Microbes play a key role in the function of ecosystems. They contribute to biodiversity (Fierer et al. 2012), nutrient cycling (Fenchel et al. 2012), pollutant detoxification (Kolvenbach et al. 2014), and human health (Gevers et al. 2012). Since they control the composition of the gases in the atmosphere, they also play an important role in climate change (Bardgett et al. 2008). In urban ecosystems, microbes account for most of the biodiversity and are major agents in nature’s material cycles and food webs (King 2014). Thus the sustainability of cities over the long term is inextricably linked to microbes and their evolution.
But how does urbanization affect the microbiome? Are urban microbes resilient in the face of rapid environmental changes? This is mostly unknown.
The tiniest urban dwellers can change the planet
Microbes might be the tiniest of urban dwellers, but they are powerful. While known primarily as pathogens and potential threats to human health, microbes play a key role in maintaining major ecological functions that directly support humans and city life. Microbes include bacteria, viruses, archaea, and single-celled eukaryotes such as amoebas, slime molds, and paramecia. Since microbes are invisible to humans, we tend to underestimate their importance in maintaining ecological and human wellbeing.
Microbes play a significant role in the evolution of planet Earth. They have been living on the planet for 3.8 billion years: 2.3 billion years ago, cyanobacteria triggered the Great Oxidation Event, the most significant extinction event in Earth’s history, by producing the oxygen that enabled the evolution of multicellular forms. The extraordinary capacity of microbes to adapt to novel environments makes them particularly interesting to scientists trying to understand evolution on an urbanizing planet. They are tiny and ubiquitous and exhibit vast genetic and metabolic variability as well as great genetic plasticity. These properties allow them to adapt rapidly to unfavorable and changing environmental conditions (Guerrero and Berlanga 2009). Interestingly, microbes rarely act alone; instead, they operate as a team in complex communities (Boon et al. 2013). By building on their metabolic diversity these communities operate as complex networks to perform a variety of ecosystem processes and functions.
Photomicrograph of cyanobacteria. Author: Matthewjparke
Despite microbes’ remarkable power, we know surprisingly little about them, and even less about those in the urban environment. In fact, scientists are continually discovering new species. Metagenomic sequencing of the urban microbiome will advance our knowledge as we come to understand the genes necessary for survival in urban habitats and learn how their expression enable microbes to adapt to city environments.
The urban microbiome
The urban microbiome is made up of diverse assemblages of resident and transient microbes that inhabit the city (King 2014). Microbes can be found in and on both the natural and built components of urban ecosystems, including the atmosphere, vegetation, open ground, soil, bodies of water, building surfaces, green roofs, indoor environments, and human bodies; microbes inhabit all elements of our city infrastructure including wastewater treatment plants, combined sewer overflow systems, roads, and subway systems (see below).
The Urban Microbiome. Microbes in the city can be found in the atmosphere (A), water (B), buildings (C), roads (D), subways (E), soil (F), vegetation (G), combined sewer overflow (CSO) outfalls (H), and green roofs (J). Background Image: Alfred Hutter
Urbanization affects soil microbes through a variety of abiotic and biotic changes in land use and land cover, and the introduction of variety pollutants. But what influence do different types of land use and human activities have on the properties of soil microbes and on soil quality in urban areas? Some initial findings indicate that the abundance, diversity, and functions of microbes vary across different land uses (Bowers et al. 2011), and their diversity seems to be higher at increased soil depth (Ramirez et al. 2014).
The urban atmosphere harbors highly diverse transient microbial communities. Brodie et al. (2007) examined urban aerosols in two US cities and found at least 1,800 different bacteria. The atmosphere constitutes both a source and a sink for the urban microbiome, and acts as a pathway through which microbes move between urban areas and their surroundings, even between very distant regions (Bowers et al. 2011). Dust storm events in Africa and the Caribbean might move bacteria across oceans (Kellogg and Griffin 2006). Griffin and Kellogg (2004) estimate that ~ 104 bacteria exist per gram of soil and that 1 million tons of airborne soil are moving around the atmosphere each year; that amounts to a total of more than 1016 dustborne bacteria in our atmosphere.
The signatures of airborne microbes might be associated with various types of land use—and the differences in types are likely driven by shifts in the sources of bacteria. Using barcode pyrosequencing, Bowers et al. (2010) determined that the bacteria in the near-surface atmosphere varied significantly across agricultural, suburban, and forest land uses in northern Colorado. In a more recent study Bowers et al. (2011) found that highly diverse bacterial communities were present in the PM2.5 aerosol fraction (fine particulate matter ≤ 2.5μm) from 96 near-surface atmospheric samples collected from cities throughout the American Midwest. The team also found that microbial communities are strongly affected by the season, but that airborne bacteria differ from those in potential source environments such as leaf surfaces and soils.Fecal material, most likely pet feces, is an unexpected source of bacteria in the urban atmosphere.
More and more researchers are documenting the presence of microbes in a diversity of building interiors and external built surfaces (AAAS 2014). In order to examine the mechanisms that shape the indoor microbiome, biologists are teaming up with architects and designers to collect samples in a variety of indoor environments. Most research has focused on environmental factors including humidity and air temperature (Frankel et al. 2012) and the movement of microbes into the built environment from outdoor habitats and organisms, including humans (Hospodsky et al. 2012), pets (Fujimura et al. 2010), and plants (Berg et al. 2014). Others are exploring the role of building design and maintenance. For example, Kembel et al. (2014) found that architectural design might drive the biogeography of indoor bacterial communities.
Central Park microbiome
When Kelly Ramirez and her team started taking soil samples to characterize the soil in Central Park in New York City, they did not expect to find that its microbial diversity was comparable to the biodiversity seen around the world. To characterize the soil microbiome the team collected a total of 596 soil samples, one every 50 meters throughout the 3.4 square kilometers of green space. They analyzed the samples’ pH, moisture content, carbon and nitrogen concentrations and also sequenced 16S and 18S rRNA to characterize the archaeal, bacterial, and eukaryotic composition of the microbiome. Their key finding, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (Ramirez et al. 2014), is that urban systems harbor significant amounts of soil biodiversity: Central Park soils contained nearly as many distinct soil microbial phylotypes and types of soil communities as diverse biomes including the Arctic, tropics, and deserts. Also, though the makeup of the microbiome varies widely across the park, they could predict below-ground diversity patterns based on soil characteristics.
Central Park microbiome. A: Map of the 596 sampling locations in Central Park. B: Only 16.2% of sequences of all bacterial and archaeal species matched the Greengenes database. Of the eukaryotic species found in Central Park, only 8.5% of sequences matched the SILVA database. Histograms of (C) bacterial and archaeal and (D) eukaryotic observed number of phylotypes by samples (a-diversity) across the Park. Reproduced with permission from Ramirez et al. 2014Central Park soil diversity is similar to soil communities from other biomes. Phylotype accumulation curves for (a) bacterial and archaeal communities, and (b) eukaryotic communities from Central Park (green) and global soils (blue). Relative abundances of the most dominant (c) bacterial and archaeal taxa, and (d) eukaryotic taxa from Central Park (green) and global soil sample set (blue). Reproduced with permission from Ramirez et al. 2014
Urban microbes travel on the subway
Recent investigations in Hong Kong and New York City show that urban subways exhibit distinct clusters of microbial communities (Leung et al. 2014). Yet we are only beginning to uncover the mechanisms that shape subway microbiomes across the globe. Microbial diversities within the subway were associated with temperature and relative humidity. The abundance of commuter-associated genera correlated with carbon dioxide levels. The authors also compared the diversity of alpha and beta types and detected different phylogenetic communities associated with different subway lines. The bacterial community within a given subway line could also be correlated with architectural characteristics, outdoor microbiomes, and the degree of connectedness with other lines. Moreover, microbial diversities and assemblages vary within and across days, between peak and non-peak hours.
Ecosystem function
Microbes play key roles in sustaining life on Earth and loss of microbial diversity would significantly affect global and local ecosystems function (Van der Heijden et al. 2007). Although it is well known that microbes drive major biogeochemical cycles and represent the major pool of living biomass in terrestrial ecosystems, ecologists know little about how microbial communities vary across biomes. Scientists are using metagenomic sequencing to unveil some striking patterns. Fierer et al. (2012) examined the functional attributes of samples from 16 soil microbial communities collected from deserts, cold deserts, forests, grasslands, and tundra. They identified the functions the various bacteria performed, including photosynthesis and carbon cycling, and found that the diversity of microbial functions in the soil was directly related to the plant biodiversity above ground.
Microbes have the largest genetic diversity on Earth. Scientists estimate that there are billions of species, although they have described only 1% to 5% of those species. In cities, microbes constitute the greatest pool of genetic biodiversity, providing major ecosystem services that sustain human activities: they treat our wastes, biodegrade a variety of pollutants, and fix nitrogen (King 2014). Thus, loss of microbial diversity could have significant impact on such functions. Soil microbes for example are important regulators of plant community dynamics and plant diversity (Van der Heijden et al. 2007). Although the impact of microbial diversity on plant productivity and diversity is not fully understood, recent studies show that reducing the diversity of soil microbes reduces plant growth. Lau and Lennon (2011) experimentally reduced the complexity of the microbial community in soil, and found that the plants growing there were smaller, had less chlorophyll content, produced fewer flowers, and were less fecund compared to plant populations grown in association with more complex soil microbial communities.
Microbes play also significant roles as agents of both pollution and detoxification. They produce greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change and tropospheric ozone (Bardgett et al. 2008). Yet, since microbial life provides a critical contribution to biogeochemical functions such as decomposition and nutrient cycling (Fenchel et al. 2012), microbes are also a key player in mitigating climate change.
Human Health
Many researchers have established linkages between diseases and the composition of microbiomes (Armougom et al. 2009, Martinez et al. 2013). Recent studies have also found various ways that the human microbiome significantly benefits human health (Ravel et al. 2013). Fierer et al. (2012) points out that the human microbiome constitutes 1014 to 1015 microbial cells. Bacterial cells likely outnumber human cells by at least an order of magnitude, and bacterial genes outnumber the number of genes in the human genome by several orders of magnitude (Qin 2010).
Microbiologists are shifting their attention towards the human microbiome: there are increasing numbers of research projects investigating the relationship between the human microbiome and human health. The National Institute of Health (NIH) Common Fund Human Microbiome Project (HMP) is one of many large scale international initiatives (Methé et al. 2012). Research into the human microbiome and interactions with the urban environment holds significant promise for public health.
Mapping the urban microbiome
Using metagenetic sequencing, scientists have started to map assemblages of microbes that live in urban areas including parks, subways, and buildings, and that live on historical artifacts, cell phones, and other objects, to better understand the urban microbiome (Feazel et al. 2009, Berg et al. 2014, Fujimura et al. 2014, Meadow et al. 2014).
Scientists worldwide use DNA sequence barcodes to catalog the urban microbiome. A project called PathoMap is exploring the microbiome of public spaces in New York City, starting with the subway system. A team at Weill Cornell University in New York City are collecting 1,404 surface samples from 468 NYC subway stations to explore the microbiome at the city level. PathoMap uses a mobile software application from GIS Cloud to record and analyze samples over time. New York University Center for Genomics and Systems Biology and Mount Sinai School of Medicine are collaborating on the study.
The Urban Barcode Research Program (UBRP), led by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, is a science education initiative using barcodes to uniquely identify each species of living thing. It gives high school students an opportunity to study biodiversity using DNA technology. During the 2013–2014 school year, 20 student research teams, representing 17 high schools throughout the five boroughs of New York City, developed projects studying city wildlife, biodiversity, food systems, invasive species, and microbiomes.
How do microbial communities affect urban resilience?
It is well established that the microbiome is important for both the Earth’s ecosystems and human health. Yet we do not know how the stability of the microbiome and its ability to adapt to change relate to the resilience of urban ecosystems. Emerging evidence does indicate that there are symbiotic relationships between microbial communities and human and ecological health, suggesting that microbes play a significant role in maintaining both human and ecosystem functions over the long term. Initial findings show that the urban microbiome is complex, diverse, and dynamic, yet largely unknown at present. Advancing mechanistic understanding of the ecological, evolutionary, and functional implications of anthropogenic impacts on the microbial communities in urban areas pose many challenges and opportunities for preserving ecosystem function and human wellbeing.
A key question is how the urban microbiome influences resilience in urban ecosystems. Although microbial communities are highly adaptable to new conditions, responses to disturbance might shift communities from their initial states to a new state. Understanding the relationship between potential shifts in microbial diversity driven by urbanization and the function and stability of microbial communities will provide important insight towards creating resilience in an urbanizing planet. However, this requires that we expand our knowledge of the diversity and distribution of microorganisms across urbanizing regions.
Recent advances in metagenomics and big data provide new and important opportunities to better understand the invisible life that can influence the future and wellbeing of urban dwellers.
These are some of the questions about urban microbiomes that scientists might focus on, given their new and improved tools:
—How do microbial communities vary across an urban gradient?
—Can we identify an urban microbial signature?
—What mechanisms control these signatures?
—How does the diversity of species affect their function?
—How do the dynamics of microbial communities change with urbanization?
—How can mapping the urban microbiome inform urban planning and design?
In the many current discussions about how to make cities more resilient, the potential roles of citizens and urban nature are largely overlooked. There are exceptions, including Krasny and Tidball’s work on civic ecology and that of a number of people associated with the Stockholm Resilience Centre (cf. Andersson, Barthel, & Ahrné, 2007; Barthel, 2006; Bendt, Barthel, & Colding, 2013; Elmqvist et al., 2004; Ernstson, Barthel, & Andersson, 2010; Krasny & Tidball, 2012; Tidball & Krasny, 2007). However, the level of interest seems disproportionately small given the tremendous opportunities for citizens to steward nature in cities—or to ‘collaborate’ with nature, as Ernstson and colleagues have inspired me to think of it:
In order to build resilience and face uncertainty and change means to harness the interactions between stakeholders. This requires an involvement of society in its broadest sense towards a change of culture that makes ‘‘collaboration’’ between society and the environment (rather than mere ‘‘interaction’’) the central focus of attention.
—Ernstson, Leeuw, et al., 2010, p. 538
Along with citizens and nature, urban spaces are the third player in this transition waiting to happen. I share Timon McPhearson’s belief in the potential of vacant land in cities (TNOC Encore July 2014). My interest also extends to other ‘loose spaces’ (Franck & Stevens, 2007). These include areas that are not necessarily empty but are in transition, such as post-industrial sites, alleyways that are no longer used for service provision, waterways along which freight has ceased to move and even official greenspaces that do not currently meet the needs of users. I like the idea of “sustainability fallows” (a term I learned from Marianne Krasny’s contribution to TNOC’s recent roundtable on urban environmental education), which refers to all kinds of urban spaces that are lying ‘fallow’, just waiting to have their potential released and be transformed into assets.
Vacant land and undervalued urban spaces have a key role to play in helping to restore urban ecosystems to health and, as Timon also mentioned, in reconnecting people with nature. In another recent TNOC encore blog, Tim Beatley referred to the extensive evidence concerning the positive impact of contact with nature on human health and well-being. Not very long ago I undertook a literature review for The Nature Project (as background for developing strategies to combat nature deficit in Quebec) and was staggered by the range of effects that had been documented. In light of this, it was disconcerting to hear (during the empirical phase of the research) about the lack of contact with nature and the level of discomfort, and even fear of nature, experienced by many Quebecers.
It was however reassuring to discover that solutions were close at hand. We weren’t going to have to find the large amounts of money and overcome the other barriers to getting people out into the wild (which was initially seen as a possible solution to the nature deficit). The environmental educators and biodiversity experts that I interviewed confirmed that we had everything we needed to turn this trend around within the city itself. They believed that urban nature could provide the regular contact people needed to develop a relationship with nature (while also agreeing that experience of less human dominated environments was very valuable and should be available to those who sought it). Several very committed environmentalists told me about how their own dedication to the natural world began in a vacant lot near their childhood homes—and I was assured that watching pigeons was a perfectly good starting point to learn about ecosystems. What these experts also noted was the need to improve both the quality of nature in cities and the opportunities to interact with it. The ‘quality’ that was sought seemed to combine increased biodiversity (and diversity in general), eco-revelatory capacity and elements that people would find interesting and attractive.
As Timon noted, there are many spaces of opportunity in cities. The challenge is how to move them out of their ‘sustainability fallow’ phase and transform them into assets. The large number of urban spaces that need help to fulfill their social and ecological potential makes such a transformation an ambitious project.
Where can cities find the resources to enhance urban nature and maximize citizen interaction with it? Fortunately, a large part of the answer lies with the citizens themselves—and with the places. Around the world, an ever-increasing number of citizens have demonstrated their willingness to get involved in working with nature and transforming their cities.
Credit: Comité de la ruelle champêtre Henri-Julien/Drolet
I have experienced firsthand the level of commitment of volunteers who have struggled for years to help nature thrive in urban spaces and allow people to benefit from it. And it has been a struggle—our efforts to green schoolyards and alleyways in Montreal faced resistance from staff of local government and schools, as well as neighbors and parents. Although there were some supports in place for these sorts of initiatives, we still seemed to be going against the grain. A widespread feeling seemed to persist that nature didn’t belong in cities. Nature was troublesome, potentially dangerous and without any obvious value. If nature was present, it should be restricted to carefully controlled patches in people’s yards or parks. There was also a sense that citizens had no right to intervene in the cities where they lived. It was up to authorities to make decisions and up to paid staff to implement them. In this context, it is easier to stick to mown grass and tarmac rather than attempt creative things involving diverse species and requiring complex maintenance.
Fortunately the tide is turning. The efforts of guerrilla gardeners and insurgent urbanists (Hou, 2010) have helped people get used to wilder and more diverse urban spaces. More city dwellers have begun to realize that relinquishing a bit of control can lead to more interesting cities, greater sense of community and a generally better quality of urban life. There are still people who are uncomfortable with the idea of replacing pavement with vegetation and letting their neighbors make decisions about what should be planted, but they no longer dominate the discussion, they are part of the discussion.
Many local governments that were previously closed to citizen intervention are also becoming more open—in part because they realize they can’t look after things themselves. In the UK, budget cuts have affected maintenance of parks and public spaces for a number of years now and local governments have had to let citizens take over—and are gradually learning to work with them. Montreal now has a fantastic network of green alleyways (ruelles vertes if you are looking for more information) and its expansion is officially supported. The champ des possibles is a space transformed by citizens and now officially co-managed by citizens and city.
Sadly, I cannot speak about these advances in Montreal without also mentioning the recent bulldozing of the wonderful ‘Parc Oxygène’. This urban oasis was created by neighbors nearly two decades ago and looked after and appreciated ever since. The land is privately owned and is now slated for development and the argument was made that the cost of protecting this small space was too high. I would argue that it was an iconic space that has inspired many Montrealers to make positive changes in their neighborhoods and therefore the cost of losing it was too high. I hope that one day the worth of places that redefine a city and invite citizens to be part of making it a better place will be factored into such calculations.
The recently bulldozed Parc Oxygene, Montreal. Photo: Janice Astbury
How to get citizens involved with urban nature:
Invite them
How can we ‘invite’ citizens to engage with urban nature in ways that make their cities more socially and ecologically resilient? I believe such an invitation is most effectively communicated through the landscape itself.
If someone asks you to define ‘city’, chances are that an image of an urban landscape will come into your head and that will be your starting point for thinking about what a city means. For many people, that image is still one of tall buildings and expressways with barely a living thing, human or otherwise, in sight. But that is gradually changing and it will change further as there are more and more examples of urban landscapes where people and nature are highly visible and the relationship between them is one of collaboration rather than control. I use ‘collaboration’ to refer to people working with urban nature rather than against it; protecting and enhancing nature and consequently enjoying the many ecosystem services provided.
So how can we encourage ‘inviting landscapes’ to come into being? The first strategy is, of course, not to block the efforts of people who take it upon themselves to make them.
Include everybody
It is also important to think about how to deliberately design and create such landscapes, particularly in areas of cities where people do not generally feel empowered to transform their local landscapes—or even to interact with nature. Even in areas where visible changes are underway, it is important to ensure that the invitation is inclusive. It shouldn’t just speak to people who are comfortable sneaking out in the middle of the night to take a pickaxe to the pavement—or people who are neighborhood organizers or biodiversity experts. The invitation needs to make all sorts of people feel that they have permission to intervene in the spaces they live, that they are included in the process and that they have something to contribute.
In Clovenstone (Edinburgh), citizens supported by Wester Hailes Edible Estates have begun transforming a small triangle of sad looking grass into a community garden. They will retain the enclosing fence (which can make the area feel helpfully ‘defensible’) but they have also placed raised beds around the perimeter of the fence and have built a step “so that no one hurts themselves climbing over the fence”. Photo: Janice Astbury
In Clovenstone (Edinburgh), citizens supported by Wester Hailes Edible Estates have begun transforming a small triangle of sad looking grass into a community garden. They will retain the enclosing fence (which can make the area feel helpfully ‘defensible’) but they have also placed raised beds around the perimeter of the fence and have built a step “so that no one hurts themselves climbing over the fence”.
Make it seem safe
The landscape has to signify permission to enter—and reassure people that it is safe.
The fear of even slightly wild places in cities should not be underestimated. Numerous people involved in transforming urban spaces in Manchester have told me about what a difference a mown path makes (even through what would otherwise be viewed as weeds).
Mown path, Gateshead. Photo: Janice Astbury
Cultivate an aesthetic of care
An ‘aesthetic of care’ (Nassauer, 1997) is very important in loose urban spaces. Most people recoil from places that are subject to neglect and victims of disdain. Removing litter is key. It needs to be repeatedly removed until a space stops being perceived as a dumping ground. Usually neighbors and particularly keen volunteers can be persuaded to do this a couple of times a year (and it should be made clear that it was citizens who did it) but this is an area where there should be investment in paid staff to sustain the invitation until people begin to take it up.
Showing that the place is cared for gradually changes its identity. There are ways to reinforce this, like giving it a new name. Soon no one in Manchester will remember that ‘Nutsford Vale’ was once known as ‘Matthew’s Lane Tip’.
Citizens cleaned up this space. Photo: Janice AstburyNutsford Vale. Photo: Janice Astbury
Make identity apparent
The identity of a place is important for inviting interest and much of the vacant land in cities seems to have no inscribed meaning or story. Most places do have some sort of little known story and a bit of research might reveal what it is and then efforts can be made to make it legible in the landscape. Or new stories can be created by organizing activities in the space or installing something that attracts attention. Interesting and attractive elements can be added; wildflowers seem to work particularly well. One can look for ways to make the nature that is present more legible. If it can’t be seen, show what is hidden or what could be there.
Regent’s Canal mural. Photo: Janice Astbury
Support the unexpected
Surprises are generally a good idea. Not every Inviting Landscape needs to be surprising but people need something to help change their ideas about what they can do in urban spaces. City centers are good locations for the unexpected because lots of people pass through them and because they send the message that if you can do something in places where nature is so little visible and space so controlled by powerful entities, then you can do it anywhere.
What regeneration of the canal landscape could look like? (The backdrop is a photo of the sort of regeneration that is going on just behind this greener space created in the corner of a car park in Manchester.)
