Environmental traumas are here. Global climate is a reality that is bringing extremes in weather as we have seen recently with the devastating impacts of Hurricane Sandy in the northeast of the USA. And in the last several years there have been massive earthquakes that have devastated cities in Japan, Haiti and New Zealand. To manage the effects of these traumas on the urban environment, we first must identify the socio-ecological drivers governing the urban ecosystems and then ascertain the degree of departure of the “new-normal” state from the pre-trauma conditions. Individual and institutional responses set the trajectory of recovery and subsequently create a “new-normal” not only for ecological but also social systems.
The Christchurch earthquakes that began in September 2010 provided a unique opportunity to address the impacts of traumas on the urban environment and in particular, identifying “resilient” components of coupled ecological-social systems. In this blog I will outline a study focussing on urban vegetation succession post-earthquakes. In later contributions I will update the findings of this study based on further data analysis and discuss other aspects, such as the effects on urban fauna, and implications and options for future urban greening thru ecological design.
A shallow earthquake of 7.1 magnitude struck the South Island of New Zealand at 4:35 am on 4 September 2010. The quake caused widespread damage and several power outages, particularly in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand’s second largest city. Mass fatalities were avoided as the quake during the night when most people were off the street.
Aftershocks have continued into 2012 with some causing significant damage themselves. The strongest to date, of magnitude 6.3, occurred on 22 February 2011. Because this was centred very close to Christchurch and it occurred during the day, it was much more destructive, with 185 fatalities. Significant liquefaction affected the eastern suburbs, producing around 400,000 tonnes of silt. The total cost to insurers of rebuilding has been estimated at NZ$15 billion, making it by far New Zealand’s costliest natural disaster, and the third-costliest earthquake (nominally) worldwide.
In the aftermath of the earthquakes (and there have been >12,000 aftershocks as I write this) significant decisions meant that several parts of Christchurch city would not be re-built as the ground was deemed too unstable. This residential “red zone” (see the map below) includes over 7,000 residential properties which have been abandoned and are being progressively demolished.
The current proposal for the residential “red zone” is to convert it into a public park called Avon-Otakaro (see the map below). Here is an excerpt from the Avon-Ōtakaro Network [AvON] charter:
“Avon-Otakaro is a network of individuals and organisations promoting the future use of the residential red zone lands as an ecological and recreational reserve. We wish to establish a community-driven science-informed living memorial to rejuvenate and nurture the long-term environmental, economic, community and spiritual wellbeing of the eastern suburbs and of those living throughout greater Christchurch. Our aim is to turn a tragedy into an opportunity, a polluted drain into a vibrant river system, and exhaustion and despair into hope and inspiration.”
Various volunteer groups have been collecting ecological information on the area, particularly on the occurrence of notable mature native and exotic trees that should be preserved.
The majority of the properties in this zone were abandoned after the earthquakes in September 2010 or February 2011 with little or no subsequent maintenance to gardens and road verges. We sampled 100 properties over 9 suburbs with a view to determining the regeneration responses of native and exotic woody tree and shrub species after abandonment. The regeneration of native species has been rapid and, in some situations, prolific.
Native Plagianthus regius (lowland ribbonwood) seedlings 1.5m tall established on silt (liquefaction) in the front garden of a residential property. Photo: Glenn Stewart.
In the absence of garden management we are seeing a “new” vegetation dynamic driven by new substrate availability, dispersal of seeds by birds, and the presence of surviving seed sources. The most common native seedlings are cabbage tree (Cordyline australis), Coprosma spp. Pittosporum tenuifolium, P. eugenioides and Solanum aviculare, all of which have fleshy fruits and are dispersed by birds. There has also been a dramatic increase in seedlings of exotic species as well. Examples include Scotch Broom (Cytisus scoparius), Elderberry (Sambucus nigra), Prunus spp., Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus), and Buddleja spp. This is not surprising as disturbed substrates and a high light environment provide an ideal environment for exotic invasion, especially if persistent seed banks are already present.
Native Coprosma repens seedlings established in an untended “herbaceous border” in a residential property. Photo: Glenn Stewart
Substantial planting of native trees and shrubs in city residential gardens over the last several decades has provided a seed source for this regeneration. Seedlings are more abundant in suburbs with more mature native trees and also with greater numbers of “perch” trees (for bird-dispersed species). There was also a distinctive pattern of compositional change in native species (seedlings) with increasing distance from the coast. For example, the dioecious shrub Coprosma repens (naturally a coastal species) was more prevalent close to the coast. Prior to the earthquakes this species would not have been as common as it is not regularly planted in residential gardens. But after property abandonment it is increasing rapidly as a result of natural successional processes.
A typical “abandoned” property in the residential “red zone”, Christchurch. NB the front lawn now resembles an unkempt pasture and contains abundant exotic herbaceous and woody weeds. Photo: Glenn Stewart.
Conclusions and further research
Early indications are that the native flora is remarkably resilient. So much so that it seems certain that in the absence of human interference a substantial native-dominated urban forest will establish in the residential “red zone”.
On the other hand, vigorous and intensive on-going management will be required to control exotic species that are both adaptable and aggressive. The introduction of other native species that currently lack a seed source would also increase biodiversity and offer other important food sources for native birds, lizards and invertebrates. This area (Avon-Otakaro) has the potential to add to the rich tapestry of natural habitats in the city and become an area of considerable native biodiversity.
The preliminary results from our pilot study highlights the need for further studies of vegetation dynamics in urban landscapes and the nature of chronic and catastrophic disruption on the mechanisms of and management of vegetation within the context of dynamic physical, social and ecological systems.
The preliminary results from our pilot study highlights the need for further studies of vegetation dynamics in urban landscapes and the nature of chronic and catastrophic disruption on the mechanisms of and management of vegetation within the context of dynamic physical, social and ecological systems.
“It is estimated that 220 natural catastrophes, 70 technological disasters and 3 new armed conflicts occur each year”. Alexander (2005)
The urban environment and community are key indicators and drivers of a nation’s adaptability and resilience to catastrophic events such as earthquakes, fires, floods, tsunamis, dust storms and hurricanes. Yet the urban environment is often ignored or is an afterthought in planning even though accessible and diverse green space is regarded as a predictor of human health, happiness, equity, and biodiversity. In fact, the value of urban green space and more specifically biodiversity is critical to providing ecosystem services, services used by humans to survive and live and achieve resilience in the face of impending global disruption and despite the coming associated environmental and economic trauma(s).
With almost all of my career (and most of my adult life) spent working in or around city parks, I was recently surprised to learn an astonishing fact. In American’s largest cities, more than half contain park systems that are more than 50 percent “natural.” In fact, in America’s 10 largest cities, all but one (Chicago) have park systems where more than half are natural.
The idea that our nation’s largest cities are repositories of natural areas of significant size flies in the face of not only the perception of cities as crowded “concrete jungles,” but also of the popular image of city parks all being in the Olmstedian tradition, of designed, heavily manicured greenswards or large modern recreational facilities — ballfields, tennis courts, golf courses, running and cycling tracks, and skating rinks.
That so much of the park systems of our largest cities are natural has profound implications for the future not just of the park systems themselves, but also for the environmental sustainability of cities and for all of the factors that go into planning, designing, constructing, and managing parks. And as cities confront climate change, rising sea levels, increased storm water runoff, or drought, and in some cases burgeoning populations, their parks and especially their natural areas, will play even more important roles, particularly as they are recognized for providing ecosystems services and other benefits.
Importantly, city officials, park managers, scientists, landscape architects, planners, engineers, and open space advocates understand the value of natural areas in cities, and are taking steps to protect, study, manage, and, in some cases, restore natural areas.
These facts can be found in the recently issued 2014 City Park Facts (CPF), written and published by The Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence, a “think tank” for urban park issues. For readers wondering how America’s biggest cities — some of them very densely populated and developed — have so much natural land within their borders, it is important to first define the terms. According to CPF, “Natural areas are either pristine or reclaimed lands that are open to the public and left largely undisturbed and managed for their ecological value (i.e., wetlands, forests, deserts). While they may have trails and occasional benches, they are not developed for any recreation activities beyond walking, running, and cycling.”
CPF also takes pains to define “Designed Parkland”: “Designed areas are parklands that have been created, constructed, planted, and managed primarily for human use. They include playgrounds, neighborhood parks, sports fields, plazas, boulevards, municipal golf courses, municipal cemeteries, and all areas served by roadways, parking lots, and service buildings.”
In most cases, the natural areas were deliberately preserved as part of official efforts to save large open spaces and preserve their natural aspects. In other cases, the preservation of natural areas was somewhat accidental at first, as open space acquired to develop as active parkland sat fallow due to lack of resources or civic will, or formerly disturbed areas (garbage dumps, filled-in freshwater and tidal wetlands) were naturalized as human intervention tailed off.
The “benign neglect” theory applies to New York City, by far the nation’s largest city, and the largest city to have a park system more than 50 percent natural. I have some experience with that, as for two years in the late 1980’s, I was the Director of the NYC Parks Department’s Natural Resources Group (NRG). The NRG was created in 1986 under then Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern. Stern had a personal fondness for natural areas and especially for trees, and his First Deputy Commissioner, Robert Santos, proposed creating the NRG to assess and develop management plans for the City’s natural areas.
This was a watershed moment for NYC, and perhaps for urban park management nationally, because generally speaking, the then quite vast areas of woodland, meadow, and salt and freshwater wetland (approximately 10,000 acres of city parkland; another 7,000 acres of Federal parkland were mostly “natural” as well) were shown on park maps as “undeveloped land.” While recent Federal and State regulations offered some protections for wetlands, the natural areas were all subject to being “developed“ for active recreation purposes, or in some cases for roadways. With the creation of the NRG, we set out to determine what the resource was, see how healthy it was, assess the types of restoration or other intervention that might be appropriate, and also promote the values of the wild areas through education and the creation of trails and nature centers, helping people to understand, appreciate, and use them more.
How did NYC come to possess so much “natural” open space? Some of it was deliberate — though Robert Moses is reviled for filling in wetlands and building major highways along shorelines, he also presided over the saving of what was left of the open spaces of Jamaica Bay, including land that would later be transferred to the National Park Service as part of Gateway National Recreation Area. Much earlier, in the early 1880s, John Mullaly led an effort to acquire and protect as parkland almost 6,000 acres of woodlands and meadows and wetlands in the Bronx, creating Pelham Bay Park — still the city’s largest park and almost four times the size of Central Park — along with Van Cortlandt Park and Bronx Park, later the homes of the Bronx Zoo and NY Botanical Garden.
But other “natural” parks are former dumps, filled-in wetlands, and areas of designed parks that either naturalized due to lack of maintenance, or were deliberately restored or managed as natural areas.
In many other cities, the preponderance of natural areas is due to “the idiosyncrasies of city boundaries” according to the CCPE, but also because many cities have within their boundaries large Federal or State parks or natural areas. In that vein, Anchorage, Alaska leads the pack. Its astonishing 501,785 acres of parkland include just 2,400 acres of designed parks, and the vast majority of its parkland is contained in the Chugach State Park, with 490,125 acres within the Anchorage city limits. Spacious natural parks also dominate in cities with large populations as well as in those not as densely populated.
Of the 36,113 acres of parkland in Los Angeles, more than 26,000 are natural, with the State managing over 10,000 acres, and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority managing almost 6,000 acres. Phoenix, Arizona also has a huge park system, mostly city-owned, and 43,610 acres are natural, with 5,654 acres designed. Of Scottsdale, Arizona’s nearly 29,000 acres of parks, a scant 974 are designed. In New Orleans, Louisiana more than 24,000 of the total 28,432 acres of parks are contained in the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge.
Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary in St. Paul, Minnesota, a Trust for Public Land Project. Image from The Trust for Public Land database. Photo: Allen Brisson-Smith
So with all of this natural land in many cities, what are the best strategies for protecting and even expanding these areas? Some of them face threats that may include inappropriate development (such as utility rights of way), lack of funding for maintenance and security, and the effects of climate change. Is there consensus among city leaders, or even among environmental managers, for how best to take care of the resource? For example, in many places there have been efforts to restore natural areas through the careful eradication of non-native, exotic species of plants, and even of animals. But that is an expensive proposition, with no certainty of a desired outcome, and some professionals, such as Peter del Tredici, suggest that we should respect the tenacity and success of certain invasives and not try to fight an ultimately losing battle against them.
What are the challenges confronting natural areas in cities and the benefits they provide? How can cities best address these challenges, and who are their potential allies?
First, the impetus to protect and enhance urban natural areas must start locally. In a number of cities, municipal and county government and non-profit organizations have come together in productive partnerships. The Green Seattle Partnership provides a sophisticated stewardship model for urban woodlands. In Portland, the Intertwine brings together a variety of levels of government and the non-profit sector to address the varied needs of natural spaces and the connective tissue of greenways. The Chicago Wilderness Alliance links together public and private entities with a focus on the prairie ecosystem.
But a stronger partnership between the three prominent levels of government may be the key to success in the preservations and productive use of urban natural areas. In New York City, the NRG is partnering with the US Forest Service in the operation of an “Urban Field Station,” a jointly run laboratory where city, state, federal, and academic researchers and practitioners are studying the impact of natural areas and trees on the environmental health of cities. The Million Trees NYC project, that has led to the planting (so far) of nearly 850,000 trees, is now the focus of research projects thorough the Urban Field Station. It is accepted that trees and woodlands play an important role in cleaning the air, storing carbon, mitigating the urban heat island effect, and processing storm water, but how much of a role do they play, relative to other design features? Which trees function best in the difficult urban environment, and what is the mortality rate of small whips planted in old landfills, compared to large balled-and-burlapped trees planted in sidewalk pits?
Part of the funding for the research, and for base level assessments of the natural areas of NYC is coming from a major public-private partnership focused on helping protect and manage the resources, known as the Natural Areas Conservancy, which in just a few years has already raised over $5 million in donations from private funders. Also in New York City, a conservancy has been formed to partner with both the National Park Service and the NYC Parks Department on caring for and programming the 10,000 acres of mostly natural parklands of Jamaica Bay, and a research institute focused on the damaged ecosystem of the bay has recently been created.
But the biggest lift may be the one of changing attitudes. Too many elected officials still look at large natural areas and see them as “empty” or “undeveloped,” envisioning active recreation facilities, roads, container ports, or real estate developments. In coastal cities, at least, drastic weather events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy have shown the perils of building anything in flood zones, but as cities grow and feel the pressure to create housing and economic development, will we forget the cruel lessons of the recent past?
Particularly in cities affected by extreme weather events, we have seen an evolution and new appreciation for the ecosystems services value of natural areas, and even the value of creating green infrastructure to capture storm water and mitigate storm surge, with the attendant layers of value as parks and habitat. And there may be additional, less urgent, but equally interesting challenges.
There are a number of metrics that have been developed for calculating the value of trees on city streets and in landscape designs, but not necessarily for urban forests. Can we develop metrics for the value of large urban natural areas? How much carbon dioxide can be processed by one tree? What are the optimum species and sizes? What is the rate of return of a large wooded area? Does size matter, or is it density and species composition? The groundbreaking work of Richard TT Forman in landscape ecology offers ways to predict the soil’s carbon storage potential in different types of forests or other landscapes, based on such factors as types of plants and rainfall data. Are all wetlands generally helpful in storm surge mitigation, or must they be of a certain magnitude? Can we develop metrics that would suggest an ideal amount of tidal wetland or number of trees per person for an environmentally healthy city?
Three decades ago, forestry school graduates and ecologists were looked at as batty to practice their trades in or focus research on cities — surely, no real “nature” was taking place there. But as people around the world and in the US (83 percent at last count) live in cities, and as we come to understand the extraordinary value of natural areas to cities, the cutting edge research and practice of natural area protection and management will increasingly take place in urban areas. Elected officials, public sector managers, non-profit and academic partners, and citizens can help to effect a sea change in how our urban natural areas are viewed, appreciated, and treated going forward.
A review of the book Animal Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution by Alexander Pschera (English translation from German by Elisabeth Lauffer). 2016. 209 pages.ISBN: 9781939931351. New Vessel Press. Buy the book.
Apply the sunscreen, fill the water bottle, and put the damn phone at the bottom of the pack. My (precious) time outside, in the woods or on the water, often starts with disconnecting from the internet. Losing that tether is for me a liberating experience that makes me present in my surroundings. Indeed, the internet and its distractions is usually considered an impediment towards bringing people closer to nature. Its offerings easily draw us (and especially our children) away from the complex beauty, the here-and-now wonder of the lives of plants and animals.
Pschera sees the animal internet as fundamental to revolutionizing human-animal interactions. It provides us with the basis for giving wild animals an individual identity that is critical to the protection of them and their habitat.
But what if ecology truly extended to the digital realm? As smart streets and cities becomes the norm for urban managers, can our screens also become a regular means of embracing the wild around us and more critically managing our interactions with plants and animals (and their interactions with us)?
That is the prospect offered by Animal Internet by Alexander Pschera. Pschera draws on the example of Animal Tracker, an app developed by the Max Planck Institute that follows wild animals all over the world in near-real time, to offer valuable insights into the social, ethical, and a few of the management implications of an “internet of animals”. While light on technical details and some practical management considerations of remote sensing of wildlife, this smart book will trigger all kinds of interesting discussions about how tech can change our relationship with nature.
A bit of background: Animal Tracker draws its data from another free online infrastructure also housed at the Institute, Movebank, used by researchers to store and share data on daily and seasonal migrations. The aggregated information is used for research and management, and has that in common with apps with more targeted management objectives such as Whale Alert, which tracks individual whales and is used by agencies, NGOs, and shippers to reduce ship-strikes and other conflicts in Boston Harbor and other locations. But Animal Tracker also enables community sourcing of supporting information, including uploading individual observations and photos of tagged (and named) animals to Animal Tracker. It intentionally seeks to create an online community in support of public understanding, similar to those fostered by other apps such as iNaturalist and its Bioblitzs’ and City Nature challenges.
But the scientist behind Movebank and Animal Tracker, the ornithologist Martin Wikelski, sees a broader purpose. Tapping into the swarm intelligence of birds, turtles, fish, and insects by tracking their movements can be put to a broad array of purposes. Experiments are how underway to use migration patterns to predict and monitor earthquakes and floods, track vectors of disease and climate change, and monitor fisheries and agriculture. His ICARUS project, backed by the German and Russian space agencies, launched a satellite in February 2018 designed to facilitate the tracking of animals from space and lowering costs; a big step toward creating the animal internet that is the subject of the book.
It is the social and ethical dimensions of this change where Pschera, a student of philosophy and chronicler of the internet, makes his most astute observations. He posits that by tracking the movement of creatures in handheld apps and other digital tools can help increase the transparency of the natural world, and bring it closer to our lives and the life in our cities. The close observation of wild animals and any notion of developing a real relationship with them is difficult for most city residents. Naming animals, following their movement and perhaps feeding or reproductive success through webcams and posted photos, both illuminates their world and connects it with ours. It can help humanize apex predators like mountain lions or sharks or celebrate the arrival of migratory birds and fish.
