, south, east, and west, green and its benefits for resilience, sustainability, and livability tend to concentrate in wealthier areas. How might we start to face up to and act upon the idea that access to urban green in a right made available to all? This was one of eight TNOC Summit Dialogues in Paris in 2019.
This is an output of The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris.
At TNOC Summit, we largely avoided long presentations in plenary—i.e. “Keynotes”. Rather, we gathered for eight “Dialogues”, similar to the Roundtable format at TNOC. For each dialogue there was a core question or prompt, such as the one in this Roundtable. We invited three people to participate, striving for a multi-disciplinary group, with diverse points of view, perspectives, and approaches. Each of the three delivered a short intervention (6-8 minutes), and then sat together for a longer conversation.
In this Roundtable, with Isabelle Anguelovski (Barcelona), Adrian Benepe (New York), and Samarth Das (Mumbai), we present both their written texts and a video of their presentations. Also below you can find a transcription and video of the conversation below.
A transcription of the conversation
David Maddox (Moderator): Does everyone in this room believe in the benefits of green space?
Raise your hand if you believe in the benefits of green space. Very good, then who gets to enjoy those benefits? Does everyone get to enjoy those benefits? No, they do not. So, the two big threads in this conversation. One is about the developed World. Lots of parks. And the other is places like places like Mumbai and many other places not only in the global South, but often the global South, which have very few or no green spaces at all. So I think there are two threads that we want to talk a little bit. The first one is to riff a little bit on what Adrian and Isabelle were talking about, how if we believe in the benefits of green space and we are trying to create a brilliant program like 10 minute walk to a park, which is very consistent with the what they’re doing in India as well, how do we break a cycle between the benefits of the creation of green space and gentrification and displacement. How do we break this pattern?
Adrian Benepe (Senior Vice President, The Trust for Public Land, New York): It’s a question that we’re actually wrestling with now, we got some money to do some studies. There’s very little actual good data on this. There’s a lot of data about it that lacks any direct conclusion about causation. There’s a lot of correlation, but it’s as we dig into it the causation becomes a lot thinner, because you also have to look at other things like the development of mass transit lines and all the other things that lead to gentrification.
Soho and Tribeca in the West Village of New York gentrified well before parks were added there. These were these are communities absolutely without parks, so the forces behind gentrification and particularly the impact of gentrification which is displacement are varied and complex. However, that said, what we have learned is that it is not an either/or but a but/and. If you’re particularly going to be doing large-scale park development, you have to look at the potential impacts and look at how can we ally this with affordable housing development or making sure that you keep permanently affordable housing there. There are homeowners who love the idea of gentrification because the value of the property goes up, the renter’s not so much. So again, you have both sides.
So, what we have learned finally in the park creation business is it’s not just a park. It’s going to have a ripple effect and, exactly as you say Isabelle, you have to look at how do we combine this park with mobility, with affordable housing, and all the other things that make a holistically healthy community a park by itself won’t do that and it could have, as you point out, unintended consequences.
Isabelle Anguelovski (social scientist, justice advocate, Barcelona): I couldn’t agree more and the causation really requires spatial analysis methods that are very complex, and that are really important because otherwise, as you say, you cannot really parse out the role that green space plays in in gentrification. That said, I think that we also seeing is really some progressive mayors, like I would say our mayor in Barcelona, the mayor in Nantes, really embedding considerations of gentrification in every possible policy that they think about, that is related to land use, so they have special working groups, they have committees, they have almost like a gentrification impact assessment, if you will, which I think is a really smart way to think proactively about it. Cities like Washington DC also have Innovative models. For instance Community Land trust’s are quite popular in the United States, but very difficult to fund. I think regulations also very important like the inclusionary zoning aspect is key. The amount of affordable housing is key.
But you often have mayors who are elected having real estate developers in their pockets, and now real estate development is what drives growth in cities, both economic growth and spatial growth. So, if you don’t have a decoupling between urban agendas and who funds cities and at the same time growth in the city, I think you are going to keep having these gentrification effects, which as I was trying to highlight, really does not only concern lower income and minority residents, but also increasingly concerns the middle class. And it’s shifting. It’s like Boston gentrifying Washington DC because most people can’t afford to live in Boston, now DC becoming so expensive people go to Philadelphia, and now Philly…you know, there’s kind of this rotation around the country. It’s really in the end is kind of a national crisis
David: And Mumbai has a fraction of the green and open space that even New York. New York is a very dense City, but Mumbai has a tiny fraction of what New York has how do you respond to these kind of conversations?
Samarth Das (architect, Das & Associates, Mumbai): To give you the exact figure, the open spaces ratio to number of people in London is 31.68m2 of open space per person. It’s about 26.4m2 per person in New York. In Mumbai, it’s 1.1m2. So, we really don’t have any parks or open spaces when you look at our population density. That’s based on the data in the year 2000, and it’s probably even worse right now. (Source: Vision Juhu – Expanding Public Spaces, 2009, http://pkdas.com/published/juhu-book-final.pdf)
So yes, we are dealing with very different contexts. But the important thing for me is in the process of developing the park and then considering its ripple effects of gentrification, it’s important who’s developing the park. In Mumbai, what we have managed to do is really integrate even the small pocket parks, really integrate and build the process from ground up. I give you the example of some of the parks that I showed in my talk, those parks when undeveloped had illegal activities, drug peddling, but during the daytime you had kids from the slums coming there and playing. It depends who owns the park. Once we developed the parks we’ve ensured that it still be accessible to the kids from the slums. Still have access to those parks. Sonow they have started learning how to use these spaces, because they’re not used to have such spaces. So, initially we are faced with issues of vandalism, of theft. These are some things that communities push back against and then push for exclusion of certain groups of people, but we’ve managed to build that sense, a ground up network. Governance is very important.
And then in Mumbai—I don’t know the situation the other cities—but we have privately owned parks and publicly owned parks. And some of the parks that we’ve developed. In fact, the citizens fought against land-grabbing developers who had snatched land for real estate profits. You had the community mobilizing; you had almost 15,000 people at the gates to the park standing to oppose. We fought in the Supreme Court. So, the people get invested in the process. And then once the Park comes to life, there’s a sense of ownership, of belonging and, of course, maintenance that comes with it.
So, in Mumbai people are yearning for open space, we’re all crying out for some sense of open space. So, unfortunately—or fortunately—we’ve not reached the situation where we have to worry about gentrification that comes with parks, but for now, we want to make more parks.
David: If you applied the 10-minute walk to a park metric that Adrian described in Mumbai, we know what the answer would be it. Could you imagine though that if you applied such a metric in Mumbai, it could be a political tool, as Adrian described, that you could use it as a motivator for leaders and mayors, because they start to look bad? Could you imagine doing that?
Samarth: Well, absolutely. And in fact, that’s precisely what we use to leverage getting some support. We work actively with elected representatives from the government. There are politicians who sometimes very insensitive to the ideas of greening and improving public space and more importantly ensuring access to public space. But we’ve been blessed over the last five or seven years with very active members of the legislative assemblies, along with the officers and the bureaucracy who see the benefits and then support this process.
It is why we focused on the nullah project, because of the importance of scalability. We have 250 kilometers of waterways within Mumbai. In fact, we took this project to the City of Mumbai and the commissioner gave us permission: “All right, here you go, 1.2 kilometers. This is your pilot you have to find funding for it because we don’t have it. Let’s see if it’s successful and then we can Implement that across the city” … and of course everyone jumped onto that opportunity. So now the members of legislative assembly who supported the project already recognition in the city for doing something that has not been done anywhere in the country. Now there are people who piggyback on a process, and then it’s really how we stitch together those collaboratives to make something successful. It’s highly localized, even across the several projects that we worked on. The approaches have been very different, based on the different communities that we’ve been interacting with.
David: Isabelle, do you find the metrics like this to be positive political tools to promote the idea, not only of more parks and access to green space and their benefits, but also as a forum to discuss some of the negative things that you talked about: gentrification and displacement?
Isabelle: Yes, and I think certainly so especially as some cities are focusing on universal access to green space rather than addressing equity. And I think the example of Nantes is very good in that sense. Unlike for instance what Los Angeles has been doing, which is more to map where communities have least access to green space and then to motivate private developers to contribute to a fund, and that then will be used to create new green space around the city … except that this fund is actually going to other communities. So, at the end of the day you have new real estate development in low-income communities that don’t have green space, and the the communities that already have green space have it more. So, I really like the tool of universal access. It’s important.
Adrian: I was really interested in what you said, Isabelle, about the issue of gentrification impacts not just on poor people, but also middleclass people. We had a project in Bozeman, Montana. Bozeman is a small city of 30,000 people, but it’s doubled in population over the last 10 years. It’s going to double again, and we are creating the Central Park of Bozeman. It’s a 60 acre park, which is a big park for Bozeman, right downtown. We were able to carve off eight acres to be set aside for affordable housing. By Bozeman standards affordable didn’t mean for poor people, it meant for teachers, firefighters and others so they didn’t have to live 30 miles outside of town and have a big commute in. And it was also guided by local zoning, which turned out to be really difficult because the local zoning was for single family homes, affordable single-family homes. There isn’t a developer of affordable single-family homes in the United States, and certainly not in Montana. So, the constraints that were placed by zoning made it almost impossible. Luckily, we came up with a solution so that eight Acres of a site are now going to be devoted to affordable, that is for middle-income sort of city workers. So those kinds of trade-offs are important.
I should also add that this issue of green gentrification: there’s a concept of make it “just green enough”. That is make a just green enough that the wealthy people won’t want it, but it’s okay for the poor people. I defy that concept because in all of my work and central Brooklyn, in the South Bronx, and Harlem, I never had a community member say to me “make it just green enough don’t make it as nice as Central Park”. I heard just the opposite: make it as nice as the parks in the rich neighborhoods. And that’s the debate. That’s the problem. T he poor people who live there don’t want a second-class park. They want a first-class park. But if you build the first-class Park, will the poor people be displaced? That’s the big problem. So it’s it is a dilemma.
David: Let’s take a couple of questions from the audience.
Audience member: Hi. I’m wondering if the green gentrification is like a bubble that might just burst in the similar way. We talk about housing in Australia. Is it just a matter of time until the bubble bursts and we have it everywhere. And in the meantime, do we just have to bear the pain?
Isabelle: The problem with housing bubbles is that they burst and then we grow again because we don’t learn and we don’t question our models of growth and development. So hopefully it will burst but I think—and it’s tragic at the same time to think about it this way—as the middle class becomes increasingly impacted by having to leave and then cities lose a variety of their workforce, then they will really starting start questioning what type of housing they need to provide and how to fund it better. So, in the end of the day. it will also become much bigger housing agenda. There are a lot of housing platforms growing in many countries because housing has become an emergency.
Audience member: It’s not really a question; it is more comment or a proposal. I’m thinking about this concept of resilience that we are all are very familiar with. We can have an ecosystem that is resilient but not necessarily just. So we can use a social-ecological approach or social ecological systems approach. Okay, that’s good. I can bring local knowledge. I can network social capital of the people there. and I can use their knowledge to better manage the ecosystem. But still, the definition comes up short when it comes to environmental justice. So, I don’t know if we should keep on relying on this concept. I don’t know if it is an outcome from this conference. Why not create a new definition of resilience, in support of those ecosystems that can support and maintain ecological processes, but also are based on on justice for everyone?
Adrian: I spent some time this morning with the local Parisian parks officials, and they have some really sophisticated metrics now. They’re built into how they design new parks. And, of course, space is at a premium in Paris, and they are trying to put a whole lot into small spaces. What they said to me was that the smallest spaces are the more difficult, because they have to address all of these different demands—the equity demands, the resilience demands—and it was remarkable to see how much you’re squeezing into a six hectare park, roughly 14 acres, where they’re putting in humid zones and native plantings and play areas and all these things,
They created a program, a computer program, that the community could tap into called Design Your Own Park. You can put in all the elements you want, and then the program reports the price, and you have to figure out which you can’t afford to do. It shows an increasing sophistication, with resilience being at the top of what they were looking for and also social aspects being done for this park. I worry that we’re expecting a park to play too many roles, expecting that this park is going to solve all our problems, make us resilient, do all these things. At the end of the day, i’s got to be a great park that brings people together.
As I’ve traveled around Paris, seeing these tiny little parks with a lot of different things in them, and really being used … this is the greatest value of parks. It is not the health benefit or the environmental benefits. It’s people interacting with people which makes a great City and when you leave and you go to the suburbs in your in your private home and you don’t have parks and you have a backyard, it’s not people interacting with people. That’s the greatest virtue of parks. In my four decades of working in parks, it is the connection between people which defines what makes cities not just great, but also viable .
Samarth: So just to talk about the issue of ecology and open spaces. The movement of public space in Mumbai is very intensely interlinked with the movement to reclaim our natural assets and our ecological corridors, because in Mumbai we are faced with another problem. It’s interesting that all three presentations started off with mapping as an exercise—mapping as a means to empower a certain pocket of land, a park, a certain group of people. So, mapping is a tool to the to enable the Right to the City in Mumbai.
What’s interesting is that the mapping we did wasn’t just limited to the open spaces, but it also mapped the mangroves, the forests, the creeks, the salt pan lands, the wetlands. These areas had never existed on the map of Mumbai. In fact, after we did this mapping the city has recognized these resources for the first time in the last 60 years. The new development plan of the city actually has areas marked with edges with buffer zones for mangroves to wetlands to salt pan lands. Now there is a legitimate means to fight for them. So, for communities like us, activists who are looking to fight legal battles, these maps become legal tools.
We had a Seed Session yesterday about the Right to the City, which was very exciting. I believe access to open spaces, and at the same time access to natural spaces, which ensure vigilance and ensure their protection equally, stake a claim in the Right to the City,
Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.
Adrian Benepe has worked for more than 30 years protecting and enhancing parks, gardens and historic resources, most recently as the Commissioner of Parks & Recreation in New York City, and now on a national level as Senior Vice President for City Park Development for the Trust for Public Land.
Samarth Das is an Urban Designer and Architect based in Mumbai. Having practiced professionally in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and subsequently in New York City, his work focuses on engaging actively in both public as well as private sectors—to design articulate shared spaces within cities that promote participation and interaction amongst people.
Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.
Isabelle Anguelovski
Urban greening and green spaces are vital to ecological and human health. However, achieving equity in urban health and reducing health inequalities requires a more complex approach than simply claiming that urban greening contributes to better health or livability.
Asking how we demand access to green space as a right for everyone can be rephrased into how we build green, healthy, and equitable cities for all rather than creating green cities as enclaves of privilege.
This question is particularly important because traditionally, lower-income and minority residents suffer to a greater extent from environmental toxics, climate risks, and poor access to green space/infrastructure in comparison with white and higher-income residents.
