Justice and Geometry in the Form of Linear Parks

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Here at The Nature of Cities, we write a great deal about the benefits of “green” cities, widely construed. In particular, we write that green infrastructure and biodiversity in cities have broad benefits for people, nature, and, indeed, for the world at large through their effects on sustainability and resilience. Green infrastructure is good for human health and quality of life, it reduces the carbon footprint of cities, it increases resilience by insulating us from storms, it helps create foci of community building, and so on. Furthermore, green cities are good for nature in the form of conservation. This constellation of benefits constitutes what we call ecosystem services.

If how to increase park access is the question, then linear parks are a good answer. The reason is their geometry and the nature of their shape—they touch more people.

Do we truly believe in the benefits of ecosystem services? If we do, then two important questions follow. First, who should enjoy these benefits? The answer is really self-evident: everyone. Does everyone currently enjoy these benefits, in cities around the world? In short, and emphatically: no.

If we believe in nature-based solutions to urban problems, then we must also believe in the fair and equitable access to such solutions. All green infrastructure designs and their implementations have elements of justice and equity built in. Stated another way: “green” is an issue of justice.

Traditionally, environmental justice discussions have focused on the distribution of environmental “bads”—namely, that environmental waste and pollution are disproportionally experienced by the poor. This issue isn’t solved.

There is a flip side to this equation, too, and that is whether there is equitable access to environmental “goods”, or, the positive benefits of ecosystem services. We are lagging here, also. Does everyone have access to benefits such as parks, street trees, open space, nature-based protection from storms? Broadly, the answer is no.

The idea of access to nature-based solutions is within the decision-making power of city governments around the world. And, as a matter of assessment, access is relatively easy to measure, and so it is straightforward to assess how near or far we are from the goal of full and equitable access to nature and open space.

What are ecosystem services--David Maddox
What are ecosystem services? Image: David Maddox
Trees are good--David Maddox
Trees are good. Image: David Maddox

It’s easy to measure access

Trees are good. They have a role in providing clean air, jobs, carbon sequestration, reduced crime, increased property values, mental health benefits, temperature control, stormwater management, wildlife habitat, beauty, and livable neighborhoods. This is why across many cities in the United States and elsewhere, there are tree-lined streets. There are also streets that are not tree-lined. There is generally more tree canopy in wealthier neighborhoods.

In Washington, DC, the Washington Post reported a strong correlation across neighborhoods between median household income and tree cover. The richer the neighborhood, the greener it was. New York City also exhibits dramatic spatial variation in tree cover. A thoughtful response to this disparity has been that new street trees planted in the “Million Trees” program are clustered in underserved neighborhoods. Such a clustering approach means that areas without a full complement of trees are directly brought to a complete set of trees, rather than remaining behind as trees are placed with equal frequency across all neighborhoods, without regard to need.

Washington Tree Cover--David Maddox
Washington Tree Cover. Source: The Washington Post
New York City tree cover. Source: New York Department of Parks and Recreation
New York City tree cover. Source: New York Department of Parks and Recreation

Similarly, access to parks is widely variable around the world. This variability is easy to measure. One of the goals of New York City’s sustainability plan (PlaNYC) is that every New Yorker should be within a five-minute walk of a park. (Let’s leave for another essay the idea of the quality of that park, and concentrate simply on access.) New Yorkers for Parks has done admirable work documenting how New York is performing on this goal. The graphics shown here are examples of a large body of work New Yorkers for Parks have done in neighborhoods throughout New York. The data are rich as measurements of progress toward a common and publicly-stated standard. Two elements of this are key. First, that there is an explicit goal—every New Yorker within a 5-minute walk of a park—is critical for public debate about the characteristics of the city we want. Second, an explicit and simply articulated goal makes it possible to measure progress toward the goal.

There is similar data in Los Angeles. The Sustainable Cities Program of the University of Southern California reports that, countywide, only 36 percent of Los Angeles children live within ¼ mile of a park. (It is 85 percent in San Francisco.) Worse, the number of park acres per 1,000 children is much higher for census tracts dominated by white families than tracts dominated by African American or Latinos. That is, African-American and Latino children have less access to parks and their benefits.

Access to parks in New York. Source: New Yorkers for Parks
Access to parks in New York. Source: New Yorkers for Parks
Los Angeles access to parks--David Maddox
Los Angeles access to parks. Source: The Sustainable Cities Program at the University of Southern California

Matters of access can be even worse in other parts of the world—indeed, there is a crisis of open space in many of the world’s cities. For example, while New York is a relatively dense city—New York has approximately 4m2 of open space per person—Mumbai has much less: people in Bombay have only 1 percent as much open space as New Yorkers. According to Das, much of this results from cozy and non-transparent relationships between developers and cities that don’t serve people.

But this pattern can also be seen as a fundamental question of design and its limitations in planning. We can diagnose the problem and state a goal for change, but what can we do about it? In dense, populous cities, where would you put a new park to create more access? What is the way forward?

Mumbai stream restoration--Credit PKDas
Mumbai stream restoration. Image: PK Das

Corridors and catchment areas

First, let us acknowledge that access to open space is but one of the justice problems we have with green infrastructure. Nevertheless, let’s focus on this narrow problem. How can we create more access to green and open space in cities that don’t have much space to spare?

Linear parks are an answer, and the principle reason is geometry.

Imagine three hypothetical parks. Each has the same total area—four km2—but they are shaped differently. One is square, the other two progressively more long and thin. Consequently they differ in the total lengths of their perimeters: 8 km around the edge for a square park; 10 km for a rectangular one; 17 km for the thinnest and longest one.

Let’s take the New York standard as a reference: appropriate access is defined as living within a five-minute walk of the park, or approximately 0.5 km. The hatched area in the figure below is the area within 0.5 km of the edge of each park. It is easy to see that long and skinny parks have a much larger area “captured” within 0.5 km of their borders, for the simple reason that they have more perimeter. That larger area represents more people closer to the linear park.

How much more? A hypothetical, square 2km x 2km park comprises a “people catchment area” of about 2.5km within a 0.5km distance of its border; a 0.5km x 8km linear park captures an area of 4.5km. Let’s presume, for a moment, that these three parks are surrounded by the same density of people. The long and skinny park is within a short walk of almost twice as many people.

If how to increase park access is the question, linear parks are a good answer.

People catchment area. Image: David Maddox
People catchment area. Four equally sized parks have dramatically different perimeters because of their shapes. The long and skinny park is within 1/2 km of almost twice as many people as the square park. Image: David Maddox

Some arithmetic

What does this mean for some real cities? The table below includes several cities from around the world, but it is easy to make these calculations for other cities, too. The table uses commonly available data on total population and size to calculate each city’s density (people per km2).

Of course, density is not even across a city, but for argument’s sake, let’s imagine that it is. Further, imagine a linear park within this city: it is 2.5 km2 in area, and it is long and skinny, with a shape of 5 km x 0.5 km.

The people catchment area of this park is the space within 0.5 km of the perimeter. How many people live within this area depends on the density of people around it. How many people live within 0.5 km of such a park in Mumbai (i.e., live within 0.5 km)? Answer: almost 180,000 people (the size of the catchment area multiplied by the density). In Seoul, such a park would serve about 100,000 people. In Bogotá, it is 81,000.

In each of these cities, what is the size of a square park that would serve this many people? Remember, square parks have much smaller perimeters per unit of total size. In each of these cities, a square park of over 3 km per side (i.e., over 12 km2 in total area) would be required to serve the same number of people as the linear park.

Do you have room for a new 3 km x 3 km park in the middle of your city? Probably not.

Access to parks--David Maddox
Access to parks. Image: David Maddox

Linear parks and opportunity

The perimeter to area ratio is why linear parks have great potential to address some of our justice problems with respect to access to ecosystem services: more people are likely to live near a linear park and so be able to enjoy it.

Additionally, linear parks are much more likely to fit within existing cities. In Mumbai, New York, Seoul, Johannesburg, and so on, there are not very many places that large square parks and open spaces could be created—at least, not without displacing a lot of people, which would create its own justice problems. Thus, the opportunities for linear parks are another immensely attractive feature. There are places in existing cities that can accommodate the design of linear parks as part of the natural fabric and topography of the city: along streams (especially day-lighted ones), near roadways, along topographic features, and so on.

There are many examples of emerging liner parks around the world, and they have considerable potential to increase access of people to open space: the HighLine (New York), the Emerald Necklace (Los Angeles), Cheonggyecheon (Seoul), Jerusalem, P.K. Das’ work in Mumbai, and many others in cities around the world. They are projects of opportunity that have the potential for great rewards in increased access and, therefore, in environmental equity.

Seoul stream--Photo David Maddox
Cheonggyecheon stream restoration in Seoul. An elevated highway was removed to daylight the original stream bed. Photo: David Maddox

Linear parks as panacea

Linear parks don’t work for every purpose, of course. It’s hard to put a ball field in a long and skinny park. In some cases, the edge habitat that dominates skinny parks doesn’t suit certain types of biodiversity or human contemplation. (Although they may promote biodiversity connections between larger green spaces and facilitate other human activities, such as walking and foot-based commuting.) Furthermore, we know that just inserting a green space into previously underserved neighborhoods, however well-intentioned, isn’t always sufficient.

Still, we know that we have a crisis of access to green and open space in many (or most) of the world’s cities. We assert that everyone should have access to the benefits of nature and ecosystem services, from the enjoyment of biodiversity to clean air and protection from storms. As a matter of justice—through the lens of equitable access to the myriad benefits of nature—corridor parks are major opportunities in urban design and planning to improve the lives of millions of people.

David Maddox
New York

On The Nature of Cities

Justice from the Ground Up

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
12. BargmanSoil contamination is a baseline condition for most of the sites I’ve worked on over the past two decades. The toxic imprint derives from industry—steel production, shipbuilding, fabrication of automobile and machine parts, to name just a few—in both urban and rural settings. But it also comes from lead-containing gasoline and paint, banned long ago but still quietly wreaking havoc. It’s a byproduct of the human pursuit of greater material wealth and a more convenient and comfortable life. In other words, it’s the legacy of progress, for better or worse. 

Landscape design and social justice are inseparable—an extension of Olmsted’s ideal: that city dwellers deserve the physical and mental health benefits provided by open access to nourishing environments, regardless of their social or economic status.
As a landscape designer with expertise in toxic remediation and the regeneration of fallow land, the “better or worse” part is vitally important to me. I can say that with certainty, thanks to hindsight and 30 years of academic and professional experience. I didn’t grow up with the term “environmental justice,” which came into use in the 1980s to describe, in part, the unequal distribution of the benefits and burdens of progress. But I now know what a growing body of research shows: in the United States there’s a disturbing overlap between the maps showing where poor people and ethnic minorities live, and where contaminated soils exist.

You might use a stronger word than “disturbing” if you or a loved one were to develop a learning disability, cancer, or liver damage, which are just three of the many proven ill-effects of poisoning by lead, arsenic, and other pernicious elements found in soil. As I write this essay, residents of Vernon, California, in East Los Angeles, a low-income and largely Latino community, were celebrating a bittersweet victory, after forcing the closure of a battery recycling plant owned by New Jersey–based Exide Technologies. The sickening part of the story, pun intended, is that the plant operated for two decades after its environmental violations were first reported to the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC). Both the cleanup efforts (just 150 of 10,000 contaminated properties were reported to have undergone soil remediation as of early October) and the official response have been weak. “All of us could have acted sooner to develop a more complete picture of what the operations of that facility meant to the health of the residents around it,” DTSC director Barbara A. Lee said. She hastened to add that “the department had tried to shut down the facility in the past but the courts blocked the effort,” according to one published report.

When I read that I chuckled sadly to myself. It reminded me of an exchange I had a few years ago with a high-ranking city official with oversight of a new development for low-income residents I was working on. The developers were eager to start construction, to show “progress,” so they broke ground before testing the soil. Sure enough, the dirt was hot. I had joined the project late, when the momentum to build the inaugural prototype house was unstoppable. But when I learned the test results, remediation was still possible, and regardless, I was bound to report them. I still get a pit in my stomach when I think of the official’s response, which went something like this: The city has enough problems that are plain to see, so let’s not add to them by disclosing a difficult truth, especially one that’s invisible. To my disappointment, the project team elected not to address the contamination, and I was politely excused from the job.

To me, it’s common sense to start every project with the assumption of site pollution. So the natural thing to do—the right thing to do—is to determine the type and extent of toxicity, and incorporate that information into your design strategy and development plans. That’s my vision of the landscape designer’s role in creating a just city: Scrutinize the site right down to the molecular level, identify who’s in harm’s way and of what, and push decision makers to take active steps to remediate the bad stuff.

That simple idea—the opposite of the prevailing “don’t dig, don’t tell” mentality—was the driving principle of one of my most significant collaborations. Big Mud was D.I.R.T. Studio’s contribution to Operation Paydirt, the brainchild of the ingenious conceptual artist Mel Chin. Like many of Chin’s initiatives, Paydirt—which launched in 2006 and continues to this day—focuses on social justice. D.I.R.T. participated in the project from 2007 to 2009, helping to devise an implementation strategy to address the high lead content in New Orleans’ soil—in other words, a social recipe for just ground. 

As I wrote in the anthology Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design, Big Mud proposed a landscape-recovery strategy that takes into account the many physical and social scales within which New Orleans, like all cities, functions. Working with local lead soil expert Dr. Howard Mielke, we helped reveal the “geography of lead.” Our team then concocted a way to treat leaded soil, by amending it with phosphates and adding clean fill. The phosphates bond with lead to form pyromorphite, which is insoluble in water, neutralizing the toxicity. Clean river sediment abounds in New Orleans from alluvial deposits piled on shore during flooding. Put a layer of that rich Mississippi mud over the phosphate-treated soil, plant trees, et voila—a healthy landscape. Implementation called for the training and employment of community members to collect, stockpile, and deliver the ingredients from a network of holding sites that range in size from extra large distribution hubs we called Mud Depots to smaller Mud Markets, like a neighborhood garden center.

This implementation strategy has yet to be realized. But Paydirt and Big Mud were, and still are, hugely important to me. They crystallized my core belief that landscape design and social justice are inseparable. This notion is actually an extension of Frederick Law Olmsted’s ideal: that city dwellers deserve the physical and mental health benefits provided by open access to nourishing environments, regardless of their social or economic status.

Today I aspire to a similar social imperative but face a different urban landscape, one where poor people and poor soils often go together. To address this inequity—which weakens families and communities through higher instances of illness and learning disabilities, as well as nervous and emotional disorders—I offer a simple proposal. Always test the soil before you create places where people will live, work, and play. If it’s toxic, address it. As Mel Chin said of post-Katrina New Orleans, we have the opportunity to rebuild “from below the ground up.”

Social justice—and soil remediation—must be built into the foundation of a just city. It’s a solution that’s as simple as dirt.

Julie Bargmann
Charlottesville

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
10. GoranskyThe purpose of this essay is to share some considerations about the meaning of “just City” from the perspective of a lawyer dedicated to the reform of justice administration and, in particular, to the design of systems that promote, encourage and facilitate the approach of justice for the people. This historically means not only a change in the rules and culture but also a change in the design of the spaces in which justice is administered.

A just city is only achieved when its inhabitants have a sense of belonging, respect for the rights of others and for the place in which they live.
It is also written from the perspective of a city dweller from Buenos Aires, a city in which more than 3 million people live, and where 1.2 million cars and 1.2 million people in public transportation arrive every day from the suburbs. Traffic and traffic violations are one of the most serious problems and affect our everyday life in a dramatic way.

The guiding principle of these reflections is that a just city is only achieved when its inhabitants have a sense of belonging, respect for the rights of others and for the place in which they live. In no other aspect is this clearer than in transit, in which the disregard for the laws brings enormous cost not only in human lives but also can easily become a very heavy burden in everyday life, in which aggression and lawbreakers are the norm. For example, in Argentina it can be said that traffic rules are not respected and more than 7,000 people die each year in traffic accidents, and more than 120,000 are injured in varying degrees. This is one of the highest rates of mortality from traffic accidents and is significantly higher when compared with the rates of other countries in relation to their population and number of cars.

When I think of a just city there are some general issues that arise and are central to its development. First, is the need for an equitable distribution of resources among all the people and neighborhoods, in accordance to fairness.  Fairness does not necessarily mean equal amounts of money everywhere but an adequate amount of resources to ensure that people from all parts of the city have the same opportunities to enjoy the benefits of community life, including access to education, health, safety, justice, etc.

On the other hand, is important to assure the participation of all inhabitants in the management and administration of the city. A just city always has different ways to encourage its citizens to participate in the discussion of the problems that affect them and in the process of decision-making. Therefore there are accessible public spaces designed to appeal to neighbors and to foster community life.

In particular, a just city is a city in which everyone respects the general rules of coexistence, where respect of others and the environment is a shared value. This means some basic things, like speed limits and throwing trash into trashcans and much more complicated matters.

What is important though is that people follow the rules of the city because they recognize the city and its rules as theirs. This is why is so important to have a system that allows people to move around in a friendly environment, otherwise we will have a dangerous, aggressive and corrupt city — corruption starts with small bribes to transit agents.

A just city is also a place where everybody lives safely and the rights of all are respected. That means that ensuring security should not come at the cost of disregarding privacy and intimacy. With accessible new monitoring technologies, the boundaries between privacy and security become complicated. While having a camera on the dashboard of every police vehicle seems like a good idea, the over-extension of surveillance should be at the center of the debate between politicians and inhabitants if we are going to build a just city. Sometimes better lights, more illumination, are all we need to make ours streets more secure and to invite people to walk around at night.

And a just city is conceived and designed for their people to have a simple, economic and fast access to the different areas of public administration. In particular, those responsible for the administration of justice: police, courts, prosecutors, defenders, prisons, etc. The design of each court, each police department and each place of incarceration deserves special attention to ensure that they serve their purpose. For example, the courts must allow the public to sit comfortably and see the way justice is done; the places of incarcerations must assure the dignity of the prisoners; the police departments needs places where victims of crimes can be properly heard, protected and assisted.

Very often judicial buildings are chosen and designed by lawyers formed in systems where justice is kept away from the people. Consequently the buildings are located and designed to meet the needs of those who administer justice and not to those who need justice. Often these buildings and offices are true labyrinths inaccessible for regular people. For example, in Buenos Aires, the Federal Building is far for everything and there is nothing around it — no place to meet people, to have a coffee, is dangerous at night, etc. Buenos Aries’ Justice Palace is a complicated labyrinth were visitors routinely get lost. Only a few years ago an NGO won a case that ordered ramps be built for disabled people entering the building.

In a just city, justice is at the service of the people and with that purpose there is a network of public transportation that communicate all the public services with the different areas of the city, has understandable signs to facilitate the access to the different offices, and has systems that enable the access of people with different capacities. That is why is so important to decentralize the courts and the prosecutors’ offices. Years ago I was in charge of a unit that lead programs in connecting the prosecutors with the community, in the reorganization of the Prosecutors Institution and in the launch of the first-ever decentralized prosecutors office in Buenos Aires. The main goal of all these projects was to strengthen the idea that justice is a public service and to work with people of other disciplines to design institutions that fulfill the needs of all.

And last but not least, a just city is a city that chooses to remember and share its history with the generations to come and exhibits its past in memory sites, in public places in which, at the same time, democratic values ​​and human rights are promoted. In Argentina there are many places where we can learn about what happened during the dictatorship that ruled my country from 1976 to 1983. Clandestine centers of detention where people was detained, tortured and killed are now museums or memorial sites that allow us to know what happened and to say that this will never happened again, never more.

Mirna D. Goransky
Buenos Aires

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination

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See the full list of Essays
Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
3. Maher

You want to read about a vision of a just Karachi? The contract killer ($50 a hit) ripping up the road behind Disco Bakery on his Honda 200CC and the secret service colonel cracking skulls in a Clifton safehouse will both cite one vision: Dubai. This happens to also be the vision of the one-armed Afghan refugee selling Beijing socks off a cart in Saddar bazaar and the unsexed Karachi Port Trust shipping agent waiting for shady clients to cough up cash so he can escape to Phuket. To borrow from an old Urdu election rallying cry: Chalo, chalo, Dubai, chalo. Come, come, let’s go to Dubai.

A vision of a just Karachi? I am laughing. Visions are supposed to create. What do you call wanting to undo?
Vision presupposes the ability to see what is in front of you, and based on the understanding this seeing yields, you can plan with some measure of wisdom to create what you do not want to see in the future. And so, it is noble to ask what could be a vision of a just Karachi—except that this is an unfair assignment given that this city completely confounds the senses. Just when you think you have some idea of what Karachi is, the landscape will chimerically shift. It is small wonder that the people who live here are forever trying to explain Karachi to themselves and to each other, to define it and even try to form some vision of what it should be. But the city is elusive. In our desperate attempts to exercise some control over this kind of existence, we tend to do two things in reaction: look outwards or backwards.

Those who look outwards have fixated on Dubai, a long-time employment destination for the Pakistani laborer who idealizes it as a city where the streets are paved with gold. Given that Dubai is a 90-minute flight away, the elite and upwardly mobile middle classes of Karachi exalt it as an escape from Karachi’s filth and madness. Dubai fits their vision of a shiny, clean, crime-free metropolis where you can exhaust yourself in air-conditioned malls with their Nine West stores, JC Pennys and Starbucks. Dubai assuages our near-Catholic sense of Islamic guilt of enjoying things too Western; not only is the city Arab but if it is kosher for the sheikhs to order hickory barbecue (chicken) bacon cheeseburgers at the Hard Rock Café, so can a Muslim from Karachi without going to hell in a breadbasket. Stories of Dubai’s real estate bust or the effects of its sterile soullessness and hidden human rights violations don’t figure much in conversations in Karachi.

So, one vision of Karachi is to become a Dubai. Sadly, this is the vision of policymakers in Karachi and the powers that be in our federal capital of Islamabad, who hold the purse strings to our infrastructure development. You can see this vision manifest on our streets in the 44 pro-car and anti-pedestrian overpasses, the new malls, the gated communities. We look outwards when we want to envision Karachi. We would rather mimic instead of indigenously assessing what Karachi is and what its people—rich or poor—need.

Those in Karachi, who do not worship Dubai as an urban model, look backwards. They are full of nostalgia for a postcolonial port city that had dance halls, cinemas, nightclubs, booze, cabarets, promenades, bars, even the British. Dizzie Gillespie came to Karachi in 1956. Custard was served at the Scottish Freemason Hope Lodge. The nostalgia is dated to the 1980s, however, when political violence started to erupt. But oh, before that you could walk around the old city parts of Saddar and not get murdered. Now you can’t even wear your diamonds beyond Sind Club (where a sign once said, “No women and dogs beyond this point”). The lament for this Kurrachee, as the British spelt it, and the yearning for it to return, conveniently ignores that it was, as Karachi historian Arif Hasan puts it, “a culture of a colonial port city with a colonial administration under the Empire.” It was bound to eventually end as it did in a decade with the exit of the British upon Partition in 1947.

Either way, Dubai or Kurrachee, at least these residents of Karachi have some idea of what they want this city to be like. I envy them. I look—but I see nothing. I am afraid to form a vision of Karachi, much less one for a just Karachi. This should not be a challenge given that I know and love this city as a journalist can. Each day, for fifteen years, I have been editing news about it, writing it, scouring it, cajoling reporters and photographers to go forth to negotiate with it. We are reluctantly intimate with its subterranean economies, its government extortions, its skins, its rejections, its hidden mercies, not to mention where to get the best goat curry.

Oddly though, the knowledge of these Karachis has had the opposite effect of creating confidence to comment with any authority on the city. If anything, I know that you cannot know anything about it for sure. I have come to see it as intellectually dishonest to hold forth on Karachi. To generalize, especially, is a sin.

Take for example, the long-held view of the residents of Karachi and its police that our slums are the root of crime and religious extremism. It is a convenient snobbery to declare that the poor are criminals. More specifically, we assume that the Afghan refugees, who flocked here from their homeland upon the Russian invasion in the 1970s, are holed up as the Taliban or are the only ones peddling crack on our streets. Crime statistics reveal a more nuanced picture that criminals also live in middle class apartments and not just our ghettoes. When crime shoots up the police and paramilitary forces raid slums. Young men are rounded up, blindfolded and trundled off to police stations only to be released a few days later because there is no evidence against them. The crime graph doesn’t budge a coordinate. We fool ourselves into thinking we know this city.

Perhaps my caution when it comes to reaching conclusions—and hence developing any vision—about Karachi seems extreme. But even if I suspend it for an essay to try to envision a just Karachi, I am stumped by a paralysis of imagination. I baulk at drawing on the examples of cities in the global North because there are no guarantees that what works for New York will fit for Karachi. The catch phrases resilience and smart city fail to resonate with Karachi (so much so that a friend in urban studies has started a “Dumb City Project”). Similarly problematic is casting an envious eye towards our neighbor India with its Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, Ministry of Urban Development and e-Seva services. I have come to believe that this inability to even dare to dream of a just Karachi is in part a symptom of living in a city that has been forced to run on crippled formal systems or none at all. Where would I even begin? By shamefacedly admitting that we don’t even have an office of the mayor? We have not had an elected city manager since 2009 but it is only now that the Supreme Court is trying to push the provincial or state government to hold local government elections before the year ends. (In the meantime a handpicked bureaucrat, officially referred to as a city administrator, has been in charge. But his mandate is not to run the city efficiently as he is not answerable to the people of Karachi.)

To be fair, though, not all of what Karachi is today can be attributed to the current failure to form local government. But if I am to draw from the accepted international standard of having city government systems in place to run our cities, I can be forgiven for assuming that this would be a prerequisite to forming any vision in the first place. Isn’t it supposed to be like this: You elect the best qualified mayoral candidate who presents what is closest to your vision for your city?

Instead, over the decades, there has been an erosion of the institutions that have traditionally managed Karachi, with the office of the mayor being the last nail in the coffin. With the recession of these formal systems has come a slow descent into informality, which explains why the city keeps spinning. Our water doesn’t flow from the tap because a tanker mafia steals it from the bulk mains at source and sells it back to us at Rs2,500 (US$25) for 2,000 gallons. The government’s inability to provide affordable housing has left people at the mercy of loan sharks and real estate middleman who squat on state land by developing slums. Informality is the only formality we know. To borrow from beat writer Richard Fariña: “Been down so long it looks like up to me.”

In this ‘down,’ Karachi has learned how to survive and keep working. There is a special Urdu word for this: Jugardh. It means ‘make do’ or ‘quick fix,’ to put it roughly. This is our new city social contract in the absence of government. If we want to get anything which the city management would otherwise do for us, we have to rely on informal networks. If you want to get a sewage pipeline fixed in your street, for example, you call up your uncle who happens to know the managing director of the water board.

I understand that perhaps people who have lived in cities with long histories of experimenting and honing the formula for local government are now wondering if a certain measure of informality or organic bottom-up self-determination isn’t a better model. This is a position that can be taken by someone within the luxury of a working system. To me a system is a safeguard from inequality. The system applies to everyone, not just those with enough powerful connections. Inequality and justice are two sides of a coin to me. Isn’t justice, by one definition, the administration of the law or authority to maintain what is fair and reasonable? If so, then without an elected City Council with its Treasury and Opposition to keep in check a mayor and his administration (called the Karachi Municipal Corporation), nothing this city decides for itself will be fair and reasonable. Systems inherently carry checks and balances because they are premised on rules. If informality is the only ‘system’ we have then no rules apply.

One example stands out in memory. When we did have an elected city council from 2001 to 2009 Opposition councilors from one political party locked horns with the Treasury members and the mayor, Mustafa Kamal, over the distribution of funds to their neighbourhoods. They could prove to the city, their voters and those who gave Karachi city its funding that they had been gypped. Don’t get me wrong; our experiment with devolved local government was not untainted by corruption, which emerged at the smallest city unit, the union council level. But at least people living in UC-9, for example, had someone to go to with their needs and that councilor could take it to the town nazim who could make a noise in the city council in front of the mayor.

A vision of a just Karachi then perhaps just asks for a basic system of governance. Its residents—whether they drove Mercs or motorcycles, lived in mud huts or mansions — should be able to elect their own representatives. And through them the people would be able to provide their own sense of a just Karachi or at least be able to fight an unjust one.

In the absence of a city council we have been left at the mercy of the ‘vision’ of ill-informed bureaucrats who have been handpicked by the province’s (state’s) powerful political parties to ‘run’ Karachi as puppets. So we have a Karachi Administrator instead of a mayor and he runs the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation which includes, for example, the departments of transport and communication, sanitation services, parks, land management and local taxes. This has essentially allowed the only two powerful political parties on Karachi’s scene to make unchallenged decisions about the city’s resources. Let me give one example of a series of coordinated yet unexamined decisions that were made without any input from Karachi’s residents that will have devastating effects on the future of the city.

In 2010 the government created a new high density law and declared 11 zones in Karachi, many of them slums, open for high-rise construction. Height-related restrictions were removed. The amalgamation of plots was allowed, plot ratios were removed and the sizes of buildings were increased. The reasoning provided by policymakers was that Karachi’s population was rapidly growing and densification was needed. No one pointed out that the areas earmarked for high density zones were already dense and there were plenty of rich neighbourhoods with sprawl that were untouched.

This law has opened the door to mega real estate projects without any oversight from the city’s Master Planning department, which has essentially a fairly good design for the city till 2030. This important department has been administratively placed under Karachi’s building control authority, which doles out permits for all construction in the city. The world over this hierarchy is the opposite; only if a building adheres to the plan the city has made for itself can it get the green signal.

For those of us who have tried to keep track of the changing face of Karachi it is dismaying to behold a constant slipping away of its beauty and charm, or that intangible magic that makes us love this city despite its madness. It is being taken over by the untrammelled development of gated communities. The timber mafia keeps felling its ancient Banyan trees. We had a water crisis this summer because no one is at the helm to plan for the future of our supply or fix our leaky pipes. Our footpaths are disappearing under billboards. Our parks are being taken over by the offices of political parties. Public spaces are being taken over by parking lots.

A vision of a just Karachi? I am laughing. Visions are supposed to create. What do you call wanting to undo?

Mahim Maher
Karachi

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Key Factors in Sustaining the Local Ecological Agenda

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One hundred ninety two national governments and the EU have signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), pledging to work towards its three objectives (see here).  In reality, much of the onus falls on local governments although, often, neither level is aware of this nor how it should take place.  In fact, local governments’ task is disproportionately important because their efforts can reach so many people in such relatively small spaces.  An urban park, for example, can expect orders of magnitude more visitors per unit area than even the most popular national park.  And it’s not just about the collective acreage of land.  Access to nature where people live can affect their attitude towards nature in general – and this is manifested through their votes and other forms of support.

Much good work is being done by many dedicated individuals in this field.  However, in most of the world’s cities management of biodiversity is given little consideration or priority.  It is therefore up to the international community to set this right through initiatives to support those willing to take steps towards improvement.  Unfortunately projects and programmes to address this often lack any true sense of continuity.  Workshops present a common example: they are relatively easy to organize, convene and fund, and they allow a box to be ticked no matter what happens after everyone goes home.  Even with longer-term projects it’s relatively easy to start something and then say “ok, now you take over”.  What’s much more challenging is to ensure the sustainability of an initiative, especially if the beneficiaries weren’t consulted or involved in the conception of the idea.  For local government officials, among others, this can be demoralizing in the long term.  They may look to aid agencies, international organizations etc. with hope, but might receive little more than ideas and contact details – useful though these may (or may not) turn out to be.

I count myself among the guilty.  I have been involved in a number of initiatives in which continuity has not been a central focus.  I believe we, as “city biodiversity people”, need to be in this for the long haul.  We need to figure out not what sounds good, but what is realistic; we need to figure it out in consultation with those who need to carry on with it; and we need to employ mechanisms that will increase the chances of them being able to do it.  Here I’ll outline three mechanisms to which, I think, we need to pay more attention when working to support local governments: personality, politicians, and policy & planning.

Personality

Credit: www.have-a-nice-day.org

One of the most striking mechanisms to achieve positive change that I have experienced in years of working with local governments has been “champions”.  In many cases an individual’s ingenuity and determination can achieve more than even a considerable amount of funding.  This is partly because such an individual will find ways to ensure that the broader workforce of the local government by which they are employed can be harnessed and mobilized to achieve many of the results for which they are aiming.  Almost every local government department is affected by, and has an effect on, ecosystems through their work.  If each of them is made aware and considerate of the need to conserve biodiversity, much more will be achieved than the biodiversity practitioner could dream of achieving alone – even with a huge budget.  And in many cases all that is required is their will, not necessarily more work or more funding, but a different approach.

Champions’ position in the hierarchy is important in affecting this kind of cross-sectoral illumination and working together but more important, I think, is personality.  I have encountered many individuals who have achieved success by virtue of who they are and how they relate to others.  They are also determined, thick-skinned, strategic, proactive, and patient.  For example, in a Canadian municipality the director of the city’s natural areas office has established good relationships with the mayor and directors of each of the city’s major divisions so that all are now prepared to listen when biodiversity is brought up; he has increased local decision-making autonomy from the provincial level; and he has been at the centre of the development of numerous new and innovative projects.  He has established his city as a known world leader through their involvement in global initiatives like ICLEI’s Local Action for Biodiversity (LAB) Programme, thereby effectively advertising and thus bolstering the work already done by his city. He is a source of inspiration for many with whom he has come into contact.