What regeneration of the canal landscape could look like? (The backdrop is a photo of the sort of regeneration that is going on just behind this greener space created in the corner of a car park in Manchester. Photo; Janice Astbury
Show that cities can change
Cities have a way of seeming very permanent and we tend to think that what we see is how things should be and how they will stay. Cities often communicate obduracy (Hommels, 2005); the scale and concreteness of much urban infrastructure makes the city seem resistant to change. This is ironic because cities change all the time and the magnitude of things can just as easily be taken as evidence for what is possible, as Raymond Williams once noted:
H. G. Wells once said, coming out of a political meeting where they had been discussing social change, that this great towering city was a measure of the obstacle, of how much must be moved if there was to be any change. I have known this feeling, looking up at great buildings that are the centres of power, but I find I do not say ‘There is your city, your great bourgeois monument, your towering structure of this still precarious civilisation’ or I do not only say that; I say also ‘This is what men have built, so often magnificently, and is not everything then possible?’ (Williams, 1975, p. 15)
Temporary meadow in Manchester city centre. Photo: Janice AstburyMeanwhile land, Salford. Photo: Janice Astbury
Changes can be temporary. They can provide examples of what could happen when people are not quite ready for it on a more permanent basis. Or they can occupy spaces that are slated for other uses and thus send a message that things don’t have to be permanent. ‘Meanwhile land’ can serve all sorts of purposes and show that urban spaces can be adaptable to changing needs and possibilities.
Focus on home-like landscapes
While city centers represent excellent locations to showcase possibilities, their often more ‘official’ and commercial landscapes are not the ones with the most potential to extend an invitation. People are more likely to intervene in landscapes that feel like home, places which are human-scale and defensible and where they run into people they know. That is why alleyways and sidewalks in residential neighborhoods are generally quite inviting. These are places that feel like they are in between public and private space regardless of who actually owns the land. Because of proximity to where they live, people have opportunities for regular interaction with these landscapes and with the other people who use them, which helps to build connection, a precursor to action
Opportunities to interact with other people are hugely important. People attract people, and out of simple exchanges come great ideas and transformative projects. Putting in a place to sit and organizing gatherings creates space for things to happen.
Rusholme alleyway. Photo: Janice AstburySocial space at Calders. Photo: Janice Astbury
Make it personal
It is good when the things that happen are clearly a result of citizen action. Hand-painted signs and unconventional infrastructure send a message that these things were done by people like oneself.
Better still if one can actually see the citizens. People are part of landscapes too and nothing is a more convincing message about the capacity of citizens to work with urban nature than seeing us doing it. If a passerby shows interest, say hello and explain what you’re doing. Tell them they’re welcome to get involved in some way if they like.
Citizens at work. Photos: Janice Astbury
One of the most important characteristics of an Inviting Landscape is that it must appear that good things are being accomplished but still seem unfinished in some way. It should look as if it’s waiting for someone else to come along with their particular skills and ideas to do the next bit. This is challenging for changemakers. Most people, including urban planners, landscape architects and citizen activists, tend to think in terms of finished projects—and then worry about maintaining them.
But just as we have begun to speak about resilience as a goal for cities, in recognition of inherent complexity and constant cycles of change, so we should think in terms of resilient citizen engagement. People should constantly be invited to bring their own vision and energy to some part of a transformative project or to the next step. Rather than getting depressed about how we’re left with just a few volunteers and the garden isn’t being weeded, we can think about how to create an invitation for other citizens to come and work with nature in their own ways.
Tidball, K., & Krasny, M. (2007). From risk to resilience: What role for community greening and civic ecology in cities. In A. Wals (Ed.), Social learning towards a more sustainable world (pp. 149–164). Wageningen, Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers.
The “Megurizaka pond renovation” project started in 2008 by creating a place for children to play and help restore nature to a small part of Kitakyushu City in southern Japan. The aim was to create an area for children’s play and ecological education that could also form a part of an ecological network in the urban zone.
A generation ago, children had access to wild lands and used them for exploring, challenging and exercising the skills needed to master a complex landscape and unforeseen situations. “Children’s play” is an important experience in learning about the structure of nature, but “environmental education” has been afforded much greater importance in primary and secondary school education in Japan since 2002. Thus, preserving open spaces as wildlife habitat where children can play would be a very important addition in urban areas.
The project site before the renovation. Egeria densa, an exotic species, dominated the water. Photo: Keitaro ItoThe project site after the renovation. Photo: Keitaro Ito
Process Planning
Although we knew the general direction in which we wanted the project to proceed, it was difficult to predict what kind of flora and fauna would establish there, so we needed to choose a flexible planning method for the project. The architect Arata Isozaki describes three different types of planning.
1) “Closed planning”, which takes every aspect of the planning process into consideration
2) “Open planning”, which focuses on development for the future
3) “Process planning”, which focuses on the planning process itself and not solely the end form.
We felt that “process planning” was the best, given that the space would naturally evolve over time and that its form was likely to change according to the needs of those who use it. We also referred to 80 year old map to know the history of this district. Based on this map it was clear that the landform had been dramatically changed; it was interesting that we had water flow from near forest to this pond.
The 80 year old map we referred to in this district. There used be many ponds, however now there are just two. They were described as being covered with Lotus flowers.
Landscape planning for multiple functions
According to this method, the space was divided into a number of overlapping layers: vegetation, water, playground and ecological learning. However, unlike “zoning”, Multiple Function Landscape Planning (MFLP; Ito et al., 2010) does not separate a space into distinct functional areas. The overlapping of layers creates multi-functional areas in which, for example, children who are playing by the water can also learn about ecology at the same time. Thus, with the creation of multi-functional play areas, children are able to engage in various activities as different layers are added on top of each other. In addition, we expected they would learn something new about the ecology when they were playing there at the same time.
Multi Functional Landscape Planning. Credit: Ito et al. 2003, 2010Plan for the water renovation. Credit: Keitaro ITO, 2008
Children and teachers participating in planning of their own ecological play spaces
Children at the school, their teachers and a number of university students participated in the planning and construction phases of the project and in making improvements to the park. At first, the children and the university students were surveyed about the kind of insects and plant life they hoped to find in the park. During workshops they were asked to make final presentations about their image of the park based on everything that had been talked about in the previous workshops. The children made suggestions for the water environment, in particular regarding fish, small aquatic insects and the depth of the water. They came out in favour of planting fruiting trees to attract birds and evergreen and deciduous trees to attract small animals and insects. Following this, the final drawing and model was completed by Keitaro ITO’s Laboratory (images above and below).
Planting trees was the students’ idea, and the park subsequently succeeded in attracting birds on numerous occasions. As a result, it was suggested that the park could become one of a number of habitats for bird and insects in this urban area.
In short, this city park not only provides the children with a place to play in a variety of ways but has also become a habitat for a number of living creatures such as birds, insects and fish.
1/100 model for the renovation. Credit: Keitaro ITO Lab. , 2008Children participating in the restoration, using the wood that used be this park. Photo: Keitaro ItoChildren playing in the project site. Photo: Keitaro Ito
Future issues
The children have learned about the existence of various ecosystems by playing in the park and through their participation in the planning workshops. The teachers and a number of local residents have also been active in this process, and their interest in the park remains strong because they actively participated in the development of an accessible environment and have been able to propose ideas for its future management.
Nevertheless, the following issues were encountered during the planning of the park. First, it needs a great deal of time to plan and manage the project. Second, the cooperative framework in which the park is managed changes every year because the teachers are transferred to other schools every 3 to 5 years. This creates some difficulties in attempting to maintain continuity in the planning process over time.
The city park is not so big but it has been gradually changing into an urban biotope over the past five years and the ecosystem contained in it has become more complex every year. It is important that this type of city park can contribute to the ecological network in the city. For example, a lack of outdoor space to play in, fear of violence in public spaces, the longer working hours of parents and the artificial nature of most playgrounds have helped create the present-day situation in which young children have gradually lost contact with nature.
So, I think that the present-day planners and landscape designers consider “landscape” as an “omniscape” (e.g., Arakawa,1999, Fjortoft & Ito, 2010). It is much more important to think of landscape planning as a learnscape, embracing not only the joy of seeing, but also stimulating the five senses as a whole.
Fjørtoft I. and Ito K. (2010) How green environments afford play habitats and promote healthy child development. A mutual approach from two different cultures: Norway and Japan. Science without Borders. pp. 46-61, Transactions of the International Academy of Science H&E.
Cali has 562 species of birds; more than all of Europe. Key reasons are that its boundary spans an elevational range between 950m and 4,100m, going through wetlands, grasslands, and dry forests, climbing up to cloud forests and the high Andes. The city lies at the crossroads of three major biogeographic regions. And Cali also has a remarkable number of protected areas.
The city of Cali in southwestern Colombia boasts a staggering number of 562 species of birds, and it probably has the longest bird list for any city in the world. But can we find out for sure?
Birds are the link between the urban and the wild. A bird-friendly city can harbor an important sample of species found in the surrounding natural areas. In contrast, hostile urban environments will only have a handful of species that can thrive in harsh conditions. Birds are therefore the emissaries that speak on the impacts of anthropogenic drivers over the natural world and the increasing role of cities in the conservation of nature.
Overview of the city of Cali in the western Andes of Colombia with some key protected areas within its administrative boundary. Photo: Ana Maria Valencia
To ask how many birds live in a city is a first step to help us understand the effects of urbanization on wildlife and the extent to which a city has successfully created the habitats in which wildlife can thrive. Also, by comparing lists across different cities, we can gain insights into what it takes to design more sustainable urban environments. However, it turns out that even when birders and ornithologists are obsessed with lists, finding bird lists for cities is very hard, and most cities don’t have one. There are many lists for localities, counties, or countries, but just not for cities.
To illustrate the difficulty in finding bird lists for cities, consider a 2014 study on the effects of urbanization on a global scale, where researchers compiled bird lists of 54 cities across six continents. They found a median of 112 birds per city, ranging between 24 species (Jerusalem) and 368 species (the city-state of Singapore). Unfortunately, this dataset is still far from complete. The authors did not include any cities in Colombia, the country with the largest bird list in the globe (1884 species, ranked first according to BirdLife International).
At that time, the researchers would have found out that the city of Ibagué, on the Eastern Andes, has an eye-popping list of 537 species, topping their dataset. Other cities with published lists were Medellin (445 species), Manizales (439 species), Popayan (338 species), and Pereira (203 species). Bogota, Colombia’s capital, hovers around 300 species. But it’s not the researcher’s fault for not finding these lists back then. Bird lists of cities are mostly found in the grey literature, or in obscure journals in foreign languages. Thankfully, there are now ongoing efforts to make biodiversity knowledge more accessible, and researchers are more aware they should expand their search to non-English sources.
Fast forward and in 2017, I lead a research team to find out the number of birds in the city of Cali. My motivation was to provide a tool to raise awareness on preserving the avifauna of the city. Cali has a privileged geographic position in the foothills of the western Andes of Colombia, in a region known for its endemics and small-ranged species that so critical for conservation.
The Andean cock-of-the-rock is one of the most iconic birds of Cali, usually found in the upper Pance River, where people flock to take a swim. Photo: Ruben Dario Palacio
We were not much concerned with the final number of species. The estimates for the city of Cali were about 400 species of birds, a rather average number for Colombia. But, as we began compiling records, this number was quickly left behind, and that’s when we got excited. We then hoped as work progressed to get over 500 birds, and we were optimistic, but the list was building up fast. Could we end up having more species than Ibagué? Yes, we did.
We finished our research with a list of 561 confirmed records of birds, and other 25 potential records (link to manuscript here, where each species has its supporting referenced record). To our surprise, Cali was standing as the city with the most birds in Colombia, the country with the most birds in the world. Our work inspired the creation of a new guide to the birds of Cali in 2019, published by Calidris, Birdlife’s partner in Colombia. A record was added, and 562 bird species is the new official number.
The list of the birds of Cali has been the basis for a new illustrated field guide of the city and its promotion as an ecotourism destination. Photo: Ruben Dario Palacio
How impressive is the number of 562 bird species? Cali has a few more birds than the Quindío Department, which is three times larger in area (central Andes of Colombia; 560 species). In the international context, it is very telling that Cali has more species than all the 541 wild birds that regularly occur in Europe.
So, why does Cali have so many species of birds? A key reason is that its administrative boundary spans an elevational range between 950 m and 4,100 m going through wetlands, grasslands, and dry forests, climbing up to cloud forests and the high Andes. All of this happens within 562 km2, of which only 30% is urban. The city lies at the crossroads of three major biogeographic regions and has species from all of them: the tropical Andes, the Choco Biogeographic Region, and the Geographic Cauca River Valley.
Cali also has a remarkable number of protected areas including a portion of the National Natural Park Farallones de Cali, considered one of the most irreplaceable areas in the entire globe. Farallones place is still largely unexplored, and a new species of Antpitta was recently found. It will become the 563 species once it is officially described.
Among other sites of importance for birds, lies the Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) cloud forest of San Antonio/km-18, one of the most visited places for birdwatchers in Colombia. It is also among the few sites in the world with over 100 years of ornithological research. I had the honor to be part of this history and to conduct conservation work in this region through my non-profit Fundacion Ecotonos. The urban center of Cali is also well forested, and there are places such as the Universidad del Valle which works as a large, green island and steppingstone for bird movement.
The Multicolored Tanager is an endemic and threatened bird of Colombia, which inhabits the cloud forests of the KBA San Antonio/km-18. Photo: Ruben Dario Palacio
But is Cali the city with the longest bird list in the world? We can look for other potential candidate cities not listed in the 2014 study. We can narrow our search by focusing on the Tropics. Cities up north just don’t have that many species. Take Vancouver, for instance, which only has 48 species of birds (although the crows are really dazzling). So, we can discard cities in temperate regions for now. I also quickly looked into some cities in Asia in that dataset, and most had lists between 200 and 300 species.
It is in the tropical belt of South America that we have the most likely chance to find the city with the longest bird list in the world, one would suppose. For instance, take Georgetown, Guyana, one of those hidden gems in Neotropical Birdwatching. Nicknamed the “Garden City”, it’s reported to have 285 species of birds, but it falls short of Cali. Not to say the birding is not outstanding, but I am not talking here about birding experience; I’m focusing on sheer raw numbers.
Keeping up with the Neotropics, the city with most birds that I can think of is Quito, Ecuador. The Metropolitan District of Quito is said to have 542 species of birds. It has been called the “Bird Capital of the World”. This is not surprising because, similarly to Cali, it spans different elevational belts and ecosystems. However, the Quito number encompass entire metropolitan region of Quito. This is a sizeable area of 4,230 km2 (1,630 sq mi), whereas the city of Quito itself is 372.39 km2 (143.78 sq mi) and should have fewer species.
Is Cali the winner, then?
It turns out that we can’t even be sure for Colombia. Earlier this year, the Alexander von Humboldt Institute published a study quantifying bird richness within administrative and protected areas in the country. Notably, they estimated the number of birds for all 1,122 municipalities. The issue is that their analysis was based on expert maps which have a coarse resolution, and you can get some wonky results. They estimated Cali had only 482 species… 80 species shy from its actual bird list. But for many municipalities the numbers seem too high, with close to 300 municipalities having 600 species or more! In any case, it might well be that some other city in Colombia has more birds than Cali, but we need thoroughly revised checklists to be sure.
Now, the only rightful contender in the title for the city with most birds in the world that I am aware of is actually outside of Colombia and South America: the city of Nairobi, Kenya. Its bird list has an interesting history.
In 1997, Bill Harvey published his “Checklist of the birds of Nairobi including Nairobi National Park” with an impressive list of 604 birds. This led to many claims of Nairobi as the city with the most birds in the world, but the list had some erroneous records and inconsistencies. Fifteen years later in 2012, Brian Finch, one of Kenya’s most seasoned ornithologists, published “Nairobi National Park Bird Checklist”. He reported 493 species. The eBird hotspot has 498 species. Will Nairobi sum up to over 562 species? It could be possible.
But maybe the city with the longest bird list in the world is neither Cali nor Nairobi, and it might not even be in Colombia. Perhaps it’s actually an Asian city, or some other city in South America. I would love to find out for sure, and I think this is a fun and important question to ask. Why? Because I am convinced that cities are the future of conservation and exploring questions around birds in urban environments could ‘pave’ the road towards a more sustainable future. Cities have a long list of duties to become global environmental leaders, and I contend that a humble bird list is a great way to start.
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.
What inspires our work? Why have we each chosen to pursue a vision of cities that incorporates and expands our views of nature? Was it a particular mentor, a class or school experience, time spent in wilderness, or a book or film that led us to think boldly about a green future for cities?
Aspirational solutions that are largely unattainable but serve to awe and inspire can also help us progress—just as the golden age of science fiction motivated us to keep striving for something better, even though the political realities of the present made progress seem impossible.
I grew up in a part of Queens, a borough of New York City, that at the time was almost entirely devoid of the types of nature-inspired and integrated projects and spaces highlighted here at TNOC. But inspiration can come from many places, and I was recently reminded of the importance of the formative experiences that influence us while chatting with the wonderful New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) Career Ladder staff about my early experiences there.
The author in the 1980s, with her brother Thomas. Photo: George Pataki
Founded as the part of the 1964’s World’s Fair, NYSCI is now a designated New York City Cultural Institution, and has to date enlisted more than 3000 inner city students to work as museum “Explainers” communicating science to the public. I recall my high school experiences in this program clearly, and think of them often as I work toward inspiring young people to study science, nature, and the nature of cities. These days, at least in my part of the world (the western U.S.), students are increasingly choosing scientific disciplines as their course of study. But when it comes to nature and the nature of cities, I feel that it’s actually becoming more difficult to inspire young scientists and ecologists to join the collective effort to build thriving cities and spaces that draw on and harmonize with nature. After speaking with many students and colleagues, I think one important reason has to do with major shifts in our beliefs about the future of cities and the role of science from the mid to late 20th century to today.
The 1980’s were a difficult period in New York City, which lost almost 1 million residents between 1950 and 1980. Schools and public infrastructure were drastically underfunded, crime rates were perceived to be dangerously high, and the inner city was not considered a particularly desirable place to live. In short, the city had many, many challenges that seemed difficult or nearly impossible to overcome. And yet, as a child I never doubted that the city and that our civilization as a whole had a great future that would be better than the present. Luckily for me, growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s I caught the last glimpse of the “golden age” of futurism of the early to mid-20th century. It was obvious in the remnants of 1964 World’s Fair, famously dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe”. Its many (somewhat neglected) artifacts loomed large in my childhood visits to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, such as the “Tent of Tomorrow” designed by Philip Johnson, and the “Unisphere” (which has an interesting design history closely linked to Robert Moses). For a large part of the 20th century, books, films, and television programming offered paths toward a better future in which human ingenuity solved the most pressing issues of our time. The fact that many of these ideals were overly “techno-optimistic” and likely unattainable is immaterial, as described by Neal Stephenson in his essay Innovation Starvation:
The fondness that [researchers and engineers] have for science fiction reflects, in part, the usefulness of an over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision…scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.
Remnants of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The New York State Pavilion is on the left with the Tent of Tomorrow in the center. The Unisphere is on the far right. Photo: Johnathan Reich, Wikimedia
In retrospect, it’s striking to me how many of these shared visions include cities with significant green spaces (even in outer space!) or innovations that expanded our ideas of the potential for nature in cities. Science fiction illustrators like Harry E. Turner and Frank R. Paul and space artists like Robert T. McCall combined daring, aspirational technology with vast expanses of green, recognizing the role of urban nature in the best possible vision of future cities, while through the 1970’s writers speculated about utopian visions of the human-nature relationship, perhaps culminating with Ernest Callenbach’s iconic Ecotopia.
New York State Pavillion at the 1964 World’s Fair. Photo: Unknown
Of course, most of these visions were not to come to pass. Technological advances certainly have their dark side as we now well know, and these were as visible in New York City as anywhere when the “golden age” of science fiction and futurism came to a close. As humankind’s capacity to engineer the built environment grew ever more grand, futuristic new freeways arrived to divide communities, well-loved monuments like the original Penn Station were razed, and “slums” were demolished in the name of urban renewal, altering cities in ways that we’re still trying to recover from today.
In many ways, these events were the embodiment of the urban visions that were presented at the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, and showed us the unanticipated consequences of re-engineering cities on a large scale. Humanity’s footprint on the environment also became more and more difficult to ignore. As Jane Jacobs battled Robert Moses in lower Manhattan, Rachel Carson warned of the collapse of food chains, and The Nature Conservancy was founded to protect dwindling open space. In the face of cities that were becoming less livable, more unsustainable, and increasingly isolated from surrounding ecosystems, many people lost hope in the possibility of building amazing new places, and in the potential for science and technology to bring about a future that would be substantially better than the past. It’s ironic that just at the dawn of the space age, the Apollo missions brought us moving images of the Earth from space, such as “the Blue Marble” taken in 1972 on Apollo 17. Our early forays into space didn’t much resemble the fiction that inspired it, but instead showed us a lonely and vulnerable planet in the vastness of the solar system. These images helped to crystalize the urgency of the environmental movement to preserve and protect our critical natural resources.
Today, very few of my students profess to be very optimistic about the future of cities. Most choose to contribute their scientific knowledge to medicine, engineering, finance, or computer science, where the rewards seem greater than in the fields that tackle urban challenges. Those that take on urban issues hope mainly to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, resource depletion and urban sprawl, and basically keep things from getting any worse. The faith that we have the potential, the knowledge, and the political will to build places that are far, far better than what we see today seems to have faded away. To quote Stephenson, “the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone.” More directly, young people are now surrounded by the most dystopian visions of the future imaginable, with every possible permutation of the post-apocalyptic city from floods, disease epidemics, and nuclear wars to of course, zombies (so many zombies!) permeating popular American culture. This is most worrisome, since we’re unlikely to achieve a future that’s bolder, more daring, and more innovative than we allow ourselves to imagine.
I became an urban ecologist because, like so many contributors to TNOC, I came to believe that a promising future for cities will be found in re-imagining the relationship between the built environment and nature. While some see the goal of bringing more nature to cities as a rejection of technological innovation, I believe in the possibility for a re-alignment of science—both natural and social science—with the design and planning fields, recognizing the central role of design in finding novel and exciting ways to bring nature to the urban experience. Philip Silva summarized this well in his TNOC essay, “Sustainable cities don’t need nature–they need good design”, where he explained that rejecting our humanity and “retreating from society to find holiness in the purity of streams and meadows, forests and mountains” cannot solve the puzzle of how to build cities that allow communities and culture to thrive. Human ingenuity, culture, and imagination will be key ingredients in the green cities of the future, which will need an ever more advanced understanding of the relationships between human well-being, ecological processes, and attributes of the urban environment. And although we always want to apply our best scientific understanding to urban design, in my view these visions don’t always have to be practical and fully feasible to serve the common good. Aspirational solutions that are largely unattainable but serve to awe and inspire can also help us progress—just as the golden age of science fiction motivated us to keep striving for something better, even when the political realities of the present often made progress seem impossible.
So is green the new flying car? We know from the hard lessons of the last several decades, now that flying car technology as actually arrived, that it will not solve all, or perhaps any, of our transportation problems. But wasn’t it worth imagining for all of these years? How many people thought bigger, better, and more boldly about transportation solutions because of it? Now it’s time to do the same for green initiatives, not just here at TNOC but widely throughout popular culture. In my opinion, we need to surround our students with far fewer zombies and far more designs by Vincent Callebaut. Fortunately, we have already taken the first steps, in that the inner city has once again become a desirable place to live. In New York City and many other U.S. cities, including Salt Lake City where I currently live, the urban core is thriving again. There are still enormous challenges ahead, including gentrification, growing wealth inequities, and persistent air and water pollution problems. But there are also promising indications that big ideas may be back. In Flushing Meadows Corona Park, just adjacent to NYSCI, the nearby “Tent of Tomorrow” from the 1964 World’s Fair New York State Pavilion was the focus of a design competition sponsored by the National Trust and People for the Pavilion. The submissions were amazing, awe-inspiring, and truly reminiscent of the spirit of the World’s Fair, which Isaac Asimov described “as the direction in which man is traveling…viewed with buoyant hope.” And tellingly, green components were everywhere in the winning designs for a re-imaged pavilion.