These inequalities are illustrated by earlier highway construction projects replacing valuable green space for people of color, such as the I-10 construction on Clairborne Avenue in New Orleans in the 1960s, and by more recent unequal access to green space for Latino and Black residents in places like Los Angeles County. Such inequities have a particularly strong health ramification since high exposure to green space is associated with lower risk of all-cause mortality. Put differently, unequal access to green space by race, ethnicity, or class also shapes health inequalities and disparities.
Unequal access to green amenities more generally have been produced by urban development trends, including what is now increasingly known as green gentrification. In the context of cities advancing green agendas, visions, and urbanism, our research on green gentrification trens shows that green amenities can create conditions for the social and spatial exclusion of the most socially and racially vulnerable residents, their livelihoods, and practices. Parks, greenways, or climate-proofing infrastructure can become GREENLULUS in racially mixed and low-income neighborhoods.
In our Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ), our research has shown city-wide green gentrification trends in places like Barcelona, where approximately half of the new green spaces created between 1990 and 2005 contributed to strong green gentrification. We have seen similar trends in our recent study of Washington DC, where green space creation predicted losses in African-American residents. In addition, in DC, we were able to pinpoint that the green spaces most associated with green gentrification seem to be community gardens, which have historically been spaces of refuge for people of color. Finally, our latest study, in Boston, confirms the association between community gardens and gentrification, while also adding greenways to the picture of green gentrification. Greenways are particularly important because of the emphasis of local climate plans, such as the 2018 Boston Harbor Plan, on linear resilient parks to address stormwater and flooding.
Bringing it back to health, our work also tries to understand whether everyone’s health benefits from green space and other livability initiatives or, alternatively, whether the process of green gentrification cause worse health outcomes for some and better health outcomes for others. In a recent study of NYC, being exposed as a resident to a higher percentage of neighborhood active green space was associated with lower odds of fair or poor health. We also found that only the health of privileged groups (i.e., those with high incomes and those with high levels of education) who live in gentrifying neighborhoods benefited from active green space. In contrast, residents living in other neighborhoods, and less socially privileged residents in gentrifying neighborhoods, did not experience health benefits from active green space.
Counter-examples
Knowing this reality, what are counter-examples of green, inclusive, equitable planning? One example that comes to mind is the Superblock program in Barcelona. Embedded in the 2012 urban mobility plan, this program combines climate mitigation (emission reduction) and adaptation (heat island) goals. By altering mobility and enhancing access to public/open spaces, it proposes new a urban development path and city vision questioning spatial growth. Additionally, by planning to build more than 500 superblocks in the city, the plan emphasizes an equality-driven vision where all neighborhoods in the city would benefit from superblocks. In our views, this approach may avoid a “flagship” effect, whereby some projects draw specific attention, investment, and possibly green speculation. The HighLine example in New York is a prime example of this process.
Another socially-inclusive greening approach was adopted by Nantes in France at the beginning of the 1990s. At that time, Nantes decided to operate a transition from an industrial shipyard city to a high-tech industry and cultural center, oriented towards sustainable development, health, social cohesion, and livability. From 1984 to 2015, it added 200% green space (1,000ha), and achieved its stated goal of allowing all inhabitants to live within 300m of a green area. During this greening process, Nantes also created ecology- and health-centered ”active” eco-districts in working-class neighborhoods. Last, it added different affordable housing schemes and projects in redeveloped green neighborhoods. One of the most strongest regulations here is the obligation for developers to include 30% of affordable units for every new development. Last, this greening trajectory has been operated in an inclusive manner: In Nantes, green space is co-created and managed with residents, with large resources and times allocated to the Green Space Department to developing new uses, programming, and activities in green spaces.
In sum, urban greening and green spaces are vital to ecological and human health. However, we in our BCNUEJ lab, we argue that achieving equity in urban health and reducing health inequalities requires a more complex approach than simply claiming that urban greening contributes to better health or livability.
In closure, I would like to propose a few directions for planning green and equitable cities: In our views, cities should integrate the concerns and local uses of social groups that might be less vocal or visible is core to the process of designing equitably beneficial public/green space. They should direct public action in ways that places the well-being and health of existing residents at the center of public policy and planning, and that controls real estate development, housing rights, and mass tourism. Policy-makers should also consider how supra-local constraints and politics undermine sustainability planning and decisions and build lasting wider socio-ecological political coalitions. Finally, there should be greater genuine cooperation between public entities and institutions at different territorial levels so that equitable greening is not envisioned and achieved at the municipal scale only, but takes metropolitan and regional realities into consideration as well.
Adrian Benepe has worked for more than 30 years protecting and enhancing parks, gardens and historic resources, most recently as the Commissioner of Parks & Recreation in New York City, and now on a national level as Senior Vice President for City Park Development for the Trust for Public Land.
Adrian Benepe
As we demand and proclaim the right to parks and open space, we can ground the abstract in the tangible by introducing a metric for park access: everyone within a 10-minute walk to a park.
Our relationship to parks and open space is beginning to fundamentally change. Many of my colleagues at The Nature of Cities’ Summit in Paris this past June made the case that the perception of what makes a city livable, and worthwhile, is shifting. More and more, people are demanding green space as a right, not as a luxury.
The right to green space is a new idea, necessitated by the swelling populations of high-density urban areas, and the need to provide respite, relief, and leisure for those communities who are often on the frontlines of the worsening impacts of climate change. Excessive heat, flooding from storm water runoff and rising seas, deteriorating air quality, and the ensuing health challenges exacerbated by these factors, all require a reimagining of the physical and social infrastructure that compose our cities. Part of that is a new way of thinking about green space, and proclaiming it as a right as opposed to an amenity.
As we demand and proclaim the right to parks and open space, we can ground the abstract in the tangible by introducing a metric for park access: the 10-minute walk. The Trust for Public Land (TPL) has adopted a 10-minute walk (half a mile—or roughly 800 meters) to a park as our principle metric in assessing park access in cities across the United States, and we have launched a campaign—The 10 Minute Walk Mayors Campaign—to sign up mayors (300 and counting) willing to make a commitment to 100 percent 10-minute walk park access in their cities by 2050: the “100% Promise”.
NYC schoolyard before and after a TPL-led transformation.
TPL has also helped create or transform more than 500 parks that give 8 million people access to a high quality park within a short walk. One of our programs, NYC Playgrounds, has transformed over 200 asphalt schoolyards in New York City into thriving, green community playgrounds. The model created by this program has been adopted by cities across the US, and we have added more green schoolyard programs in cities like Philadelphia, Camden, Dallas, Atlanta, and Oakland. Paris, our host city for The Nature of Cities’ Summit, has very successfully incorporated the green schoolyard model into their sustainability plans, and have already transformed a number of sites through their Urban Oasis project, thanks to the “importing” of the TPL model by Bloomberg Associates. It’s a model that offers perhaps the best way for creating park access at scale, since most neighborhoods have schools, and by recreating their adjacent schoolyards into public playgrounds, we can create new green space without having to actually acquire new land—a difficult and very expensive prospect. It of course has its own complexities, like the need for a joint-use agreement between municipal agencies, but it nonetheless has the potential to deliver 10-minute walk park access to tens of millions of people.
A Paris Schoolyard, part of the city’s Urban Oasis Project.
As we ask mayors to make specific commitments, we are also equipping the public and city officials with the data necessary for spurring action and guiding implementation. Two TPL resources, ParkServe and ParkScore, do just this. In creating ParkServe, we mapped 14,000 communities in the United States to locate 131,000 parks and identify gaps in park access, and to find out how many residents did not have a park within a 10-minute walk. We also built in a tool where park planners locate optimal points for new parks that would provide the most people the most benefits, and layered these maps with information about the demographics of communities, using census data. We then fed all this information into ParkScore, which ranks the 100 top park systems in the countries according to access, amenities, funding, and a host of other criteria. This year, Washington D.C. came out on top, beating out the prior champion St. Paul, Minnesota, by a narrow margin. ParkScore is a potent tool, as mayors are naturally competitive. By ranking cities, we’ve found that mayors have been incentivized to improve their park systems, creating a race to the top. As a validation of our efforts to elevate the role of parks in the public discourse, the most recent US Conference of Mayors survey listed parks and open space as the number one sub-issue for mayors in 2019.
With many mayors now on board, and the right to green space gaining traction, we are now working with cities to help them meet their commitments and reach the goals they have set for themselves. All of us—community groups, constituents, and non-profits—must continue to celebrate visionary leaders and help them succeed, so that the right to green space is asserted and made a fundamental human right for city dwellers in perpetuity.
With additional writing and research by Thomas Newman, National Programs Coordinator, The Trust for Public Land
Samarth Das is an Urban Designer and Architect based in Mumbai. Having practiced professionally in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and subsequently in New York City, his work focuses on engaging actively in both public as well as private sectors—to design articulate shared spaces within cities that promote participation and interaction amongst people.
Samarth Das
This “nullah” weaves through various neighbourhoods. What better way to connect and integrate our various disparate communities within cities than to develop a string of linear parks and shared spaces along such watercourses—which provides easy access from every neighbourhood adjacent to them?
Defining relationships
We are currently seeing a rising trend of ‘gated communities’ crop up all throughout the city of Mumbai. These gated communities further the fragmentation and segregation of the city’s fabric; as well as re-inforce and re-assert the several social and economic divides between various classes of people that call the city their home. By the sheer nature of their planning and construction, they promote an ‘exclusiveness’ and thereby a certain apathy towards the surroundings they are located in. Romantic ideas of a utopic lifestyle complete with private parks and amenities are sold to buyers in the market – boldly acknowledging that one needs to ‘get away’ from the disrepair and hopelessness of the city itself in order to find comfort and feel ‘at home’.
The isolation that these types of developments promote stands equally true to the built as well as un-built environments. The concept of ‘nature’ is becoming increasingly manicured – almost manufactured – with little or very less importance given to natural eco-systems and environments.
Fragmented city fabric with apathy towards natural assets. Photo: Johnny Miller, Unequal Scenes, Mumbai
It is important, in this scenario, to build and define relationships collectively between people as well as with nature especially on questions of integration, cohesiveness, co-habitation and sustainability. Over the last 40 years, our architectural endeavours and our design practice PK Das & Associates, have stood by the belief that organising movements and creating grassroots networks would certainly help in defining these relationships.
Wider public dialogue and popularisation of ideas are necessary means towards the achievement of political recognition and thereby influencing structural legislative changes. The practice has been fairly successful in achieving these goals through city-wide public exhibitions for example, which have seen participation from key government officials and politicians; as well as organising and participating in public marches and protests with communities around issues of protecting their neighbourhood parks, gardens and open spaces.
Open Mumbai Exhibition. Mumbai, 2012. Photos: PK Das & Associates
Need for collective intervention
In 2007, we launched the Juhu Vision Plan—which propagated the idea of neighbourhood based planning for cities, instead of ‘city wide’ master plans—which are often alienating to many. Juhu is a western suburb of Mumbai, and this project envisions a public realm integrated into the neighbourhood through networking the public spaces and natural assets in the area. Providing access to these areas also ensures vigilance and protection. We evolved campaign posters in order to sensitise the community about the project as well as achieve the larger goal of popularising planning. The press and media become an indispensable part of this process by helping increase awareness amongst citizens, and ensuring accountability on behalf of governments.
Campaign Poster, Juhu Vision Plan. Credit: PK Das & Associates and KRVIA Design Cell
Integrating the backyards
Focussing on eliminating the expanding backyards of filth, abuse, discrimination and exclusion of places as well as people is a priority as it is undermining urbanisation and the very idea of cities. We argue that ‘urban’ is a larger concept that lends to a certain quality of life and spaces that respect our built as well as natural environments. Therefore, not all cities are ‘urban’; rather in this context rural areas and villages can be far more progressive than cities and thereby are more ‘urban’ in nature.
‘Nullahs’ were originally planned as open water channels – following natural low lying areas and drain channels in order to take storm water from the land to the sea. Unfortunately the apathy with which natural assets are dealt with have turned these potentially incredible waterways into open sewers and dumping grounds carrying the filth of untreated sewage to the sea. It is indeed a challenge to engage with the invisible yet perceived barriers across city landscapes while ensuring their unification.
Irla Nullah – before the Juhu Vision plan. Photo: Samarth Das.
Through urban planning and design endeavours
Urban planning and design are effective democratic tools of social and environmental change and such change must be demonstrative through participatory means and wider collective action, as has been in the cases of several neighbourhoods of Mumbai.
Irla Nullah
The movement to reclaim our neglected backyards has since moved on to several other projects. One of the most significant of these is the restoration of the Irla Nullah. In the process of re-appropriating these spaces, the project has been successful in creating walking and cycling tracks complete with landscaping and lighting and performance spaces which ensure that these spaces are multi-functional yet open to be appropriated in any way as deemed fit by the community.
Owing to its physical footprint, this “nullah” weaves through various neighbourhoods. What better way to connect and integrate our various disparate communities within cities than to develop a string of linear parks and shared spaces along such watercourses —which provides easy access from every neighbourhood adjacent to them? The idea is to advocate smaller, pocket and linear parks that are within walking distance instead of major, city level central parks which we all have to travel to using some means of transport. This project is also the first of its kind in the country where there is an attempt to clean the waters flowing in these nullahs. With over 150kms of ‘nullahs’ running across the city of Mumbai, the potential of this project’s scalability is enormous.
The Irla Nullah Re-invigoration Project. Photos: PK Das & Associates
Bring about citywide transformative change
Bottom up processes and their scalability to city-wide transformative change must be a necessary mission in the re-envisioning of cities and their sustainability. The movement to reclaim public spaces in Mumbai started almost 23 years ago. Through all our public work and engagements we have engaged with communities in each neighbourhood. With every project our understanding of the city grows, and with it, the potential for scalability of ideas across these various projects increases.
Movement to reclaim public spaces in Mumbai – 23 years and continuing Image credit: PK Das & Associates
Open Mumbai
In 2012, we held an elaborate city-wide exhibition called ‘Open Mumbai: Re-envisioning the city and its open spaces’ . A mapping of open and natural spaces in the city revealed some incredible facts. A brief list of the incredible natural assets that we fail to realise within our city can be seen in the image below. Sadly, we have failed to recognise in our city’s development plans. This ignited the idea for the Open Mumbai Plan. vThe Open Mumbai plan proposes the re-invigoration and re-integration of over 300 kms of the natural watercourses within our city’s landscape; and thereby develop a network of linear parks and shared spaces across neighbourhoods and the city.