Recommendation: Identify champions so that their lessons can be shared and their actions further supported; and identify those who have the potential to fill this role, empowering them to act in their own municipalities by showing them what’s been done; how to do it; and that they are not alone in their endeavor.

Politicians  

While a biodiversity practitioner’s effect is limited to some extent by their position, a politician is constrained more by their need to address a number of often-conflicting issues, and to satisfy their constituency.  This also has quite a lot to do with personality but it’s more about awareness and subsequent willingness.  If politicians have the will to support biodiversity, biodiversity practitioners are likely to be given considerable freedom in their work and, just as importantly, more likely to be able to access municipal funding.  On the other hand if a politician has taken a stance in opposition to biodiversity, for example if they consider it to do nothing but impede development, then very little will be achieved by even a well-staffed and well-integrated biodiversity unit.  Even the neutral politician can be restrictive because, when biodiversity comes up against other priorities, the likelihood is that this decision-maker will know and care more about a new road or housing development than about a concept with which they are less familiar.

In my work I have encountered fewer politicians who are really moving biodiversity work than practitioners.  In some cases, however, a politician has really made things happen. One Australian mayor has made his relatively small and previously unknown city stand out globally by associating himself with biodiversity issues.  It is unlikely to be a coincidence that he is also the president of his state’s local government association; member of the executive committee of the world’s largest local government organization dedicated to environmental sustainability; and that his city is regarded among the leaders in local biodiversity conservation worldwide.

Recommendation: Build relationships with politicians, and between them and their biodiversity staff, and raise awareness on how the support of ecosystem services can be used to support their position and campaign (remember politicians are always on campaign).

Policies and plans  

The problem with both personalities and politicians is impermanence.  While both represent very worthwhile mechanisms for maintaining a focus on biodiversity considerations, they do unfortunately come and go.  This is especially true for the latter and necessitates a constant process of relationship-building which can be especially tricky when a new administration abhors the old, and may even get rid of officials associated with it.  As an additional and supporting measure policy is, therefore, critical.  It, too, can be changed over time depending on the administration but can provide an additional safeguard.  Even if a new administration is bent on changing or removing it, the due process required may at least buy some time to win them over.

Both policy and the plans that flow from them need, however, to be timed and placed strategically.  For example a recent study (Radeloff et al. 2012) of 35 countries worldwide showed that the promulgation of protected areas tended to occur in spates rather than gradually over time.  44% of the countries studied “protected more than half of their protected area in one year, and 61% did so in one 5-year period”.  The authors concluded that conservationists need to account for these ‘hot moments’ in countries’ political progression, which “often coincided with societal upheaval such as the collapse of the USSR or the end of colonialism”, in order to be most effective.

Placement is equally important.  Consider, for example, the case of a medium-sized city in which a biodiversity action plan is one of about 50 sectoral plans.  Although it guides the biodievrsity unit responsible, it cannot be expected to influence 49 other sectoral plans.  The rather simple and elegant solution was to ensure that the key principles of the biodiversity plan were integrated into one of the city’s overarching plans, which must be followed by each sector and appropriately reflected in their sectoral plans.  Again, timing is also important because there is a limited period during which plans can be revised.

Recommendation: Encourage biodiversity practitioners in local government to consider their contribution to policy and plans to be a strategic component of their duties that will pave the way for their on-the-ground work.

Parting words

The mandate of the United Nations, as its name suggests, is to serve the national governments of the world.  The message that I am trying, with others like my supervisor, Oliver Hillel and colleagues from ICLEI, to get across is that they are the ones only who start things.  National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) are a requirement of each Party to the Convention but, in reality, the “A” and “P” parts of the acronym can be specific enough to result in implementation only once the plan is applied and specified at the local level.  A 2010 report on progress with NBSAPs by the United Nations University confirms that “the overall NBSAP will only be implemented if corresponding strategies and action plans are also developed and implemented at the relevant sub-national level(s)”.

And yet there remains a huge gap between national strategy, and local planning and implementation.  Who best to do this than the local arms of the same national governments?

There is much work to be done but implementing mechanisms at the local level, while simultaneously working to raise awareness at national and international level to increase support for what happens locally seems a good way to go.

André Mader
Montreal

 

Knowing vs. Doing: Propelling Design with Ecology

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A review of Projective Ecologies, edited by Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister. 2014. ISBN: 1940291127. ACTAR, Harvard Graduate School of Design. 314 pages. Buy the book.

Several months ago, I reviewed Landscape Imagination, a collection of essays by James Corner, a professor at University of Pennsylvania and the landscape architect who designed New York City’s celebrated High Line. Composed over twenty years, his essays examine the many factors hindering the advancement of the cultural medium of landscape. One factor Corner repeatedly addresses is the hoary old dichotomy between nature and culture still pervasive in landscape architecture—the belief in a pristine nature separate from humans.

If we cannot get our most innovative and challenging ideas out of books and into real landscapes, we will squander an opportunity to determine a proud future.
While his collection proposes the “landscape imagination” as a way to transcend this outdated belief in landscape architecture, Projective Ecologies, a new collection of essays edited by Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister, turns to ecology for new ways to think beyond the old nature/culture split. Taken together, these complimentary volumes offer a powerful new raison d’etre for contemporary landscape architecture. But they also reveal another thorny dichotomy.

While the essays in both collections are exquisitely written, I am hard pressed to imagine contemporary built landscapes that actually represent the challenging ideas conveyed in either book. This dichotomy between landscape as idea—in academic writing and imaging—and the actual production of landscapes—in the common client/contract model of practice—is not new. Nor is it unique to the discipline. But like nature versus culture, the idea versus practice dichotomy leaves landscape architecture ill equipped to work effectively in a world of quickly hybridizing landscapes.

coverProjective Ecologies aims to recover a critical sense of ecology for the design professions because they operate at the intersection of nature and culture—particularly landscape architecture, since its medium holds unique environmental, social, and existential opportunities and responsibilities. Emerging from a multi-year research initiative at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Reed and Lister drew on Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge to present three “parallel genealogies,” or intellectual traditions, dealing with the concept of ecology: natural sciences, the humanities, and design.

Reed and Lister abandon any hope of editing a chronologically linear exploration of ecology across the disciplines. Instead, they take a cue from it, and tend a wild garden of vines and sprawling, root-like ideas with no center and no linear narrative. While it was once believed that ecosystems were linear, gradually and steadily reaching stability until disturbed by an external force, it is now understood that change is built into them. Biologist Robert E. Cook eloquently explains this paradigm shift in his essay “Do Landscapes Learn? Ecology’s “New Paradigm” and Design in Landscape Architecture” (1999). For Cook, ecosystems depend on change for growth and renewal.

All of the essays are at their best when they investigate the consequences of design and planning operating from the old paradigm in ecology. Jane Wolff demonstrates how decades of decisions and actions from within the old paradigm made Hurricane Katrina such an unprecedented disaster for New Orleans. The complex hybrid ecological systems that have emerged in New Orleans are making rehabilitation efforts nearly impossible. David Fletcher discusses how Los Angeles River revitalization efforts are led by goals to fix the river rather than understand what it has become. This desire to return the river to a “natural” state threatens its urban ecologies, which have adapted to perform significant ecological functions independent of human agency.

Erle C. Ellis, a professor of anthropogenic landscape ecology at the University of Maryland, further explains why these dichotomies are so troublesome in his contribution “Taxonomy of the Human Biosphere.” Ellis defines our new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, as “the completion and permanence of human influence on the terrestrial biosphere.” He argues that the Anthropocene began roughly 10,000 years ago, when humans first started planting crops. The epoch really got underway with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Anything that was not altered before is now undergoing rapid changes caused by human-induced climate change. The future of all species, including our own, sits entirely in our hands. Ellis makes a case for understanding and managing our anthropogenic biosphere by moving beyond the mythology of humans as destroyers of a pristine and fragile nature, a theme that is central to the nature versus culture dichotomy. Since this cultural perception of nature does not actually exist in the reality of a biosphere that is now a hybrid of nature and culture, it will not empower us to create nurturing landscapes in the new epoch. Likewise, if we cannot get our most innovative and challenging ideas out of books and into real landscapes, we will squander an opportunity to determine a proud future.

C.Tuccio
Christopher Tuccio. Milkweed Habitats. 2008.

The essays offer three important perspectives of ecology to better understand ecology as a model of the world and the agency exercised by design and planning in shaping that world. The first perspective from Projective Ecologies is that ecology has transcended its origins as a natural science. The expansion is trans-disciplinary, cutting across the natural and social sciences, history and the humanities, design and the arts. It also pertains to the pervasive co-opting of ecology as an overused metaphor for any general idea about environment or as a poorly understood stand-in for the idea of dense networks of connectivity (see any recent issue of Forbes or Fast Company in which entrepreneurs explain the “ecology” of their multi-million dollar “ecosystem”). In Christopher Hight’s essay “Designing Ecologies,” he declares ecology among the most important epistemological frameworks for the environmental narrative of our times. But because of ecology’s expansion—and, consequentially, its descent into simplistic truisms that everything is interlinked and interacting—it loses its meaning as a specific idea. Reed and Lister say, “few designers have ventured beyond the metaphors and mechanics of these two-decade-old models to design effectively for adaptation to change, or to incorporate learned feedback into the designs, or to work in trans-disciplinary modes of practice that open new apertures for the exploration of new systems, synergies, and wholly collaborative work.”

The second perspective from Projective Ecologies (as implied by the title) is that ecology is actually a plural concept, spanning a broad spectrum of fields. Some of the specialized areas of ecologically oriented research that have emerged, include: landscape ecology, human ecology, urban ecology, applied ecology, evolutionary ecology, restoration ecology, deep ecology, the ecology of place, and unified theory of ecology. These appropriations are responses to the importance of ecology as model, metaphor, and medium for the interrelationships between plants, animals, and the physical, biological, cultural, and experiential world. In a hybrid world of nature and culture, singularities—such as ecology existing outside the city, and urban as external to ecology—no longer exist.

The third main perspective in Projective Ecologies is that ecology holds projective potential for the design disciplines. Reed and Lister explain that, “as ecologists are limited by their conceptual models of ecosystems rarely able to be tested on ecosystems themselves, the term projective thus embraces the creative and speculative ambitions of representation.” Reed and Lister model a speculative and creative approach with the very structure of their book, layering essays, drawings, and other graphics in an effort to bring new connections and new ideas to light. Chris Hight explains a projective ecological program of design as less about organizing matter or even catalyzing processes, as much as it is about researching the critical junctions and “pressure points” of systems. Projective Ecologies proposes a synthetic understanding of ecology as a medium of thought, exchange, and representation for design.

M.DesvignePaysagistes
Michel Desvigne Paysagistes. Thirty-Year Planting Development. Thomas Plant, Guyancourt, France. 1989.

While Projective Ecologies raises many questions about the future of ecology and urbanism, it left me asking one critical question: “What is next in the lineage of the project?” We can surely anticipate similar collections of essays and drawings from ecological thinkers. But how does ecology as a medium of thought, exchange, and representation translate to the messy realities of our cities? How does it translate to practice more broadly? How do mid-career practitioners like myself “catch up,” so to speak, with advancements in the ecological paradigm shift since we were in landscape architecture school? How do we become familiar with the realities of a hybridized world shaped by cultural intention and natural process?

Jane Wolff asks a question in her essay, “Cultural Landscapes and Dynamic Ecologies: Lessons from New Orleans,” that is applicable across hybrid landscapes: “What can be done to address the tension between what we know and what we do? With enough public investment, the technical dilemmas posed by New Orleans and southern Louisiana could be addressed successfully. The most significant obstacles to progress are cultural. The need for public literacy about New Orleans’s hybrid ecology suggests a new role for landscape and urban designers, who have the skills to mobilize, represent, and synthesize information about current conditions and more resilient alternatives.”

Perhaps attaining more widespread ecological literacy should be the first goal in breaking down the “nature versus culture” and “ideas versus practice” dichotomies plaguing landscape architecture. As practitioners, taking responsibility for our own knowledge will allow us to better use our skills and creatively mobilize, represent, and synthesize information for the public. These goals may not be practical within the dominant model of practice where methods are monetized, outputs are commoditized, and the march of ecological time is suspended to create landscapes with instant appeal. But the world depends on us to learn from ecology and create hybrid forms of ideas and practice that enable us to better understand the ecosystems and human populations we impact through the landscapes we shape. Offering up the insight that we may not be making the most of a diverse and complex concept of ecology, is, perhaps, the greatest success of Projective Ecologies.  

Anne Trumble
Los Angeles

On The Nature of Cities


Knowledge Systems for Urban Renewal

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“Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ” — Leo Tolstoy

Knowledge production can be elitist and exclusionary, with important voices omitted. Further, the knowledge produced by current knowledge systems is often disconnected from action. We need to diversify the kinds of knowledge available to support NBS.
 We know that our cities need to look and function differently. There is a wealth of scientific evidence showing that urbanisation has been, and continues to be, a global driver of habitat loss and ecological transformation, but that cities can also be places of rich biodiversity. Nature-based solutions are needed for urban resilience, human health, and environmental protection, as has been highlighted many times on this blog (e.g. here and here). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of local green space to human well-being and has opened opportunities for new ways of connecting with and stewarding urban nature.

Here in Nottingham, as in many cities around the world, the pandemic has dealt an enormous blow to the local economy, in addition to the tragic human health toll and social disruption caused by restrictions on social mobility. Yet, in the midst of this crisis, opportunities for change have emerged. The most striking is the Broadmarsh site in the centre of Nottingham. Plans had been in place to redevelop the prominent shopping centre, with the previous building already demolished. However, partway through the redevelopment process, the economic impacts of the pandemic drove the company into administration, opening up an opportunity for the city to reimagine a renewed and ecologically-sensitive urban centre. Creative ideas have emerged such as the site being transformed into an inner wildlife sanctuary incorporating woodlands, wetlands, and grasslands, or a new ‘green quarter’ focussed on sustainability, urban agriculture, and eco-housing.

A concept imagination of a new greenspace in the centre of Nottingham. Credit: Influence Architects and Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust

The Broadmarsh site is just one of many examples of opportunities for ecologically-sensitive urban transformation. In seeking to operationalise this change, the topic of knowledge comes to the fore. The quote by Tolstoy above suggests that science is unable to provide knowledge of what a good life (or city) looks like, or how we can create one. Certainly this is true of traditional, explanatory science grounded in reductionism and experimental approaches that seek to control complexity. However, in recent years, new forms of “post-normal” science have emerged that embrace system uncertainties, ethical complexities, and value-laden decision contexts – characteristics that define urban systems, and urban science. So what kind of science is required to direct us to transformative, regenerative urban solutions? What kind(s) of knowledge is (are) needed? Who contributes to this knowledge? How will necessary knowledge be produced? As a city that is home to two large universities, how can these institutions contribute to the kind of knowledge needed for a sustainable and resilient Nottingham? These questions lead to a bigger question for many of the readers of The Nature of Cities: with many of us working to generate and apply knowledge, are our knowledge systems failing us? TNOC is a rare home for transdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration yet, arguably at a global scale, our knowledge is not having the necessary impact as urban trends in terms of habitat loss, energy use, and resource consumption continue to show.

The question of how formalised knowledge systems, such as universities, research institutes, and educational institutions can contribute to ecologically flourishing futures was explored in the recent paper by Fazey et al. (2020) “Transforming knowledge systems for life on Earth: Visions of future systems and how to get there”, published in Energy Research and Social Science. The article documents insights from a participatory research methodology that elicited responses from 340 participants from diverse disciplinary backgrounds at the “Transformations to Sustainability” conference in Dundee, 2017. The Three Horizons Practice was used to gather participant understandings of (1) the challenges of current knowledge systems; (2) what future, more effective systems might look like; and (3) the domains of policy and practice needed to help facilitate shifts from the current to the future desired knowledge systems. A summary of the results is outlined below.

A summary of the key characteristics of current and envisioned knowledge systems, as reported in Fazey et al. (2020).

The current knowledge system was understood to be fragmented and compartmentalised. Legitimate forms of knowledge are neglected: there is often an emphasis on positivist epistemologies with little attention to ethics and aesthetics (knowledge of what is right and beautiful). Knowledge production can be elitist and exclusionary, with important voices missing such as marginalised socio-economic groups including the poor, young, women, and non-white cultures and ethnicities. Further, the knowledge produced by current knowledge systems is often disconnected from action, with academia specialising in precisely assessing problems rather than learning how to implement solutions.

In contrast, the knowledge systems desired by conference participants that can support regenerative futures are characterised by collaboration rather than competition, and an openness to different ways of knowing including intuitive, experiential, and traditional knowledge. The world is viewed as interconnected and inter-related, with an openness to the ‘re-enchantment’ of the mysteries around us. Future knowledge systems need to be focussed on solutions, and these solutions should be empathetic to the needs, desires, and perspectives of the diverse communities impacted via direct involvement in knowledge production. Citizens should play an important role in setting agendas, generating knowledge, and making decisions. Yet solutions must also have a transformational dimension, going beyond incremental change so as to address the scale of the climate and nature crises facing the planet. This kind of knowledge system reflects Aristotle’s idea of phronesis (or practical wisdom), which recognises that knowledge, action, and concern for human (ecological) flourishing are inseparable. Such a system is enabled by cultures of freedom and trust, leading to enhanced creativity, and allowing researchers and other actors to bring their ‘full selves’ to the process of research.

Clearly, this description of a future knowledge system is a long way from what many experience in cities around the world, yet it finds resonance with many of the examples of co-production of knowledge highlighted in The Nature of Cities. The researchers identified a number of domains for policy and action that can help to bring about this change. First, windows of opportunity need to be identified. These can be technological, socio-economic, environmental, or other forms of change. Notwithstanding the huge social, economic, and health costs, the current pandemic offers an enormous opportunity to think differently about how universities, in particular, can help renew and regenerate cities and open up knowledge and learning to a wider citizenry. Second, there is a need to experiment with new ways of creating and implementing knowledge, with research funding bodies having an especially important role to play in this. Third, promising innovations need to be protected and amplified. Fourth, new support and organisations are needed to allow new ways of producing knowledge to become embedded in the context of established structures, routines, and dominant interests. Finally, in many cases, for transformations to knowledge systems to occur, transformations to other accompanying systems (e.g., media, education, finance) are also necessary, as these shape prevailing narratives and norms around legitimate and valued knowledge.

Returning to Nottingham, there is now a valuable opportunity to begin to work towards this new vision of a knowledge system oriented towards the ecological renewal of the city. Already, the local authority has committed to being carbon neutral by 2028. The City’s Carbon Neutral Action Plan has incorporated an emphasis on scaling up biodiverse green and blue infrastructure to enhance resilience and adaptation to flooding and other climate change impacts. Further, the two universities (University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University) have recently signed a Civic Agreement with commitments to collaborative working, environmental sustainability, and unlocking the universities to enable stronger partnerships among different actors in the city.

There are already promising signs of action. For example, the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham are aligning c.1000 architecture, planning, and engineering student projects to sites across Nottingham to find solutions to challenges and opportunities related to the carbon neutral 2028 target and the pandemic recovery. Similarly, students on the MSc in Environmental Leadership & Management programme are connecting with local organisations such as the Environment Agency and Nottingham City Council to find solutions to local environmental challenges. Further, research on blue-green infrastructure is being conducted in partnership between planners, decision-makers, and university researchers to increase resilience to flood risk while enhancing biodiversity and open space provision. Now is the time to scale up these activities and embed a new collaborative, solutions-oriented knowledge system in Nottingham.

An example of a proposed blue-green solution to flood resilience in Nottingham. Credit: Nottingham City Council – Blue Green Infrastructure.

While the scale of change outlined in Fazey et al. (2020) may seem overwhelming, there are signs of promise from many cities highlighted on TNOC. Let’s continue to identify and enhance opportunities “for future systems to go beyond creating knowledge about the world to rapidly creating the wisdom about how to act appropriately within it.” (Fazey et al., 2020: 15).

Christopher Ives
Nottingham

On The Nature of Cities

Kuwait Transformed: Urban and Social Change from Pre- to Post-Oil Kuwait

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A review of Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life, 1st Edition. by Farah Al-Nakib. 2016. 296 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0804798525 / ISBN-10: 0804798524. Stanford University Press. Buy the book

A thought-provoking mixture of urban history and urban sociology, Al-Nakib’s book sheds a much-needed spotlight on urban planning practices in 20th century Kuwait and their implications on the everyday life of its residents.

For anyone interested in understanding urban development in the Arabian Gulf (“Gulf Urbanism”), Farah Al-Nakib’s Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (2016) is a must-read. Benefitting from both a thorough academic historical research approach and a deep personal understanding of local context and culture, Al-Nakib’s multi-layered book provides a sharp, nuanced and grounded critique of urban and social change in twentieth century Kuwait, focusing on the link between the two.

The book begins with a chilling snap shot of present urban life in Kuwait: four fatal criminal incidents (2012 – 2013) which shocked the general public because they were undertaken in the open, “in the midst of hundreds of witnesses who chose not to intervene” (p. 2). Al-Nakib argues in the remainder of the book that the transformation of urban areas in Kuwait has led to a “highly segregated and factional society” where such incidents are to be expected. In this piece, I hope to draw out the book’s main themes and arguments which are applicable not only to Kuwait but also to the wider region, and perhaps also to other fast-developing cities around the world.

Kuwait City, 2012. Photo: ©Khaleel Haidar

A critique of Modernist Planning

Al-Nakib is unequivocal in her criticism of modernist city planning: the “top-down”, wholesale master planning promoted by planners like Le Corbusier in the decades post World War I. In Kuwait, this movement began in 1951 with the commissioning of foreign planning experts to develop a masterplan with the stated objective of transforming pre-oil Kuwait town into the most socially progressive city in the Middle East. The relative wealth and power of the Kuwaiti government and society’s open and unquestioning attitude to change in the early post-oil era rendered Kuwait an ideal setting for the implementation of centralized planning projects.

Kuwait Town, circa 1950. Photo: ©David Foster

The result of these projects was the obliteration of the pre-oil urban character and tangible history of Kuwait and consequently a complete change of its society’s lifestyle and behaviors. People moved from living in traditional houses in close-knit neighborhoods to living in sprawling, single-family villa developments with limited opportunities for community interaction. Furthermore, the related state-led process of land acquisition and redevelopment was not implemented transparently, leading to significant inequalities in wealth distribution and therefore to social tensions. As such, while the modernist masterplans advocated for urban change as a tool for progressive social change, the absence of community involvement and influence in their development and implementation led to the destruction of both Kuwait’s physical character and social fabric.

Cosmopolitan urbanity and identity

Kuwait Town, 1960. Photo: ©Brett Jordan

Al-Nakib vividly depicts the economic, social, and political interactions occurring in the port, the suq (market), the mixed-class firjan (neighborhoods), and the homes of pre-oil Kuwait town. Urban life in that era is described as characterized by diversity of place and people, simultaneity of activities in spaces, spontaneity, engagement with difference, and a sense of need which strengthened social relatedness. This changed with the advent of oil, with affluence removing the sense of need and allowing community members to exist in physical and social isolation from one another. In other words, the small maritime town of Kuwait possessed more of the aspects of cosmopolitan urbanity than the post-oil, suburban city of Kuwait with its physically and socially segregated spaces. This is similar to Saskia Sassen’s critique of mega development projects in cities, which raise density but destroy the finer grain of streets and squares effectively de-urbanising city neighbourhoods.

The success of the port economy in Kuwait town was dependent on the friendly and accepting nature of its society. The town attracted immigrants from various ethnic and religious backgrounds, to the extent that its cultural identity was defined by the hybrid of languages, customs, and tastes harmoniously coexisting. As highlighted by Al-Nakib, this stands in glaring contrast to ethnically and spatially segregated Kuwait of today and to the post-oil identity narrative in the region’s cities which is centered around a singular national identity.

“Islamic city” design principles

Al-Nakib’s historical narrative of pre-oil Kuwait town highlights aspects of traditional city planning and architecture in the region: inward-oriented courtyard houses, gender-segregated spaces, the importance of privacy in both street and building design. However, she cautions from over-simplifying traditional planning principles and basing them solely on the concept of gender separation or more specifically female containment. Firstly, she points to the reality of women’s lives whereby there is evidence of them having access to the larger society, beyond female-only spaces. Second, she highlights other context-specific influences on planning including climate and building materials.

Public and private spaces

Many of Al-Nakib’s most interesting insights relate to the delineation of city spaces on the spectrum between public and private use, in both pre-and post-oil Kuwait. Within a farij (neighbourhood), spaces between houses such as sikak (narrow pedestrianized streets) and barahas (small squares) were treated as “semi-private spaces” used only by the particular farij’s residents as spaces for children to play and people (including women) to interact more openly, compared to other public spaces outside the farij. Similarly, spaces within private courtyard houses functioned as “semi-public” spaces facilitating access between neighbors.

Another significant space for Kuwaiti society was the diwaniyya (space within a home, primarily utilized by males and accessible from the main street). While physically attached to private homes, visitors were not turned away from a diwanniya and thus this space straddled the public/private divide and acted as meeting space for public social, business and political discussions in the farij. As Al-Nakib notes, the “…integration of multiple functions and daily activities in the town’s various morphological sectors created a vibrant everyday life…” (pp 68-69).

Today’s single-family, detached homes and car-centric neighborhoods in Kuwait bear no resemblance to the traditional neighborhood and homes described above. To the contrary, the new suburban areas provide almost no quality public or semi-public spaces to encourage social interaction.

Al-Nakib also comments on today’s malls: the region’s “quintessential urban form”. Privatized and often exclusionary to some income and social classes, malls are the primary public spaces in Gulf cities today, highlighting the lack of diversity in spaces and experiences.

Restoring “the right to the city”

The book concludes with a call for a restored “right to the city” and to public involvement in planning. Al-Nakib cites the example of The Secret Garden, a community project started by a diverse group in order to upgrade an existing public space and facilitate its use by various segments of society, promoting community ownership and diversity. Since the publication of the book, The Secret Garden is sadly reported to have been destroyed; however, this project may still serve as the starting point for a different kind of transformation.

Conclusion

A thought-provoking mixture of urban history and urban sociology, Al-Nakib’s book sheds a much-needed spotlight on urban planning practices in 20th century Kuwait and their implications on the everyday life of its residents. Al-Nakib explores these themes without romanticizing the past and without calling for the reversal of the cycle of development. What she argues for is the importance of place and people-sensitive urban development, one which respects the past and seeks to encourage diverse and dignified social interaction.

These principles are at risk in times of radical transformation (in Kuwait’s case from pre to post-oil), when change is rapid and there is limited professional reflection and assessment or community participation and feedback. It is particularly during these times when investment must be made in understanding the existing economic, social and cultural fabric of the city and the intricate interdependencies with physical space and urban form.  In addition, a critical assessment of the short and long-term impacts of transformation on the spaces and interactions in the city must be encouraged. This will require an open dialogue involving government entities, planning and design professionals and academics, the local business community, local community groups and the general public.

Huda Shaka
Dubai

On The Nature of Cities

Banner image: Kuwait City, 2012. ©Khaleel Haidar

To buy the book, click on the image below. Some of the proceeds return to TNOC. 

An aerial view of a river with an island and a boat

L’approche conceptuelle du Plan directeur de conservation, d’aménagement et de développement du parc Jean-Drapeau
The Conceptual Approach of the Parc Jean-Drapeau’s Conservation, Planning, and Master Plan

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En tant que paysage patrimonial avec de nombreuses années d’histoire, il semblait fondamental d’intégrer la fragmentation du Parc Jean-Drapeau plutôt que d’essayer de l’aplanir. L’idée était de reconnaître que le parc est un produit évolutif de plusieurs siècles, récupérant le sens perdu et affirmant l’identité.

Retrouver le sens perdu et affirmer l’identité du parc

Les parcs sont aujourd’hui une collection éclectique de strates de paysages aménagés et construits issus de multiples époques[1]. Autant pour ceux qui réalisent des parcs que ceux qui les conçoivent, il est à propos de se questionner sur la conciliation entre d’une part révéler et célébrer l’historicité des parcs et leurs composantes et d’autre part appliquer des approches actualisées de transformation pour en faire des parcs qui répondent aux besoins du XXIe siècle. Comment considérer les patrimoines qu’ils contiennent et représentent tout en laissant place à la production de nouvelles formes contemporaines?

An aerial view of a river with an island and a boat
La célébration du grand parc insulaire grâce à la consolidation de ses rives et du cœur des îles Sainte-Hélène et Notre-Dame. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)

Est-ce qu’une cohabitation des fonctions, des styles et des traces est possible et souhaitable? Comment répondre aux éléments de rupture et de désuétude tout en assurant une continuité identitaire du lieu? Quelles formes devraient prendre les parcs du futur? Ces questions ont informé l’approche conceptuelle du Plan directeur de conservation, d’aménagement et de développement du parc Jean-Drapeau 2020-2030 réalisé et dirigé par NIPpaysage, avec Réal Paul, architectes, ATOMIC3 et Biodiversité conseil.

A graphic of trees in a line leading to a boat
La mise en en valeur des espaces et des écosystèmes pour assurer un continuum d’expériences paysagères. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)

Dans les dernières décennies, l’usage public du parc Jean-Drapeau a vécu une crise. Un éloignement et une distanciation se sont opérés avec les citoyens au point de faire du Parc un « landscape of estrangement » pour reprendre le concept de James Corner. Celui-ci critiquait la technologie et le capitalisme qui contribuaient à nous éloigner de la valeur poétique de l’architecture de paysage et prônait pour une conciliation de l’histoire et du sens du lieu avec les circonstances contemporaines. «Many fail to even appreciate the role that landscape architecture plays in the constitution and embodiement of culture, forgetful of the designed landscape’s symbolic and revelatory powers, especially with regard to collective memory, cultural orientation, and continuity[2]». Il convenait donc, à travers le processus de conception paysagère, d’œuvrer à positionner clairement l’identité du Parc pour lui redonner une cohérence physique, refléter ses valeurs culturelles et le réinscrire dans les pratiques citoyennes. Après avoir placé la conservation comme l’une des principales orientations stratégiques, sept principes d’aménagement ont été élaborés : positionner le Parc à l’échelle métropolitaine et régionale, célébrer le caractère insulaire du Parc, mettre en valeur le riche héritage patrimonial, mettre en valeur les paysages aquatiques et leurs écosystèmes, favoriser la diversité et la connectivité des écosystèmes, assurer le continuum d’expériences paysagères du Parc et miser sur les expériences de mobilité pour découvrir le Parc. En découla le concept d’aménagement qui répond directement à cette perte de sens et de contact, soit : «La célébration du grand parc insulaire grâce à la consolidation de ses rives et du cœur des îles Sainte-Hélène et Notre-Dame».

Three trail maps
Les trois grands gestes d’aménagement : la liaison des cœurs des deux îles, la promenade riveraine, les attaches entre les rives et les cœurs. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)

Le parc et le paysage comme destination paysagère et sociale

À la manière des parcs de Frederick Law Olmsted, la volonté partagée était de faire du paysage insulaire réinventé du parc Jean-Drapeau une destination en soi[3]. Citons en exemple Central Park, Millenium Park ou Governor’s Island où la qualité de l’aménagement a été, dès l’étape de planification, prévue pour être une attraction locale et touristique de premier plan. Le plan d’aménagement du parc Jean-Drapeau vise aussi à créer du vide, à laisser s’exprimer le design du Parc dans toute sa créativité. Comme le soulignait Bernard Huet : «We are afraid of emptiness. Afraid of void, of an empty, beautiful space[4]». L’importance de cesser de surcharger et de remplir l’espace d’installations temporaires de tout genre (panneaux de signalisation, barrières, clôtures, mobilier, arrangements floraux, plateformes, etc.) de même que de viser l’optimisation des paysages a largement fait partie des réflexions pour valoriser le site patrimonial, célébrer les legs en architecture de paysage et surtout contribuer à l’émergence de milieux habités. Comme l’écrivait Kate Orff dans The New Landscape Declaration : «Where the spaces can be reimagined as productive landscapes that are not only pastoral settings but also active generators of social life[5]».

Clare Cooper Marcus écrivait que: «Two frequently cited reasons for park use are: a desire to be in a natural setting and a need for human contact[6]», un constat toujours d’actualité aujourd’hui qui a informé tout le processus créatif. Celui-ci s’est également appuyé sur les «guidelines», «design recommandations» et «users’ needs ” élaborés par plusieurs auteurs au fil des ans, dont les critères de qualité pour les espaces fréquentés par les piétons de Jan Gehl, (2012), qui ont fait ressortir les éléments qui font le succès des espaces publics (successful features) (notamment Whyte, 1980[7], Cooper Marcus et Francis, 1990[8], Tate et Eaton, 2015[9]). La réflexion a été particulièrement soucieuse de répondre aux besoins et aux habitudes de tous les usagers et des communautés culturelles par un engagement envers la diversité. Divers auteurs ont en effet étudié les différences culturelles dans les attitudes, comportements et occupations des parcs; certains groupes culturels préférant davantage des rassemblements autour de repas ou une récréation passive et d’autres préférant le mouvement et la récréation active à titre d’exemple[10].