It’s interesting now to revisit Asimov’s 1964 article, Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014, in which he predicted “that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.” Arguably, that prediction became a reality in the early part of the 21st century (as did several other aspects of Asimov’s essay).
1964 World’s Fair. Photo: Unknown
So what now of our prediction for the World’s Fair of 2064? We’ve gathered enormous knowledge about ecology, social systems, the built environment, human-environment interactions, and both the pros and cons of technology in the last 50 years. Will we be bold enough to imagine aspirational cities in which nature and culture are beautifully integrated in entirely new ways, and on a scale large enough to reach all of the urban population? How will we recruit the next generation to join that effort, despite the prevalent belief that it will be too costly, too politically challenging, and too risky to fully achieve? I choose to believe that design, transdisciplinarity, ingenuity, and collective engagement will bring about an exciting new future for cities and urban residents. Leaders in education and outreach such as NYSCI’s Design Lab are preparing the next generation for that vision, but they can’t do it alone. Many, many more of us are needed to join this effort.
As Asimov wrote in Prelude to Foundation:
You don’t need to predict the future. Just choose a future—a good future, a useful future—and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.
Increasingly, cities are becoming risky and vulnerable places to live in because of climate change; it is vital to integrate natural defences with gray, or built, infrastructure for sustaining cities.
We need to learn from the mistakes of the past and pay adequate attention to investments in natural infrastructure that would maximise our resilience to floods.
The past decade, from 2005–2015, has shown us what happens when we ignore the vital signs of urban ecosystems, which are often viewed as the lifelines of nations, and represent the complex human-coupled natural, social, and economic ecosystems. The deadliest 2005 floods in Mumbai and Gujarat, Assam in 2012, Uttarakhand in 2013, Jammu and Kashmir in 2014, and 2015 floods in Chennai showed us that the urban metabolism has collapsed. Mumbai received 944 mm of rain in a single day in July 2005, killing 500 people. Gujarat floods in the same year recorded more than 123 deaths, with financial losses accounting to 800 million rupees. Jammu and Kashmir experienced floods in several districts as a result of torrential rains in September 2014, submerging almost 390 villages in Kashmir. In the Uttarakhand floods, almost 100,000 pilgrims were trapped as a result of destruction of bridges and roads and more than 5,000 people were killed. The recent December 2015 floods in Chennai, of 1,284 mm of incessant rains, resulted in a loss of 3 billion U.S. dollars to the economy as the city came to a grinding halt. The floods occurred as countries met for climate negotiations at COP21 in Paris, and climate change was cited as one of the reasons; the countries responsible for climate change were blamed as indirectly responsible for the floods in Chennai.
Flooding in Chennai. Photo: Google Images.Flooding in Chennai. Photo: Google Images
While climate change can increase the probability of such extreme events happening, can this be the real culprit?
Hazards turn into disasters when planners violate man-made and natural laws. We have failed to monitor the urban ecosystem vitals seriously, nor have we taken precautions to ensure that the lifelines do not collapse. The reality in both Mumbai and Chennai, as well as other booming cities, is that the storm water and sewage systems have a very small capacity. The drainage system is old, poorly managed, and clogged with garbage at several places. The storm water system of Mumbai, for instance, has the capacity to carry only 25 mm of rainwater per hour (1). In Chennai, construction-blocked storm water channels reduce the capacity of the reservoirs to soak up unseasonal rains. Land-constrained cities are encroaching on drainage areas such as the mouths of rivers and canals, blocking effective drainage. Zoning regulations were weak or neglected in both the cities due to different political and socioeconomic factors. People have suffered because of a lack of adequate warning mechanisms.
Flooding in Mumbai. Photo: Google Images
Though the projects require environmental impact assessments in theory, in practice, these are often inoperative. The marshes and swamps are replaced to make way for construction. Mangroves, which provide protection from storms, are destroyed. People have placed construction close to riparian areas. It is well known that riparian areas reduce floods and concrete structures nearby reduce their infiltration abilities (2). The root systems of living natural vegetation in riparian areas open pores in the soil, intercepting runoff and acting as a potential barrier against moving water. By expanding desultorily, we have disturbed a delicate ecological balance, thereby denying the chance of peaceful co-existence of mankind with nature.
Floods are not a new phenomenon to India, nor are they a concern for developing countries alone. Between 1995 and 2015, more than 3,000 flood disasters affected almost 2.3 billion people worldwide, per the UN’s report on “The Human Cost of Weather Related Disasters (3). India, with approximately 900 cities characterized by high density of population and economic activity, is highly vulnerable to climate-meteorological disasters.
While one cannot fight with the forces of nature, one can take adequate steps to improve resilience and minimize the damage caused by these natural disasters. Such steps have their foundation in well-conceived and consistently implemented urban planning and regulations.
Clearly, the deluge in India is not only due to natural forces and the extent of damage could have been minimized with proper urban planning. We will have to pay for past mistakes and, in the immediate future, we may have to face the brunt of nature’s increasing fury. Climate change, can intensify the frequency and intensity of such extreme events happening and we need to prepare for this. What options do we have?
Flooding in Kashmir. Photo: Google Images
The options we have are to provide (1) resistance, (2) resilience, and (3) remediation. Resistance means preventing the floods or minimizing the damage. This may include new flood gates, flood proofing, flood resistant designs, and using materials which absorb flood related stresses. Resilience means developing the ability of the system to cope with the disaster, both structurally and functionally. Resilience is related to the frequency of the disasters—if cities are resilient, they recover from disasters, else they collapse. Resilience can be improved through strong infrastructure (drainage infrastructure and waste management, for example) and good governance (better weather predictions, advance flood warning systems, awareness campaigns). Remediation means adapting to vagaries and repairing damages after disasters have occurred.
We need to learn from the mistakes of our past and pay adequate attention to investments in natural infrastructure to maximise our resilience to floods. So what are our options?
Nature-based systems have multiple benefits, unlike so-called gray investments, which are highly specific.
Wetlands, floods plains, marshes, swamps, riparian lands need to be maintained and vegetation cover has to be restored on these lands
Pavements need to be permeable
Mangroves provide natural defense to floods cost effectively than gray infrastructure like dykes and and need to be conserved
The basic vitals of the cities (pressure points like the carrying capacity of the storm water systems, ability of the cities to drain water, losses in vegetation, demographic growth and the preparedness to extreme events) must be monitored regularly and appropriate actions taken so that city dwellers are not susceptible to the vagaries of nature.
Rather than emphasising on gray infrastructures alone, nature and nature-based solutions should be integrated with engineering solutions to provide multiple lines of defense.
Studies highlighting the costs and benefits offered by natural alternatives need to be undertaken.
Several successful examples of investments in natural infrastructure across the world exist, and they show how cost effective they can be. During the Mumbai floods in 2005, the loss of life and damage could have been much higher but for the 104-sq. km. Sanjay Gandhi National Park, which lies entirely within the city limits.
Corporations should realise the value of and make investments in infrastructure as part of their social responsibility.
It is time to identify flood areas, estimate how many people are at risk, regulate the areas vulnerable to floods, build green infrastructure, and provide good basic flood information and early warnings.
As the threat of climate change looms large, a coordinated approach across multiple stakeholders and proactive natural infrastructure strategies and policies is the need of the day. India may require an exclusive Flood Control Act.
A review of A Sequel to Suburbia: Glimpses of America’s Post-Suburban Future. By Nicholas A. Phelps. 2015. ISBN: 9780262029834. MIT Press. 248 pages. Buy the book.
James Joyce suggested that the creative work of an author—and I also include the work of an artist or landscape architect—presumes the intellectual level of the audience that is needed to appreciate it. Having attempted to read Ulysses myself and come up short, the remark makes a lot of sense. After a few pages of author Nicholas A. Phelps 2015 book, Sequel to Suburbia my mind drifted to Joyce’s wisdom and to the question: For whom and for what purpose is this book intended?
Those who expect reinforcement of their particular views of suburbia may encounter a refreshing challenge in “A Sequel to Suburbia”.
The title Sequence to Suburbia is engaging, especially to a planner and landscape architect, like me, interested in the problems and the design potential of the unprecedented suburban pattern. The caption of the book that follows, Glimpses of America’s Post-Suburban Future, should extend the attraction to city planners, professors, or practitioners, implying that the book is forward-looking, useful, and will offer productive insight for one’s own work. On these points, the book will not disappoint, especially if the reader is familiar with the problem of the modern city and how to restructure it as a theoretical activity that is principally academic and research-tempered.
Enthusiasts of urbanism and landscape will encounter familiar issues and “contradictions” of suburbia in the forward and exposition of book. For example, the promise suburbia made for a new kind of civility that would be settled in nature but never materialized as garden, green and diverse mix of urban uses were replaced by optimized homebuilding strategies. But in addition to other, frequently alleged problems of suburbia, such cultural decentralization, lost human potential through travel distances and the consumption of natural resources, Phelps adds that some time after World War II, America as a whole gained from the movement of business out of cities, while the outer suburbs themselves barely benefitted, as simultaneously, the inner cities bore the cultural and financial costs. The familiar précis and recitation of topics sets up an expected delight and twist in the direction of the book.
Books about The New Urbanism such as The Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler, or alternatively, counterarguments that are pro-suburbia such as Robert Bruggeman’s Sprawl; A Compact History, tend to polarize the debate with mercurial, and at times, snarky rhetoric. While Phelp’s research-driven exploration seems to lean towards the former in the beginning, the text takes an unexpected change of direction with the following.
Quoting Phelps, “Yet, if the Zeitgeist is of a sequel to suburbia waiting to be written by some architects, planners, and civil society organizations under the manifesto’s of a New Urbanism, TOD, smart growth, and the like, that picture is not one received by all. Indeed – and here’s the rub – arguably, the majority of citizens, architects, planners, politicians, land speculators, and construction, banking, and insurance companies are happy for the story of suburbia to carry on.”
What is perhaps the best contribution by the book, and one that recommends it as an additional to any shelf on the topic, is the realization that Phelps is studying suburbia with an open mind. In lieu of the pedantic or preachy, this transforms the book into something that the reader can appreciate objectively by considering that perhaps the question of suburbia isn’t a matter of replacement or the need for a sequel but rather its refinement. This is a refreshing counterpoint to broader debate about suburbia that in some cases can unfortunately descend into a kind of uncritical zealotry. Considering the author’s background, the writing style and prose that delivers the book’s objectivity may be a challenge for professionals to appreciate.
Nicholas A. Phelps is a professor of urban and regional development at University College London. A prolific writer, his online dossier indicates that he has written fifty-some books and published articles across a spectrum of major academic journals. It is interesting that Phelps wrote Sequel to Suburbia, since his primary academic field is economic geography, not planning or urban design. The statistics, quantities, and economics that dominate the intellectual world in which he dwells are unquestionably part of a city. But in a city, the quantitative co-exists with a qualitative realm that includes a vast and unmeasurable dimension of human emotion, wonder, and imagination. The two together make the true city.
Perhaps Phelps’s familiarity with his own quantitatively-driven field explains the impoverishment of drawings, diagrams, and the kinds of maps that one might typically expect in a text that outwardly appears to be about urban planning and design. If sensibilities, such as those reflected by The New Urbanism, represent a raison d’être, Phelps’s somewhat non-orthodox exploration of suburban planning and analyses of American suburbanism is heightened by his roots in English culture. Here he examines North American suburban patterns with the cool objectivity of a foreigner studying a specimen from a distance, versus, say, how an anthropologist might take on a similar project by living within a culture to more thoroughly understand the non-quantitative idiosyncrasies that can elude data collection.
The book is modest in length, which makes it approachable as a reading project. Eight chapters are organized onto 180-pages and a 51-page appendix that includes footnotes and an index to support them.
The overview in Chapter One advances the central question of the book: “While the shine has worn off the outer suburbs of the ‘first modernity’ (a term Phelps frequently uses, which is of his own invention) is there sufficient documentation and cultural agreement and intellectual consensus to glimpse the makings of a distinctly new post-suburbanity?”
From this point, the text proceeds with an admission that a cohesive field of suburban study and a nomenclature of its many vaguely defined parts has yet to emerge. In reinforcing this point, Phelps provides a useful enumeration of terms that have attempted to capture the essence of the spatial vagueness of the American metropolis and its different constituent elements, including:
Galactic Urbanization
Post-Metropolis
Edge City
Technoburbia
Edgeless Cities
Boomburbs
He concludes the exposition by offering that a recent—planetary urbanization—may “end the terminological proliferation”.
The next six chapters are organized into symmetrical sets of three that mirror each other in content construction. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore three distinct theoretical assessments of American suburbia by Phelps; they prefigure a set of case studies that demonstrate the same set of three assessments that continue in Chapters 5, 6 and 7.
Respectively, the case studies are: Chapter Five, downtown Kendall, Florida near Miami; Chapter Six, Tyson’s near Alexandria, Virginia (formerly known as Tyson’s Corner until the city elected to reconsider its brand identity and drop the second word); and Chapter Seven, the expansive suburb of North Chicago, Schaumburg.
While the three case studies offer a kind of small, medium, and large geographical examination, their selection raises critical questions, especially in how Phelps points out that each example possesses somewhat unique qualities. It is curious that cities such as Phoenix, Houston, or Atlanta, which are textbook demonstrations of a vast and generic proliferation of suburbia that is unaffected or unmodified by the interference of geographical circumstances and natural features such as rivers and mountains are not included. And the musings of James Joyce became relevant again in considering the summary offered in Chapter Eight which leaves the question of suburban reform, revision or diminishment, open and inconclusive.
For whom and for what purpose is this text principally written? Clearly, it seems to favor academics and theoreticians doing research. Urban enthusiasts who are more accustomed to the flowering and nostalgic concepts of the New Urbanism will find this text turgid and frustrating when they encounter simple points enveloped in fog. Consider the following, “The prospects for the reworking of suburban space are crucially dependent on the extent and manner in which any rescaling of the state can address corollaries to private accumulation.” I understand all the words, but not when they are put together like this.
Those who expect that a new book about suburbia will reinforce their particular view of suburbia—either pro or con—even before turning the first page, may encounter a refreshing challenge. Wading through the rhetoric takes some work and persistence to reach the ultimate realization that Sequel to Suburbia, while skeptical of the topic on the one hand, remains open to the consideration that suburbia is an established cultural fact at this point in history, more in need of refinement than elimination. In this respect, the title, Sequel to Suburbia, becomes clearer as a question than as a declarative or imperative. To embolden the readers as their own arbiters sets the book apart as a text that is intelligent, refreshing, and useful.
In my last post, I wrote that efficient urban sustainability policy should be inclusive, in the sense that it should address sustainability in an area large enough to encompass urban centers, but suburban, periurban and dependent rural, or natural places. I called for planners to abandon the “false dichotomy between urban and rural areas,” andreplace it by a rural-urban continuum.
Among the comments received, there was this one from Darien Simon. She mentioned that sooner or later there will be—there already is—an intense competition between land required for non-residential uses, and cities growth. And she wrote: “The limit will be reached in the finite system unless one or more of the system conditions themselves are somehow transformed…Perhaps our best approach is to focus first on trying to learn from previous incidents, and then apply those lessons with due caution and precaution as we move toward greater sustainability across the entire urban-rural, human-environment system.” Well, it sure makes a lot of sense, but how to do that concretely?
I started thinking: is there already some type of urban arrangement addressing the urban-rural continuum—it does not necessarily result from “incidents”—that, if generalized, would deeply transform urban systems conditions while contributing to a more sustainable future? Yes, there is one, and its name is urban agriculture. Urban agriculture defines a spatial pattern that goes far beyond the urban-rural continuum. It postulates that some type of agriculture can flourish within the city, in addition to the existence of an urban-rural gradient of the whole urban area. It considers that urban multifunctionality should also include farming.
But well, as usual, things are not that simple in the wonderful world of sustainability planning. Urban agriculture is both an oxymoronic and elusive term. What do we call urban agriculture? Are community gardens parts of urban agriculture or not, for example? A TNOC roundtable April 2014— The sky is the limit for urban agriculture. Or is it?—showed strong differences of opinion on this issue. When Mary Rowe boldly declares, “community gardens and urban agriculture are not the same thing”, Lindsay Campbell completes and nuances: “Community gardening and urban agriculture are not synonymous. Although community gardens can be important agricultural sites, certainly not all gardens focus on food.”
Which calls for another question: what are the differences between urban and non-urban agriculture? Well, urban agriculture is not only about food and landscapes, and urban agriculture production can certainly not be sufficient to feed a whole urban area, anyway. As Gareth Haysom puts it in the same roundtable: “Universal calls for urban agriculture “as the solution to the urban food challenge” obscure deep systemic issues within the wider urban food system.” The question then becomes: what specific services may urban agriculture bring to a city and what nuisances and unexpected consequences may result? An important though too often dodged issue. Eventually, it is not so evident that urban agriculture can turn an urban area sustainable by itself.
Indeed, urban agriculture is not such a fresh idea. Moreover it is certainly not an offspring of sustainable development. Urban agriculture has existed for centuries in very different places around the world, such as the chinampas in Tenochtitlan (the actual Mexico City) since the 15th century or sooner, the hortillonnages in Amiens (a French city north of Paris) for more than twenty centuries, or the interstitial gardens (agriculture d’interstice) of Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, which accompanied the foundation of the city in the 19th century.
Hortillonnages in 1920. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Throughout the 20th century, architects and planners forged tight though ambiguous links between the farming world and the urban world, based on the notions of landscape and quality of life in Europe and Northern America. One of the pioneers certainly was Frederick Law Olmsted—the landscape architect of Central Park in Manhattan and Mont Royal in Montreal—who introduced the idea that landscape can foster social change and individual development, while creating economic opportunities. The emergence of the landscape as a central concern in urban planning, paved the way to the advent of urban agriculture. Ebenezer Howard included kitchen gardens within its Garden City, which was in addition surrounded by family farming, as he explained in his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Even Le Corbusier—who didn’t generalized this approach later—tried to couple landscape with agriculture in the Cité Radieuse where he intended, as an experiment, to assign a determined acreage of orchards, fields and kitchen gardens to his collective housing (Le Corbusier, 1929). From 1950s to 1990s both planners, policy-makers and more generally city-dwellers were losing interest in urban agriculture, although Guerilla Gardening activism—a form of direct action that consists in creating kitchen gardens in abandoned land or land perceived to be neglected by its legal owner—occurred sporadically in the 1970s (Reynolds, 2008). The 1980s were characterized by the creation of large-scale urban parks, in the context of urban policies promoting open and green areas in the city seen essentially as recreational facilities. There was no more any interest in gardening, farming of food production.
But times were changing in the 1990s, as Michael Hough devoted an entire chapter of his book Cities and Natural Process: A Basis for Sustainability to “City Farming”, in 1995. Since then, there has been a growing proliferation of projects promoting urban farming architectures, such as Agritecture, or Tree-Like Skyscrapers and Vertical Farming—cultivating plants or breeding animals within tall greenhouse buildings or vertically inclined surfaces—developed by Dickson Despommier. At the same time, urban rooftop farms are epitomized by the mainstream medias as the paragon of urban agriculture.
Well, at the risk of being a wet blanket, I would like to recall that a single cow needs more than 3.70 acres of grassland in its life. There is obviously a huge discrepancy between the dream and the reality. Even Michael Pollan—the well-known guru of local self-sufficient farming—admits in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A History of Four Meals that locating food producers and consumers in a same place is very tricky, if not completely infeasible, especially in huge urban areas. This being said, the complex interactions that food production and distribution has with the urban metabolism should be considered when trying to design a sustainable and thus multifunctional urban fabric, as mentioned by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood in Above the Pavement – the Farm! : Architecture and Agriculture at Public Farm.
Greenhouses at Lufa Farms, world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse in Greater Montreal. Source: Wikimedia Commons…But, roof farming is not so recent either: La Havana, Municipio 10 de Octubre. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The very basic question—What do we call urban agriculture?—now takes another form, maybe easier to answer. What are the different objectives of urban agriculture? Community gardens, kitchen gardens, food farming, for example, are three different things, completely. The types of urban agriculture that exist in a city vary a lot according to the climate, the cultural background, the economic and social situation of the city, etc. In many urban areas of Central America or India, urban agriculture is essentially a food security issue, related to fight against poverty and malnutrition. Mark Redwood shows in his book,Agriculture in Urban Planning: Generating Livelihoods and Food Security, that urban farming can improve food security.
The situation is quite different in European or North American cities. There, urban agriculture is mainly seen as a social innovation that contributes to improving the quality of life, fostering social links among neighbors, and enhancing urban landscapes. It is not so much about food, really. The main expressions of this approach are community gardens and kitchen gardens. But, as mentioned by Ulf Sandström in his paper Green Infrastructure Planning in Urban Sweden, these gardens, as well as urban food farming, are often temporary—not to say ephemeral—and eventually they disappear sooner or later under the pressure of urban growth, urban densification and increased property value.
Urban agriculture is not only about food: Freiburg. Source: Wikimedia Commons
We definitely have a long way to go in including agriculture in urban planning on a permanent basis. Andre Viljoen and Joe Howe‘s proposal to create a seamless network of open green areas, connecting all the types of urban vegetated places from the very center of the city to its outskirts, and beyond to the more rural neighboring areas, would be a good start. Their Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPUL) establishes productive lands as the core as a key component of urban design. It is a real breakthrough for planning. Moreover, the CPUL, which penetrates the smallest nooks and crannies of the urban areas, from the outskirts to the very center of the cities, as a capillary network, is a wonderful tool to link the different parts of the urban fabric.
Squares, parks, gardens—community gardens and kitchen gardens, as well as public gardens—and more generally all vegetated urban public spaces, are obvious components of the CPUL. But forests, wetlands, ancient wastelands and brownfields, slopes and talus, or farmlands may also be part of it. Thus, the banks of a river running through an urban area may absorb floodwaters naturally, while providing other ecosystem services, such as walking and leisure activities, and even being used seasonally as horticultural gardens as it is the case in Amiens with the hortillonnages. Besides, CPUL improves greatly the quality of the urban fabric, by linking formerly scattered vegetated places within a consistent network. Thus, urban agriculture can be cornerstone that helps reconfigure urban areas, provided that unbuilt urban open spaces are considered as permanent structures and the backbone of any urban development project and — more generally — of planning.
Using the banks of rivers: Hortillonnages at fall, with the Amiens cathedral in the background. Source: Wikimedia Commons
This new approach embodies in many recent actions, such as the Loutet Park Farm in Vancouver. This pilot project consists of the creation of an urban farm in an under-used portion of a public park, under the partnership of three organizations: a local authority (the City of North Vancouver), a local association (North Shore Neighborhood House), and a research center (Greenskins laboratory at the University of British Columbia). This urban farm is designed as a social enterprise to connect Vancouver inhabitants with food production, and providing them access to fresh, local produce, while addressing issues about the quality of the urban fabric and quality of life. In doing so, the Park Farm also promotes a new park typology that includes agriculture.