A plan that aims to create non-barricaded, non-exclusive, non-elitist spaces that provide access to all our citizens. A plan that ensures that open space is not just available, but is geographically and culturally integral to neighbourhoods and a participatory community life. A plan that we hope will be the beginning of a dialogue to create a truly representative “People’s Plan’ for the city of Mumbai”.
We need a rethink of the way cities are planned and built. That is why ecology, biology, and climatology are disciplines that have acquired a greater relevance in landscaping and the planning and design of urban open spaces.
The functions of today’s green are defined mainly by the needs that were conceived in the hygienist movement linked to the industrial city of the nineteenth century. Environmental pollution was the driving force behind public open spaces at that time, and at that time, the need for socialization and recreation was recognized. Today’s green space is heir to the industrial city, and although the need for clean air and social interaction continues, the environmental challenges facing cities in the 21st century involve reformulating the concept of green space.
Today’s urban green needs to be understood as an ecological infrastructure, which acts as a structuring element of the ecological functions needed in the city. It is fundamental in the reproduction of so many natural processes in the city: constituting corridors of connection with the natural habitats of the environment, increasing the degree of biological diversity and the auto-generative capacity of the ecosystem itself, as well as an important role in the prevention of the “heat island” effect, the resilience of cities to climate change, among others.
The functionality of green, in terms of urban infrastructure, refers to the possibility of assuming the urban green system as an instrument to attenuate and guide the urban development of the city, giving it a connotation of high environmental quality, in which the green infrastructure forms the structure. The reality is that the systemic approach of the territory must be translated into a systemic approach of the city, which forms part of the territory, in such a way that the city must be reconnected to the territorial biophysical matrix. That is why green spaces play a central role: to respond to ecological and environmental problems.
Another of the ideal conceptions of current green spaces is that they are intended to constitute a system, that is to say, that they are conceived as a communicated and continuous whole, where the set of the different pieces has more value than the simple sum.
The continuity of the green system is opposed to ghettoization. The city must incorporate green areas as part of its own fabric, and not as a good to be sought far from it. When configured in the urban fabric in the form of a complex network and related to the system of peri-urban open spaces, it represents an effective solution for the improvement of the urban ecosystem. In this sense, the urban green network assumes the connotations of a true and own infrastructure that, along with the others, assumes structural functions of the organization of the city.
Thus, the new green systems are built from the idea of recovering lost ecological connectivities, but also on the basis of each of the new spaces that can be established. A concept that goes hand in hand with an integral vision of the landscape, whether natural or human-made. This integral vision allows a better protection of the landscape through the introduction of corridors that link the urban space with the rural and forest. This initiative is evident in the planning of cities such as Amsterdam, Munich and Berlin.
Urban ecology and green infrastructure
Urban ecology proposes a different way of understanding the city, as an ecosystem. The idea of analyzing the city as a living system is nothing new, there is no notion of this concept since Patrick Geddes, considered the father of urban ecology, in 1904 with his “City developments”. But it was not until 1973 that the importance of urban ecosystem analysis was seriously recognized in UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere program.
To better understand the concept, reference is made first of all to the natural ecosystem, which is nothing more than a set of biotic and abiotic elements that interrelate with each other, producing flows of matter and energy between them. Biotic elements (living beings) need to degrade energy and materials to stay alive, but in natural ecosystems it is only plants that have the possibility of regenerating this energy through photosynthesis.
The following is a brief summary of the characteristics of the city that are derived from urban ecology:
Cities do not produce any of the resources they consume and need to exploit other ecosystems in order to function. This is why, from the point of view of ecological productivity, the urban ecosystem is considered a heterotropic system (Naredo and Rueda, 1998), which feeds on others, depending on other natural and agricultural ecosystems that are often found at great distances from the city.
In the city, most of the flow of resources that it imports to function—matter, energy and information—is done horizontally (through transport systems such as railways, highways, energy networks), unlike natural ecosystems that do so, in most cases, vertically. In other words, the metabolism of cities is linear (Rueda, 1999). Dependent on fossil fuel and emitter of greenhouse gases
The resources (matter, water and energy) once consumed and metabolized in the city, are returned to the ecological system in the form of solid (waste), liquid (wastewater), and gaseous (air pollution) pollution.
In urban areas the “natural” conditions of a territory are transformed, from the soil and subsoil, altering the water permeability, the reduction of the vegetal layer, the climate etc. Giving rise to altered natural processes, which therefore will no longer be altered, becoming ecological processes proper to the urban system.
The alteration caused by cities on natural ecosystems can be felt through micro-climatic modifications and imbalances in natural cycles, mainly carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen (N), carbon monoxide (CO), sulphur dioxide (SO2), ozone (O3), the natural water cycle. These alterations caused by the city are collected by the following areas of environmental action:
Atmosphere. The atmospheric affectation is characterized mainly by the increase of the environmental pollution, pollution, especially increase of the emissions of CO2 and CO, linked to the consumption of fossil fuels. This is closely related to the model of a city dependent on transport networks to obtain the resources it needs and to function internally. At the same time, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), produced by combustion in motor vehicles and power plants, when reacting with volatile organic compounds, such as hydrocarbon gases, in the presence of abundant sunlight, generates tropospheric ozone (O3), which is why there will be higher ozone concentrations when solar radiation is more intense, in the case of Panama, this would occur mainly during the dry season. It should be noted that ozone causes health problems ranging from eye irritations, nostrils, bronchial tubes and lung infections.
Water cycle. Cities affect the water cycle through the extraction of water in natural spaces, and water pollution, causing alteration of natural aquifers, and generating floods in the urban environment, due to the lack of vegetation cover in the city, increasing surface runoffs.
Energy. The high consumption of energy in the city contributes to the exhaustion of non-renewable energies, which in turn increases greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to climate change. At the same time, the phenomenon (heat island effect), generated by urban models of the high density of constructions and heat accumulating materials (concrete, asphalt, etc.), raises the urban temperature.
Finally, energy combustion also releases other substances that contribute to air pollution by deteriorating air quality.
Biodiversity. The urbanized space has usually led to the loss of a natural land cover, in not a few cases this translates into loss of habitat for fauna and flora. In addition, cities represent an interruption of the territory’s ecological connections, making it difficult in both cases to conserve biodiversity.
Cities form complex systems in which numerous relationships and exchanges of matter and energy take place, but at the same time they are the main exploiters of natural ecosystems and their connections extend over the entire planet, being responsible for global entropic growth. In such a way that the cities have become parasites of the environment, consuming resources and at the same time contaminating the ecological systems that in turn deteriorate the habitability of the city itself. In this scenario, it is evident the need for structural changes in urban spaces, in different areas. One of them is the reconversion of urban vegetation in such a way that it responds, not to all of them, but to several of the urban environmental problems and future challenges.
The role of tree planting in the construction of green urban infrastructure
How can vegetation and green spaces respond to the ecological and environmental problems of the city, and provide solutions to achieve an environmentally balanced urban planning? The new approaches to nature in the city are no longer limited to a pleasant space and ornamental vegetation, now are priority objectives ranging from the habitability of open spaces for the population, the importance of spatial continuity within the city, habitat for biodiversity and climate change.
Water cycle
The water cycle when entering the urban system suffers a series of alterations that translate into environmental impacts and hydrological risks, which can be prevented or mitigated with various tree planting strategies. On the one hand, excessive urban water consumption prevents the long-term protection of water resources and, on the other hand, the rainfall regime is changing due to climate change. Extreme events alternate, droughts and high intensity torrential rains are expected to become more frequent, as global temperatures continue to rise. As a result, the risk of droughts and floods increases.
This translates into the promotion of sustainable water consumption, which in terms of green infrastructure implies the use of vegetation adapted to the climate, so that during the dry season irrigation is not required. At the same time, rainwater in an impermeable environment such as an urban one conflicts with the water network that naturally crosses urban areas, which as a whole represents a risk of flooding. Therefore, an urban policy of green infrastructure must be aimed at the recovery of the banks of urban rivers, mainly with the planting of riverside tree vegetation, and also the increase of the vegetated surface within the urban fabric. The creation of urban forests is essential to control erosion and protect the water network of cities.
Every year, floods cause considerable damage in urban areas.
Green infrastructure can contribute to rainwater management, absorbing water in a greater percentage of vegetated surface, through controlled and designed temporary flooding systems of squares (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2016), or systems of bio-retention of rainwater, turning these into fundamental equipment in the design of squares, urban and periurban parks, and even in green cords of public roads. At the same time, tree-planting not only helps to absorb rainwater, but also controls runoff at source, reducing erosion and pollution in water courses (Vargas et al 2008).
The conservation of gallery forests and the maintenance of banks of rivers free of construction are fundamental strategies in the constitution of a green infrastructure that prevents floods. Photo: Graciela Arosemena. Former Clayton Fort, Ex-Canal Zone (Panama).
Implications for improving air quality
City trees can reduce some air pollutants. Pollution is reduced directly when dust and smoke particles are trapped in vegetation. In addition, plants absorb toxic gases, especially those caused by the combustion of motor vehicles.
At the same time, high temperatures accelerate the formation of pollution, such as tropospheric ozone (O3). In this sense, the moderating effect of vegetation, especially trees, can reduce temperatures and in turn reduce the formation of pollutants. Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognized that arborization is a measure to reduce O3.
Carbon dioxide is another air pollutant that contributes to climate change. Urban arborization can reduce CO2 levels by capturing the gas through its leaves with photosynthesis, and sequestering CO2 in the trunk, branches and roots while it is growing; in addition, regulation of the urban microclimate reduces extreme temperatures and reduces the energy consumption associated with air conditioners. (Sorensen, Barzetti, Keipi, & Williams, 1998).
Trees extract pollutants in two main ways:
They incorporate gases and pollutants through the stomata of their leaves. The gases enter the interior of the leaves, where there is a lot of water. Many gases dissolve and change state.
They capture particles on the surface of the leaves.
Ideally, the tree should have many leaves and be large in size.
They absorb polluting gases (e.g. NO2, SO2), intercept PM10 (dust, ash, dust and smoke).
In a study of urban forests in Honolulu (Hawaii), it found that 43,817 trees in the city remove about 9 tons of air pollutants, an environmental service estimated at $47, 365.00 dollars (Vargas, McPherson, Peper, & Et. al., 2007).
Thus, when choosing tree species to be located in urban open spaces, consideration should be given to the morphological characteristics that are most suitable for the functions of absorption of polluting gases, or for the prevention of ozone formation. Ornamental aspects are thus left in the background.
Road trees are essential to keep the passage of automobiles shaded and to prevent pollutants such as NO and non-metallic hydrocarbons from mobile sources (automobiles) from becoming ozone due to the action of solar radiation. Photo: Graciela Arosemena
Climate regulation and resilience to climate change
One of the main issues facing urban societies in the 21st century is how to curb their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the already present effects of climate change. In Panama, for example, one of the effects associated with climate change is the increase in absolute temperature, which could increase by between 1 and 3ºC during the months with the highest temperatures: April and May (CATHALAC, 2008). And absolute maximum temperature events above 38ºC would be exceeded by 2020. (CATHALAC, 2008).
In cities with hot climates, extreme temperature episodes are expected to be more severe due to adverse baseline conditions associated with the ‘urban heat island’ effect (UN-HABITAT, 2011). A problem generated by the high density of constructions and heat accumulating materials (concrete, asphalt, etc.), by the concentration of anthropogenic heat generating activities (traffic, air conditioning, etc.). In fact, according to the climate change vulnerability maps of the different ecological units in Panama, in terms of temperature, the Pacific Metropolitan Area (Panama) has a high average vulnerability to changes in temperature increase (Tremblay & Ross, 2007).
Bearing in mind that the temperature increase of 1ºC implies an increase in energy consumption in air conditioning of between 3 and 4%, and can reach up to 10%, energy consumption could increase up to 30% with an increase in temperature of 3ºC.
In order to mitigate the effects of the heat island and reduce high energy consumption it is essential to plan the woodland as a natural climate for the urban microclimate.
Key environmental variables for human thermal comfort include solar radiation, urban surface temperature, air temperature, humidity and wind speed. Research has shown that urban tree planting can improve these environmental variables through the prevention of solar radiation and the reduction of heating of building surfaces, combined with the effect of reducing air temperature through evapotranspiration. (Akbari & et al., 1992) (Simpson & McPherson, 1996); (Georgi & Zafiriadis, 2006). In short, urban woodland intervenes in the modification of the climate in warm zones, mainly in the following three effects (Akbari H., 2002):
Shading: The treetops intercept solar radiation, preventing the heating of buildings, asphalt and pavements.
Evapotranspiration: The transpiration of the leaves requires heat energy captured from the environment, producing a decrease in the temperature in the environment.
The treetops generate a protective screen against solar radiation, minimising the heat island effect in cities. Photo: Graciela Arosemena.
The capacity of trees to modify the urban climate, above all to reduce high temperatures, depends fundamentally on the degree of tree cover, i.e. the percentage of urban surface located under the projection of the tree tops, as well as the type and density of the tops. On the refreshing effect of vegetation in urban environments, it has been reported that measurements made in different cities of the North, such as the study carried out in the Berlin Zoo (Hoerbert, 1982). In this study the temperature differences were 5-7°C and the relative humidity varied 10% and reported variations between 3 and 8 ºC for different compositions and species of trees, the measurements were also made at different times of the year.
Measurements on the effect of shadows have been made in studies where design, building typologies, landscape and climates were assessed, they found that energy savings would be around 25% to 80%. The greatest savings were associated with the density and extent of shadows, solar radiation being the largest source of heat gain (Simpson & McPherson, 1996).
Conservation of biodiversity and natural heritage
From an environmental point of view, urban open spaces, in addition to exercising functions of climate control or filtering atmospheric pollution, among others, must guarantee the conservation of biological diversity and a permeability that allows ecological connections, maintaining environmental and landscape values.
Cities can play a fundamental role in the conservation of biodiversity through strategies that include the introduction of ecosystems and habitats into the urban fabric, or the preservation of pre-existing ones, as well as the creation of continuous urban green spaces that guarantee biological connectivity and control territorial fragmentation (Generalitat de Catalunya, 2003). A fundamental objective of this is to establish as the backbone of the territory a continuous network of natural spaces that crosses the city and connects peri-urban natural spaces with urban natural spaces.
The need to increase the nature of the city and strengthen the connections between the city and its surroundings is evident, and one of the key pieces for achieving this are the urban tree planting strategies, aimed at effectively providing habitat for species of birds, mainly mammals. Trees provide habitat, shelter and food for local fauna. In order to guarantee an arborization that restores the ecological biodiversity in the cities, it is necessary to choose native plant species, which are the ones to which the fauna is accustomed. In fact, the use of exotic species is one of the direct causes of threat to biodiversity and ecosystem conservation, along with habitat destruction (Aguirre Muñoz & Mendoza Alfaro).