Ces connaissances issues de recherches scientifiques et d’observations terrain ont été sérieusement considérées afin de s’assurer d’une justice sociale dans l’accessibilité au parc (égalité, équité, inclusion). Dans The Politics of Parks Design, Cranz écrivait que le potentiel des parcs à façonner et à refléter les valeurs sociales n’était pas encore pleinement apprécié ou compris et qu’un contrôle social a de tout temps limité l’accès au parc [11], un constat appuyé par Beardsley à travers la notion «d’érosion[12]». Cette lecture demeure plus que jamais valable et comprise dans la planification et la conception. Les aménagements proposent ainsi à la fois des opportunités de rencontres, de contact social et de rapprochement avec la nature, une complémentarité entre les espaces verts et urbains, une variété d’espaces et de types de paysages ouverts et fermés qui permet des activités dynamiques et statiques, récréatives et passives. À l’instar des écrits de Jean-Marc Besse[13], le plan d’aménagement considère le paysage avant tout comme une expérience, une manière d’être, d’y être impliqué pratiquement, c’est-à-dire de l’habiter. Les propositions visent moins à contempler qu’à vivre et sentir le paysage. La promenade riveraine de 15 km permettant de découvrir les paysages des rives des deux îles ainsi que les panoramas sur le fleuve Saint-Laurent et même au-delà est le premier geste d’aménagement clé pour renforcer l’identité du Parc et en faire une destination. Cela permet de réhabiliter la passerelle du Cosmos et le pont de l’Expo-Express et d’offrir un contact direct avec l’eau tout en bonifiant l’intérêt écologique du pourtour des îles.

A graphic of trees and bushes next to text
La consolidation des forêts à trois strates permet une variété d’espaces et de types de paysages ouverts et fermés pour des activités dynamiques et statiques, récréatives et passives. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)
A picture sidewalk trailing through a field of trees with people walking along it
La création d’un pré-fleuri ponctué d’œuvres d’art redonne la place à la nature au cœur du mont Boullé. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)
An aerial view of a shore and a body of water
La reconfiguration de la berge, par l’adoucissement de son profil, permet la création d’une promenade riveraine et un nouveau rapport au fleuve Saint-Laurent. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau. (2019). Projet d’idéation de réaménagement du stationnement P8 en promenade verte riveraine. Société du parc Jean-Drapeau.
A picture of people sitting at tables, on the grass, and benches in a park
La promenade riveraine et un emmarchement à la Place des Nations permettent de découvrir les paysages des rives ainsi que les panoramas sur le fleuve. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)

Une matrice verte comme structure de connectivité

En s’inspirant de la triade Bridging, Mediating, Reconciling d’Elizabeth Meyer[14], la stratégie d’aménagement voulait reconnecter les espaces, faire une médiation des vocations et se réconcilier avec le lieu. Influencée par l’approche «Process-based» d’Anita Berrizbeita[15], la conception s’est appuyée sur les formes existantes, le sens du lieu et l’accumulation des histoires pour révéler la trajectoire du Parc, augmenter la lisibilité des forces et faire émerger une matrice qui répond à la multiplicité, la flexibilité et la temporalité nécessaires à la vie d’un grand parc urbain. Aux qualités visuelles et spatiales recherchées s’ajoutent des notions de préservation, de performance, de connectivité et de fonctions écologiques. Gilles Clément posait la question : «Peut-on élever le non-aménagement, et parfois le désaménagement, à hauteur de projet?[16]» Sans aller jusqu’à proposer une pédagogie de l’herbe, le plan d’aménagement laisse une grande place à la protection des paysages aménagés et naturels et au design écologique adaptatif, en plantant massivement et en restreignant l’accès à plusieurs secteurs du parc. La liaison des cœurs des deux îles est le deuxième geste d’aménagement clé à travers la création d’un corridor écologique entre la micocoulaie du mont Boullé et les zones ripariennes de l’île Notre-Dame via un pont vert au-dessus du chenal Le Moyne. Cela permet d’assurer une connectivité des écosystèmes au sein du Parc et d’enrichir ces noyaux de biodiversité, où la faune et la flore sont particulièrement abondantes[17].

Three trail maps
La matrice écologique : le corridor écologique entre les cœurs des deux îles, la bonification de l’intérêt écologique du pourtour des îles et l’aménagement de liens entres les rives et l’intérieur des îles. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)
A graphic of a footbridge with trees and people standing on top of it
L’axe véhiculaire de la passerelle du Cosmos transformé en pont vert et en promenade urbaine. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)
A picture of a boardwalk with people standing, sitting, and milling about
Creation of an ecological corridor between the Mont Boullé wetland and the riparian areas of Île Notre-Dame by widening the Cosmos footbridge and providing access for wildlife. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).

Un paysage hérité stratifié

Bernard Huet disait qu’un parc avait une continuité, une longue histoire[18], alors que Peter Latz affirmait qu’un parc n’était jamais complété, mais devait plutôt être considéré comme un processus continuel[19]. Cette vision d’agrégation qui a émergé dans les années 1990 se matérialise notamment dans les approches et les projets d’Adrian Geuze et de Norfried Pohl qui misaient sur les qualités intrinsèques du lieu comme inspiration conceptuelle. «This is one of the reasons why it is necessary to add different layers over a period of time in order to evolve into a ’public park of stature’; ‘because the already existing and intented qualities must be understood and not forgotten’ [20]». En tant que paysage patrimonial ayant eu plusieurs phases de planification et couches d’occupation, il est apparu fondamental de tirer profit de la fragmentation du parc Jean-Drapeau plutôt que d’y voir qu’amalgame de choses disparates qu’il convient de lisser. L’idée n’était pas de créer un nouveau grand geste monumental, mais de faire état que le parc est un produit évolutif depuis plusieurs siècles. La prise en compte des traces, la révélation des couches et la superposition de trames ont été les bases de la réflexion. Les objectifs étaient d’inviter le public à se réapproprier le parc, de le réinscrire dans la mémoire collective et d’assurer une continuité tout en ajoutant une nouvelle structure et organisation spatiale. Le plan d’aménagement propose ainsi une matrice pour rendre manifeste l’existant et conjuguer différentes «associations de temps»[21].

Dans la considération de la valeur patrimoniale du Parc et dans la logique de la «conservation inventive» de Pierre Donadieu[22], l’aménagement de l’espace a privilégié à la fois la conservation d’éléments concrets du paysage et la création de formes innovantes correspondant à de nouvelles ou à d’anciennes fonctions du territoire. Le concept d’aménagement s’est attardé à enrichir la tridimensionnalité du paysage, ce que Jacques Simon nommait des «rapports d’alliances et d’autonomies de trois étages distincts de l’organisation de l’espace[23]». C’est dans ce contexte que le troisième geste d’aménagement clé a été imaginé, celui des attaches entre les rives et les cœurs. Ce geste est intimement lié à l’expérience de la promenade riveraine ainsi qu’à celle des cœurs historiques et écologiques du Parc. Les attaches comprennent une déclinaison d’objets paysagers (passerelles, quais, belvédères) qui permettent de décloisonner et de relier les paysages enclavés tout en offrant une expérience unique «à plusieurs niveaux» qui révèle et expose l’identité du Parc. Cette série de liens ponctuels et continus répartis sur les deux îles offre un nouveau regard sur des trésors oubliés et sur les paysages du fleuve tout en créant de nouveaux dialogues entre les ensembles autrefois isolés. Les passerelles sont inspirées des structures aériennes du minirail de l’Expo 67, à l’époque constituées de pilotis en forme de V inversé reliés par une longue poutre longitudinale. Leur matérialité dialoguera avec la signature contemporaine du paddock et des futurs bâtiments de parc, contribuant ainsi à l’émergence d’une identité architecturale ancrée dans l’histoire et l’imaginaire du lieu.

A picture of people standing on snowy concrete overlooking a frozen river
Les attaches entre les rives et les cœurs permettent de décloisonner et de relier les paysages enclavés tout en offrant une expérience unique « à plusieurs niveaux » qui révèle et expose l’identité du Parc. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)
A picture of a bridge with people walking on it with people in kayaks in the water underneath
Les passerelles sont inspirées des structures aériennes du minirail de l’Expo 67, à l’époque constituées de pilotis en forme de V inversé reliés par une longue poutre longitudinale. Photo: NIPPaysage et parc Jean-Drapeau (2020)

Le ménagement d’un «parc public d’envergure»

Certes, de grands projets transformeront l’image, la mobilité et l’expérience du parc Jean-Drapeau, mais ils le seront principalement sur des terrains sous-exploités et des infrastructures existantes n’incarnant pas les valeurs du Parc. Nous ne sommes plus à l’heure de l’invention d’un nouveau paysage, mais à celle de prendre soin de notre territoire, de le lire, de le repenser et de le valoriser. Comme l’exprimait si bien Thierry Paquot : «Il faut inventer un ménagement des gens, des lieux et des choses[24]». Le parc Jean-Drapeau n’est pas et ne sera pas une esthétique unifiée et finale, mais un amalgame cohérent de formes héritées qui s’adapteront à de nouvelles préoccupations environnementales et pratiques sociales. C’est là que résidera l’innovation et que se concrétisera l’identité retrouvée et rehaussée du parc Jean-Drapeau. C’est en privilégiant les superpositions, les connexions et les médiations qu’aura lieu la réémergence d’un grand parc urbain aspirant à devenir un «parc public d’envergure».

Jonathan Cha
Montréal

On The Nature of Cities

Références

[1] Cet article est une version plus détaillée de l’article : Jonathan Cha (2022), « Superpositions, connexions et méditations, la réémergence d’un grand parc urbain », p. 35-37, Paysages, no-17.

[2] James Corner (1991), « Theory in Crisis » in Simon Swaffield, Theory in Landscape Architecture, Philadelphie, University of Pennsylania Press, p. 20-21.

[3] Alexander Garvin (2011), « Park development », in Public Parks. The key to livable communities, New York et Londres, W. W. Norton & Company, p. 58.

[4] Bernard Huet (1995) [1993] « Park design and continuity », in Martin Knuijt, Hans Ophuis, Peter van Saane et David Louwerse, Modern Park Design. Recent Trends, Bussum, Thoth Publishers, p. 21.

[5] Kate Orff (2016), « Urban Ecology as activism », in Landscape Architectural Foundation, New Landscape Declaration, Los Angeles, Rare Bird Booksp, p. 77-79.

[6] Clare Cooper Marcus et Carolyn Francis (1990), People Places. Design guidelines for Urban Open Space, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, p. 71.

[7] William H. Whyte (1980), The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Washington, The Conservation Foundation, 125 p.

[8] Clare Cooper Marcus et Carolyn Francis (1990), People Places. Design Guidelines for Urban Open Space, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 295 p.

[9] Alan Tate et Marcella Eaton (2015), Great City Parks, New York, Routledge, 332 p.

[10] Halil Özgüner (2011), “Cultural Differences in Attitudes towards Urban Parks and Green Spaces”, Landscape Research, Vol. 36, no-5, p. 599-620.

[11] Galen Cranz (1982), The Politics of Public Parks. A History of Urban Parks in America, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 347 p.

[12] John Beardsley (2007), « Conflict and Erosion : The Contemporary Public Life of Large Parks » in Julia Czerniak et James Corner, Large Parks, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, p. 199-213.

[13] Jean-Marc Besse (200), “Le paysage et les discours contemporains: Prolégomènes” in J.-B. Brisson (dir.), Le jardinier, l’artiste et l’ingénieur, Paris, Les Éditions de l’Imprimeur, p. 71-89.

[14] Elizabeth Meyer, « Uncertain Parks : Disturbed Sites, Citizens, and Risk Society”, in Czerniak et Hargreaves, op.cit. : 59-85.

[15] Anita Berrizbeitia, « Re-placing Process » in Czerniak et Hargreaves, op.cit. : 175-197.

[16] Gilles Clément (2006), Où est l’herbe?, Arles, Actes Sud, 159 p.

[17] Pour plus de détails, voir Jonathan Cha (2021), « La réinvention du parc Jean-Drapeau : un nouveau parc plus accessible, diversifié, public, et vert » , The Nature of Cities, 18 octobre : https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2021/10/18/la-reinvention-du-parc-jean-drapeau-un-nouveau-parc-plus-accessible-diversifie-public-et-vert/.

[18] Knuijt, Ophuis, van Saane et Louwerse (1995) [1993], « Time, space and landscape », op.cit. : 83.

[19] Knuijt, Ophuis, van Saane et Louwerse (1995) [1993], « A park est un parc is een park ist ein Park », op.cit : 30.

[20] Knuijt, Ophuis, van Saane et Louwerse (1995) [1993], « Continous change or changing continuity », op.cit. : 34.

[21] Knuijt, Ophuis, van Saane et Louwerse (1995) [1993], « Time, space and landscape », op.cit. : 84.

[22] Pierre Donadieu (1994), « Pour une conservation inventive des paysages » in Augustin Berque et al, Cinq proposition pour une théorie du paysage, Paris, Éditions Champ Vallon, p. 52-81.

[23] Des surfaces (0 à 2 mètres) à l’organisation topographique et végétale (2 à 8 mètres) jusqu’au massif forestier (8 à 20 mètres) Jacques Simon (1980), Les parcs actuels, (Ser. Aménagement des espaces extérieurs, no-13). Espaces ouverts, 127 p.

[24] « Thierry Paquot, « Il faut inventer un ménagement des gens, des lieux et des choses ». Entrevue avec Thierry Paquot, Philosophie magazine, 19 mars 2014.

* * *

The Conceptual Approach of the Parc Jean-Drapeau Conservation, Planning, and Development Master Plan 2020-2030

As a heritage landscape with many years of history, it seemed fundamental to incorporate the fragmentation of Parc Jean-Drapeau rather than trying to smooth it out. The idea was to acknowledge that the park is an evolving product of several centuries, recovering lost meaning and affirming identity.

Today’s parks are an eclectic collection of layers of landscapes built and developed from multiple eras. For both park makers and park designers, it is appropriate to question the balance between revealing and celebrating the historicity of parks and their components and applying updated approaches to transformation to make them responsive to the needs of the 21st century. How can we consider the heritage they contain and represent while leaving room for the production of new contemporary forms? Is a cohabitation of functions, styles, and traces possible and desirable? How can we respond to the elements of rupture and obsolescence while ensuring a continuity of identity for the site? What forms should the parks of the future take?

An aerial view of a river with an island and a boat
The celebration of the great island park through the consolidation of its shores and the heart of the islands of Sainte-Hélène and Notre-Dame. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).

These questions informed the conceptual approach of the Master Plan for the Conservation, Planning, and Development of Parc Jean-Drapeau 2020-2030, produced and directed by NIPpaysage, with Réal Paul, architects, ATOMIC3, and Biodiversité conseil.

A graphic of trees in a line leading to a boat
The enhancement of spaces and ecosystems to ensure a continuum of landscape experiences. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).

In recent decades, the public use of Jean Drapeau Park has been in crisis. A distancing and estrangement from citizens have occurred to the point of making the park a “landscape of estrangement” to use James Corner’s concept. Corner criticized technology and capitalism for distancing us from the poetic value of landscape architecture and advocated a reconciliation of the history and meaning of place with contemporary circumstances. “Many fail to even appreciate the role that landscape architecture plays in the constitution and embodiment of culture, forgetful of the designed landscape’s symbolic and revelatory powers, especially with regard to collective memory, cultural orientation, and continuity. It was, therefore, necessary, through the landscape design process, to clearly position the Park’s identity in order to give it physical coherence, reflect its cultural values, and reintegrate it into the practices of citizens. After identifying conservation as one of the main strategic orientations, seven planning principles were developed: positioning the Park on a metropolitan and regional scale, celebrating the Park’s island character, highlighting its rich heritage, emphasizing the aquatic landscapes and their ecosystems, promoting ecosystem diversity and connectivity, ensuring a continuum of landscape experiences in the Park, and focusing on mobility experiences as a means of exploring the Park. The concept of development that directly responds to this loss of meaning and contact is: “The celebration of the great island park through the consolidation of its shores and the heart of St. Helen’s and Notre Dame Islands.

Three trail maps
The three major development actions: linking the hearts of the two islands, the riverside promenade, and the links between the shores and the hearts. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).

The park and landscape as a landscape and social destination

In the manner of Frederick Law Olmsted’s parks, the shared desire was to make the reinvented island landscape of Jean Drapeau Park a destination in itself. Examples include Central Park, Millennium Park, and Governor’s Island, where the quality of the design was intended from the planning stage to be a major local and tourist attraction. The development plan for Parc Jean-Drapeau also aims to create emptiness, to let the Park’s design express itself in all its creativity. As Bernard Huet pointed out: “We are afraid of emptiness. Afraid of void, of an empty, beautiful space. The importance of not overloading and filling the space with temporary installations of all kinds (signs, barriers, fences, furniture, floral arrangements, platforms, etc.) as well as aiming to optimize the landscapes has been a major part of the reflections to enhance the heritage site, celebrate the legacies of landscape architecture and especially contribute to the emergence of inhabited environments. As Kate Orff wrote in The New Landscape Declaration: “Where the spaces can be reimagined as productive landscapes that are not only pastoral settings but also active generators of social life.

Clare Cooper Marcus wrote that: “Two frequently cited reasons for park use are: a desire to be in a natural setting and a need for human contact”, an observation that is still valid today and that informed the entire creative process. This process was also based on the “guidelines”, “design recommendations” and “users’ needs” developed by several authors over the years, including Jan Gehl’s quality criteria for spaces frequented by pedestrians (2012), which highlighted the elements that make public spaces successful (notably Whyte, 1980, Cooper Marcus and Francis, 1990, Tate and Eaton, 2015). The thinking has been particularly concerned with meeting the needs and habits of all users and cultural communities through a commitment to diversity. Various authors have indeed studied cultural differences in attitudes, behaviors, and occupations of parks; some cultural groups prefer more meal gatherings or passive recreation, and others prefer movement and active recreation as examples.

These insights from scientific research and field observations have been seriously considered to ensure social justice in park accessibility (equality, equity, inclusion). In The Politics of Parks Design, Cranz wrote that the potential of parks to shape and reflect social values is not yet fully appreciated or understood and that social control has historically limited access to the park, a statement supported by Beardsley through the notion of “erosion. This reading remains more valid and understood than ever in planning and design. The developments thus offer opportunities for encounters, social contact and closeness to nature, a complementarity between green and urban spaces, a variety of spaces, and types of open and closed landscapes that allow dynamic and static, recreational, and passive activities. Following the example of Jean-Marc Besse’s writings, the development plan considers the landscape above all as an experience, a way of being, of being practically involved in it, that is to say, of inhabiting it. The proposals aim less at contemplating than at living and feeling the landscape. The 15-km shoreline promenade, which will allow visitors to discover the landscapes along the shores of the two islands, as well as the panoramic views of the St. Lawrence River and beyond, is the first key development to reinforce the Park’s identity and make it a destination. This will allow for the rehabilitation of the Cosmos footbridge and the Expo-Express bridge, providing direct contact with the water while enhancing the ecological interest of the islands’ perimeter.

A graphic of trees and bushes next to text
The consolidation of the three-layered forests allows for a variety of open and closed spaces and landscape types for dynamic and static, recreational and passive activities. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).
A picture sidewalk trailing through a field of trees with people walking along it
The creation of a meadow punctuated with artworks restores the place of nature in the heart of Mount Boullé. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).
An aerial view of a shore and a body of water
The reconfiguration of the riverbank, by softening its profile, allows the creation of a riverside promenade and a new relationship with the St. Lawrence River. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2019). P8 parking lot redevelopment ideation project as a waterfront green walkway. Société du parc Jean-Drapeau.
A picture of people sitting at tables, on the grass, and benches in a park
The riverside promenade and a step at Place des Nations allow for the discovery of the shoreline landscapes as well as the views of the river. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).

A green matrix as a connectivity structure

Inspired by Elizabeth Meyer’s Bridging, Mediating, Reconciling triad, the planning strategy sought to reconnect spaces, mediate vocations, and reconcile with place. Influenced by Anita Berrizbeita’s process-based approach, the design drew on existing forms, sense of place, and accumulated histories to reveal the trajectory of the park, increase the legibility of strengths, and emerge a matrix that responds to the multiplicity, flexibility, and temporality necessary for the life of a large urban park. In addition to the visual and spatial qualities sought, there are notions of preservation, performance, connectivity, and ecological functions. Gilles Clément asked the question: “Can we raise the non-development, and sometimes the disdevelopment, to the level of a project? “Without going so far as to propose a pedagogy of grass, the development plan leaves a lot of room for the protection of developed and natural landscapes and for adaptive ecological design, by planting massively and restricting access to several areas of the park. Linking the hearts of the two islands is the second key design gesture through the creation of an ecological corridor between the Mount Boullé wetland and the riparian areas of Ile Notre-Dame via a green bridge over the Le Moyne Channel. This will ensure the connectivity of the Park’s ecosystems and enrich these biodiversity nodes, where flora and fauna are particularly abundant.

Three trail maps
The ecological matrix: the ecological corridor between the hearts of the two islands, the improvement of the ecological interest of the islands’ perimeter and the development of links between the shores and the interior of the islands. Photo: and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).
A graphic of a footbridge with trees and people standing on top of it
The vehicular axis of the Cosmos footbridge transformed into a green bridge and urban promenade.
A picture of a boardwalk with people standing, sitting, and milling about
Creation of an ecological corridor between the Mont Boullé wetland and the riparian areas of Île Notre-Dame by widening the Cosmos footbridge and providing access for wildlife. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).

A stratified inherited landscape

Bernard Huet said that a park has a continuity, a long history, while Peter Latz said that a park is never completed, but rather should be seen as a continuous process. This vision of aggregation, which emerged in the 1990s, is reflected in the approaches and projects of Adrian Geuze and Norfried Pohl, who relied on the intrinsic qualities of place as conceptual inspiration. “This is one of the reasons why it is necessary to add different layers over a period of time in order to evolve into a ‘public park of stature’; ‘because the already existing and intended qualities must be understood and not forgotten’.

As a heritage landscape that has had several planning phases and layers of occupation, it seemed fundamental to take advantage of the fragmentation of Parc Jean-Drapeau rather than seeing it as an amalgam of disparate things that should be smoothed out. The idea was not to create a new great monumental gesture but to state that the park is an evolving product for several centuries. Taking into account of traces, the revelation of layers and the superposition of frames were the bases of the reflection. The objectives were to invite the public to reappropriate the park, to reinscribe it in the collective memory, and to ensure a continuity while adding a new structure and spatial organization. The development plan thus proposes a matrix to make the existing manifest and to conjugate different “associations of time”.

In consideration of the Park’s heritage value and in the logic of Pierre Donadieu’s “inventive conservation”, the planning of the space has privileged both the conservation of concrete elements of the landscape and the creation of innovative forms corresponding to new or old functions of the territory. The concept of planning has focused on enriching the three-dimensionality of the landscape, what Jacques Simon called “relationships of alliances and autonomies of three distinct floors of the organization of space. It is in this context that the third key planning gesture was imagined, that of the ties between the banks and the hearts. This gesture is intimately linked to the experience of the riverside promenade as well as to that of the Park’s historic and ecological hearts. The links include a series of landscape objects (footbridges, quays, belvederes) that break down the barriers and connect the enclosed landscapes while offering a unique “multi-level” experience that reveals and exposes the Park’s identity. This series of punctuated and continuous links across the two islands offers a new look at forgotten treasures and river landscapes while creating new dialogues between once-isolated ensembles. The footbridges are inspired by the aerial structures of the Expo 67 minirail, which at the time consisted of inverted V-shaped pilings connected by a long longitudinal beam. Their materiality will dialogue with the contemporary signature of the paddock and future park buildings, contributing to the emergence of an architectural identity rooted in the history and imagination of the site.

A picture of people standing on snowy concrete overlooking a frozen river
The linkages between the shoreline and the core areas allow for the decompartmentalization and connection of enclosed landscapes while providing a unique “multi-level” experience that reveals and exposes the Park’s identity. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).
A picture of a bridge with people walking on it with people in kayaks in the water underneath
The walkways are inspired by the aerial structures of the Expo 67 minirail, at the time consisting of inverted V-shaped pilings connected by a long longitudinal beam. Photo: NIPPaysage and Parc Jean-Drapeau (2020).

The creation of a “major public park”

It is true that major projects will transform the image, mobility, and experience of Jean Drapeau Park, but they will be carried out mainly on underused land and existing infrastructures that do not embody the values of the Park. We are no longer at the time of the invention of a new landscape, but at the one to take care of our territory, to read it, to rethink it, and to develop it. As Thierry Paquot expressed it so well: “We must invent a way of caring for people, places and things”. Jean Drapeau Park is not and will not be a unified and final aesthetic, but a coherent amalgam of inherited forms that will adapt to new environmental concerns and social practices. This is where innovation will reside and where the new and enhanced identity of Parc Jean-Drapeau will take shape. It is by privileging superimpositions, connections, and mediations that the re-emergence of a large urban park aspiring to become a “major public park” will take place.

Jonathan Cha
Montreal

On The Nature of Cities

See Notes and References at the end of the French version above.

La réinvention du parc Jean-Drapeau : un nouveau parc plus accessible, diversifié, public, et vert

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Réinventer le parc Jean-Drapeau a été l’occasion non seulement de renouveler le développement des deux îles, mais aussi de réévaluer le rôle du parc dans la ville actuelle et future. Face à l’urgence climatique et à la crise sanitaire du COVID-19, nous devons transformer la peur en espoir, et procéder à une relance verte, sociale, solidaire, juste et équitable.

Un grand parc contemporain modèle d’adaptation et d’innovation

Le parc Jean-Drapeau, localisé en face de Montréal, sur le fleuve Saint-Laurent, fait partie de l’arrondissement de Ville-Marie et de l’archipel d’Hochelaga. Situé sur un territoire ancestral autochtone, représenté aujourd’hui par les Kanien’kehà:ka, le parc Jean-Drapeau, composé des îles Sainte-Hélène et Notre-Dame, est un des lieux les plus significatifs de l’histoire de Tio’tia:ke/Montréal, comme en fait foi son site patrimonial cité. Les Iroquoiens du Saint-Laurent, les Français et les Britanniques l’ont habité avant qu’il ne devienne le premier parc public de la ville, en 1874. Cette colline boisée nommée île Sainte-Hélène a été transformée en parc pittoresque puis agrandie artificiellement pour devenir le centre culturel du monde pendant l’Expo 67 (« Terre des Hommes »). L’île Notre-Dame a ensuite accueilli les Jeux olympiques de 1976, le circuit de Formule 1 en 1978 et les Floralies internationales en 1980. Avec la montée de l’intérêt pour les événements, un entretien déficient et un sous-financement, parmi d’autres enjeux, le parc a malheureusement connu dans la dernière décennie un important déclin de ses qualités de parc public.

Crédit : Parc Jean-Drapeau

C’est dans ce contexte que Montréal a adopté en avril 2021 son nouveau Plan directeur de conservation, d’aménagement et de développement du parc Jean-Drapeau 2020-2030, une réponse forte à l’urgence climatique et à la crise sanitaire du coronavirus. Avec le rôle significatif que joueront les parcs urbains dans l’avenir des villes, ce plan directeur arrive à point nommé. Ambitieux, audacieux, au fait des meilleures pratiques en architecture de paysage et en aménagement, il sera l’une des pièces maîtresses de la vision Montréal 2030 (plan stratégique) dont les quatre orientations sont :

  • d’accélérer la transition écologie
  • de renforcer la solidarité, l’équité et l’inclusion
  • d’amplifier la démocratie et la participation
  • de stimuler l’innovation et la créativité.

Dans les quatre dernières années, un vaste diagnostic, une importante consultation publique, de nombreux chantiers de réflexion, un travail de conception soutenu et la prise en compte des tendances mondiales ont jeté les bases du cadre stratégique et de la réinvention du parc.

La pandémie de la COVID-19 qui a frappé le monde en 2020 et en 2021 a profondément modifié notre rapport aux parcs urbains et aux espaces verts. Ceux-ci se sont révélés des lieux essentiels au bien-être physique et mental par les citoyens en étant pris d’assaut pour toutes sortes d’activités. Cette situation a largement contribué à la « renaissance des parcs publics urbains[1] », à leur grande appréciation et à une demande accrue tant d’un point de l’occupation, de la création, de l’entretien que de la programmation. C’est dans cette foulée que le parc Jean-Drapeau s’est doté d’un cadre stratégique basé sur une application transversale de développement afin d’en faire un projet de société qui soit économiquement pérenne, écologiquement durable et socialement équitable. Les stratégies d’aménagement mises de l’avant par NIPPaysage avec la collaboration de Réal Paul architectes, ATOMIC3 et Biodiversité conseil, cherchent notamment à positionner le parc à l’échelle métropolitaine et régionale, célébrer son caractère insulaire, favoriser la diversité des écosystèmes, assurer le continuum d’expériences paysagères de parc public et miser sur la mobilité pour la découverte du parc. C’est de cette manière que le parc pourra offrir des expériences paysagères rehaussées et devenir un modèle d’adaptation et d’innovation.

Crédit : Parc Jean-Drapeau

Les défis contemporains des parcs urbains

La littérature portant sur les grands parcs urbains en Occident – notamment Modern Park Design – Recent Trends (1995), Rethinking Urban Parks – Public Space and Cultural Diversity (2005), Large Parks (2007), Future Park – Imagining Tomorrow’s Urban Parks (2013), Great City Parks (2015) ainsi que le Rapport sur les parcs urbains du Canada (2019, 2020, 2021) – met en lumière les nombreux défis contemporains auxquels doivent faire face les espaces verts publics métropolitains. Le parc Jean-Drapeau ne fait pas exception à la règle. Parmi ceux-ci, notons la tenue de grands événements et leurs équipements, la valeur écologique et la résilience devant les changements climatiques, l’évolution des besoins et la mobilisation citoyenne, la valeur culturelle et l’identité collective, la grande diversité de paysages, la planification, la gouvernance et le financement, la démocratie, l’Accessibilité et la réconciliation, l’obsolescence du parc immobilier, l’utilisation accrue pendant la pandémie de COVID-19. À ces défis s’ajoutent ceux spécifiques au parc Jean-Drapeau et qui ont été adressé dans la planification : une cohabitation complexe des vocations, des rives et un rapport à l’eau sous-valorisés, un parc méconnu mais des marques fortes, un couvert végétal décousu, un patrimoine culturel et historique négligé, une vocation sportive en manque de reconnaissance, une organisation de la mobilité nuisible à l’expérience du parc, une gouvernance à renouveler et un modèle d’affaires à repenser. Le Plan directeur a pris en compte la volonté marquée des citoyens de retrouver le caractère public du parc, de favoriser l’accès au fleuve Saint-Laurent et d’en faire un environnement vert bleu qui privilégie une mobilité durable. L’idée d’un parc signature qui reflète la priorité donnée à la nature urbaine a essaimé et a alimenté tout le processus de conception du plan.

Crédit : Parc Jean-Drapeau

Des gestes forts d’aménagement pour une réappropriation citoyenne

À l’heure actuelle, seulement 9 % des utilisateurs se rendent au parc Jean-Drapeau pour jouir du parc public, notamment parce que les grands équipements y font figures de destination (le parc d’amusement La Ronde, le Casino de Montréal, les grands événements, la plage Jean-Doré). Le Plan directeur propose d’en transformer son visage, de lui donner une identité contemporaine et d’en faire un lieu reconnu et convoité. Les principaux projets célèbreront les patrimoines du parc et bonifieront la qualité des milieux et des espaces, tout en en assurant la pérennité de ses actifs construits. De nouvelles expériences de promenades, un dialogue direct avec les plans d’eau et le fleuve Saint-Laurent, une variété de paysages, des espaces accessibles pour tous, une mobilité accrue, des aménagements résilients, des éléments patrimoniaux réhabilités et des signatures visuelles distinctives sont autant d’aspects qui représenteront désormais le parc et l’ancreront dans le XXIe siècle.

La continuité de la promenade riveraine, celle débutée il y a 30 ans, est un élément phare qui poursuit les volontés de la Ville de Montréal et de la Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal de créer un parcours riverain dans le Havre et une Promenade fluviale du Grand Montréal sur la digue de la Voie maritime du Saint-Laurent. Inspirée du Seawall de Stanley Park à Vancouver, la promenade riveraine permettra de découvrir une multitude de paysages à travers la mobilité active et deviendra une destination pour les promeneurs à l’instar du chemin Olmsted du parc du Mont-Royal. Cette promenade de près de 15 km contribuera à la réappropriation du fleuve Saint-Laurent et à la création de milieux humides dédiés à la transition écologique.