At the heart of urban agriculture lies the strong desire of people to connect with nature, as pointed by Tim Beatley, who developed the notion of Biophilic City. A recent paper addressing the expectations of visitors at the Parc de Bercy in Paris, showed that their three main interests in going to the park were wandering purposelessly, escaping urban pollution and getting in touch with nature. Urban agriculture, as a hybridization process between city and farming, offers many advantages compared with other expressions of nature in the city. In addition to making agro-production activity consistent with urban aspirations to connect with nature, and in addition to providing many ecosystem services, urban agriculture gives new perspectives to planners in considering the urban fabric. Designing a capillary network of production gardens within the city as the backbone of a new and more sustainable urban arrangement is probably one of the more innovative approaches—although an ancient but forgotten one—to foster urban transition to sustainability.
François Mancebo
Paris
Community gardens in the Parc de Bercy – Paris. . Source: Wikimedia Commons
California has long been a center of gardening culture. With a mild climate and a history of agricultural expansion followed by rapid urbanization, California’s ornamental gardens are populated by plant species and cultivars imported from all over the world. Many of these exotic species have become iconic, such as the palm trees, figs, and citrus of southern California. However, the current drought has brought wide recognition of the fact that most of these ornamental plants, from the palm trees of Rodeo Drive to Santa Barbara’s landmark Moreton Bay Fig, are supported by irrigation that is rapidly becoming a scarce commodity. So, is there a place for ornamental gardens in the new California? We’ve been studying this question for a number of years in Los Angeles and its surrounding municipalities, and fortunately, the answers are not as alarming as most people seem to assume.
Water conservation in irrigated gardens generally has three components: watering less; employing more efficient irrigation technologies; and changing the composition of garden plants (by removing lawns and non-waterwise species, for example). Many Californians have concerns about the costs of these measures and their implications for the aesthetic and recreational quality of urban parks and gardens. Just as “xeriscaping” became associated with mental images of sparsely planted cacti and succulents that were unappealing to most people, the new language of water conservation is “mandatory watering restrictions,” which brings to mind brown lawns and withered flowers. Is that the future of California’s cities?
Banded trees at UC Irvine, where Pataki measured their water use. Photo: Pataki and Pincetl
We’ve extensively measured the water use of residential yards, parks, and also individual plants and trees grown in the Los Angeles area, and can consider each of these measures in turn. First, let’s think about irrigation efficiency. Reducing water applications without changes in technology or plantings is the “low hanging fruit” of outdoor water conservation, but most people are lacking information about the actual water requirements of urban landscapes. Excess irrigation is apparent virtually everywhere in California, perhaps most visibly in urban storm sewers and storm drains. As the name implies, storm sewers are meant to convey stormwater—that is, rainwater—away from streets and residences. However, looking at California’s storm drainage system at any given time of the year, including the “dry season”, one will find storm gutters and sewers full of running water. In the absence of storm events, most of this year-round “nuisance flow” originates from irrigation runoff. Excessive irrigation has been prevalent in most California cities for a number of years, and the consequences have been severe not only for water conservation, but also for water quality: irrigation runoff contains contaminants that pose serious problems in coastal waters due to eutrophication and bacterial outbreaks. To combat this issue, some coastal municipalities prohibit excessive runoff from residential properties, but these restrictions are very difficult to enforce. Widespread over-watering has simply become an accepted source of both water consumption and non-point source pollution throughout the irrigated western U.S.
The potential upside to all this over-watering is that eliminating it can be an effective means of meeting conservation targets without drastic changes to landscaping. But, how will residents know how much to water? Many water districts and state and local agencies provide guidelines, although we have found that these often over-estimate the actual water requirements of urban landscapes, particularly lawns shaded by trees or buildings. Online recommendations and calculators are a starting point, but many residents don’t access or properly implement them. This is where irrigation technology provides the next effective strategy in urban water conservation. Most people have a general sense that lawn and garden watering requirements vary with the weather: cooler temperatures = lower water requirements. Unfortunately, the ubiquitous irrigation timers found in most California homes have to be adjusted by hand to account for changes in the weather. And even with the best of intentions, most of us have probably failed to adjust or shut off these systems during foggy or rainy conditions. Newer systems use environmental measurements to do this for us: there are systems that record soil moisture onsite or that tap into California’s network of weather stations to automatically adjust irrigation schedules at the appropriate times, although the accuracy of the calibrations for these systems can vary. Of course, changing irrigation technology costs money, and the reality is that these new systems need to be widely incentivized by water districts to be implemented on a large scale. The good news is that they work: for example, we found that a soil moisture-based system tested in residential turfgrass at the South Coast Research and Extension Center in Irvine, CA had almost 100% irrigation efficiency, with virtually no water lost to runoff or drainage (percolation below the rooting zone).
An example of what can replace a lawn—gravel with non-native, small, and unobtrusive plants. Photo: Pataki and Pincetl
Lawn watering practices and the extent of turfgrass in California cities are important aspects of urban water conservation. We agree that reducing the area of urban lawns should be an important aspect of water conservation strategies. Yet much of the appeal of California’s urban gardens is due to their stunning array of other types of ornamental plants. Many media reports highlight fears about the loss of valued ornamentals such as exotic trees, heirloom roses, and other flowering shrubs as a consequence of the current drought.
Is there a place for these species in the new California? Most definitely, the answer is yes. Of all of the plants that we’ve studied, lawns require the most water by a large margin, mainly because they are very shallowly rooted. In all ecosystems including cities, the deep soil is a storage pool of water, and plants that are deeply rooted have a far better capacity to withstand drought than lawns and grasses. Virtually all shrubs and trees, including ornamentals, use far less water than lawns, and can persist on infrequent (but deep) watering if they’ve developed adequate root systems. One significant factor limiting the success of these species is that most home irrigation systems are optimized to keep lawns green, not to properly water trees and shrubs. Further, some urban developments are built with relatively restricted soil volumes, and plants in these areas will be prone to drought stress regardless of watering practices.
San Juan Capistrano, where ornamentals have been cultivated despite the drought. Photo: Pataki and Pincetl
Thus, there can be room for ornamental shrubs and trees in the new California, even for species that many presume to have high water requirements (roses, lilacs, ficus, and Eucalyptus to name a few), but cities will need the appropriate infrastructure to accommodate them, including adequate soil depth and irrigation practices that are optimized for deep root systems. Without these changes, the future of California’s urban tree canopy may be threatened as lawns are increasingly removed: while most people don’t specifically irrigate urban trees, California’s urban forest has long benefited from the excessive watering practices associated with lawns. Even large trees require far less water than lawns, but they still require some water in addition to local rainfall. This water will have to be provided by modest irrigation—at half the rate or less than current average outdoor water consumption—and the efficiency of the irrigation could be enhanced with low volume or drip irrigation systems.
Without proper stewardship of California’s urban ornamental gardens, the consequences for the new California will be dire. Urban trees and gardens provide a significant cooling effect, and large reductions in the extent of urban vegetation will exacerbate warming of California’s cities. What’s more, although the mechanisms are not well understood, many studies have found both physical and mental health benefits of access to urban vegetation. Finally, many people simply enjoy ornamental plants, as California’s active gardening culture shows. Ornamental gardens make cities more livable and enhance quality of life for many residents. So remove your lawn but keep your roses, and switch to infrequent, deep watering applied directly to the soil with no excess runoff. The new California will be better for it.
Diane Pataki and Stephanie Pincetl
Salt Lake City and Los Angeles
Pincetl has written extensively about land use in California, environmental justice, habitat conservation efforts, urban ecology, water and energy policy.
Every month 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.
Tim Beatley, Charlottesville There are many things we can and should do to make cities more accommodating for birds, but we must also work hard to actively connect urbanites to the birds already around them.
Luke Engleback, London Defining this term ‘bird friendly’ is largely subjective. It is better perhaps to see birdlife as an essential part of a wider system.
Dusty Gedge, London Will the human inhabitants embrace a new birdfriendly urban realm? Urbanists and modernists will probably say no! However I think the people I meet on a daily basis, whilst filming Kingfishers, would say yes!
David Goode, London If you don’t rigorously protect significant areas of greenspace and water against continuing pressure of urban built development the diversity and numbers of birds will inevitably decline.
Madhu Katti, Fresno In terms of urban design, it seems that habitat diversity begets bird diversity. The trick is in figuring out how to attract and support more of the native avifauna while discouraging invasives and keeping small predators (cats) at bay.
John M. Marzluff, Seattle Cities are bird friendly with much room for improvement. To ostracize birds from cities is to forget who we are and how we came to be.
Bongani Mnisi, Cape Town We all have a role to play in creating environments and cities that are bird friendly. You have to bother because if it is not you who enjoys sighting various kinds of birds, maybe the next generation would.
Glenn Phillips, New York City Is there a perfect bird-friendly city today? No, for sure, but cities today are generally good for birds. Ways to improve include more green space, control of pets, and building standards that reduce collisions.
Ken Smith, New York City New York City is the intersection of celebrities, real estate and birds. Apparently like their human counterparts some birds are drawn to cities. Here are some anecdotal notes on bird life in New York City.
Yolanda van Heezik, Dunelin To be truly bird-friendly, a city needs to have citizens who value biodiversity and influence both bottom-up and top-down decisions on how to manage the urban environment.
Maxime Zucca, Paris A bird-friendly city is probably a city where every urban person would like to live. It’s a place where urbanism is able to design a city shared between its human and non-human inhabitants, and not only aimed to increase efficiency of human society. Maybe, a bird-friendly city is a non-pragmatic one.
Tim Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for the last twenty-five years. He is the author or co-author of more than fifteen books, including Green Urbanism, Native to Nowhere, Ethical Land Use, and his most recent book, Biophilic Cities.
Every city can and should work to be bird-friendly, both out of an appreciation for the profound quality of life benefits provided by having birds around us, and out of a deep ethical respect for these sentient wonders that we, in so many ways, can affect for good or ill. Hearing birds is one of the joys of life and for me triggers intense memories of childhood. The songs of birds were a source of great pleasure, a calming force; they lulled me to sleep as young boy, and propelled me forward during difficult days. And the emerging research (and practice) is helping to verify these beneficial experiences. There is the Liverpool hospital using bird songs recorded by sound artist Chris Watson to calm kids (at stressful times, such as when being given shots). There is new research that shows that respondents rate images of development more highly if they also hear birdsong, and especially song from multiple birds.
I think we should start to judge the progress of cities (and my profession, city planning) in terms of the ability of residents to hear native bird song. Several of our partner cities in the Biophilic Cities Project are demonstrating the value and feasibility of such a goal or vision. In Wellington, NZ, there is a marvelous wild area in the center of the city, called Zealandia, where through the building of a predator proof fence, they are attempting to restore native species of birds., so devastated by these introduced species. The tagline of Zealandia, is “Bringing Back the Birdsong to Wellington”. Already the numbers of birds such as busy saddleback, tūī, and kākā, a charming and raucous native parrot, have rebounded (in the case of the kākā, from a low of six, reintroduced in 2002, to several hundred today), and the neighborhoods around Zealandia are seeing these birds and hearing them again.
There are many things we can and should do to make cities more accommodating for birds: bird-friendly design guidelines, use of bird-friendly glass (such as the new Ornilux line, which incorporates a UV coating seen by birds but not humans, and inspired by the strands that spiders weave into their webs to prevent birds from flying into them), lights-out programs, and work enhancing and expanding habitat in cities.
But we must also work hard to actively connect urbanites to the birds already around them. And watching and listening to birds is an important element in urban stress-reduction, and a reason to be outside and to break-away, at least for a few minutes, from the sedentary arc of lives. Recently here at the University of Virginia we organized our first bird walk directly through the campus. With the help of a more seasoned birder from our local bird club, we guided mostly undergraduate students along a pre-planned route through a cross-section of the campus (the Grounds, we call it), stopping to listen and observe. I think the students were fairly astounded at the number of bird species (we counted 17 species that day), and the quantity of birds we encountered, and they also seemed to have a lot of fun. We handed out a sheet for recording observations—mostly written but some drawn. I’m not sure whether any of those who participated that day continued to look around their environments for bird, but I am convinced it helped shift, at least for some, the ways they see the pathways, trees and buildings through which they move everyday. These are hopefully understood now as co-inhabited spaces, places where if we listen closely, and if we work hard to reduce the unhealthy noise from cars and jackhammers and leaf-blowers we might be able to hear and understand the voices of life around us.
Studio Engleback’s work currently includes a diverse range of proposals including a Biophilic retrofitting of public realm under and adjacent to the elevated Westway viaduct in London, a major urban renewal site in East London, a ‘green’ low impact design neighbourhood in Kigali (Rwanda), a cultural centre in Bamiyan (Afghanistan), a passive haus co-housing scheme in Essex, and village extensions in sensitive Sussex landscapes.
Since 2007, more than half of Humanity lives in urban areas, a quantum forecast to reach 70% by 2050. An economic system that, hitherto, has not placed a value on ecosystems that support us all has fuelled Industrialised urbanism, but there is a change occurring. The human value of Ecosystem Services was highlighted in the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), an approach beginning to inform sustainable city planning and retrofitting, for resilience to future environmental change.
Cites occupy about 3% of the Earth’s land surface, but are sustained by vast ecological footprints that extend across the globe; therefore, we might ask how should city boundaries, and ultimately, ‘urban bird friendliness’ be defined? Compared to some agricultural monocultures, cities can be very significantly more biodiverse.
The concepts of Ecourbanism (whole system urban design and retrofitting) and Biophilia (an innate tendency for people to seek connections with Nature) are central to reducing our impact on the environment. The links between human and ecosystem health have been shown in many studies. Birdlife might be regarded as a barometer of environmental wellbeing.
Urban bird life depends on its location and hinterland, as well as provision for wildlife within its fabric, so a simultaneous consideration of interventions at macro, meso and micro scales is needed, not only for ‘bird friendliness’, but for essential ecosystem services providing for all.
What does it look like?
Nairobi, capital of Kenya (area 696 km2, estimated population 3.4 million) is the most bird-rich city in the World with 604 species recorded within its boundaries (British Council 1997) of the 1080 species that may be found within Kenya. New Delhi, capital and second most populous city of India (metropolitan area 1484 km2, population about 25 million), is the second most bird-rich city in the world with 202 species recorded. It is also one of the most air polluted.
Common to both cities are extensive areas of forest/scrub and well-treed suburbs that contrast with other neighbourhoods in those cities that are unremittingly urban with little or no vegetation. Clearly, the size of an undisturbed natural habitat coupled with a network of vegetation plays a vital role in ‘bird friendliness’, but defining this term is largely subjective—for how do we define bird friendly or unfriendly, and are these the same as bird safe? It is better perhaps to see birdlife as an essential part of a wider system.
The fabled Nightingale in Berkley Square is a distant memory despite its proximity to Green Park and Hyde Park, both subject to more wildlife-friendly management techniques. However, the large area of ruderal herb and scrub on the Palatine Hill and forum in central Rome (area 1285 km2, population 2.9 million), or the native species plantings in the modernist Flamenco Park by Roberto Burle Marx, are home to a wide variety of birds, seemingly happy to be close to the rumble of traffic and large visitor numbers add to their cultural value. In the case of Rio (area 1182 km2, population +/- 6 million), the adjacent Floresta da Tijuca National Park covering 32 km2, is a prime example of designed Urban Green Infrastructure. This rich wildlife reservoir was replanted in the late 19th century on land that had been cleared for former coffee and sugarcane plantations, to arrest soil erosion and, to secure the water supply for the city.
Large scale thinking is essential, since overheating in cites leading to premature deaths, is caused by the cumulative lack of vegetation, extensive sealed surfaces, and expanses of biologically inert masonry.
This significantly alters microclimate, creating the urban heat island effect (UHI). Work by ASSCUE in Manchester demonstrated that in the UK, a 10% increase in urban verdure could reduce the UHI by 4˚C, whilst a 10% reduction may see a rise in UHI temperatures of up to 7˚C. Investing the city fabric with vegetation not only aids biodiversity, but also to improves air quality, reduces surface water runoff, improves urban soils, effects summer cooling and energy savings, and pumps down atmospheric carbon. In London 80% of the Public Realm in London (metropolitan area 1572 km2, population >8.2 million) comprises roads and paving (GLA 2014), more of this could become vegetated or made porous. Moreover, there is also significant scope to vegetate roofs and walls.
Biodiverse living roofs support invertebrates that are food for birds, and such roofs provide habitat for birds, including Black Redstarts in London and breeding Lapwings in Switzerland. In fact, once more vegetated surfaces are provided to mitigate the urban condition, birds are needed to play their part in managing the enriched urban ecosystem. Encouraging more bird life brings with it the need to address other issues including reducing light pollution, safe roosts, and measures to reduce risks to bird life – especially collision with glazed surfaces – a danger that can kill both healthy and weaker birds alike in large numbers.
Bird friendly cities may therefore look greener, express and celebrate a range of ecosystem services, and make more efficient use of resources. Sustainable, resilient design may be more biophilic, it must certainly be more biodiverse.
What does it not look like?
They are not hard, glassy, energy intensive, impersonal urban deserts that ignore ecosystem services and have only token planting and no soul.
Dusty Gedge is a recognised authority, designer, consultant and public speaker on green roofs. Dusty has also been a TV presenter on a number of UK shows and makes his own Green Intrastructure and Green Roof and Nature Videos. He is an avid nature photographer and social networker posting on Twitter, Facebook and G+.
Birds have always frequented cities. Shakespeare wrote of kites and their stealing linen in cities and of course there is the ubiquitous feral pigeon throughout the world in modern times. Whether these birds had or have merit to the human inhabitants of our metropolitan areas is an open question. I am sure that kites were a major irritant to medieval housewives, but now are celebrated when they are seen flying over London on a regularly basis.
I have recently being spending time in my small local park filming Kingfishers. This iconic bird is on the wish list of many a birder in England. A flash of blue on a river is the most we can expect to see. However in Lewisham they are bold, unlike their timid their rustic cousins. Whilst filming, the whole social and ethnic fabric of my area has engaged me in conversation. After marvelling at the Kingfisher our conversations turn to the ‘crane’ (heron) and why there is a pheasant wandering around. How and where did it come from? This is affirmation of birds being a route to encounters with nature.
The river where we are able to marvel at the splendour of the Kingfisher 15 years ago was a concrete channel devoid of anything natural except the water itself. The river was remodelled 15 years ago and naturalised. People and wildlife could once again meet as they probably did one hundred years before when millponds flanked the river Ravensbourne. This kind of change is characteristic of cities. Change is part of the very fabric of cities.
And there is change afoot. The 20th Century approach to our cities was one of sealing the surface. Concrete, steel and glass ruled. It still does to a certain extent. However many cities are embracing, and most will, the unsealing of surfaces. The notion of green infrasrtructure is taking root. There is a long way to go but it’s happening.
My own work is linked to this new green infrastructure approach. I am first and foremost a birdwatcher. My involvment in green roofs grew out of trying to protect a bird associated with the bomb sites of World War 2 and the industrial blight of 1970s and 80s. The Black redstart, along with a myriad of other birds, associated with dry stony habitats, positively thrived in this urban devastation and decline. In 1990s boom was back and developments burst out of the industrial blight. Protecting birds against the economics of new developments was a hard ‘ask’ but I, along with others, was fortunate to be able to put green roofs on the map in the UK. The protected species status of the black redstart helped ensure that green roofs were created for biodiversity mitigation. That was 17 years ago and central London now has over 179,000 m2 of green roofs. A large proportion of these are partly due to the bird.
So to me the bird friendly city of the future is intricately link to this new agenda. Rivers will be broken out of concrete to allow an encounter with a heron or a Kingfisher. Buildings will be decked with vegation allowing black redstarts to reside in the upper altitudes of our cities. Surely the bird friendly city of the future is confirmed by projects like the Bosco Verticale. Cities comprised of wooded towers and dry grasslands plains on roofs, where the dawn chorus of birds heralds the start of the urban day.
Will the human inhabitants embrace this new birdfriendly urban realm? Urbanists and modernists will probably say no! However I think the people I meet on a daily basis, whilst filming Kingfishers, would say yes.
David Goode has over 40 years experience working in both central and local government in the UK and an international reputation for environmental projects, ranging from wetland conservation to urban sustainability.
Two key issues determine whether a town or city is ‘bird-friendly’. One is the range and quality of habitats that prevail, together with opportunities for food and nest sites. The second is the culture of the place, whether birds are protected, encouraged, tolerated or shot. The UK has a long tradition of interest in natural history that results today in a great abundance of bird-life in its towns and cities. But it has not always been so. In 19th Century London finches and other small birds were caught in thousands to provide cage birds. Seagulls that ventured up the Thames were regularly shot from Westminster Bridge. Times change, but our cultural attitude to nature is still crucially important today in many aspects of city life, from detailed architectural and landscape design to wider issues of urban planning and land management.
At the habitat level we are lucky that many of our towns and cities have a significant amount of greenspace and water within their boundaries. In Greater London this amounts to two thirds of the area. Private gardens alone amount to one fifth of the total area. As well as parks, cemeteries, golf courses and reservoirs, there are extensive tracts of woodland, meadow, marsh and riverside. This great variety of habitat types supports 133 species of breeding birds, along with numerous wintering species. Many of these habitats are protected as nature reserves through planning regulations, covering one fifth of the area of Greater London. This is an absolutely crucial feature of a bird-friendly city. If you don’t rigorously protect significant areas of greenspace and water against continuing pressure of urban built development the diversity and numbers of birds will inevitably decline.
The range of habitats in Greater London. Note that the built environment occupies only one third of the area.(From GLA Biodiversity Strategy 2002 www.london.gov.uk)
A striking feature of bird populations in cities is the way that they find food supplies and breeding sites within the urban fabric. Some, such as feral pigeons and roof-nesting gulls, are not popular with city managers, but there are many species that are well adapted to city living that could easily be encouraged if we were minded to do so. Swifts are almost entirely restricted to urban areas for breeding, yet their populations are in serious decline due to the absence of suitable nest sites in modern glass and concrete buildings. One small change in architectural practice could influence this species in a dramatic way. Putting swift bricks in new buildings, or constructing towers specifically to accommodate swifts, would be a very tangible way of creating a bird-friendly city. Similar things already exist for other species such as peregrine falcon, grey heron, kingfisher, osprey, black guillemot and many others. The options are endless and every one of these has a good-news story attached.
Slight variations in landscaping techniques can have a profound effect. The number of species of birds breeding in city squares increases from only a few in hard paved landscapes to nearly twenty in those with fringing mature trees grading into shrubberies and lawns. Town parks can be improved even more. Over 50 species of birds now breed in London’s Royal Parks, a direct legacy of naturalist W. H. Hudson who first championed the concept of landscaping for birds in 1898. Bird-friendly parks result in people-friendly birds, as can be seen every day in central London.
Habitats on rooftops and green walls provide some of the greatest opportunities for enhancing grim and grey inner city townscapes, and with them will come the birds. Two final thoughts. Every city should have a major nature reserve designed for people to experience birds at close quarters like the London Wetland Centre, and we also need to take care of local phenomena such as inner-city pied wagtail roosts that bring delight to so many people.
(Much supporting evidence for these views can be found in Nature in Towns and Cities by David Goode, published by Harper Collins in 2014. Hudson’s compelling advocacy for bird-friendly parks forms chapter 14 of Birds in London Longmans Green, 1898.)
Madhusudan is an evolutionary ecologist who discovered birds as an undergrad after growing up a nature-oblivious urban kid near Bombay, went chasing after vanishing wildernesses in the Himalaya and Western Ghats as a graduate student, and returned to study cities grown up as a reconciliation ecologist.