On the contrary, native tree species in urban environments provide food for fauna, which would be reduced or absent in the case of exotic trees. In addition, native trees increase the richness and diversity of fauna, so an important strategy of urban arborization is the recognition which native species of trees are habitat of certain fauna, in order to establish a biodiverse habitat in the urban environment.
Metropolitan Natural Park, in the middle of Panama City. Humid forest to dry tropical biodiversity reserve that provides environmental services such as sponge rainwater and sink of pollutant gases. For all these functions, it should be considered a green infrastructure facility of the city. Photo: Graciela Arosemena.
A new model of urban open spaces
The impact that local and global environmental problems are having on urban environments is unprecedented in urban history, and this calls not only for a rethink of the way cities are planned and built, but also for a new approach to the system of free and green urban spaces. That is why ecology, biology, and climatology are disciplines that have acquired a greater relevance in landscaping and the planning and design of urban open spaces.
No city can meet the environmental challenges of the 21st century without considering the construction of ecological green infrastructure.
Akbari, & et al. (1992). Cooling our communities: A Guidebook to tree planting and light colored surfacing. .U.S.A EPA, Ofice of Policy Anallysis, Climate Change Division, Washington, D.C.
CATHALAC. (2008). Potential Impacts of Climate Change and Biodiversity in Central America, Mexico and Dominican Republic.
Georgi, N., & Zafiriadis, K. (2006). The Impact of trees on microclimate in urban areas. Urban Ecosyst .
Hoerbert, M. (1982). A climatic and air hygienic aspects in planning of iner-city open spaces: Berliner Grosser Tiergartes. Energy and Buildings, 5 (1).
Naredo, J. (1997). Sobre el origen, eluso y el contenido del término sostenible. Cuadernos de Guincho .
ONU-HABITAT. (2011). Informe mundial sobre asentamientos humanos. Las ciudades y el cambio climático: Orientación para polítcas. Londres: Earthscan.
Rueda, S (1995) Ecologia Urbana: Barcelona i la seva Regió Metropolitana com a referents. Ed. Beta Editoria
Simpson, J., & McPherson, E. (1996). Potential of tree shade for reducing residential energy use in California. Journal of Arboriculture (22).
Sorensen, M., Barzetti, V., Keipi, K., & Williams, J. (1998). Manejo de las áreas verdes urbanas. Documento de buenas prácticas. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. División de Medio Ambiente del Departamento de Desarrollo Sostenible., Washington, D.C.
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La arborización en la infraestructura verde urbana
El impacto que están generando los problemas ambientales, locales y globales, sobre los entornos urbanos no tienen precedentes en la historia urbana. Es fundamental un nuevo planteamiento del sistema de espacios libres y verdes urbano. Es por ello que la ecología, biología y la climatología, son disciplinas que han adquirido una mayor relevencia en el paisajismo, en la planificación y diseño de espacios abiertos.
Las funciones del verde actual están definidas principalmente por las necesidades que fueron concebidas en el movimiento higienista vinculado a la ciudad industrial del siglo XIX. La contaminación ambiental fue el impulsor de los espacios abiertos públicos en aquel momento, y paralelamente, fue reconocida la necesidad de socialización y recreación. El espacio verde actual es heredero de la ciudad industrial, y aunque la necesidad de aire limpio e interacción social continúan vigentes, los retos ambientales – a los que se enfrentan las ciudades en el siglo XXI, implican reformular el concepto de espacio verde.
El verde urbano en la actualidad requiere ser entendido como una infraestructura ecológica, que actúa como elemento vertebrador de las funciones ecológicas necesarias en la ciudad. Es fundamental en la reproducción de tantos procesos naturales en la ciudad: constituyendo corredores de conexión con los hàbitats naturales del entorno, incrementando el grado de diversidad biológica y la capacidad auto generativa del ecosistema mismo, así como un importante papel en la prevención del efecto “isla de calor”, la resiliencia de las ciudades al cambio climático, entre otros.
La funcionalidad del verde, en términos de infraestructura urbana, se refiere a la posibilidad de asumir el sistema verde urbano como instrumento para atenuar y orientar el desarrollo urbanístico de la ciudad, imprimiendo a este una connotación de elevada calidad ambiental, en la cual la infraestructura verde conforma la estructura.
La realidad es que la aproximación sistémica del territorio se debe traducir en una aproximación sistémica de la ciudad, que forma parte del territorio, de tal forma que la ciudad debe ser reconectada a la matriz biofísica territorial. Por eso los espacios verdes, desempeñan un papel capital: responder a los problemas ecológicos y ambientales.
Otra de las concepciones ideales de los espacios verdes actuales es que se pretende que constituyan un sistema, esto es, que se conciban como un todo comunicado y continuo, donde el conjunto de las distintas piezas tenga más valor que la simple suma.
La continuidad del sistema verde se opone a la guetización. La ciudad debe incorporar las áreas verdes como parte de su propio tejido, y no como un bien que hay que buscar lejos de él. Cuando se configura en el tejido urbano en forma de red compleja y se relaciona al sistema de los espacios abiertos periurbanos, representa una solución eficaz para el mejoramiento del ecosistema urbano.
En este sentido, la red verde urbana asume las connotaciones de una verdadera y propia infraestructura que, a la par de las otras, asume funciones estructurales de la organización de la ciudad.
Así, los nuevos sistemas verdes se construyen desde la idea de recuperar las conectividades ecológicas perdidas, pero también sobre la base de cada uno de los nuevos espacios que se pueden establecer. Concepto que va de la mano de la visión integral del paisaje, ya sea natural o antropizado. Esta visión integral permite una mejor protección del paisaje a través de la introducción de corredores que vinculen el espacio urbano con el rural y forestal. Esta iniciativa se hace evidente en la planificación de ciudades como Ámsterdam, Múnich y Berlín.
Ecología urbana e infraestructura verde
La ecología urbana plantea una forma distinta de comprender la ciudad, como un ecosistema. No es nada nueva la idea de analizar la ciudad como un sistema vivo, se tiene noción de este concepto desde Patrick Geddes, considerado el padre de la ecología urbana, en 1904 con su “City developments”. Pero no fue hasta el año 1973 cuando fue reconocida seriamente la importancia del análisis del ecosistema urbano en el programa Man and Biosphere de la UNESCO.
Para comprender mejor el concepto, se hace referencia primeramente al ecosistema natural, el cual no es más que un conjunto de elementos bióticos y abióticos que interrelacionan entre sí, produciéndose entre ellos flujos de materia y energía. Los elementos bióticos (los seres vivos), necesitan degradar energía y materiales para mantenerse vivos, pero en los ecosistemas naturales son únicamente las plantas quienes tienen la posibilidad de regenerar esta energía, a través de la fotosíntesis.
A continuación, se resumen brevemente cuáles son las características de la ciudad que se desprenden de la ecología urbana:
Las ciudades no producen ninguno de los recursos que consumen y necesitan explotar otros ecosistemas para poder funcionar. Es por ello que, desde el punto de vista de la productividad ecológica, el ecosistema urbano es considerado un sistema heterótrofo (Naredo, 1997; Rueda, 1995), – que se alimenta de otros -, al depender de otros ecosistemas naturales y agrícolas que muchas veces se encuentran a grandes distancias de la ciudad.
En la ciudad, la mayor parte del flujo de los recursos que importa para funcionar – materia, energía e información -, se realiza en sentido horizontal (a través de sistemas de transportes como el ferrocarril, autovías, redes de energía), a diferencia de los ecosistemas naturales que lo hacen, en la mayoría de los casos, de forma vertical. En otras palabras, el metabolismo de las ciudades es lineal (Rueda, 1999). Dependiente de combustible fósil y emisor de gases efecto invernadero
Los recursos (materia, agua y energía) una vez consumidos y metabolizados en la ciudad, son devueltos al sistema ecológico en forma de contaminación sólida (residuos), líquida (aguas residuales), y gaseosa (contaminación atmosférica).
En las zonas urbanas las condiciones “naturales” de un territorio son transformadas, desde el suelo y el subsuelo, alterando la permeabilidad hídrica, la reducción de la capa vegetal, el clima etc. Dando lugar a procesos naturales alterados, que por tanto ya no lo serán más, pasando a ser procesos ecológicos propios del sistema urbano.
La alteración provocada por las ciudades sobre los ecosistemas naturales se pueden palpar a través modificaciones micro climáticas y de los desequilibrios en los ciclos naturales, principalmente del dióxido de carbono (CO2 ), del nitrógeno (N), monóxido de carbono (CO), dióxido de azufre (SO2), ozono (O3), el ciclo natural del agua. Estas alteraciones ocasionadas por la ciudad son recogidas por los siguientes ámbitos de acción ambiental:
Atmósfera. La afectación atmosférica se caracteriza principalmente por el aumento de la contaminación ambiental, polución, especialmente aumento de las emisiones de CO2 y CO, vinculados al consumo de combustibles fósiles. Esto está estrechamente relacionado con el modelo de ciudad dependiente de redes de transportes para obtener los recursos que necesita y para funcionar internamente. Paralelamente, el dióxido de nitrógeno (NO2), producido por la combustión en vehículos motorizados y plantas eléctricas, al reaccionar con compuestos orgánicos volátiles, como gases hidrocarburos, en presencia de abundante luz solar, genera ozono troposférico (O3), es por esto que habrá mayores concentraciones de ozono cuando la radiación solar es más intensa, en el caso de Panamá, esto ocurriría principalmente durante la estación seca. Cabe señalar que el ozono provoca problemas para la salud desde irritaciones en los ojos, fosas nasales, hasta bronquios e infecciones pulmonares.
Ciclo hídrico. Las ciudades inciden sobre el ciclo del agua a través de la extracción de agua en espacios naturales, y la contaminación de las aguas, provocando alteración de acuíferos naturales, y generando en el medio urbanizado inundaciones, debido la falta de cobertura vegetal en la ciudad, aumentando escorrentías superficiales.
Ámbito energético. El alto consumo de energía en la ciudad contribuye al agotamiento de energías no renovables, que a su vez aumenta emisiones de gases efecto invernadero, contribuyendo al cambio climático.
Paralelamente el fenómeno (efecto de ‘isla de calor’), generado por modelos urbanos de la alta densidad de construcciones y materiales acumuladores de calor (hormigón, asfalto, etc.), eleva la temperatura urbana.
Por último, la combustión energética además libera otras sustancias que contribuyen a la contaminación atmosférica deteriorando la calidad del aire.
Biodiversidad. El espacio urbanizado, usualmente ha conllevado la pérdida de una cobertura de suelo natural, en no pocos casos ello se traduce en pérdida de hábitat de fauna y flora. Además, las ciudades representan una interrupción de las conexiones ecológicas del territorio, dificultando en ambos casos la conservación de la biodiversidad.
Las ciudades forman sistemas complejos en las cuales se producen numerosas relaciones e intercambios de materia y energía, pero a su vez son las principales explotadoras de los ecosistemas naturales y sus conexiones se extienden sobre todo el planeta, siendo responsables del crecimiento entrópico global.
De tal forma que las ciudades se han convertido en parásitos del entorno, consumiendo recursos y a su vez contaminando los sistemas ecológicos que a su vez deterioran la habitabilidad de la propia ciudad. En este escenario, es evidente la necesidad de cambios estructurales de los espacios urbanos, en diversos ámbitos. Uno de ellos es la reconversión de la vegetación urbana de forma tal que responda, no a todos, pero a varios de los problemas ambientales urbanos y los retos futuros.
El papel de la arborización en la construcción de la infraestructura verde urbana
¿Cómo la vegetación y los espacios verdes puede responder a los problemas ecológicos y ambientales de la ciudad, y dar soluciones para conseguir un planeamiento urbano ambientalmente equilibrado’. Los nuevos planteamientos de la naturaleza en la ciudad ya no se limitan a un espacioagradable y con vegetación ornamental, ahora son prioritarios objetivos que van desde
la habitabilidad de los espacios libres para la población, la importancia de la continuidad espacial dentro de la ciudad, hábitat para la biodiversidad y el cambio climático.
Ciclo del agua
El ciclo del agua al entrar en el sistema urbano sufre una serie de alteraciones que se traducen en impactos ambientales y en riesgos hidrológicos, que pueden ser prevenidos o mitigados con diversas estrategias de arborización. Por un lado, el consumo urbano desmedido de agua impide la protección a largo término de los recursos hídricos y, por otro lado, el régimen de precipitación pluvial se está modificando a causa del cambio climático. Los eventos extremos se van alternando, sequías y lluvias torrenciales de alta intensidad se espera que sean más frecuentes, toda vez que continúa aumentando la temperatura global. Como resultado, el riesgo de sequías y de inundaciones se incrementa.
Esto se traduce en la promoción del consumo sostenible de agua, lo que en términos de la infraestructura verde implica el uso de vegetación adaptada al clima, de tal forma que durante la estación seca no sea requerido el riego. Paralelamente el agua lluvia en un ambiente impermeable como el urbano, entra en conflicto con la red hídrica que naturalmente atraviesa las zonas urbanas, lo que en su conjunto representa un riesgo de inundación. Por lo que una política urbana de infraestructura verde debe estar encaminada a la recuperación de las riberas de los ríos urbanos, principalmente con la siembra de vegetación arbórea de ribera, y además el aumento de la superficie vegetada dentro del tejido urbano. La creación de bosques urbanos es fundamental para controlar la erosión y proteger la red hídrica de las ciudades.
Cada año, las inundaciones causan daños considerables en las zonas urbanas.
La infraestructura verde puede contribuir a gestionar el agua lluvia, absorbiendo agua en un mayor porcentaje de superficie vegetada, a través de sistemas inundación temporal controlada y diseñada de plazas (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2016), o sistemas de bio retención de agua lluvia, convirtiéndose estos en un equipamiento fundamental en el diseño de plazas, parques urbanos y periurbanos, e incluso en cordones verdes de las vías públicas. Paralelamente, la arborización además de contribuir a absorber el agua lluvia, controla la escorrentía en el origen, reduciendo erosión y contaminación en los cursos de agua (Vargas, McPherson, J, Simpson, Peper, Gardner, & Xiao, 2008).
La conservación de bosques de galería y el mantenimiento de márgenes de los ríos libres de edificación, son estrategias fundamentales en la constitución de una infraestructura verde que prevenga inundaciones. Foto: Graciela Arosemena. Antiguo Fuerte Clayton, Ex-Zona del Canal (Panamá).