Plusieurs espaces inutilisés, voués aux stationnements ou destinés uniquement à la mobilisation événementielle seront réaménagés en places publiques, renaturalisés ou verdis pour la pratique d’activités libres et la récréation légère tout en maintenant la flexibilité de leurs usages. Ceci répondra aux besoins d’accessibilité, d’inclusivité et de sociabilité des Montréalais et particulièrement des résidents des quartiers centraux. Le réaménagement permettra au parc de devenir un déterminant de l’activité physique en encourageant les déplacements actifs et la pratique sportive en toute saison. Aux activités et sports d’escalade, de baignade, de natation, de canoë-kayak, d’aviron, de bateau-dragon et de cyclisme s’ajouteront la raquette, le ski de fond, le vélo de promenade, la course à pied et la marche, par l’amélioration et l’ajout de plusieurs kilomètres de sentiers, pistes et voies réservées qui faciliteront la déambulation et le transport actif. Sachant que l’accessibilité, la sécurité, l’adaptation à la marche et les installations sportives favorisent le nombre de visites dans un parc, il est d’ores et déjà acquis que le nouveau parc Jean-Drapeau sera une nouvelle destination prisée à l’échelle métropolitaine[2].

C’est l’équivalent de plus de 30 terrains de football qui seront redonnés aux citoyens pour de nouvelles expériences. Ce verdissement créera une multitude d’espaces de rencontre et de paysages en remplacement d’aires asphaltées et de gravier. Sachant que les parcs urbains peuvent avoir une température de 10 à 15 degrés inférieurs à des secteurs résidentiels et industriels, le parc réduira par conséquent ses îlots de chaleur, offrira une variété de lieux dégagés, semi-couverts et couverts et contribuera à augmenter l’effet rafraîchissant[3] au bénéfice de la santé de la population. Rappelons que la relation est significative entre le pourcentage d’ombre dans les parcs et le nombre d’usagers qui recherchent la fraîcheur associée et la protection des UV[4].

En adoptant les meilleures pratiques en développement durable, en conservation, en aménagement et en mobilité, ce plan directeur orchestre un changement de cap significatif dans l’identité et la gestion du territoire du parc Jean-Drapeau. Par la création de corridors écologiques, la végétalisation des stationnements, l’adoption d’une gestion différenciée, la mise en valeur des habitats et des milieux naturels, la mise en place d’un plan de mobilité durable, la connexion des espaces par des parcours et des expériences paysagères renouvelées, ce grand parc public servira la santé publique et le bien-être collectif pour des générations à venir.

Crédit : Parc Jean-Drapeau

Pour une complexité écologique

Le plan d’aménagement a été précédé d’une analyse de l’intérêt écologique des habitats végétaux existants (structures, formes, superficies). Les habitats présentant une végétation multi-strates, généralement caractérisés par une grande biomasse et une diversité végétale, ont été considérées comme ayant un plus grand intérêt que les habitats ayant une structure plus simple, moins dense et diversifiée. La stratégie végétale adoptée s’est notamment appuyée sur cette analyse et sur les recommandations de l’étude de Francoeur, Dupras et al. (2018)[5] pour mettre en place un corridor de biodiversité et bonifier la complexité écologique: par l’accroissement des habitats végétaux à grand intérêt écologique, la gestion et la diversification des habitats végétaux et l’introduction de nouveaux types d’habitats, soient les arbustaies, les pré-fleuris et les “forêts à trois strates”. La complexification des zones de végétation basse contribuera à augmenter les services écosystémiques et plus largement la résilience du patrimoine naturel urbain de Montréal. “Au moment où nous cherchons à nous adapter aux changements climatiques et à accroître la biodiversité”[6], il est important, comme le rappelle Les amis des parcs, de s’assurer que les parcs comportent des aires naturelles. Le Plan directeur s’inscrit dans la tendance marquée de naturalisation des parcs urbains et de demande pour davantage d’infrastructures vertes en accroissant le pourcentage d’aires naturelles. Pour ce faire, le Plan propose un corridor écologique traversant le parc. Cette connectivité écologique assurera la performance des écosystèmes, évitera “l’effet d’îlot”[7] et offrira un potentiel de dispersion du vivant. Elle “est fondamentale pour le maintien des populations d’organismes vivants, de leurs mouvements dans le paysage et pour assurer leur diversité génétique, et ce, à toutes les échelles”[8].

Les aires où l’approche ornementale est encore appliquée, de même de plusieurs stationnements et aires gazonnées bordant les chemins, feront désormais place à des pratiques écoresponsables en matière d’espaces verts et à des prés fleuris composés de plantes indigènes qui favorisent la biodiversité, les pollinisateurs et les îlots de fraîcheur. Une part significative des espaces verts du parc adoptera une gestion différenciée qui augmentera la contribution des infrastructures naturelles. Non seulement le parc Jean-Drapeau aura plus d’espaces verts écologiques contributifs à la santé des Montréalais, mais cette grande biodiversité conditionnera de plus la perception de bénéfices, de bien-être et d’effet réparateur des espaces verts urbains[9].

Crédit : Parc Jean-Drapeau

La nouvelle valeur augmentée du parc Jean-Drapeau

Selon l’étude de King et al. menée à Denver, “l’impact du réaménagement d’un parc amène une augmentation significative du nombre d’utilisateurs et de la proportion des utilisateurs s’adonnant à des activités d’intensité modérée ou élevée”[10]. L’augmentation de l’accessibilité, de la qualité et le pourcentage de parcs à l’échelle de la ville a également pour résultante l’augmentation du bien-être communautaire[11]. Le réaménagement du parc Jean-Drapeau sera bénéfique à la santé physique et mentale de la population en accroissant les lieux de rencontres, les espaces dédiés à la marche et à la pratique d’activités physiques et le sentiment de ressourcement par une connexion à l’eau et à la nature urbaine tout en abaissant la température de plusieurs degrés. L’augmentation des surfaces appropriables par la population, notamment la plaine des Jeux, facilitera l’accessibilité et réduira les inégalités sociales en santé pour répondre aux citoyens des quartiers les plus défavorisés du centre de la ville.

Un pas vers la réconciliation

Dans la foulée de la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada (2007-2015), le gouvernement du Canada s’est engagé à renouveler la relation de nation à nation avec les peuples autochtones, fondée sur la reconnaissance des droits, le respect, la coopération et le partenariat. En 2017, la Ville de Montréal a adopté la Déclaration des Nations unies sur les droits des peuples autochtones (2007) et s’est dotée d’une Stratégie de réconciliation en 2020. Les États et les municipalités ont aujourd’hui la responsabilité de mettre en œuvre les principes nationaux et internationaux en matière de réconciliation. Or, aucune stratégie de collaboration, de valorisation et de commémoration n’a été mise en œuvre au parc Jean-Drapeau dans le passé, malgré son importance historique comme lieu de passage et de rassemblement au milieu du fleuve, ses sites archéologiques autochtones et ses œuvres d’art autochtones datant de l’Expo 67. Dans ce contexte et pour l’importance que joue le plus ancien et grand parc public de Montréal, la Société du parc Jean-Drapeau (SPJD) reconnaît que les terres sur lesquelles se situe le parc – sises dans le fleuve Saint-Laurent, au cœur de l’archipel d’Hochelaga et face à Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal), font partie du territoire ancestral autochtone. Admettant les torts causés par notre passé colonial et notre responsabilité collective envers la compréhension et la réparation, la SPJD a fait de la réconciliation une orientation stratégique de son Plan directeur (les autres orientations sont le développement durable, la conservation, la gouvernance ouverte, l’innovation et l’expérience citoyenne). Portée par sa vision et ses principes de conservation, de pérennité, d’inclusion et de partenariat, la SPJD s’engage à œuvrer de concert avec les communautés autochtones (Premières Nations, Inuit et Métis) tant pour le respect et la préservation de cet environnement que pour la valorisation des cultures et des pratiques autochtones. L’aménagement, la toponymie, l’art public, la programmation, parmi d’autres, seront influencés par la concertation avec les communautés autochtones. Ces nouveaux processus et cet engagement contribueront à rendre le parc plus inclusif et plus complexe dans sa re-création, son expérience et sa narration.

Crédit : Parc Jean-Drapeau

Le retour du parc public

Réinventer le parc Jean-Drapeau ne fut pas seulement l’occasion de renouveler les aménagements des deux îles, mais de réévaluer le rôle du parc dans la ville actuelle et future. Face à l’urgence climatique et à la crise sanitaire de la COVID-19, il faut changer la peur en espoir, procéder à une relance verte, sociale, solidaire, juste et équitable. Le Plan directeur de conservation, d’aménagement et de développement du parc Jean-Drapeau 2020-2030 ouvre la voie à la société de demain en contribuant au capital santé de la ville. Les orientations stratégiques tout comme les propositions d’aménagement visent à transformer le parc Jean-Drapeau en un parc plus accessible, diversifié, public et vert.

Jonathan Cha
Montreal

On The Nature of Cities

[1] Jonathan Cha (2021), “La renaissance des parcs publics urbains”, revue Paysages, no-16, p. 22-25.

[2] Selon l’étude d’Adinolfi et al. (2014), tiré de Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), op.cit.

[3] Voir l’étude de Jaganmohan et al. (2016), tiré d’INSPQ, op.cit.

[4] Selon l’étude d’Adinolfi, op.cit.

[5] Xavier W. Francoeur, Jérôme Dupras, Danielle Dagenais, Christian Messier (2018), La fin du gazon! Où et comment complexifier les espaces verts du Grand Montréal pour s’adapter aux changements globaux, Fondation David Suzuki, novembre, 34 p.

[6] Park People / Les Amis des parcs (2020), Rapport sur les parcs urbains du Canada, Park People / Les  Amis des parcs, 165 p.

[7] Selon Pamela Zevit, planificatrice de la conservation de la biodiversité de Surrey, tirée de Park People / Les Amis des parcs (2020), op.cit. : 27.

[8] Francoeur, Dupras et al., op.cit. : 21.

[9] Selon l’étude de Carrus et al. (2015), tiré d’INSPQ, op.cit..

[10] Selon l’étude de King et al. (2015), tiré d’INSPQ, op.cit.

[11] Selon l’étude de Larson et al. (2016), tiré d’INSPQ, op.cit.

Lakes as Urban Classrooms | Reflections on the case of Rachenahalli Lake, Bangalore (2015-2018)

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As scholars are allowed to experience and visit a living ecosystem from the past, they may be able to imagine and wish to sustain nature of their cities in the future. The lake thus becomes a classroom.
Civic engagement by the Jaimitra trust, and various civic organisations involved in conserving Rachenahalli Lake, was to create a space expected to help alleviate the stresses of living in an urban jungle, and break away from the infamous legacy tied to the images of highly polluted, frothing and aflame lakes of Bangalore.This article argues that using lakes as classrooms can encourage generations of urban scholars to preserve nature in the city. Such an urban pedagogy looks beyond the more established methods of either using the lake as an object of study, or as a site for exploring nature-based technologies, to the act of being in lake proximity, surrounded by nature, as a critical component of connecting with urban nature, and seeing oneself as part of urban nature.

The abundance of beautiful lakes, like Lake Ulsoor, a popular site for family gatherings used to be an indelible part of the public image of Bangalore. Yet, in the past four decades, Bangalore has lost almost 79% of its water bodies and more than 90% of remaining lakes are heavily polluted or severely threatened as a result of encroaching urbanization. Against the backdrop of these challenges, Bangalore lakes have become important sites for various types of learning initiatives, research and discovery. Lakes (and other surface water bodies) capture the attention of students and scientists, encouraging generations of scholars to apply and test myriad frameworks of relevance to urban scholarship. For instance, they have been studied as social ecological systems, by documenting and understanding both the history of the place, as well as the many socio-cultural groups that lay claim to resources in lakes and in their surroundings. Urban planning and environmental students have also conducted studies to analyse the storage capacity of these bodies of water, in relation to a burgeoning city population, and a morphing cityscape. Thus, scientific and sociological studies on Bangalore lakes have generated a multifaceted understanding of nature in the city through different lenses such as urban commons and social inclusion; and urban practices such as citizen science, civic collaborations and lake encroachment.

Biodiversity (variety of plant and animal life) is key for the waterbody to provide myriad ecosystem services and benefits of nature for neighbouring communities. Photo: Sumetee Pahwa Gajjar
On one of my morning walks along the lake, I chanced upon a group of engineers from Manyata TechPark, who were clearing invasive vegetation, and planting indigenous plants along the lake. There is much potential for local businesses and industries to invest more in such spaces, as part of their social and environmental responsibility, and for their own sustainability and increased well-being.

More recently, citizen science initiatives to test pollution levels and bathymetry were conducted at several lakes in Bangalore. As a result of these efforts, what we have is a significant body of “scientific knowledge” on Bangalore lakes, with dispersed examples of translating this knowledge for wider, public consumption. Simultaneously, multiple active citizen groups associated with lakes, have achieved significant levels of awareness building among communities through cleanliness drives, events, talks and cultural programmes. Several of these awareness drives coincide with efforts which can best be understood as educational engagements. These range from extended learning programmes for school children, to guided visits and tours for practitioners, and university scholars. Yet, the translation of ‘expert knowledge’ into ‘environmental education’ is happening in pockets and needs strengthening. An overview of several such educational endeavours reveals that lakes are in fact both objects of study and, places where study or learning happens, akin to an outdoor classroom. And that the place of study component occurs both as a site for testing technologies and nature-based solutions, and as a place of being, as part of nature.

This article captures the learnings from diverse educational practices at Rachenahalli Lake, in North Bangalore. It draws upon the work of committed citizens, facilitators, college and school teachers, and attempts to discern general findings, which are common across multiple initiatives. The investigation around lakes as sites of education started as an institutionally-funded assignment, while I was associated with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. The original question I explored was whether lakes can become places of urban scholarship on a range of issues, including urban nature, nature-based solutions, the spatial and physical processes of urbanisation, and citizens’ agency to shape urban geography and create places for reflection, amidst rapid urbanisation. The interviews and my own reflections reveal educational content which nudges at the much larger potentiality of lakes as urban classrooms.

A fenced walkway along the MGIRED campus creates a physical and visual separation between sections of the lake which are accessible by public, and those which require regular cleansing services. Photo: Sumetee Pahwa Gajjar
Manyata Technology Park is a visual treat as backdrop to the lake’s Southern boundary. Occupants of the TechPark are direct beneficiaries of the climate regulation services and aesthetics provided by the lake. Photo: Sumetee Pahwa Gajjar

Early institutional arrangements for lake conservation

Jalmitra Trust was formed under the leadership of MGIRED (Mahatama Gandhi Institute for Renewable Energy and Development) a government institution with offices located at the Rachenahalli lakebed. The aim of the Jalmitra Trust was to achieve high levels of participation in visiting and maintaining a clean environment at Rachenahalli Lake. A functioning and healthy lake ecosystem was expected to attract and engage neighbouring communities; and help alleviate the stresses of living in an urban jungle. It could also help break away from the infamous legacy tied to the images of highly polluted, frothing and aflame lakes of Bangalore. Local ward committees and lake specific residents’ associations attempt to solve such problems, but often lack a collective voice and have to work very hard towards gaining legitimacy and agency. Jalmitra Trust aimed to provide a collective voice to citizens and resident associations passionate about Rachenahalli Lake restoration and maintenance.

Evolution of the dual mandates of environmental custodianship and education

As lake governance and associated structures were evolving, engagement with municipal departments and political leaders revealed the multi-layered structures which are involved in designing and implementing changes to support and maintain lake functions; and in improving community facilities and civic amenities, in and around the lakebed. As mentioned, MGIRED took the lead in formalising governance structures for environmental custodianship, which included the establishment of JalMitra Trust. Interestingly, part of the institution’s core mandate was to disseminate technical knowledge related to renewable energy and water management, among government officials, practitioners and government college students. These teaching and training activities were conducted both inside the MGIRED campus, as it hosted small-scale examples of renewable energy infrastructure (wind turbines and solar panels), and in the lakebed, which provided rich examples of ecological infrastructure, such as the wetland.

Majority of the walkway along the lake is kept permeable, to allow rainwater to seep into the ground, and avoid the glare and heat from a hard, paved surface. The lamp posts along the waterbody were not functional when this photograph was taken, as the lamps were damaged. They were functioning in 2013, just after installation. Photo: Sumetee Pahwa Gajjar

As civic engagement through the JalMitra Trust grew, the teaching agenda at the lakebed was expanded to include school children, from public and private schools. Facilitators, who were also members of the JalMitra Trust, found that engaging public schools was harder, due to bureaucratic requirements. Various teaching efforts across different audiences were undertaken, which are discussed more specifically in the next section.Facilitators interviewed for this research shared that young learners are naturally curious about several aspects of the lake, including the pollution levels. In order for them to understand the challenges associated with lake conservation, students were tasked to reach out to government officials, to enquire about and make recommendations for improving the lake. Having understood the limitations faced by local authorities in ensuring water quality while neighbouring communities allow untreated wastewater to flow into the lake, the students conducted awareness building campaigns. These knowledge-based endeavours were held at multi-storey apartment blocks and in various residential neighbourhoods. Funds were raised among the school community, and a cycling and tree-planting event was organised, participated in by the parents, school students, residential community-members, and neighbouring institutions. The organisers found it a great challenge to make the event inclusive to the point where residents of informal settlements would attend. However, sufficient awareness was created, so that the local politicians and municipal commissioners took note of the significance of the water body and formal lake management structures were established, after due process.

Developing and delivering an urban environmental curriculum

As discussed above, MGIRED staff were delivering teaching programmes to university students as part of their core mandate on the campus and in the lake vicinity. Through JalMitra Trust efforts, in early 2016, teaching events and training programmes were augmented to include school students, as well as non-technical colleges such as Srishti Design School. In the following narrative, these training programmes are classified across different student groups (middle and high school; pre-university, university), and content focus (ecology, sustainability, technology, urban design), exhibiting the wide variety of topics that can be taught using lakes as urban classrooms.

  • The fundamentals of ecosystem services of urban lakessuch as maintaining biodiversity, sourcing medicinal plants, the value of soil and wetland for flood regulation and water cleansing. School students observed nature, explored birding, and experienced art and music, at dedicated events, along the lake boundary. They measured changes in pollution levels at the lake and were able to understand practical uses of different plants – pollution abatement, medicinal or ornamental. Some of their questions were addressed through interactions with scientists at a local research centre for ecology and by conducting experiments at the school laboratory. Queries about the quality of fish at the lake however, remained largely unanswered by the local fishermen.
  • Global perspectives on sustainability, such as the value of nature in cities, global citizenship and climate change were taught to school children. There was a clear scaling up of content towards technology, to enhance urban eco-services such as ground water recharge, water purification and storm water management. At the same time, the challenges associated with lake governance were discussed, in the context of urban management and multiple actors and often, divergent agendas with regards to utilisation of land and water, to incite the budding social scientists. According to the facilitator, pupils established a deep connection with the lake in the process, sharing photographs of the place with overseas students, and speaking about the experience at their graduation.
  • Application of principles taught within ecology / biologywere explained to school students, pre-university students of biology and university scholars of science, by showcasing the biodiversity at the lakeand explaining the working of a constructed wetland and its role in purifying storm-water. Students were able to observe the interactions of various parts of nature here, and practically apply classroom learning to an actual place. Science graduates were encouraged to explore relevant technologies and implementation of nature-based solutions.
  • Urban water governancewas delved into greater detail for post graduate students of environmental sciences. Policies and laws related to the water sector and institutional arrangements were articulated to highlight the need for interdisciplinary approaches, which ensure that technical solutions converge with the socio-political context specific to a city, the hydrological system of which the lake is a part, and the lake
  • Elements of urban designsuch as designing the lake boundary for cleanliness, children’s play area, the needs of walkers, joggers, cyclists and senior citizens, were explored by graduate students of art and design. The core idea was to imbue a sense of viewing the lake as a community learning and recreational facility.
  • Technological interventions for lake water purificationsuch as sewage treatment plants, aerators, wetlands and water lifting mechanisms were the subject of study in a series of learning sessions for engineering students from metropolitan cities, facing the dual challenges of over-crowding and water scarcity, resulting in poor quality surface water.
  • Environment and Sustainabilitywas taught to working professionals of urban local bodies, and state officers of the Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Forest Service. Related to the three core ideas of ecological services, community engagement and policy interventions, practitioners and officers learnt about the importance of waste water treatment, the revival of traditional water harvesting systems, the creation of tanks for storage of water, lake governance and community involvement.
  • The role of communities in managing local resourceswas a half-day session planned and conducted for communities living in the lake vicinity, with the express aim of encouraging and improving community engagement. Such a learning session had to consider the varying degree of knowledge and interest among community members, and at the same time impart a sense of agency among them. Thus, the content had to skilfully scale up from teaching the importance of water, the lake, waste-water generation and current scientific methods of treatment and disposal, to conveying the significance of the various ecological services provided by the lake, including wastewater purification by the wetland. Moreover, the key role of communities in managing local natural resources and working with government institutions, as a pressure group, was explained.
Bamboo planters now mark the starting point for a complete circumambulation around the lake, which has only been possible since 2016, after the clearing of invasive alien vegetation. Gardeners employed at the lake and their dog are also visible. Photo: Sumetee Pahwa Gajjar

Desirable characteristics of the lake as a classroom

Interviews with facilitators also revealed characteristics and facilities which are desirable in the future, in order to enhance the capacity of the lakebed as a site for education.

Maintaining the non-commercial and natural character of the lake

The ecosystem of the lake is thriving, and currently a certain level of naturalness is maintained. Permeable surfaces are being maintained on pathways, ensuring catchment of local rainfall. Ordinances regarding lake governance here do not permit any vending or hawking, in contrast to other commercial lakes in the city, such as Lumbini Gardens, a mere 3 km from Rachenahalli, and also a part of the Hebbal valley lake system. Furthermore, the primary industry along the eastern boundary is non-polluting (the Manyata Technology Park). This is in stark contrast to polluting industries along lake systems in the south of Bangalore. Open areas around the lake allow relatively greater air movement, reducing local air pollution, and rendering a climate regulation service. Wildlife such as snakes have been spotted along walkways and in the lake water. Pelicans, which are a rare species in the rest of the city are spotted regularly at this water body.

Interviewees felt that this semi-natural character of the lake is imperative to utilising the surrounds for educational purposes. Without this character, the lake would resemble any other commercialised or urbanised water tank, servicing cultural or recreational activities of citizens. Education for diverse age groups and interests is possible when indigenous plants are utilised along the boundary, the wetland is maintained, attracting local birds, and commercial activities are kept at bay. However, there are concerns that current plantation drives, under the aegis of new governance arrangements and landscaping contracts, are limiting biodiversity, and concentrating on a few species, with limited functions. There are also fears of encroachment occurring on land parcels along the lake boundary, not meant for development, but nevertheless being built upon, due to pressures of urbanisation.

Greater access for the masses

Interviewees expressed that the lake and its surrounds should be opened up and made accessible for educational purposes and inclusive, knowledge awareness events. In the early years of civic engagement for environmental custodianship, the water body and its surrounds were easily accessible, from several points along the external boundary, and at any time of the day. However, as the governance changed with a larger role for the municipal government, and hard boundaries were instituted in the form of a metal fence and gates, access became controlled, requiring permissions at designated times and specified locations. It was also expressed that currently the elite, who are aware of the health benefits of walking in nature are able to maximise on the recreational and aesthetic services provided by Rachenahalli lake, and that this should change. Greater awareness would assist in drawing a diversity of people to the lake, such as through regular school excursions and participatory events. However, the challenge of balancing the natural characteristics of the lake system, while also providing greater access and improving facilities, still needs to be addressed.

Improved facilities and amenities

In terms of physical requirements, while trees provide shade, a gazebo would also provide cover from the rain. One such space has been created in the municipal park, but issues of access remain. Greater availability of maintenance funds has meant that paths are now clear of vegetation and debris. Provision of drinking water facilities and good quality sanitation amenities would increase the likelihood of people spending extended time in the lake vicinity.

Knowledge areas that can be explored further for urban scholarship

As of 2017, Rachenahalli Lake became a visiting site for practitioners attending the Urban Practitioners’ Programme (UPP) at IIHS. The one-week UPP training focused on a range of urban infrastructure networks (such as storm water drainage systems) and ecological services including wetland functions, within a larger context of urban ecology and governance thereof. I was a facilitator at one of these lake visits and experienced first-hand how well the planners and civil engineers from municipalities, were able to relate to the conservation, governance and infrastructure management issues at the lake. They were also able to express their frustration at not being able to implement much of their knowledge and translate their experience into nature-based solutions, which included the preservation of such spaces within the urban fabric.

Thinking forward, a possibility exists that such teaching / training be conducted at similar sites in multiple cities, such as wetlands or lakes, where conservation needs to be formalised, and nature-based solutions need to be explored and applied.Such teaching / training can be built upon scientific knowledge about the site topography, the history of human settlements in lake vicinity, and the evolution in cultural associations with water and its significance.  Thereafter, environmental solutions to maintain and enhance wetland functions, can be developed by practitioners, alongside knowledge of bio-physical and socio-cultural contexts.

Extensive practical knowledge now exists with regards to collective approaches for arriving at nature-based solutions, both from technological and traditional perspectives. One such solution which has found much success across Bangalore water bodies is the creation of floating wetlands, using a range of organic and non-organic, recycled materials.For instance, students of Environmental Planning at Srishti Design School, worked with installation artists to design and implement a floating island at an upstream lake – Jakkur lake, in the last quarter of 2018.

In 2018, visits to Bangalore lakes were integrated into IIHS’ Urban Fellowship Programme. Slightly different to the practitioners’ (UPP) training described above, UFP lake visits were designed as part of a larger urban curriculum, structured around sustainability, infrastructure and settlements, policy and land governance, urban economy, urban planning and housing. One of the facilitators interviewed for this article, Geetika Anand, taught both practitioners and fellows, and thereafter attended an urban ecology course as part of her Masters in Southern Urbanism at UCT (University of Cape Town). Geetika now feels that urban scholars should be allowed to visit natural areas in cities, with minimal structure, so as to allow them to reflect and be guided by their individual experiences and responses to urban nature.

A case of emergent work is that of Nikhil Jain, a 2017 fellow of the Urban Fellowship Programme at IIHS, who chose Rachenahalli Lake as a site to understand sociological aspects of urbanisation. He studied a range of social actors including those who relied directly upon the ecosystem services of the lake such as shepherds and local villagers, property developers who were encroaching public land in the lake vicinity, and public institutions and individuals in their personal capacity, who had positioned themselves as guardians of the water body. His study led to the development of a learning game called Foul Waters, based upon the actors who were part of the lake social ecological system. This urban teaching tool was designed to educate learners across all age ranges, about social determinants of the environmental condition of the lake, and therefore the multiple aspects of sustainability and ecology.

Consequently, the game was played at various gatherings and events focused on sustainability such as the Bhoomi Habba (translated as Earth Festival, an annual event hosted at the Visthar Eco-sanctuary in north Bangalore). As the game progresses, learners are allotted pre-assigned roles and thus, are able to recognise the long-term impacts of decisions made by different social actors, on the sustainability of a water body.

My early training in history of architecture reminds me that there is an additional factor which renders the lake as an urban classroom in its own right, for teaching and embedding the principles of environmental conservation and urban sustainability. This is the quality of the space or place, and when it is a living lake or a thriving ecosystem, how it situates itself within the larger urban geography, physically, ecologically and socially.

It is in this quality as a space, that parallels may be drawn between the lake as a classroom for urban scholarship and practice, and sites of old monuments, some of archaeological value, as classrooms for architectural scholarship.A living lake, established centuries ago, performs the function of connecting visitors and scholars to the past, similar to historic architectural sites. When students of architecture visit, document and draw remains of old buildings, they also attempt to recreate in their minds and on paper, a past that can only be imagined. And this faculty to visualise a resurrected past, ignites the creative spark, which also allows them to imagine a future, and design evocative buildings that would inhabit that future.

Elements of design such as balance, form and symmetry in buildings of extraordinary relevance, are thus taught and transmitted while the student is in a mental state of quietude and reflection. Similarly, a lake enables students to experience a snippet of a past when perhaps the water body was the centre piece of surrounding human settlements. The place holds the potential to re-ignite a continuous and unfettered connection with nature, which is difficult to imagine or achieve in hard landscapes of modern city-building, despite well-meaning attempts at greening and pedestrianisation. Waterbodies which are the size of Rachenhalli Lake afford a vertical and horizontal escape for vision, allowing the mind to explore new ideas as the eyes explore horizons. It is a freeing of the mind, accompanied by a freeing of various senses, so that sights, smells and sounds which are more natural than manmade, are processed through conscious and unconscious thought.

The hope is that as scholars are allowed to experience and visit a living ecosystem from the past, they may be able to imagine and wish to sustain nature of their cities in the future. The lake thus becomes a classroom, not only through what we can learn by studying it as a living social ecological system, but also by us simply existing alongside its physical and ecological presence. The ideas articulated above can be used to build a particular form of urban pedagogy, used repeatedly and successfully in architectural education, and extend similar principles to urban scholarship. They can be used to undertake lake conservation / preservation or rejuvenation exercises, as part of an urban curriculum, and to enable emergent ideas among future urban practitioners, towards sustainability and ecology.

Since the majority of the work is already residing in cities, such encounters and time spent in nature, as part of a structured or semi-structured urban curriculum, may encourage an aptitude for preserving biodiversity and conserving nature (wetlands, floodplains, waterbodies and forests) at a regional scale. This will be most valuable in growing cities of Asia and Africa, where urbanisation is occurring at a rapid pace, and natural landscapes are being replaced by urban landscapes, with little consideration for not only biodiversity, nature, and nature-based services, but also human connection with nature, and nature as teacher.

Sumetee Gajjar
Cape Town

On The Nature of Cities

Acknowledgment:

To write this article, I have drawn upon six years (2013-2018) spent in the vicinity of Rachenahalli Lake, several hundred walks on the lake bundh, and ensuing interactions with hundreds of social actors, including urban activists, conservationists, educators, scholars, local residents and tourists. During this time, I participated in teaching / training experience with IIHS (UPP and UFP), Legacy School and Srishti Design School. This article also draws upon interviews with members of Jalmitra Trust, committed citizens who have been involved in education efforts at Rachenahalli Lake since 2015, and teacher / trainers associated with IIHS and Srishti Design School:

  • Ms Bindu Anil – facilitator for Global Perspectives at Legacy School (2015-2017)
  • Mr Haridas Gopalan – Retired Major General, Chairman of JalMitra Trust
  • Ms Shobha Anand – Consultant at MGIRED (2014-2016); Senior Consultant at IIHS (2017-2019)
  • Ms Geetika Anand – Senior Consultant at IIHS (1999-2016); MPhil in Southern Urbanism at UCT (2017-2019)
  • Ms Kamya Ramachandran – Senior lecturer at Srishti Design School (2018)
  • Mr Nikhil Jain – Senior Urban Fellow, IIHS (2016-17)

Land Use Planning: The Critical Part of Climate Action Plans that Most Cities Miss

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Cities pledge to reduce emissions and fight climate change—but do these commitments measure up? The transport sector makes up nearly one-third of urban emissions, a factor influenced by distances traveled and modes of travel. Most cities focus on policies to reduce emissions from modes of travel, such as encouraging residents to switch from personal automobiles to public transport.

Land use policies need to be integrated with transportation measures in order to reduce transport-related emissions.
Cities that fail to incorporate land use measures actually see an increase in transport-related emissions. To better understand how cities are addressing transport-related emissions, I investigated climate plans in 12 U.S. cities to identify and compare: 1) level of emissions reductions pledged, and 2) policies and metrics to reduce transport-related emissions. The analysis focuses on a small but diverse group of U.S. cities, and recommendations may be extrapolated to other cities in a global context.

Intro Photo
Urban transport systems can help cities solve climate change. But it’s just one part of the equation. Photo: Pixaby

Cities on the frontline of climate action

Many cities have taken steps to address climate change by creating and implementing ‘Climate Action Plans.’ These plans detail current carbon emissions, set emissions reductions targets, and outline strategies to reduce these emissions. City climate plans are not inconsequential—54 percent of the global population lives in urban areas and 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are from cities.

The leadership and initiative of international and U.S. cities were highlighted throughout the UN climate conference, COP21. Over 700 global mayors gathered in Paris at the Climate Summit for Local Leaders, which took place parallel to the official UN negotiations. Global leaders at the Summit, including Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, espoused the importance of cities in driving and advancing measures to reduce climate change. Their message was loud and clear: cities cannot wait for mandates from state or federal governments and must instead be trailblazers to move the climate agenda forward.

The emphasis on cities was a break from previous climate conferences, and reflected the global recognition that city actions to address climate change are instrumental—but insufficient—for meeting international climate goals . International city networks, including groups like ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability and C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, play an important role in championing and building capacity for cities to action on climate.. A subset of this group present in Paris was the Local Climate Leaders Circle, a delegation of 12 U.S. cities representing the diversity of urban areas in the U.S., from Des Moines, Iowa to Santa Monica, California (see map below for complete city list). These cities were identified as “speaking out as champions for climate action in national and international policy forums” and are the focus of my research on transport-related climate strategies.