Pschera does his best writing in describing how these interactions, and the power of social media and the internet generally in defining new social spaces and modes of being. He argues that our inherent need to relate to other living things can be well served by this digital world, in part by reducing the physical barriers and expertise once required to closely observe animals. This transparent nature is indeed critical to overcoming the traditional divisions of green and gray. By revealing life through the flexible mechanisms offered by technology around us we will bring animals back into our lives and reaffirm their utility to society. The animal Internet is “nature after nature”, a symptom of the Anthropocene era.
His discussion of the practical implications of the animal internet is not as well developed. The massive and practical challenges of storing and sharing data between scientists, agencies, and the public is not really acknowledged. I would have liked to have some more concrete examples and considerations for how the data could be displayed or shared, what has worked and what has not when it comes to using the internet to engage the public and drawing their interest into difficult policy and management questions.
Also relatively unexplored is some of the darker side of all this information gathering. Tracking animals is as valuable for poachers as it is for managers. Pschera argues that transparency will overcome these issues, and offers some good examples. But as with the internet of people, the harvesting of big data can be used for ill as easily as for good, and Pschera could have gone deeper into these questions.
But perhaps that is the point and the book’s real contribution. The internet of animals is surely coming here in one form or another, and with it “an ecology after ecology”. Coming to grips with what this means is more about ethics and understanding than quality assurance plans and user agreements. Pschera sees the animal internet as fundamental to revolutionizing human-animal interactions. It provides us with the basis for giving wild animals an individual identity that is critical to the protection of them and their habitat. The creation of stories about real animals will personalize them and make their lives real to people.
Can the data become as much of the management of cities as crowd-sourced traffic data and shopping patterns? That is left to others to determine.
Engagement is the first step toward active acknowledgment, inclusion, and stewardship of the environment. Nature Atlas provides a rich tapestry of options for engaging with urban nature.
Edward O. Wilson popularized the concept Biophilia more than 30 years ago, in 1984, describing it as “the urge to affiliate with other life forms”. In short, Biophilia is a hypothesis that suggests the innate affinity of humans towards nature. We agree that humans possess the tendency to seek connections with nature—whether as a place for escape from the busy and chaotic city life, or as scientists curious to learn about other life forms, or designers seeking inspiration from natural habitats/environments, or as artists fascinated by colors, forms, shapes, and habits—we all share a love for living systems. It is this tacit, inherent connection between humans and nature that we explore in this essay and wish to make explicit through a research project based on Ruchika Lodha’s master’s thesis, called Nature Atlas, which excavates hidden layers of urban environments by mapping relationships between humans and nature. With this project, we hope to broaden the spectrum of human engagement with nature, to deepen awareness and knowledge, invoke curiosity to observe, interact, and engage, all as a way to help create a culture of stewardship toward our urban (and non-urban) environments.
The purpose of Nature Atlas is to invoke diverse ways of perceiving, understanding, and engaging nature by actively and consciously interacting with our environments through various practices across disciplines, inclinations, expertise, and capacities.
In the Anthropocene, people may be aware of and concerned about the environment, but there are many factors that deter them from being actively engaged with the nature around them. There are time constraints, lack of knowledge or expertise, fear of nature, and many other possible reasons. Engagement is the first step toward active acknowledgment, inclusion, and ultimately stewardship for environments (accreting toward nature at large). Personal associations and attachments that people build with environments provide stronger and more permanent motivations for engagement and stewardship (Nassauer 2011). The aim of Nature Atlas is to involve people with various interests and expertise to create a collective consciousness toward our environments.
Developed over 2016 and 2017, Nature Atlas employs alternative mapping techniques that go beyond top-down, two-dimensional spatial visualization to employ mapping as a reflexive, sensorial, and immersive methodology to excavate the unseen, tacit, or disregarded layers of nature within a case study in New York City, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. This kind of mapping provides a wide range of inspirations and real-life projects to evoke readers to engage with the environment in their own ways without suggesting one universal or “best” strategy. The Atlas, thus, is a compendium of interpretative and speculative maps, diagrams, illustrations, and stories visualizing quantitative, qualitative, archival, scientific, empirical, and anecdotal research.
We envision the Nature Atlas as a step toward the creation of a broader collective of knowledge that yields diverse ways to actively and consciously recognize, interact with and engage nature through sensorial experiences, reflection, and speculation to understand how we (may) intervene with/in the Anthropocene to shift the present toward a more desirable future, Good Anthropocene (Bennett et al. 2016, McPhearson et al. 2017). Below we iteratively map layers of history of the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn as a basis for exploring the current landscape of contemporary imaginaries and engagement of this changing nature in the city. This historical lens provides an opportunity to compare shifts in human-nature relationships through time.
“Primitive nature”
About four centuries ago, Gowanus was a saltwater marshland and meadows called Gouwane after the chief of the Lenni-Lanape group (Alexiou 2015), who were its earliest inhabitants.
The natives lived well off the tidal inlet of the marshland—a creek, then—through subsistence farming (of corn in the outlying lands), seasonal fishing, and collecting shellfish. These early inhabitants shared resources and lived intimately with nature, ebbing and flowing with its bounty.
Humans (as inhabitants) subsumed within and living intimately with nature (habitat). Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
A speculative representation of primitive nature where human subsistence depends on natural topography. Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
European Encounter
Europeans first arrived in Gouwane around the 1630s and settled in the area, intrigued by its plentiful and pristine nature, which was unlike the ordered and complex European cities (Alexiou 2015)[1]. The Europeans introduced new concepts of land ownership, property, and regulation. They appropriated and tamed the topography by delineating land, water, fields, settlements, constructing mills and roads for farming, fishing, trade, commerce, and navigation. The creek became a means to cultivate and transport produce from Gowanus to Manhattan markets. These delineations between land and water, labor and leisure, nature and society that were nonexistent or mutable before the arrival of the Europeans became clearly defined boundaries with distinct meanings and functions. Nature was therefore “tamed” and appropriated to create an ideal middle ground or pastoral ideal between wild, primitive nature of Gowanus and highly organized European societies to fulfill needs beyond subsistence, arguably producing a dichotomous relationship between nature and society.
An abstraction of the pastoral image as the ideal middle ground between wild nature and civilized society. Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
The introduction of property and land ownership changes human perceptions of, and implications on, nature. Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
Commercial nature
The nineteenth century saw the establishment of many early industries along the creek. Political and economic structures increasingly influenced and subsumed the topography of Gowanus. Infrastructural systems including the construction of the canal were seen as engineering marvels that eased the processes of manufacturing, trade, and commerce providing economic gains and convenience for sewage discharge. The canal became a raw material for exploitation and a waste receptacle for industries and society rather than an environment to inhabit and appropriate based on needs for subsistence (as in the 1600s). Mechanized labor, driving economic and political systems, and technological advancements, dictated its use and form changing the perception, function, and interaction with inhabitants intensifying the separation between society and nature.
Increased alienation between nature and society due to mechanical, industrial, political, and economic systems. Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
The implication of the political grid plan on topography of Gowanus Canal. Map source: https://issuu.com/proteusgowanus/docs/gowanus_canal_maps_1639_2004. Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
Post-industrial detritus
Since the stock market crash during the Great Depression in 1929, development and construction in Gowanus were almost completely at a stand-still due to lack of investments. The century and a half long industrial history that led to its glory, progress, and development also resulted in extreme contamination and toxicity in the canal. Map 4 hyperbolizes the post-industrial landscape of Gowanus Canal. It is a juxtaposition of industry, trade, commerce, prosperity, stagnation, toxicity, grime, romanticism, and charm. This perception of Gowanus Canal exposes contesting and overlapping epistemologies of nature. In the early twenty-first century, after residents and government officials raised concerns and voices, the site was studied and sampled producing reports of contamination levels and its effects on public and environmental health. This was representative of the acknowledgment of the interconnectedness between nature and society. After two years of deliberation, the government eventually designated Gowanus Canal a Superfund site, placing it on the National Priority List 2010. The site is now managed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and undergoing remediation and cleanup.
Map (iv) is a representation emphasizing the industrialization of Gowanus Canal. Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
Abolishing the idea of nature to envision reality without binaries (of society and nature). Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
Contemporary nature
The current remediation plan envisions Gowanus Canal as an amenity to human society, an accessible piece of nature with flourishing habitats for plant, animal, bird, and aquatic species. Even though there are efforts to clean the canal and employ design strategies to acknowledge, address, include, and improve habitats for other species that cohabit the environment with humans, the vision co-opts the idea of a pastoral “garden” that manifests the reconciliation between deteriorating wild nature and extremely chaotic society through technology. Although there is awareness of the interconnectedness between societies and nature, nature is still perceived as an externality that supports and situates society. The knowledge produced through literature and scientific research that promote ecological thinking are often inaccessible or abstruse to laypeople.
A rendering by dland studio for the restoration of Gowanus Canal Sponge Park, is a composition of overlapping layers of various perceptions of nature (pastoral garden, industrial charm, ecological). Credit: DLand Studio
Actionable engagement
In this section of the Atlas, we list projects and practices that critically engage with nature through various disciplines and skill-sets including science, research, design, photography, art, and pedagogy as a pathway for the multi-scalar approaches for initial and ongoing environmental engagement. This collection hopes to provide inspiration and invoke readers from various backgrounds, with diverse inclinations and capacities to engage with nature by actively observing, acknowledging, interacting and engaging with their environments. The Atlas may also become a live archive connecting people and building networks among similarly-inclined practitioners and aspirers while bridging the gap between the literature on nature and empirical experiences through multidisciplinary practices.
Practice 1: Cartography, research. Source: Gowanus Canal Public Health Assessment Final Release and the New York State Department of Health, January 2017. Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
Interpretive reporting is a method to translate long, tedious, and abstruse scientific reports into accessible and legible (visual) information to a population that is not academic or scientifically-inclined.
Practice 2: cartography, theory, research. Source: Gowanus Canal Public Health Assessment Final Release and the New York State Department of Health, January 2017. Credit: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
Relational reporting allows us to map the relations between things, facts, implications, causes to understand the connections within a situation or context under consideration.
Practice 3: Pedagogy, research, multi-disciplinary collaboration. Photo: Ruchika Narendra Lodha
The Verge Workshop, “designing for inclusion” aimed to engage students and scholars from various backgrounds in an open-ended collaborative discussion around invisible actors, systems, and structures within the framework of extractive economies and environments.
Ellie Irons is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in environmental science whose practice explores human-nature relationships through interactive, exploratory, recreational, and fieldwork-based methods. The Invasive Pigments project focuses on what she calls “spontaneous urban plants” or invasive weed species that rapidly grow within densely populated and developed urban landscapes in order to make pigments to produce paintings, diagrams, or field guides. Whereas, the Next Epoch Seed Library is an archive and seed exchange program that promotes awareness of and engagement with urban plants.
Conclusion
Nature is a complex realm with many meanings and manifestations and for many can be daunting to engage with. Ambiguous genealogies discussed as part of the history of the Gowanus debunk the need for a universal theory to understand or know nature. Our interest here lies in exploring the multiplicities of epistemologies of nature and the shifting relationships of humans within nature to elicit new ways to engage with nature within situated urban environments. This collection of “maps” is both a research method and a presentation technique that expands the scope of and translates abstract and esoteric literature to understand and engage nature within empirical context in two ways: one, by re-telling the story of Gowanus with the focus on human-nature relationships, and two, by addressing the diversity of epistemologies of nature through an assembly of praxis projects in order to create a collective knowledge of and engagement with nature.
As a research method, the Atlas suggests observing and interacting with the environment in a conscious, analytical, and sensorial manner by revealing covert layers. In the case of the Gowanus Canal, the alternative mapping techniques incite the acknowledgment of smells, weeds, “inanimate matter”, and micro-ecologies within the water and soil of the canal. As a presentation technique, the Atlas distills complex information like the transformative history of the landscape of Gowanus, and scientific reports on contamination and health impacts into easily comprehensible visuals through story-telling techniques. In both capacities, the Nature Atlas provides for a pedagogical tool that helps conscious, and more involved interaction and understanding of our environments. Bringing this into local neighborhoods, classrooms, community organizations, and backyard barbecues is the next step to link multiple ways of understanding and to connect to the everyday nature in our communities and streets.
This research, including mapping, interviews, and workshops, was conceived and conducted as part of Ruchika Lodha’s unpublished graduate thesis (2017) for MA in Theories of Urban Practice at Parsons School of Design.
Bennett, E.M., M. Solan, R. Biggs, T. McPhearson, A. Norstrom, P. Olsson, L. Pereira, G.D. Peterson, C. Raudsepp-Hearne, F. Biermann, S. R. Carpenter, E. Ellis, T. Hichert, V. Galaz, M. Lahsen, M. Milkoreit, B. Martin-Lopez, K. A. Nicholas, R. Preiser, G. Vince, J. Vervoort, J. Xu. 2016. “Bright Spots: Seeds of a Good Anthropocene.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14(8): 441–448, doi:10.1002/fee.1309
McPhearson, T., D. Iwaniec, and X. Bai. 2017. “Positives visions for guiding transformations toward desirable urban futures.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (Special Issue), 22:33–40 DOI: 10.1016/j.cosust.2017.04.004
Nassauer, Joan Iverson. “Care and stewardship: From home to planet.” Landscape and Urban Planning 100, no. 4 (2011): 321-23. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.02.022.
Alexiou, Joseph. “Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal.” New York: New York University Press, 2015.
Dr. Timon McPhearson works with designers, planners, and local government to foster sustainable, resilient and just cities. He is Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Nature in cities benefits our health, but how can we bring this fact into more specific guidelines and insights? Here are seven key messages for planners and designers.
What the pandemic we live in revealed is something we knew, experienced, but had not well-evidenced at scale: nature in cities is fundamental for maintaining and regaining our physical and mental health. There is a broad literature on the benefits of green space for promoting physical activity and health, reducing obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular and cardiometabolic risk. Green space can also increase mental and psychological well-being through different mechanisms (e.g., relieving stress, reducing concentration problems, significant improvement in self-esteem and cognitive functioning). In addition, green space can improve the sense of place, neighborhood satisfaction, social cohesion, and social capital, and reduce crime and incivilities, all related to social determinants of health. The provision of green space can, therefore, potentially counteract some of the health-related manifestations of inequality (Jennings, Larson, & Yun, 2016; Sharifi, Levin, M.Stone, & Nygaard, 2021; Sugiyama, Leslie, Giles-Corti, & Owen, 2008).
During the Nature of Cities Festival 2021, we brought together different perspectives on what matters for planning and designing urban green spaces or urban ecosystems that can mediate or contribute to better physical and mental health. Our dialogue session brought forward seven key messages for urban planners and urban designers to consider building from evidence in Australian cities:
Quality and quantity of urban parks matters for healthy cities;
Access to urban parks can be a small step towards addressing health injustices in cities;
Access to urban green spaces improves well-being;
Shocks alter behavior and perceptions of people for using urban green spaces;
Urban parks were preferred gateways to other peri-urban nature areas during the pandemic;
Plan and design cities with green should be done with wise considerations on different heat effects during the day and night.
Every bit of green matters when dealing with heat in cities.
First, efforts to design and maintain high-quality urban parks can contribute to people’s health. It is well known that physical inactivity is a major cause of chronic diseases, and moderate-intensity physical activity such as walking is protective against them. An important contribution of urban parks is to provide people with an opportunity to be physically active. Research has found that high-quality urban parks with various features (e.g., walking paths, grassed areas, amenities) are conducive to recreational walking and park visits (Sugiyama et al 2015). Improving the quality of urban parks thus has the potential to increase residents’ physical activity. In addition, visiting parks means exposure to natural environments and a chance to interact with neighbors, which are beneficial for mental health and well-being. It is important to point out that renovating urban parks is much easier than improving other environmental factors that are known to be related to walking (e.g., population density, street network, public transport) and there is public support for park improvement (Sugiyama et al 2018). Local governments are recommended to consider improving their parks to enhance residents’ health.
Second, urban parks may be used to mitigate socioeconomic inequalities in health. There are systematic and persistent disparities in health between the deprived and affluent, and reducing such health inequalities is a key priority in public health (Bleich et al, 2012). Studies have shown that areas with higher levels of deprivation and those with lower levels do not differ in terms of the number of parks, but they differ in the quality of parks: parks in deprived areas tend to have more incivilities (e.g., litter, graffiti, poor maintenance) and fewer amenities than those in less deprived areas (Crawford et al, 2008; Hughey et al, 2016). Given that people of lower socioeconomic status are less physically active during leisure time than those of higher socioeconomic status (Beenacers et al, 2012), it is possible to mitigate health inequalities by improving the quality of parks and encouraging recreational physical activity in deprived neighborhoods. This can be a small step toward tackling health injustices in cities.
Third, access to green spaces in cities is associated with higher levels of subjective well-being. To effectively contribute to bringing this knowledge closer to policy front, we develop a novel green space accessibility index that, unlike conventional measurement approaches, considers all green spaces that can be accessed from a locality. The access index is affected by the distance to green space, the crowding of that green space, and the area of green space. Our gravity model is built to indicate that the importance of green space decreases when the distance increases but does not disappear. (Sharifi, Nygaard, M.Stone, & Levin, 2021). To analyze the effect of green space, we build a hedonic model of subjective well-being. The results reaffirm and emphasize green space’s role in supporting well-being and the importance of protecting or enhancing green space provision in urban environments. In the next step, we examine the effect of different green space qualities, in terms of size, on subjective well-being. The results indicate that only the large green spaces — greater than about 1 hectare — have a significant and consistent effect on subjective well-being. To increase green space efficacy, therefore, policy initiatives need to consider developing interconnected green spaces, combining them with walkable areas that support local jobs and social networking (Sharifi, Nygaard, & M.Stone, 2021).
Fourth, shocks like bushfires and the COVID pandemic alter behavior and perceptions of people for using urban green spaces. During the 2019-20 summer bushfires, it was unsafe for Canberrans to go outdoors, because bushfires in the state of New South Wales have resulted in smoke haze that worsened air quality in Canberra (ACT Emergency Services Agency, 2020). During the COVID pandemic, in order to stop the spread of COVID-19, Canberrans were encouraged by the local ACT Government to avoid mass gathering and non-essential travel. Furthermore, preliminary evidence suggests that these two recent shocks have also affected the ability of residents to interact with and use various forms of urban green space and green infrastructure in Canberra. Green spaces are important to people through the provision of various general and mental health benefits (World Health Organisation, 2016, Astell-Burt and Feng, 2019), which are particularly vital for maintaining wellbeing during stressful times of shocks. It is crucial that the impacts of shocks are taken into consideration during the design and management of urban green spaces in the future, as the occurrence of shocks are expected to be more frequent.