Implicaciones en la mejora de la calidad del aire
Los árboles de la ciudad pueden reducir algunos contaminantes del aire. La contaminación se reduce directamente cuando las partículas de polvo y humo quedan atrapadas en la vegetación. Además, las plantas absorben gases tóxicos, especialmente aquellos originados por la combustión de vehículos motorizados.
Paralelamente, las altas temperaturas aceleran la formación de contaminación, como es el caso del ozono (O3) troposférico. En ese sentido el efecto moderador de la vegetación, especialmente de la arborización puede reducir las temperaturas y a su vez reducir la formación de contaminantes. Recientemente, la Agencia de Protección Ambiental de Estados Unidos (EPA), reconoció que la arborización es una medida para reducir el O3.
El dióxido de carbono es otro de los compuestos contaminantes del aire que contribuye al cambio climático. La arborización urbana puede reducir los niveles de CO2 mediante la captación del gas a través de sus hojas con la fotosíntesis, y el secuestro de CO2 en tronco, ramas y raíces mientras está creciendo; y además la regulación del microclima urbano reduce las temperaturas extremas y se reduce el consumo energético asociado a los aires acondicionados. (Sorensen, Barzetti, Keipi, & Williams, 1998).
Los árboles extraen contaminantes de dos formas principalmente:
Incorporan gases y contaminantes a través de las estomas de sus hojas. Los gases ingresan al interior de las hojas, donde hay mucha agua. Muchos gases se disuelven y cambian de estado.
Capturan partículas en la superficie de las hojas
Lo ideal es que el árbol tenga muchas hojas y sea de gran tamaño.
En un estudio sobre bosques urbanos en Honolulu (Hawaii), encontró que 43,817 árboles en la ciudad remueven cerca de 9 toneladas de contaminantes atmosféricos, un servicio ambiental estimado en $47, 365.00 dólares (Vargas, McPherson, Peper, & Et. al., 2007).
De forma tal que, en el momento de escoger las especies de árboles para ser ubicados en los espacios abiertos urbanos, deben considerarse las características morfológicas que sean más idóneas para las funciones de absorción de gases contaminantes, o para la prevención de formación de ozono. Los aspectos ornamentales quedan así en un segundo plano.
El arbolado viario es fundamental para mantener sombreado el paso de los automóviles y evitar que, por la acción de la radiación solar, los contaminantes como NO, y los hidrocarburos no metálicos, provenientes de fuentes móviles (automóviles), se transformen en ozono. Foto: Graciela Arosemena
Regulación del clima y resiliencia al cambio climático
Uno de los principales aspectos que deben afrontar las sociedades urbanas en el siglo XXI es cómo frenar sus emisiones de gases invernadero y adaptarse a los efectos ya presentes del cambio climático. En Panamá por ejemplo, uno de los efectos asociados al cambio climático es el incremento de la temperatura absoluta, la cual podría aumentar entre un 1º y 3 ºC, durante los meses en los cuales hay mayores temperaturas: abril y mayo (CATHALAC, 2008). Y los eventos de temperaturas máximas absolutas superiores a 38ºC serían rebasados hacia el año 2020 (CATHALAC, 2008).
En ciudades de climas calurosos, los episodios extremos de temperatura que se prevén son de mayor gravedad debido a las condiciones adversas de base, asociadas al efecto de ‘isla de calor urbana’ (ONU-HABITAT, 2011). Un problema generado por la alta densidad de construcciones y materiales acumuladores de calor (hormigón, asfalto, etc.), por la concentración de actividades antrópicas generadoras de calor (tráfico, climatización, etc.). De hecho, según los mapas de vulnerabilidad al cambio climático de las distintas unidades ecológicas de Panamá, en lo referente a la temperatura, el Área Metropolitana Pacífica (Panamá), tiene una vulnerabilidad media alta a cambios en el incremento de la temperatura (Tremblay & Ross, 2007).
Teniendo en cuenta que el aumento de temperatura de 1ºC supone un incremento de consumo energético en la climatización de entre 3 y 4%, y puede llegar hasta un 10%, el consumo energético podría aumentar hasta un 30% con un incremento de temperatura de 3ºC.
Para atenuar los efectos de la isla de calor y reducir los altos consumos energéticos es esencial la planificación del arbolado como climatizador natural del microclima urbano.
Las variables ambientales fundamentales para el confort térmico humano incluyen radiación solar, temperatura en las superficies urbanas, temperatura del aire, humedad y velocidad del viento. Se ha demostrado en diversas investigaciones que la arborización urbana puede mejorar estas variables ambientales a través de la prevención de la radiación solar y la reducción del calentamiento de las superficies de las edificaciones, que se suman el efecto reducción de la temperatura del aire a través de la evapotranspiración. (Akbari & et al., 1992) (Simpson & McPherson, 1996); (Georgi & Zafiriadis, 2006). En resumidas cuentas, el arbolado urbano interviene en la modificación del clima en zonas cálidas, principalmente en los siguientes tres efectos (Akbari H. , 2002):
Sombreado: Las copas de los árboles interceptan la radiación solar evitando el calentamiento de las edificaciones, asfalto y pavimentos.
Evapotranspiración: La transpiración de las hojas, requiere energía calorífica capturada del ambiente, produciéndose un descenso de la temperatura en su entorno.
Las copas de los árboles generan una pantalla protectora contra la radiación solar, minimizando el efecto isla de calor en las ciudades. Foto: Graciela Arosemena.
La capacidad del arbolado para la modificación del clima urbano, sobre todo para la reducción de las altas temperaturas, depende fundamentalmente del grado de cobertura arbórea, es decir el porcentaje de superficie urbana situada bajo la proyección de la copa de los árboles, así como de la tipología y la densidad de las copas.
Sobre el efecto refrescante de la vegetación en ambientes urbanos, se ha reportado que mediciones hechas en distintas ciudades del Norte, tal como el estudio realizado en el parque zoológico de Berlín (Hoerbert, 1982). En este estudio las diferencias de temperatura fueron de 5-7°C y la humedad relativa variaba un 10%[1] y reporta variaciones de entre 3 y 8 ºC para distintas composiciones y especies de árboles, las mediciones se hicieron también en distintas épocas el año.
Mediciones sobre el efecto de las sombras se han realizado en estudios en donde se valoraban diseño, tipologías de edificio, paisaje y climas, encontraron que el ahorro energético estaría alrededor del 25% al 80%[2]. Los mayores ahorros fueron asociados con la densidad y extensión de las sombras, siendo la radiación solar la mayor fuente de ganancias de calor (Simpson & McPherson, 1996).
Conservación de la biodiversidad y patrimonio natural
Desde una óptica ambiental, los espacios abiertos urbanos, además de ejercer funciones de control climático, o de filtro para la contaminación atmosférica, entre otros, debe garantizar la conservación de la diversidad biológica, y una permeabilidad que permita las conexiones ecológicas, mantenido valores ambientales y paisajísticos.
Las ciudades pueden jugar un papel primordial en la conservación de la biodiversidad a través de estrategias que incluyen la introducción de ecosistemas y hábitats en el tejido urbano, o la preservación de los preexistentes, además la creación de espacios verdes urbanos continuos que garantice la conectividad biológica y controlen la fragmentación territorial (Generalitat de Catalunya, 2002). Un objetivo fundamental de ello es establecer como elemento vertebrador del territorio una red continua de espacios naturales, que atraviese la ciudad y conecte los espacios naturales periurbanos con los espacios naturales urbanos.
Es evidente la necesidad de aumentar la natura en la ciudad y fortalecer las conexiones entre la ciudad y su entorno, y una de las piezas claves para conseguirlo son las estrategias de arborización urbana, orientadas a proporcionar efectivamente hábitat a especies de aves, mamíferos principalmente. Los árboles proveen hábitat, refugio y alimento para la fauna local. Para garantizar una arborización que restaure la biodiversidad ecológica en las ciudades, debe escogerse especies vegetales nativas, las cuales son a las que la fauna está acostumbrada. De hecho, el uso de especies exóticas es una de las causas directas de amenaza de la biodiversidad y la conservación de ecosistemas, junto con la destrucción de hábitat.
Por el contrario, las especies nativas de árboles en ambientes urbanos proveen alimento a fauna, que sería reducida o ausente en el caso de árboles exóticos. Además, árboles nativos incrementan la riqueza y diversidad de fauna, con lo cual una estrategia importante de arborización urbana es el reconocimiento cuáles especies nativas de árboles son hábitat de determinada fauna, con tal de establecer un hábitat biodiverso en el entorno urbano.
Parque Natural Metropolitano, en medio de la ciudad de Panamá. Bosque húmedo a seco tropical reserva de biodiversidad que brinda servicios ambientales tales como actuar de esponja de agua lluvia y sumidero de gases contaminantes. Por todas estas funciones, debe ser considerado un equipamiento de la infraestructura verde de la ciudad. Foto: Graciela Arosemena.
Un nuevo modelo de espacios abiertos urbanos
El impacto que están generando los problemas ambientales, locales y globales, sobre los entornos urbanos no tienen precedentes en la historia urbana, lo cual amerita no solamente repensar la forma de planificar y construir ciudades, sino además, es fundamental un nuevo planteamiento del sistema de espacios libres y verdes urbano. Es por ello que la ecología, biología y la climatología, son disciplinas que han adquirido una mayor relevencia en el paisajismo, en la planificación y diseño de espacios abiertos, para la configuración de verdaderos equipamientos urbanos.
Ninguna ciudad puede afrontar los retos ambientales del siglo XXI, sin considerar la construcción de una infraestructura verde ecológica.
Akbari, & et al. (1992). Cooling our communities: A Guidebook to tree planting and light colored surfacing. . U.S.A EPA, Ofice of Policy Anallysis, Climate Change Division, Washington, D.C.
CATHALAC. (2008). Potential Impacts of Climate Change and Biodiversity in Central America, Mexico and Dominican Republic.
Georgi, N., & Zafiriadis, K. (2006). The Impact of trees on microclimate in urban areas. Urban Ecosyst .
Hoerbert, M. (1982). A climatic and air hygienic aspects in planning of iner-city open spaces: Berliner Grosser Tiergartes. Energy and Buildings, 5 (1).
Naredo, J. (1997). Sobre el origen, eluso y el contenido del término sostenible. Cuadernos de Guincho .
ONU-HABITAT. (2011). Informe mundial sobre asentamientos humanos. Las ciudades y el cambio climático: Orientación para polítcas. Londres: Earthscan.
Rueda, S (1995) Ecologia Urbana: Barcelona i la seva Regió Metropolitana com a referents. Ed. Beta Editoria
Simpson, J., & McPherson, E. (1996). Potential of tree shade for reducing residential energy use in California. Journal of Arboriculture (22).
Sorensen, M., Barzetti, V., Keipi, K., & Williams, J. (1998). Manejo de las áreas verdes urbanas. Documento de buenas prácticas. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. División de Medio Ambiente del Departamento de Desarrollo Sostenible., Washington, D.C.
Tremblay, L., & Ross, E. (2007). A Preliminary Assessment of Ecosystem Vulnerability to Climate Change in Panama.McGill University and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama.
United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2016). Green Infrastructure and Climate Change. Collaborating to Improve Community Resiliency.
Vargas, K., McPherson, G., Simpson, J., Peper, P., Gardner, S., & Et al. (2008). Tropical Community Tree Guide. Benefits, Costs, and Strategic Planting. United States Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. Pacific Southwest Research Station.
Notas
[1] Mascaró, L. R. AMBIÊNCIA URBANA = URBAN ENVIROMENT. Sagra-D. C. Luzzatto, Porto Alegre, 1996.
[2]Meier, A.K. STRATEGIC LANDSCAPING AND ARI-CONDITIONING SAVINGS: A LITERATURE REVIEW. Energy and Buildings. 1990.
By engaging with residents during the rain simulation process, we were able to explain exactly why their Sustainable Drainage System had been installed and let them see how the system performed with a massive volume of water typical of an extreme rainfall event.
Nature-based solutions are emerging as a key mechanism for renaturing cities, yet barriers around evidence and effectiveness still stand in the way of widespread rollout across our urban landscapes. More by luck than design, we learned that a straightforward technical test of a Sustainable Drainage System (SuDS) retrofit scheme in a social housing estate could provide an innovative mechanism for overcoming local authority and local community reticence towards nature-based solution SuDS. By literally creating a storm in a bioswale, we saw perceptions change through experiencing SuDs in action; securing community confidence and transforming a London borough’s approach towards managing stormwater with nature.
Nature-based solutions provide the potential to reconnect urban communities with nature and the broad array of ecosystem service benefits that nature can provide. Nature-based solutions are solutions that use nature and/or natural processes to simultaneously provide ecological, environmental, social, and economic benefits. Whilst consensus on an exact definition for nature-based solutions has yet to emerge, the evidence base in relation to the cost-effectiveness of such approaches has expanded and it would appear that our urban landscapes will be transforming in the coming years as nature-based solutions become a more widely adopted strategy globally (TNOC essays: 1, 2, 3, 4).
Emerging research links nature-based solutions with everything from improved health outcomes (Kabisch et al. 2017), to better social cohesion (Rutt and Gulsrud 2016), from stormwater management benefits (Haase 2015) to locking away carbon (Davies et al. 2011), and from economic uplift of property (Eftec 2013) to increased workforce productivity (Saraev 2012). Despite this ever-expanding list of potential benefits, key barriers continue to constrain widespread implementation across our cities.
Derbyshire St Pocket Park, a nature-based solution pocket park in the heart of East London, UK.
As urban ecologists and nature-based solution advocates, we wear several interdisciplinary hats. This includes both working as consultants, monitoring the ecosystem service benefits of nature-based solutions, and as academics, trying to push learning and understanding of the planning, delivery and legacy-management phases of nature-based solution implementation. It is the colliding of these two worlds that has provided us with some insight into barriers that can stand in the way of nature-based solution acceptance and rollout, and simple ways that some of these barriers can be addressed.
We are currently working on the EU Horizon 2020 project Connecting Nature. The project brings together researchers, industry, local authorities, local communities, and NGOs to create a community of cities that fosters peer-to-peer learning and capacity building. The aim of the project is to support cities in upscaling and out-scaling nature-based solutions, to move them from a situation where they are delivering innovative small-scale nature-based solution pilots, to one where nature-based solutions are delivered across the city and represent “business as usual”.
One of the Connecting Nature Cities, Glasgow (UK) working to implement nature-based solutions as a mechanism for enhancing the multifunctionality of their open spaces.