Fig1
The Local Climate Leaders Circle Cities, a partnership between ICLEI, the National League of Cities, the U.S. Green Business Council, World Wildlife Fund, in association with C40 and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Image: Emily Wier, Yale FES

Cities pledge to reduce carbon pollution

Over one hundred U.S. cities have committed to addressing carbon pollution. Their reduction pledges represent the equivalent of taking 62 million cars off the road, equivalent to a quarter of the 253 million cars on the road today. Cities typically commit to climate change mitigation in order to meet a state directive, or to respond to local leadership or community action. The projected emissions reductions are driven primarily by cities with long-term targets (i.e., 2035-2050). In the U.S., 62 cities have set targets to meet the federal goal of 26-27 percent reduction in emissions below 2005 levels by 2025, and 33 local governments have targets to reduce emissions by 80 percent. Figure 1 below shows how targets and timelines in the Local Climate Leaders Circle compare; nearly half of these cities meet the federal emissions reductions goal.

Figure2
Figure 1. Emissions reductions targets for Local Climate Leaders Circle cities by year and anticipated percent reduction in emissions. Cities with long-term emissions reductions targets have greater emissions reductions goals. Image: Emily Wier, Yale FES; data compiled from CDP & city Climate Action Plans

Setting specific and measurable targets is the first step in mitigating climate change. The next and critical part is figuring out how to reach mitigation goals and establishing indicators to track progress. Cities have a suite of tools available to mitigate emissions associated with urban form, which includes transportation planning, zoning, and behavioral-based policies. Geographic and municipal boundaries impact the policy options available to mitigate emissions resulting from each of these drivers. Even though mitigating emissions from transportation and land use could be an important aspect of city climate plans, few cities adequately create and implement measures to reduce these emissions.

Tackling transportation emissions

Transportation and land use—how we move around and build our cities—are two of the largest sources of city emissions. Nationally, nearly one third of carbon emissions are from transportation, but there is much more heterogeneity at the local level. Transport-related emissions can vary from 5 percent (Chula Vista, California) to over 50 percent (Grand Rapids, Michigan) of a city’s total emissions (see Figure 2). The presence of a metro or subway system, commuting distances, connectivity of transit options, and spatial composition of housing and jobs has profound impacts on city transportation emissions.

Figure3
Figure 2. Percentage of total citywide emissions due to land use and transportation average 30 percent, but vary between less than 5 percent and more than 50 percent. Image: Emily Wier, Yale FES; data compiled from CDP & city Climate Action Plans

Through climate policies, cities can encourage residents to swap their cars for public transportation, make it easier to live closer to work, or support more efficient fuels. For example, a bike sharing program and electric vehicle charging stations in Columbus, OH, helped reduce the city’s emissions by 3 percent—the equivalent of taking 19,000 cars off the road. Investments made today in transportation infrastructure, housing stock, or other mobility options have long-term consequences for future emissions. If a city invests in low-carbon transportation infrastructure, it will be locked in to a low carbon emissions scenario that will make it easier to meet climate targets.

Cities tackle transportation and land use in climate plans by proposing to reduce emissions associated with vehicle transportation in two broad categories: 1) reduce vehicle miles traveled by promoting alternative transportation options or promote no- or low-carbon fuel sources; or 2) reduce the physical distance driven through land use policies. Mitigation measures in climate plans typically focus on the former category to reduce the carbon intensity of vehicle use, such as encouraging the use of electric vehicles or creating bike lanes. The two most common interventions proposed by cities in the Local Climate Leaders Circle are transportation policies to improve biking and walking infrastructure. Eight out of twelve cities implemented these policies to try and get people out of their cars and using alternative transportation.

Five of the cities analyzed integrated at least one land use policy within their climate plan. A standout example is Oakland’s Energy and Climate Change Action Plan, which begins to integrate land use consideration by reducing vehicle emissions and the physical distance driven. The integration of transportation policies and land use planning is designed to encourage more people to live closer to work and to use safe and efficient transportation alternatives. Oakland uses transport-oriented development to encourage housing development near transportation nodes and along high-use corridors. Street design optimizes bike, walk, and bus rapid transit infrastructure. Regional transportation planning incorporates the needs of Bay Area residents and plans growth targeted to promote sustainable development.

Do the numbers add up?

Some cities are getting it right. After Oakland’s Energy and Climate Change Action Plan was implemented in 2012, the city’s transportation emissions decreased slightly. Other cities that integrated transportation and land use planning in their climate plans, including Atlanta, Georgia and Columbus, Ohio, also reduced their transportation emissions.

Other cities are not doing as well. Transport-related emissions increased by around 18 percent in Boulder, Colorado and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania after they implemented their climate plans. These cities did not integrate transportation and land use, and instead implemented measures to reduce emissions solely associated with vehicle transportation. Boulder and Pittsburgh adopted policies to support hybrid vehicles, alternative fuel use, and an increase in bike lanes and associated infrastructure. But these measures alone are not enough to shift the city toward a low-carbon transportation pathway because of the exclusion of land use measures.

In developed or mature cities, infrastructure lock-in, including transport systems and land use patterns, directly impacts emissions trajectories. Due to the inertia of the existing built environment, it is more difficult to change residential patterns to aggregate housing near transit nodes or along multimodal corridors. The suburban sprawl that characterizes much of American cities and subsequent car dependency will require large shifts in the built environment and the way citizens think about their transportation options. Government policies to bring about these shifts are challenging because the policy options are decentralized, often logistically difficult, and are often reliant on personal behavioral shifts.

In creating climate plans, cities identify emissions reductions targets and measures to achieve those targets. These targets are often not associated with a specific performance level or directly tied to a policy measure. The Des Moines Tomorrow Plan identifies a goal to “provide multimodal access in the region” but it is unclear how the city aims to achieve this goal. Multimodal transportation, which integrates a variety of transportation options (e.g., bus, train, bicycling) into a transportation network, is vague—what type of multimodal access is proposed? How will this be measured? What defines the region and where investment in multimodal access will be centered? Greater clarification and specificity is needed.

Other plans, such as Santa Monica’s 15×15 Climate Plan, are more clear and direct—Santa Monica has a target to increase ridership on the Big Blue Bus by an additional 200,000 annual passengers, which is both measurable and quantifiable. Creating policy measures that are both actionable and quantifiable is tied to better success in achieving emissions reduction targets.

How can cities improve their plans?

Although many cities have reduced overall emissions as compared with baseline levels, the transport-related emissions are increasing in several cities where integration of land use and transportation measures have not been included. As cities develop Climate Action Plans, how can these plans be strengthened to ensure that transport-related emissions are effectively mitigated?

Track progress to meet goals. Not enough data is provided by cities to evaluate which land use and transportation measures have been implemented and whether they have yielded the anticipated emissions reductions. It is recommended that cities identify metrics to analyze with respect to land use and transportation, and establish a standardized reporting timeframe. A checklist, such as Oakland’s 2015 Implementation Progress Report, could be created by each city and inserted into an online portal to mark whether a mitigation measure has been implemented, the date of implementation, and emissions reductions associated with that measure to date. The data feedback helps create a reinforcing cycle to identify policy measures that reduce emissions and those that need to be modified.

Link policies to mitigation measures. Mitigation measures are too vague and do not correspond with programs or projects that can be implemented and tracked. Currently, many mitigation measures outline steps to “encourage,” “explore,” or “expand” various emissions reductions steps. The Grand Rapids Sustainability Plan outlines clear targets and measurement indicators, which are completely absent from West Palm Beach’s Sustainability Action Plan. Mitigation measures should instead be clearly linked to policy measures, or otherwise separated into ‘Policies’ and ‘Suggestions’ along with the appropriate policy instruments. This would facilitate better implementation and transparency of the legal framework and create more actionable policy measures.

Make data transparent and available to the public. Data should be readily available, downloadable, and transparent to allow for public engagement. The creation of a portal with baseline data, emissions reductions targets, policy measures, and progress reports on the city website would facilitate better public awareness, accountability, and transparency of the climate plan and its implementation. Boulder, Chula Vista, and Oakland have tracking reports and inventories available on their websites, but the data is not standardized. The scope of a central data clearinghouse, such as Carbon Disclosure Project, could be expanded to make data public and transparent.

Incorporate more land use measures. Measures focusing specifically on land use are disproportionately omitted from climate plans. About 17 percent of all measures in plans focus on land use measures. Four cities have adopted no land use measures, and three others have one land use measure each. Where they do occur, they are siloed from transportation measures, even though land use and transportation are intrinsically related. More mitigation measures aimed to reduce the total miles driven would be beneficial in climate plans; the integration of climate plans with regional plans presents opportunities to change zoning regulations to increase mixed-use development, promote the co-location of housing and employment, and ensure basic services are within a given distance of households. Land use measures are more successful when integrated with transportation policies, and combining these types of measures creates a cohesive development trajectory.

Cities have made progress to address climate change through the implementation of Climate Action Plans, and continued efforts by cities to reduce emissions will be critical to meet these existing climate commitments. However, the process and means of implementation need to be improved because many U.S. cities are not meeting their targets. Although this analysis focused on U.S. cities, many of the findings can be extrapolated to cities around the world that face similar urban challenges. On a global scale, land use policies need to be integrated with transportation measures in order to reduce transport-related emissions. This is important for growing cities, particularly in Asia and Africa, which are not yet locked-in to a high-emissions trajectory. Mayors and city officials in these rapidly urbanizing regions can learn from both the successes and challenges that U.S. cities face in implementing effective low-carbon transportation and land use measures.

When world leaders gather for the UN Habitat III conference later this year to design the New Urban Agenda, there is a strong incentive to link the theme of sustainable cities with climate commitments made in Paris. The New Urban Agenda presents a perfect opportunity to share lessons from cities on how to incorporate transportation and land use policies for low-carbon development on a global scale. Addressing climate change in cities necessitates innovative transportation planning that considers not only how people move in cities, but also the land use decisions that greatly impact carbon emissions and the future sustainability of cities.

Emily Wier and Alisa Zomer
New Haven

On The Nature of Cities

Acknowledgement: Thank you to CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) for providing data for this analysis.

Alisa Zomer

About the Writer:
Alisa Zomer

Alisa Zomer is a Research Fellow at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Her research focuses on urban climate change governance and sustainability policy at both local and international scales.

Landscape initiatives are in operation or in development in many parts of the world. What is key to making them work and be useful? How are they good for cities?

Europe, People & Communities, Place & Design, RoundTable, Science & Tools, , , , , , , , , , ,
Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Steve Brown, Sydney Peony poppies tell me a great deal about landscape. They show me how landscape is as much personal as it is urban/rural management tool.
Martha Fajardo, Bogotá  The Latin American Landscape Initiative acknowledges landscapes as essential components of people’s environment.
Carla Gonçalves, Porto Let’s make the invisible, visible by launching a World Landscape Campaign that helps to share and spread landscape initiatives.
Liana Jansen, Cape Town The biggest challenge we face in Africa is capacitating existing professionals and academics within African countries.
Monica Luengo, Madrid The city is being transformed vertiginously; we need a new approach from the perspective dynamics of urban landscape to meet future challenges.
Claudia Misteli, Barcelona Landscape initiatives are like living cells: they have much more power when they group to form something bigger and more complex.
Osvaldo Moreno, Santiago Through a green infrastructure planning approach, our cities can be more sustainable and resilient living systems.
Laura Spinadel, Vienna I am constantly confronted by PRIVATIZED public space which is marked by Big Brother and the fear of what is different.
Ken Taylor, Canberra Landscape is not static; it reflects changing human ideologies over time.
Menno Welling, Zomba As in Zomba, Malawi, officials may opt for immediate benefits, rather than the elusive prospect of increased economic potential from landscape preservation initiatives.
David Maddox

About the Writer:
David Maddox

David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director.

Introduction

What are “landscape initiatives”, and can they transform how we create cities and their surrounding regions?

Key to the relevance and context of this roundtable is the very meaning of the word “landscape”. One dictionary definition reads “all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal”. But this definition is not nearly comprehensive. Where it fails is in the limiting effect of the words “visible” and “aesthetic”, because in fact the word landscape conveys a richer meaning that includes, of course, the aesthetics of nature and the out of doors, but also the organization and design or infrastructure, the biophysical and social services of ecosystems, the livability of communities, and the justice aspects of how our living environments are (or are not) democratically decided upon and created.

Indeed, in recent decades, the concept of landscape has surpassed its limited traditional meaning, which was intimately bound up in the visual perceptions of open space. Today we speak of landscape as a system of services (e.g., ecosystem services), as an expression of social relations, as balances of designed open space and wild, and as a result of everyday experience—that is, as a superposition of layers of many meanings and values embodied in a particular place, and which is central to a place’s identity. To use a line from The Nature of Cities’ mission statement: “[cities] are ecosystems of people, nature, and infrastructure”. In other words, they are landscape in a complete and integrated sense.

How can we build such an important constellation of concepts into the planning of better cities—cities that work for people, communities, and the environment? Such a challenge requires integration of many streams of thought and action: design, ecology, sociology, psychology, governance, law, justice, inclusivity, and participatory democracy. It’s a tall, but critical order. The so-called Landscape Initiatives are a way forward. The European Landscape Convention, agreed upon in 2000, was the first international treaty to be exclusively devoted to all aspects of landscape, and it is the touchstone for many similar efforts around the world, some of which are described in the following contributions. These global attempts at the broad value and meaning of “landscape” have similarities, but also take locally adapted forms. And they can be central to creating cities with the attributes we crave at The Nature of Cities: resilience, sustainability, livability and justice.

Steve Brown

About the Writer:
Steve Brown

Steve Brown is Lecturer in Archaeology (Heritage Studies) at The University of Sydney, Australia.

Steve Brown

Breaking down binaries: landscape and personal heritage

Landscape is not a helpful term when it is used to separate city from country or urban from rural. To confine the term to one or other of these poles is to enact age-old Cartesian binaries in Western thinking. When I think of my home city of Sydney, for example, I recognise that more than 30,000 years of Indigenous occupation has come before me; the suburb in which I live was, until the twentieth century, productive farmland. Thus, in an historical sense, rural landscape (“the bush,” in Australian slang) versus urban landscape is an artificial construct.

Landscape initiatives are most useful when they have relevance to individuals and relate to people’s feelings for places, things, and practices.

I argue that the idea of landscape is useful for recognising and exploring personal or “unofficial” heritage; that is, places, things, and practices valued by individuals, families, and small groups. This is because landscape can be used to refer to the physical environment, processes of change, sensory experience, and perception. To my mind, these different aspects of landscape are most evident in domestic gardens, whether associated with farmyards or suburban backyards. As Australian scholars Lesley Head and Pat Muir show, planting and working in gardens serves to entwine people with local nature-cultures.

I am currently living between homes—moving from a 350m2 suburban property in Sydney to a 56 hectare (140 acre) bush-block near Canberra. Typically, the latter would be characterised as a rural landscape and the former a component of an urban landscape. However, I have always recognised the suburban block as a landscape in and of itself. It was a place where my partner and I created a wonderful garden (and life) with plants for eating and admiring.

An example of the latter is the fiery red peony poppies that we grew in the garden. My partner inherited a container of seeds from his much-loved maternal grandmother, Doris. They grew in profusion in our garden: dense copses of stems up to a metre high with silver-green leaves and topped with spectacular, fire-engine red, pom-pom-like flowers. Year after year, each spring, the self-propagating plants emerge to re-announce their brilliant presence. The poppies mark a celebratory connection with Doris and are a direct connection to a loved family member, provoke sensations of warmth, fun, and happiness. In Sara Ahmed’s words, they are ‘happy objects’.

S Brown-roundtable-imageFor me, the poppies are in themselves a landscape, one that entangles past and present, people and place, urban and rural. They are material things imbued with affective power and bound to the physicality of place (our garden). They have a capacity to recall the past (e.g., stories of Doris, sharing seeds with neighbours and friends) and to shape the present (providing a welcoming presence when returning home). Through growing peony poppies and creating a garden, connections are created to people and places—a personal landscape of attachment.

So what do poppies have to say about global landscape initiatives and their benefit to cities? For me, landscape initiatives are most useful when they have relevance to individuals and relate to people’s feelings for places, things, and practices. Landscape is neither defined by scale (large or small) nor reliant on binaries such as city/country and material/symbolic. Current initiatives by global NGOs to produce an International Landscape Convention are therefore challenged to find a balance between creating a holistic planning tool and ensuring relevance to people’s everyday lives, whether they are lived in cities or in wide open spaces.

For now, I am off to plant peony poppies in the new garden.

Martha Fajardo

About the Writer:
Martha Fajardo

Martha Cecilia Fajardo, CEO of Grupo Verde, and her partner and husband Noboru Kawashima, have planned, designed and implemented sound and innovative landscape architecture and city planning projects that enhance the relationship between people, the landscape, and the environment.

Martha Fajardo

It is clear that we stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history: we must choose our future. We are living in a time of intense change in the way we value our lives. There is an amazing revival taking place as society, governments, and stakeholders begin to appreciate the true value of the LANDSCAPE.

That landscape represents a direct experience of the everyday life of people explains the growing global interest in landscape.

The adoption of the European Landscape Convention (our inspiration), the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, the proposal for an IFLA International Landscape Convention, the Landscape Declaration of Florence 2012, the Latin American Landscape Initiative (LALI), the Canadian Landscape Charter, and the Asia Pacific Region Landscape Charter have established the role of landscape as a vital component of collective well-being and have highlighted the need for landscape management at all scales, throughout the region, including the urban and the suburban, cities and towns (especially degraded everyday life), and places with high value for heritage and natural significance.

The rise of potentially devastating problems, such as climate change, ill-conceived urbanization, water shortages, and biodiversity loss means that transboundary cooperation in landscape has become imperative. Nowhere is such cooperation more important than in Latin America.

IMAGENES CARTAS DEL PAISAJE-03
Landscape visions for Brazil.
IMAGENES CARTAS DEL PAISAJE-02
Landscape visions for Bolivia.
IMAGENES CARTAS DEL PAISAJE-01
Landscape visions for Argentina.

Today, Latin American society is fully aware that the pressures are a threat to numerous resources, both natural and cultural, and that among them is the landscape. Therefore, we felt that we needed to move forward to stimulate regional and local initiatives through a resolution establishing the landscape as a holistic tool for the planning, management, and creation of sustainable development; in protecting the past but shaping the future, we must recognize the vital connections between government, people, culture, heritage, health, and economy.

Latin American landscape and habitat professionals, together with the academic sector and civil society, initiated the Latin American Landscape Initiative. LALI aims to foster the recognition, valuation, protection, management, and sustainable planning of Latin American landscapes. The initiative acknowledges landscapes as essential components of people’s environment, as an expression of the diversity of our shared cultural and natural heritage, and as a foundation of our identity; it acknowledges the special capacities, responsibilities, and leadership possessed by civil society when intervening in landscapes; and it commits to supporting the elaboration, execution, promotion, and communication of the Declaration Action Plan through the LALI Clusters, Landscape Charters, and members.

LALI III Forum Buenos Aires
Latin American Landscape Initiative forum meets in Buenos Aires.

That landscape represents a direct experience of the everyday life of people does a great deal to explain the growing interest of the local world in the landscape. It is time to re-focus on local solutions and innovations. The local realm is increasingly viewing the landscape as an engine for its development and a way to boost the level of citizens’ self-esteem, identity, and quality of life. Cities around the world are already acknowledging the value of landscape for urban life; they have shown that investing in landscape and green areas can enhance economic prosperity, health, and social well-being.

From the European Landscape Convention, we have being inspired to see that physical improvement cannot stand alone. Many people care passionately about their landscapes and take pride in their distinctive character and diversity.

“Cities, towns, villages and the landscape are a reflection of their social, political, economic and environmental context. Consequently, any improvement should be part of the well-being of the people. Cities, towns and villages must make efficient and sustainable use of land and other resources; be safe and accessible by foot, bicycle, car and public transport; have clearly defined boundaries at all stages of development; have mixed uses and social diversity; have streets and parks, spaces that respects local history, the landscape and geography; and have a variety that allows for the evolution of society, function and design”.

BOLETÍN RIO SF
Goals and objectives of the Latin American Landscape Initiative.

This is the vision that we link with the European Landscape Convention.

Then, and only then, will the pride we feel as landscape professionals be matched by the quality of our contributions to this world.

Links

LALI Website: www.lali-iniciativa.org

LALI BLOG: www.lali-iniciativa.com

LALI Cluster SOCIVIL: https://www.facebook.com/laliniciativa?ref=hl

IFLA ILC http://iflaonline.org/projects/ilc/

CSLA CLC http://www.csla-aapc.ca/canadian-landscape-charter

Carla Gonçalves

About the Writer:
Carla Gonçalves

Carla Gonçalves is a landscape architect from Porto, Portugal. See more about her work here.  

Carla Gonçalves

The European Landscape Convention (CoE, 2000) has reinforced the role of democracy in relation to landscape, increasing the knowledge and awareness that common people have about their right to landscape and to be a part of the decision making process. Being that landscape is “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (CoE, 2000), what fascinates me is that we cannot rethink landscape without acknowledging the experience of landscape initiatives that are not only designed by landscape architects, geographers, and urban planners, but also by the common citizen.

I believe we need to create a global partnership platform—a World Landscape Campaign similar to the “World Urban Campaign” from UN-Habitat—that helps to share and spread ideas and dialog about landscape.

Cities are witnessing rapid and dramatic changes. New urban territories are not only short of public spaces in terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality. Across the globe, we can find a variety of landscape initiatives in which people are engaging both with themselves and with their communities to protect or improve the common good—the landscape—and, as a result, improving the quality of their lives and of their neighborhoods, enhancing the cities they live in.

If we look carefully, we see that citizens are conscientious of the importance of landscape and that their everyday landscapes are a part of their identities. As a result, people are becoming “landscape changers”, trying to improve the urban environmental they live in, presenting solutions to challenges that today’s cities are dealing with. Landscape initiatives are crucial because they strengthen citizens’ awareness for landscape.

I think that most of the landscape initiatives that we can find today—not only those working at the city scale—are an active response to urgent needs and demands by citizens, in which it’s crucial to engage the stakeholders that have the duty to protect, manage, and plan our landscape. In my opinion, for landscape initiatives to succeed, it’s fundamental to link them to other stakeholders, cooperating towards a shared vision and strategy for our future landscape (regardless of whether we are talking about the national, regional, or urban scale), driven by a participation and proactive process. Bottom-up processes will be the key to transforming our cities—of course, there are many challenges in implementing a collaborative process and there are also many difficulties in defining operational mechanisms to implement it.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that nowadays, these process have already started and progressively more citizens are engaging with landscape initiatives, aiming to reflect on their past, present and future.

IMG_8525
“Southwest Landscape Forum—Rethinking the implementation of the European Landscape Convention”: example of a landscape initiative organized by CIVILSCAPE and Evolving Landscape, CRL at Serralves Foundation in Oporto, Portugal, 2015, http://evolvinglandscape.org/.

I would like to thank TNOC for the opportunity to take part in this roundtable and to discuss these issues, and I cannot finish without throwing a challenge that I think could be very useful to all landscape initiatives around the world.

I believe we need to create a global partnership platform—a World Landscape Campaign similar to the “World Urban Campaign” from UN-Habitat—that helps to share and spread individual, corporate, and public initiatives that protect, manage, and plan landscapes by promoting dialogue, difficulties, and knowledge about our future landscape. Any volunteers?

References

Council of Europe. 2000. European Landscape Convention. Available at: http://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/rms/0900001680080621

Liana Jansen

About the Writer:
Liana Jansen

Liana Jansen is a registered professional Landscape Architect and an accredited Professional Heritage Practitioner with 15 years experience in the design, planning, and conservation of landscapes.

Liana Jansen

There are a number of landscape initiatives in operation in Africa. The authors of a study published by the GlobalCanopy (2015), identified 73 such initiatives in 32 African countries, most of which have begun in the past six years. Most initiatives were motivated by and have invested in agricultural production, ecosystem conservation, human livelihoods, and institutional strengthening.

We must strengthen professional networks and host planning and events in Africa itself.

One of the largest and most recent is The African Union New Partnership for Africa’s Development, or NEPAD, which launched the African Resilient Landscapes Initiative, or ARLI. This initiative will be implemented through forest and ecosystem restoration, biodiversity conservation, climate smart agriculture, and rangeland management. ARLI will capitalise on previous experience from Africa-led partnerships such as TerrAfrica and work through various existing platforms. The initiative will be implemented through the African Landscapes Action Plan, prepared by African Union NEPAD and partners from the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative to advance landscape governance, research, and finance through priority actions that embrace all land actors and all sectors (NEPAD 2015).

In a study done by the World Agroforestry Foundation, Hart and colleagues found that integrated landscape initiatives in Africa are investing heavily in institutional planning and coordination, but they have had mixed results engaging different stakeholder groups, especially the private sector (Hart et al 2015). The authors of the Global Canopy study offer many recommendations, but the most applicable in my opinion are the following (GlobalCanopy 2015):

  1. “Adopt integrated landscape management as a key means to make progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals at national and sub-national scales. Governments, investors, businesses, and communities adopt integrated landscape management approaches within their policies and plans, implementation strategies and reporting processes.
  2. Empower local stakeholders to design sustainable landscape solutions that meet their unique priorities and contexts. Recognise and strengthen local organisations and institutional platforms for meeting, sharing, consulting, acting, and monitoring in landscapes.
  3. Build capacity and facilitate learning among key stakeholders for better outcomes in integrated landscape management. Develop learning systems for emerging leaders in integrated landscape management to actively share and discuss lessons from successes and failures. Establish multi-objective landscape monitoring and data systems for adaptive management. Convene multi-stakeholder dialogues to deepen understanding of landscape management and encourage cross-stakeholder communication. Build long-term interdisciplinary research partnerships between universities and landscape initiatives.”

The biggest challenge we face in Africa is often not the amount of organisations operating on international funding, but capacitating existing professionals and academics in countries such as South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Botswana, etc. The professionals working in the development sector—architects, engineers, and landscape architects—are actively working on projects not only in their own countries, but also in wider Africa. In my experience, they most often work in silos, not being aware of other professionals operating in the same geographic area and most certainly not aware of organisations involved with landscape initiatives. We must strengthen professional networks and move away from decentralised events and planning in Europe, England, or America, and hosting such events in Africa itself.

Sources

Global Canopy (2015) The Little Sustainable Landscapes Book. Report, available online: http://globalcanopy.org/sites/default/files/documents/resources/GCP_Little_Sustainable_LB_DEC15.pdf

NEPAD. 2015. NEPAD Launches Initiative for the Resilience and Restoration of African Landscapes, available online here.

Hart, AK, Milder, JC, Estrada-Carmona, N, DeClerck, FAJ, Harvey, CA and Dobie, P. 2015. Integrated landscape initiatives in practice: assessing experiences from 191 landscapes in Africa and Latin America, World Agroforestry. 2015 Climate-Smart Landscapes: Multifunctionality in Practice, Published Report.

Monica Luengo

About the Writer:
Monica Luengo

Monica Luengo is an art historian and landscape architect. Honorary member of the International Scientific Committee of Cultural Landscapes, consultant, and lecturer on cultural landscapes.

Monica Luengo

Cities as landscapes

When I have been asked to participate in conferences on urban landscapes, I have often realized that the organizers intended me to speak only of parks and gardens—of “green” in the city, literally. Therefore, perhaps the first clarification we should make is this: What do we mean by urban landscape?

A landscape approach will be the basis for improving both cities and the global environment.

In recent decades, the concept of landscape has surpassed its traditional meaning, which was limited to the view of a natural landscape that becomes a mental construction in the mind of the observer, which subsequently becomes a critical perception of the territory (European Landscape Convention, 2000). And still further, today we speak of landscape as a system of services (e.g., ecosystem services), as an expression of social relations, and as a result of everyday experiences—as a superposition of layers of different meanings embodied in a particular place, which acquires a particular identity. Thus, a city, or its urban landscape, is made up of an amalgam of territorial, political, cultural, social, economic, and environmental layers.

From this complex view of the landscape—particularly the urban landscape—and because of progressive environmental (and landscape) degradation due to multiple factors, there have been many new initiatives exploring how landscape directly affects the welfare of people and their sense of identity.

These initiatives are born at multiple levels—international, national, regional, or local—since landscape is affected by both global (climate change, migration) and local factors; they are dependent on specific territorial policies. In 2000, the need to address these different spatial scales inspired the European Landscape Convention, or ELC, which includes both the countryside and urban areas. The Convention aims to contribute “to the welfare of human beings and the consolidation of European identity”, and has become an important element in the quality of life of populations. The ELC intends to promote the protection, management, and planning of landscapes, and organizes European cooperation based on the understanding that the landscape knows no borders.

Following from and rooted in the Convention, numerous strategies, national plans, and landscape laws have been established in most of the countries represented in the Council of Europe, and cities have established their own Landscape Plans.

General view of the "Morro da Providencia" favela, one of the most violent of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, taken on August 20, 2008. The French photographer identified as JR is launching a project called "Women Are Heroes", through which the photographs of women, relatives of the victims of clashes between the police and drug traffickers, were placed in the facades of the houses. This project already took place in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Liberia, and will be taken to India, Cambodia, Laos and Morocco after Brazil. AFP PHOTO/VANDERLEI ALMEIDA (Photo credit should read VANDERLEI ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images)
General view of the “Morro da Providencia” favela, one of the most violent of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, taken on August 20, 2008. The French photographer identified as JR is launching a project called “Women Are Heroes”, through which the photographs of women, relatives of the victims of clashes between the police and drug traffickers, were placed in the facades of the houses. This project already took place in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Liberia, and will be taken to India, Cambodia, Laos and Morocco after Brazil. Photo: VANDERLEI ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images

The ELC has had a large influence since 2000. Although it is not compulsory for cities to create a landscape plan, the strength of the ELC has inspired many cities to reconsider the urban landscape with new legislation, rules, or guidelines. Such legal and regulatory work has made cities healthier, safer, and happier places to be. Various actions have been implemented: reducing risk of flooding, planning inspiring environments throughout the urban fabric, taking measures against climate change, enacting biodiversity plans, and even plans that combine all of the aforementioned. This is the case with my own city, Madrid, which a few years ago adopted a landscape plan. Unfortunately, there remain many examples, as is the case with Madrid, in which the “landscape” plan is limited to mostly architectural or aesthetic aspects of the city, largely ignoring people and the complex strata of lived experience in the city. Our collective concept of the “urban landscape” is evolving, but still has some way to go to achieve a consistently holistic view of the urban environment as a matrix of people, built form, and nature.

After UNESCO adopted the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape in 2011, we have seen the great challenge of the conservation of historic cities and their identity for years to come. In brief, the policy suggests abandoning a purely architectural or monumental view of the city, replacing it with a landscape approach. The idea for a possible Global Landscape Convention, another UNESCO project born at this time, has also experienced many impediments to progress. On the other hand, the innovative Latin American Landscape Initiative and MED-O-MED, or MedScapes—referring to the Mediterranean—has found surprising success.

Traditionally the domain of architects and urban planners, the city is still an uncharted area in which to experiment with these new ideas of landscape—ideas that promote an understanding of the urban phenomenon from a holistic point of view. The landscape idea views cities as processes, as dynamic entities in which both the natural and the built play important roles, but many other factors, including people and communities, also have vital influences. Moreover, in today’s world, we must not forget that cities are extraordinary meeting places, places of coexistence and of exchange of values in incredible settings of cultural diversity. Today, during an age of significant migration to cities and among countries, the evolution of cities continues or even is accelerated.

The urban landscape of our cities is changing and transforming at a breakneck speed, and, at the same time, we are faced with severe environmental degradation. Undoubtedly, a landscape approach, in which dynamism is one of the key and appreciated characteristics, will be the basis for improving both cities and the global environment.

Claudia Misteli

About the Writer:
Claudia Misteli Fajardo

Social communicator, journalist and social designer, interested in how design, communication and social innovation can shape and reshape a more resilient and sustainable future. A strong believer that empathy, creativity, cooperation and the force of landscape opens up infinite opportunities to build better societies, more connected to nature and people.

Claudia Misteli

A landscape initiative is like living cells. Cells have all the equipment necessary to carry out functions of life. A cell can move, grow, transform, adapt to changes in its environment, and can even replicate itself. A cell has life in itself, but cells have much more power when they group themselves to form something else, something bigger and more complex.

People are the meaning, the instrument, and the main objective of the Latin American Landscape Initiative.

This is precisely the character of the Latin American Landscape Initiative, or LALI, an initiative launched and ratified in Medellín, Colombia, in October 2012. LALI is a living organism that aims to stimulate, at global, regional, and local levels, the recognition and the position of landscape as a fundamental objective in order to protect our past—our heritage—and to configure the future in a more coherent way with nature, people, and their landscape. It’s a bottom-up initiative that, from the knowledge, the experience, the persistence, and the endeavor of people and entities, has been able to weave a large network throughout Latin America for the benefit of the protection, management, planning, and recognition of the landscape.

One of the requirements of an initiative such as this one is leadership. Although these initiatives should be organized in a transverse way without a rigid hierarchy, a leadership or co-leadership of someone, several people, or several organizations, must be present.

A second key factor deals with the idea, the message, that the initiative promotes, as well as its content. For instance, the Latin American Landscape Initiative organized itself in different clusters; although they all deal with different topics and disciplines, all of the clusters are related with each other and need the energy and power of the others in order to go forward. Clusters such as Education, Civil Society, Good Practices, Catalogues, Publications, and Communications are, at present, the core of the initiative.