Fifth, urban parks are gateways for connecting with nature and people and are preferred to other peri-urban nature areas during the pandemic. Urban parks play an important role in the everyday lives of urban residents. In Canberra, many activities take place in urban parks and in the presence of green infrastructure. Urban parks are often regarded as community hubs, where residents could come for exercise, or gather for BBQs and picnics. Alternatively, they are also a place for relaxation, where Canberrans could rest, and enjoy the natural environment. Preliminary evidence suggests that urban parks are highly valued during the COVID pandemic in Canberra. Local parks were also more accessible during the pandemic compared to peri-urban nature areas, which are often further away. Visits to local parks became a chance for residents to leave home, after spending more time working remotely, and to restore their well-being. This has helped people to maintain their health and to enhance their resilience during the pandemic.
Sixth, when planning for bringing vegetation or trees to cities, it needs to be done in consideration of the day and night heat effects it will have on people. Excess urban heat is a major issue to the health and the thermal comfort of city occupants. In the Australian context, 86% of the Australian population residing in cities and frequent, severe heatwaves caused the second-highest mortality among all other natural disasters in Australia. Therefore, urban heat mitigation should be in the discussion with a high priority. Urban surface characteristics and their aerodynamics can cause excess heat in cities with altered urban energy budgets. Hence, my recent work is focused on how different urban surface characteristics are related to urban heat (Herath et al., 2021). Among “green” surfaces types in cities, canyon vegetation, urban trees, and green roofs proved to be potential heat mitigation strategies during different times of the day; in daytime and nighttime. Urban green proved to be highly effective to reduce nighttime temperature, therefore, urban green is applicable as Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect mitigation strategy. It is important to highlight when cities are planning with green spaces, designing should consider their effectiveness in the time of the day and the spatial distribution. This could be effective in terms of urban heat as well as with other ecosystem services by green in an urban ecosystem.
Seventh, we should appreciate and count every bit of green for dealing with heat in the city. In the study in Melbourne, the best results for heat reduction were obtained from extreme ratios of surface types such as green roofs and cool roofs (Herath et al., 2021). But in realistic conditions, urban designs with green and cool surfaces have to be limited. As revealed in correlation analysis, urban vegetation, green roofs, and cool roofs depicted high, strong negative relationships. On the other hand, the canyon vegetation performed linearly for minimum temperature in the CBD, as the higher the urban trees ratio, the lower the nighttime temperature. Moreover, strategic improvements in surface characteristics should be made in the overall city, regardless of the urban condition, CBD, or the rest of the urban because it is essential for the best thermal performance in the entire city. Also, since the effectiveness of different surfaces differs with the time of the day, we propose experimentations for strategic combinations of different surfaces for maximum effectiveness. Therefore, it is evident that every bit of green counts equally for cooling cities; however, with an accurate arrangement.
Nature in cities benefits our health; how to bring this into more specific guidelines and insights for urban planning is an on-going quest. As the main motivation and mission of the Nature of Cities Festival 2021 was to connect different perspectives and find connections and bring different pieces of the puzzle together, we hope that our blog post from the dialogue session provides a summary of such an attempt.
Takemi Sugiyama, Farahnaz Sharifi, Zirui (Jerry) Yao, Prabhasri Herath, and Niki Frantzeskaki Melbourne, Melbourne, Canberra, Canberra, and Melbourne
On The Nature of Cities
References
ACT EMERGENCY SERVICES AGENCY 2020. ACT Emergency Services Agency Operational Review of the Bushfire Season 2019/20, Canberra.
ASTELL-BURT, T. & FENG, X. 2019. Association of Urban Green Space With Mental Health and General Health Among Adults in Australia. JAMA Network Open, 2, 198209-198209.
Beenackers MA, Kamphuis CBM, Giskes K, et al. Socioeconomic inequalities in occupational, leisure-time, and transport-related physical activity among European adults: A systematic review. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. Sep 19 2012;9116. doi:10.1186/1479-5868-9-116
Bleich SN, Jarlenski MP, Bell CN, LaVeist TA. Health inequalities: Trends, progress, and policy. Annu Rev Public Health. Apr 2012;33:7-40. doi:10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031811-124658
Crawford D, Timperio A, Giles-Corti B, et al. Do features of public open spaces vary according to neighbourhood socio-economic status? Health & Place. 2008;14(4):889-893. doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2007.11.002
Herath, P., Thatcher, M., Jin, H., & Bai, X. (2021). Effectiveness of urban surface characteristics as mitigation strategies for the excessive summer heat in cities. Sustainable Cities and Society, 72(June), 103072. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2021.103072
Jennings, V., Larson, L., & Yun, J. (2016). Advancing sustainability through urban green space: Cultural ecosystem services, equity, and social determinants of health. International Journal of environmental research and public health, 13(2), 196.
Sharifi, F., Levin, I., Stone, W. M., & Nygaard, A. (2021). Green space and subjective well-being in the Just City: A scoping review. Environmental Science & Policy, 120, 118-126.
Sharifi, F., Nygaard, A., & Stone, W. M. (2021). Heterogeneity in the Subjective Well-being Impact of Access to Urban Green Space. Sustainable Cities and Society, 103244.
Sharifi, F., Nygaard, A., M.Stone, W., & Levin, I. (2021). Accessing green space in Melbourne: Measuring inequity and household mobility. Landscape and Urban Planning, 207, 104004.
Sugiyama, T., Gunn, L.D., Christian, H., Francis, J., Foster, S., Hooper, P., . . . Giles-Corti, B. 2015. Quality of public open spaces and recreational walking. American Journal of Public Health, 105:2490–2495. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.302890
Sugiyama T, Carver A, Koohsari MJ, Veitch J. Advantages of public green spaces in enhancing population health. Landscape and Urban Planning. 2018;178:12-17. Doi: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2018.05.019
Sugiyama, T., Leslie, E., Giles-Corti, B., & Owen, N. (2008). Associations of neighbourhood greenness with physical and mental health: do walking, social coherence and local social interaction explain the relationships? Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 62(5), e9-e9.
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION 2016. Urban green spaces and health – a review of evidence, Copenhagen.
Farahnaz Sharifi is a researcher at the Centre for Urban Transition. Farah utilises advanced GIS and quantitative methods to analyse the relationship between urban amenities and subjective well-being from the just city perspective.
Zirui (Jerry) Yao is an environmental science student and researcher with an interest in the research domains of urban green infrastructure and urban sustainability. His recent research focuses on the access to green infrastructure and wellbeing of Canberra residents.
Prabhasri Herath is an environmentalist and a researcher with an interest in sustainable, resilient and liveable cities. Her research work focuses on excess heat mitigation with Nature-based Solutions in cities.
Niki Frantzeskaki is a Chair Professor in Regional and Metropolitan Governance and Planning at Utrecht University the Netherlands. Her research is centered on the planning and governance of urban nature, urban biodiversity and climate adaptation in cities, focusing on novel approaches such as experimentation, co-creation and collaborative governance.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Rebecca Bratspies, New YorkThe grim reality is that far too many communities of color, and low-wealth communities must fight tooth and nail for clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. This situation is neither accidental nor inevitable.
PK Das, MumbaiI argue participation in planning and design ought to be a right too. Planning that is inclusive takes all existing reality—life forms, activity, and places as the basis of planning.
Marthe Derkzen, ArnhemThe prompt ‘How can we uproot structural inequity in the provision of nature?’ sounds as if something radical needs to happen, something that makes the earth shiver, a need to completely revise what we are doing now. But in reality, oftentimes, a small turn of direction can make a big difference.
Joost Gerretschen, ArnhemOne group that ‘scores’ low on nature quantity, quality, and access, are residents of social housing units. They often live in small rental houses in working-class neighborhoods with little public greenery and may not have the means and/or little opportunity to visit parks, forests, and other nature areas. For them, having a garden can potentially make a big difference.
Rob McDonald, BaselEcologists should advocate for nature as a universal service if we are serious about uprooting structural inequality in nature access, and then be willing to engage in the messy policy discussions about how this policy can be achieved consistent with other goals of city residents, including affordability.
Maria Mejia, BogotáWho gets the best piece of urban green first has to do with abilities to create stories of protection; secondly, the ability to mobilize it and make it popular but these possibilities are, of course, linked to race, gender, class, and historical implications
Praneeta Mudaliar, IthacaFostering meaningful diversity and inclusion within environmental departments will inevitably be accompanied by significant growing pains, as the chorus for addressing structural inequities becomes louder.
Steward Pickett, PoughkeepsieStructural inequality is globally ubiquitous, reflecting consumer capitalism, profligate resource extraction, settler colonialism, and violent enclosure of indigenous lands.
Stephanie Pincetl, Los AngelesThe provision of nature is something that humans have been active agents in delivering for millennia. The degree of structural inequality today is an artifact of the triumph of capitalism, that rode into the far reaches of the globe on the back of Imperialism and fossil energy.
Rebecca Rutt, CopenhagenThe lens of environmental justice brings social disparities into focus but, historically, has imparted a partial view emphasizing human inequality. We do not believe we will ever ease the great disparities across the human species if we do not also deconstruct the artificial separation of humans from the rest of nature.
Huda Shaka, JeddahI would suggest that nature provision is embedded into social infrastructure planning policies and procedures, especially since nature does provide many social services.
Henriette Steiner, CopenhagenHow can we humans place all species in the realm of deserving benefits and broader well-being? How can we remember that ‘nature’ is not there waiting to be provided, but a web of life within which we are deeply embedded? How can we deepen awareness of our own dependency on everything else
Ebony Walden, RichmondOnce we see differently, we can act differently and be disruptors. Otherwise, we will try to solve the problem with the same heart, mindset, and biases that created the problem. To be disruptors we have to uproot these things in ourselves, first and on an ongoing basis.
Steward Pickett is a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. His research focuses on the ecological structure of urban areas and the temporal dynamics of vegetation.
An Invitation to Nature for All: Uprooting Structural Inequity
As an African American born in the (then officially) segregated South of the United States, I have always understood the oppressive effects of racism. My understanding was originally shaped by two myths that in fact helped reinforce the oppression. Myth One is the idea that racism is in the hands of individual bad actors. Racism emerges from the words and deeds of individuals who happen to be bigots.
Myth One suggested that the oppression of racism could be overcome by countervailing individual action: whatever individual people of color chose to do, we had to work harder at it than the bigots. Of course, that is an oppressive assumption in itself: “Just spend your life being more productive than the people who hate you. No problem. Work harder and the doors to natural benefits in city and country will open.” If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because the “solution” can only live in a world governed by a second myth.
Myth Two was that racism in the United States was an affliction of the empowered white majority alone, leaving people of color unaware of how Myth One distracted everybody from the social, economic, and cultural system that was the deep source of individual bigotry in the first place. In other words, the first myth is a symptom of the operation of the oppressive system purposefully obscured by Myth Two. The second myth makes us blind to the fact that we are all participants – oppressors and oppressed — in an interlinked system of social, cultural, and economic processes. Even while chafing against it, sometimes the oppressed unknowingly support the system by accepting one or both of the myths. One doesn’t overcome such a large, oppressive system by working longer, harder, or more cleverly. Oppressors have too much at stake in the system to admit that it even exists, or that it favors them, or that it is anything other than the outcome of supposedly inherent, negative attributes of the oppressed.
Forget both myths. As societies and individuals, we only overcome such a system of oppression by recognizing it and dismantling it. Dismantling might require a kind of reverse engineering. Is that too slow? If so, is the approach to figure out where the wrenches are best thrown into the gears? Making us all look away from the larger machinery of racism is one of the racialized machine’s most insidious strategies for its own perverse resilience.
Of course, such oppressive systems do not just operate in the United States. The gigantic social-environmental system of racism has dimensions of colonialism at global and within-nation scales. In traditions where race doesn’t provide the operative hierarchy, colorism often stands in. Oppression has other dimensions too: religion and sect, gender, class, migrant status, and access to training and education, among others. Research on such things as the global extent of segregation, or the deep, lasting legacies of colonialism in both the “periphery” and the “mother country,” demonstrate the virtually universal importance of a structurally inequitable system that affects access to nature’s benefits.
This round table asks scholars, activists, scientists, and humanists having diverse perspectives, experiences, and geographic spheres to examine how to address the myths supporting inequity that they see at work; to explore how the situations in different global regions, countries, or different social-cultural perspectives shape the modes and opportunities for dismantling the network of structural inequities confronting marginalized and excluded groups and persons. What stands in the way of access to nature’s benefits, and the avoidance of any hazards that can emerge from nature’s energies? How do we sweep those barriers away?
Rebecca Bratspies is a Professor at CUNY School of Law, where she is the founding director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform. A scholar of environmental justice, and human rights, Rebecca has written scores of scholarly works including 4 books. Her most recent book is Naming Gotham: The Villains, Rogues, and Heroes Behind New York Place Names. With Charlie LaGreca-Velasco, Bratspies is co-creator of The Environmental Justice Chronicles: an award-winning series of comic books bringing environmental literacy to a new generation of environmental leaders. The ABA honored her with its 2021 Commitment to Diversity and Justice Award.
If we are going to uproot environmental inequality, we must take two critical steps. First, we must “see” the problem. Second, we must reorient the machinery of urban environmental decision-making to prioritize protecting the most vulnerable.
We all deserve to live in healthy communities. Yet, the grim reality is that far too many communities of color, and low-wealth communities must fight tooth and nail for clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. This situation is neither accidental nor inevitable.
Consider New York City. The city’s racial segregation was carefully planned. This link shows a map of the New York City neighborhoods that were redlined nearly a century ago. It is a map of structural racism — of the government’s deliberate decision to exclude racialized Black and brown neighborhoods from the economic prosperity of the New Deal.
The choices New York City has made since then have only reinforced the inequalities driven by structural racism. Tracking where the city sited its power plants, its wastewater treatment plants, and its waste transfer stations creates a map of New York City’s environmental racism. Unsurprisingly, this map is virtually identical to the redlining map, and also closely tracks the neighborhoods targeted by the city’s unconstitutional stop and frisk policy and that continue to suffer most from mass incarceration.
Now take this map of structural and environmental racism and add neighborhoods with few green spacesor street trees. Add neighborhoods where environmental enforcement is lax. Add neighborhoods where kids struggle with asthma and miss too much school because they are sick. Add neighborhoods where residents bear a disproportionate cardiopulmonary disease burden. Then add the neighborhoods most vulnerable to the city’s heat island effect, and finally add the neighborhoods where COVID-19 hit first and hardest. Once again it is largely the same map. This is the map of New York City’s environmental injustice, the places where the polluting industry has the biggest impact on the health and welfare of residents, and the city has failed to address the environmental needs and priorities of the community.
These combined maps grew out of both the legacy of past de jure racialized exclusion and of current de facto racial discrimination. Past and present combine to create structural inequality in the provision of nature and its benefits to people. Yet, history is not destiny. The future does not have to be an endless replication of environmental inequality, but it will take active intervention to uproot environmental inequality and build a greener, fairer, more equitable city.
If we are going to uproot environmental inequality, we must take two critical steps. First, we must “see” the problem. That means acknowledging that profound inequalities exist in our cities with regard to air quality, water quality, tree canopy, and access to green spaces. And it means confronting the reality that these inequalities are, in fact, structural. They cannot be reduced to market forces, or about the accumulation of private preferences. Instead, environmental inequalities are a manifestation of the racialized, structural inequality that sits at the core of so much public decision-making. Once we recognize that the problems are structural, it becomes clear that the solutions must be structural as well.
This brings us to the second step. We must reorient the machinery of urban environmental decision-making to prioritize protecting the most vulnerable. In 2021, New York took an important step toward this goal by adding Art. I, Sec 19 to the state constitution. This amendment reads, in its entirety, “Every person shall have the right to clean air, clean water, and a healthful environment.” In adopting this language by an overwhelming majority, New Yorkers put themselves on the right side of history. They joined the United Nations, and 150 states in recognizing that clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment are basic human rights that belong to everyone. Everyone! Not just those with enough money, not just those living in the right zip code, or having the right complexion, accent, or religion.
Putting the right to a healthy environment at the center of urban decision-making can be a way to get us from environmental racism to environmental justice. By drawing a clear starting point that no communities are sacrifice zones, this approach to urban decision-making reorients priorities.
P.K. Das is popularly known as an Architect-Activist. With an extremely strong emphasis on participatory planning, he hopes to integrate architecture and democracy to bring about desired social changes in the country.
I argue participation in planning and design ought to be a right too. Planning that is inclusive takes all existing reality—life forms, activity, and places as the basis of planning.
We have two important questions before us in this round of discussions—overcoming structural inequity and accessing nature services and their benefits by all. Let us deliberate.
1 Overcoming structural inequity
Inequity in the access to nature and its benefits is a structural issue, intertwined with larger inequity questions—exclusion, oppression, discrimination, and abuse of vast sections of people, places, and the environment. This wide spectrum of inequity, injustice, and violent conflicts is being relentlessly carried out by the ruling dispensation through many divisive means—religion, caste, race, faith, gender, classes, and so on. Addressing or dealing with one or the other issue individually will not yield any significant structural change in the prevailing conditions of inequity.
The way forward is to comprehensively address these fundamental inequity issues across the various divide that have over the years violently fragmented and severely damaged the ecology of places—people & nature; and build close relationships across various social, environmental, and political rights struggles. As a matter of fact, access to nature and nature services equally by all could form an effective means for spearheading the larger coalition and unity objective. The issues relating to nature and its services, particularly their segregation from people’s lives, has come to be one of the most critical concern–having resulted in catastrophic climate events and the compounding existential crisis of the planet itself.
Alongside the need for building larger forces of unified struggles, an understanding of the significance of nature and its services little understood is a necessary step. Knowledge dissemination through wider public campaigns, dialogues at all levels—including engaging governments, protests, and deeper study and research are necessary tools for the achievement of the objective of overcoming inequity at all levels, including nature and its benefits.
2 Accessing nature services and benefits by all
Benefits of nature and its services must be equally accessed by all. As a matter of fact, such access must be considered a right. Not a matter of decision and discretion in the hands of a few who direct the supply and provision. Being a right would mean decision-making in the hands of collectives in which all the people―being increasingly aware, participate equally, towards the achievement of the objective of democratizing natural elements and assets.
In what form do we relate to nature and its benefits, establish close relationships between people and nature, and thereupon access equally? Such forms, also being the means in providing wider awareness and knowledge, re-enforces the resolve of the various movements demanding equity and justice for all. For example—it is the restoration, conservation, re-invigoration, and integration of nature and its services with development objectives, through participatory planning, and design of our places of habitation at all levels—cities, towns, and villages. Therefore, I argue participation in planning and design ought to be a right too. Planning that is inclusive takes all existing reality—life forms, activity, and places as the basis of planning.
This would mean an exercise by the collective of movements in evolving through participatory means an open data and mapping of the natural areas, thereafter the understanding of their impact and benefits, with an objective of promoting nature-led planning as the way forward. To make this process successful, it would be prudent to address planning at the neighborhood level as a bottom-up process in city/town planning.
The catastrophic climate events and the existential crisis warrants the urgency for re-inventing our places of habitation—the expansion of commons. A paradigm shift from the ways by which business is carried out as usual—top-down authoritarian planning with an objective of colonization of the commons, including nature, to individual and corporate interests.