Is there such a thing as a bird-unfriendly city? Not if the people are bird-friendly
In North-East India, e.g., in Nagaland, one hears of villages that are eerily quiet because there are no birds to be heard. This is because, when it comes to wildlife, local people adhere to the principle: “if it moves, eat it!” Children learn to hunt early on, and even 10-year-olds armed with slingshots contribute to the family dinner table small morsels of feathered delights or eggs. And so birds have learned to stay away from, and be very quiet around, humans. Yet the nearby hills and forests hold some of the highest diversity of bird species in the world. A bird-rich bird-friendly area containing some of the least bird-friendly human settlements. There may be other such bird-unfriendly cultures elsewhere in the world, but not very many.
Can you think of a city where there are NO birds? Surely there are some pigeons or house sparrows or crows even in the most densely built-up urban center? Indeed, many of the world’s cities support scores if not hundreds of bird species, many in populations larger than in surrounding “natural” habitats. A recent comparative analysis of bird diversity in 54 cities worldwide (Aronson et al 2014, coauthored by me) found, for example, that the median bird diversity was over 110 species; i.e., at least half of the 54 cities support 110 or more species of birds, and less than 5% are non-native species. Worldwide, one in five bird species (2041 out of 10,052 known species) were reliably recorded in just these 54 cities.
Take the metropolitan area of Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta), for example: famously teeming with people (now over 14 million) this dense urban conglomeration is home to over 250 species of birds, with not a single non-native species managing to establish a foothold competing against native urbanite birds. Other Indian megacities boast of similarly rich avifaunas, comprised of native species that have found ways to make a living amid the cities’ hubbub. Singapore supports over 350 bird species.
So what’s the secret to building a bird friendly city? Well, it depends on what you mean by bird-friendly. It seems that many birds have found ways to live in the interstices of human habitation, as long as they are tolerated and not hunted by people. Even cats, those infamous killers of all manner of wildlife, can’t keep down the sheer number of birds a city may support. Yet cats—and humans—have also driven particular species to extinction, even as others may thrive there. So when you say bird-friendly, you have to be careful to specify which birds!
None of the world’s cities were built with bird diversity or conservation as a goal. So how do they end up with so many birds? The answer is at least two-fold: (1) many birds will come looking for food and other resources no matter how strange and novel a habitat we create; and, (2) the more diverse a range of habitats in a city, the more species of birds you are likely to find. In terms of urban design, it seems that habitat diversity begets bird diversity. Cities generally provide plenty of food (even if mostly junk) for a variety of birds, and often also relatively safe habitats (despite cats). So much so that we must worry if urban habitats are ecological traps drawing threatened species to their eventual doom. The real trick then is in figuring out how to attract and support more of the native avifauna while discouraging invasives and keeping small predators (cats) at bay. And making sure cities don’t become ecological traps, but habitats where birds thrive. All of which is possible if we have bird-friendly people living in our cities.
Even in Nagaland, conservationists were able to work with local communities to completely stop the annual massacres of the threatened migratory Amur Falcons a year ago. Which should inspire us to do even better to conserve bird diversity in our cities.
Cities should sustain their friendly attitudes with birds, else humanity forgets its past
In my opinion, all cities are bird friendly, to a degree. Even the most hardened metropolis provides a few nooks and crannies, and some bits of food that are seized upon by sparrows, gulls, pigeons, vultures, or crows. Our waste is their bread and butter.
Most cities provide much more for birds. Parks, recreational areas, and cemeteries offer birds of many species respite within the concrete jungle. Here birds can find a variety of more natural foods and nest sites. The warmth of the city may extend birds’ breeding seasons and some of the birds’ natural enemies may be rare. Where citizens notice birds many enjoy feeding them. So, supplements of food, water, and nest sites abound, especially in the less dense suburbs and exurbs that fringe the city. As a result, I see all cities as having great potential to harbor considerable populations and communities of many types of birds. And reviewing checklists of birds found in cities around the world suggests that most cities live up to their potential. For example, in continental Europe, the authors of Birds in European Cities (2005, Ginster Verlag) assessed the species richness of 16 cities, and found Lisbon to have the least avian diversity (44 species) and Bonn to have the greatest—an impressive 168 species.
But, will this potential continue to be realized?
As human populations grow and cities squeeze out all they can for human residence it is possible that urban bird abundance and diversity may decline. Therefore to me a truly bird-friendly city is one in which citizens remain vigilant of, and engaged with, their winged neighbors and take proactive steps to assure their continued prosperity.
1. Reduce the area occupied by manicured, industrial turf lawn and replace it with more diverse plantings;
2. Limit the two most significant sources of bird mortality—unrestrained outdoor cats and large clear or reflective windows;
3. Reduce night lighting, especially steadily glowing, red tower lights;
4. Encourage bird feeding and provision of nest boxes, except in rare instances (e.g., some parts of Australia) where hyper aggressive species benefit and exclude other native birds;
5. Celebrate native predators;
6. Foster a diversity of habitats within their city and the natural distinctiveness of their region;
7. Create safe connections between land and water; and
8. Enjoy and bond with the birds that thrive in the yards, parks, and commercial centers of their city.
Taking these steps will ensure that the habitats, populations, and human engagement exist so that birds can continue to adapt to city life.
Failing to sustain birds in our cities is obviously bad for birds, but it is equally bad for people. Birds add enjoyment, reduce stress, induce wonder and curiosity, and contribute to the economics of the city (houses in bird friendly locations fetch a premium price and purchases of bird feed and supplies add considerably to a city’s economy). Appreciating and understand birds can help build a broad, ecological land ethic, as espoused by pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold. Birds can help us see our land as a community, not simply as a commodity. When we do so, we are able to love and respect nature. This ethic begins at home, but it should extend from the city to wilder places. Understanding the ecology of home informs residents about the species that do poorly in our shadow. This lesson resonates with an ecologically literate and compassionate public building a willingness to sacrifice by setting aside large, wild areas outside of cities so that the birds and other animals that cannot live with us also have a place in an increasingly human-dominated world.
Paul Shepard, in The Others (1997, Island Press), claimed that birds and other wild animals made us who we are. They were, and continue to be, important selective agents in our evolution as a species. To insulate us from their creative energy is to limit our own potential. To loose them is to loose an understanding of how we came to be. To encourage the company of birds in the city allows todays people to experience a profound taxon that stimulated our ancestors’ cultures by providing both challenge and sustenance, while always engendering curiosity and respect.
Spotted towhees, dark-eyed juncos, and fox sparrows are common visitors to bird feeders in suburban Seattle, WA. Photo: John Marzluff
Bongani Mnisi is a Regional Manager in the Environmental Resource Management Department, City of Cape Town where he manages the largest part of the City’s Biodiversity Network including four Nature Reserves.
A bird friendly City is…Cape Town…of course if said this I would face a lot of resistance, wouldn’t I. Rather, it is best to state that bird friendly cities do exist.
This would be a city which puts into practice agreed environmental policies; a city which takes its ecological functioning systems such as rivers, wetlands and other green open spaces forward through open green parks, proclaimed national parks and nature reserves. This city would often support greening programmes in all open spaces using native plant species. Bearing in mind that a bird friendly city would often not be without infrastructure such as roads, healthcare facilities, basic and tertiary education as well as central business districts and industrial areas, however, this would be a city where biodiversity and conservation underpins development planning. It is a city where biodiversity is a fabric on which all developmental needs are knitted.
It is important to state that to create a bird friendly city could also be championed by interested individuals who come together through various forms. This could be in the form of tree planting foundations that receive donations for trees or propagate plants/trees for greening purposes. It could also be through university programmes where masters and doctorate students carry on research to establish connections which would see previously fragmented cities reconnected through a series of ecological corridors. These corridors could be established by restoring previously disturbed environments; small individual gardens in unused open spaces such as schools, healthcare centres and even road reserves. These individual gardens alone and isolated would not add any value, but when networked together, they form a network of stepping stones that can easily connect fragmented environments.
For all bird unfriendly cities as highlighted above, the opposite is true. These cities would most likely value rapid infrastructure development with little regard of the environment on which the city itself relies. This would be a city where every square kilometre would be developed. I would call this “The Concrete Jungle”. What is not often realised is that most bird species are sensitive to various elements such as roads and electrical transmission lines. Most people would often talk about the last time they saw a certain type of bird, which is no longer in the area. However, by tracing back what the area used to be like back then compared to now, it would be easier to see why. If not, why is it that when a certain type of plant is planted, the same birds return. This is a clear indication that there are some links with habitat fragmentation and even destruction of natural environments. This would be a city where its industrial development zone is not properly followed and the level pollution is spiralling out of control. A city that lacks green and connecting open spaces.
In all this, we all have a role to play in creating environments and cities that are bird friendly. We can do this by planting bird friendly gardens adding some plant species that produce nesting materials for some birds. Creating bird baths and feeding areas where it is necessary to attract other kinds of birds which we would have otherwise not seen due to lack of plants that attract them. We also have to bother enough to watch and pay attention to our beloved pets especially domestic CATS, which are notorious bird hunters. Like with infrastructure such as roads etc., birds would often avoid homes or areas that are frequented by cats. By trying to manage cats “although it may seem impossible” we may start seeing lots of birds returning to the areas where they once occurred. Pay attention to what you are planting i.e. does it produce nesting material, is it thorny “does it lends itself to be used as a nesting area?”, does the plant have nectar and is it bird pollinated?
You have to bother because if it is not you who enjoys sighting various kinds of birds, maybe the next generation would. So do it not for yourself, but for those who are yet to come.
As a New Yorker and a bird conservation professional, the question of what is a bird-friendly city is frequently on my mind, and often I think of how sustainability efforts here in one of the largest cities in the world have helped shape a more bird-friendly future. Let me start by saying that I think that cities are critical to the future for birds. Habitat loss is the number one threat to birds, by an order of magnitude, and suburban sprawl is a significant contributor to habitat loss and fragmentation. New York CIty is home to almost as many people as the entire state of Virginia. Imagine 40,000 square miles that could be devoted to unfragmented habitat and sustainable agriculture. Add in the significantly lower carbon footprint of cities like New York with robust public transit systems and the reduced heating and cooling costs of multiple unit dwellings, and cities seem pretty bird friendly from the get-go.
That doesn’t mean that cities should be given a free pass. Cities still present significant threats to birds from feral and free-ranging cats, collisions with glass, light pollution, and toxin bioaccumulation. A truly bird-friendly city must address all these threats. Prohibiting trap and release programs for cats and requiring cat owners to be responsible for their pet’s tresspasses could significantly reduce one of the largest threats to birds. Likewise, rules for dog owners should prohibit dogs from the most sensitive places and times, especially off-leash dogs, places like beaches where threatened piping plovers nest. Requiring the use of bird-friendly construction, especially adjacent to green spaces and waterways, but also along migratory corridors to key stopover sites. A truly bird-friendly city would prohibit the development of new glass box buildings, and require mitigation for existing structures. If even a few more cities followed the lead of San Francisco on this issue, it could promote the development of a huge variety of new bird-friendly glass products which could help reduce the hundreds of millions of birds killed annually in the United States. The American Bird Conservancy has been testing materials for bird-friendliness for several years, so there are already effective solutions on the market. Actively combating light pollution with fully shielded fixtures, prohibitions on vanity lighting, and strong lights-out policies could go a long way to reduce the impacts. Light pollution is implicated in raising collision rates and probably has significant impacts on migration as birds.
After generations of industrial use, cities have significant problems with persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals, that make their way into the food chain and can have significant lethal and sub-lethal impacts on migratory birds that must stop to replenish fat stores during their long flights between wintering and breeding territories. More work needs to be done both to understand the consequences and to mitigate them.
Actively making cities better for birds is the final component, and some cities, New York among them, have made positive strides. First, cities must provide healthy urban forests. New York CIty’s undertook the Million Trees Project as a way to galvanize public support, but despite the hype, the project has made real gains for urban forests, which also provide important habitat for birds, as the nuthatches and goldfinches and occasional Cooper’s hawk in the street trees outside my office window can attest. Managing natural areas in the city with the best interest of native plants and wildlife is another critical effort. New York City’s new Natural Areas Conservancy and Chicago Wilderness seek to do just that for the benefit of people as much as nature.
FInally, actively promoting the recreational enjoyment of birds and bird-watching is critical, as people must value their natural heritage in order to be moved to preserve it.
Is there a perfect bird-friendly city today? No, for sure, but cities today are generally good for birds, and with effort from dedicated individuals and conservation groups like the American Bird Conservancy, they can be better.
Ken Smith is one of the best-known of a generation of landscape architects equally at home in the worlds of art, architecture, and urbanism. He is committed to creating landscapes, especially parks and other public spaces, as a way of improving the quality of urban life.
New York City is the intersection of celebrities, real estate and birds. Apparently like their human counterparts some birds are drawn to cities. Researchers have found that pigeons, waterfowl, raptors and house sparrows are well adapted to the urban jungle. Following are some anecdotal notes on bird life in New York City.
927 Fifth Avenue—Home of Pale Male and Lola. It only figures that in New York City birds would achieve celebrity status and have their lives chronicled on television, in the news and as a topic of cocktail party chatter. Finding a good place to live in New York City is always a challenge for new residents. When red-tailed hawk, Pale Male arrived in Central Park in 1991, he first settled in an old tree nest but was driven off by thuggish neighborhood crows. But like any striving young New Yorker he soon upgraded to a building ledge above the front door of a fashionable Fifth Avenue manse. Like other New York celebrities, we were obsessed by the news stories about this eligible bachelor’s love life. There were a series of girlfriends, First Love, then Chocolate, then Pale Male reunited with First Love, who tragically died young after ingesting a poisoned pigeon. He was with Blue from 1998 to 2001 but Blue disappeared after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Lola, his true soul mate, arrived in 2002 and Pale Male and Lola were the social “It Couple” around town. They soon ran into trouble with the building’s coop board, which was skeptical of their means of support and family connections. The board callously removed Pale Male and Lola’s nest and installed anti-bird spikes.
There was an international outcry; people protested on the street outside the building. The Audubon Society became involved and an out-of-court agreement resulted in a new engineered-nest being installed. Maybe because of the trauma, the pair failed to hatch any new eyasses following the disturbance of their original nest. “Pale Male: New York’s Most Famous Red-Tailed Hawk May be A Father Again’” declared ABC News in on May 20, 2011. After years in which Pale Male and his mate Lola produced broods of eyasses, Pale Male took up with a new mate Ginger at his Fifth Avenue address. Pale Male’s seventh and eighth mates were Zena and Octavia. In recent years many more red-tailed hawks have taken up residency in New York City and it is not an uncommon sight to see a hawk flying overhead in a city park. Apparently it is still common practice, however, to poison rats and pigeons and this leads to the unintentional death of raptors, like the red-tailed hawk, which prey on these lower food chain animals.
55 Water Street—Home of the “FalconCam“. A live webcam at 55 Water Street in Financial District of lower Manhattan transmits the lives of nesting peregrine falcons, in what is perhaps the first instance of reality TV programming. Last year it was reported that Adele, a falcon, had laid four eggs, according to Scott Bridgewood the director of building maintenance of the 54-story office building. The falcons have nested on a 14th-story ledge since the 1990s and the FalconCam was installed a decade ago to let naturally voyeuristic New Yorkers peer into the lives of other urbanites. The original breeding pair named Jack and JJaie are gone now from the nest, but like any good pied-à-terre, it was soon occupied by another real estate lucky couple Jasper and Jubliee. In 2008, The New York Times reported that some 17 pairs of peregrine falcons live in the city. The falcons nearly faced extinction in the 1960s from the use of the pesticide DDT, but since then have returned to the city, reclaiming old habitats, in a form of nature gentrification.
Battery Park—Home of Zelda the Turkey, now deceased. On Thursday, October 9, 2014, the Daily News headline read “Zelda, Battery Park’s resident wild turkey, dies after being hit by a car”. The bird was hit while walking along South Street near Pier 11 on the East Side. Zelda was a Lower Manhattan fixture, named after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, who came to represent the renewal of downtown and Battery Park. I personally had seen Zelda, who was very much the bird-about-town in our neighborhood. She once posed for a celebrity photograph with my wife Priscilla. Zelda moved to Battery Park in mid-2003 and was known for roaming around the city’s open spaces. Reportedly, she even had her own Wikipedia page. Wild turkeys have become somewhat common in New York City, especially in the greener outer boroughs. While Zelda was much-loved, not all of the wild turkey population in the city is appreciated. There are about 100 feral wild turkeys (if that isn’t a redundant phrase) living in Staten Island. In a bit of overstatement, the Daily News reported in November 2013 that a “Flock of wild turkeys take over Staten Island”. The wild turkeys there wander freely in the borough’s neighborhoods, on public and private property and along the beaches. Local officials have been trying to relocate the birds for years because the birds defecate in public, stop traffic and are considered a nuisance by many residents. Because the birds have adapted to city conditions they can’t be released into the wild, where their survival would be threatened. Last year a local psychiatric hospital that didn’t like the birds on its ground, rounded up several dozen wild turkeys and shipped them off to a poultry processing plant to an ill fate. Animal activists were rightfully outraged. National Public Radio reported on November 27, 2014, “Wildlife Activists Try To Save Staten Island’s Wild Turkeys”. The conflict between humans and turkeys is still unresolved in Staten Island, the city’s greenest but perhaps least bird friendly borough.
Turkeys just get no respect. Bald Eagles, on the other hand, are much admired. Our country’s founders chose the eagle over the turkey as our national emblem and the rest of the story is history. Bald eagles have been making a comeback in New York City, where their population is the highest since the 1970s. A recent survey showed that there were 569 bald eagles in New York State after coming back from a precarious population estimated at just two living birds in 1975; the result of hunting, pesticide contamination and deforestation. I guess it is a commentary on human prejudice that we admire the birds that soar high overhead like the red-tailed hawk and the bald eagle but we don’t appreciate the ground birds like the wild turkey and the common pigeon.
1 Central Park West—Masters of the Universe. Today’s New York Times real estate section reports that a fully renovated penthouse in the Trump International Tower was recently sold for 33 million dollars, making it one of the most expensive nests in the city. The wealthy humans who can afford it love their urban aeries. These nests for the masters of the universe “birds of prey” provide spectacular views of the urban domain and a tremendous sense of power. Unfortunately we are becoming increasingly aware that architectural glass, the type that provides the sought-after privileged views, is the single biggest killer of birds in the United States. According to the American Bird Conservancy, collision with glass is claiming hundreds of millions or more bird lives annually. The New York Audubon Society has taken the lead with their Project Safe Flight, started in 1997 to provide research and awareness programs aimed at policy makers, architects and builders about the threat glass buildings pose to birds.
Yolanda van Heezik is currently exploring children’s connection with nature, and how ageing affects nature engagement. She is part of a multi-institutional team investigating restoration in urban areas, and cultural influences on attitudes to native biodiversity.
To be truly bird-friendly, a city needs to have citizens who value biodiversity and influence both bottom-up and top-down decisions on how to manage the urban environment. At the level of local government, the valuing of native fauna and flora should be part of a city’s vision of its identity, and embedded in its district planning. The conservation of native biodiversity should be viewed as a priority, rather than an added cost impeding economic development.
Residents of a bird-friendly city will have an awareness and appreciation of plants and animals that motivates the management of their own gardens and neighbourhoods, as well as influencing the people they vote into local and national government. Ideally, all ethnicities would espouse the sense of guardianship of the environment that is practiced by the Māori; i.e. kaitiakitanga. This is based on a belief that there is a deep kinship between humans and the natural world. Managing the environment following a process of kaitiakitanga would create the mindset that would ensure a bird-friendly city.
Bird-friendly cities are green and leafy, and have few barriers to dispersal. Most of the urban area would support a large amount of structurally complex vegetation, dominated by native species, and spatially configured to allow connectivity across potential barriers to dispersal. The potential of natural corridors such as rivers and streams would be optimised, with bird-friendly plantings. Plantings could also create corridors out of man-made features, such as railway lines and roads.
Urban predators are a major threat to birds in cities. Pet cats are probably the most abundant predator, although in New Zealand rats and possums are problems as well. People value their pets and derive benefits from them. In order for city residents to gain benefits from their pets as well as from a biodiverse environment filled with birds, regulations would need to require all cats to be contained indoors at all times, or in a run outdoors. If all owned cats were confined it would be much easier to control unowned cats and other urban pest species.
What do bird friendly cities not look like?
Research has shown that the parts of cities that do not support a diverse avifauna are depauperate in vegetation: in the suburbs green spaces consist mainly of lawn, and small gardens have little complex green cover.
Why bother?
Without regular daily encounters with birds and other wildlife, how can we expect people to value biodiversity and develop a conservation ethic? A growing body of evidence suggests we need contact with nature for our own health and well-being.
MZ is an ornithologist, working at the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (LPO), France main bird protection NGO, as a director of nature protection department. He has written books on Bird Migration and on Paris breeding birds.
I live in Paris, and I wouldn’t say it is the most bird-friendly city I’ve ever seen. As a birdwatcher, the immediate proximity of high quality wetlands or forests would be the main reason to elect a city as such. The urban wetland of Costanera Sur, in Buenos Aires, is probably the most striking example: it is full of birds and biodiversity in general, readily accessible in the middle of the city, on the bay front. We would dream of such a wetland in Paris. Berlin, with important forested areas within the city limits, even host rare breeding species like the White-tailed Eagle. We can’t compete.
But could a city become bird-friendly, when none or very few space is available? Paris is one the densest cities in the world, with 21,000 inhabitants per km². Two urban forests, Vincennes and Boulogne’s woods, stand just out of the ancient city walls limit (what we call “Paris intra-muros”); Boulogne hasn’t changed in centuries for, and Vincennes hasn’t changed since the Napoleon. These places are interesting for forest birds, especially since wood isn’t harvested.
But let’s talk about the challenging part: Paris intra-muros, within the walls. A recent survey has shown that 65 bird species regularly bred in this entity—55 do so every year. With regards to the number of breeding birds in the whole France (277) and Ile-de-France (178), this is quite a good score.
Most of these birds will be found in green spaces, especially in the parks, those places where the contact of citizens with nature is also essential for well-being, self-harmony, health. Once this relation between nature and human well-being is understood by city dwellers, the city can quickly become bird-friendly, and the space be shared to a greater extent. This space can easily be shared inside green spaces. A part is managed for people first, and biodiversity second—it can be used to rest on lawns and benches, to enjoy playgrounds and scenery, it must of course be suitable for disabled people… But this is not discordant with several birds’ reluctance: old trees can be left if not threatening, horticulture can attract many insects. And another part of the park is managed for the biodiversity first, the humans second: herbaceous plants are cut less often and at different times, local bushes and shrubs grow densely, small wetlands are created, management is extensive… Some new parks, in Paris, are now more “bird-friendly” than old ones, even if there are smaller.
Places of water is of course important for a bird-friendly city. Paris is definitely not waterbird-friendly. The small lakes you find in some of the bigger parks have their whole banks mineralized, without any bushes, mud or reeds. Moorhens and Mallard are the only water birds able to use them regularly, and even migrant birds are not attracted to these places. Creating several small scale high-quality wetlands, who could also have a function of water treatment, is necessary in order to become more attractive.
Then, the buildings, of course: they constitute the main surface of the city! Many birds use them to breed, to hunt, to hide… Bird-friendly buildings are often the oldest ones. The new “ecological” energy-positive buildings are problematic for birds: the walls are smooth, without any holes or anfractuosities, not even a perch. To think the building as a biodiversity habitat—including the humans inside of course—is a prerequisite for the numerous urban specialists, which are mostly rupestrian birds. And of course, the roofs layer is definitively important: it is the only habitat with very few human disturbances.