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The LALI Network.

A third key element, and a very important one when we talk about landscape, is certainly transdisciplinarity. The diversity of approaches and perspectives (from architecture, geography, ecology, arts, publicity, etc.) enriches landscape projects and multiplies all synergies. But it is noteworthy that the LALI initiative could not work without the support and commitment of civil society (in the end, LALI comes from Latin American civil society). People are the meaning, the instrument, and the main objective.

Another relevant aspect, which does not depend on the initiative itself, is the existence of a legal landscape framework that could act as an umbrella for the development of the different activities of the initiative. For example, the lack of this legal landscape framework at a Latin American level has not stopped the work of the LALI—in Europe, the European Landscape Convention already exists—but this legal framework could help strength and provide more tools and possibilities for its implementation.

Cities are, like landscape initiatives, living organisms. This is why cities need these new approaches to develop and evolve, to become urban hubs of ideas, commerce, culture, education, and, of course, to empower people to be more aware of what they have, the cities they want to live in, the quality of cities’ landscapes and the kind of society and values with which they are identified.

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Main square in Filandia (Quindío), Colombia. Photo: Claudia Misteli
Osvaldo Moreno

About the Writer:
Osvaldo Moreno

Osvaldo Moreno Flores is a PhD candidate and has his MSc. in Landscape, Environment and City. He has worked as a professor and consultant in landscape architecture and in urban environmental planning.

Osvaldo Moreno

Traditionally, the focus on green areas and public spaces in cities has been characterized by a fragmented way of addressing the problems of planning, design and management, without a systemic approach that can integrate their interrelationships and potential synergies. This has resulted in enabling spaces and equipment in contexts of urban centrality, with high construction and maintenance costs and low impacts on beneficiaries’ coverage. It should be noted here that most Chilean cities are under the standards of green areas per inhabitant defined by the World Health Organization, which recommends 9m2. of green area per inhabitant. In general, cities in Chile have rates around 4m2. of green area per inhabitant (Urban Observatory, MINVU). Under these terms, achieving the standards that relate to improved urban environmental quality is a difficult task, especially if the focus is on building new green areas.

Green spaces’ comprehensive, dynamic, and participatory management represents one of the most important challenges of urban and environmental agendas in Chilean cities.

Moreover, a large number of public and private green areas are located in areas of middle and upper socioeconomic strata, as opposed to the deficit situation observed in low socioeconomic sectors. Such sociospatial segregation affects the provision and accessibility of ecosystem services that green areas provide to city’s inhabitants. Green spaces and their components—at the level of vegetation, soil, water, programs, infrastructure and equipment—are systems that contain important ecological, sociocultural, and economic functions. Therefore, green spaces’ comprehensive, dynamic, and participatory management represents one of the most important challenges of urban and environmental agendas in Chilean cities.

From this scenario emerges the need to incorporate the notion of green infrastructure into public policies that aim to form a systemic and integrated look that can go beyond traditional management models of urban green areas. These policies should promote an innovative approach for rethinking, understanding, and managing those systems and components that contribute to the balance of life in its many forms—human, animal, plant—which generally are degraded, neglected, or hidden in urban contexts. Rivers, streams, creeks, wetlands, hills, farmland, forests, grasslands, parks, and peri-urban spaces—these systems and components, almost in the manner of a puzzle, are available to regroup and to strengthen, to establish synergies and complementarities that benefit not only natural ecosystems, but that also provide strategic functions and services for the population living in the city and its surroundings.

Hills in Santiago (Credits Carbonell & Soto)
Hills in Santiago. Image: Carbonell & Soto

Green infrastructure is defined as an interconnected network of urban, peri-urban, rural, and wild green areas that preserve and furnish ecosystem functions and environmental services for the human population, such as providing clean water, improving air quality, mitigating urban heat island, conserving biodiversity and wildlife, enabling recreation, providing scenic beauty, and facilitating disaster protection, among other benefits. In terms of international experience, green infrastructure as a normative or indicative planning instrument is evident in various initiatives globally, especially in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Among others, the Green Infrastructure and Landscape Plan of Valencia (2011), the Green Belt Plan of Vitoria-Gasteiz (2010), the System of Coastal Forests of Japan managed through programs such as the Forest Conservation Projects (Ohta, 2012), the Natural England Green Infrastructure Guidance (2009) or the Green Infrastructure and Low Impact Development Evaluation and Implementation Plan of the State of New York (NYSDEC, 2012).

Through a green Infrastructure planning approach, our cities can be more sustainable and resilient living systems, improving the quality of people’s lives and helping to conserve ecosystems and landscapes, which are understood as key pieces for the balance of our social, economic, and environmental dynamics.

Laura Spinadel

About the Writer:
Laura Spinadel

Architect, Urban Designer, Landscaper, Filmmaker, Multimedia Communicator, Editor. Cisiting professor in Spain, Brazil, Mexico, USA, Italy, Colombia and Argentina.

Laura Spinadel

Tell me, when you were a child, were you allowed to play in the street?

I am constantly confronted by PRIVATIZED public space which is marked by Big Brother and the fear of what is different.

Autobiographical details mark us out in our thinking and our actions. I am convinced that the work I do is shaping society…and that often makes me aware that I must constantly feed my curiosity with images and experiences from all over the world. Seeing how different cultures spend their time in society is my definition of URBANITY. And by building living spaces as an integral designer, it is from those gaps that I must permanently tame the INNER CHILD we all have inside of us, in order to be open to other ways of experiencing the multiple realities that exist. My key has always been to link space with TIME, which is what leads us to understand that everything changes, and that what is important is to be sensitive, and to recognize the POTENTIAL that we must awaken in people so that they can relate to it and evolve.

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Campus WU. Photo: Laura Spinadel

Going back to the question. I was not allowed to play alone in the street because I lived much of my childhood under military dictatorships in Argentina. Nowadays, I live in a city where everyone takes “pride” in not playing in the street because that is what foreign immigrants do. In my work as a holistic architect, I am constantly confronted by PRIVATIZED public space that, obviously, nobody wants to pay for, and which, in our globalized culture, is marked by Big Brother and the fear of what is different.

It was very interesting when, a few years ago, I made a film about Campus WU in Vienna, interviewing all of the protagonists who interacted in the conception and realization of the largest University of Economics and Business in the European Union. I asked all of them the same question to kick off the dialogue. Economists, architects, politicians, etc.—all people from different cultures who, together, helped us create this MIRACLE, each of them complementing the others with their NOSTALGIA, using our vision to give birth to a place for FREEDOM. The miracle was that everyone was ready to synchronize with the vision of creating a huge university park which would be open 24/7 for everyone—overcoming all preconceptions—where overstretched economics students would cross paths with visitors to the popular Prater amusement park; and with hoards of football fans who lay waste to everything before the game, drinking beer on our campus; and with international tourists trying to get a selfie in front of a piece of architecture from the “Star System”.

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Campus WU. Photo: Laura Spinadel

But…careful…don’t think that we have overcome the 1960s and that everyone respects pedestrians, or that investors have suddenly discovered that they want to be patrons who BRING MORE LAUGHTER into society. When we won the competition for the Masterplan Campus WU, we had no budget for the 70,000m2 university park, nobody in the city had thought about the impact of having 30,000 intruders in a neighbourhood of 100,000 people, and, of course, there was no facility manager to set limits by pointing out that having a university open to society would result in maintenance and security costs that were higher than those for a mega building with an indoor academic life.

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Campus WU. Photo: Laura Spinadel

I think it’s extremely important that someone moderate the process and set up a Hannah Arendt “table” in order to interrelate interests and allow the process to gestate COMMUNITY. In this case, it was an anthroposophic Latin American woman dreaming of a better world who managed to wake up the perceived enemies—ECONOMISTS—to the belief that public space was the added value, in order to change perspectives so that we could RETHINK ECONOMY.

In the last few years, I have travelled extensively around the world presenting this project, which has not just stayed on paper, but through the efforts of thousands of people has been transformed into a contemporary space that is driving the economy and culture in Vienna. It is not a space which is merely a baroque jewel; it is a PROCESS that this city was encouraged to start. I must say, in answer to your question, that I’m frightened by the housing speculation bubble that is destroying all of the values that I am talking about in terms of building the RES PUBLICA of the XXI century. I am given hope by initiatives such as the Landscape Law in Chile, Flower Power Neighbourhood Movements in Australia, and the new American generations in Washington who do not want the American dream.

We are learning to see and to believe again. It’s worth encouraging creation from within!

Kenneth Taylor

About the Writer:
Kenneth Taylor

Emeritus Professor Ken Taylor has had a research interest in management of heritage places and cultural landscapes since the mid-1980s.

Ken Taylor

My comments focus on the relationship between the landscape idea and cities and the proposition that cities (urban areas) are in fact cultural landscapes (Taylor 2015). The cultural landscape paradigm can be seen to offer a trajectory of thinking relevant to the historic urban environment, not least because we are dealing primarily with vernacular culture, where landscape study is a form of social history. Such discourse in turn supports the notion that views landscape as a cultural construct reflecting human values.

Landscape is not static; it reflects changing human ideologies over time.

The significance of the cultural landscape concept in the urban sphere is that it allows us to see and understand the approach to urban conservation that concentrates on individual buildings as “devoid of the socio-spatial context” that “contributes to a deterioration of the [wider] urban physical fabric” (Punekar, 2006, p.110). Notable to this line of thinking is the emergence of the Historic Urban Landscape paradigm and its evolving pivotal role in the discourse on historic urban conservation. Inherent in this mode of thinking is the role of landscape change that takes place over time with changing values in culturally diverse communities. Landscape is not static; it reflects changing human ideologies over time. In the urban landscape it is critical that we are able to manage change so that historic cities, as they change in response to changing values, reflect their human history, but do not become merely designated historic zones with a tight boundary around them, devoid of a sense of lived-in places. This thinking is summarised by van Oers (2010, p.14):

“Historic Urban Landscape is a mindset, an understanding of the city, or parts of the city, as an outcome of natural, cultural and socio-economic processes that construct it spatially, temporally, and experientially. It is as much about buildings and spaces, as about rituals and values that people bring into the city. This concept encompasses layers of symbolic significance, intangible heritage, perception of values, and interconnections between the composite elements of the historic urban landscape, as well as local knowledge including building practices and management of natural resources. Its usefulness resides in the notion that it incorporates a capacity for change.”

References

Taylor K, (2015), ‘Cities as Cultural Landscapes’ in Bandarin F & Van Oers R, eds (2015), Reconnecting the City.The Historic Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Punekar A (2006), ‘Value-led Heritage and Sustainable Development: The Case of Bijapur, India’ in Roger Zetter and Georgina Watson (eds) Designing Sustainable Cities in the Developing World, Aldershot UK & Burlington VT: Ashgate.

van Oers R, (2010), ‘Managing cities and the historic urban landscape initiative – an Introduction’ 7-17 in Van Oers, R. & Haraguchi, S., eds. UNESCO World Heritage Papers27 Managing Historic Cities; Paris: UNESCO World Heritage Centre.

Menno Welling

About the Writer:
Menno Welling

Menno Welling is the owner and lead consultant of African Heritage Ltd in Zomba and African Heritage Consulting in the Netherlands. His interests are in African archaeology, cultural landscapes, heritage tourism and intangible cultural heritage.

Menno Welling

Currently, Zomba is the fourth city in Malawi. But while the other three are ever expanding, Zomba seems to maintain a status quo. There is no big industry, and government departments are slowly moving out. In colonial days, Zomba was the capital of the Nyasaland Protectorate. It was founded by the Blantyre Mission of the Church of Scotland in the 1880s, and British Consul A.J. Hawes decided the little settlement—at the foot of a lush green plateau with several mountain streams—would be the ideal place for setting up central government administration.

In Zomba, Malawi, historic preservation and greenery seem to be considered antithetical to development and the modern city.

In the course of the next decades, Zomba slowly developed. Office buildings were constructed in vernacular architecture and residential areas laid out, the latter following racial and social segregation, as was common in that time. The high ranking white officers lived up the slopes of Zomba Mountain. A large golf course separated them from the African and Asian communities down below. In those days, Zomba was known as the Garden Capital of the British Empire. Indeed, the comparatively moderate climate lent itself to urban greenery. Trees were planted along the roads—and not only in the upper class area. Privately, the British officers, if not their wives and Malawian gardeners, tended their gardens in typical fashion. The common lot size in the white area was 1 hectare, allowing for sizable lawns surrounded by tropical flowers and trees. These, in turn, attracted the most colourful birds, such as Livingstone’s turaco and various hornbills.

typical colonial residence with a brick wall surrounding the neighbours plot
A typical colonial residence in Zomba, Malawi, with a brick wall surrounding the neighbours’ plot. Photo: Menno Welling

After independence, President Kamuzu Banda decided to move the capital of what had become Malawi to Lilongwe, which was much more centrally located. The city of Lilongwe was developed with the aid of South African urban planners in the 1970s. Following South African principles of ‘divide & rule’ the Lilongwe neighbourhoods, or “Areas”, as they are called, were spaced wide apart, separated by bush or agricultural land. Ever since, Zomba has gradually seen its government departments and the parliament move to Lilongwe. Whereas other British colonial capitals in Africa have become metropolitan cities with high-rises and skyscrapers, Zomba has, for the most part, retained its charming colonial character. Indeed, its historical core would be worth a World Heritage nomination. Just as nearby Mozambique Island is an outstanding example of Portuguese colonial heritage. And like Mozambique Island–or Zanzibar, or the Island of Gorée, for that matter—Zomba could exploit that heritage for tourism purposes in order to boost the local economy.

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Brick wall construction. Photo: Menno Welling

As it is, such developments seem far away. In April 2014, Zomba City Council started cutting the century old Mahogany trees that flanked the main road through Zomba and which are its hallmark. Historical buildings such as the District Assembly and the regional police headquarters were marked for destruction. As any modern city, Zomba was to have a dual carriageway, and greenery and buildings had to give way. From an urban planning point of view, the proposed development was poor; it had all the signs of a political campaign tool of a sitting president seeking re-election who had not yet left a tangible legacy in her home district. City administrators seized the opportunity, as a more sensible city bypass might never come.

On technical grounds, a group of concerned citizens managed to get a court order against further destruction and the National Roads Authority settled for merely redoing the existing road. A lot of damage to the trees was, however, already done. Given vested interests, even some trees outside the construction zone had been cut. Two year later, little seems to have come from the mandatory replanting of 500 trees as part of the court settlement. And another mahogany tree was just cut down by a local resident citing laxity in pruning by city officials.

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A road with its flanking trees cut down. Photo: Menno Welling

Yet another development is threatening the garden city of modern Malawi. Under the pretence of security concerns, homeowners have started erecting brick walls around their plots. If this tendency is not kept in check, the pleasant mountain roads along lush gardens and charming white houses will turn into brick funnels. How would this historical neighbourhood then be different from a newly built, middle class area in, let’s say, Lilongwe?

At the heart of these issues lays the concept of development. I dare say security concerns in Zomba do not warrant a brick wall fence. The wall has become part of the middle and upper class homeowner mentality. The same goes for city officials; historic preservation and greenery seem to be considered antithetical to development and the modern city. At the same time, officials may opt for immediate benefits, rather than the elusive prospect of increased tourism potential—despite such being included in the Urban Development Plan.

Landscape, Cities, and the Pope: a Shift for a Better Future?

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Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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I believe that urban landscape matters! The landscape in which one grows up, matures, and lives life may be the essential factor in determining the behavior towards and empathy with nature and with other people and their cultures. The landscape can even be the way we connect to ourselves.

The shape of our cities is a result of the historical changes in land cover, built structures, and the continuous man-made interferences that are made in the landscape and its relationship with natural factors such as geomorphology, climate, biodiversity, ecosystem remnants, green areas, and urban forests. Social aspects are not less important. Cities that segregate social life in closed communities (being gated high-end or middle class enclosures, or favelas), malls and cars, may induce prejudice and injustice. Live streets and urban amenities are the public realm where the different meet, learn with each other, and may have daily contact with nature and natural processes.

Landscapes and the spiritual bond with Nature

When I walked along the Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto, I felt the spiritual power of Nature in the urban landscape. The path meanders along a channelized river, with clean waters in the city border. The landscape is peaceful, with the city in one side and the forest in the other, the water flows in between.

Shinto shrine. Photo: Cecilia Herrzog
Shinto shrine. Photo: Cecilia Herrzog

There are several Temples and Shrines along the path. The Shinto Shrines profoundly touched me. I was ignorant of their sacred meanings, but I have never felt this deep connection with Nature in a spiritual way before. Being a non-religious Jew myself, I perceived the temples and churches I have entered in my life as built structures; I have never had the feelings I had in the shrines! Actually, much earlier in my life I remember when I was in Assisi (Italy), I felt something very special. I was touched by St. Francis of Assisi’s history of loving of nature and its creatures. At the top of the hill was the place where he had lived, and I could feel the energy of nature flowing around. Maybe this was the source of his inspiration and connection with holy love to nature and living organisms.

After these experiences, I started reflecting about our divine bond with nature, and how the landscape influences our lives and values.

Until I read the E.O. Wilson’s book The Creation, I had never really had any thoughts about how religion could play an important role in ecological education and awareness raising. In his book, scientist Wilson dialogues with religion, and looks for the common ground to protect and restore Nature.

And what a grateful surprise was the Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis! The LAUDATO SI’ calls on all of humanity “to care for our common home”. Firmly grounded in science, the Pope talks about consumption, greed and accumulation; the oil addicted society that eradicates ecosystems and depletes natural resources. He also says that we cannot trust only in technical solutions to solve our environmental and social problems. He declares the urgent need to restore, conserve, and protect our environment. He urges all of us to mitigate the colossal damage that our civilization has made, and to avoid climate change and the huge uncertainties that are threatening the future of humanity. The response to his message has been massive, and I believe that 2015 is crucial to prioritize life and also to shift the way we see, plan, and design our landscapes at all scales.

Cities in challenging times

How can globalized, modernist urban landscapes reconnect urban dwellers with Mother Earth?

We are living in challenging times in which cities play a crucial role, as so many authors of The Nature of Cities have pointed out from different perspectives. In this international blog, contributors have presented and discussed examples that are popping up around the world—of social-ecological oriented research, planning, and design, wherein biodiversity is treated as fundamental. Many of those case studies come from local residents who want more livable places to raise kids in healthy and diverse environments.

However, many cities have remained in the old modernist sprawl paradigm—based on high consumption economies, gated communities with homogenized gardens, and automotive transportation that requires costly infrastructure—known as business-as-usual. The surrounding ecosystems’ remnants and productive lands are eradicated in this process. Also, old urban areas have been transformed, destroying their history and culture. Gentrification in renovated regions is another negative factor, displacing residents and small businesses while ceding room for a globalized culture and international brand stores. This globalized trend widens the social gap even farther, especially in poorer countries, where it is already abyssal.

Our planet is urban not only because the Biosphere is giving way to built surfaces, but also because the political and economic decisions are largely taken by city dwellers.

I consider ecological illiteracy to be one of the main drivers of the disconnection and disregard of our Home: our planet, our region, our city, our neighborhood, our street or our own home. Or even with our own selves!

How can people connect with nature and its processes if they spend their life in air-conditioned (or heated) built boxes, apart from biodiversity and social diversity? How can they develop and act on their Biophilia in artificially built and “controlled” landscapes? [Biophilia is the “innate and genetically determined affinity of human beings with the natural world” (E.O. Wilson)] Much has been written, published, and discussed in conferences about those issues (see for instance Tim Beatley in this blog).

Urban landscapes and reconnection with Nature

For me, the Pope’s call to “care for our home” is more than a metaphor for the Planet’s degradation and the related risks to Humanity. It is time to care for our home at all scales, including the ecological restoration of our urban landscapes.

In Brazil, the number of urban dwellers that are engaging in growing organic food, fighting for ecosystem restoration and water conservation, and getting together to learn and exchange experiences has been growing exponentially. As everywhere, in this country, social media is helping people to communicate among themselves about their findings and experiences with Nature and natural processes in multiple ways. We have very positive results on the fields that actually enhance urban landscapes ecologically and socially: publications and courses on related themes are starting to pop up around the country; leaders are assuming important roles, participating in actions and policy elaboration; volunteers are expanding their work in a society without a tradition of social work.

There are lots of good examples that are more powerful every day, as I have already mentioned in my previous posts in this blog. Hortelões Urbanos (Urban Food Gardeners), an urban agriculture group in São Paulo, has been a source of knowledge and inspiration to similar projects in cities around the country, and now depends on more than 17,000 followers (in less than 4 years). Their interventions in parks and squares in São Paulo, the largest Metropolitan Region, are awesome: from green or gray deserts, they create biodiverse, productive landscapes with waters springing again.

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A Hortelões Urbanos (Urban Food Gardeners garden in São Paulo. Photo: Cecilia Hezog

Rios e Ruas (Rivers and Streets) is another group that has been working in the last decades to ecologically educate residents. They have been tracing rivers and creeks that were wiped out from the landscape. The severe drought that is hitting Southeastern Brazil, with water shortages threatening the removal of large number of residents from urbanized areas, has helped to give visibility to their work

Fig3-a-2014-11-09 Oficina Festival Praça da Nascente 02A few years ago Juliana Gatti and Sandro Von Matter started the Instituto Árvores Vivas (Living Trees Institute). They have a remarkable engaging and educational role in São Paulo. They are actually changing the way Paulistas (São Paulo residents) see, feel, and act regarding trees and their urban lives.

The green economy is slowly starting to emerge in Brazilian cities, with new companies that develop green technologies to implement green roofs and walls, solar energy, water bioremediation and conservation, and bio-sanitation, at different scales. Hopefully, with the dramatic water shortage and the challenges of the changing paradigm towards a clean economy, they will rise and help Brazil get out of its severe economic crisis.

Another excellent and inspirational example is the Skygarden, a relatively new company specialized in green roofs and walls, that mimics São Paulo’s native ecosystems: Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Rainforest) and Cerrado (Brazilian Savanah). The founder/owner Ricardo Cardim, studied odontology, but soon fell in love with botany and native ecosystems and then went on to a Master’s in biology. In 2008, he started an NGO named Árvores de São Paulo (São Paulo Trees), and from then on has been helping to change hearts and minds regarding autochthonous urban trees, not only in streets and parks, but also in roofs and facades

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The TransCarioca Trail, in Rio de Janeiro.

In Rio de Janeiro, the remarkable TransCarioca Trail project is underway with the support of hundreds of volunteers under the leadership of Pedro Menezes and Celso Junius. It is a more than 180 km-long walking track over the splendid massifs of the city, connecting several protected areas. It spans the world-renowned Sugar Loaf to the distant beaches of Guaratiba.

Another initiative that is also gaining more support is Green Corridors, part of the Carioca Mosaic project, in the lower areas on the water basin where most of the Olympic Games facilities are concentrated.

Fig-6-flood-prone-areas
The locations of the low lying areas, or water basin, in Rio.

Shift for a better future

I have written before in this blog about the challenges and opportunities that the city of Rio de Janeiro has had in the last few years, especially with the high investments focused on international events—the 2014 Soccer World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games being the most internationally recognized. Unfortunately, decisions about the future of our cities (not only Rio de Janeiro) are mainly focusing on companies that build gray infrastructure, engage in non-productive land speculation, and support the oil-based transportation industry. This means building cities-as-usual: sprawling and transforming the landscape and changing natural processes and flows with social segregation.

The current trend can be easily seen in the “Marvelous City” of Rio de Janeiro. There is a disconnection between the recommendations of scientific assessments to adapt the city to climate change and what is being actually implemented. The money is flowing to the West Zone, where the map shows high vulnerabilities of low lands to floods and sea level rise.

Gated community in Rio. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
Model of gated community in Rio. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
Golf-olimpic(Herzog)
Golf Olimpic in Rio.

We might expect that what is happening was planned based on the knowledge that was generated by state-of-the-art academic research, supported by the city since 2007. Not at all…Wetlands and protected areas have been eradicated with the excuse of the Olympic Games. The rich biodiversity and wet landscapes that offer irreplaceable ecosystem services have been transformed into more and more gated communities, commercial areas adorned with homogenized cosmetic gardens, and the expressways on which oil-dependent transportation oil-dependent relies. In this process, the city is losing not only its ecological heritage, but its cultural identity.

One of the most significant examples is the Olympic Golf course that was built over one of the last protected remnants of Restinga (sandy soil, sea border ecosystem). Besides the elimination of biodiversity and ecosystem services, the landscape conversion to lawn requires daily irrigation in times of uncertain climate. The real estate market is the beneficiary of this mega-gated development, as many others in the same water catchment.

A sewage canal in Rio. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
A sewage canal in Rio. Photo: Cecilia Herzog

The social segregation and lack of sanitation are still huge issues and the City has not complied with the commitments it assumed when the right to host the Olympic Games was won. The rivers, lagoons and even Guanabara Bay are heavily polluted with sewage, diffuse stormwater run-off, and garbage.

Civil society is fighting against what is happening in the city. Its voices are heard mainly on social media when the traditional media doesn’t open space for protests and meetings.

Landscape for today and the future

Landscape is becoming an important issue as people start to understand how they depend on biodiversity and the ecosystem services they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives. Unfortunately, in Brazil, the profession of landscape architect is neither recognized nor institutionalized. We are in the process of passing a law that will make possible to start new undergrad courses in the area of landscape architecture in Brazilian Universities. We need to implement interdisciplinary courses, establish research groups, and fund pilot projects that demonstrate how our landscapes work, their social-ecological functions, and their processes.

Pierre-André Martin and I are coordinating a new Master’s in Ecological Landscape Planning and Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in the Department of Architecture and Urbanism, to start next August. The course is interdisciplinary, with professors from landscape planning and design, urbanism, biology, geography, social sciences, law, anthropology, and engineering.

We urgently need cities that praise nature, that protect and restore native biodiversity in all possible ways. We must escape from the trap of fragmented knowledge and look for integrative research and teamwork on adaptive landscape-based urban planning and design. We must monitor results and learn what works or not in our landscapes. We must plant trees to have water and food. The cities have to be part of the Biosphere with green infrastructure that regenerates degraded gray and polluted areas. People have to be educated and reconnected to life to participate in the landscape planning and design process.

I hope that the momentum we are living is transformational. Powerful forces are moving to make effective change in the economic, social, and environmental paradigms: from a competitive society to a more cooperative world, where natural capital has more value than the virtual financial market. I believe that the call of Pope Francis can help, especially in Brazil. We are the most populous Catholic country in the world, with more than 120 millions followers of the religion.

I hope all people hear his call and give science and practitioners with ecological vision the opportunity to contribute to a shift to a better future.

Cecilia Herzog
Rio de Janeiro

On The Nature of Cities

A garden full of flowers and tall plants

Landscapes Can Talk

Essay, North America, People & Communities, Place & Design, , , ,
Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Make the stories of your landscapes louder. Narrate them. Spread their seeds. Write about what you see around you, about the beauty and pain that emerges in these varied contexts. Pay attention to the places and spaces that are of value to your loved ones, and notice all that is there. Remember, remember, remember.

It’s July. With the windows down, drive to the corner of Hudson Street and Netherwood Avenue. Pull into the driveway lined with Marigolds and with Morning Glories climbing the mailbox. You might miss the street sign, which is regularly hidden behind Sunflowers 10 feet high, but you can’t miss the strawberry patch nipping at their feet. Park the car and step outside. A warm breeze will caress your skin and tenderly play the percussion of wooden wind chimes. You will feel something special about this place, and the birds will confirm it; you’ll find dozens of them singing at the bird baths, waiting patiently for the bird feeder, made from plastic soda bottles, to be refilled with seeds. Say hello to them.

A driveway lined in orange marigolds leading up to a white house and a man turned away from the camera
Photo: Ashley Jankowski

Gramps will come through the screen door in cracked bare feet and a sunhat. You can take your shoes off, too, if you’d like to feel the sweet grass on your ankles and the thick mud between your toes. He’ll hand you a Tupperware bowl with your name Sharpie-scribbled on the lid before wandering around the side of the house. Follow him.

He’ll lead you just around the corner to a blueberry bush. As you step closer, you’ll smell sugar and earth, a scent that conceals the stench of the trash cans and recycling bins overflowing against the house’s exterior. Gramps will gesture to your Tupperware and tell you that the birds will get to the blueberries first if you don’t hurry. ​​Careful now; look out for critters as you gently pull a berry from a branch. Look closely. Each blueberry is a rounded, blue-purple shade of perfect and just about the size of a marble. Squeeze one between your thumb and your pointer finger and notice how little force is required for it to fall apart. Pop it into your mouth; feel the fruit drenching your tongue in tart juice instead of the expected sweet. A few steps further and you’ll find a pocket of sky-high beanstalks, heavy with foot-long beans that are more often purple than green. Munch on one and tug at another to add to your loot. Start thinking about creative ways to prepare them. Once Gramps knows you like them, he’ll bring you jumbo Ziploc bags of them all summer long. In your peripheral vision, you’ll catch the sight of a dilapidated statue of the Holy Mary standing lopsided next to a prayer bench covered half with soft moss, half with peeling paint. Be sure to thank the hands that prepared this food; this is how Nana used to conclude grace before every family dinner.

Continue into the backyard. To your left, find the tiny, concrete patio adorned with wooden picnic furniture painted terracotta red. You won’t be able to see the years of barbeque nights, rounds of Hearts, Scattergories, and Easter egg dyeing held around the sticky table-clothed table. The table is now covered with old prescription bottles that once held Gramps’s Alzheimer’s medication and Nana’s Parkinson’s pills. They are now filled with seeds and layered with new labels of wrinkled duct tape.

A garden full of flowers and tall plants
Photo: Ashley Jankowski

To your right, find Gramps’s three piles of compost – separated by jagged metal sheets and chunks of broken doors and fences – which he meticulously spins thrice annually. Here lies the secret behind his fertile soil. Watch as he scatters a handful of pumpkin seed-laden compost onto his yard; he will accidentally grow a sweeping pumpkin patch by fall.

Gramps is resourceful and imaginative. He finds new life for everything. Adjacent to the compost is Gramp’s shed, overflowing with odds and ends, crates, wires, tubs, twigs, tires, and tubes, all of which Gramps has saved to tend to his yard. Bags of human hair, collected from the local barber shop, rest against the shed, waiting to be poured out around the garden to deter the deer. Hanging on the outer wall of the shed are three wooden hooks labeled Kyle, Ashley, and Chelsea: places for his three grandchildren, now grown, to hang their little coats, grab a shovel, and learn alongside him.

Watch your head! Two taut clotheslines spread from Gramp’s shed to a tired post. He is hang drying his jeans, his underwear, and his single-use medical masks. During the 30 years of his marriage, Gramps was not allowed to touch the laundry, as Nana feared that he might tragically mix colors or disrupt her meticulous schedule. Sometimes, you pass by, see the lines, and forget she’s gone. But she’s dead, and he’s learned to tend to his own clothes in necessitated mimicry. Gramp’s wrinkled fingers pinch wooden clothespins one by one.

Continue on. Against the house, beauty and pain intersect; Gramp’s thorny pink roses and deep green ivies wrap higher and higher about his trellis each year. The once-was are made tangible in their old growth. As you greet the thick rows of carrots and jungle of tomatoes running the length of the backyard, notice an intermittent array of lime green tennis balls bobbing upon the poles delineating the contours of the garden. These are round relics of the fateful summer evening when my brother, playing hide and seek in the garden, pounded his knee into a rusty metal stake. After watching his grandson get eight stitches and a tetanus shot, Gramps decided to kid-proof his yard.

The back corner of the lot is where the old wooden swing lies. Look, don’t touch. The slats of the seat are battered and unsittable; the arms and its chains have pulled away from the wooden frame, leaving the entire structure laying sideways. It is broken. To a passerby like yourself, it might just look like a pile of junk. But Nana loved it.

Just beyond this swing and along the sidewalk, a cardboard sign balances on the curb. Read aloud the handwritten message: FREE! PLEASE TAKE! In this spot, Gramps gives away hundreds of seedlings – sunflowers, peppers, tomatoes, rose of Sharon – each summer to lucky friends, neighbors, and strangers. He once gave away one of Nana’s cherished diamond rings at this spot, which my family, to our heartbreak, only found out about later. Whatever it is that he gives away, it is here that Gramps shares the abundant melody of his garden and of his life, and invites everyone to sing along.

Welcome to Gramps’ garden.

The truth is, I love this messy, memoried landscape more than any place in the world.

. . .

I remember the time when Gramps’s garden received a citation from the city. He brought the letter over to our house, confused.

“I think it has something to do with my yard,” Gramps said, exasperated.

Over the past several years, the city has come to his doorstep several times with demands about his garden. Once, they asked that he trim back his prized sunflowers to improve traffic visibility; in another instance, they alerted him that they would be asserting eminent domain and carving into his property by 5 feet to install a sidewalk. To Gramps, this letter was just another nuisance in a long history of what he considers to be municipal clashes.

My mother spent hours on the phone with the city, trying to understand what, exactly, about her 80-year-old father’s yard seemed to be the problem this time. Their answer was simple: “Poor yard maintenance; exterior debris”. Gramps was to rectify the perceived failings within his responsibilities as a homeowner or head to court.