Hopefully, the above understanding of the macro-issues and the need for mobilization of people’s collective forces would facilitate and enable a structural shift towards the achievement of equity of nature and all its benefits for all.
Dr. Marthe Derkzen is a researcher and lecturer with the Health and Society chair group. She studies urban nature from a social justice perspective with an interest in climate adaptation, local food, healthy neighborhoods and stewardship of the commons.
The prompt ‘How can we uproot structural inequity in the provision of nature?’ sounds as if something radical needs to happen, something that makes the earth shiver, a need to completely revise what we are doing now. But in reality, oftentimes, a small turn of direction can make a big difference.
The prompt ‘How can we uproot structural inequity in the provision of nature?’ sounds as if something radical needs to happen, something that makes the earth shiver, a need to completely revise what we are doing now. But in reality, oftentimes, a small turn of direction can make a big difference. I will share an example from my hometown Nijmegen in the Netherlands where a few good-intended people are making big, green changes.
In the Netherlands, as in many countries, a decisive factor in structural inequity in nature provision (and many other things) is where you live: in a spacious suburban residential area or in a working-class neighborhood? In an apartment or a detached house? And do you rent or own your home? Inequity in the provision of nature and its benefits to people are related to quantity (the amount of nature available), quality (does it serve people’s needs), and access (for anyone anytime). One of the groups that ‘scores’ low on nature quantity, quality, and access, are residents of social housing units. They often live in small rental houses in working-class neighborhoods with little public greenery and may not have the means and/or little opportunity to visit parks, forests, and other nature areas.
For this group, having an attractive garden can potentially make a big difference. But if you work long hours, fall ill, if your children keep you busy, or you just don’t have a green thumb, designing and maintaining a garden can become too much. Also, in some cities, it used to be practiced to completely remove a garden and strip it back to sand or tiles when a new renter would move in. So, in many social housing areas, sealed front and back yards keep nature far away. The private sphere is hard to influence, and there is no tax on sealed surfaces (yet), so if you want to make a change, you need to get personal.
Start talking to your neighbors. That is what they thought at the housing corporation Portaal and community center De Broederij in Nijmegen. In 2021, they piloted the Groenpost: a team of community center volunteers, living in the neighborhood, who maintain gardens of residents who are not or who are no longer capable to take care of their gardens. In a few months, several gardens have been transformed so that residents can start enjoying their outdoor space. Sometimes, a vegetable garden is brought back to life, other times it is weeding that gives a garden a fresh new look. The goal is not to turn the garden into a nature paradise, but to let residents enjoy and make use of their garden rather than perceiving it as a burden or something to be ashamed of. And a goal of the Groenpost pilot that is at least equally important, is to grow social contacts among neighbors.
Gardens transformed via the Groenpost project. Photos: De Broederij
The gardenwork performed by the volunteers brings them benefits also. The Groenpost volunteers are not otherwise employed, and admit they have few social contacts themselves. The Groenpost is a reason to leave home, helps structure the week, and gives meaning to their lives. Volunteers indicate that the work brings them joy and energy and that it benefits their mental health. They experience feelings of purpose, self-esteem, and independence. Working in a team also brings along responsibility and a feeling of togetherness, reducing the risk of loneliness according to one participant. The fact that the volunteers are personally acquainted with many issues that are common among residents of this neighborhood, helps them in establishing contacts. Decreasing social isolation and increasing social control drive the participants to continue their Groenpost work.
Mid-2022, DeBroederij, Portaal, two other housing corporations, and the local government have signed an agreement to collaborate and continue with the Groenpost pilot. This is just a small example of how structural inequity in nature provision can be uprooted by good intentions and personal action – and that governments should play a role in facilitating citizen engagement.
Joost recently graduated from Wageningen University and Research (WUR) in the field of environmental sciences, having specialized in the relationship between urban climate adaptation and socio-economic inequalities. He now works for the Dutch Association of Municipalities (VNG).
Dr. Robert McDonald is Lead Scientist for the Global Cities program at The Nature Conservancy. He researches the impact and dependences of cities on the natural world, and help direct the science behind much of the Conservancy’s urban conservation work.
Ecologists should advocate for nature as a universal service if we are serious about uprooting structural inequality in nature access, and then be willing to engage in the messy policy discussions about how this policy can be achieved consistent with other goals of city residents, including affordability.
To think about how to uproot nature inequality, we need to be clear about its causes. These are complex, and vary a lot by society (and indeed, one study found very little nature inequality in Singapore) and the type of natural feature. In the United States, where I have conducted the bulk of my research, tree canopy cover is very unequally distributed, for at least two (related) reasons. Structurally, most households of low income or of people of color are in dense neighborhoods often near the urban core, whereas most households of high income or of non-Hispanic whites are in less dense suburban or exurban neighborhoods. This leads to a degree of structural inequality in tree cover since denser neighborhoods have higher impervious surface cover and hence lower tree canopy cover on average. One could argue that income inequality (or past discriminatory policy) leads to land inequality which leads to inequality in tree cover. Even after controlling for differences in density, poor and minority neighborhoods tend to have lower tree cover than equivalently dense higher-income or white neighborhoods. This residual inequality can be more directly attributed to unequal investment in tree planting and maintenance, either on public or private sector land.
Concerted efforts by the public sector to invest in tree cover improvements in currently less-green neighborhoods could go a long way toward rectifying tree cover inequality. This is especially true for “residual” inequality, which my coauthors and I estimate could be rectified in US cities by planting 62 million trees for around 18 billion dollars. But for structural inequality, solutions must also be found on private land, whether yards or buildings, simply because it is difficult to plant enough trees on public land in dense neighborhoods to reach tree cover levels in less dense neighborhoods. Other solutions must be sought.
I would argue that the provision of nature in cities is undergoing a transition to being thought about in a way equivalent to other urban services, such as the provision of water, sanitation, and electricity. Sanitation and drinking water provision was, for instance, thought of for centuries primarily as the responsibility of individual households, with some important exceptions (the aqueducts and sewers of the Romans among them). In the 19th century, however, the germ-theory of disease and other factors led to the development of what has been called the Sanitary City. Sanitation and water (and later electricity and phone service) became universal services supplied by the state to all, an expectation of urban citizens. In the same way, there is a movement toward thinking of access to nature as a universal right. This movement goes stronger each day, as the evidence of the mental and physical health benefits of nature grows.
Imagine if workplaces and schools were required to have a certain minimal level of nature, with thresholds varying depending on the circumstances of the building. This would parallel the requirement for natural lighting as much as possible in the European Union workplaces. Imagine if homes, before they were sold or rented, were required to have certain minimal levels of nature, with the threshold varying by building circumstances. This would parallel requirements of services such as water, sanitation, and electricity.
Urban planners, of course, have many factors to consider. They must balance competing demands such as traffic flow, energy use, cost of construction, and residents’ preferences. Creating affordable housing is often a key concern and should be considered in any plan. A mandate for equitable provision of nature would require someone (city governments, landowners, employers, or individuals) spending money and would increase property values of greened neighborhoods relative to not-yet-greened ones. But universal mandates for water and sanitation provision also require substantial public and private sector investment, one which we now think of as worthwhile (and do not blame for gentrification often, because services are provided universally). Ecologists should advocate for nature as a universal service if we are serious about uprooting structural inequality in nature access, and then be willing to engage in the messy policy discussions about how this policy can be achieved consistent with other goals of city residents, including affordability.
My heart is scattered across Colombia, Germany, the United States. and the Philippines. I have worked with incredible teams (Asian Development Bank, German Cooperation Agency, PIK Institute, etc.). Now back home, I'm currently leading the BiodiverCities by 2030 Initiative at the Humboldt Institute of Colombia. Editor of Urban Nature: Platform of Experiences (2016) and Transforming Cities with Biodiversity (2022). Volunteer at Fundación Cerros de Bogotá. Friend of TNOC since 2013.
Who gets the best piece of urban green has to do with abilities to create stories of protection, secondly, the ability to mobilize it and make it popular but these possibilities are, of course, linked to race, gender, class, and historical implications.
“Carnival for Life” or Carnaval por la vida was a 5.000-people mobilization organized by activists of comuna 18 and corregimiento La Buitrera in Santiago de Cali (Colombia) in 2014. The aim was to raise awareness of the need to protect the Meléndez River—the City’s pride back in the 50s and now significantly transformed. An important front of this struggle was El Morro (“The Hill”), an area locals attached environmental and cultural values to but designated for housing developments by the City Administration. The Meléndez River medium-low basin is home to a low-income, working-class community. Read more here: https://epub.uni-bayreuth.de/4520/
I’m interested in how urban biodiversity conservation is no longer a field lying exclusively on scientific knowledge, but rather what we are witnessing is that it is becoming an issue for civic engagement, for collaborations between activists, scientists, researchers, artists, and they are shaping new stories to protect nature in cities. In two words, my interest would be the civic turn that urban nature is taking!
Who gets the best piece of urban nature and why?
Place yourselves in Stockholm, Sweden. Civic associations stopped the building of motorways and houses in a park by interlinking royal heritage values with animal habitat preservation. On the other side of town, however, a similar effort at a green area led to a very different outcome—the Stockholm City Council ignored local resistance and previous decisions to invest in a landscape park and went ahead with plans to build 4000 flats.
What I aim to illustrate here is that even if we are talking about advocates, there are profound differences in how power is distributed across civic mobilizations. So, who gets the best piece of urban green has to do with abilities to create stories of protection, and secondly, the ability to mobilize it and make it popular. However, these possibilities are, naturally, linked to race, gender, class, and historical implications.
Bottom line, let’s follow power distribution to understand who gets the best piece of urban green and why.
What do you think needs to be “uprooted” to achieve equity of the benefits of nature in cities?
If you are an urban ecologist: Ask yourself how often you think about nature i.e., parks, lakes as black boxes, spreading benefits equally across the city. Feel encouraged to unpack power relations, and acknowledge structural and historical aspects such as race, gender, and class.
If you’re an advocate: Create a narrative, a story to protect that piece of nature you are aiming to keep. Add power to your story by ‘picking up’ artifacts (often produced by other actors) and align them with their program to give it ‘weight’. Artifacts can be Scientific reports, maps, numeric values, projections of scenarios, lists of species or ecosystem services, etc., Also, physical structures e.g., buildings.
If you are a local authority: Listen, stabilize good innovations to then connect between them. Why not create a laboratory to understand and transform environmental conflicts in your city? Also, support platforms that spread good ideas and practices. Value experimentation and encourage learning.
What are a couple of important ways you see to dismantle structural inequity?
Enhance tools and mechanisms of participation;
Do not be afraid of addressing conflict but understand what’s at stake in each case;
Do not be skeptical about experiments. Here is one of my favorite aspects of the so-called Transformative Change theory: transformation means, in essence, developing a shared vision of the future, a common idea of well-being and inclusion (a space where the rules of the dominant system do not predominate)
Do you have an inspiring or important example in your city or region you think people should know about?
Yes, I do. The social movement in defense of urban wetlands in the city of Bogota. It is an example of how place-based engagements can create significant agency leading to new forms of knowledge production and even new policy frameworks. Here are some highlights:
Since the early 1990s up-to-date, the struggle has never ceased. As Certeau pointed out in 1984: “Whatever it wins [the powerless], it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities.”.
Twenty years back, advocates opened up a new layer the city had overlooked: the ecological value of urban wetlands.
Advocates involved in these place-based struggles overcame local barriers and developed community actions based on embedded bonds of solidarity – 15 different networks engaged with urban wetlands.
Collaboration between advocates and academics led to the possibility of re-framing the city policy. Technical knowledge was produced thanks to the interest in this social mobilization, this evidence ultimately supports the work of advocates and helps create a larger impact. (Read more: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2399654420929355)
Praneeta Mudaliar is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Natural Resources Policy and Stewardship at the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada. Praneeta’s interdisciplinary social scientific research and teaching spans across the commons and collective action, climate justice and climate policy, and decolonizing conservation for advancing social justice and environmental sustainability.
Fostering meaningful diversity and inclusion within environmental departments will inevitably be accompanied by significant growing pains, as the chorus for addressing structural inequities becomes louder.
Institutions of higher education (IHEs) have been complicit in perpetuating and maintaining structural inequity, racism, and white dominance since their inception. In Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of American Universities, Craig Steven Wilder writes, “The first five colleges in the British American colonies—Harvard…William and Mary…Yale…Codrington…and New Jersey—were instruments of Christian expansion, weapons for the conquest of Indigenous peoples, and major beneficiaries of the African slave trade and slavery (p.17). While the United States’ long-overdue reckoning with racism has been fraught, environmental departments in IHEs have been silent. Acknowledging the racist origins of the environmental movement and the racist founding of their institutions can be a first step toward uprooting structural inequity in the provision of nature and its benefits to people.
The silencing, minimizing, and erasing of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students and faculty is distressing at best and infuriating at worst. During my own education, I, a Brown person from India, could not shake off the feeling of being an outsider. In graduate school, we studied the preservation and conservation debate between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot through Ken Burns’ documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The documentary was gripping and yet unsatisfactory in its uncritical depiction of John Muir as the “father of preservation” at the expense of the genocide of Indigenous peoples. We watched the 1970 Dixie cup commercial where an “Indigenous” person sheds a tear as trash, callously thrown out of a car window, lands at his moccasins. The narrator says, “People start pollution. People can stop pollution.” We did not explore the hypocrisy of corporations to shift responsibility onto people for keeping the environment clean, nor did we discuss the whitewashing of an Italian actor to portray an Indigenous person. Even my dissertation on race and caste erased me. Instead of discussing how a Brown person conducts fieldwork in an all-white context, my dissertation committee questioned me on the validity and reliability of qualitative methods in my dissertation defense. I was left questioning my place in the environmental field because I did not see my experiences represented in what I was studying. The environmental field as well as these departments universalized whiteness.
Correcting this legacy of environmentalism in environmental departments to benefit the environmental movement will take all faculty to engage in intentional planning and effort. Awareness of the prejudiced history of environmentalism can help students intervene for altering the racist trajectory of this history. Yet, moving beyond content is essential. While writing anti-racism plans to support BIPOC students and faculty is fashionable, the actual work that faculty must do in educating themselves on the historical reality of systemic racism and developing self-awareness about different experiences falls to the wayside. Faculty can learn to articulate what dominant culture is and how language, tropes, and norms of the environmental discipline drive BIPOC students away to departments where they might feel more heard, seen, and welcomed. Faculty can reevaluate the ways in which they deemphasize social and racial identities in teaching about the environment—as well as in everyday interactions. Faculty can reflect on how they adopt colorblind ideologies, foster meritocracy, and “help” or “save” minoritized folx that pushes students away.
Fostering meaningful diversity and inclusion within environmental departments will inevitably be accompanied by significant growing pains, as the chorus for addressing structural inequities becomes louder. Instead of ignoring the racist origins of environmentalism and the racist founding of IHEs, engaging in uncomfortable conversations, and working through the discomfort will retain more BIPOCs in the environmental field and better equip them to meaningfully empower and touch the lives of people and nature.
Steward Pickett is a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. His research focuses on the ecological structure of urban areas and the temporal dynamics of vegetation.
How can ecologists, as part of the social-economic “industry” of conservation, resilience, and greening stop getting in the way of nature for all?
Structural inequality is globally ubiquitous, reflecting consumer capitalism, profligate resource extraction, settler colonialism, and violent enclosure of indigenous lands.
Structural inequality is globally ubiquitous, reflecting consumer capitalism, profligate resource extraction, settler colonialism, and violent enclosure of indigenous lands. Ecologists can unintentionally reinforce a “conservation-industrial complex” that constrains nature for all by supporting structural inequity. Ecologists’ lapses include supporting conservation based on displacement of indigenous peoples or those experiencing poverty; embracing a view of resilience that references past social or environmental states in which social oppression is embedded; and assuming that greening is a neutral solution suitable for all social and ecological situations. Ecologists might begin to correct their lapses by examining problematic concepts that reinforce structural inequity in conservation, resilience, and greening. Here are some examples.
Non-white. Used to label all racialized groups incurring lower status in some societies, this term has three faults. First, it obscures the variety within socially assigned categories and their equally diverse ecological situations. Such homogenization can environmentally or economically disadvantage certain people in conservation decision-making. Second, it “accidentally” honors white folks by naturalizing their assigned hegemonic position. Third, it is wrong to define people by what they are not, implying that they lack something. “Disabled,” suffers from this same problem.
All Green is Good. Green ecological infrastructure in cities can reduce the burden on engineered infrastructure and can increase ecosystem services. However, assuming that green infrastructure is good for all people at all times may be a mistake. GI may have costs and hazards that are differentially apportioned among residents. For example, some communities fear negative social implications of green infrastructure or worry that they must spend time and money maintaining it. Dialog with communities that might be impacted — in any way — by green infrastructure should start early in projects and be ongoing to address fears and burdens of GI.
Green gentrification is just the market in action. Greening can lead to increased rents and housing prices, conversion of apartments to short-term rentals, or more aggressive policing of the unhoused or long-time residents of color. Fear of gentrification is real in neighborhoods hosting disempowered or under-resourced people. The market is often seen by ecologists and residents alike as an inevitable consequence of greening. That assumption should be rejected. When ecologists’ work supports greening, they should also use their social position to speak for policies that limit the damage an unfettered housing market can cause. Ecologists who accept this challenge must work with other experts and activists.
Avoid socially loaded terms. Vernacular terms transported into technical contexts may still carry social baggage. When such terms act as “industry standards,” their implications for systemic inequities are rarely evaluated: What does “invasive” species connote about human immigration? Does “exotic” suggest dismissive othering of people’s social or ethnic identities? Does the negative implication of “non-native species” parallel judgements from nationalist movements? Does “resilience” draw comfort from reactionary movements, or seek to maintain past social rankings? Does “sustainability” suggest keeping inequitable social structures? Even the seemingly innocent study of vegetation dynamics has terms with social baggage. “Succession” justifies societal stability. Likewise, “colonizing species” may ignore global resource extraction, displacement, and genocide. “Pioneer species” explores the same colonialist frontiers. This is no mere call for superficial political correctness because these terms tacitly reference social assumptions supporting systemic inequity.
Don’t normalize criteria of inequity. Social categories are socially constructed for political or economic purposes. But many categories supporting inequity have been “naturalized,” that is, assumed to be givens that just describe the way things are. Terms like race, poverty, privilege, education, and wealth are often treated in research as inherent characteristics of groups. Consequently, what these terms assume about merit or disadvantage has been hidden. Such terms should be seen as tools of structural inequity. Race is particularly problematic. Introduced by Linnaeus in 1753 as a geographic and physical descriptor of human variety, it became a Euro-centric hierarchy of social worth in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae (1758-59). Since then, many people assumed that race was a biological criterion, leading to decades of misguided and ultimately rejected racist research and eugenics, aiming to support the alleged human racial hierarchy.