One of the key activities of Connecting Nature involves collaborative work with local authorities across a number of partner cities, exploring the barriers they encounter to nature-based solutions roll-out. This process revealed that different cities can face different challenges, generating a wide range of barriers that cover all aspects of nature-based solution implementation from finance and entrepreneurship, to governance and technical design. Encouragingly however, because this process established a peer-to-peer exchange between cities and practitioners, it transpired that barriers faced by one city were often a challenge that had already been addressed by another. Demonstrating the value of a co-creation approach, these exchanges identified that a range of innovative solutions were possible and that these merely need to be recognised and shared amongst practitioners to help them to unlock nature-based solutions barriers. It is an example of such an innovative solution to barriers that we share here.
Connecting Nature peer-to-peer exchange. City officials from across the EU working together to explore barriers to upscaling and outscaling nature-based solutions.
From the Connecting Nature scoping process, it was apparent that some of the key barriers to the rollout of nature-based solution related to public perception of nature-based solutions, buy-in from different local authority departments, and confidence of local authorities in the guaranteed performance of such solutions. Whilst exploring these barriers in one of our academic workshops, it became clear that during our double-lives as a consultants, we had been directly involved in a project that established an innovative but relatively simple solution that could address these barriers with a single action. The solution came out of a project spearheading the retrofit of low-cost nature-based solutions for the management of stormwater: Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS). Nature-based solutions are increasingly being adopted for stormwater management, but many local authorities are still cautious about adopting such an approach. In many local authorities, SuDS are still either in the infancy or are not being adopted at all. This is particularly the case when considering retrofitting SuDS into existing developments, and adopting a nature-based solution approach to SuDS design.
The EU Life+ project Climate Proofing Social Housing Estates was a pioneering programme aiming to showcase a novel SuDS retrofit approach and demonstrate the multifunctional benefits it could provide. Led by Groundwork London, the project investigated whether nature-based solution SuDS could be cost-effectively retrofitted across three social housing estates in the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham in the UK. Our role in the project was to lead on delivering the monitoring of the project to assess the ecosystem service benefits of such an approach. A key part of this was monitoring a range of the SuDS features to assess their performance in terms of stormwater management. Various monitoring methods were adopted that included the use of weather stations, pressure sensors, and fixed-point cameras to quantify and qualify the rainfall capture and attenuation performance of the SuDS. These monitoring methods provided data to support the local authority in gaining confidence in the implementation of SuDS within the borough. However, of the monitoring methods implemented, by far the most effective for breaking down a range of barriers to nature-based solution implementation was also one of the simplest. This effectiveness was also a happy coincidence rather than an intended impact of the monitoring design:
Rain gardens installed in the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham to take rainfall runoff from the road. Part of the Climate-Proofing Social Housing Estates EU Life+ project.
One of the key problems of monitoring in-situ SuDS features is that, in order to understand how they perform under extreme weather events, you have to wait for an extreme weather event to occur. Most SuDS features are designed to manage a specific sized weather event, for example a 1 in 10, 1 in 30, or 1 in 100-year rainfall event. By definition therefore, in order to monitor their as-designed performance, you might have to wait 100 years for an event of that magnitude. As if this is not enough of a challenge, field monitoring being the fickle thing that it is, you can almost guarantee that when that mega-event does finally occur, the battery will have gone on your pressure gauge and the data will be missed!
So, to try to avoid the vagaries of waiting for natural storm events, we decided to create a storm(!) and simulate our own extreme downpour. Checking through the literature, we found evidence that storm simulation had been trialled under laboratory conditions (Alfredo et al. 2010), but in-the-field testing had only been carried out on a small scale previously (Alves et al. 2014). So, it seemed like a fairly novel approach on the scale we were operating. The aim of the simulation was to mimic the rainfall magnitude to which the SuDS feature had been designed (1 in 100-year storm event) by inputting the volume of rain that would be expected to fall during a one hour storm event of the same magnitude. The volume was calculated by multiplying the depth of rainfall expected to fall during such an event by the as-built catchment area for each individual SuDS feature that was to be tested. The calculated volume of water was then to be gradually pumped into each SuDS element being tested over a one hour period.
Depositing a 1 in 100-year storm event onto a real-life housing estate comes with a certain amount of anxiety… The night before the simulation was spent checking and rechecking calculations, nervous that 10,000 litres seemed like an awful lot of water and that some erroneous zeros in the wrong place could lead to way too much water flowing into the SuDS feature than we wanted! Fortunately, this fear proved to be completely unfounded and the storm simulation went very smoothly.
Breaking down civic barriers
For the simulation, we used a bowser containing water collected from the outflow of a wastewater treatment centre so that there was no waste of mains water. As the 10,000 litres were pumped out, we used a selection of monitoring methodologies to assess the capacity of the SuDS feature and the control flow chamber (the chamber that releases water to the storm drain system if the feature is overloaded) to deal with this quantity of stormwater.
The simulation was a great success, with no exceedance of capacity and all standing water infiltrated into the ground within a mere 15 minutes of the end of the event. As the event was organised, in part, to help break down the nature-based solution barriers related to buy-in from different local authority departments, and confidence of local authorities in the guaranteedperformance, local authority representatives were on site to observe the test, and it was videoed so that results could be shared. As this was the first attempt at simulating an in-situ storm event, the local authority representatives were the extent of the invited participants, as there was some nervousness about running such a simulation for the first time. However, this proved to be a missed opportunity in relation to breaking down further nature-based solution barriers. We wouldn’t learn the extent of this missed opportunity until our next storm simulation.
Breaking down community barriers
Buoyed by the success of the first rainfall simulation, for our next storm simulation at a series of rain gardens on another of the housing estates, we publicised the event more widely and some local residents joined us to watch the test in action. Unbeknownst to us at the time of planning, this proved to be an incredibly successful venture, specifically for solving one of the remaining barriers to nature-based solution rollout: public perception of nature-based solutions.
Stormwater simulation at Sun Road Rain Gardens
The development of the nature-based solution SuDS across the three estates had very much been carried out using a co-creation approach that incorporated the residents’ input. Nevertheless, as we discovered during conversations with residents at the start of the simulation, there were still lingering concerns and a lack of understanding about how and why their local open spaces had been changed. Of most value from these interactions, we learned an unexpected misconception held by residents: a sense of anxiety that their properties had been put at greater risk of flooding locally in order to reduce the risk of flooding and combined sewage overflow across London as a whole.
By engaging with residents during the rain simulation process, we were able to explain exactly why their SuDs had been installed and let them see how the system performed with a massive volume of water typical of an extreme rainfall event. At the end of the simulation, there was very positive feedback and residents informed us that their perceptions had changed completely. Most importantly, seeing the SuDs in action had assuaged their concerns regarding changes in water management across their open spaces.
Such was the success of this endeavour in building confidence in local authority planning teams and local community members, that we would recommend this type of hands-on demonstration in all nature-based solution SuDS retrofit projects (or at least until SuDS is more widely accepted). Overall, the project was such a success that the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham is leading the way in rolling out SuDS retrofit in London, including a much more substantial retrofit on the largest London housing estate in White City. A critical part of this success though was the potential effect of this kind of citizen-focused storm simulation on the local community. It was eye-opening to experience first-hand both the stress that a change in stormwater management had brought to local residents, and the subsequent change in perceptions by experiencing the SuDS in action.
Co-creation
Nature-based solutions are delivered through co-creative processes involving local community participation. The success of their legacy and wider uptake is dependent on both this co-creation approach to design and on community acceptance, understanding, and ownership. Citizen engagement delivered through this basic storm simulation testing proved to be an effective way to support this understanding. In so doing, it represents an excellent mechanism for changing both civic and community perceptions, promoting social acceptance, and removing barriers that currently prevent nature-based solution mainstreaming.
The performance of the Beatrice House nature-based solution SuDS feature under storm simulation conditions. The bars represent the input of “stormwater”, the blue line represents the water level in relation to the pressure sensor depth.
In order to develop this process further, the next step would be to capture the resident’s perceptions before and after the storm simulation in a more formal way, to quantify the effect in terms of reducing stress and increasing resident understanding. For now though, we look forward to the continued rollout of this type of nature-based solution and the continued opportunity to create storms in a bioswale. We encourage others to follow suit with this kind of hands-on demonstration, to actively engage communities in performance assessment, and to begin to break down the barriers to successful broader nature-based solutions rollout.
Caroline is a Research Assistant in the Sustainability Research Institute at University of East London, working primarily on biodiversity and urban green infrastructure design
The good news is that far from being a theoretical exercise, cities are already well along the way of integrating their own climate and resilience plans into the Green New Deal framework.
It was only a year ago when the idea of a Green New Deal entered the American public sphere with a big splash. When a group of young activists, joined by an idealistic new crop of congresswomen, stormed the incoming house speaker’s office to demand nothing less than the wholesale transformation of unsustainable industrial systems into regenerative and equitable social and economic structures, few could have predicted just how rapidly and profoundly their action would shift the country’s political and moral ground.
The term “Green New Deal” had been floating around various progressive circles since 2007, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman first started using it as a moniker for a panoply of market-based climate solutions, from taxing carbon to creating incentives for wind and solar energy. As far back as 2009, UN Environment expanded the idea to “A Global Green New Deal” in a policy report that sought to connect economic recovery and poverty eradication with reduced carbon emissions and ecosystem degradation.
However, it wasn’t until that day in November 2018 when the promise of this modern version of the original New Deal—a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted in the 1930s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to dig the United States out of depression—was catapulted onto the national stage. Supported by a vast majority of Americans as an ambitious but viable blueprint to addressing an unprecedented climate emergency, the Green New Deal has not only become a rallying cry for a new generation and a litmus test for political candidates, but produced congressional declarations and policy proposals in the form of the Green New Deal Resolution and, most recently, The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act.
Credit: A Message From the Future. Narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and illustrated by Molly Crabapple.
And it’s not just in the United States that these three simple words have sparked widespread optimism. From Canada to Spain to the United Kingdom, a growing number of countries around the world have been framing their policy proposals around a broader Green New Deal framework. While local conditions and specific prescriptions vary for each country, there are now even calls for an International Green New Deal, modeled after the Marshall plan that followed World War II. The thinking goes that this transnational scale is needed to bring geographic, historic and technological equity to the process of protecting and repairing a biosphere we all share.
What do cities have to do with all of this?
In short, everything.
Growing Together by James McInvale (left), Breathing New Life Into America by Caitlin Alexander (center), The Green New Deal by Jordan Johnson (right). From the Green New Deal poster series by Creative Action Network.
You don’t have to venture far to understand why. A brief glance around the pages of TNOC offers a remarkable array of examples of just how diverse, complex, and far-reaching of a human and natural ecosystem the modern city is. Its interwoven physical, social, ecological and design strands make for a metabolism worthy of a human body. There is an inherent need for resilience built into an organism that has to function in such a densely populated space while putting so much stress on its natural systems.
Invariably, the stress on its natural environment also translates into stress on its economic and social environments, with some inhabitants faring better than others. This creates a need for structural interventions and investments in its weakest links, to offer access to basic resources to all residents, which is not only fair but an indicator of the organism’s overall health.
The good news is that urban visionaries have already been experimenting with the kinds of policy changes in transportation, housing, energy, education and a host of other sectors that are at the core of creating healthier organisms. Standards and frameworks—from Arup’s City Resilience Index and c40’s Climate Action Planning Framework to Ecocity Standards and the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework—have been developed to create roadmaps for cities on the most holistically sustainable paths forward.
Understanding the city as a bioregional urban ecosystem. Graphic: Ecocity Builders.
The conditions, challenges and aspirations laid out in these frameworks for urban sustainability, in essence, mimic the conditions, challenges and aspirations of the Green New Deal. And with cities having been at the forefront of the fight to mitigate climate change for quite some time now (to date, major cities like New York, London, and Paris as well as 1,180 jurisdictions and local governments covering 290 million citizens have declared a climate emergency), it stands to reason that these microcosms for humanity’s unbalanced ecological budget make for great laboratories to shape the most effective, comprehensive, and inclusive national and international Green New Deal programs.
There are numerous reasons why cities are uniquely positioned to fulfill the central Green New Deal tenets, but here are three important ones that come to mind.
1. The Physical Impact of Cities
According to the latest UN reports, cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, residents of just 100 cities account for 20 percent of humanity’s overall carbon footprint. From transportation to construction to food waste, no other entity emits as many greenhouse gases as the city.
There is simply no mathematical path to attaining the principal goals laid out in the Green New Deal Resolution without significant contributions by the largest artifacts humans build. Achieving “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers” and investing “in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century” will not be attainable without cities doing much of the heavy lifting.
Green New Deal photo booth. Design & Photo: Sunrise Movement.
2. The Social Tapestry of Cities
The “fair and just transition for all communities and workers” outlined above points to the next pivotal provision in the resolution with regard to cities. In the United States in particular, but also across the globe, the growing rift between the haves and have-nots—not only economically but in terms of clean air and water, climate and community resiliency, healthy food, access to nature, and a sustainable environment—has disproportionately washed over its city-regions.
As the most densely populated settlements have had the most experience in grappling with and addressing these social and environmental inequities, they are also best equipped to offer models on how to level the playing field. Or, as the resolution states, to “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of frontline and vulnerable communities”.
Green New Deal photo booth. Design & Photo: Sunrise Movement.
3. The Ecological Footprint of Cities
As recent reports of some of the world’s largest cities have shown, consumption, or embodied emissions from goods, food, and services may be as much as 60 percent larger than previously estimated. This departure from a two-dimensional, production-based carbon footprint assessment puts cities at the vanguard of the kind of whole systems ecological or “atmosphere-based” accounting that must be at the core of any large scale remedy to climate change.
The resolution’s aim to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere by restoring natural ecosystems, enhancing biodiversity, and promoting an international exchange of technology, expertise, products, funding, and services thus places cities into yet another pole position for Green New Deal modeling. Moreover, with social and economic justice at the front and center of the resolution, the creation of better equity between cities in developed and developing countries provides a blueprint for an eventual Global Green New Deal.
Green New Deal photo booth. Design & Photo: Sunrise Movement.
A Global Green New Deal for Cities
The good news is that far from being a theoretical exercise, cities are already well along the way of integrating their own climate and resilience plans into the Green New Deal framework. The City of Los Angeles is pitching its sustainability plan as its own version of the Green New Deal. Seattle recently launched itself on the path to a Green New Deal. Momentum for policies that help lay the groundwork for a national Green New Deal is growing in state and local legislatures across the United States, including conservative municipalities across the American heartland that are feeling the threats to their cultural identity from climate change and are willing to take action.
In Chico, California, a city of 100,000 that grew by 20% overnight due to the catastrophic 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed much of the neighboring town of Paradise, the City Council recently announced their Chico Green New Deal. The plan mandates 100 percent clean energy by 2020, climate neutrality by 2045, and that policy plans and initiatives to achieve these goals will be in place by 2026.