Poor yard maintenance? The great majority of Gramps’s time is spent tending to his yard. In fact, when the snowstorms and frigid temperatures typical of New Jersey winters keep Gramps out of his garden, he is overcome with restlessness and depression. During these cold months, my family and I relentlessly strategize to keep Gramps’s mind busy and to fixate his outlook on the April and May mornings to come. His Christmas list is usually quite simple: new sandals, new seeds, for spring. We know the pride he takes in his garden. Why does it have to look ‘good’ for everyone to know the ‘good’?

Without much of a choice, we spent the next month trying to align Gramps’s yard with what the city believed was more aesthetically pleasing. We organized the tools, bins, and crates surrounding his shed, and against Gramps’s protests, tossed out any of the particularly flimsy ones; we tried to work with Gramps to create a new system for storing seeds and seedlings; with heavy hearts, we helped him dispose of the deteriorated wooden swing. Through all of this, Gramps looked physically uneasy, as if we were rooting through his private belongings and erasing the memories upon which he relied.

That’s because we were.

Despite his progressing Alzheimer’s, Gramps spends hours out in his garden daily; his yard grounds him in a loving routine of care and growth, almost as if it were a radical denial of all that he has lost. Like sticky notes with appointment reminders stuck onto the refrigerator, Gramps’s garden is riddled with his own familiar cues to care. Feeling the temperature on his skin and dipping his fingers into the damp springtime soil, Gramps knows when it is time to plant his seedlings. A quick look and waft above the compost, and Gramps knows when it is time to add more brown or more green. Based on how the flowers hang their blossomed heads, Gramps knows when it is time to give them a drink. The birds singing; the makeshift labeling systems; even the laundry hanging out to dry: it all reminds Gramps of his responsibility to his yard and to himself. And all of these broken-down statues, swings, and metal sheets? They remind Gramps that he has lived and loved.

“If the inspector would just talk to me, he would come to the conclusion that there is not one single thing in my garden that I do not use,” Gramps said. “Not one!”

“I know, Dad,” my mother said. “They’re just noting what they see from the street, they don’t really understand.”

. . .

I often wonder why the city could not grasp this landscape of memory. Importantly, landscapes, even as small as a private yard, are tools of communication, and “above all other information, people seek information about each other when they experience a landscape” (Nassauer 1995). Gramps’s garden was obviously a poor communicator, but what was it saying to others, if anything at all?

Numerous scholars have pointed out that the ecological benefits of landscapes are often obscured from sight or eliminated entirely due to the neat and orderly aesthetic expectations of human viewers (Nassauer 1995; Eaton 1997; Hill 2007; Gobster et. al 2007). At the neighborhood scale, the community perceptions of what care and aesthetic quality should look like dominate hyperlocal landscape features and change. The white picket fence, the freshly trimmed green grassed yard: these outdated ideals of the American Dream promote the idea that we can show that “we are good citizens by the way we care for the landscape to make it look neat or picturesque, safe or inviting” or by using the landscape “to express power or wealth” (Nassauer 1995). With values of neatness and orderliness on a pedestal, a yard’s inherent disorderliness is often associated with poor stewardship and lack of neighborly-ness, regardless of its true ecological health (167). Even if some people may be open to improving the ecological quality of their yard for moral reasons, most people would not do so “at the expense of the proper appearance of their landscapes” (162). Gramps may be an outlier in this by prioritizing the ecological function of his yard over anything else. But as Nassauer (1995) writes, even “if personal preferences for an unconventional landscape structure exist, they tend to be subsumed by the power of convention”, or in other words, the power of a municipal citation (232). Ecologically, socially, and physically beneficial landscapes that lack aesthetically pleasing features are often, as a result, undervalued, ignored, or worse: totally destroyed.

And it is not just the disorderliness of the landscape that is the problem, but our false perception or assumption of it. If it is unclear how a less-than-pristine landscape is being intentionally used or enjoyed, it can easily be mistaken or misinterpreted for “neglected land” (Nassauer 1995). As Nassauer points out, “perception of human intention may be the difference between a nature preserve and a dumping ground, or the difference between a wetland and a slough” (162). While aesthetic experiences — positive and negative — are happening immediately at the surface, “so many imperceivable things are happening in the background” (Eaton 1997). For this reason, Saito (2002) suggests that “we need to develop public capacity to see value in what, at the surface, appears to be aesthetically negative” (259). To Saito’s mind, this involves communicating ecological importance through “comprehensible and pleasing design vocabulary to appeal to our current aesthetic experience and sensibility”. Nassauer (1995) agrees and asserts that one way this may be done is by placing familiar “cues to human care” that indicate human intention and biological worth in otherwise novel or messy landscapes (163-5).

But how do we provide cues to the rather intimate, often illegible, unreliable, and completely invisible: someone else’s memory and memories?

Picturesque American ideals and Western knowledge systems — and therefore, western governance systems that operate within places like Gramps’s city— rely on evidence, either visual or scientific, and therefore fail to recognize the intangible and interpretative benefits of ecosystems (Fish et. al, 2016). Gobster et. al (2007) offer that “it is difficult for people to understand, care about, and act purposefully upon phenomena that occur at scales beyond our own direct experience,” (960). The “perceptible realm” — fundamentally, what people can see and interact with in landscapes — “is the scale at which humans intentionally change landscapes, and these changes affect environmental processes” (960). When I ask myself why I love Gramps’s garden, I am flooded with memories of learning to tend to the land with a loving guide, dirt under my nails, and worms way beneath my feet. The municipal inspector, I remind myself, never pulled thick carrots from the ground in Gramps’s garden; never mourned the loss of Gramps’s pepper plant seedlings after an unusual April cold front; and was never handed a surprise bouquet of freshly cut sunflowers from Gramps on a Saturday morning.

Gramps’s garden is a living extension of his memories and ours — the good ones and the bad ones; like memory, the value of his garden is not about making things pristine. It is about embracing, not fighting, change and loss. It is about passing on learned experience. It is about relationships with each other and with the land. It is about the wholeness of life. I don’t think this is about uncritical nostalgia; this is about refusing to accept that landscapes are silent and memoryless slates. This singular example of a municipal citation falls into a greater social and political phenomenon of uprooting memory from place and force-feeding memoryless aesthetic expectations and solutions onto landscapes. It poses significant threats to many of the physical, mental, and sociocultural benefits that they have the potential to provide. In particular, the sociocultural benefits provided by landscapes are crucial to our understanding of people’s identities, histories, values, and how people shape and change landscapes as a result (Nassauer 1995, Fish et. al 2016).

So, what do we do about it?

“Changing the way people design and manage” [and perhaps, condemn] “landscapes will require change in the way people read social characteristics into landscapes,” Nassauer (1995) writes, and I agree. I would assert that maybe this change will also require accessing people’s capacity to keep, share, and read memory. This isn’t a new idea. Theorists of the aesthetics of nature often ponder how “our appreciative experiences [are] in fact affected by our upbringing, our profession. our culture, our beliefs,” (Carlson and Bearleant, 2014). Environmental philosopher Thomas Heyd also offers what is considered to be a postmodernist approach to nature appreciation:

“That is, if aesthetic appreciation depends on our capacity to take note of a thing, to make a thing the object of our sensory attention and of our imaginative play, then stories … may be of great value because, in contrast to scientific classification, which, due to its abstractness, draws us away from the present thing, such stories, because of their concreteness, draw us into the object, site, or event,” (Heyd 2001).

This is something he holds true for “cases of both artistic and non-artistic stories, as well as ones that are communicated by verbal and non-verbal means,” (Heyd 2001; Carlson and Bearleant 2014). Examples of these include the Indigenous tradition of translating knowledge about relationships with non-humans through storytelling, and the intention communicated by cultural resources like a particular arrangement of rocks or flowers, or as Dr. Robin Kimmerer points out, the weaving of Sweetgrass. It includes reading the detailed signage, tombstones, and murals that capture the rich history of a place, or it could be as simple as noting a carefully placed glass lawn ornament. It includes sharing a good laugh with good company over good food and wine. It includes wondering about the lives of the birds in your yard. “If stories enrich our capacities to aesthetically appreciate the natural environment (pure or modified),” Heyd writes, “then they are relevant” (Heyd 2001).

I wonder if we might continue this intellectual investigation by making conscious efforts to let the landscape talk.

I think back to Gramps’s exasperated comment towards the city: “If the inspector would just talk to me, he would come to the conclusion that there is not one single thing in my garden that I do not use. Not one!”

Maybe he’s right.

Just think of how we transmit memories to our friends, colleagues, and loved ones: storytelling. The only way to make intangible memory perceptible in landscapes, therefore, is to make a practice of listening to landscapes. There are rich, beautiful, painful histories embedded in the scenery –whatever the scenery may be–and we need to begin asking to hear about them while we still can. Perhaps before making a decision about a landscape’s worth and a landscape’s future, talk to the people who steward land. Ask what these spaces remind them of. Get their stories. Hear their ‘whys’. In our race against the clock to fight climate change, protect biodiversity, and ensure ecological prosperity, our impatience will be our demise. What I’d like to say to the city is simple: Slow down, and hear what Gramps’s landscape has to say.

And if the city won’t listen? Well, let the city be damned.

Make the stories of your landscapes louder. Narrate them. Spread their seeds. Write about what you see around you, about the beauty and pain that emerges in these varied contexts. Pay attention to the places and spaces that are of value to your loved ones, and notice all that is there. Find the qualities and personalities of your loved ones in a landscape: perhaps in the hurriedness of a red Cardinal in the tree outside your window, in the ever-patient hope of a four-leaf clover in the grass; in the resilience of a dandelion poking through the sidewalk cracks. Collect fallen leaves and rocks found on your path on a really good day, or maybe just take a picture. Revisit the landscapes that changed your life, and bring a friend. In your garden, plant the flowers your mother loved, or buy a bouquet of them at the bodega, or sketch them in your journal. Thank the hands that prepared your food. Remember, remember, remember.

Gramps’s brain is deteriorating. His own memory won’t last forever. My family won’t have his green thumb. We won’t know the totality of his complex systems of knowledge and care, and this garden landscape, left unstewarded, will inevitably change. Maybe because I know Gramps’s memory is slipping away, I feel the responsibility of preserving and perceiving his story in landscapes I steward to ensure access to this melody for myself, my children, and my grandchildren.

This is already quite true of my childhood yard. My mother, Gramps’s eldest daughter, spends her springtime Saturday mornings like Gramps does: listening to the wind chimes in her garden beds, tending to the thirst and weeding needs of our Hyacinths, Tiger Lilies, and Black-eyed Susans. Using the tips gathered from Gramps across the years, she meticulously curates a collection of symbiotic flowering plants in large pots and places them around the yard to acquire the perfect balance of sunshine and shade. Our blueberry bush, hand-planted by Gramps a decade ago, offers a small harvest each July; during late summer nights under the stars, I’ve snuck old friends and new love interests back to steal a few. Gramps’s transplanted sunflower seedlings are now growing strong in our front garden for the second year in a row after I learned to take the hair from my hairbrush and put them at the base of the stems to prevent any snacking rabbits and deer. We’ve got a small composter, and we do our best to remember to save our egg shells and vegetable scraps to add to the bin; last Summer, Gramps used old plywood to create three separate piles – just like his – although we’re still learning to master the turning schedule. And perhaps most importantly, we have a back patio with a table large enough for our family, where we gather regularly for summer meals, Gramps included.

Gramps’s wisdom grows wild in our yard, and it will keep growing back stronger and louder with every season.

Ashley Jankowski and Joan Nassauer
Ann Arbor

On The Nature of Cities

Works Cited

Carlson and Berleant, A. (2004). Introduction: The aesthetics of nature. In The aesthetics of natural environments. Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press. 11-42.

Gobster, P., J. Nassauer, T. Daniel and G. Fry (2007). “The shared landscape: what does aesthetics have to do with ecology?” Landscape Ecology 22(7): 959 – 972.

Eaton, M. M. (1997). The beauty that requires health. Placing Nature: Culture in Landscape Ecology. J. I. Nassauer. Washington, D. C., Island Press: 85-107

Fish, R., A. Church and M. Winter (2016). “Conceptualising cultural ecosystem services: A novel framework for research and critical engagement.” Ecosystem Services 21: 208-217

Heyd, T. (2001). Aesthetic Appreciation And The Many Stories About Nature. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 41(2), 125–137. https://doi.org/10.1093/BJAESTHETICS/41.2.125

Hill, K. (2007). Urban ecological design and urban ecology:  As assessment of the state of current knowledge and a suggested research agenda. Cities of the Future. V. Novotny and P. Brown. London: 251-260

Nassauer, J. I. (1995). “Culture and changing landscape structure.” Landscape Ecology 10(4): 229-237.

Nassauer, J. I. (1995). Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames. Landscape Journal, 14(2), 161–170. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43324192

Saito, Y. (2002). “Ecological Design.” Environmental Ethics 24(2): 243-261.

Joan Nassauer

About the Writer:
Joan Nassauer

Joan Iverson Nassauer, FCELA, FASLA, is a Professor in the School for Environment & Sustainability at the University of Michigan. She investigates ecological design and planning to support everyday aesthetic experiences, well-being, and the cultural sustainability of ecosystem services.

Launching the Global Biophilic Cities Network

Essay, Science & Tools, , ,
Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Nature provides immense emotional, spiritual and health benefits to residents of cities. There is little wonder then as to why many of us in the urban planning and design fields see nature as central and essential to all that we do and to imagining the future of cities.

The concept of biophilia is at the core and argues that we have co-evolved with nature, and that we have a deep need to affiliate with the natural world. The human species has “grown up with nature,” as Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has said. To Wilson, biophilia is understood as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.  Innate means hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature.” It is thus not surprising that we are happier, more productive, more creative, and even more generous in the presence of nature. Nature in cities offers the promise of lives that are wondrous and connected, lives attentive to the natural magic around us.

Much of our work here at the University of Virginia has focused on connecting the urban and the natural and envisioning cities that contain bountiful and abundant nature and are committed to restoring and celebrating that nature, and to cultivating an urban ethos and populace that is profoundly connected to and cares about the nature around them—essentially what we have been calling Biophilic Cities (see Beatley, 2011).

From October 17-20, 2013, we convened an impressive group of urban leaders from around the country and the world here in Charlottesville at what we called our Biophilic Cities Launch. The conference was a significant step forward for our work developing the concepts of biophilic cities and biophilic urbanism, and extending and applying these concepts around the world. It was a culminating event, celebrating two years of collaborative research and work, but also a Launch event looking into the future of taking on the task of imagining and designing a larger network of cities and interested individuals and groups around the world willing to embrace and move forward the idea of biophilic cities.

The Biophilic Cities Project, underway for several years at the University of Virginia, stems from the essential premise that nature is absolutely essential to urban life. Biophilic cities must provide opportunities for daily contact with nature and deep connections to the natural world for citizens to be happy, healthy, and productive and to lead meaningful lives. Funding for the initial two-year research and for the conference and launch events was provided by the Washington DC-based Summit Foundation, in addition to the George Mitchell Foundation.

It was a most stimulating four days, attended by at least three fellow TNOC blog writers (Mike Houck, Lena Chan, and Cecilia Herzog). Panelists shared a mix of presentations about the innovative work of cities, the immense challenges (political and otherwise) they face in giving nature priority in their planning and design and a host of practical and innovative ideas. There were workshops, earth walks, a biophilic cities exhibition, and many, many productive and stimulating conversations over meals, walks and breaks between sessions.

Much of the work of the Biophilic Cities Project has focused on certain cities around the US and the world. In these “partner cities,” and through collaboration and information sharing, we have been able to assemble similar GIS and data layers across the cities, and to understand the detailed programs, policies and projects advancing biophilic urbanism in these cities. We have conducted site visits to partner cities, and have also been working to document the innovative urban nature projects in these cities, and the variety of tools, techniques and planning strategies utilized in protecting and incorporating nature in these cities, and in fostering connections with the natural world. One key goal of the Launch was to allow and encourage these cities to share their stories and insights and begin to help each other to better integrate nature into their planning and management.

Our partner cities, and cities we have been actively studying, have included a wonderful mix of cities actively fostering connections to the natural world, including: San Francisco, California; Portland, Oregon; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Phoenix, Arizona in the US, and Singapore, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; Oslo, Norway; Birmingham, United Kingdom; and Wellington, New Zealand. Representatives from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Perth, Western Australia; and Montréal, Canada also joined the launch event and were included in the Launch exhibition, with the hope that we will begin to include them in our work as well.   Attendees came from cities all over the US and beyond, including St. Louis, Missouri; Boston, Massachusetts; Houston, Texas; Stockholm, Sweden; Washington, DC; Seattle, Washington; and elsewhere. The event was extremely well organized and managed by an incredible team of faculty, staff and students at UVA, with Julia Triman, graduate student in Urban and Environmental Planning and Carla Jones, Project Manager and Instructor leading the team.

The first two days of the Launch provided partner cities the chance to present their good work, and a rather amazing and exciting set of urban nature stories emerged. An initial panel addressed ways that universities might help in advancing biophilic cities. Jana Soderlund from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, discussed the innovative Green Skins initiative, spearheading the installation of green walls around the port city of Fremantle, and her preliminary research assessing their reception and impact on local residents.  Jana’s work is providing significant insights about what urban residents like about green walls. Her preliminary survey results show, among other things, that respondents tend to emphasize the beauty of these walls. Craig Thomas, from Arizona State University, discussed the ASU-UVA educational collaborative that has allowed several classes of honors students to analyze Phoenix neighborhoods against the metrics and concepts of biophilic cities. Kelly Hare, from Victoria University in Wellington, NZ, one of our partner cities, described the successful “halo” initiative, helping residents of that city living in close proximity to the innovative urban park and restoration project called Zealandia (a piece of wilderness in the city, where through a mammal-proof fence, native bird species such as Kaka parrot are rebounding dramatically).

We had two rousing and stimulating keynote addresses that helped push our collective thinking in important ways. An evening lecture by Jennifer Wolch laid out a Biophilic Cities “Manifesto.” Provocative and thoughtful, Wolch challenged us to think carefully about the many different and often marginalized interests (people and animals) that must be taken into account, and the potential “collisions” she sees in the movement. We must be careful, for instance, that urban greening projects like New York City’s Highline do not result in displacement and exacerbate unequal access to nature, and we must find creative ways to take full account of all species impacted, what she referred to as an “Intersectional Transspecies Urbanism.” Proponents of biophilic cities must think more about governance issues, and about the ethics of urban consumption as is impacts global nature. [You can watch the Jennifier Wolch lecture here.]

Kellert’s talk continued some of these themes,  presenting the evidence and evolutionary logic for biophilia and arguing that that biophilic values “need to be nurtured and developed through learning and experience.” A strong advocate for the power of biophilia, Kellert challenged us to work to shift our values,  culture and consciousness away from domination, disconnect, and transcendence of nature, to a paradigm of design and planning that understands contact with nature as essential and” deeply rooted in human biology”. He spoke of the special importance of aesthetics and beauty as biophilic values, and connections to nature.  Kellert put forth at the end a set of Biophilic Urban Propositions at the end (using his own city of New Haven as an example), that explained location, livability and future thriving based on natural features and conditions. He later signed copies of his newest book, Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World. [You can watch the Stephen Kellert lecture here.]

Friday panels provided an array of compelling examples of urban commitments to nature and biodiversity. The first morning panel addressed urban compactness and nature. Matt Burlin of Portland, Oregon described the many impressive urban greening efforts there, including the some 1,300 green streets, examples of that city’s innovative approach to stormwater management, and he ended with video of the thousands of residents watching and reacting to the spectacle of tens of thousands of migratory Vaux’s Swifts descending down the chimney of a city school.

Rebeca Dios Lema described the history of efforts in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of the Basque Country of Spain, and a recent Green Capital City of Europe, to restore nature and to establish its green ring, and more recent efforts to extend that ring into the interior of this very compact and walkable city. Finally, Lena Chan, Director of the National Biodiversity Center (and a TNOC blogger!) descried the many impressive efforts of Singapore to implement its vision of itself as a “City in a Garden.” These efforts include promoting Skyrise Greening, an innovative Park Connectors network, and support for the creation of community gardens and green schools, among many others. She also reported on Singapore’s Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Inventory (which is about halfway completed), and Lena tells me that already they have discovered some 64 new marine species (i.e. species not known to science).

A second late morning panel “Urban Nature on the Edge” provided equally impressive stories of the efforts to conserve and enhance nature in San Francisco, California, Wellington, New Zealand, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Peter Brastow, the City of San Francisco’s Senior Biodiversity Coordinator and Scott Edmondson, from the city’s planning department, together described this city’s major ongoing and emerging efforts, including a vision for connecting parks and natural areas within the city, and restoring native habitats. Several areas of innovation were discussed, including the city’s urban forest management plan, Green Connections initiative (planning and improving some 24 routes by which residents can reach nature in the city), and the city’s new Biodiversity Program. Particularly impressive are the many examples of community-based stewardship in the city. Together these efforts will allow the city to shift its vision from “Park City” to “Wild City.”

Amber Bill, who heads Wellington’s Our Living City Programme, described that city’s impressive efforts, including its town belt and green belt, and new emerging idea of a blue belt, that would encompass the harbor, marine reserve, and other marine and water environments. Finally Cecilia Herzog (another TNOC blog author!) discussed the impressive nature of Rio de Janeiro, the efforts of her NGO Inverde (for instance in the design and planning of the Olympic Green Corridor), but also the sobering difficulties faced in advancing an urban nature or urban ecology agenda in that city (with relevance certainly to other cities).

The afternoon panel saw efforts in three more cities described: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Montréal, Canada and Birmingham, United Kingdom. Here the focus was more on how nature might be enhanced and reinvigorated in older cities. Matt Howard, Environmental Sustainability Director for the City of Milwaukee, described many initiatives there, including continuing efforts to restore the city’s rivers with new efforts focused on the Menomonee River (and an impressive new Urban Ecology Center and park opened there). Montréal has recently completed its first biodiversity action plan, which Sabine Courcier described, along with other urban greening innovations there, including the city Green Alleys program. Finally, Nick Grayson described Birmingham’s innovative planning efforts connecting a number of public health concerns (air pollution, urban heat, poverty) with a vision of how the city’s natural assets (e.g. its network of small streams) might be harnessed to address them and to reduce overall chronic stress.

A key goal of the conference and launch was to provide opportunities for partner cities to share insights about work and experience, and to begin to develop personal and institutional relationships that will lead to future sharing and collaboration. That seems to be very much what happened, with attendees sharing stories and ideas over the course of the event, and forming friendships and developing plans for future interactions and collaborations.

DSC_0475BiophilicCities1In addition to the main city presentations on Thursday and Friday, there were a number of side events, earth walks, and workshops for participants and the general public. These includes walking tours of the Dell Stream Day-lighting project on the UVA Grounds and the Meadow Creek Stream Restoration Project (in the City of Charlottesville, a collaboration of the city and The Nature Conservancy).

On the first day of the conference a workshop on green walls was jointly organized and run by Jana Soderlund, from Western Australia, and two graduate student members of the UVA Biophilic Cities team: Mariah Gleason and Amanda Beck. The graduate students, as part of the Launch and exhibition, built a clever, rollable green wall, from wood palettes (see below). They explained this design and have prepared how-to instructions for others interested in building a similar structure, which can be found here. Jana discussed in more detailed her efforts in Fremantle, and at the end, Launch participants joined together to plant several additional (commercial) mountable green walls, which once planted became part of the biophilic cities exhibition.

photo_JPGOne of my favorite events had to do with ants. We were joined for most of the launch by an entomology post-doc from North Carolina State University, Amy Savage. On Friday, during the bulk of our presentations from partner cities, Amy was busy setting out ant bait (including such things as Snickers bars, tuna, and pecan Sandies), attempting to see just how many species of ants she might find in and around the UVA School of Architecture. She was quite successful and discovered 13 different species in short order, in close proximity to where we were meeting. Education about this ant diversity, the habitat we were sharing that day, became something we attempted to weave into the more formal meeting and power point presentations. With Amy’s help at several points during the day we interrupted the Launch presentations with a report on what species had been found. We also produced a series of five ant collecting cards, with images of ant genus on one side and information about biophilic cities on the other side.

AntCard_1The incorporation of ants provided a visceral demonstration on the ways in which nature, much of it small and difficult to see, is all around us in cities. There is immense wonder and fascination value in ants, of course, yet urbanites are not well educated in looking for, identifying or even visualizing their existence all around us. Amy works with a wonderful initiative called the School of Ants that seeks to engage citizens in the collection and identification of ants throughout the country. They have produced a highly valuable urban ant identification guide, copies of which were distributed during the Launch.

AntCard_2On Saturday afternoon, Amy took the ant station, including her microscope, to the Charlottesville Downtown Mall, engaging children and families walking by about the ants around them—something we called the Urban Ant Safari! In her interactions with people on the downtown mall Amy asked people to write down memories and recollections they had about ants in their past. She later compiled and shared these with us, and some were quite moving. An older woman wrote a note about her days as a child in England during WWII. She wrote, ‘When I was an evacuated little girl of 5 in WWII Britain, I used to watch ants. I dreamed of having a see through container, so that I [could] watch them work.’

On Saturday evening, John Hadidian, Senior Wildlife Scientist with the Humane Society of the United States, presented ideas for human-wildlife coexistence in cities, passionately arguing for tolerance and understanding, and offering a number of examples of approaches and strategies for co-existence and non-lethal resolution of conflicts.

On the final day of the Launch, participants traveled to Washington, DC, to paddle up the Anacostia River on canoes. Hosted by the Anacostia Watershed Society, participants saw an unusual side to that capital and the hidden nature, from abundant cormorants to sunning river water turtles.We learned about green rooftop subsidies, and other efforts to green the City of Washington and areas around the Anacostia River.

One major premise of the Project has been the power of telling stories about nature in cities through still images and film. In pursuit of the latter goal, several short documentary films have been prepared about our study cities, with several premiered at the Launch event. Indeed, Friday evening became our biophilic cities film night (which we kiddingly referred to as the first annual Biophilic Cities Film Festival). The feature film was Stephen Kellert and Jim Finegan’s beautiful hour-long documentary Biophilic Design (featuring several Launch attendees, including Bill Browning of Terrapin Green). The film presents a dizzying array of projects and sites, with a heavy emphasis on buildings of various kinds and the biophilic powers they deliver.

Four biophilic film shorts were premiered, as well, three telling the story of partner cities. These included films about Singapore, Wellington (NZ), and McDowell Desert Preserve (in the urban environs near Phoenix). A fourth short film told the story of the restoration of Meadow Creek in Charlottesville, Virginia. These are now on YouTube, and available to view:

VideoLeft

VideoRightTaking place alongside the conference and launch we also organized a major Biophilic Cities Exhibition in the UVA School of Architecture’s largest exhibition space, the Elmalah Gallery. With mounted images and text about each partner city, largely provided by participant cities, and consistently formatted maps presenting the comprehensive nature in each city, the result was a spectacular picture of the many different ways in which nature can be planned and designed into urban areas. Along with still images, film and video were available on stands with mounted iPads. Two of our graduate students, Sarah Schramm and Harriett Jameson had a major hand in designing and installing the exhibition.

One of the most interesting features in the exhibition was a beautiful glass terrarium, which we commissioned from the design firm Crooked Nest, based in San Francisco. Our UVA team designed and built an equally beautiful biophilic table made from recycled wood and steel. The wood table top was routed to convey the pattern of a water ripple, with the terrarium placed in the center of the ripple, as if it had just fallen from above.

The terrarium quickly became known locally as the “’biophilic bubble!” It is quite arresting and soothing in the small nature it provides. A fitting piece of the exhibition, the bubble graced postcards and publications announcing the exhibition and conference and became a kind of symbol for the importance and potential of small natural elements to deliver some of the power of nature. Stephen Kellert reminded us at several points of the importance of considering the kinds of nature that might be brought into indoor and interior spaces, recognizing that more than 90 percent of our typical day is spent inside (despite efforts to get us out of doors). Planning and design of biophilic cities ought not to forget the impact and value of bringing nature inside as well, where we can.

biophilic cities postcards_Page_1Biophilic bubble_JPGOn Saturday morning a smaller group, mostly partner city representatives, came together to participate in a workshop to discuss and invent the new global Biophilic Cities Network. For several hours we discussed and debated key questions about what the Network could or should look like, what functions it will serve, what value it will have, and how and in what ways it might meet needs not served by other networks that exist.

There was considerable enthusiasm for the network and at the end of the meeting as a symbolic gesture and show of support participants went outside and signed a blown-up version of the Biophilic Cities Pledge Card. Meant very much as a draft and work in progress, we have already revised and amended this card, but here is the card as we discussed it that day.

Pledge_1 Pledge_2PledgeGroupOne of the most useful parts of our discussion had to do with what value of such a global network and how it would serve to strengthen the position of those in and outside city government working in support of nature. Some participants emphasized the importance of different local departments breaking out of their silos and that the network might help to do this. Others noted that the pledge card seemed to envision participants and signatories as primarily local council or local governments, but that left out universities, NGOs and many others with a stake in the network but working outside the city government.

One of the most interesting ideas is that the network might serve as a focal or organizing point for nature across a city and across the sectors of that city. This is something that had not occurred to me that in addition to the global network linking cities in different places and regions it might also serve to link disparate interests and actors within a city (and then perhaps linking these local constellations across the globe!).

There is still much to be done, as we near completion of our two-year Summit grant and look to the rolling-out of the global network. Key deliverables for the project will include a case book of best urban practices, including analyses of the accomplishments and urban-nature innovations in each city. We are also developing an urban-nature index as an aggregate measure of connections to nature, and as a way of comparing exposure to nature across cities. Other pieces of this work we hope to complete include a Delphi study through which we hope to be able to offers insights about the minimum daily amount of nature needed in cities. And of course we will continue to maintain and expand our Biophilic Cities webpage, blog, and e-newsletters.

Please stay tuned as we determine the exact language and mechanisms through which cities can declare their intentions to be a biophilic city (some version of the pledge language above) and participate in the Network.

We hope to grow this network into a global force on behalf of nature in cities and we will need your help!  If you or your city would like to join the Biophilic Cities Network, please send us an email: [email protected].

by Tim Beatley
Charlottesville

On The Nature of Cities

Legacy as Visioning Tool: Urban Greening in Zagreb

Essay, Europe, Place & Design, ,
Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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While Zagreb’s circumstances and regimes changed, planners often remained, pulling the values of the previous period and linking them with values of the next period. Most of the time positive aspects remained while the undesirable ones were replaced.
When we consider planning for green infrastructure, we typically think forward to what kind of city we might imagine for the future. Far less frequently do we consider the history of the city and how past generations have shaped the green spaces and the activities and meanings related to them. In Croatia, a country known for its majestic landscapes and beautiful coastlines, the city of Zagreb is a unique example of how past generations have shaped the city’s green legacy.

Zagreb indeed has a rich and complex history. It entered the 19th century as a small town in the Austrian Empire only to become the largest city and the capital of Croatia in the mid-19th century. The change in the balance of power between Austrians and Hungarians resulted in subjugating Croatia to the Hungarian Kingdom which governed it as a colony, suppressing its social and economic development. The First World War marked the end of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and Croatia united with other south Slavic nations in the Yugoslav kingdom where Zagreb was the second largest city and economic centre. The short fascist phase during the Second World War was followed by almost half a century-long socialist period in which Zagreb was again the economic centre of Tito’s Yugoslavia. The independent era finally began in the 1990s with Zagreb becoming a modern European metropolis. So, over the last 200 years, Zagreb lived through changes in government forms, ideologies, planning ideas and practices, and, all of this impacted how greenspace was perceived, planned, and maintained.

Zagreb: Circa 19th century

Before the 19th century, Zagreb was a small town with two separate cores: religious (Kaptol) and secular (Gradec). Both were built densely within the fortification walls for protection from Ottoman conquests. In such a compact area, there was not much space for parks, so the city’s rural surrounding provided most opportunities to enjoy nature. Where green spaces did exist in the city, they were primarily designed around religious buildings, as is the case in Kaptol, where the churches’ green spaces were almost exclusively reserved for the clergy. It wasn’t until the end of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century when urban parks around the two settlements really started to take root (Barešić and Sirovec, 2011). Yet, it remained the case that the creators of these parks were most often the bishops of Zagreb, as they owned most of the land around the town. In the same way, today’s largest park in Zagreb—Maksimir—was created. Its initial development was influenced by the baroque landscape design ideas penetrating from central Europe. Although imagined as a regular-structured French garden, construction took many years. It was finished in the mid-19th century in the style of an English landscape garden with many romantic elements.

Maksimir Park in the mid-20thcentury. Source: The Zagreb City Museum

The golden age of urban greenspace

A new era of urban greening began when the two cores, Kaptol and Gradec, began to merge together in the city of Zagreb. At this time, Zagreb was industrialising. Railway construction accelerated population growth and economic development, and as the population moved into the city Zagreb expanded rapidly, creating new quarters and “absorbing” surrounding villages (Slukan Altić, 2012). The separation between church and state led to the civil government overpowering the clergy, and landscape design became a civil activity. Zagreb got an official architect and urban planner whose task was planning the construction of new parts of the city, which also included the greenspace. City planners in Zagreb were usually schooled in other large cities of the Austrian Empire, and design and style in these cities greatly impacted planning ideas in Croatia.