Ecologists must understand that race is actually a socially constructed tool, in spite of the fact that some heritable physical features may be used as racialized markers. Any stability of race is social, not biological. Similarly, individuals or populations are not inherently poor, privileged, educated, wealthy, or vulnerable to hazards. Social and spatial circumstances affect what status people experience. This suggests alternative ways of speaking: “people who are experiencing poverty,” “people benefitting from privilege,” or “people identified as members of a racialized group.”
Don’t just work in your own “backyard.” Social-ecological researchers often work in locations that are familiar to them in terms of racial categories, economic status, or social class. This of course can bias data that are available to support conservation, resilience, and greening efforts, especially when those results are to be applied to areas with different social characteristics. Similarly, research questions may be biased as a result of the social spectrum represented by a research team. Posing conservation and greening research questions that go beyond those asked by a team that reflects only white or middle- or upper-class concerns, may be crucial to address structural inequities. Working in unfamiliar places and asking novel questions are best accomplished when research teams include people who are schooled in or have lived in a variety of situations, and who are sensitive to the ethics of such work.
Ecology is not morality. Ecological knowledge is a way of understanding how various material worlds work. Those worlds of course include humans, other organisms, institutions (in the broadest sense), biogeochemical processes, and interactions among all these. Humanistic concerns, religions, ethical thinking, and moral tenets can influence the interactions involving humans in all their richness, and certainly affect how the material understanding of ecology is shaped and applied. However, the morals and ethics surrounding ecology and its use are social phenomena, not the result of scientific knowledge alone. Ecology is sometimes cited to mean that human action should favor equilibrium or balance, that ecosystems demonstrate almost teleological progress toward socially desired conditions, or that systems are closed and self-adjusting toward some end. None of these things does ecological science require, although it can empirically illustrate the material implications of those assumptions. As powerful and consequential as social values about closure, endpoint, or balance are, those guides are just that – human and social values. Ecology can be put in service of a community’s or a polity’s accepted values, but ecological data themselves do not supply those values. Ecologists concerned with ethics and values, and ecology as a socially embedded process of generating knowledge about material worlds, must be in dialogue with other communities and thinkers in a wide variety of other human pursuits, ranging from art, to politics, to law, and religion at the least.
Pincetl has written extensively about land use in California, environmental justice, habitat conservation efforts, urban ecology, water and energy policy.
The provision of nature is something that humans have been active agents in delivering for millennia. The degree of structural inequality today is an artifact of the triumph of capitalism, that rode into the far reaches of the globe on the back of Imperialism and fossil energy.
How to uproot structural inequality in the provision of nature and its benefits to people is a substantive question in the first quarter of the 21st century where we are experiencing an acceleration of the enclosure of nature, of country sides where people have exercised a living for hundreds, if not thousands of years, cultivating, harvesting, and nurturing trees, herbs, crops, coppices, prairies, and meadows. The increasing concentration of land ownership, whether in private hands such as agribusiness companies, mining companies, timber companies, or in public hands such as Chinese municipalities, is forcing more people into cities and transforming nature. They are rationalizing complex landscapes productive of food, fiber, and diverse life, into extractive landscapes, depleting them rapidly.
Humans have been organically mixed into nature and what we perceive to be natural processes since they have arisen on the planet, planting, harvesting, burning, cultivating, and building. But until the rise of Western Imperialism and the harvesting of the Earth for the growth of capitalism, natural system transformation was not ubiquitous, and extractivism, at the scale made possible with fossil energy, was more modest, and in many places, remediable. Thus, the provision of nature is something that humans have been active agents in delivering for millennia. The degree of structural inequality today is an artifact of the triumph of capitalism, that rode into the far reaches of the globe on the back of Imperialism and fossil energy. Unraveling that coupled situation is the task before us today, and structural inequality will not be uprooted until we do.
The current growth in incursions for soy and cattle in the Amazon encouraged and fostered by the Brazilian government and at the service of agribusiness, is a particularly obvious example. The continued conversion of rainforests in Sumatra and Kalimantan for palm oil (250,000 hectares a year), or the Cambodian push for more sugarcane fields, is pauperizing the local inhabitants, transforming them into labor for the commodity, and no longer able to cultivate food for themselves or the region, and maintaining biodiversity. Rather, in the search for cheap commodities, the countryside and nature, continue to be the sacrifice zones for capital.
Once we were concerned with Enclosure, this was in the context of industrializing Europe, and particularly the UK, recognizing that this process squeezed people off the land and concentrated wealth, as well as access to resources – those shallow coal veins – leaving behind toxic slag and poisoned streams to feed the growing industrial machine. We saw how this process forced people into cities to become wage laborers. But we tend to be blind to this process today, and the consequences for nature and its benefits for people, not only in terms of soil fertility and health, diverse foods, and wildlife but also for human health and well-being.
These commodity frontiers as they have been described, are still extant, inexorably continuing to transform country sides to supply ever larger urban agglomerations devoted to consumption activities. High-energy modernist urbanism is dependent on extraction from afar, perpetuating inequality between cities and rural areas, and destroying natural processes. While much has been written about the need for ‘nature’ in cities, to make them more habitable, there is a greater need to understand urbanization as a coupled process with continued enclosures. Only by curbing inputs into cities will structural inequalities begin to be addressed, and natural systems able to endure.
Rebecca Leigh Rutt is a dedicated local volunteer, grassroots activist, and an Assistant Professor of European Environmental Policy, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Nature for All: How can we uproot structural inequity in the provision of nature and its benefits to people?
The lens of environmental justice brings social disparities into focus but, historically, has imparted a partial view emphasizing human inequality. We do not believe we will ever ease the great disparities across the human species if we do not also deconstruct the artificial separation of humans from the rest of nature.
As we reread the prompt for this blog post, we stumbled over the last words ‘benefits to people’. Why this? The provision of nature for human benefit is deeply subject to structural inequalities, affecting physical and psychological access and decision-making spaces. These are classic dilemmas of environmental justice, and extremely urgent to redress ― if we care about social justice. But we would also like to argue that at the heart of environmental injustices exists a profound injustice also to the wider ecosystems that surround us and the trees, grasses, birds, and insects to name a few, with whom we cohabitate and on whom we deeply depend.
The lens of environmental justice brings social disparities into focus but, historically, has imparted a partial view emphasizing human inequality. We do not believe we will ever ease the great disparities across the human species if we do not also deconstruct the artificial separation of humans from the rest of nature.
Human history is rich with kinship relations with other species[1]. Today’s dominant yet false separation of humans from, and value positioning over, the rest of nature, originates in historical circumstances and is an outcome, especially of just a few hundred years of ‘scientific revolution’ and human ‘Enlightenment’. The developments of this time entailed a narrative of domination and mastery of humans over all else. Not least, René Descartes’ ‘dualist ontology’ created the ontological building blocks by which we today can speak casually of ‘natural resources’ and ‘ecosystem services’, “as if to emphasize [Nature’s] subordination and servitude”[2].
This way of thinking enabled a rising capitalist economic order, which benefited from the mechanization, and so ‘death’ of the rest of nature, to legitimize its plunder. All of this unfolded to the general deterioration of quality of life for the majority of humans and other species. Just read Carolyn Merchant’s seminal book The Death of Nature, Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution from 1980 for a profound and thought-provoking account of these historical, epistemological shifts and the tolls they have taken on humans and the rest of nature. These shifts are crucial to grasp if we are to equip ourselves to act in the face of the current socio-ecological crises.
Historically, our numerous and diverse human cultures of reciprocity and interdependencies with other species and natural ecosystems have largely been pushed to the background. They have been replaced by an idea of human exceptionalism, constructed primarily in the image of the white, wealthy, male born of a capitalist and industrialized West. This divide and conquer strategy, these false dichotomies that separate and order our world, are repeated also within human societies, based upon other problematic divisions of gender, racializations, and more that enable exploitation. Not all species count, not all humans count. Such false binaries and dichotomies are the means by which social and environmental injustices have been produced and continue to be upheld.
So, how can we humans place all species in the realm of deserving benefits and broader well-being? How can we remember that ‘nature’ is not there waiting to be provided, but a web of life within which we are deeply embedded? How can we deepen awareness of our own dependency on everything else, and cultivate a sense of moral duty to reciprocate the gifts we receive from the rest of nature[3]? What work must we do in our scholarship, communities, and societies?
What we must do, we believe, is recognize the existing and imagine a host of new alternatives. Feminist degrowth scholar Stefania Barca tells us that emancipatory ecological revolution demands telling the ‘other stories’, those “excavated from the oblivion of the master’s narrative”.[4] We must acknowledge the relationships between and contributions of different actors across human and non-human worlds ― including trees, birds, grasses, reptiles, shrubs, and a site’s climatic and soil conditions ― and envision ways to equitably co-exist. We must look to contemporary efforts to displace the prominence of capitalist economies, such as ‘community’ and ‘solidarity’ economies based upon provisioning, sufficiency, care, and commoning[5]. We must look to the decolonization work of bodies, minds, and landscapes by many Black and brown feminist scholars and indigenous and local communities. And we can look to the many community gardens, commoning initiatives, and social movements for racial, gender, food, water, and housing justice.
All of this is not to say that we should disregard human equity in acts of landscape and city (and rural) planning, but it is a call to an alternative way of thinking about relationships and our ways of being in the world. By doing so, we exercise our imaginations and participate in building more equitable and compassionate modes of living and working together ― not just with other humans but with the other species and ecosystems upon which we depend. We must do this in ways that are joyful, humble, and caring, mindful of and traversing the limits to the conceptual apparatus and ways of living we have inherited and on which our present world was built.
[1] See for instance seminal work in ecofeminism such as Carolyn Merchant’s 1980 book, The Death of Nature, Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, Donna Haraway’s work including the 2016 book Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, or other recent work including Arturo Escobar’s 2017 book, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, and Jason Hickel’s 2020 book, Less is More – How Degrowth Will Save the World.
[2] Hickel, J. 2020. Less is More – How Degrowth Will Save the World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
[3] Please read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 book, Braiding Sweetgrass.
[4] Barca, S. 2020. Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene. Cambridge Press.
[5] See work by e.g. Gibson-Graham such as the 2006 book A Postcapitalist Politics, and with Dombroski, the 2020 Handbook of Diverse Economies; Bollier and Helfrich such as their 2019 book Free Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons; Kallis, Paulson, D’Alisa, and Demaria’s 2020 book The Case for Degrowth, and many more. J
Henriette Steiner is an Associate Professor at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. Through her research and teaching, Henriette strives to inspire more self-reflective, diverse, equitable, and compassionate spatial practices for designing cities and landscapes. Her most recent books are Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architectural and Digital Culture (MIT Press 2020) and Touch in the Time of Corona: Reflections of Love, Care and Vulnerability in the Pandemic (De Gruyter, 2021). Both books are co-written with Kristin Veel.
Huda's experience and training combine urban planning, sustainable development and public health. She is a chartered town planner (MRTPI) and a chartered environmentalist (CEnv) with over 15 years' experience focused on visionary master plans and city plans across the Arabian Gulf. She is passionate about influencing Arab cities towards sustainable development.
How can we uproot structural inequity in the provision of nature and its benefits to people?
I would suggest that nature provision is embedded into social infrastructure planning policies and procedures, especially since nature does provide many social services.
There are three important underlying points within this question that are important to highlight and unpack. I will work backward…
Benefits
It is critical to acknowledge that not all experiences of nature are equal. For example, research[1] shows that the mental health benefits gained from experiencing nature depend greatly on the quality of the experience. This is influenced by factors such as the level of interaction (how many senses are engaged) and the level of exposure (how much time is spent).
What this means is that we need to go beyond KPIs which focus on the quantitative aspects of nature provision (e.g., area of green space, number of trees, length of shoreline). In order to plan and assess for equal benefits, we need to investigate how nature is experienced and what benefits result from this experience.
There is also interesting research that demonstrates that “people of lower socio-economic status reap greater benefit from urban green space than more privileged groups”[2]. In other words, sometimes the people who have the least access to nature spaces (see structural inequity section below) are exactly the people who would benefit the most from these spaces. A disappointing reality and one which must change.
Provision
The word “provision” struck me because I typically think of nature as an available resource to be protected and made accessible, rather than a good or service to be provided. However, if the starting point is a fully developed/urbanised city based on 20th-century models, then provision is probably an accurate word to use.
This then begs the question: who is providing? Should nature provision be a government service/responsibility? Can it be delegated to the private sector (e.g., developers)?
The closest model we have is the provision of social infrastructure and community services. Developers of large-scale projects (full neighbourhoods and master plans) are typically required to provide social infrastructure facilities (e.g., schools, hospitals, mosques… etc.) to gain planning approval. One could think of a situation where developers (public or private) are required to provide a minimum level of ‘environmental infrastructure’ or simply nature.
Structural inequity
The question assumes that structural inequity in nature provision exists. What does the data say? There are some relevant studies from the US on the inequality of nature based on race and income[3]. There is also an interesting case made around intergenerational inequalities[4] particularly given the climate crisis.
I feel that this is still a relatively new research area, and that more investigation is required to fully understand the inequities in nature provision and access across all community groups including across race, age, and gender, and the causes (structural or otherwise). In cities specifically, access to nature will be linked not only to the provision but also to mobility options and choices (what good is a park to a child if they need to drive to it?).
Now that we’ve unpacked the three points, back to the overall question: How can we uproot structural inequity in the provision of nature and its benefits to people?
Currently, environmental planning requirements are focused on mitigating negative environmental impacts. This is a reactive mindset which is based on protection and compensation rather than provision.
I would suggest that nature provision is embedded into social infrastructure planning policies and procedures, especially since nature does provide many social services. Within this governance structure, adequate attention should be given to the level of interaction facilitated by the nature spaces. This is a function of both the physical characteristics of the spaces (e.g., is the space in a safe and accessible location?) and the programmed events and activities (e.g., are educational walks available in all spoken languages?).
Once there is a structured governance framework for nature provision, uprooting the structural inequity will require regular assessment, open dialogue, and transparent decision-making.
Ebony Walden is an urban planner, consultant and facilitator with over a decade of experience working to transform communities. Ebony is the Founder and Principal Consultant at Ebony Walden Consulting (EWC), an urban strategy firm based in Richmond, Virginia. At EWC, she works with organizations to design and facilitate meetings, training and community engagement processes that explore race, equity and the creation of more just and inclusive communities. Ebony is also an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University where she teaches Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the City.
Once we see differently, we can act differently and be disruptors. Otherwise, we will try to solve the problem with the same heart, mindset, and biases that created the problem. To be disruptors we have to uproot these things in ourselves, first and on an ongoing basis.
As a DEI consultant and urban planner, my work is at the intersection of systemic racism and place. I help leaders and organizations create more just and inclusive communities by disrupting the ways in which racism and inequality show up in themselves, their organizations, and the places they shape and inhabit in the built and natural environments. In my consultancy, I admonish clients to work on three levels in order to uproot the ways in which poor people and people of color are disproportionally impacted by climate change, pollution, health, wealth, housing, and transportation inequities in our cities. We must first address the biases within ourselves, disrupt damaging practices within institutions, and collaborate differently.
Start with yourself
I would dare to say that the inequalities we see in society are a manifestation of centuries of believing in a false hierarchy of human value, that certain people are superior and others inferior ― and thus access to resources, treatment across society, and life outcomes have become reflective of that lie. In order to disrupt this lie, we have to replace it with the truth. The place we have maximum control to do that is within ourselves. I like to encourage clients to begin to see and analyze the ways in which race, racism, and systemic inequality have impacted their lives, the places they have lived, and their perspectives (what biases and stereotypes do they hold?) as well as get a deeper understanding of the history and root causes that have gotten us here. In your city, what specific policies and practices have caused some of the inequalities you see? Can you make the connections?
Once we see differently, we can act differently and be disruptors. Otherwise, we will try to solve the problem with the same heart, mindset, and biases that created the problem. To be disruptors we have to uproot these things in ourselves, first and on an ongoing basis.
Disrupt Institutional Practices
As placemakers, we are a part of and frequent institutions within our communities. How are these organizations continuing the status quo of inequality? Are the boards and leadership representative of the community? Are the organizational cultures inclusive? Do they have policies and practices that are causing inequities in pay? hiring? advancement? Are their programs and services leading toward equitable outcomes in cities? Are they incorporating the most vulnerable and those with lived experience in their decision-making?
In order to uproot systemic inequity, we need to assess and disrupt the behaviors, practices, and processes that lead to inequitable outcomes within our institutions (using both qualitative and qualitative data) to best understand where we are and what changes to our behavior, culture, or processes will lead to more equitable outcomes.
Collaborate Differently Across Sectors
There are no single-issue communities, what happens in housing impacts education, transportation, the environment, etc., and vice versa. Therefore, we must partner more and partner differently. Horizontally, we must work across sectors ― asking ourselves who is already working on these issues, who is missing, and are there other vantage points that would be important to incorporate? Vertically, not just working with those in traditional power and leadership, but with leaders who are at the grassroots level and everywhere in between. Centering the voices of people that have been historically on the margins and compensating them for their expertise is key. Nothing about us without us is an important principle as well as lifting up, advancing, and funding people of color-led organizations.
If we want to uproot structural inequality, we must all become disruptors ― starting with ourselves, while also working institutionally and partnering vertically and horizontally for change.
Normally, in these book reviews, I do my best to present a fair, unbiased account of what a book does well, as well as what it doesn’t do so well. However, in this case, I want only to tell you how INCREDIBLE this book is. A collection of stories, poems, drawings, and photographs contributed by numerous Chicago artists, scientists, and residents, it whisks the reader through the streets, parks, and history of the Chicago region, giving a perspective on the city’s relationship with nature that is at once complete, nuanced, detailed, entertaining, and surprisingly intimate.
Urban development has had profound impacts on nature in Chicago, but the interesting story is of the opposite interaction: how nature has influenced the people.
The first contribution, “Keeping Chickens,” by Terra Brockman, provides a glimpse into a schoolyard chicken-keeping program. Many people may not consider chickens to be wildlife, or a schoolyard to be wilderness, but the book isn’t really about either of those things. “City Creatures” is really about relationships. In an urban setting like Chicago, the most influential participants in any relationship are almost undoubtedly people, and the real surprise and delight of “City Creatures” is just how human it is.
There are a few contributions that focus mainly on plants and animals, such as Stan Gehrt’s portrait of Chicago’s coyotes, which he has dedicated his life to studying. But most of the stories in “City Creatures” focus on how humans and nature have interacted, and are still interacting, to make Chicago what it is today. Someone with a more detailed knowledge of, and experience with, Chicago could speak better to this, but the book gives a fascinating historical perspective on how the landscape of the Chicago region has been altered by human activities. The Chicago region was, and still is, one of the most biodiverse areas in North America, owing to its proximity to both Lake Michigan and to tallgrass prairie habitat, as well as its role as a migration stopover point for innumerable migratory birds. Urban development has had profound impacts on all of these, but the really interesting story is of the opposite interaction: how nature has influenced the people of the Chicago area.