Chico Vice Mayor Alex Brown summarizes both the urgency and the vision: “We are in the midst of a climate crisis and cities and counties are uniquely situated to take the vision of a Green New Deal and apply it locally, using their unique strengths to steward the value of sustainable, resilient, just and economically stable communities.”
Credit: The Green New Deal, explained. Video: Vox.
And that’s just in the United States. The Green New Deal in the context of cities has already gone global, as a coalition of 94 mayors announced their intention to support a Global Green New Deal and recognize the “global climate emergency” at the c40 Climate Summit in October. In a tweet from the summit, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the co-authors of the resolution, summarized why cities are the perfect laboratories for a Global Green New Deal: “Federal governments are failing to act on the climate crisis. We can’t wait for others to lead.”
Green New Deal resolution co-author Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweets from c40 Summit. Photo: Twitter Screenshot.San Francisco Climate Mural Green New Deal art: Mona Caron. Photo: Sven Eberlein
Cities should remain open and willing to learn from other cities and with other cities and urban change makers so as to progress urban planning to urban resilience.
Experimentation is a way to bring new solutions or approaches to cities. As a researcher on sustainability and sustainability transitions, I believe that, if solutions are to be adopted and scaled to improve human and ecological conditions in our world, they require testing in the field, beyond closed-door labs but in real-life laboratories. This way we can better hybridise, stretch, and embed them.
With this motivation, 5 years ago we started the RESILIENT EUROPE project together with 11 cities in Europe, to think of ways to upgrade and improve deprived neighborhoods, adopting the lens of urban resilience. The idea was very practical and simple, informed heavily by the mounting evidence on both sustainability transitions and resilience: can we find what can work to change the course of development in underserved areas, experimenting with ideas to make them more resilient? If we figure out what can alter the present and the future in the toughest places, then we can build policy, social confidence, and knowledge on what works at various scales.
But our motivation was also deeper and much closer to the heart of the young and brave planners I had the opportunity to collaborate with: what about working together with the people in the places that need it the most rather than having one more “red-ribbon” project in areas that are already overperforming?
And yes, we experimented—it was the way forward.
But experimentation for what?
The cities of Resilient Europe worked in areas in their cities that have been assessed and marked as deprived neighborhoods and places of deteriorating resilience. Deprived neighborhoods are places with unrepaired or outdated infrastructure, abandoned or low-quality public spaces, detached or even alienated civil society, and with evidence of broken relationships among local residents and between residents and their Place—that is, with not “sense of Place”, or even Place detachment. In these areas, social policy programs or urban regeneration strategies have left their (often negative) mark by haphazard interventions and partial implementation of social capacity building programs. Many cities have seen numerous efforts using public consultation and social programs fail in such neighborhoods for unspecified or undetermined reasons. The reason is that researchers rarely investigate failed approaches. The focus is always on effective measures, best practices, and other “showcase” projects. It’s more fun to do another “red ribbon” project with a high probability of success.
Deprived neighborhoods are soft spots in the cities, places that require new ways of thinking, approaching and relating with the citizens. Many cities have seen a sequence of social programs that fail in deprived neighborhoods simply because the plans were drafted with the residence in mind but not in the room. Co-design and co-creation is often an aspiration but not a practice when it comes to urban planning, and even more to programs that have “social policy” character. But it is not only the policy and planning (mal)practice that reinforce a stigmatized image of these areas. It is also the stories, the narratives and their power in preconditioning anyone about what these places are like. Often, marking them as “problematic” or “challenging” stigmatizes them and does not allow seeing them as places that a positive transformation is possible.
In Resilient Europe, the partner cities chose exactly these places to work with, as the toughest case studies, so as to learn-by-doing for urban resilience. The cities and their focus neighborhoods were: Sint Antries in Antwerp, Belgium, Lawrence Hill and Easton in Bristol, United Kingdom, Zaleze in Katowice, Polland, Senge Park in Malmo, Sweden, West End in Vejle, Denmark, Pamvotis waterfront district in Ioannina, Greece, City center district in Potenza, Italy, Dolno Ezerovo in Burgas, Bulgaria, Toumba in Thessaloniki, Greece, Ruchill and Possil Park in Glasgow, United Kingdom and Afrikaanderwijk in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Experimenting is a process of trialing, testing, hybridizing an idea, approach or solution that centers on social and policy learning on the institutions, rules, roles and capacities of people to reorganize or rework their practices with and about the new idea, approach or solution. Experimentation allows for new institutions, new roles and capacities of people engaged into it to be trialed. Experimentation allows for this trialing to be ‘safe to fail’ and to maximise learning. It is also a process that connects imagination and creativity about new processes, new rules and new roles with practice through learning. Experiments are the spaces and places that experimentation is organized, facilitated, designed and realised.
Experimentation with what?
A large number of our experiments were about nature, or as we called systemic solutions that are powered by nature, nature-based solutions. Transition experiments with nature-based solutions foremost allowed citizens to bring their creativity and knowledge of place and nature as equals to planners and co-design interventions in the deprived neighborhoods. Experiments were the welcoming and open institutional spaces that enabled and facilitated the co-creation of solutions that showed the “power of nature in cities” (Frantzeskaki 2019).
In Antwerp, the community, social innovation initiative, and youth group, together with the city officers, co-designed interventions for flood reduction and climate mitigation through restoration of green spaces along the main streets and urban public spaces in the Saint Andries neighbourhood.
In Dolno Ezerovo neighborhood of Burgas, city officers and urban planners had the opportunity to open a dialogue with the residents about the outdated drainage canal. Together they co-created an action plan for the renaturing of the public space that will also allow a natural connection with the lake front. The transition experiment in Dolno Ezerovo included the active removal of sealed soil and planting of trees in a parcel of what was a sealed creek and in the public square that was celebrated by citizens and city alike. So, the experiment achieved what the city was failing to activate over years: a sense of community, and a sense of mission to this community, seeing the only public space they had, transformed from a cemented canal to a pocket park that all use and enjoy.
A view of Dolno Ezerovo, Burgas, Bulgaria. This sealed creek was the starting point of the experimentation, where in 2018 citizens together with planners unsealed a small part of it and started planting trees, transforming it to a green urban common. Photo: Niki Frantzeskaki, 2015
Bringing nature back in cities has been proven to be a catalytic theme and “attractor” for mobilizing citizens and for breaking the stereotypes that different actors had for each other. In Ioannina (Greece), a debate continues on how to restore the lake waterfront with nature-based solutions for both climate resilience and restored water quality. Increasingly, people became interested, with soaring participating in open meetings and workshops, from a small group of 10 to 150 people. When the “health of the lake” and “bringing back the nature in the waterfront” were proposed as “design requirements”, citizens and policy makers debated forcefully about priorities, areas that needed to be looked at first, and eventually created an on-line platform to crowdsource ideas on how to employ nature, beyond trees, and pocket parks to restore the lake front. It is a long process to build trust between people, and experiments in which everyone participates allow for such new relations and new institutions to be tested and be built. What the Ioannina city team learned is that restoring trust in nature was fast-paced. With the recent developments in the city, it is evident that nature-based solutions are valued solutions for the lake restoration and in the near future they will simply be the new reality of the city.
A view of the lakefront needing “restoration” of the Pamvotis Lake, in Ioannina City, Greece. Photo: Niki Frantzeskaki, 2015
Experiments allowed for new roles to be revealed, cast, and tested. The community (meaning citizens, civil society organisations, and small to medium enterprises of the neighborhoods in which the experiments took place) was took the lead in all the small-scale transition experiments in the majority of the cities, and the city played a facilitative and enabling role. This shift of roles is seen as a first step in active empowerment of the citizens and progression towards stewardship of places. For example, in Vejle in Denmark and in Potenza in Italy, citizens established community councils to self-organise how to restore and re-appropriate vacant urban place into green space for all. Veijle’s experiments showcased that they are “fast-paced wins” for the city, since due to their scale and attractive character, they get momentum and are quickly realized the moment the community is activated and supported. As such, experiments can become beacons of change, evincing today what it is possible for the cities of the future.
In Potenza city, the trauma of earthquake damages from the 1980s persists, and is very present in the ways the city understood resilience: most urban public spaces were cemented. Literally, everything in the city is very heavily fortified with cement, leaving just too little space for anything to grow or bloom. With the introduction and opening of the debate to “what will make our city resilient”, the city’s new approach enabled and mobilized active citizens to re-appropriate with green vacant space in the city centre, with urban agriculture as a pocket showcase for reimagining city’s common spaces beyond cement. These new initiatives, not only in Veijle and Potenza, but also in other cities of the RESILIENT EUROPE network of cities, resulted in new collaborative relations between the citizens and urban planners and the organization of a continuous exchange and dialogue in place of city-led consultation and information sessions about projects and decisions.
A view of West End’s empty urban parks in Veijle, Denmark. Photo: Niki Frantzeskaki, 2015Citizens creating a new urban green commons in Veijle West End. Photo: Niki Frantzeskaki, 2015A view of Potenza’s city centre, where cement and parked cars rein. Photo: Niki Frantzeskaki, 2015
Experiments are not only about solutions but inherently about people carrying these solutions. The experiments were humanized by bringing forward the “people of the experiment” more prominently rather than the systemic elements only that the experiment was set to trial or investigate. Humanizing the experiments showed that these experiments were not technocratic fixes to an urban problem but rather socio-technical or socio-ecological interventions that respond to social needs and consider social complexity. Humanizing the transition experiments does not mean to personalize them nor that specific communities only receive the benefits of the experiment. Rather it means that the uniqueness of the experiment is brought to the foreground, it bears a social meaning and community image and, in this way, ameliorating the political coloring of its impact.
Is experimentation natural in cities?
Cities and urban change agents in general have to rethink how existing spaces and places can be used for experiments in order to inspire transformative action for urban resilience. Here urban planners and urban change agents in general have to take two aspects into account: First, all experiments require open public spaces as spaces to meet, to act, to organize and often as places to transform. Second, existing spaces are often linked to past visions and plans for the city and are often the places that contest the future and the past. This sparks discussions, dialogues and often action for re-appropriation, regeneration and re-utilisation that fits the present and the future for urban resilience by urban innovators.
Cities should remain open and willing to learn from other cities and with other cities and urban change makers so as to progress urban planning to urban resilience. With the positive experience of city networks, cities can further valorize environments that allow them to learn-by-doing, and also learn from other cities and with other cities in a collaborative and interactive way. Receptivity to new ideas, new approaches and new solutions that can progress urban planning for urban resilience is critical for the cities that want to foster and achieve urban resilience in their future. Last but not least, inclusion in city networks and collaborative transdisciplinary research projects can be one but rather important future action for ensuring continuous learning and building of governance capacity for working for the cities of the future.
Jakarta Is Sinking So Fast, It Could End Up Underwater —New York Times headline, 12/21/17
A flash of silver-green in the water. That is all Hasan sees, but it is enough. He runs after, alongside, his small legs propelling him across the planks and platforms that crisscross the city. The wood once scratched underfoot, but it has gone smooth with time and wear, just as the soles of Hasan’s feet have grown thick and hearty, able to withstand all but the sharpest of splinters.
He hasn’t seen a turtle for days. He promised Ricardo he would get one for him. He said it braggingly, hands on hips, in the way of eight-year-olds who still believe they are unstoppable, that the world holds no match for them. Now, days later, he is beginning to feel twinges of chagrin, a new emotion. But then, there it is: the flash of silver-green. Redemption.
See a video of a reading of the story at TNOC Summit below.
Hasan hears his feet thunk-thunk on the wooden platforms. The planks whisper softly below his pounding weight. He has no fear that they will break. They will hold; they have always held. He has run this way and that across the city since he was able to walk. He hears the swish of the turtle, gliding through the water alongside, the lap of the water’s edge against the planks. The waterways cut through the city like a maze for which Hasan knows every turn and curve and dead end.
The turtle, too, knows its way. The turtle, too, has been here before. The turtle watched the ingress of water into the city, but unlike the humans, it watched without fear, without alarm. It watched, instead, with patience. It waited to retake the land the humans had taken from it.
The turtle makes a sharp right. From where Hasan stands, the turtle’s logic is unclear, but no matter. Hasan has only to follow, to trust that the turtle knows where it is going and why. Hasan jumps from board to board, keeping the turtle always in sight. He runs past the fishermen, past the dry goods shop, past the seamstresses, heads bent over their work. Past the school where he spends six hours a day learning to read and write, learning his arithmetic, so that one day he can go to University like Ricardo. Ricardo is a doctor, Hasan knows, but not the kind of doctor who can fix a body. He’s a doctor of turtles is what Hasan thinks, a doctor of the sea.
Ricardo came to study their city. That’s what he told Hasan. That their city was the only place in the world that lived so close to the water, the only city in the world that had found a way to coexist with the rising tides. Hasan nods his head when Ricardo tells him this, but it does not totally make sense to Hasan. Of course they live close to the water. Where else would they live?
Hasan’s grandparents tell him the city was not always like this, but he has known nothing but. To him, it is beautiful, a never-ending playground of mangroves and sea hibiscus, long-tailed monkeys and heron. His grandparents tell him the city sank, not just because of the rising waters of the sea but because of human greed, human corruption, humans digging under the surface of the city, lowering it inch by inch. That, even, was before their time. Eighty years earlier, an era unknown.
Many fled to higher ground, but those who stayed welcomed the water. It was the corrupt ones who fled, that’s what Hasan’s grandparents say. Those who remained adapted, rebuilt. They raised their houses on stilts; they grew accustomed to moving about the city on makeshift rafts. They built the platforms that Hasan runs across now. The government offered to resettle them, to move them to solid ground. But why should they move? Hasan’s family has lived in the city for centuries. His ancestors walked its roadways back when it was known only as the port of Sunda Kelapa, a valuable stop on European trade routes. His ancestors fought for Sunan Gunungjati, driving out the first colonizers. Sunan Gunungjati, who named the city Jayakarta. Victorious City. These are the lessons Hasan learns in school. Impossible to understand the present, his teacher says, without understanding the past.
The turtle has reached a dead end. But it does not fret. It glides to a stop and floats, contemplating its next move. It is patient. It feels the warmth of the sun above, the cool water below. It has time.
Hasan pulls the equipment Ricardo gave him from the pouch that hangs across his back. He lies on his stomach and reaches his hands into the water. Slowly, slowly. He inches his hands toward the turtle’s body until he holds its ancient mass between his fingers. He lifts it out of the water and into the humid air, gentle, gentle. It flaps its flippers, but it does not fight. He holds the turtle by the body, careful, careful, just like Ricardo showed him. He takes its flipper between his thumb and index finger. It trembles in his hand. Hasan runs the disinfectant swab over the flipper and clips on the metal tag, quick, quick, the flipper tough like leather. He eases the turtle back into the water and feels the splash of drops on his face. He wonders if he will ever see this turtle again. The tags will help him know.