A bird-friendly city is probably a city where every urban person would like to live. It’s a place where urbanism is able to design a city shared between its human and non-human inhabitants, and not only aimed to increase efficiency of human society. Maybe, a bird-friendly city is a non-pragmatic one.
Adaptation and evolution as seen in Darwin’s voyage of discovery has now landed in our city centers where increasing number of restorationists hone their skills.
Island archipelagos are more than faraway places with strange sounding names. They lie at the heart of our understanding of ecology and evolution. Since Darwin’s stop at the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador, biologists keep turning towards islands for an understanding of biodiversity and the processes that drive adaptation. The famed finches of the Galapagos, the honeycreepers and fruit flies of Hawaii, and the species-rich plant genera on many island sites will draw the curious biologist more than the pink sands, reggae music, and hula dancing that attract less scientific emotions. Darwin’s poetic ending to the Origin of Species is a kind of slogan on the foundation of evolutionary studies:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, . . . endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
These oceanic islands led to studies of conceptual islands, pockets of habitat that are surrounded by a contrasting matrix. Managers of reserves and designers of park networks often consider their holdings as islands surrounded by, not seawater, but farm fields, highways, and industrial zones. For this reason, the theory of island biogeography has led to studies of many conceptual islands and how their biological communities form and are sustained. Whether it’s a patch of milkweeds surrounded by other wildflowers in an old field or a newly exposed bare surface in the rocky intertidal zone, concepts from the oceanic islands have been tested to see the limits of extrapolation of ecological principles.
Restoration ecologists in their own way are creating islands of habitat surrounded by a contrasting matrix. We struggle with the fundamentals: how many species should we start with; will mutualists arrive; will edge effects weaken birth rates and heighten death rates; will we lose control of the ecological community structure as kids on motorbikes and non-native species sweep through our newly planted projects? Some of the core principles of island biogeography are also on our minds, most importantly, immigration rates and extinction rates that reflect distance from species sources and the size of the restored projects we are championing. Landscape ecology reminds us that links and corridors among habitat islands are critical to reach the goals stated at the beginning of a restoration process.
Wandering in our great cities may seem like the antithesis of a holiday on tropical islands. But in the sense that urban habitats are surrounded by a sea of asphalt, concrete, and the barriers of apartment buildings, skyscrapers, and elevated tracks, the smaller urban habitats can be branded as islands floating on the Hardscape Sea.
Locally adapted varieties, ecotypes, have been documented in many urban environments. Photo: Steven Handel
Just as the Galapagos and Hawaii are icons of evolutionary novelty, work has shown that our urban islands also may be sites of rapid evolutionary change. Selection forces are strong, with urban heat, atypical soils that are chemically and physically different from historic horizons, and disturbances initiated by people all joining to push against the traits of species that have evolved in more rural settings. A suite of studies (see Briggs 2009, Cheptou et al. 2008. Thompson et al. 2016, and others in the Recommended Readings listing) have documented changes in morphological and physiological traits in urban populations of many plant species. Even behavioral traits of urbanized animals are now known to have changed, evolved, under urban island pressures.
Our cities are known as centers of creativity. This usually means theater, art, and choreography. We now know that the creative acts also include modified dispersal and pollination rates, tolerance for soil pH, and leaf morphologies resistant to heat stress. Buy a ticket and get a front row seat, this new evolutionary show will knock your socks off. As we plan our urban restoration projects the need for attention to these evolutionary changes doesn’t make our work easy but will be needed for long-term sustainability, something we all desire. Are the plants and seeds we purchase appropriate for these oddball urban islands, or do they have provenances that will only thrive in out-of-town ecological theaters? Will our urban islands be close enough to other habitat venues to allow for adequate dispersal rates bringing in new seed and young animals as well as dispersal islands so isolated that they are at the fringes of the native population network and will fade with population extinctions unless long-term and expensive land management is a required project specification? Evolution sometimes occurs quickly, but will change of our initial plant populations occur rapidly enough to match habitat adaptation needs to environmental stresses?
Considering our urban habitats as islands in a sea of constructed problems may focus the protocols of urban work in a different way from restoration work repairing or enlarging most rural habitat preserves. Darwin’s “tangled bank” is being replaced around the world with new concrete jungles. Adaptation and evolution as seen in Darwin’s voyage of discovery has now landed in our city centers where increasing number of restorationists hone their skills. Evolution isn’t ancient history or the stuff of those faraway places, it’s downtown. Take the A train and enjoy it.
Briggs, D. 2009. Plant Microevolution and Conservation in Human-Influenced Ecosystems. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cheptou, P.O., O. Carrue, S. Rouifed and A. Cantarel. 2008. Rapid evolution of seed dispersal in an urban environment in the weed Crepis sancta. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105: 3796–3799.
Collinge, S.K. 2009. Ecology of Fragmented Landscapes. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Daou, D. and P. Pérez-Ramos (eds). 2016. New Geographies 8: Island. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Darwin, C., 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London, UK: John Murray.
Haila, Y., 2002. A conceptual genealogy of fragmentation research: from island biogeography to landscape ecology. Ecological Applications 12:321–334.
McDonnell, M.J. and A.K. Hahs. 2015. Adaptation and adaptedness of organisms to urban environments. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 46:261–280.
Thompson, K.A., M. Renaudin and M.T. Johnson. 2016. Urbanization drives the evolution of parallel clines in plant populations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 283: 20162180.
“It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandelion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”
Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) is legendary for his watercolor landscapes, painted near his Buffalo, NY, home. His paintings are typically about nature: swamps and forests and backyards that include plants and birds and insects and rays of light. They are full of shapes and living things. His late period pictures, especially, are intense and even hallucinatory. There was a remarkable exhibit of his work at the Whitney Museum in New York City a few summers ago.
He was also a great journalist and over his lifetime wrote over 10,000 pages in various handmade volumes. It was there, on 5 May 1963, that he wrote: “It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandelion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”
And so they are difficult to take in, both for their beauty and their complexity. How can you describe and assess them? Convey them to one who hasn’t seen? You finally stumble, awestruck, into saying that they are “beautiful”, or “majestic”, or just “amazing”. But as scientists and decision-makers we often have to describe and quantify such entities and then communicate the results in ways that aren’t hopelessly obscure. That are somehow specific. That is, we need to communicate a very complicated thing in a simple, essential, and, above all, useful way.
Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967), Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon, 1961-1965; watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and sgraffito on lightly textured white wove paper faced on 1/4-inch-thick laminated gray chalkboard, 56 x 39 5/8 inches; Karen and Kevin Kennedy Collection. https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:l2010-001-058-dandelion-seed-heads-and-the-moon/
***
I often find myself at meetings of scientists who want their work used more broadly among policy-makers and practitioners. I often find myself in meetings with practitioners and city managers wondering how to get information they can use. More rarely these are the same meetings.
Disconnects often reside when the language turns out to be different. The rewards don’t exactly match. The information that is needed is at a different scale—time, space, detail—than the information that is on offer. The value systems don’t quite match.
Or sometimes what we’re trying to communicate about is amazing, like a Dandelion. Irreducible. We try to reduce it to something we can measure, comprehend, and communicate. But we don’t quite capture it. The discussion becomes a frustration of ill-matched assumptions.
It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
And yet…
And yet, people who have to make real decisions about the design of cities and parks and plazas and buildings crave, even require clear bases for their decisions; they crave data and information that would suggest the right course of action. Elected officials too, crave some data to support a project that, in the end, may have to, often do, spend a lot of money and proceed on a hunch, on intelligent intuition.
Don’t get me wrong. Intelligent intuition is a powerful thing. It is that, plus values, which lead us to say:
That Dandelion is beautiful.
And so it is.
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Such conundrums turn up in abundance when we talk about ecosystem services. Why have we been so interested in finding monetary equivalents to the value of biophysical ecosystem services? It is so we can make apples to apples comparisons about how to spend money and make cities work the way we need them to: for people, for Nature, for economies and even for beauty. How much rainwater does a tree pit collect and so keep too much water from entering a combined sewage system (CSS)? That captured water can prevent storms from overwhelming the system, leading to sewage being released untreated, in a Combined Sewage Overflow, or CSO event. According to EPA and other studies CSO events can release 20-30% of annual urban waste into receiving waters. For me, in New York City, those “receiving waters” would be something more familiar: the Hudson and East Rivers, which make Manhattan an island.
Even preventing CSOs through nature-based solutions is embedded with some abstract values. It costs money. What is the value of a cleaner river next to my city? I don’t swim there. I’m not aware, exactly, of how clean it is. But the idea of a clean river motivates me. What is the value of that?
We, as a society, often make decisions based on complicated and often inscrutable calculus. We make them, effectively, on (hopefully) informed intuition.
***
I worked for a number of years on a project with the Bureau of Land Management in the USA, on a team to create “Rapid Ecoregional Assessments” of the Mojave and Central Basin & Range (Nevada) Ecoregions. These Ecoregions are vast and complex (the Central Basin covers most of Nevada), but an assessment was needed—a description of the status of the place and how it is changing—that was broad in scope but shallow in depth. The BLM needed a useful snapshot that would help them know what to do as they managed their lands in the face of development, ecological transformation, and climate change.
A core thing in such an assessment is to “roll up” small-scale measurements to make larger-scale observations and conclusions. We wanted to take a collection of observations about species and agents of change (water extraction, exotic species, climate change, renewable energy development…not all agents of change are bad) and make conclusions about multi-dimensional and emergent attributes like “ecological integrity”. BLM could then know how to best manage its land for the future.
Was that roll up true? It depended on the values embedded in what we choose to measure and how we interpreted the numbers. Stated that way, truth had no relevance other than the value system we imposed by measurements we emphasized.
Was it absolutely true? No. Did it work was an evaluation of a value system our teams agreed on as key? Yes. Did it work as a decision making tool? We’ll see.
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Perhaps everything that counts can’t necessarily be counted, but still there are controversial decisions to be made, hard decisions in which there are winners and losers, that have to be decided on hard comparison, apple to apple, that can’t rely on the studied intuition of a savant.
Or can they?
We strive to be societies of laws and rules, societies that are fair and equitable. When we can’t measure that Dandelion, on what basis can we say it is more beautiful than the hawkweed? Than the rose? Than the chickadee. Than the housing development? How is that fair?
But ideas and choices can, in theory at least, be based on values that transcend dollar value. We can decide, as a society,that the Dandelion is not only more beautiful, but more valuable than the parking lot.
We can decide as societies what we value, how we build, what kind communities we make, what they should look like. What they shouldn’t look like. To do so we will need to have more conversations about values. About the kinds of places we want to live. About what kinds of money-things we are willing to forgo to have them. These kinds of conversations will have to take place in commissions and planning boards. They won’t—and can’t—always be about putting dollar values on things, but they do need to assign Value through dialog. All of us will need to participate.
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Words like improvisation and imagination and intuition can sound awkward in the context of science and policy. Yet these are the very abilities that we need to be able to see past and beyond the details—this species is here, that process is there—to create and understand how a vast and majestic thing works and how it might change.
Perspective is another important word—a sense of what you value in the picture you are creating. The Dandelion seeds are close up in Burchfield’s picture. He values them. The sky is there too. You need to see the patterns and perspective and not only the details; the beating of the heart and not just the heart’s location in the chest.
How do you “take in” a complicated, multidimensional thing like a mountain? Or a park? Or a community garden? Or a city?
With an act of scientific and social imagination.
As summer changed to fall, Burchfield felt the same urge to imagination.
“All day on the gateway to September putting in the huge insect tree in the August part. For the first time in weeks I let myself go in improvisation and fantasy.” —Charles Burchfield’s Journals, Gardenville, NY, 9 Sept 1950
In my last TNOC article, I wrote about the city of Rio de Janeiro’s rich biodiversity and the huge transformations that the city is going through, boosted by the international events that are already taking place here: 2013 FIFA Confederations Soccer Cup happened in June and the Pope will visit the city for the World Youth Day in July, when millions of young people are expected. In 2014 Brazil will host FIFA World Soccer Cup and in 2016 the Olympic Games will happen in Rio de Janeiro.
I have also talked about how the city is being “prepared”; how the urbanized areas are gray, expanding and destroying the last ecosystem remnants, cutting trees to give place to more concrete and asphalt. People are not participating in the decisions. Isolated local demonstrations against the eradication of green areas have happened during this period of time, but the results have been always the same: bulldozers reign.
We are living extremely intense and interesting days in Brazil, as in several other countries. People want to be heard and to be part of the game! In this historically peaceful country, suddenly masses gathered in the streets with more than 1 million citizens marching in one single day! And the protests continue.
Politicians are astonished. There are analysts of different fields of knowledge trying to understand what really is under those human surges in cities and towns all around the country. There are all kinds of requests: ethical behavior from our legislators, officeholders and all public representatives; full transparency and accountability of public investments and expenses; effective participation in the decisions, and so on.
São Paulo during a protest at Avenida Paulista, the center economic and financial district of the city seen from inside the Bikers Vegetable Garden (Horta do Ciclista) done by Hortelões Urbanos—a group of citizens concerned with healthy food and direct contact with nature. Photo: Fernanda Danelon
The problems are complex and quite intricate, but in my view, there is an important factor that is not being considered: people want to live in cities that are livable. Livable cities are those in which people matter and in which nature matters. During the last years I have seen how urban dwellers praise their trees and green areas, and how they are trying to protect them against creating cities “business as usual”, based on car-centric transportation and sprawl. I love when I go to urban parks and they are packed with curious and happy families, with people of all ages enjoying trees, birds, monkeys, squirrels, and flowers… and life!
Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden: people appreciating the huge Sumaúma (Ceiba petranda) – a giant tree from Amazon. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
How can our decision makers destroy what make people happy? Ignorance, I guess. In my view, the only way is to teach and draw people out of the “videophilia” that infects “modern” life, to discover and enjoy biophilia. I believe the only way is through ecological literacy, as Tim Beatley, Richard Louv, Edward O. Wilson, Fritjof Capra and many others so eloquently write about. Unfortunately, Brazil is still out of all these exciting discussions. There are almost no publications in Portuguese, and most Brazilians don’t read other languages.
My reflections are about how people need to understand ecology and the cycles of life, and have a systems thinking to not only love and praise nature, but really protect and invest in biodiversity, especially inside the cities—where most of us live! Our leaders should be ecologically educated so we can shift to a new paradigm focused on everyone’s life, including ALL species!
I have been involved in many activities related to urban nature in the last 10 years because I was lucky to radically change the course of my life. In my first 50 years I was totally unaware of the web of life, but I loved nature! I went to business school because my father was an entrepreneur. It was the natural thing to do! Although I had thought about studying architecture twice… Buildings are not my main interest up to now, and there was no (and still there is not!) landscape architecture, nor formal education in urban ecology in this wonderful tropical country.
What made a difference? During a few years Fernando Chacel, who was a pioneer in ecological landscape planning and design in Brazil, coordinated a landscape architecture undergrad course at the Universidade Veiga de Almeida. I was fortunate to have studied with him. From then on, things suddenly started happening. I have been able to meet and learn with people from different places and fields. I became ecologically involved in life, in all species of life. Finally, I overcame my ecological ignorance.
It has been almost a personal mission to study, research and teach about landscape, natural processes and flows, and the interrelations of biodiversity and natural resources with people, culture and human activities.
A group presentation after a four week course organized by INVERDE Institute, where Pierre-André Martin and I teach green infrastructure and urban ecology—May 2013. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
In the beginning of 2012, I decided to go further to try to transmit what I have learned, so I have started writing a book for Portuguese speakers aiming to contribute to fill the huge knowledge gap in a wider scale. The book “Cities for ALL: (re)learning to live with NATURE” (Cidades para TODOS: (re)aprendendo a conviver com a NATUREZA) was released in the World Environment Day, last June 5th. The response has been amazing!
Cover of the book “Cities for ALL :(re)learning to live with NATURE”, release June 5th [in Portuguese] forewords by Cynthia Rosenzweig and Thomas Elmqvist.I have signed books in Rio and São Paulo, and I am giving lectures to different audiences. I have gone to the radio and TV programs and have written articles for newspapers and digital blogs. In just a few weeks, I have already met more lovely people from all social, educational and professional backgrounds that are sharing the same passion for life and all kinds of living organisms, and nature! They all feel the same amazement I feel, they become enthusiasts and they want to collaborate and volunteer in any way they can. It is so rewarding.
Finally, it is not all about the money! It is about getting together and sharing experiences, dreaming and working to transform what seems impossible: bringing people and native biodiversity to the forefront of urban discussions, planning and design.
Book signing with a group of architecture students. Photo: Alex Herzog
A new opportunity is opening: in June 24th UNDP launched the World Centre for Sustainable Development—“Rio +”. It aims to change the way “we do things” in order to comply with our planetary boundaries. As our Minister of Environment Isabel Teixeira states:
“RIO+ will also be a relevant political space for the promotion of the dialogue with the society, opening doors for universities, private sector, governments and everybody interested in discussing and promoting sustainable development.”
Rio+ World Centre for Sustainable Development launching, June 24th 2013 in Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
On the same day there was a seminar promoted by FBDS (Fundação Brasileira para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável—Brazilian Foundation for Sustainable Development) and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network led by Jeffrey Sachs, to launch the “Rio Sustainable Initiative”. It seems to be a good occasion to introduce biodiversity and ecosystems services in the urban planning scenario to build a resilient and sustainable city.
Soon the publication “Cities and Biodiversity Outlook—Action and Policy” will be released in Portuguese, and hopefully it will be synergetic with our actions and dreams. Maybe we will be able to transform hearts and minds of more people and may influence the course of our cities towards a social-ecological outcome for ALL, (re)learning to live with NATURE.
É Hora de Tornar a Cidade Maravilhosa Realmente “Verde”!
Em meu último artigo, escrevi sobre a rica biodiversidade da cidade do Rio de Janeiro e as imensas transformações que vem sofrendo impulsionadas pelos eventos internacionais que já estão acontecendo: a Copa das Confederações da FIFA foi em junho e a visita do Papa, devido ao Dia Mundial da Juventude, será em julho – quando milhões de jovens estão sendo esperados. No ano que vem o Brasil irá sediar a Copa do Mundo e em 2016 os Jogos Olímpicos acontecerão no Rio de Janeiro.
Eu também falei sobre como a cidade está sendo “preparada”; como as áreas urbanizadas são cinza e estão se expandindo e destruindo os últimos remanescentes de ecossistemas nativos, cortando árvores para dar mais lugar para concreto e asfalto. As pessoas não estão participando de fato das decisões. Nesse período têm ocorrido demonstrações públicas isoladas de insatisfação contra a erradicação de áreas verdes, mas os resultados têm sido sempre o mesmo: motosserras e escavadeiras reinam.
Estamos vivendo dias extremamente intensos e interessantes no Brasil, como em inúmeros países. As pessoas querem ser ouvidas e participar do jogo! Nesse país historicamente pacífico, de repente as massas ganharam as ruas com mais de 1 milhão de cidadãos marchando em um único dia! E os protestos continuam.
Os políticos estão estonteados. Analistas de diferentes campos do conhecimento estão tentando compreender o que está por trás dessas hordas humanas nas cidades de todos os tamanhos ao redor do país. Há todo tipo de demanda: comportamento ético de nossos representantes nos poderes legislativo, executivo, judiciário e de membros do Poder Público; completa transparência e responsabilização nos gastos e prestação de contas com o dinheiro de nossos impostos; efetiva participação nas decisões e por aí vai.
São Paulo durante as manifestações na Avenida Paulista, o centro econômico e financeiro da cidade visto de dentro da Horta do Ciclista trabalho do grupo de “Hortelões Urbanos” – cidadãos que estão preocupados com alimentação saudável e contato direto com a natureza. Crédito: Fernanda Danelon
Os problemas são muito complexos e intrincados, mas sob a minha ótica, há um importante fator que não está sendo considerado: as pessoas querem viver em cidades com alta qualidade de vida, e nessas cidades pessoas e natureza importam. Durante os últimos anos tenho visto como os moradores da cidade valorizam as suas árvores e áreas verdes, e como eles estão tentando protegê-las contra a transformação das cidades “como sempre se fez”, com base em transporte individual e na expansão urbana ilimitada. Eu adoro quando vou a parques e eles estão lotados de famílias felizes e interessadas na natureza, com gente de todas as idades apreciando árvores e pássaros e macacos e esquilos e flores… e vida!
Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro: pessoas apreciando a Sumaúma (Ceiba petranda) – gigantesca árvore da Amazônia. Credito: Cecilia Herzog
Como podem os nossos tomadores de decisões destruir o que faz as pessoas felizes? Ignorância, eu suponho. Em minha opinião, a única maneira é ensinar para tirar as pessoas da “videofilia” que contamina a vida moderna, de modo a que venham descobrir e apreciar a biofilia. Acredito que as pessoas precisam ter uma alfabetização ecológica, como Tim Beatley, Richard Louv, Edward O. Wilson, Fritjhof Capra e muitos outros escrevem a respeito eloquentemente. Infelizmente o Brasil ainda está fora dessas conversas estimulantes. Não há praticamente publicações em português sobre o tema, e os brasileiros raramente leem outras línguas.
Minhas reflexões são sobre como as pessoas precisam entender ecologia, os ciclos da vida e ter um pensamento sistêmico para não apenas amar e apreciar a natureza, mas realmente proteger e investir na biodiversidade, especialmente nas cidades – onde a maior parte de nós vive! Nossos líderes deveriam ser ecologicamente educados de modo que possam mudar para o novo paradigma focado na vida de cada um, incluindo TODAS as espécies!
Tenho estado envolvida em diversas atividades relacionadas com natureza urbana nos últimos 10 anos porque tive a sorte de mudar radicalmente o curso de minha vida.
Nos meus primeiros 50 anos de vida era totalmente desconectada da rede da vida, mas amava a natureza! Cursei administração de empresas porque meu pai era um empresário. Era a coisa natural a fazer! Embora tivesse pensado em estudar arquitetura duas vezes… Edifícios não são meu foco principal de interesse até agora, e não havia (e ainda não há!) curso superior de paisagismo, nem educação formal em ecologia urbana nesse maravilhoso país tropical.
O que fez diferença? Durante alguns anos Fernando Chacel, que foi um pioneiro em projeto e planejamento ecológico da paisagem no Brasil, coordenou um curso superior de paisagismo na Universidade Veiga de Almeida. Eu tive a sorte de ter estudado com ele e sua equipe. A partir de então as coisas começaram a acontecer rapidamente. Tive a oportunidade de conhecer e aprender com pessoas de diferentes lugares e campos do conhecimento. Eu me tornei ecologicamente envolvida com a vida, com todas as espécies de vida. Finalmente consegui ultrapassar minha ignorância ecológica.
Estudar, pesquisar e ensinar sobre paisagem, processos e fluxos naturais e suas inter-relações com a biodiversidade, os recursos naturais e as pessoas e suas atividades se tornou quase uma missão pessoal.
Apresentação de grupo depois de um curso de quatro semanas organizado pelo Instituto INVERDE, onde Pierre-André Martin e eu ensinamos sobre infraestrutura verde e ecologia urbana – maio de 2013. Crédito: Cecilia Herzog
No começo de 2012, decidi ir além para tentar transmitir o que tinha aprendido. Então, comecei a escrever um livro destinado aos leitores de língua portuguesa objetivando contribuir para preencher a enorme defasagem de conhecimento em uma escala mais abrangente. Lancei o livro “Cidades para TODOS: (re)aprendendo a conviver com a NATUREZA” no Dia Mundial do Meio Ambiente, dia 5 de junho passado. A resposta tem sido impressionante!