Chicago’s history as an area rich in biodiversity has inspired a sentiment of stewardship into the area’s culture. “City Creatures” provides numerous examples of this ethic in practice throughout Chicago’s urban wilderness. From the restoration of Bubbly Creek (“Canoeing through History: Wild Encounters on Bubbly Creek,” by Michael Bryson) to the creation of a natural classroom outside the American Indian Center (“Kiskinwahamâtowin [Learning Together]: Outdoor Classrooms and Prairie Restoration at the American Indian Center of Chicago,” by Eli Suzokovich) to people volunteering their early mornings to find unfortunate migratory birds that have fallen to the streets after striking one of Chicago’s many skyscrapers (“Migration: A Bird’s and Birder’s Eye View” by Joel Greenberg), inspiring stories of people caring for nature abound. A particularly hopeful note comes from the story of the Prairie White-fringed Orchid, a severely endangered plant found in one of Chicago’s parks by a young Latino college graduate. The population sometimes was as low as four individuals, and in some years no orchids were found. However, through the dedicated efforts of scientists and volunteers, the orchid has made a comeback and the population now numbers in the hundreds or thousands.
As mentioned before, though, not all the stories are about animals that might normally be considered “wild.” One story that hit me especially hard was “Falling Apart,” by Tom Montgomery Fate. It is a heartbreaking sketch of a family in a time of crisis: their beloved cat, Rosie, is dying. At the same time, a family friend passes away, family member is hospitalized, and a nephew is born. It is the family’s love for Rosie, and their grief at her passing, that keeps them together through this emotional tug-of-war. It is an intimate, heartrending glimpse into a raw emotional state, so beautifully written I can’t possibly do it justice here. I mention this story not to bum you out, but instead to illustrate the wondrous range and scope of “City Creatures,” and to demonstrate its aforementioned ‘human’-ness.
“City Creatures” is expertly and elegantly written, edited, and arranged. The skill and knowledge of the contributing authors and artists are marble of the highest quality, but editors Gavin van Horn and Dave Aftandilian are the Michelangelos who saw and brought forth a David. I had the pleasure of hearing Gavin speak at the 2015 Urban Wildlife Conference in, probably not coincidentally, Chicago. From that talk, I knew immediately that this was a special project, and regret that it took me this long to get a chance to read “City Creatures.” One aspect of Gavin and Dave’s work I highly value is the noticeable and enriching diversity of perspectives they have included. The voices of women and minorities are indispensable here, as they are elsewhere. I truly hope that the richness and depth they provide here can be emulated in other arenas.
Cannon Dill and Brett Flanigan, Fox, part of the Art in Public Places project, aerosol and latex paint on concrete (2013); photograph by Joseph Kayne.
The other lesson to be taken from “City Creatures” is about Chicago itself. At nearly ten million inhabitants, it is one of the largest urban agglomerations in the country and, indeed, in the world. Nevertheless, here we have proof that wilderness and nature not only survive, but thrive in the metropolis. Perhaps we don’t necessarily need to sacrifice our connection with nature in order to live in a thriving city—Chicago illustrates how the two can coexist. Surely, incorporating some of these lessons into our other growing cities will be valuable, not only for the various associated health, psychological and ecosystem benefits, but also so that, someday, even the most urban of dwellers may have a story to tell about the city creatures of their neighborhood. Stories like these help bring us together and foster a sense of community, which can, in turn, have effects beyond experiencing nature, like getting groups together to tackle social justice issues. Connecting with nature improves lives, and makes cities better places to make lives.
Brooks Blair Golden, Owl, part of the Art in Public Places project, acrylic and spray paint on concrete (2012); photograph by Lisa Roberts.
“City Creatures” is a must-read. I don’t attach any qualifiers, like ‘for anyone interested in urban wildlife,’ because I don’t believe they’re necessary. “City Creatures” is not only one of the best books about urban wildlife I’ve ever read, it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m sure it will remain on my bookshelf for years and years to come, and obtain ever more creases and signs of love as I read and reread its pages.
If a post-COVID world can move towards more people-centered social infrastructure investment, with ambitious goals for nature in cities and Biophilic design, then our financial investments in nature will be rewarded with less crowded and more resilient cities, which will hopefully also lead to a more equitable and healthy country.
As a city and regional planner by training, I have been alarmed at the tendency to blame urban density (defined as people per square mile) as a primary culprit for New York City’s relatively severe initial COVID-19 outbreak. An epidemiologist from Stanford, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California, and a professor of computational medicine from UCLA all identified density as the enemy in a pandemic in the US by making disputable comparisons between COVID-19 statistics in New York and Los Angeles. However, statistical analysis does not show a consistent connection between big-city density and COVID-19 impacts. One only needs to look at cities like Hong Kong, Seoul, and Singapore to see that New York’s predicament is the result of many more significant factors than urban density. Those other factors, such as inequality and lack of public health infrastructure, have been well documented elsewhere.
Density is not the problem, as L.V. Anderson points out when discussing the resilience of cities in a post-COVID-19 world. Crowding is the problem, and “reallocating outdoor space is the city planner’s secret weapon.” Bruce Schaller, a New York City transportation consultant, distills this same argument very eloquently in his essay entitled Density Isn’t Easy. But It’s a Necessity: “The question is not whether we need cities and density. The question is whether we have the vision, commitment, and fortitude to make our cities equitable, affordable, and sustainable as well as dense, creative, and diverse.”
Urban density, of course, has merit. It’s the key to being able to offer access to shared amenities, including parks, trails, and other recreational open spaces. Cities are by far the most efficient and effective forms of human settlements, including energy efficiency, economic activity per capita, and as centers of creativity and innovation.
In facing a pandemic like COVID-19, the lesson here should not be becoming anti-density, but instead re-learning the lessons of the public park movement of the late 19th century. The parks of this era were specifically designed to avoid crowding and were intended to foster “a temperate, good-natured, and healthy state of mind.” Parks are a fundamental part of the city’s social infrastructure, which also includes community centers, libraries, and hospitals. As Samuel Kling, Global Cities and ACLS/Mellon Public Fellow at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, correctly states: “Cities are vulnerable amid [a] pandemic, but they are not the problem.”
So, while there are many dimensions to making cities better in a post-COVID-19 world, here are four salient action items we can take to promote nature in cities, reduce crowding, and improve urban density’s natural advantages to foster economic resilience and efficiency.
Transfer Land Use from Cars to People
Set Goals for Nature
Take a Biophilic Approach
Invest in Nature
1. Transfer Land Use from Cars to People
This is an easy one in concept and is already happening in many cities around the country by converting car lanes to pedestrian and bicycle lanes and creating “parklets” out of under-utilized parking spaces and other impervious surfaces. Allocating less space to cars and more space to functional open space will ease crowding and make cities more vibrant economically.
Not incidentally, by using natural elements such as tree boxes and pervious paving, reducing the amount of impervious concrete and asphalt roadway for these new people-centric uses will also help reduce urban flooding and stormwater pollution and lightening the cooling load for adjacent buildings in this era of climate change), which are some of the key objectives of Philadelphia’s Green City, Clean Waters Plan.
In 2001, The Conservation Fund and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) launched a pioneering flood management program, Greenseams. Greenseams purchases land and conservation easements from willing landowners in the Milwaukee, Menomonee, Oak Creek and Root River watersheds, where major suburban growth is expected to occur. Photos taken in September 2019 by Ivan LaBianca.
2. Set Goals for Nature
It is incredibly important to undertake strategic analysis for identifying what is important to protect that keeps natural systems and human communities thriving. As density is a measure of people per square mile, it is appropriate and essential to set targets for what level of functional open space a particular city should have on a per capita basis and ensure that this open space is equitably distributed across demographic and economic categories. Metropolitan areas, such as Portland, Oregon, have developed regional conservation plans that help them protect strategically important areas and help them spend available money wisely. These types of approaches can be applied in dense urban settlements to help protect and restore natural systems and provide open space opportunities for more urban dwellers. Natural areas and features are essential to green civic infrastructure.
3. Take a Biophilic Approach
The Biophilic Cities movement highlights the importance of daily contact with nature as an element of urban life and a public health necessity, in addition to the ethical responsibility that cities have to conserve global biodiversity and to foster shared habitat for non-human life and people. Although a global movement, local action following Biophilic principles is happening in the United States, with Washington, D.C.’s 11thStreet Bridge Park and Lindsay Street Park in Atlanta as signature examples of expanding access to nature in cities while intentionally mitigating the potential for displacing lower-income residents that often accompanies environmental investments in cities. Green should be for all, not just the wealthy if we want healthy and economically viable cities.
Caption: Lindsey Street Park took six vacant and blighted lots in a poor and high crime area of Atlanta with fewer acres of green space than anywhere else in the city, renovated the site, planted local pollinator species, recreated the historical streambed and incorporated a job training program for residents. Photo: Whitney Flanagan
4. Invest in Nature
Most advocacy for nature in cities includes an argument for more money, and this article is no exception. The good news is that, in the U.S., we now have full and permanent funding for the U.S. Land and Water Conservation Fund. With the annual appropriation around US$900 million, this will provide an opportunity for urban areas (and rural areas) to have a more appropriate level of investment that gets closer to meeting the needs for parks and open space for current and future generations.
In conclusion, if a post-COVID world can move towards more people-centered social infrastructure investment, with ambitious goals for nature in cities and Biophilic design, then our financial investments in nature will be rewarded with less crowded and more resilient cities, which will hopefully also lead to a more equitable and healthy country.
A review of Min Joung-Ki, an exhibition of large-scale urban nature paintings at Kukje Gallery in Seoul, South Korea.
Founded in 1982, Kukje Gallery is one of Korea’s most prolific exhibitors of international contemporary artists. Indeed, the institution is more of a small arts complex than a gallery, consisting of three modern buildings positioned gingerly within the fabric of an old urban neighborhood on the edge of Seoul’s ancient seat of power, Gyeongbok Palace.
Min’s paintings intensify thousands of years of human history, and relationships with nature in Korea’s capital city. For example, the varied story of Seoul’s famous Cheonggye stream, is offered here … seen out the windows from inside a simple barber shop.
As a city, Seoul has been the seat of government in Korea since 1392. It is interesting then that, in this particular exhibition, painter Min Joung-Ki literally conjures scenes from then to now. Obsessed with exploring the thin lines between urban development and nature, as well between modern and historical culture, Min, who was born in 1949, is somewhat of an oddity in the Korean arts scene. Unhappy with the direction of the domestic art world during the years of dictatorship in Korea, he refused to take part in state-funded exhibitions. In place, he co-founded a small collective of artists named the “Reality and Utterance Group” with an aim to move away from art that was “alienating” people from reality and each other, and instead to give art a role of re-connecting these spheres of human life. The works on view here—mostly recent, large scale oil paintings, focusing on urban nature—speak softly to this point.
Min Joung-Ki, “View of Sajikdan at a Distance,” 2019, Oil on canvas | photo by P.M. Lydon for The Nature of Cities, cc-by-sa
Works such as “View of Sajikdan at a Distance” present us with a typical Seoul thoroughfare, though the tree-lined street appears at first drab in color, smoggy, and somehow eerily dark. Min’s use of vivid color hides from us at first. On closer examination, we notice an undercurrent of clear, broad strokes of vivid, dayglow oranges and iridescent greens. This color treatment reappears often, and within it likely hides something of Min’s views about the nature/culture divide.
The physical situations that Min chooses to portray serve to intensify thousands of years of human history, and relationships with nature in Korea’s capital city. Many of the paintings here—modern buildings mingling with mountain Buddhist temples, both placed along winding stairways up and into mountain peaks topped with wiggling Korean Red Pine trees—show Seoul at is finest.
Though these depictions come across as unreal, they do in fact exist in the current day city.
Min Joung-Ki, “Baeksecheongpung 1,” 2019, Oil on canvas | photo by P.M. Lydon for The Nature of Cities, cc-by-sa
Familiar though the settings may be, stylistically these works place us in between worlds. Though most of these works feel light and bright, there is also an overwhelming dimness, a brown haze that infuses the scene. Min accomplishes this with exquisite subtlety, in a way that the effect is almost there, yet almost not. The longer you spend with these works however—especially his most recent works—the more a distinct tension, and even sadness, comes out in the color palette he chooses.
If one has just stepped into the gallery from Seoul’s seemingly omnipresent smog, the overall feeling of these works will not surprise. In the past year, the city has seen only 25 days where the air quality could be considered “good.” In air quality surveys, Seoul continually ranks among the worst in the world.
If we look back a decade in Min’s paintings however, we find that his paintings weren’t always bathed in the dim brown.
Min Joung-Ki, “Guiyuyean Pond at Yongchungukok Gapyeong,” 2005, Oil on canvas | photo by P.M. Lydon for The Nature of Cities, cc-by-sa
There is much wet green in Min’s portrayal of Guiyuyean Pond, not only wet in what it portrays, but in Min’s technique, a thick application of paint leaves the canvas literally dripping with glistening green. It gives the viewer relief. One of the few scenes here painted outside of Seoul, it seems one of the images that viewers stop and stay with the longest. Staring into the lush depths of this pond, reflecting a cool blue sky.
It’s something of a healing experience.
Water is a reoccurring theme in this exhibition, and indeed one of Seoul’s most well-known urban waterway projects is featured here. Many urbanists know well the story of Cheonggyecheon. During Korea’s rapid urbanization in the 1970s and 80s, this storied stream that runs straight through the core of the old city center was buried beneath a highway, only to be bought back to the light of day a few decades later. The varied story of Cheonggye stream, is offered here in the spirit of Korean poet Park Taewon, seen out the windows from inside a simple barber shop.
Min Joung-Ki, “Park Taewon’s Scenes from Cheonggye Stream,” 2019, Oil on canvas | photo by P.M. Lydon for The Nature of Cities, cc-by-sa
The series of three paintings, arranged side-by-side, explore the changing view of Cheonggyecheon over what appears to be a century, as the stream develops from a place of commerce and trade, to a highway construction zone, and finally as it is today, a social gathering space for citizens and tourists.
It is not until we reach the final room of this exhibition, that we encounter what is perhaps the defining work, a soft-yet-monumental piece that ties Min’s sentiments together. The divide between the “otherworldly” life of nature, and the concrete nature-devoid lives we tend to inhabit in most cities could not be more clear than it is in “Roving Mongyudowon”.
Min Joung-Ki, “Roving Mongyudowon,” 2016, Oil on canvas | photo by P.M. Lydon for The Nature of Cities, cc-by-sa
Here, tree-like mountains—or are they mountain-like trees?—act as shapes, morphing into the atmosphere, slightly unruly orchard blossoms fronting a brightly-painted traditional house, iridescent water flowing magically down through the entire scene.
And then it all stops.
Abruptly.
A concrete bridge for cars, walls of brick and mortar below, a scene solidified, a completely different world than the one above. What Min portrays above seems like the heavens, shapes of the universe; what he paints below, the comforts of our daily reality, come across here as a structure-obsessed life.
The colored water stops its magic at the vehicle bridge.
The broad strokes of bright greens and oranges that dance wildly in the skies and mountains, is covered here, with solid layers, roof tiles, streets, walls; traces of the elusive radiance peek through only in a few areas of unkempt urban weeds.
Through all of this, however, one is still never quite certain where Min’s heart lies, never certain if the paving over of these colorful gestures leaves us at a gain or a loss. His work on the whole plays with dualities, being at once graceful and powerful, loud and peaceful. Both urban and natural scenes elicit beauty, as much as they also lend us emotional quandaries.
In treading lines so lightly as Min does though, he leaves much room to question our own feelings about these scenes, about the interplay between nature, culture, and our urban structures, and too, about the history folded up so deeply within these elements.
In a city so rapidly developing as Seoul—and where development often comes at the wholesale destruction of thousands of years of culture and billions of years of nature—Min’s works might at first come across quaint.
Yet perhaps that is part of the power and magic unfolding here; paintings that allow us to access and contemplate the undercurrents within deceivingly simple scenes. If we spend enough time with Min’s work, these qualities offer us welcome room to contemplate not only what our cities were and are, but in turn, what they might become.
In our transition from rural to urban life (arguably the largest ever migration of humans on Earth), we lose contact with Nature—that we already knew. It is not easy to find ways to raise awareness of the beauty, as well as the critical role, that living beings, all 30 million species of them, play in giving us our health, food, air and water in our cities. One interesting approach I’d like to propose here is to appropriately manage the natural attraction we have for birds and other animals (from butterflies to whales to bats), notably those migrating “en masse” across continents and seas looking for food or protection in wetlands or protected areas. Not surprisingly (as birds are evenly spread across all biomes in the world, and as around 1,800 species of migrating birds represent about 19% of known bird species), so-called “bird flyways” cross all continents and ecosystems.
Flyways of the world. Credit: Wetlands International, 2009
Birds are colorful, visible and ubiquitous. Three million people take international trips each year to witness the spectacular movements of migratory birds, traveling thousands of miles along their flyways, but it is estimated that domestic numbers can easily attain 10 times more. According to US Fish and Wildlife Service, bird watching is reported as being the fastest growing outdoor activity in America with 51.3 million people contributing more than $36 billion to the US economy in a year. In the UK, expenditure is estimated at $500 million each year and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in the UK has membership of over 1 million people. It is thus not a surprise that the Mexican birdwatcher and architect Hector Ceballos-Lascurain coined the term “ecotourism” in 1985 working in an American Flamingo breeding place in northern Yucatan.
“Birding plays a significant and growing part in the tourism industry, and creates direct and indirect economic benefits for many countries and communities, also amongst developing countries. Wildlife watching appeals to a wide range of people, and opportunities to participate in wildlife watching are and should increasingly be a factor in tourists’ holiday choices today” said Elizabeth Mrema, Acting Executive Secretary of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS).
Like tourism in general, that attraction to migrating birds can be compared to fire in terms of its relation to the protection of Nature: it can cook your food but can also burn your house down. The right kind of “bird flyway” tourism can help finance parks for these migratory animals, can raise political attention and public awareness to these often endangered species, and can provide much-needed and relatively low-impact jobs and business opportunities for local communities around parks, making them allies for biodiversity (and for the implementation of multilateral agreements like the Convention on Biological Diversity, for which we work). Without the right institutional governance setup, however, too many people can literally “love the parks—and the birds—to death”, or what is as bad, unvisited and badly managed parks of critical importance to the birds may be left to waste outside of the public view and we lose the opportunity to put birds and parks towards decent livelihood options and source of pride for locals. Those areas (most often wetlands and watersheds) also provide surrounding communities with freshwater (wetlands are very cost-effective filters—treating water chemically and through water plants costs around 10 times more) and leisure options (strongly linked to urban health).
Moreover, it turns out that in terms of governance, success or failure of these initiatives depend largely on the close cooperation between national, subnational and local governments mediating and facilitating cooperation with business, civil society and other major groups. The sustainable use of such “bird flyways” as tourism attractions depends largely on the capacity of local and subnational governments to conserve their biodiversity and ecosystem functions, restore degraded areas and leverage the business opportunities from tourism for residents and park agencies alike, always involving civil society in governance and stewardship.