Hasan watches it swim away, untroubled by his brief intervention, the feel of human hands already forgotten.
Hasan, too, will one day be a doctor of the sea.
The turtles, Ricardo says, are coming back.
Jayakarta. Victorious.
This story is also published in the book A Flash of Silver Green, and on line at ArtsEverywhere.ca, which, along with The Nature of Cities and others, was a lead sponsor of this collection.
New ideas such as green roofs could add a decent amount to Cairo’s green spaces, given the huge amount of abundant flat concrete roofs. The idea has triggered the government’s attention in the form of two national campaigns.
I live in a country that lives the dream of conquering the desert and building new cities. Cairo is the second largest city in Africa with a booming population crossing 23 million over an area representing less than 5 percent of the whole country’s land. I always wondered what is so special about my city that, according to various metrics, it is one the fastest growing cities in the world, in terms of population.
Why do we build more cities in the sand?
How is my government dealing with the city’s overpopulation? The answer is simple, according to their perception: “lets conquer the desert and build new cities!”. There is also a paradoxical situation in which the state constantly attempts to “green the desert”, often with little success, while on the other hand failing to strike a balance that allows for the protection and increased productivity of existing agricultural land.
Cairo’s Informal Settlements represents 60 % of its footprint accommodating around 17 Million inhabitants. Photo: Abdallah Tawfic
To escape from the congestion of central Cairo with all its challenges, there are two patterns evolving to absorb the increasing population. The first is building illegally on existing agriculture land on the peripheries of Cairo—inside the delta, which is known as the “breathing lung and the food basket” of Egypt. The absence of effective laws that prohibit agriculture land encroachment, and the leniency of the government in dealing with violators is resulting in the continuous increase of such activities. This is also exacerbated through time when lands are being inherited by more people and fragmented to smaller plots. Through time the living style has changed and farmers owning small plots of agriculture lands are realizing that constructing/selling houses is an easier way of making money, compared to agriculture activity, which usually requires continuous interventions, in terms of technology, labor, operation and maintenance and the return of investment.
Agricultural land incremental transformation into informal settlements through time. Credit: Abdallah Tawfic
This pattern creates lots of challenges in terms of open and green spaces. Those lands were originally divided according to the agriculture basin subdivision and have been transformed through time to unplanned dense urban dwellings. The aftermath of this incremental transformation could be described as “A Transformation from active agricultural producers to intense inactive consumers”.
The second pattern is the governmental vision to expand toward the east and west of Cairo, away from the river, building new cities in the desert. David Sims, in his book “Understanding Cairo”, describes new desert cities as “an investment bubble; and a vehicle for the dispensation of patronage and favors”, referring to desert real estate investors being either behind the bars or on the run. The problem is that very few state funds have gone to the development of Cairo’s existing informal settlements, which are the home of two third of Cairo’s population, whereas the few, largely elite suburban inhabitants out in the desert have seen countless millions poured into their communities for the development of those new desert cities.
Cairo’s East-West expansions and urban agglomerations evolving on agriculture land around Cairo through time. Images: Earthobservatory.NASA.gov
How are green spaces defined in Cairo?
Aerial Image of Embaba one the most densely populated urbanized districts in Cairo, and completely lacking open/green spaces. Photo: arch2o.com
Cairo’s share per capita of green spaces—1.7 m2/capita—is much lower than the international norms and standards, and according to the study “ Review of green spaces provision approaches in Cairo, Egypt” by Merhem Kelleg is still lower even when compared to more arid cities like Dubai. WHO recommendations of 9 m2/capita for a livable environment and 50 m2 for ideal living conditions. This 1.7 m2/capita is not evenly distributed among Cairo’s population. More than half of the city’s population only have 0.5 m2/capita; 70% of the population experience less than the city average of 1.7 m2/capita. In other words, the little green and open space there is concentrated in just a few neighborhoods.
Recreational green space has historically been provided in Cairo at a very low level compared to other cities globally and in the region. Much of the green space that is provided—by municipal government or private entrepreneurs—is provided as a private amenity, enclosed and charged for either by membership fee or entry toll.
A study conducted by Kelleg about green spaces provision in Cairo revealed that two thirds of the green spaces areas in Cairo is provided by the private sector, when the other one third could usually be found in private sports clubs. The focus for private green spaces can be clearly seen in either sports club or gated residential communities. Recently, a growing number of gated communities has been developed especially in the new desert cities East and West of Cairo. These compounds mainly target high income families promising safety through fencing the community with big concrete walls and trained security staff who controls the entrances, with a promise of bringing a better quality of life. In their master plans they tend to focus on the presence of vast green to promote their projects, usually using a reverse psychology of the contrast image that you should run away from, a polluted, chaotic and densely populated non green city of Cairo.
Sporting Clubs are private recreational areas that provides reasonable amount of green spaces to individuals, but with annual memberships. They provide leisure environment and direct access to well managed and maintained landscapes and green areas. Those clubs are usually the escape for residents of Cairo’s middle and upper-class families.
There are other green spaces that evolved in Cairo through partnerships between different entities, adding to the total area of greenery in Cairo. Most of them charge entry tickets, but as the project stakeholders have different agendas and aims, the prices of the tickets vary a great deal: some are relatively affordable for a great percentage of the public like Al Azhar park, being implemented in partnership between Agha Khan foundation, the Egyptian Government as well as some local NGOs. The park, developed at a cost in excess of USD $30 million, opened its gates in 2005 as a gift to Cairo from Aga Khan IV: a descendant of the Fatimid Imam-Caliphs who founded the city of Cairo in the year 969. The low entrance ticket price allows for diversity of socioeconomic strata to benefit from the green spaces inside the park, compared to other green spaces that usually charges a relatively high entrance fee. Despite the important role those green spaces play in adding to the total share of green spaces, they cannot be considered a reliable source for green space for the public as they are designed for specific stakeholder and could be categorized as semiprivate green spaces.
El Azhar Park in the center of old Islamic Cairo is one of very few attempts of affordable semipublic gated Parks. Photo: Agha Khan Development Network
The government has only one centralized entity responsible for the creation and management of any city-related green space. This entity—“ The National Authority for Beautification and Cleanliness”, NABC”—does not get strong political and financial governmental support compared to other local authorities. The authority is also concerned with solving more pressing issues in Cairo, including solid waste management, with the support of the ministry of Environment.
The absence of strategies for green spaces in the city, a lack of policies and governmental support, and the general unawareness of the importance of landscape to the surrounding built environment contribute to the currently poor situation of green spaces Cairo.
It is also obvious that the social aspects of green spaces is mostly overlooked, which affects the livability and social attitudes in Cairo. “Do not ask me about sensations in green spaces because I have lost them a long time ago. My only concern is to feed my family. Green spaces and sensations is a luxury, which I cannot afford even thinking of”, answered one of the interviewees to a question of “How essential to people’s daily lives are the feelings evoked by green spaces?” according to detailed PhD research done on the dynamics of urban green space in Cairo.
In the same study, when asking the residents how do they perceive the problems of existing green spaces, the most common answers were: “Social Behavior” (or misbehavior of certain users in terms of respecting others); “Security” (or lack of nearby police stations and security guards); and “Maintenance” (the lack of essential public services, including seating and site furniture). These problems lower the use-value of green space to residents and may reduce the visiting frequencies, especially for children, families, and women.
Just because we are a sprawling concrete metropolis in a desert does not mean we don’t need some public greenery in our lives. And luckily, there are a few places in Cairo where you can find just that, even if you don’t belong to a sporting club. Districts like Zamalek and Maadi are considered relatively rich in green spaces, However, there is obvious inequality in terms of green space distribution when comparing those districts to other middle/low income ones, situated only a short distance away within the boundaries of the same city.
Public Green Spaces are relatively in good shape in middle-upper class districts like Zamalek & Maadi. Photos: Fraigo (Flickr)
Is it possible to revive Cairenes’ biophilia?
Biophilia is a hypothesis suggesting simply that we as human beings have a feeling of love to all what is living, and that we always seek connections with nature and other forms of life. How can people living in Cairo define their own Biophilia given the challenging urban patterns they live in?
Most of the new Cairenes generations nowadays are not well connected to the natural environment. It could be due to the struggle of the normal Cairo resident in finding a simple and defined access to public green spaces. There is so much pressure on land in Cairo that green spaces become sidelined as the least important use of the land.
As described by the cofounder of Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, There could be two possible models to revive green spaces in Cairo and present it to the public in a sustainable manner. One could be having some commercial activities attached to existing parks, such as concession stands or cafeterias, which would generate income. A park of a small fee ticket for the general public would not impede residents from enjoying green spaces, and at the same time high end restaurants could be introduced to subsidize such tickets and work on making this park as much alive as possible.
The other option is what is called “Privately Owned Public Space” or POPS, a model introduced in many cities around the world and very popular in New York City. It works by inviting the private sector, including banks, companies, law firms, and large cooperation to work inside the city center itself. A part of their branding could be to have a little bit of an urban park outside the premises or headquarters, and it becomes part of their marketing image to dedicate some of their property to public use.
Those two ideas are usually welcomed by the government, given that the budget of public green spaces is always way less than what is really needed for the city and this could support many agendas to improve the livelihood in the city. The challenge facing the government is usually how to create a sustainable public green space, that are free of charge and in good shape for the public. Collecting entrance fees and privatization of public spaces could partially solve the issue of regular operation and maintenance through the acquired funds, however, it contradicts with the realization of environmental justice and proving that green spaces is a free and substantial right for anyone living in the city away from any kind of discrepancies. Given the existing socioeconomic conditions in Cairo and the increasing percentages of urban poverty, those ideas will not find acceptance from a big sect of the Cairenes urban fabric, who are focused on basic needs provision, rather than paying fees for a “luxury” setting as perceived.
Thinking out of the box… up to the top of it
New ideas such as green roofs could add a decent amount to Cairo’s green spaces, given the huge amount of abundant flat concrete roofs, and given the fact that Cairo holds at least 40 % of the total amount of Egypt’s built-up area. The idea has triggered the government’s attention, as they launched two national campaigns with the support of the Ministry of Environment and Cairo Governorate, to Green as much governmental, public and residential buildings possible. The idea is appealing and is expected to have a positive impact on the urban life in Cairo if applied on a larger scale.
Roofs in Cairo are usually used as storage space. In conventional residential buildings any tenant can have an access to the roof and may usually use some storing space for free upon agreement with the building owner. Turning any residential building’s roof green, which will then be used, operated and maintained by all tenants would require a cost sharing scheme alongside the approval of the building owner.
Productive Green Roofs could be a possible solution to increase green spaces in dense areas of Cairo and also tackle food security issues in the growing city. Photo: Urban Greens Egypt
In Cairo’s informal settlements the situation is not simple. The land was historically illegally squatted and converted into residential buildings. The problem arises when apartments are sold to individuals, and the roofs are no longer owned by anyone, but converted in to a shared ownership for all the building tenants. In informal concrete buildings of 10 floors with usually no elevators, a green roof might be a pleasing idea for tenants living at the top floors compared to the ones living in the lower ones. Cost sharing to build a green roof in this case is still not easy to apply and would require more equal incentives for all tenants.
Green roofs could be connected to agriculture production and this could be an incentive supporting the spread of the idea over different social strata. The benefit can start with decreasing food expenditures and creating smart agriculture job opportunities, to being able to produce healthy and fresh food, as well as reconnecting the people again through a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) model. Using environmentally friendly materials that are durable, locally available and cheap is the key for disseminating the concept of productive green roofs in Cairo.
Rooftops in our urban centers represent a strong potential of currently underused space. The transformation of these urban rooftops into a socioecological resource through an increased implementation of green roof technology is becoming a normal practice in many cities around the world. As a result of the growing interest in urban agriculture practices, a new type of green roofs is emerging. It is no longer a question of whether or not green roofs should be implemented, but rather how their impact can be maximized beyond their recognized environmental values. Green roofs usually target densely populated cities and urban agglomerations that lack open/green spaces. This is exactly where the presence of agricultural lands is rare, and the proximity to fresh and nutritious produce is diminishing. The development of Productive Green Roofs could transform conventional green roofs into business-driven systems if properly studied and implemented.
A model of a rooftop garden in a public school in one of Cairo’s Informal Settlements. Credit: Rouba DagherA teacher explaining to students how to plant and harvest at the school rooftop farm, in one of Cairo’s Informal. Photo: Abdullah Tawfic
Lufa Farms project in Montreal, Canada and Gotham Greens in NY and Chicago are excellent examples of utilizing underused roof spaces in creating a multidimensional agriculture business opportunity. Those projects created a trend that will one day impact the regional agricultural market in Canada and the US if properly disseminated. They have provided a successful attempt to integrate rooftop agriculture practices in urban areas and solely develop through an independent business model.
The fact that those models lies under sophisticated greenhouse systems that used high technology components does not overlook the potential of low tech rooftop farming systems, if the proven agricultural measures are followed. However, It is logical to state the difference in capabilities between simple and complex agricultural techniques.
Nowadays most of rooftop agriculture projects in developing countries is planned on a small/household/pilot scale. Most of the larger scale rooftop farms exists in the developed world especially North America, where in most cases the produce is meant for private use rather than for the market, or is processed, cooked and/or sold to another business in the same building (a restaurant with a kitchen garden). Some rooftop farms cooperate with regional farmers to increase product variety and use common marketing and distribution channels. The commercial farmers in developed countries compete on the basis of quality rather than price. It is important to state the difference in market demand between developed and developing countries. Large scale Productive Green Roofs planned for informal settlements in Egypt would have a different ideology, design approach, marketing techniques, and selling strategies when compared to the ones in Canada or the United States.
Students and Teachers during vegetables and herbs planting session at their rooftop garden. Photos: Mai Hafez and Rouba DagherUsing local materials that are cheap, available for the community and easy to implement is the key for sustainable productive green roofs. Photos: Mai Hafez and Rouba DagherFamilies enjoying the view of the Citadel and Old Islamic Cairo skyline complemented by greenery and trees of one of the few semi public parks in Cairo . Photo: Flickr
There is no argument that Urban green spaces should be considered as a basic right and a not a luxury setting. With the complexity and diversity of our cities morphology, the perceptions usually change on how we design, manage, and deal with our urban green spaces and channel their use according to our different desires and needs.
Cities are different in their urban fabric and morphology, but we all share being human, and biophilia should be rooted inside all of us, no matter where we belong.
The question is still on for Cairo: What should we do to revive our Biophilia and strengthen our connection to the environment and create sustainable development opportunities in a city growing in the desert?
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