Capa do livro “Cidades para TODOS: (re)aprendendo a conviver com a NATUREZA, lançado no dia 5 de junho com apresentação de Luiz Fernando Janto e prefácios de Cynthia Rosenzweig and Thomas Elmqvist.
O livro foi lançado no Rio e São Paulo, e estou dando palestras para diferentes públicos. Já fui ao rádio e televisão, e tenho escrito e contribuído com artigos para jornais e blogs digitais. Em poucas semanas já encontrei pessoas adoráveis com diferentes formações e origens sociais que estão compartilhando a mesma paixão pela vida de todos os organismos vivos, e pela natureza! Todos sentem o mesmo deslumbramento que eu sinto, e estão se tornando entusiastas, querem colaborar, voluntariar de alguma maneira, qualquer maneira. É muito recompensador. Afinal, não é tudo apenas pelo dinheiro!! É sobre conviver e compartilhar experiências, sonhar e trabalhar para transformar o que parece impossível: trazer pessoas e biodiversidade nativa para a vanguarda das discussões, planejamento e projeto de nossas cidades.
Durante o lançamento do livo com um grupo de estudantes de Arquitetura. Crédito: Alex Herzog
Uma nova oportunidade está se abrindo: dia 24 de junho foi lançado o “Rio+” – Centro Mundial de Desenvolvimento Sustentável pelo PNUD (Programa das Nações Unidas para o Desenvolvimento). Ele objetiva mudar a maneira como “fazemos as coisas” de modo a contemplar os limites planetários. Como afirma a ministra do Meio Ambiente, Izabella Teixeira “O RIO+” será também um espaço político relevante para a promoção do diálogo com a sociedade, abrindo portas para universidades, setor privado, governos e todas as pessoas interessadas em discutir e promover o desenvolvimento sustentável”.
Rio+ Lançamento do Centro Mundial para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável – Rio+ no dia 24 de junho no Rio de Janeiro. Crédito: Cecilia Herzog
No mesmo dia teve lugar um seminário promovido pelo FBDS (Fundação Brasileira para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável presidido por Israel Klabin) e o Sustainable Development Solutions Network (Rede de Soluções para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável liderado pelo economista Jeffrey Sachs), para lançar a “Iniciativa Rio Sustentável”. Parece uma excelente oportunidade para introduzir a biodiversidade e os serviços ecossistêmicos no planejamento de uma cidade resiliente e sustentável.
Em breve será lançada em português a publicação “Panorama das Cidades e Biodiversidade – Ações e Políticas”[1]. Acredito que terá sinergia com nossas ações e sonhos. Talvez sejamos capazes de transformar corações e mentes de mais pessoas e possamos influenciar o curso em direção de uma perspectiva socioecológica para TODOS, (re)aprendendo a conviver com a NATUREZA.
Cecilia Herzog Rio de Janeiro
[1] Publicação da Convenção da Biodiversidade da ONU, Centro de Resiliência de Estocolmo, Universidade de Estocolmo e ICLEI – Governos Locais pela Sustentabilidade, traduzido pelo Ministério de Meio Ambiente do Brasil. Foi lançado em 2012 na COP11 em Hyderabad na Índia, e já está traduzido para vários idiomas.
Story Notes: More and more cities throughout the world are turning to parks, gardens, green roofs, and other kinds of “green infrastructure” to soak up storm water and simultaneously create vibrant new patches of open space for their citizens.
In this podcast, produced by Philip Silva, we explore three cases of green infrastructure that have popped up in alleyways and on sidewalks in São Paulo, Brazil, Los Angeles, California, and Montreal, Canada.
Though all three cases are unique, each points toward the need for a thoughtful community organizing and engagement strategy in getting new green infrastructure projects off the ground.
Parc Oxygène before, as a community created amenity, and after it was returned to grey infrastructure.Rendering of an LA green alley.
We hear from Tori Kjer, the Director of the Trust for Public Land in Los Angeles where residents of the South Park neighborhood have been working with city officials to create the Avalon Green Alley Network. We also hear from Anna Deitzsch, director of the São Paulo office of Davis Brody Bond Architects, the firm helping to create storm water friendly sidewalks linking new communities on the outskirts of the city. Finally, we check in with Janice Astbury, a researcher and former resident of Montreal who recounts the rise and fall of Parc Oxygene, a green alley that was bulldozed in 2014 to make way for residential development.
To learn more about each initiative introduced in this podcast, check out Crosstalk Essays by each of our three contributors here at The Nature of Cities:
Nearly 70% of the world population lives in urban areas and nearly 75% of economic activity is located therein. Urban areas concentrate not only wealth but also extreme poverty and environmental degradation. Despite the significant progress in urbanization, still a billion people live in the slums of urban areas. Thus the issue of urban transitions to sustainability is a major challenge. In Europe, the 2007 Leipzig Charter puts “sustainable cities” on top of the agenda for sustainability. Two years later, the situation report of the European Commission on the European Union Sustainable Development Strategy considered the issue of “sustainable cities” to be crucial. But what cities are we speaking about?
In the minds of many people, sustainable urbanization is identified with the historical model of European cities, with their dense center and their suburbs. Thus, “compact cities” are often perceived as the universal model of urban transition to sustainability.
I’d like to ask two very simple questions, however incongruous they might seem: Is it feasible? Is it desirable?
Urban sprawl in the Paris metropolitan region, near Versailles: Where are the limits? Photo : Medy Sejai, Wiki 2005.
For over half a century, whatever huge efforts were made by public authorities wherever in the world to limit urban sprawl, they failed miserably. Sprawl has become the usual mode of production of the contemporary city, whatever its size, institutional and administrative configuration or its policy choices. Even “shrinking cities” and those facing decline and abandonment, have to deal with fragmentation and urban sprawl.
In the compact city, sustainability generally means making a better use of what is already there, by recycling their urban fabric and their urban functions without going through phases of obsolescence and degraded neighborhoods, and without squandering soils, as mentioned by Mark Whitehead (and see Note 1 at the bottom). This is all well and good but there are other aspects of urban sustainability, which cannot be treated within the limits of the compact city. For example, any city — be it sustainable or not — has to provide water and energy to its inhabitants while reducing pollution and processing all the urban waste produced. To put it simply: it as a matter of urban metabolism. And yes, beyond all the technical solutions to make this metabolism more sustainable — smart grids, water and electricity networks, intelligent buildings, etc. — the energy, the resources, the water, the food still come from outside the compact city limits. The sewage plants and garbage dumps are also outside. And, you know what, even a large number of people working in the city live outside, when they cannot afford to live anymore in the expensive — and sometimes gentrified — compact city. When a place looks sustainable by giving to other places the burden of its transition to sustainability — exporting pollution and undesired products (waste and nuisances) or polluting activities, siphoning their resources — this place is not really sustainable. It benefits from what David Pearce (Note 2) calls imported sustainability. Imported sustainability is a major bias against the implementation of sustainability policies.
It is still unclear, for example, how local energy flows in buildings aggregate to define the larger-scale energy performance of the agglomeration. Conversely, urban heat islands are very dependent of the land cover and the structure of the neighboring natural and agricultural areas, and not only of the topography, the urban fabric or the climate (Note 3). But one thing is certain: to avoid imported sustainability, urban policies should be conceived and implemented at three complementary scales. First is the scale of the neighborhood. At this level the physical impact of urban projects, even if they are conceived at the agglomeration level, is maximal. The scale of the agglomeration is the second one, which plays a strategic role in producing sustainable urbanization. At this scale the coordination between multiple actors producing policies is crucial. Finally, there is the scale of the hinterland with the adjacent agricultural and natural areas, which reflects the agglomeration environmental footprint. It is defined to include most of the fluxes of the urban metabolism (Note 4).
Thus, on the one side effective sustainability urban policies should be conceived across areas large enough to avoid the imported sustainability bias, and on the other side it has proved impossible to prevent urban sprawl with the classical urban regulation tools. It is time to start thinking differently. No, high urban density and compact city are not the be all and end all of transition to sustainability. No, it is not possible to address urban sustainability issues by considering only urbanized areas and urban centers. Yes, it is crucial to design sustainability across or integrating areas large enough to include most of the fluxes of the urban metabolism, which means areas encompassing suburban, periurban and dependent rural, or natural places.
Forget the city limits: Soay sheep, grazing on the top of the old fortifications of the city of Lille (France). Photo: Lamiot, Wiki 2012
There is a debate going on over whether there is a need for a stand-alone sustainable urbanization goal within the SDG or not. The main argument against is that urban sustainability is a cross-cutting theme —giving it the status of a main development goal means taking the risk of shifting the focus away from issues such as poverty and exclusion. But, how should I put this: It looks like the defenders of this position don’t live in the same planet I do. Over one billion people live in slums in the developing countries, and the number continues to grow, and these slums are de facto urban areas, as Thomas Elmqvist pointed out in a previous TNOC post. In so-called developed countries, social exclusion and extreme poverty is usually associated with social housing complexes, or run-down urban areas. Besides, our future world will be predominantly urban. It means that urban areas are humanity’s best places to act, for example against climate change, promote social innovation, and bring people out of poverty. That is, provided that policies don’t address the cities only, but also include the periurban and rural neighborhood or context. In this sense, we surely need an urban sustainability development goal.
As a matter of fact, why on earth are we supposed to set up a false dichotomy between urban and rural areas? What about Giorgio Piccinato’s Città Diffusa? Indeed, the social, economic, scientific, technical and cultural transformations of the last few decades have produced deep changes in how society relates to space. Today, urban areas have either no boundaries or very fuzzy ones. Given that lifestyle, facilities and amenities are not so different between urban and rural areas, is it still worth separating them with an imaginary border?
Soft mobility, pastures and sustainable water recovery system in a periurban area (urban development zone – ZAC) near Saint-Omer (France). Photo: Mélanie Huguet, Wiki 2008
Such a perspective compels us to cast a fresh eye on what is going on with the periurbanization, one eye without prejudice, which does not consider from the start only the negative aspects of periurbanization. Naturally periurbanization often goes with urban sprawl, and urban sprawl has many pernicious effects. It goes without saying that urban sprawl is unsustainable for at least three reasons: the development of estates and the phenomena of urban segregation all conspire to degrade the quality of life with ever-longer commuter travel, accessibility problems; the cost of connection to public service networks is much higher than in urban centers; urban sprawl leads to an exponential waste of land, not only because urban density is low but also because many cumbersome transport infrastructures need to be built — accessibility for one periurban housing unit costs much more surface than one housing unit in a denser area.
It must be accepted nevertheless that periurbanization does have its advantages. It reduces the concentration of nuisances and pollution, and lowers the density of urban centers that are sometimes on the brink of congestion. Besides, it is geographically impossible for everyone to live downtown. There is the idealization of a quasi-urban life in the countryside, which, even if completely illusory, is a myth that fuels the desire for periurban housing. All the more so as the economic aspect — the possibility for a household to get more square feet and a small garden investing the same amount of money — reinforces the myth. And well, eventually, it is not possible to impose a residential choice when this choice contradicts the deep motivations of a population; this is the reason why all the policies developed to contain urban sprawl have failed.
Thus, to foster urban transition to sustainability the solution is not to oppose urban sprawl but to guide it. After all, low-density urbanization was rather the rule than exception for centuries all around the world — in villages and hamlets small communities have had a very dynamic social and cultural life. Besides, climate policies introduce new arguments for low-density urbanizations. Green, low density neighborhoods planted with trees with a high water loss coefficient can lower locally the temperature (10% of vegetation increase lowers the temperature as much as 1°C within a 100 meters radius). In low density areas there higher square-foot of roof per household than in high-density areas. Thus, generalized photovoltaic roofs can be a significant source of clean energy and so on. More generally, periurban areas are wonderful places to examine how to integrate science, technology and societies. In particular, how do inhabitants change, or not, their usage of cities after urban transformations due to new combinations of techniques (grids, eco-constructions, etc.), scientific knowledge and political decisions? Such places oblige us to think new forms of living that may result in the transition towards sustainability — forms in which the improvement of environmental conditions stricto sensu (water quality, air, biodiversity, prudent use of resources, land and energy, etc.) will lead to improved living conditions; one in which technical devices and ecological processes — included in areas large enough to take into account imported sustainability— will lead to new lifestyles.
Let there be no mistake about it — addressing sustainability on areas large enough to prevent imported sustainability, also means recognizing and promoting the diversity of paths that lead to sustainable cities. Despite differences in history, type of development, size and heritage, cities and urban regions still have an unexplored potential in adaptability.
4 — Billen G., Barles S., Chatzimpiros P., Garnier J., 2012, “Grain, meat and vegetables to feed Paris: where did and do they come from? Localizing Paris food supply areas from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century,” Regional Environmental Change 12: 325–335 Springer.
Designing for resilience is a complex undertaking. As David Maddox states in The Nature of Cities Global Roundtable, “to design for resilience suggests we can identify it, plan for it” and that “It’s a steep challenge, community by community”.
Identifying, planning, and designing for location-specific resilience is just what a Midwestern team of students and faculty are attempting to do. Drury University and Crowder College have partnered together and been accepted to compete in the U. S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon. While the focus of this 20-team national competition is on solar energy, the Crowder-Drury team has chosen to add an additional layer of complexity to their competition house: disaster resilience.
Destruction in the wake of an EF5 tornado that struck Joplin, MO in 2011.
Drury University and Crowder College are located in the heart of tornado alley in Southwest Missouri and in proximity to Joplin, where in 2011 an EF5 tornado destroyed nearly 8,000 buildings and took 161 lives. As buildings gave way under wind speeds in excess of 200 mph, fragments of the structures became missiles directed at neighbors as the ¾ mile wide, multiple vortex storm moved along its 16 mile path. What was left were three million cubic yards of debris that took months to clear and to send to landfills.
Debris from the tornado in Joplin took months to remove.
Storms of this nature have a destructive impact on individual lives, the emotional and economic well-being of a community, and the built environment. Additionally, a long-term environmental impact results from the millions of cubic yards of hazardous debris that is sent to landfills during the cleanup process.
The Crowder-Drury Solar Decathlon team believes that much of the structural devastation and loss of life in Joplin, as well as in many other tornado-hit cities, could be avoided if we designed buildings to resist the wind loads and impact of flying debris of such storms. Working out the design details of a solar powered, tornado-resistant home has been a rigorous academic and real-world challenge for the students on the team. To make the task even more challenging, for the competition, the home must be built at the home university; shipped to Irvine, CA; and reassembled to be ready for the October 8, 2015 start of the competition. Working out this logistical challenge and coupling it with our disaster resistance goal led students to discover two additional potential uses for the competition house: a disaster response command center and disaster relief housing.
The Crowder-Drury Solar Decathlon team works on design details of a tornado resistant home.
The concept for the competition house now includes all three potential uses and is called ShelteR³: a Solar Powered Home for Disaster Response, Recovery and Resistance. Team website: http://shelter.drury.edu/
The ShelteR³ concept: Respond, Recover, Resist
Disaster Response
Two pre-fabricated modules (living and kitchen/bath) are whisked via flatbed truck into a community that has been devastated by a natural disaster. The units are craned off the truck and attached together to form a disaster response command center or emergency relief housing. Roof-mounted flat solar panels generate electricity. The home or command center is self-sufficient and able to function before power and water are restored. Innovative impact resistant cladding and structural details protect from future storms and lend a sense of safety and security.
Disaster Recovery
Eventually, the community begins to rebuild from disaster and the need for residential housing takes priority over disaster response. Our structure can be easily adapted to fit these evolving needs. A foundation is laid and the two modules are separated by twenty feet. The resulting space is covered with window walls on both ends to create a spacious living area between the bedrooms and kitchen and bath. Cabinetry, customized to the owner’s needs, helps separate the living area from the bedrooms. Spacious decks extend the living space into the outdoors. Additional solar arrays are added on the roof for increased energy production. Using the ShelteR³ as the core of permanent housing could eliminate the need for temporary shelters typically delivered and used as disaster relief housing.
Disaster Resistance
The house need not be limited to post-disaster scenarios. In disaster-prone zones, the house offers a smart way to prepare for the possibility of storm winds and can be prefabricated or built on site. Structural sizing, spacing and connections as well as tension rods resist wind loads while redundant layers of impact resistant materials are the key to managing debris missiles. A 90-second video on the team website explains the concept further.
Various computer model-generated views of the Crowder-Drury Solar Decathlon team’s tornado-resistant home design, ShelteR³. In order from top to bottom: the front deck, the interior living area, the kitchen, and the exterior of the house at night.
When designing to resist tornadic events there are several programmatic issues to consider and problems to resolve.
Programmatic issues:
Preservation of life
Preservation of structure
Little to no contribution to debris field
Problems to solve:
Preservation of structure vs. sacrificial portions of structure
Resisting Impact of flying debris during storm
Preservation of life, of paramount importance, is achieved through preservation of structure and resistance to impact. Little to no contribution to the debris field can be achieved through designs that eliminate sacrificial structural elements.
Students building ShelteR³.
Many approaches to construction of a home arise after a storm. Some simply build using traditional construction methods and address future storms by placing a storm shelter in a room within the home, in the floor of the garage, or in the backyard of the home. In each of these applications, life may be preserved within one of these storm shelters if the family makes it to the shelter, but the rest of the home becomes sacrificial and is transformed by the storm into projectiles directed at the neighbors and beyond. Eventually, these sacrificial projectiles and debris field must make their way to a landfill. In Joplin, this added up to over 3 million cubic yards and months of effort and energy.
The Crowder-Drury team believes that redundant layers within the wall system can be key to withstanding a storm. Impact resistant Lexan over water repellent Zip Wall brand sheathing are finished by a Swiss Pearl fiber cement rain screen cladding, all of which create the protective enclosure. An enveloping fence of Kawneer’s Reynobond impact resistant and air scrubbing panels are the first line of defense, while hurricane-rated windows and doors protect areas of natural light and passage throughout the house.
The structural system consists of traditional 2×6 wood stud framing wall placed in compression by steel tensile rods through a steel chassis. Students worked with structural engineer Q. Scott Ragan, who specializes in disaster forensics to design this resistant home. We chose wood framing because it is a typical material used for construction in the Midwest and we wanted the challenge of resolving tornado resistance with a commonly used building material.
Students building ShelteR³.
Thermal Mechanics Inc. provided the team with a high efficiency, affordable Daikin brand mini-split heating, cooling, and ventilation (HVAC) system for the home. This is a ductless system which means less material and labor for installation and less maintenance over the life of the home. The mini-split system requires a smaller heat pump than conventional systems, reducing the energy load on the solar panels.
At every turn the students have chosen readily available, affordable, and sustainable materials for ShelteR³ such as Patcraft carpet and resilient flooring. Their goal is to educate the public on choosing and living a sustainable lifestyle that considers energy, building materials, and resilience to our ever-increasing frequency of natural disasters.
Details continue to be refined as the team constructs the home this summer. Follow and engage with us on social media, or literally behind our Transland truck convoy as we head to the Solar Decathlon competition October 8th – 18th, 2015 at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California. Our student decathletes are excited to hear from you.
We can build better, preserve life, and protect our planet—we just have to work out the details. Our team, some witnesses to the Joplin tornado, have learned through the opportunity of Solar Decathlon and a thoughtful design process that designing for resilience is location specific but several principles can be applied across the globe.
1. Respond to location and the unique challenges it brings.
2. Rethink shelter. Approach the entire building as shelter and let no parts become sacrificial.
3. Better structural details. Use specific structural details in homes and buildings to resist the high winds and impact of tornados or hurricanes, or specific threat from other natural occurrences. Include mechanical fasteners at vulnerable connection locations specific to the potential threat at a level strong enough to resist the threat, not at minimum build code requirements.
4. Think about the many layers of threat of a disaster and protect against all aspects of a natural disaster, not just the primary focus. In the case of a tornado, for example it is not just the high winds that destroy, but the missiles created by the debris field as buildings fail and break apart.
The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon challenges collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive. The winner of the competition is the team that best blends affordability, consumer appeal, and design excellence with optimal energy production and maximum efficiency.
Fact Sheet – City of Joplin – May 22, 2011 EF5 Tornado; Lynn Iliff Onstot, Public Information Office; July 1, 2013
Crowder-Drury team concept; U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2015; co-authored by student decathletes and faculty mentors, Drury University, 2015
If Thoreau were alive today, he might move to Brooklyn, not the woods. Cities of the early 21st century are where life can be lived most intensely, the place for sucking, routing, shaving, and driving life into the corner, as Thoreau famously described the purpose of his retreat to Walden Pond. Cities are where innovations happen, and he needed new ideas. He thrived on them. At 28, instead of cabin on the edge of town, Henry David could find the marrow of life while renting a walk-up in Greenpoint or Gowanus and exploring the ecosystems of the city. He certainly had the beard for a Brooklyn existence: a proto-eco-hipster.
Mannahatta2409.org is an on-line forum to help New Yorkers develop and share sustainable and climate-resilient designs for New York City.
Thoreau would come to the city to explore the possibilities. For modern day explorers, we’ve constructed a portal to help people see and shape the nature of the city: Mannahatta2409.org.
Henry David Thoreau – proto eco-hipster? Credit: Benjamin D. Maxham in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, from Wikipedia.
Mannahatta2409.org is a visionmaking tool. “Visions” are composed a combinations of ecosystems, lifestyle choices, and climate scenarios, where ecosystems include buildings and streets as well as forests, wetlands and beaches. Based on these combinations, the mannhatta2409.org estimates metrics of environmental performance in four categories: water, carbon, biodiversity, and population. In all, sixty-five measures are calculated and compared over three time points: the user’s vision, the area of the user’s vision as it exists in Manhattan today, and the area of the user’s vision as it existed 400 years ago, before Thoreau or the city, when the island of Manhattan was called Mannahatta, an exemplar of the wilderness. (Read more here.) The goal is to test the bounds and find consensus about what the nature of the city should be.
Mannahatta2409.org is meant for everyone. Since the release of the prototype in January, about 10,000 visionmakers have included students, architects, scientists, urban planners, and lots of people we know nothing about. (It is the Internet after all.) Video tutorials are available. It’s free to use, fun to play. Visions are for dreaming, sharing, investigating, and discussing. Visions can be worked on privately for as long as you like, and then can be made public by flipping a digital switch. Each vision comes with a URL that can be spread by twitter or posted to Facebook and Google+.
Here is an example: I used mannahatta2409.org to create a vision for Fourteenth Street in Manhattan with 90% less greenhouse gas emissions. I call it “Terra Nova 14th Street” because it deploys strategies from a book I wrote last year about making better cities: Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs.
Fourteenth Street is a major thoroughfare, business and residential district on Manhattan in New York City. The orange line indicates the extent of the vision. It is defined with the vision extent tool, which is the top tool of the second set of tools on the right side of the interface.Mannahatta2409.org provides access to a reconstruction of the ecosystems of Manhattan Island four hundred years ago. Ecosystems are mapped over a 10 x 10 m grid system. The dark green indicates oak-hickory forest, shades of light blue are different kinds of wetlands, beaches are light yellow, and the estuary waters of the Hudson River (left) and East River (right) are blue.Manhattan today is also composed of ecosystems, albeit ones constructed by people. Reds and pinks indicate different building types; yellows and oranges, different transportation types; and blue, estuary waters. The ecosystem painting tools are the top set of six boxes on the right side of the interface. The second tool in the second set provides a grid inspector, which allows users to select any cell and interrogate its identity in the vision, 2010 and 1609.Terra Nova 14th Street. Mannahatta2409.org allows users to develop and share their own visions for Manhattan’s future. In this case, my vision includes a light rail line down the middle of 14th Street, photovoltaic panels, a small patch of forest and an urban garden. It is also inhabited by New Yorkers making deliberate choices to reduce environmental impact by walking, bicycling, and taking electrified public transit (like the subway and light rail.) Eco-hipsters also prefer and are willing to pay a slight premium (10 – 15 cents / kWh) for renewably generated electricity. To read more about the ideas underlying this vision and how they might be achieved, check out Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs.