Notably, the utilitarian aesthetic of German planners, Ernst Bruch and Reinhard Baumeister—for whom beauty was almost synonymous with practical—guided aesthetic in the city of Zagreb. This can be seen in the construction of a green belt around the new city centre. Modelled on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, a chain of seven parks was designed as a visual barrier around the new city centre as well as a kind of buffer zone protecting it from air and noise pollution originating along the railway (Slukan Altić, 2012). Due to its U-shape, the park chain came to be known as the Green Horseshoe. Another change characteristic for this period was the redevelopment of many medieval graveyards around churches into parks as the civil authorities started considering them as non-aesthetic and non-hygienic (Barešić and Sirovec, 2011). As industrialisation increased the city’s income, greater investments were made to further city expansion.

The aerial view of the Green Horseshoe in the centre of Zagreb. Source: geoportal.dgu.hr

Socialism and urban planning in Zagreb

As the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918 with the end of the First World War, Croatia became a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In united Yugoslavia, Zagreb became an economic centre. Under these conditions, the development of new working class quarters did not follow the urban plans set in place earlier but progressed uncontrollably and informally. This caused overpopulation and led to a lack of focus on preserving greenspace (Bašić, 1989). The authorities, therefore, planned a green zone with recreational facilities along the river, which the city reached in that period, but due to a lack of money, only the green lawns were realised (Matković and Obad Šćitaroci, 2012).

Sava Riverside Park in the plan from 1936. Source: Matković and Obad-Šćitaroci (2012)

During the Second World War, the socialist party took over the government, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). The change in political values and government structures was blended with the urbanistic tradition. Socialist urbanists seemed to be aware of the benefits for workers population provided by urban greenery, including the effect on physical and mental health (Kiš, 1976). The care for urban greenery was demonstrated already in the early post-war years. Since the country did not have the financial means, the new regime implemented a decree in which the citizenry was organised to repair the damage in the city caused by the war and re-build the city. In this wave of public works all the existing parks were renewed and, according to the socialist ideology, the fences around them were removed so that access to parks were open to all. The socialist regime also nationalised all the land in urban areas, with the exception of the privately owned buildings on these properties (Simmie, 1989) to ensure planning went unimpeded, and smoothly according to socialist ideological principles.

Socialism also widened participation in urban greenspace planning processes. The general public could engage in greenspace planning by proposing ideas and implementing projects together with official service workers in charge of greenspace. One of such initiatives was the creation of the Newlyweds Park, based on the idea that newlyweds select and pay for a tree which would then be planted in the Newlyweds Park (Blažević, 1976). However, this widening of participation int he planning process also had its setbacks and ultimately led to a lack of planning control that great impacted urban green space. For example, in the 1970swhen the number of cars in the city started increasing, there was not enough parking space. Through legal means, but more often than not illegal recourse, parking lots and garages were constructed on the edges of urban parks, which impacted their size and quality. Authorities were generally aware of the problem, but not having a solution, they usually turned a blind eye on such developments. Today, the impact of this is still visible in Zagreb.

The examples of garages and parking lots intrusion in Vjekoslav Majer Park (above) and Newlyweds Park (below). Photos taken on 11/04/2018. Photo: Neven Tandarić

Contemporary Zagreb

The disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early1990s lead to yet another war that greatly impacted the development of the city of Zagreb. A political, economic and social transition introduced democracy in government and liberal market economy and various nationalised services and departments were transferred to the private sector. The lack of money in city treasury meant that some public projects could not be done exclusively by the city and needed the involvement of private investors. That often included granting some rights to private investors over the public space at the expense of public rights. Moreover, the new system allowed the private-sector-led transformation of public space, like urban parks, into commercial or residential functions. This sparked discontent among the citizenry and lead to people self-organising against these public-private initiatives to redevelop greenspace. For example, one recent initiative rallied around the preserving the only park in the Savica quarter from joint city authority, and private sector plans to build a church in it (Kramarić and Lisac, 2017).

A church was supposed to be built in the only park in the Savica quarter. Source: Inicijativa Čuvajmo naš park, 2018

Today, there are hundreds of various green spaces in Zagreb. While the most famous and central ones are well-maintained, the other ones, especially those further from the centre, are not cared for as well. Moreover, in distant districts green spaces are frequently of poor quality, they often lack landscaping, biodiversity and are mostly just plain grass lawns, and are used mostly by dog owners. Contemporary greening ideas appear to focus mainly on accommodating tourists while incorporating incorporate the longstanding mayor’s passion for fountains. There are many examples of newly introduced fountains in Zagreb squares and parks. Perhaps the largest and most expensive such project was the redevelopment of the University Meadow close to the city centre. While beautifying the image of the city, little attention is paid to the inhabitants’ opinion and the functional design of quarters. The light at the end of the tunnel is the strengthening of the civil sector in Croatia which fights its way to influence the planning of public space at the local level and publicly re-examines decisions made by city fathers.

The new design of the University Meadow. Photo taken on 29/08/2018. Photo: Neven Tandarić

Look at the history to envision the future

Over the last 200 years, greening ideas in Zagreb changed substantially. Urbanisation, influential planning practices such as utilitarian aesthetics (in the 19th century), regime ideology (socialist period), privatisation and personal agendas (post-socialist period) were all factors that greatly influenced the design and development of greenspace in the city. Parks in Zagreb are the result of original ideas and contemporary drivers of each period. While historical circumstances and regimes changed, planners often remained, pulling the values of the previous period and linking it with values of the next period. Most of the time positive aspects remained while the undesirable ones were replaced. By knowing some socio-political history, we can read Zagreb’s parks as a history of ideas of living, recreation, design and values. Moreover, the parks can help us to evaluate new ideas and re-evaluate the old ones in order to come up with functional public spaces. Even past mistakes can help us to learn and improve the planning practices.

Neven Tandarić and Chris Ives
Nottingham

On The Nature of Cities

 

References

Barešić, D. and Sirovec, J. (2011) ‘Rokov perivoj u Zagrebu’, Prostor, 19(1), pp. 184–199. Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=63030750.

Bašić, K. (1989) ‘Unutargradski prerazmještaj stanovništva kao pokazatelj funkcionalno-prostorne transformacije Zagreba’, Acta Geographica Croatica, 24, pp. 69–84.

Blažević, M. (1976) ‘Uvod’, in Uloga i značaj zelenila za stanovništvo Zagreba i njegove regije. 1st edn. Zagreb: Stablo mladosti, pp. 8–10.

Kiš, D. (1976) ‘Drvo u gradu – faktor zaštite čovjekove okoline’, in Uloga i značaj zelenila za stanovništvo Zagreba i njegove regije. 1st edn. Zagreb: Stablo mladosti, pp. 35–44.

Kramarić, I. and Lisac, R. (2017) Slučaj Savica – i struka protiv betonizacije parka. Zagreb: Savica ZA park. Available at: http://www.kulturpunkt.hr/sites/default/files/DAZ_SLUCAJ_SAVICA-podrska_struke.pdf.

Matković, I. and Obad Šćitaroci, M. (2012) ‘Rijeka Sava s priobaljem u Zagrebu; Prijedlozi za uređivanje obala Save 1899.-2010.’, Prostor, 20(1), pp. 46–59.

Simmie, J. M. (1989) ‘Self-management and town planning in Yugoslavia’, The Town Planning Review, 60(3), pp. 271–286.

Slukan Altić, M. (2012) ‘Town planning of Zagreb 1862-1923 as a part of European cultural circle’, Ekonomska i ekohistorija, 8(8), pp. 100–107.

Chris Ives

About the Writer:
Chris Ives

Chris Ives takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying sustainability and environmental management challenges. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham.

Lessons from a One-eyed Eagle

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By all rights a one-eyed bald eagle is a doomed bird. Imagine trying to catch a salmon or a brush rabbit with no depth perception. Oh eagles will scavenge and occasionally steal food from one another, but roadkill and kleptoparasitism will only get you so far in life…or so the conventional wisdom goes. The one-eyed eagle that finds its way into captivity should be put out of its misery or relegated to life in a zoo. To release such a bird is to condemn it to a slow death by starvation.

West Hayden Island Bald Eagle. Photo: Bob Sallinger
West Hayden Island Bald Eagle. Photo: Bob Sallinger

Late on a Saturday afternoon in early November, shortly before Sunset, Portland Audubon’s wildlife hospital received a call about an injured bald eagle on West Hayden Island. The location was notable. West Hayden Island sits at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. Lewis and Clark camped here almost exactly 208 years to the day earlier on their journey to the Pacific. They called it “Image Canoe Island” after observing a Native American canoe carved with the images of men and animals emerging from behind the island. It was a place teaming with wildlife. Captain William Clark noted in his journal the following:

Rained all the after part of last night, rain continues this morning. I [s]lept but verry little last night for the noise. Kept [up] during the whole of the night by the Swans, Geese, white & Grey Brant, Ducks, etc on a Small Sand Island close under Lard. Side; they were emensely numerous, and their noise horid [sic].

Two centuries later, West Hayden Island represents one of the last intact remnants of this once fertile delta area. Its 800 acres of bottomland forest, wetlands and meadows, sit between the cities of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. The surrounding river has been deepened, straightened and its banks hardened to make way for industrial development. Marine terminals line the banks to the north and south. East Hayden Island has been fully developed — nearly 750 acres of shopping malls, auto lots, high end condos and Oregon’s largest manufactured home community.

What little natural area that remains is an oasis for federally listed migrating salmon that require shallow water habitat to rest, forage and temporarily escape larger predators on their journey to the ocean. Its uplands provide habitat for a plethora of wildlife. Almost the entirety of West Hayden Island lies within the 100-year floodplain and during major flood events much of the island can be almost entirely submerged.

West Hayden Island with the Port of Portland Marine Terminals to the Right. Photo: Jim Labbe
West Hayden Island with the Port of Portland Marine Terminals to the right. Photo: Jim Labbe

It is also a battleground. For nearly two decades the Port of Portland and other industrial interests have fought to turn West Hayden Island into marine industrial terminal. Even as other downriver port facilities sit vacant awaiting tenants and teetering on the brink of failure, development interests in Portland argue that this is the last big parcel available for marine terminal facility development in Portland.

There are no tenants lining-up for West Hayden Island either; the Port can’t say what it will build or when it will be needed. A decade ago they thought it would be containers. Today the best bet is auto imports. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to be ready future whenever it comes and that means annexing the island, rezoning it for development, filling its floodplains and waiting for the “next big thing” in the realm of imports or exports.

West Hayden Island Beaches with Port of Vancouver looming in the background. Photo: Bob Sallinger
West Hayden Island Beaches with Port of Vancouver looming in the background. Photo: Bob Sallinger

On the other side of the issue, a loose coalition of environmental groups, neighborhoods and tribes have a different conception of what it means to be “prepared for the future.” Representatives of the Yakama Nation travel more than 100 miles downriver to testify against this development at hearings. In a letter dated November 6, 2012 they wrote:

What was true in 1905 — and for thousands of years before that — is still the case today and will be for the Yakama children yet unborn; salmon and the health of the Columbia River are of paramount importance to our people.

Yakama Nation and other Tribes testifying against development in 2012. Photo: Bob Sallinger
Yakama Nation and other Tribes testifying against development in 2012. Photo: Bob Sallinger

They are joined in their opposition by a manufactured home community — a trailer park in more common lingo — that has persisted more than 40 years adjacent to the natural area…high end real estate that somehow has managed to remain low income housing for more than 2000 people. In 2012, the City of Portland adopted a long range vision known as the Portland Plan which established equity as the city’s “core principle.” Hearing this, the locals rose up and flooded hearings demanding equity, although one self-described “grandma” admitted to me afterwards that she didn’t actually know what the term meant.

That’s okay, the city and port don’t really know either. It is a work in progress. From the Port’s perspective, equity equals jobs and a larger tax base. Our development community likes to talk about a three legged stool of economics, environment and equity. Funny thing about that stool though. Too often the economic leg is growing while the equity and environment legs are getting shorter. One should think twice before sitting on that stool.

In this case a small army of sign-waving “grandmas and grandpas” demanded something more substantive than metaphors, a Health Impact Assessment, defined by the Centers for Disease Control as “a process that helps evaluate the potential health impacts of a plan, project or policy before it is built or implemented.” The City agreed to do a truncated version called a “Health Analysis” — sort of a Health Impact Assessment “Lite”. The findings were not pretty. The final report revealed that, even with mitigation strategies in place, the proposed development would potentially triple air toxic levels to 55 times the state benchmarks in the local community. It also described the potential for development induced poverty and displacement in the local community.

Manufactured Home Community protesting development. Photo: Bob Sallinger
Manufactured Home Community protesting development. Photo: Bob Sallinger

In fact the project has generated a small mountain of reports. The project website lists more than eighty such documents: Economic Foundation Studies, Cost/ Benefit Analyses, Mitigation Plans, Market Studies, Growth Concepts, a report on the viability of the black cottonwood forest, another on the value of floodplains…this list goes on. The goal is to find “balance.”

If we study it long enough and hard enough perhaps a win-win solution will materialize. It hasn’t. Some places are special. They shouldn’t be turned into parking lots.

Which brings me back to the one-eyed eagle. As the sun was sinking low in the sky, my eleven year old son and I drove through the tangle of sprawling development that now covers East Hayden Island, past the shopping mall and the convenience stores and the impossible to ignore and even harder to explain “Hooters” sign, past the auto auction lot and single story industrial office parks, and finally past the tidy manufactured home community. We met the hiker who had reported the injured eagle and together we headed out into the wilds of West Hayden Island.

We found her perched in a meadow a little over a mile from the gate, a big female, white head stark against the falling darkness. When I approached she leapt into the sky, but only one wing extended and she twisted awkwardly and dropped back to the ground. We quickly bundled her up in an old Mexican blanket I had brought with me and began the mile long trek back to the car. I wondered as we walked whether this eagle could be the eagle that a few years back had established a nest and began raising young in the middle of the proposed development area. We often featured that eagle in our efforts to protect West Hayden Island. Her picture adorns the banner atop our “Save West Hayden Island” Facebook page.

West Hayden Island Eagle on nest in 2013. Photo: Bob Sallinger
West Hayden Island Eagle on nest in 2013. Photo: Bob Sallinger
West Hayden Island Eagle in Flight 2012. Photo: Bob Sallinger
West Hayden Island Eagle in Flight 2012. Photo: Bob Sallinger

Our veterinarian met us at Audubon later that night and we gave her a full work up. In addition to the injury to her wing, she had fresh wounds on both of her legs. Most likely she was injured in a territorial dispute with another eagle — the most common cause of injury for eagles treated at our center. X-rays revealed that at some point in her life she had also been shot. A bb was still lodged deep in her breast muscle but by all appearances, it had been there for quite some time.

However the worst thing was the right eye. I couldn’t see it when we were carrying her through the darkness on West Hayden Island, but we all saw it right away as we unwrapped her from the blanket under the surgical lights of our treatment room. The right eye was badly damaged — beyond repair. As we worked to treat her injured wing and legs we knew in the back of our minds that she was most likely never going to return to the wild. It was sad. She was a beautiful bird, nearly 12 pounds, other than her injuries in perfect body and feather condition. We consulted other experts from around the country. They all said the same thing. She wouldn’t survive in the wild with one eye.

Eagle being examined on arrival at Audubon. Photo: Peter Sallinger
Eagle being examined on arrival at Audubon. Photo: Peter Sallinger

However sometimes conventional wisdom is wrong. A veterinary ophthalmologist surprised us a few days later when she confirmed that indeed the damage to the eye was severe, but also that it was old, many months old, perhaps years. This bird had most likely been surviving in the wild for quite some time and doing quite well despite the injured eye.

Audubon Staff Treating Eagle. Photo: Tinsley Hunsdorfer
Audubon Staff Treating Eagle. Photo: Tinsley Hunsdorfer

Verification of her strange and unlikely journey came from an even more unlikely source. David Redthunder lives in the manufactured home community on Hayden Island. He spends much of his time communing with the wildlife that inhabits West Hayden Island. He has an uncanny ability to get close to the critters and he has a particular affinity for the nesting eagles. Sometimes when I visit the island, I find small shrines he has built to protect the birds.

Over the years he has sent me hundreds of amazing photographs he has taken of the island’s wild inhabitants including dozens of the eagles. (To see a gallery of David’s West Hayden Island Photos go here.) What were the odds that David would have captured an image of the injured eye? It seemed like a fool’s errand, but I opened the file of David’s photos on my computer and began scanning. About 30 photos along, I found it….a blurry photo dated August 12, 2012, the injury to the right eye clearly visible. The injury was more than a year old. She had not only survived her eye injury, but also apparently has successfully nested and raised two young.

Photo of West Hayden Island Bald Eagle with Injured eye on November 28, 2012. Photo: David Redthunder
Photo of West Hayden Island Bald Eagle with Injured eye on November 28, 2012. Photo: David Redthunder
Manufactured Home Community Protesting Development in 2012. David Redthunder in foreground holding picture of eagle. Photo: Bob Sallinger
Manufactured Home Community Protesting Development in 2012. David Redthunder in foreground holding picture of eagle. Photo: Bob Sallinger

More of David Redthunder’s West Hayden Island wildlife photos follow. To see more, go here.

Daves pictures 712Daves pictures copyNovember 7, 2012 012

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Daves pictures 02208-04-2012 110 (2)November 3, 2012 017September 18 2012 011sprider web (3)Somehow it seems fitting that a one-eyed eagle calls this place home. By all rights, the island should have been paved over long ago. Despite the odds, it somehow survived, decade after decade as the landscape around it developed. The odds are against it now too. The big money and conventional wisdom say development is inevitable — we need to prepare for the future. But sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong; sometimes we need to think beyond the experts or perhaps seek out different sources of wisdom. Sometimes the path forward is written not in technical reports, but on the side of a canoe and in the stories of our fellow travelers, the stories that usually don’t make it into technical reports.

A one-eyed eagle is still a long shot. Not every bird survives. Not every story has a happy ending … but if she can fly, let her go. Let her have her freedom.

Bob Sallinger
Portland

On The Nature of Cities

Kids exploring West Hayden Island Grasslands. Photo: Bob Sallinger
Kids exploring West Hayden Island Grasslands. Photo: Bob Sallinger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lessons from Beasts, Birds, and Other Inhabitants of the Urban Jungle

Art & Awareness, FRIEC, FRIEC Reviews, Review, Stories, , , ,
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A review of The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. 2013. ISBN: 978-0316178525. Little, Brown and Company. 338 pages. Buy the book.

Bestiaries—elaborate and fantastical combinations of medieval scientific knowledge and folklore—were meant to describe the animal life of the Earth. These large volumes depict all kinds of different animals using intricate illustrations, and almost never distinguish between fact and fiction.

The Urban Bestiary is a beautiful marriage of writing meant for the soul and for the mind, with information about interacting closely with wildlife.
The most famous of these kinds of catalogs, the Aberdeen Bestiary, was created in the 12th century, and now resides in the Aberdeen University Library. Its entry for the beaver states that, when pursued, a beaver “bites off its own testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes.” Beaver testicles were, in those days, highly valued for their medicinal purposes. The Aberdeen Bestiary is full of fantastical descriptions like this. It has been digitized by the University of Aberdeen, and can be accessed online here.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt has created a modern version of a bestiary, set in the urban wild of Seattle, Washington, USA. Devoting a chapter to each creature, Haupt describes the habits of her urban cohabitants. She sticks to the tradition of mixing facts and lore; The Urban Bestiary is a combination of Haupt’s personal experiences with these creatures and scientific tidbits. She gives advice on topics from tracking animals to urban deer control to human-wildlife conflict. Not only does this book tell stories, it also provides information about real ways to interact more closely with your own local wildlife.

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Haupt dedicates each section of The Urban Bestiary to a different type of urban fauna or flora. One part for the mammals (“The Furred”), one for the birds (“The Feathered”), and one for the rest (“The Branching and the Rooted”), which includes one chapter each for trees and humans, the engineers of the urban ecosystem. Disappointingly missing are the reptiles, amphibians, and insects, some of the most maligned of urban critters. In her introduction, Haupt states: “My intent was not to be all-inclusive, but rather to treat species that are common in most urban places and those that have a particular lesson for co-existing with wildlife”. Surely, Haupt missed a chance here to defend an unappreciated toad, a slandered snake, or a seemingly insignificant grasshopper.

cover big That said, The Urban Bestiary does provide some worthwhile lessons. From opossums, we learn not to judge another being strictly by its (in the opossum’s case, shocking) appearance. From mountain lions and bears, we learn humility in the face of nature’s power. From the oft-overlooked city birds (pigeons, starlings, house sparrows), we learn to appreciate the wildlife we do have in cities, instead of lamenting an absence of “nature”. From crows, we learn about non-human intelligence. From opossums, we learn not to judge by appearances. And from trees, we learn a sense of time deeper than that usually available to humans. The book is full of lessons such as these that we can learn from the everyday nature we experience even in the most urban of cities.

The Urban Bestiary is a beautiful marriage of writing meant for the soul and for the mind. By observing closely the habits of our non-human neighbors, we can learn about animals, plants, our neighborhood, our planet, and ourselves. Haupt of describes in detail the habits of, and lessons to be learned from, each organism she presents. For any urban dweller looking to connect with nature, The Urban Bestiary is a superb first step. Even skilled naturalists may find some useful tips on urban tracking or animal behavior. Haupt’s goal “is that this is just the start of a huge, earthen bestiary, an invitation to wild intimacy, written daily by all of us, through attention to the creatures in our midst.”

Chris Hensley
Fresno

On The Nature of Cities

Lessons from Britain’s Urban Nature Movement

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A review of Nature in Towns and Cities, by David Goode. 2014. William Collins, New Naturalist Library. ISBN: 9780007242405. ISBN 10: 0007242409. 417 pages.

Nature in Towns and Cities cover

The newest title in The New Naturalist Library, Nature in Towns and Cities by Dr. David Goode, is true to the series’ dual goals of “recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists” and “maintaining a high standard of accuracy in presenting the results of modern research.” Goode’s scientific background, deep personal interest in urban nature, and long-term involvement in, and advocacy for, Britain’s urban nature movement has created an entertaining and intellectually stimulating read for professional urban ecologists, planners and practitioners, amateur naturalists, and grass-root activists. While the book is specific to Britain, its descriptions of the ecological principles and the manner in which the urban conservation movement has grown over the past three decades, in Britain and beyond, are universally relevant.

Goode, with more than forty years’ experience as ecological advisor to local and regional governments, director of the London Ecology Unit, and Head of Environment at the Greater London Authority, is eminently qualified to document the urban conservation movement, including his own role as exponent, in Britain and abroad. But, beyond the institutional, political, and social factors that have contributed to changing attitudes toward urban nature, what makes Nature in Towns and Cities a practical and enjoyable read is Goode’s keen knowledge of natural history dating from the time he became a curious naturalist at the age of fourteen. Nature in Towns and Cities isn’t Goode’s first book on urban nature. His Wild in London inspired a generation of urban nature enthusiasts in the mid-1980s.

Wild in London

The Nature of Towns and Cities

Goode opens with “Nature In A Small City”, a description of British habitats through a tour of his home town of Bath, where plants and animals inhabit “deep basements and small courtyards”, sunbaked walls where leaking drainpipes and holes in masonry provide microclimates for lichens, ferns, and spiders; Peregrine falcons utilize a church steeple; and ancient graveyards, “with their rich humus and ample nutrients, support a rich array of native flora.” He offers the reader colorful and intimate illustrations whereby even in a built-up small town, a vast array of habitats host species that belong to native sites that have been engulfed by urban development and other species that are utterly unique to the urban scene where wildlife and plants live “cheek by jowl” with people. Bath, as a template city, represents a microcosm that is representative of similar towns and cities across Britain where densely built up cities, surrounded by suburbia, offer a patchwork of green spaces, wetlands, streams, rivers, and green corridors. All of these special habitats yield an amazing amount of biodiversity from city centers to the surrounding rural landscape.

Organization of the text

Two themes run throughout the book: scientifically sound descriptions of urban natural history through an ecological lens and a detailed recapitulation of the growth of the urban nature conservation movement. In “Urban Habitats” Goode methodically describes the ecology of “encapsulated countryside” woodlands, meadows, marshes, heathland and hillsides that have been subsumed and form a remnant of the surrounding rural landscape within the urban matrix. He describes the biota, both native and non-native, that has colonized canals, cemeteries, abandoned and active railways, post-industrial landscapes, “new” created wetlands, and concludes with more prosaic urban parks, squares and cemeteries. Goode provides examples of the influence of socio-economic and political factors in shaping urban habitats. For instance, he describes the manner in which “encapsulated woodlands” were transformed following the industrial revolution and in response to changes in transportation, particularly the national railroad network, and abandonment of traditional coppicing following adoption of coal for residential heating.

Regent's Canal Photo Mike Houck
Regent’s Canal, London. Photo: Mike Houck

“Colonisers And Specialists” focuses on: birds new to the urban scene—“a motley crew” of opportunists; badgers and foxes; and pigeons, sparrows and swifts. A passion for urban nature, citizen science, keen natural history observation, and detective work are all illustrated in descriptions of a changing lifestyle of urban badgers since they attained protected status in 1973. What started as a colony of badgers concentrated in a small graveyard in Bath is now a badger population occupying more than 400 cities and towns across Britain, taking advantage of myriad habitats from wooded banks and gardens to golf courses. Anyone engaged in urban canid-human interactions will recognize challenges of managing the explosive colonization of urban foxes throughout Britain. The use of “swift towers”, “swift-bricks”, and nesting “boxes” in new building construction or retrofit projects will also resonate with those who have worked to introduce or reintroduce swifts into the urban environment.

18 Urban Foxes cover
The cover of a book about Britain’s urban foxes.

I found “Post-Industrial Ecology” to be especially interesting and relevant given the modern rush to repurpose brownfield sites for new industrial development. Goode makes a strong case for investigating the ecological value of post-industrial sites, no matter how contaminated, before proceeding to industrial reuse. Goode describes how Buglife, one of the myriad NGOs at work protecting brownfield sites for their unique ecological values, created a best practices guide for planners and developers that describes the importance of invertebrate species and the benefits of ecological landscaping to protect them. He also provides several examples where endangered or threatened species, with their narrow ecological requirements, have colonized highly alkaline or acidic sites in a “Tour of Britain’s Wastelands.” Goode describes the importance of gravel pits, disused wharves, canals, and railways for providing a patchwork of plant communities that offer a range of successional patterns within the urban matrix.  He argues that urban “wastelands” are the “essence of urban ecology.”

Urban nature conservation

002“Urban Nature Conservation” traces the changing philosophy regarding the role of conservation in the urban context, a shift he persuasively declares as “one of the most important ecological movements in the past half-century.” He follows the urban conservation movement from establishment of the Nature Conservancy in 1949—to protect the “gems of British wildlife” when little or no attention was accorded urban nature—to the eventual recognitions of the value of nature to humans and their longing for connection to nature where they live, work and play. Eventually, these shifts led to an explosion of interest in urban nature conservation. Goode recounts the origins of local natural history societies that sprang up during the Victorian era in cities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol.

In the post war era many of these volunteer, amateur societies turned their attention to protecting urban natural areas. In the 1970s professional urban planners and landscape designers turned their collective attention to urban areas. Goode gives a great deal of credit for the surge of interest in urban nature to Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside, and contributions from the U. S. in the form of John Kieran’s Natural History of New York City (1959). But it was The Endless Village, a publication of the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), that Goode argues “changed the rules overnight” by dispelling the myth that cities represented “ecological deserts.”

The Unofficial Countryside cover
The cover of The Unofficial Countryside.

The 1980s: time for action

Anyone who has worked on urban nature conservation will relate to the assertion that, in the 1980s, urban conservation went viral across Britain with local conservation agendas leading the way. Goode uses a fight over a scrap of disused railroad property, the Gunnersby Triangle, to illustrate the rise of “Friends” organizations dedicated to the protection of small, locally important nature sites. A site of little ecological value in the traditional sense, the Triangle nonetheless became a cause célèbre due to its importance to the local population. Today it’s one of the London Wildlife Trust’s most important urban preserves. The 1980s saw an  explosive growth of urban conservation groups and the integration of urban nature into formal urban planning schemes across Britain, a pattern repeated in the United States.

Urban planning

In “Urban Planning” Goode describes his own work as London’s first ecologist for the Greater London Council which was created in 1982. Goode and his ecological team were tasked with three primary functions: developing policies for ecological and nature conservation for London and the surrounding boroughs; establishing an ecological database for London; and providing ecological input and advice on issues related to land use planning and management of publicly-owned land. The team published a number of influential “nature conservation guides” for London and its surrounding boroughs which serve as excellent planning templates to this day.

17 Nature Conservation Strategy for London cover
The cover of A Nature Conservation Strategy for London.

Creating new habitats and planning for nature

Going above and beyond their mandate, Goode and his colleagues also participated in the development of ecology parks and nature centers. A premier example was the creation of Camley Street Natural Park which demonstrated the feasibility of creating a new wetland park out of what had been a derelict coal tip adjacent to the Regent’s Canal, literally a stones throw away from King’s Cross tube station. Not only did the creation of Camley Street demonstrate that new habitats, in this case a wetland, could be created amidst the most urbanized of urban environments but it also showed how a bit of green could be provided for children occupying nearby low-income housing. Camley’s success sparked urban revitalization projects across Britain and was the inspiration for similar efforts in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere in the United States.

Camley Street Natural Park Photo Mike Houck
The entrance to Camley Street Natural Park. Photo: Mike Houck

Nature in Towns and Cities includes an overview of the many international conferences, publications, and key innovators who succeeded in bringing the urban conservation movement into the mainstream. Goode also describes the evolution of London’s Nature Conservation Strategy, which, for the first time, introduced nature conservation as part of land use planning for London. The process the team of ecologists employed to inventory almost 2,000 sites not only painted a comprehensive picture of the city’s ecology but provided a template of a rigorous science-based approach to documenting the ecologically significant landscapes that is as relevant today as when they undertook the process in 1982.

One of the London Ecology Unit’s most important contributions to urban nature conservation was the development of a three-tiered hierarchy of ecological sites:  London-wide; Borough-wide; and Local. Their work identified over 140 “Sites of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation” (London-wide). Surveys were also performed for 31 of the 33 London boroughs that resulted in the establishment of 1,300 “Sites of Borough or Local Importance” that together with sites of Metropolitan-wide significance represented almost 20 percent of the London area’s land base. All of this information has been described in thirty-one Ecology Handbooks published between 1985 and 2000, which constitute partial basis London’s biodiversity strategy today.

Access to nature, Biodiversity Action Plans, green infrastructure, ecosystem services, and new ecological landscapes

A conundrum for cities across the world is how much urban nature and greenspace is enough? What, in Tim Beatley’s Biophhilic Cities parlance is the “minimum daily requirement of nature?” Do we assess access to nature in hectares per capita, in quality of habitat, or rarity of habitat? One approach Goode describes is a national accessibility to nature standard developed by Natural England, which recommends at least two hectares in size within a five minute walk from home and at least one hectare of a site with the quality of a Local Nature Reserve per 1,000 population. He then describes London’s “Areas of Deficiency in Access to Nature”, which planners are using to identify where ecologically important sites can be improved, where points of accessibility can be expanded, or where new sites need to be created.

London Wetland Center Photo Mike Houck
The London Wetland Centre. Photo: Mike Houck

The final chapters cover a host of emerging concepts in urban ecology including valuing nature’s ecosystem services and the creation of large new urban wetlands such London’s Wetland Centre which attracted 135 species of birds in its first year after construction. Nature in Towns and Cities ends with a description of the newest effort to introduce greenspaces into city centers through the creation of green roofs.

Whether you share The Guardian’s assertion that Nature in Towns and Cities is “probably the finest work on urban ecology ever written” (December 6, 2014), there is absolutely no doubt you will agree that it’s an essential addition to any serious urban naturalist’s library and an essential and inspirational guide to planning for urban nature in your own city, town or region.

19 Green Wall London Photo Mike Houck
A green wall in London. Photo: Mike Houck

***

Rating Nature in Towns and Cities:  I highly recommend the book to the lay audience, urban planners, park planners, urban conservation advocates, and natural resource managers. I give Nature in Towns and Cities a five (flawless and fantastic) in The Nature of Cities parlance, even though some might find the Britain-centric nature of the book to be a slight disadvantage.

The book is full of high quality color photographs that illustrate the text. There are also excellent graphs, charts, and diagrams that accompany the quantitative oriented text. It’s hard to imagine what Goode might have left out, given its comprehensive nature. Even though these are evolving concepts he covers the ecological importance of green roofs, green infrastructure and the concept of ecosystem services. His references to important people and publications in the urban conservation movement provide seasoned veterans with inspiring reading and new-combers with motivating material to urge them into action in their own cities or towns.

Mike Houck
Portland

On The Nature of Cities