Some examples of migratory animals as tourist attractions
Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge, Austin, Texas, U.S., is home to the world’s largest urban bat colony. The Mexican free-tailed bats reside beneath the road deck in gaps between the concrete component structures. They spend their summers in Austin and migrate to Mexico in winters. According to Bat Conservation International (BCI), 750,000 ~ 1.5 million bats come and nest in the bridge each summer. The nightly emergence of the bats from underneath the bridge at dusk, and their flight across Lady Bird Lake to the east to feed themselves, attracts as many as 100,000 tourists annually, with economic impacts on the city reaching US$10 million each year. A project called “Bats and Bridges” has been put in place by the Texas Department of Transportation, in cooperation with BCI, to study the best way to make bridges habitable for bats. The Austin Ice Bats minor-league hockey team was named in honor of the bats.
Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve in Singapore was designated as a nature park by the government in 1989 and officially opened to public in 1993, and has received constant support to help preserve its beautiful space and its vast variety of nature and wildlife. The reserve was recognized as a site of international importance for migratory birds with Wetlands International presenting the reserve a certificate to mark its formal entry into the East Asian Australasian Shorebird Site Network, which include Australia’s Kakadu National Park, China’s Mai Po and Japan’s Yatsu Tidal Flats. From late 1990s to early 2000s, it received 80,000 – 90,000 visitors annually on average, of which 4,000 were tourists. Now as one of leading wetlands in the flyway, it has currently over 130,000 visitors and the number has been increasing every year as the site becomes better known and its reputation for conservation and awareness-raising is increasingly appreciated.
Taking action at UN level
Building on these and other examples, key partners with experience in the field of conservation and tourism have joined forces to design a Flyways and Sustainable Tourism project. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the Secretariat of the Convention on Migratory Species (UNEP/CMS, which in 2006 produced a seminal publication on the topic), Wetlands International and Birdlife International (as implementing partners) are collaborating with the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD), UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (UNESCO/MAB) and World Heritage Centre (UNESCO/WHC) Programmes, the Ramsar Convention Secretariat, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to protect migratory birds and their habitats and support the creation of sustainable livelihoods for local communities through the development of innovative sustainable tourism products. In the first phase, the Flyways and Sustainable Tourism project focuses on the East Atlantic, West Asian East African, Central Asian and East Asian Australasian Flyways.
Since 2006, negotiations to implement several multilateral environmental agreements (the Convention on Biological Diversity but also the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the Convention on Migratory Species, the World Heritage Convention and the selection of Important Bird Areas), have advanced on the critical role of local and subnational authorities, supported by national/federal governments, in ensuring that wetlands are well used BOTH as freshwater security “insurance” and as tourism attractions—with economic benefits reverting both to steward communities and to the park agencies responsible for monitoring and minimizing impacts of visitation. While federal governments are expected to provide guidelines, incentives and policies that create the enabling environment for those solutions, as well as leverage the use of national parks, subnational governments can apply appropriate land-use planning tools, leverage their parks and provide appropriate infrastructure. Local authorities, in their turn, can enforce rules, apply incentives and help incubate key businesses, involve and educate citizens, manage and restore ecosystems.
The critical role of local and subnational authorities
The sustainable management of tourism equipment and facilities for visitors, including the freshwater security aspect of wetland protection and restoration, depends largely on the capacity of local and State/regional/provincial (i.e. subnational) governments. Protecting water sources and the ecosystem service of filtration is critical to the quality of life of local residents, but often even more so for tourism: freshwater is one of tourism’s key resources (international tourists easily consume 10 times more water than local residents according to a study by Conservation International and UNEP) and a crucial resource in the years to come (between 1980 and 2000 available per capita freshwater supply decreased by almost half).
An interesting example comes from South Korea (the CBD COP 12 host in 2014), where Seocheon County in Chung-cheong-nam Province is being considered as one of the 8 sites of the UNWTO project. The Secretariat of East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership is also housed in Incheon. Suncheon-si is a small city located on the southern coast of South Korea, once left behind in the country’s industrialization race. A debate on Suncheon Bay’s restoration started in the late 1990s, as the administration decided to follow a different growth path. While surrounding areas devoted wetlands to industrial purposes (mostly petro-chemical plants and steel mills), Suncheon-si launched a project to restore the tidal flats into the largest sanctuary for hooded cranes.
As a result of concerted efforts by the city government and its citizens, Suncheon Bay was designated as one of the first coastal Wetland Protection Areas in 2003, and South Korea’s Ministry of Environment applied its experience with river restoration in Jeonju, Suwon and Cheonggye streams. Suncheon Bay was designated as the first Korean coastal wetland registered on the Ramsar list in 2006, and is now one of the top ecotourism destinations in the country. Additional investment in complementary infrastructure facilitated the arrival of more than 2.95 million visitors in 2010, a dramatic increase from the 0.1 million tourists in 2002. By the end of 2009, about 6,400 jobs had been created in a city of just over 200,000 people, and more than US$87 million was generated only in 2010.
One interesting fact is that the number of wintering birds in the bay also has increased, in a clear conservation/development win-win model. Nineteen species with 5,210 individuals of migratory birds were found in 1999, and with enhanced governance these totals reached 125 species and 58,000 individuals in 2011. The number of Hooded Cranes, the flagship species, was only 60 in 1996 but now is 660 in 2013.
Suncheon’s key success factor lies mainly on the local government’s strong leadership supported by the national government’s policies. Initially, plans to restore the Suncheon Bay ecosystem met strong resistance from business and land owners whose private interests were restricted when commercial areas were relocated out of the bay area, and rice fields were turned into a reserve for migratory birds. Strong leadership by mayors was the critical factor in turning initial resistance into support and eventually into political success.
The collaborative relationship between civil society and the local government was formalized in 2007 when a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement (Korean NGO) and the Suncheon city government promising continued cooperation for ‘the efficient conservation and sustainable use of Suncheon Bay’.
At the local level, the Committee on the Ecology of Suncheon Bay, consisting of 30 local residents, experts, and NGO members, has been organized to collect opinions, provide policy advice, and establish a cooperative system among various stakeholders.
The importance of national, subnational and local government’s collaborative and complementary roles can also be seen in New York City’s very recent plan of restoring Jamaica Bay. In 2010, U.S. President Obama launched the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative as an agenda for conservation and recreation in the 21st century, proposing that the federal government partner with States and local communities to rework inefficient policies and establish conservation solutions. As part of this effort, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and the City of New York met with other public agencies, non-profit organizations, and private groups to seek new opportunities for collaboration. Last May 2013, NYC Parks, in partnership with the National Park Service, launched the Jamaica Bay/Rockaway Parks Restoration Corps, with funds from a National Emergency Grant through the U.S. and NYS Departments of Labor. Approximately 200 workers were hired to assist in the clean-up, restoration, and reconstruction of Jamaica Bay and Rockaway Parks – including areas that sustained serious damage from Hurricane Sandy.
Nitrogen discharges were significantly reduced, waterfronts restored, existing natural areas were recovered based on science, and the actions and financial investments of federal, state and local agencies were coordinated with environmental stakeholder groups. Sustainable urban infrastructure (more permeable, with better drainage and was developed as part of NY’s Green Infrastructure Plan. Seaweed was converted into biofuels, oyster beds were recovered and endemic plants reintroduced. Improved satellite environmental monitoring allowed for the production of the Jamaica Bay Watershed Ecological Atlas. Enhanced attractiveness of the area led to visitation almost doubling between 1994 and 2008 (4 to 9 million visitors/year).
Conclusion
This brings us back to the UNWTO project. One key issue on which the Secretariat of the CBD would like to cooperate with all partners, most specially networks of local and subnational authorities, is to focus on capacity-building processes for these levels of government to promote sustainable tourism development as an effective and sustainable mechanism for job creation and regional economic development, always linked to successful conservation and management of wetlands and protected areas in the Migratory Birds Flyways as critical biodiversity and tourism hotspots. Please contact us at [email protected] for more information and exchanges.
Oliver Hillel
Montreal
with Jiyong Huh, SCBD intern and Seoul University Business School graduate
Los Angeles harbors many urban savvy coyotes who find hiding spaces in parks and other vegetated places.
My husband went on his bicycle to get our Christmas standing rib roast (an extravagance of every few years) at the local artisanal butcher. The butcher is in the legendary Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles, corner of 3rdand Fairfax. It remains relatively authentic despite the immense Disneyesque mall just adjacent to it: “The Grove”, a fantastically successful enterprise by Rick Caruso. People come from far and wide to enjoy its artificial family-oriented atmosphere, replete with canned music, fountains, fabulous bouquets in the parking garage (as well as a nicely appointed lounge), polite uniformed service people all over.
The place is very well policed.
Coyotes in Los Angeles. Photo: Stuart Palley (National Park Service
Farmer’s Market is a bit less glitzy, it has lots of small food venues from the ersatz French restaurant to the Mexican, Polynesian, American restaurants, ice cream makers and vendors, spice mart and vegetable purveyors. There are two superb butchers and fowl vendors too. So, back to the standing rib roast.
He puts it in his functional bicycle basket—the packaging is slightly leaky, some drips of bloody water ooze out. Negotiating the way back, avoiding the narrow spot on 3rd that parallels Pan Pacific Park, he takes the windy path that dips through Pan Pacific at the far southern end, a place where the homeless have found relatively safe shelter.
As he pedals up the last little incline, out of the bushes appear coyotes…Los Angeles harbors many urban savvy coyotes who find hiding spaces in parks and other vegetated places. Smelling the meat, the small pack of four start to trail him, sniffing and emitting soft yelps of probability for food. He gets to the first street he needs to cross to use the much safer alleyway behind the convenience store and local hotel. He stops to check for cars.
So do the coyotes. They know about traffic and getting hit by cars. He zips across, quickly followed by the animals on the hunt. Getting closer one dares a quick try at a heel nip. My husband speeds up, there is no one around in the alley. He pedals strongly. Coyotes still a bit unsure, hover trotting beside him, vocalizing softly (they are conscious of being in a city).
The next street comes, much busier. The coyotes are unsure. Should they continue the pursuit? They are visible, very visible, and there is still a lot of day light. Gradually they drop back, disappointed, and fade into the neighborhood bushes.
The roast makes its way home safely. No one is hurt.
“The more we know of other forms of life, the more we enjoy and respect ourselves…Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.”
— E.O. Wilson
A recent, satirical New Yorker piece by Andy Borowitz quoted a fictitious resident who blamed scientists “for failing to warn us of the true cost of climate change. They always said that polar bears would starve to death, but they never told us our lawns would look like crap.” Although this does not represent a real person’s exact feelings, the underlying sentiment sadly has more than a hint of truth. To many people, the impact of a changing environment seems distant and completely separate from our existence until we are directly confronted with the negative results.
Poorly conceived design visibly divided us in urban areas from our wilds and contributed to our recent ability to see nature as something isolated from us. Yet reinvigorating our bond with nature is a challenge architecture and urban design are well placed to address. Architects and designers have control over our built environment; by changing the way we design cities and buildings to connectto rather than disconnect from nature, we can change our proximity to nature and shift our physical relationship to the environment.
Photo: Schristia. Creative Commons.
The separation that we have crafted over the centuries through our isolating designs hasn’t come without costs. Obesity, ADHD, autism, a decline in creativity—these are all connected to a lack of environmental connection. Unfortunately, this estrangement from nature has not only directly impacted our health, it has impacted our ability to respond to crucial modern challenges, such as climate change, because these dire environmental topics feel removed from us. The environment appears distant because we designed it as such. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan describe this impact in their seminal book, Ecological Design:
“What do we learn from this kind of ‘nowhere’ environment? When living and working in nowhere places becomes normal, it is no wonder that we literally lose some of our sensitivity toward nature. Through the daily experience of the designed environment, we learn detachment… As nature has receded from our daily lives, it has receded from our ethics.”
Yet despite putting up physical barriers between nature and us, we still cannot shake our deep tie to and need for other species. Humans have an ingrained desire to connect. E.O. Wilson describes this impulse in his ‘Biophilia Hypothesis’ in which he explains,
“…When human beings remove themselves from the natural environment, the biophilic learning rules are not replaced by modern versions equally well adapted to artifacts. Instead, they persist from generation to generation. For the indefinite future… urban dwellers will go on dreaming of snakes for reasons they cannot explain.”
We crave connection to the natural world, even if we, individually, have always been seemingly divided from it. By calling architects and urban designers to ‘Make Nature Visible,’ as Van der Ryn and Cowan request in Ecological Design, we can begin to design places grounded in their own unique environment. In this way, designers can revive an awareness of the natural systems that affect us and recover place-based knowledge.
The advantages of interacting with and seeing nature are numerous. Beyond technical benefits, feeling the presence of the living world around us elevates the spirit. Supporting this movement, many architects and urban designers are inventively finding ways to reconnect us with the touch and feel of our wider biological community.
Photo credit: Thorbjõrn Hansen
Schools
Children seem particularly moved by biophilia and quickly gain many advantages from access to the outdoors. Schools that get children outside into natural places find that their students perform better academically (this has proven especially true for low-income students) and are more engaged and motivated to learn. These benefits come in addition to decreasing the need for disciplinary action, reducing stress, and increasing student attention spans. But the gains are not just performance-based—it turns out that the outdoors even improves vision and increases Vitamin D levels, all advantages that make students healthier. There are some great schools that strive to put children outside and reflect this philosophy in their design.
Photo credit: Thorbjõrn Hansen
Daycare Center in Holbæk, Denmark
Sitting at the highest point in the neighborhood, the daycare center on the outskirts of Holbæk, Denmark provides a base for an outdoor-oriented school. Teaching children outside has long been a traditional education approach in Denmark, with ‘forest schools’ dating back to the 1950s. This daycare, designed by Henning Larsen, includes large south-facing windows, a green roof, and gardens to allow children to play outside throughout the entire year.
Fuji Kindergarten in Japan
Physically encircling a tree, the innovative Fuji Kindergarten, designed by Yui and Takaharu Tezuka, highlights nature as a teacher every day. The children can play on an outdoor structure that surrounds the tree, climb the tree itself, or just admire the tree from every room in the school. The school furthers its connection to nature with lots of glass and open air, which means the outdoors flow seamlessly into the indoors.
Photo by Katsuhisa Kida/FOTOTECA.
Bronx Zoo School Proposal in the Bronx, New York
In the New York City borough of the Bronx, few people have close interaction with their natural environment. This proposal, which I designed for a public school in the Bronx zoo, was aimed at rectifying this problem. Our connection to the ecological systems becomes apparent day-to-day through this school’s open architecture and outdoor classrooms and is bolstered by the whooping crane breeding program, which is integrated into the school and managed by the students.
Image courtesy of Whitney Hopkins.
Hospitals
Connecting patients to nature has been innately valued for centuries—the first health centers were at remote monasteries intended to foster the tie between healing and the environment. Now, a growing body of modern scientific evidence supports this notion; patient outcomes appear to be closely related to interacting with nature. Connection to the natural environment has been shown to improve overall healthcare quality in multiple ways by reducing staff stress and fatigue, increasing the effectiveness in delivering care, improving patient safety, and reducing patient stress. All this leads to improve health outcomes and patients who are happier and heal faster. Hospitals foster this by having views, natural light, and access to gardens or the outdoors. The few following hospitals do this exceedingly well.
Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California
Designed in the early 1960s on the California coast, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula was ahead of its time in pulling the outdoors inside a healing environment. The patient rooms and public spaces have large panoramic views of the surrounding forest, gardens, and courtyards and a flow between all the indoor and outdoor spaces. It has been recently expanded and remodeled by HOK to be state of the art while maintaining the original natural tranquility.
Photo: Frank Keillor. Creative Commons.
Children’s Psychiatry Center (KPC) in Genk, Netherlands
In an artistically crafted, patient-centric building, the Children’s Psychiatry Center in the Dutch city of Genk innovatively marries a designed outdoor environment with the hospital. Children’s well being was at the core of OSAR’s design, so every space in the center captures views of internal courtyards, gardens, or the forest. In so doing, the hospital reduces the stress of the patients, their families, and the staff and creates a safe and warm atmosphere within the center.
Children Psychiatric Center, Genk, Belgium. Photo courtesy of OSAR. www.osar.be
Workplace
Because the evidence of diverse benefits is so strong, contact with nature in the workplace has become a central element in the design of healthy office spaces. Various studies have repeatedly shown that access to outdoor gardens or parks, indoor plants, and windows with views of natural places reduce worker stress levels. Beyond manipulating stress levels, it appears that employees are also happier and more productive with a connection to nature. And firms greatly benefit because sick leave and worker turnover is reduced. With all these advantages, it is no wonder that creating contact between nature and workers is happening in offices, manufacturing plants, and every type of work environment in between.
Photo by Greg Williams. Creative Commons.
Ford Rouge Factory in Dearborn, Michigan
A historic manufacturing facility that had been deemed a heavily polluted brownfield site, Ford transformed the facility into a vibrant, sustainable new factory. Nature takes center stage at the facilities, which boast the largest green roof in North America, various treatment ponds and gardens, natural vegetation, and ample day lighting. As a result, the productivity of the workers increased and sick days decreased. One complaint: the amplified bird poop from the population that has taken up residence on the factory premise.
selgascano offices in Madrid, Spain
Within the urban area of Madrid, the architectural firm of selgascano made waves with their design for their own office. Sunken into the ground, curved glass opens the office up to spectacular and unusual views of the surrounding woods. The space is filled with natural light that bounce of the bright interior colors. Reportedly, employees love working in the space.
selgascano office. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Cities
In urban areas, the expanse of human construction can particularly estrange people from the environment, so it becomes crucial to consciously give residents access to natural places. A recent Danish study by Stigsdotter and colleagues found that people who lived more than 1 kilometer away from green space were generally less healthy. They also showed worse vitality, were at higher risk for depression, and reported higher levels of stress and pain. These advantages must partly contribute to the increased values of real estate adjacent to urban green space. Some cities are working hard to bring nature into the urban core by creating or revitalizing parks and seeing green space as an essential element in their infrastructure.
Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul, with a highway running over it.
Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, South Korea
A stream runs through the center of Seoul, but for decades, most people would never have known. After years of polluting the Cheonggyecheon river, the city covered it in 1968 with an elevated, 8-lane hightway, hiding the river from view. But in 2003, the mayor began an initiative to improve traffic and restore the river. The Cheonggyecheon park opened in 2005, bringing people into close contact with the water and newly established parks through a central urban corridor. This project revitalized the local busineesess, improved transportation, and made the citizens happy by providing them with a delightful green space and reconnecting them to their historic river.
Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul. Photo: David Maddox
In partnership with nature
With nature providing such joy and many health benefits, it is time that architects and planners leverage designs that highlight the environment in our built spaces. We can hope that beyond making a healthier and happier world, we can also prompt a more ethical relationship to nature.
As Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan conclude:
“Design transforms awareness. Designs that grow out of and celebrate place ground us in place. Designs that work in partnership with nature articulate an implicit hope that we might do the same.”
The belief that the city is an entity apart from nature and even antithetical to it has dominated the way in which the city is perceived and continues to affect how it is built.