The Terra Nova strategy is straightforward and effective: (1) use electrified transport, (2) generate as much renewable electricity as you can yourself, and (3) get the remainder from renewable sources elsewhere. Fourteenth Street is a main crosstown thoroughfare in lower Manhattan, dividing Greenwich Village from Chelsea and Midtown South. Mannahatta2409.org estimates that the blocks on either side of 14th Street house approximately 34,500 people currently (comparable to the US Census Bureau estimates), with about 18,700 working in that area. Average daytime densities top 49,000 people / square kilometer; nighttime densities (without workers) 30,000. Today the most common three ecosystems are sidewalks, boulevards, and apartment buildings. Four hundred years ago, oak-hickory forest, salt marshes, and the estuary existed in the same swath. The collected buildings, parks, and streets, and the energy production to supply them, produce an estimated 1.6 billion kilograms carbon dioxide per year, mainly from burning fossil fuels. On Mannahatta, in contrast, the trees and grasses took in one million kilograms carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, estimated as plant growth minus respiration.
Terra Nova 14th Street replaces the four lanes of boulevard that currently constitute street with a light rail system, which connects with rail-lines on the Westside and the FDR Drive on the east, and streetcars on every other cross street, i.e., no cars. Bike lanes extend along 14th Street between the train and sidewalks in both directions. I painted photovoltaic panels on top of all of the buildings and added a windmill in a garden and tidal energy generator on the East River shore. Union Square Park is still green, but now with an oak-hickory woodland instead of a fenced off lawn and street trees. The trees also extend down the sidewalks in tidy rows to the island’s edge.
The most important alteration, however, was not ecosystemic, but rather lifestyle-oriented: my vision is inhabited by eco-hipsters. “Eco-hipsters” are one of the five lifestyles currently available through the interface (average New Yorker, average American, average Earthling, and Lenape person, a Native American tribe inhabited Manhattan in 1609, are the others). The eco-hipster lifestyle is based on the average New Yorker but with some tweaks to reduce environmental impacts. Eco-hipsters prefer to walk or bicycle over short distances and take the bus or subway over middling distances. On vacation, they ride the train. In town they heat and cool using electricity, living in slightly smaller apartments than the average New Yorker. (If that seems impossible, then consider the Lenape-standard dwelling with 50 square feet for a family of four.) However the most important choice that eco-hipsters make is to obtain all their electricity renewably from wind, solar, geothermal, or other real-time power generators. Electricity deregulation in New York and many other states makes this a matter of a phone call today.
Mannahatta2409.org allows users to estimate the environmental performance of their vision in comparison to the same area of the city today and the same area as existed 400 years ago, before the city. The dark brown line indicates the performance of the city today, the gold line the performance of the vision, and the green line, Mannahatta. Four categories of indicator are shown, from top to bottom, for the water cycle, carbon cycle, biodiversity and population. Other tabs in the dashboard allow the user to comment on the vision, see a flow diagram, and download a detailed readout. In this case, the Terra Nova 14th Street vision produces an estimated 93% less carbon emissions than 14th Street today.
The result, as laid out in the dashboard of environmental performance indicators, is 93% lower carbon dioxide pollution from 14th Street (106 million kilograms CO2 per year as compared to 1.6 billion kg CO2/yr) with a slightly higher population and nearly 10,000(!) more jobs. The economy of the future will thrive with eco-hipsters in charge. If those same people also rode all electric trains instead of partly diesel powered ones, then the greenhouse gas emissions could be brought to practically zero. The increases in green space and street trees also help absorb all the stormwater flows, at least for moderate precipitations events experienced with the baseline climate, defined for the years 1971 – 2000. (Feel free to suggest I use a changed future climate: mannahatta2409.org allows you to choose climate scenarios from 2020, 2050 and 2080, as well as 1609). Biodiversity is up in Terra Novan Manhattan, with habitat for an estimated 56 more types of plants and vertebrate animals than we have today, which is good, but still lags behind Mannahatta’s potential of 548 species in the same area.
Having constructed my vision in my own private workspace, the interface allows me to communicate my idea with the world. In the “Manage Saved Visions” dialogue, a switch attached to each vision is labelled: “Share with:.” The options are “me” or “everyone.” Others are free to view, probe, and analyze all the visions that have been shared. If they disagree, they can copy the vision into their own workspaces and modify it using the same ecosystem painting tools I used, re-publishing with the switch to everyone else. The goal of mannahatta2409.org is to obtain as many visions as possible of Manhattan (and eventually other parts of New York City) and then from those visions to develop some notion of what future we all want to create. Levittown in Midtown? Predator Cities? Eco-hipster-ville? Walden Pond? It’s really up to us.
Who will create the future? Visionmakers like these: the skeptical, the intrepid, and the imaginative working together. Credit: Eric W. Sanderson.
To be fair, when Thoreau did visit in New York City in 1843, he found it a difficult place, mean, crowded and expensive. He wrote his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “But I must wait for a shower of shillings, or at least a slight dew or mizzling of sixpences, before I explore New York very far.” (Many New Yorkers still share the same sentiment.) What Thoreau did like was the beach nearby, on Staten Island. “The sea-beach is the best thing I have seen. It is very solitary and remote, and you only remember New York occasionally. The distances, too, along the shore, and inland in sight of it, are unaccountably great and startling. The sea seems very near from the hills, but it proves a long way over the plain, and yet you may be wet with the spray before you can believe that you are there. The far seems near, and the near far.”
Cities that work with nature not against it seem far away, but I think they are nearer than we imagine.
A concept for a future beach on Staten Island from SCAPE / Landscape Architecture PLLC and partners for the Rebuild By Design competition. Read more about this vision here. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development is providing nearly a billion dollars to make visions like this one come to pass. Credit: SCAPE / Landscape Architecture PLLC.
James Corner’s prolific writing from the past two decades invites readers on a journey to discover the elusive medium of landscape. As one of the most prominent landscape architects of our time, his writing is as much a means of advancing the field as is his built work. The Landscape Imagination is the first written project composed exclusively of Corner’s own essays since Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, published in 1996. In the twenty years between these two books, Corner wrote the essays collected here while simultaneously composing a celebrated portfolio of built landscapes. Though his iconic designed works (for example, The High Line in New York City) eclipse his written works—particularly outside academia—we gain access to a rich and penetrating assessment of landscape’s profound role in culture when we wander through Corner’s sprawling wordscapes.
The Landscape Imagination is organized more thematically than chronologically, with essays parceled out according to areas of Corner’s ongoing investigations: Theory; Representation and Creativity; Landscape Urbanism; and Practice. Although many of the essays were written years ago, their sequencing in the collection renders them fresh. Each section builds upon the previous, linking theoretical aspects of the medium to practice through what Corner calls “the landscape imagination.” Described as a critical agent and a form of social action, the landscape imagination’s goal is to make landscapes that provoke and challenge society’s relationship to the natural world. Corner argues that landscape is the great mediator between nature and culture, since it invokes natural processes over time but is fundamentally a cultural construct. Therefore, he says, “It can renew the common and banal and reconcile our modern estrangement from place.” But the landscape imagination is needed to liberate landscape from its “devolved place as scenic object, subjugated resource, or scientific ecosystem.” This collection is a conversation about tools to unleash the landscape imagination, exemplified through Corner’s own journey.
The High Line, in New York City. Photo: David Maddox
In each essay, the landscape imagination confronts and deconstructs the simplistic binaries hindering landscape architecture: art versus science, culture versus nature, city versus landscape, theory versus practice, technique versus motivation, imaginary versus built, phenomenology versus technology, tradition versus modern. Corner argues that these are not actually dichotomous, but related—fundamental, even, to the landscape imagination. The landscape imagination is both interpreter and mediator, both informer and popularizer, both conversational and circumstantial, both dialogue and contemplation. It mediates between the local and global, between recovery and invention, and between past inheritance and future potential. These essays build a case for the landscape imagination as the great confounder, able to transcend limiting binaries by finding infinite potentials within them.
Since there are now built works influenced by the ideas found in these essays, we can better understand Corner’s writing by assessing its translation to practice. For example, “Sounding Depths—Origins, Theory, and Representation” (1990), explores several dichotomies limiting landscape architecture while addressing why new theory is critical to the field. In the next essay, “Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory” (1991), Corner proposes a hermeneutical approach to landscape architecture theory to overcome the lack of meaning in our repetitive, formulaic, and prosaic world. Hermeneutics is a practice, borrowed from the social sciences, of understanding the world through a historical interpretation of texts. Corner proposes that instead of trying to understand landscapes as self-evident objects, their complexity requires interpretation. Through critical acts of landscape architecture—drawing, writing, or constructing landscapes— we can read and interpret them like texts, uncovering infinite new potentials within the binaries. For example, it is possible to picture the High Line in New York City (a Corner project) re-created with any number of theoretical binaries: a nostalgic re-creation of its past, an objectified pictorial image, a bucolic respite from the city, or even demolished to prioritize the street grid below. If the High Line were approached from any one of these views of landscape, the final product would not offer its unique perspectives of the city and landscape as urbanism. Rather than preserving or re-creating its past, the High Line was mined for new possibilities. Thus, the High Line became an agent in the active, ever unfolding tradition of the city.
Corner’s ideas evolve in several different ways as his writing progresses over time. He identifies some of those changes in his introduction to the book, moving from representational interests to instrumental practices, from landscapes generally to landscape architecture specifically, and from landscape as parks and open space to landscape as a form of urbanism. Other changes become apparent while working through the essays themselves: from ecology as metaphor and form of representation to ecology as operational model and the gradual identification of community engagement as an “agent of creativity.” This seems to place community engagement on equal footing with ecology in Corner’s worldview.
Corner criticizes the profession for compounding the problematic binary of culture versus nature by “drawing more from objectivist and instrumental models of ecology, while design creativity has been reduced to environmental problem solving (know-how) and aesthetic appearance (scenery).” In “Landscape Urbanism” (2003) and “Terra Fluxus” (2006), he calls for a “culturally animate ecology” where culture and nature become complementary through a practice of combining them into new kinds of public spaces where landscape drives the process of city transformation. In his most recent essay, “Practice: Operation and Effect” (2010), Corner states a need for designers to develop “sophisticated conversational, social, and rhetorical skills to authentically and productively engage the public in a process that supports imagination and innovation.” With community engagement now identified as an agent of creativity, perhaps Corner will continue to explore, in writing and practice, the landscape imagination’s role in developing these skills.
Although the book’s final essay, a previously unpublished lecture titled “Hunts Haunts: History, Reception, and Criticism on the Design of the High Line” (2009), is an assessment of the High Line through the lens of John Dixon Hunt’s writings, it also exposes what Corner hopes his written and built works accomplish. Corner describes Hunt and his writings about “haunting” landscapes as likewise haunting to him over the years. Their indescribable lingering presence, or haunting, has inspired Corner to further explore them through his own writings and, ultimately, through his built work. He attributes the haunting quality of some landscapes to the human imagination. Here we see how Corner’s landscape imagination came to be, and better understand his goal to create places eluding easy definition, places that “haunt” us with lasting presence—places like the High Line.
The Landscape Imagination is a midcareer measurement of Corner’s own longue duree, what Hunt called the long duration of experience and meaning over time differentiating landscape architecture from its allied professions. Sometimes Corner’s theories are successful, sometimes they fail, but together with the vagaries of practice, they provide liberation of thought and action for those of us working with the landscape medium. There are few contemporary voices in landscape architecture whose work intentionally avoids providing formulaic answers, but rather seeks to create open-ended interpretation, as James Corner. This latest work, although a rigorous read, challenges our assumptions and encourages us to keep an open mind about landscape’s potential.
Despite the geopolitical currents that have surrounded Jerusalem for centuries, it is first and foremost a city, with the same urban needs and aspirations as any community in the world. In this urban context, making Jerusalem a cleaner, greener, and healthier city for all its residents has proved to be a shared goal.
Jerusalem has been described as “golden” by many poets and writers, inspired not only by the golden domes of holy buildings in the city, but also by the special quality of illumination created when the evening sun is reflected from the famous Jerusalem stone which characterizes most buildings in the city, whether new or old. Jerusalem stone has indeed been a major feature of the cityscape from the time of the First Temple.
The largest stones we know of are those in the Western Wall, whose lowest layers date back to the First Temple period. Yet these stones are basically the same local Jerusalem material used today in urban development. The little bird in the picture is of course the swift, mentioned in the Old Testament by the prophet Jeremiah. The Western Wall swifts, as they are called, were noted by the Prophet Jeremiah, who claimed that they are more faithful to their routine than the straying Children of Israel to their faith:
Yeah, the stork in the sky knows her appointed time, as the turtle dove and the swift observe their time of coming….
—Jeremiah, Chap. 8, vii
A swift circles before returning to its nest in the Western Wall. Photo: Amnon Hahn
There is something truly remarkable in the migration habits of the swifts. They are just a few of the half billion birds that fly over Jerusalem twice a year, on the busiest bird migration route in the world, following the famous Rift Valley, from Africa in the south to Anatolia in the North. Understanding the significance of Jerusalem in the global birding context led to the establishment of the Jerusalem Bird Observatory, a small but important natural area just behind the Knesset. Here birds are checked and banded before going on with their journey. For them, Jerusalem offers a green oasis, with food and water to compensate for their depletion of strength while flying over the desert south of the city. Many of us have come to realize that when we support a community garden or a green area in Jerusalem, we are effectively supporting this borderless global food chain. Fortunately, migrating birds are not required to hold visas for all the borders they cross…..On the other hand, a famous Israeli ecologist, Prof. Uriel Safriel, noted that the swifts seem to be no less worthy of the title “pilgrim” than the Jews, Christians, and Muslims that visit the Holy City at their appointed times.
Recently a stone in the Western Wall, that had become loose for some reason, dropped and landed at the feet of a woman who was praying by the wall. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the incident triggered a lot of speculation, and being a holy site in Jerusalem, reached the global news networks. These latter speculated as to whether this might have been an act of terrorism, but missed entirely what I believe was the important part of the story. In 2002, in the course of “repairing” the Western Wall and the walls of the Old City, the 88 nesting crevices used by the swifts for the last 2,500 years had been saved from being cemented over due to the watchful diligence of the Swift Lovers Society. After the recent incident, it was feared that in an attempt to secure the safety of pilgrims at the Western Wall, there would again be a move to cement over crevices, many of which serve as nests for the swifts during their annual visit and mating season. These gallant protectors of swifts’ rights joined forces with the Jerusalem Green Fund, the Antiquities’ Authority and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, dreading a renewed assault on the swifts’ nesting places, which might be blocked in in the name of protecting the safety of worshippers by the wall. We submitted a special request to the Rabbi of the Western Wall, and hopefully we have succeeded in ensuring the right of the Swifts to continue their annual pilgrimage to the Western Wall.
Indeed the concept of Jerusalem conjures up an infinite array of images, from the deeply spiritual, to the purely physical. The spiritual spectrum of Jerusalem primarily embraces the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and has throughout history provided a platform for conflict. Who will “control” the holy sites of Jerusalem? Who will be able to visit them? At this time, members of the three faith communities all have access to their places of worship, and the densely populated square kilometer of the Old City, with its Jewish, Christian, and Muslim quarters, conducts itself for the most part with mutual respect. This was not always so.
It is important to note that in spite of the geopolitical currents that have surrounded Jerusalem for centuries, and show no sign of abating, it is first and foremost a city, with the same urban needs and aspirations as any community in the world. In this urban context, making Jerusalem a cleaner, greener and healthier city for all its residents has proved to be a goal shared by all the communities in the city. That is why I have found great satisfaction to have been able to contribute to the greening of Urban Jerusalem and its bioregion for the last twenty-five years, in a succession of challenging roles.
First, I served as head of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (S.P.N.I) in the Jerusalem region, between 1996 and 2008. During these years I was able to develop a metropolitan coalition of organizations and neighborhood groups, known as “Sustainable Jerusalem”, and indeed major environmental goals were achieved by this cross-sectoral, non-political coalition. There is no doubt that the public impact of the many member organizations in the Sustainable Jerusalem Coalition working together, contributed greatly in the ultimately successful struggle to secure the Gazelle Valley as Israel’s first urban nature park.
In the pictures below we see a gazelle, surprised to be having his photo taken, and our friend the swift enjoying clean water in the park.
Meet a permanent resident of the Gazelle Valley Urban Nature Park. Photo: Amir Balaban
The Gazelle Valley is a triangular basin in the heart of West Jerusalem, part of the Soreq river basin, which runs out eventually to the Mediterranean. It is some sixty acres, and the land was used for fruit orchards in the 1940’s and 50’s. These were tended by two Kibbutzim, Ma’aleh Hachamisha and Kiryat Anavim. When the Israel Land Reserve Authority attempted to turn the valley into real estate, the surrounding neighborhoods, together with the S.P.N.I, fought to preserve the valley and in a historic move the residents themselves became the developers. This time, however, they developed Israel’s first urban nature park, now a sanctuary for a small but thriving herd of gazelles. In addition, as a result of designing the park around the natural drainage basin of the Soreq River, instead of the usual winter flooding, the winter rainfall is now collected in a series of three small lakes, whose water is supplemented in the summer with fully treated sewage water. This has resulted in attracting thousands of birds to the valley, and in the pictures above we can see not only a gazelle, but our friend the swift from the Western Wall enjoying his lunch break in the Gazelle Valley.
A swift stops for a midday drink at the Gazelle Valley Park. Photo: Amir Balaban
Another opportunity arose when the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem train was brought back into use (it had stopped running in 1993 because of frequent derailing, due to the sharp bends in the route). A new Jerusalem train station was built in the south-western neighborhood of Malha, instead of bringing the train to its original station in the German Colony. This left eight kilometers of abandoned railway track, which since 1993 had turned into a back yard dump for all the neighborhoods along the route. This stretch of abandoned track was to become Jerusalem’s Railway Park, a resounding success, that links an assortment of culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, such as Bet Safafa, German Colony, Bakaa, and Gonenim, through a clean, green linear park, safe for pedestrians and cyclists. The Railway Park has completely changed the ambience of South Jerusalem, providing a wonderful green corridor that runs from the business hub that thrives on the site of the old train station, to the Metropolitan Park serving Jerusalem in the South. Completed in 2015, it has exceeded expectations, and continues to surprise us again and again, with the many community initiatives that have sprung up along the route.
Green Pilgrimage and the Green Pilgrim’s Ladder. Diagram courtesy of Architect Osnat Post
Green Pilgrimage and the Green Pilgrim’s Ladder
Every year more than a quarter of a billion people choose to undertake a journey that has deep spiritual significance for them. These pilgrims do not merely seek a restful vacation or spectacular views, but a transformative experience that feeds their souls—a journey that taps into their cultural, spiritual and religious beliefs.
Most human beings share a sense of connection with the natural world. For people of faith this is linked to the belief that they have a responsibility to protect the divine work of creation, while for nonbelievers the mystery of the cycle of life on earth is often no less potent.
Throughout the world, more and more tourists are looking for alternative experiences and new meaning in their travels: tourism that caters for the individual, nature and ecotourism, incorporating a cultural, ethnic, and spiritual dimension.
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land is quite different from pilgrimage in other parts of the world, in diverse ways. Because Jerusalem is a spiritual destination for the three monotheistic faiths, members of all three communities strive to visit the Holy Land at least once during their lifetime.
In the neighborhood of Ein Karem, we have worked hard to implement the philosophy of Green Pilgrimage. To illustrate the way we see pilgrims and visitors to Jerusalem making their experience greener, we invite them to become familiar with our “Green Pilgrim Ladder”. We hope that by following the rungs of the ladder illustrated above, visitors to Jerusalem will not only benefit from the spiritual impact of their pilgrimage, but will go back home more responsible citizens of the world, having left a “Positive Footprint”. I owe special thanks to my colleagues in the Green Pilgrimage team, Architect Osnat Post and Avner Haramati
In Ein Karem, visitors can help to prune and care for ancient olive trees, and help restore the agricultural techniques used to feed the pilgrims coming to the Temple in Biblical times. When they visit Mary’s Spring, they can see how by local Christian communities joining forces with Ein Karem residents in a long and wearying campaign, the water from the holy spring has been redirected to flow as it should into the orchards in the Wadi down below.
Pilgrim Volunteers help to restore Biblical agricultural terraces in Ein Karem. Photo: Stephanie LeeThe Golden Domes of the Ein Karem Russian Church viewed from the Road to the Hadassah Hospital. Photo: Ron Havilio
In conclusion, I don’t believe it is possible to separate urban Jerusalem and green Jerusalem, which together constitute “Earthly Jerusalem”, from the city’s spiritual aura. This is supported by the fact that the flora and fauna of Jerusalem today are barely different from those of the time of the First and Second Temple and Jesus’ times. That is why we are convinced that the more our pilgrims become familiar with the nature and life-style of Biblical times, the better will they assimilate the true essence of Jerusalem, and the more they will wish to continue to “Leave a Positive Footprint” when they get back home.
As I submit this contribution to TNOC, winds of unsustainable change are blowing once again in Jerusalem, now on the eve of municipal elections. Civil society organizations are rallying once again in the Sustainable Jerusalem Lobby, desperately campaigning to protect the Jerusalem Hills to the West of the city, threatened for a second time by unsustainable urban sprawl. We are working both reactively and proactively. The damaging development is being fought in the planning committees, of course. However, parallel to that, we are trying to bring together neighborhood councils on the west side of Jerusalem, together with the small towns and villages to the west of the municipal boundary, to create a bioregional partnership of care and responsibility for the very natural resources that give us life.
Make identity apparent
Books about The New Urbanism such as The Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler, or alternatively, counterarguments that are pro-suburbia such as Robert Bruggeman’s Sprawl; A Compact History, tend to polarize the debate with mercurial, and at times, snarky rhetoric. While Phelp’s research-driven exploration seems to lean towards the former in the beginning, the text takes an unexpected change of direction with the following.
There was an international outcry; people protested on the street outside the building. The Audubon Society became involved and an out-of-court agreement resulted in a new engineered-nest being installed. Maybe because of the trauma, the pair failed to hatch any new eyasses following the disturbance of their original nest. “Pale Male: New York’s Most Famous Red-Tailed Hawk May be A Father Again’” declared ABC News in on May 20, 2011. After years in which Pale Male and his mate Lola produced broods of eyasses, Pale Male took up with a new mate Ginger at his Fifth Avenue address. Pale Male’s seventh and eighth mates were Zena and Octavia. In recent years many more red-tailed hawks have taken up residency in New York City and it is not an uncommon sight to see a hawk flying overhead in a city park. Apparently it is still common practice, however, to poison rats and pigeons and this leads to the unintentional death of raptors, like the red-tailed hawk, which prey on these lower food chain animals.
![Cover of the book “Cities for ALL :(re)learning to live with NATURE”, release June 5th [in Portuguese] forewords by Cynthia Rosenzweig and Thomas Elmqvist.](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Fig-4-book-cover-268x420.jpg)
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