{"id":363,"date":"2012-07-17T00:01:18","date_gmt":"2012-07-17T04:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=363"},"modified":"2016-11-16T00:57:23","modified_gmt":"2016-11-16T05:57:23","slug":"cities-of-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2012\/07\/17\/cities-of-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Cities of Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many entries in this collective blog about the nature of cities will focus your attention on the nature that remains in cities, defined in terms of those patches of semi-natural habitat, the green bits, which are found in all cities, and which can be encouraged or discouraged by human action.\u00a0 Consider for example Celicia Herzog\u2019s recent post delighting in the green landscapes in and around Rio de Janiero<\/a>, connecting fragments of the famously-biodiverse Atlantic Forest in which Rio is emplaced.\u00a0 Or consider Mike Houck\u2019s paean to the nature nearby<\/a>, and within, Portland, Oregon, where his organization seeks to make Pacific Northwest cities both livable and loveable for people and other critters.\u00a0 Lovely pieces both, well worth your time.<\/p>\n

I want to write about something related, but different, something which I think is both more encompassing and less well understood:\u00a0 that is, the total nature of cities.\u00a0 I want us to conceive of cities in their entirety as ecological places (more precisely, as ecological landscapes), where buildings, streets, boardwalks, sidewalks and parking lots, ball fields, basketball courts, fountains, and power plants, as well as the green bits, participate in a complex and evolving mosaic, where natural things happen.\u00a0 By nature <\/em>I mean the interactions of soil and rock, air and water, energy and life, that characterize our verdant planet, and by natural<\/em>, I mean the qualities of everyone and everything that participates in the great congress of life on Earth, including you and me.\u00a0 Those interactions and those qualities do not disappear when we build a city.\u00a0 Rather they take on new, idiosyncratic forms<\/a><\/cite>, which contrast in many, ordinary and extraordinary ways, with the ecological mosaics that formerly filled the place<\/a> where the city now stands.<\/p>\n

For example consider the fascinating work from Nova Scotia, where Jeremy Lundholm<\/a>\u00a0and his team surveyed the plants living in the cracks of sidewalks<\/a>, the edges of the lawns, and other corners of the city of Halifax, and then traced back those plants, which most of us would think only as weeds, to the ecological niches where they were originally found in the world.\u00a0 They found that Halifax city plants have affinities with species that normally inhabit cliffs and talus slopes, and less commonly, grasslands and floodplains. \u00a0Sidewalks are, from these plants\u2019 perspective, a cliff on its side.<\/p>\n

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Plants adapted to cliffs often do well in cities, like this grass plant flowering next to an abandoned building in Savannah, Georgia. Credit: CasaDeQueso from flickr.com: http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/casadequeso\/2324751838\/sizes\/z\/in\/photostream\/<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Lundholm\u2019s open-minded inquiries are on to something:\u00a0 can we read an urban landscape \u201cnaturally\u201d?\u00a0 Perhaps with analogues<\/a> we can.\u00a0 Let\u2019s let tall buildings stand in for cliffy hills, notice how gutters guide bubbling streams during a storm, observe sidewalks as animal trails with regular patterns of use in morning and evening.\u00a0 Let\u2019s talk about the evaporation coming out of grates on a cold Manhattan morning in the same breath as the evapotranspiration from trees on a summer afternoon, for both flows are part of a hydrological cycle returning rain water from the ground to the atmosphere.\u00a0 Let\u2019s find out how biological matter passes through an ecosystem, whether that biomass is measured in leaves falling from a tree, or sandwiches passing through the deli door.\u00a0 The nature of cities requires us to broaden our sense of what nature is.<\/p>\n

Of course part of what we are broadening to include is us.\u00a0 In ancient texts<\/a>, nature was commonly contrasted with artifice:\u00a0 artifice is what people create; nature is what is created without us.\u00a0 What a terrible notion!\u00a0 Terrible on two counts.\u00a0 Terrible on the first count, because it suggests an equivalency, as if one species (people) were somehow equivalent in creative powers to everything else on Earth, an idea ludicrous and arrogant, no matter how much we may delight privately in our own inventions.\u00a0 Terrible on the second count, because it suggests a sundering, a division of us from our world.\u00a0 Rather than seeing us as participants in the network of life, which we manifestly are, we instead imagine we are removed and separate.\u00a0 Much havoc has been wreaked on the backs of these misconceptions, with not the least of the mayhem originating from cities.<\/p>\n

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Streams in a city? They reappear after every storm flowing beside the traffic.
Credit: Bengt Nyman from Wikipedia.org: http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Street_gutter_in_Old_Town_Stockholm.jpg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So let us reconceive.\u00a0 What are cities?\u00a0 Cities are constructed habitat for people.\u00a0 Most species in nature come to an environment with whatever skills and characteristics their evolutionary history has provided them with and then they try to fit in.\u00a0 How well they do, whether they survive, depends on how well-suited they are to the new conditions.\u00a0 Cliff plants do well in sidewalks because they are pre-adapted to living in tight places. \u00a0The human trick is instead of adapting to the environment, we change the environment to adapt to us.\u00a0 Too cold in winter?\u00a0 Build a building and close the window.\u00a0 Not enough food?\u00a0 Domesticate plants and animals and grow a garden.\u00a0 Water levels uncertain?\u00a0 Construct a dam and an aqueduct.<\/p>\n

How are we able to do these things?\u00a0 Because our evolutionary gifts are large and flexible minds, an admirable ability to communicate in language, expression, and deed, and an affinity for each other:\u00a0 we are social like few animals have ever been.\u00a0 Because of these gifts, I can conceive of yesterday and contrast it with today; I can imagine different futures; and I can communicate my ideas with you, through this blog.\u00a0 If you find those ideas have merit, then we can work together to change the environment to match our conception of it.\u00a0 We can even, if we try, change our conceptions to match the environment.<\/p>\n

And so we get to the nub of it:\u00a0 the nature of cities.\u00a0 Cities are ecological places, but have rarely been conceived in those terms, despite a history nearly 10,000 years in the making.\u00a0 Perhaps this will be our 21st<\/sup> century contribution to the notion of urban life:\u00a0 that cities are not only places of art, culture, communication, finance, business, science, religion, politics, and economy, but cities are also places for and from and of nature, cities of nature, nature with us in it.<\/p>\n

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It helps when thinking about the nature of cities to remember the nature that was there before the city, as in the Wildlife Conservation Society\u2019s Mannahatta and Welikia<\/a> Projects.
Credit: Markley Boyer \/ The Mannahatta Project \/ Wildlife Conservation Society; Yann-Arthus Bertrand \/ CORBIS. Originally published in Eric Sanderson\u2019s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (Abrams, 2009): http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/05\/24\/books\/review\/Sullivan-t.html<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many entries in this collective blog about the nature of cities will focus your attention on the nature that remains in cities, defined in terms of those patches of semi-natural habitat, the green bits, which are found in all cities, and which can be encouraged or discouraged by human action.\u00a0 Consider for example Celicia Herzog\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":8322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[273,299],"tags":[28,34,557,29],"coauthors":[127],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-essay-place-and-design","tag-design","tag-experiencing-nature","tag-landscape","tag-what-is-urban-nature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}