The city must be recognized as part of nature and designed accordingly
— Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden (1984)
Coming on the heels David Maddox’s references to Central Park’s Pale Male red-tailed hawk and David Goode’s recent piece featuring London’s peregrines, it may appear that contributors to The Nature of Cities are fixated on urban raptors. Continuing that thread, it was just yesterday as I sat on the front stoop of the four-plex I’ve shared with friends for more than thirty years in Portland, Oregon (USA), I heard vaguely familiar cries overhead. At first the high-pitched screeching evoked the sound of hungry young red-tailed hawks, begging to be fed. Once I picked them out of the clouds and could see their sleek, swept-back, pointed wings it was clear the plaintive calls were coming from six peregrine falcons who were arrayed, Blue Angel-like across the neighborhood sky. The peregrine flyby was undoubtedly this year’s four fledglings accompanied by both parents from the nearby Fremont Interstate 405 Bridge. The Fremont, a three-span, half-through-tied arch that soars almost four-hundred feet above the Willamette River, the most productive peregrine nesting site in Oregon, has its western-most footings planted firmly in nearby in Portland’s densest neighborhood.
Adult peregrine falcon on Portland’s Fremont Bridge. Photo by Bob Sallinger.The Fremont Bridge hosts Oregon’s most productive peregrine falcon nest Photo Mike Houck.
Just a few weeks ago I had a similar aural and visual treat while walking through 5000-acre Forest Park, a ten minute stroll from my apartment. As a friend and I sauntered down Leif Erickson Road I heard, faintly overhead the unmistakable, nasal whinny of a bald eagle. It was soon clear that not one, but six bald eagles were kettling directly overhead, less than a mile from my apartment.
Vaux’s swifts swirling around Chapman Elementary School chimney in NW Portland Photo by Mike Houck.
Both the peregrine and eagles sightings came a few blocks from where up to three-thousand nature enthusiasts have migrated during the fall for the past two decades to watch up to 40,000 Vaux’s swifts dive into the chimney at Chapman Elementary School. Families gather with picnic dinners and are treated to a fantastic raptorial display as peregrines slice through the Vaux’s whirling votex or a Cooper’s hawk alights on the chimney’s lip from where they snatch a swift as it enters the opening. Half the onlookers cheer the birds of prey, while the rest boo and root for the swifts’ successful dive into the tall chimney. All of this near the heart of downtown Portland.
Lessons from Colorado
Shortly after the peregrine flyby I grabbed my copy the New York Times and turned on the television to catch the latest about the Colorado fires. More than the magnitude of the blaze and the fact that in excess of 30,000 people had been uprooted from their homes, I was intrigued that one lucky soul, whose house had been untouched by the conflagration, re-located to the steep, rural forested slopes outside Colorado Springs because of a desire to be “close to nature”, to live where they could “watch chipmunks” at their feeder!”
More than 3,000 people gather some evenings mid-September to watch Vaux’s swifts gather at Chapman Elementary School in NW Portland. Photo by Mike Houck.
From where I sat, in the densest urban neighborhood in a city of almost 500,000 and metropolitan region of two million–a region that, despite its size, still abounds with wildlife–I was saddened by the tragedy unfolding in Colorado and by the perceived need to locate outside the city in order to commune with nature. Of course their plight has been repeated throughout the country as people seeking their acre or two of paradise build in floodplains, on coastal barrier islands, in wetlands, on steep slopes and other inappropriate landscapes. Ironically, this unsustainable land use pattern fragments wildlife habitat, diminishing the very resource they located their homes to enjoy. Unfortunately, these poor choices are often abetted by local elected officials and planning commissions.
Nature Nearby…In the City
Why the perceived need to build outside the city to “have access to nature?” For too long there has been an anti-urban bias in the United States that has resulted in a desire by some to seek their “piece of nature” outside the city. Even in relatively progressive Portland, I was told by local planners almost forty years ago that there was “no place for nature” in the city. Our urban growth boundary and statewide land use planning program, they asserted, was established to protect nature “out there” beyond the urban fringe. Everything inside the urban growth boundary was “up for grabs”, intended for intense urbanization. If it was nature I wanted there was plenty to be had in the Cascade Mountains, Columbia Gorge or the Oregon coast.
This “real nature is out there” philosophy has even been echoed by some conservation organizations and wildlife agencies whose missions are focused exclusively on protecting pristine rural landscapes. Dedicating limited resources on “trashed” urban habitats, they argued, was, at best, a fool’s errand and at worst a profligate waste of limited resources.
In Livable Cities is Preservation of the Wild
Cities have for too long been demonized. While it’s indisputable that many cities were once oppressive places to live–particularly for the urban poor–and were most certainly not wildlife havens, today there is a growing renaissance in urban planning and design, with access to nature as a central tenet. People are flocking back to the urban core and new alliances of urban pioneers are working to integrate the built and natural landscapes in and around metropolitan regions across the world.
When we founded the Urban Greenspaces Institute in 1999 we adopted as our motto, “In livable cities is preservation of the wild” as a corollary to H D Thoreau’s aphorism, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Protecting the rural wilderness requires an equally aggressive commitment to make our cities more livable and loveable. That requires the protection and restoration of a vibrant urban green infrastructure that includes healthy watersheds, diverse fish and wildlife populations and ecosystems, parks, and recreational trails where the vast majority of our population lives–in cities. It also requires, as David posited in the inaugural The Nature of Cities blog, that cities be viewed and planned as unique ecosystems for both their inherent ecosystem service values and for their contribution to our quality of life.
Many conservation organizations have begun to retool themselves in recognition of the role nature in the urban and urbanizing landscape plays in a broader conservation national agenda and have begun to focus on the protection and restoration of nature in cities as well. In fact, numerous local conservation organizations in the Portland-Vancouver region now focus exclusively on urban nature conservation. The same phenomenon is occurring across the country and internationally.
Yesterday as I reflected on the Colorado wildfires I picked up a copy of our daily paper, The Oregonian. K D Lang was asked why she had recently moved to a condominium in Northwest Portland’s Pearl District. Her response? “I just think the proximity to nature is wonderful.”
When David asked if I’d participate in The Nature of Cities project I jumped at the opportunity to contribute to a dialogue whose primary focus would be nature in the city. Until very recently most efforts regarding “sustainability” in Portland have focused almost exclusively on LEED ratings, energy conservation, transit, and recycling with too little attention paid to protecting and managing nature in the city. Happily, owing to a more than thirty year sustained effort on the part of a few individuals, a growing cadre of NGOs, and a few progressive agencies, we’ve experience a dramatic shift in thinking regarding nature’s role in combining our region’s commitment to maintaining compact urban form while simultaneously striving for an ecologically vibrant city and region. For example, in its new We BuildGreen Cities initiative the Portland Sustainability Institute recently added natural habitat to its sustainability objectives.
In future contributions to The Nature of Cities I plan to trace the evolution of how our region has moved from a “nature is out there” philosophy to a regional strategy through The Intertwine Alliance to ensure access to nature is equitably distributed throughout the 3,000 square mile Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region. I’ll also explore efforts by the national coalition, the Metropolitan Greenspaces Alliance to mount an effort at the national level to attract more investment from federal natural resource agencies to metropolitan regions across the United States.
In the early 1970s neither what is now Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and Ross Island were viewed as legitimate elements of Portland’s park system. Today, Ross Island is being restored and Oaks Bottom is Portland’s first official urban wildlife refuge. More than 100 species of birds have been recorded at Oaks Bottom, less than a half-mile from downtown Portland. Photo by Mike Houck.
Nature Needs Half is a concept under consideration in the Capital Regional District (CRD)[End note 1]. Simply put, Nature Needs Half means saving fifty percent of an area’s lands and waters for nature. This concept recognizes the impact of humans upon the land, while also acknowledging that we need to share this planet with all other species.
Nature Needs Half is now being implemented across all jurisdictional scales, and in surprising and sometimes novel ways, in cities and countries around the world. The core concept of protecting half of an area for nature is being “fitted to place” by governments seeking to find workable solutions to preserving the natural world and providing for human needs.
Hikers pause near a rock cairn in the Sea to Sea Regional Park Reserve. Photo: Mary Sanseverino
CRD Regional Parks, through its 2012-2021 Strategic Plan, has advanced the idea of Nature Needs Half as a foundational principal for regional sustainability. CRD Regional Planning is currently developing a Regional Sustainability Strategy (RSS), and the concept of Nature Needs Half is included as a key goal under the draft Natural Environment Strategic Policy Direction. As the RSS process unfolds throughout 2014-2015, there will be ample opportunities for regional dialogue around the values, benefits, and challenges of adopting Nature Needs Half as a core principle of regional sustainability.
What is Nature Needs Half?
Nature Needs Half is a simple concept to understand—put most succinctly, it means saving half of the world’s lands and waters for the protection of nature. Nature Needs Half was developed by the WILD Foundation of Boulder, Colorado [2]. The WILD Foundation is a progressive leader in global wilderness conservation, perhaps best known for successfully organizing the long-running World Wilderness Congress, the world’s most preeminent public conservation project and environmental forum.
The WILD Foundation also recently launched the WILD Cities Project, which it describes as “a new concept of urbanism where wild nature is highly valued and its conservation is a conscious part of human life in cities worldwide” [3]. Goals of the WILD Cities Project include identifying successful urban initiatives aligned with the principles of Nature Needs Half, formulating criteria for defining a WILD city, and developing strategies to communicate to the public the need for nature in our cities.
A notable early proponent of a Nature Needs Half approach is the famed Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, who in his book The Future of Life (2002) proclaimed “half the world for humanity, half for the rest of life, to make a planet both self-sustaining and pleasant” [4]. This statement emanates from the many years of research by conservation biologists who have been examining the question of how much land is needed to ensure the maintenance of biodiversity.
Mountain lion in regal repose in the CRD. Photo: Eric Kilby
Although the prevailing belief has long centered on a 12% conservation target, many recent studies have shown that this target is too low to maintain diversity. Many scientists now believe that the minimum amount of protected area necessary for a given area of land is generally between 25% and 75%. Given this variability, most have settled on 50% as a workable percentage that can provide a viable balance between ecosystem services and economic development. This new understanding is pushing governments around the world to adopt new policies that will protect at least half of their land base for nature.
One of the key concepts underlying a Nature Needs Half approach is that of connectivity. Landscape connectivity is necessary to maintain the full range of life-supporting, ecological and evolutionary processes, the long term survival of species, and an area’s resilience in the face of environmental change [5]. Many conservation planning efforts have been initiated to determine how much and which lands should be targeted for conservation. A general consensus is that it depends on the characteristics of the area under consideration—its physical characteristics, its suite of species to be conserved, its past-land use decisions, and other factors. The overall goal, however, is to create enough connectivity that species can move in response to stressors including climate change, invasive species, and habitat fragmentation, degradation, and loss.
Conceptual Green Infrastructure Network [6]Typically, parks and protected areas form the core of a connectivity matrix. These core “wild” areas are then connected by other types of landscapes and environmental features, such as working lands (forestry and agriculture), rural and suburban open space, and even urban forests and other types of urban “green” infrastructure. These connectivity matrixes help ensure the maintenance of biological diversity and provide enough flexibility within a landscape that they can typically be assembled from what already exists in an area.
This approach to Nature Needs Half will work well in the Capital Regional District (CRD). The CRD contains a rich assemblage of ecosystems and species within its 245,000 hectares on Southern Vancouver Island. Fortunately, a significant portion of the CRD is still in a semi-wilderness condition (much of which is formally protected as parks), while considerable forestry, agricultural, rural and suburban open space networks exist, all of which can serve as the core of a connectivity matrix.
Proposed CRD Regional Parks and Trails System, showing connectivity corridors [7]These core undeveloped areas can be interlaced with other more graduated forms of human-impacted landscapes, such that urban forests, riparian areas, remnant natural areas, and even green buildings and other types of urban ecological design features are brought into the matrix. The potential exists for a truly integrated connectivity matrix which incorporates wilderness, rural, suburban, and urban gradients. In this vision, the ability of the CRD to preserve half of the region for nature seems within the region’s collective grasp.
Why is the CRD considering Nature Needs Half?
The CRD is ideally positioned to consider a Nature Needs Half approach as a foundational principal for regional sustainability. The region is blessed with abundant natural landscapes and a complex geography and climate that support a diverse range of ecosystems, a number of which are globally rare or endangered. Fortunately, the region has already set aside significant areas for nature protection and it still contains an abundance of forestry lands, agricultural lands, and other types of open space that could contribute to a Nature Needs Half vision. The region is equally fortunate to have an effective governance structure, progressive municipalities and electoral areas, and a public that widely supports the goal of regional sustainability and effective stewardship of natural resources.
Cabin Pond at East Sooke Regional Park. Photo: Mary Sanseverino
In spite of such strong support, the CRD is still faced with intense development pressures and associated negative impacts on the health of the region’s biodiversity and overall resiliency to environmental change. This fact underscores the critical importance of on-going, appropriate stewardship of the region’s lands and waters, and the need to develop a far-sighted approach to balancing the needs of “nature” (which also encompasses human needs) with that of economic growth and development.
There are a number of ways the CRD has already started to address this problem. CRD Regional Parks recently completed its Regional Parks Strategic Plan 2012-2021 [8]. A core concept of the strategic plan is Nature Needs Half. Regional Parks, through its strategic plan, recommended that Nature Needs Half be brought forward for discussion in preparing the Regional Sustainability Strategy (RSS).
CRD Regional Planning is leading the development of the RSS during 2014-2015 [9]. A key component of the RSS process is extensive public consultation designed to ensure a wide range of perspectives are considered during the strategy’s preparation and approval stages. The RSS will provide the framework for long-term regional sustainability by seeking to preserve and revitalize natural systems, foster social resilience and community well-being, and generate ongoing prosperity and affordability. Regional Planning supports Nature Needs Half as an important cross-cutting theme that can inform each of its key strategic areas.
Stewart Mountain ramble, Thetis Lake Regional Park. Photo: Mary Sanseverino
There is clearly more work that needs to be done to understand what Nature Needs Half might mean if applied within the CRD. Although a significant focus of Nature Needs Half is on large landscape conservation, the CRD can also “fit it to place” by including urban, suburban, and rural elements that will directly benefit regional residents right where they live, thereby maximizing the value of such an approach. To this end, it is important to understand and define what “nature” and “half” might mean in a regional context.
What might constitute “Nature” within the CRD?
Lichen and moss in the Coastal Douglas fir zone. Photo: Bev Hall
Within the CRD, it is entirely sensible to consider the full range of the region’s natural systems, functions, and elements in a Nature Needs Half approach. For instance, we would want to include those wilderness areas that still exist for their value as wildlife corridors, carbon sinks, and biodiversity strongholds (among other values), but we would also want to think about other types of landscapes that have similar or different values. In this sense, we need to think about landscapes modified by human use that still retain their relevance and value as “nature.” These landscapes will necessarily include working forests, agricultural lands, public and private open space, non-wilderness parks and protected areas, greenways, riparian zones, watersheds, wetlands, lakes, rivers, ponds, and the nearby marine environment, among others.
Green Infrastructure design across an urban-rural-wildlands continuum [10]We should not leave out consideration of nature in our urban landscapes either. Remnant pieces of nature exist in our backyards, our streetscapes, our urban forests and streams, our urban paths and trails, and in our margins and neglected areas. As well, many newer developments are built with nature in mind and incorporate green building features such as living roofs, bio-swales, rain gardens, and natural filtration ponds into their designs. All of these elements can contribute to Nature Needs Half. They are at the core of a connectivity matrix that expands outwards in all directions, linking the city with the wilderness in a continuous whole. The benefits of such an approach are multi-fold, contributing greatly to regional sustainability.
If such a Nature Needs Half approach is to be successful, it is necessary to examine the other part of the equation—that of “half.” What does it mean to protect “half” of the region for nature.
LEFT: Looking out across the Sooke Hills to the west. Photo: Heath Moffatt Photography. RIGHT: Young black bear eating new spring growth in the CRD. Photo: iStock.
What might constitute “Half” within the CRD?
When thinking of what protecting “half” of the CRD for nature means, it is necessary to look at it from the perspective of governance, equity, and scale. From a governance perspective we recognize that our system is complex, with multiple layers of government involvement in the structuring and management of our daily affairs. One definition of governance that applies to the management of nature is from the IUCN Natural Resource Governance Working Group [11]:
Understood in this way, governance, including how it shapes and is shaped by the political economy of local, provincial, and national decision-making, is a critical determinant of the effectiveness and equity outcomes of biodiversity conservation, and of the contribution that abundant nature makesto people’s well-being, empowerment and sustainable development.
When we think of protecting half of the region for nature from a governance perspective, we must acknowledge there are many stakeholders, including the federal and provincial governments, the regional district, municipalities and electoral areas, First Nations, and civil society. Each of these stakeholders is bound to the other by complex sets of rules and traditions that determine how power is exercised and how decision-makers are held accountable for their decisions.
Within this governance framework, we have a collective responsibility to steward our natural resources wisely. Many opportunities exist for collaborating on a comprehensive nature protection strategy involving all levels of government and in partnership with civil society.
In this sense, the question of equity arises. It would be impossible to mandate to the federal or provincial governments, the regional district, First Nations, municipalities, electoral areas, businesses, or private citizens that they must protect half of their land for nature. How would this be done, and who would be responsible for it? What would be the impact on different stakeholders? How feasible would it be given current development patterns? How would private property rights be addressed?
Grey beach peavine along the rugged Juan de Fuca Strait. Photo: Kyle Strauss
One obvious tactic is to embed Nature Needs Half within the RSS, which is a regionally representative approach to achieving equitable sustainability outcomes. The RSS, which will be eventually adopted by each municipality and electoral area in the region and approved by the Province, will feature a set of strategic priorities that should lead the region to greater sustainability. In this sense, all share in the costs and benefits of achieving regional sustainability, and each stakeholder commits to making it work for the benefit of all.
Nature Needs Half within this scenario is achievable through the individual and combined efforts of RSS signatories. If this is true, then the scale at which it is achieved must be addressed. Scale in this context refers to what and where the “half” will come from. There are many possibilities. If a goal is to create a seamless nature connectivity matrix stretching from our core urban areas to the most remote and wild corners of the region, then we must consider all of our natural areas and features as potential contributors to the “half.”
How each level of government and civil society will contribute to the actualization of Nature Needs Half needs to be discussed during the development of the RSS, as well as afterwards if it is adopted as a core principle of regional sustainability. A fundamental tenet, however, is that each level of government, First Nations, businesses, civil society organizations, and private individuals each have a role to play in supporting the designation of lands or features for nature protection and a shared responsibility for achieving Nature Needs Half.
Flying a kite along Sandcut Beach near Jordan River. Photo: Hello Hillary
Contributing to regional sustainability
One of the most important reasons to adopt a Nature Needs Half approach within the CRD is for its contribution to environmental sustainability. In particular, protecting nature means protecting the full suite of “nature’s services” or “ecosystem services.” These ecosystem services underpin our human economies and livelihoods.
Despite their critical importance, the capacity of ecosystems to provide essential services is being degraded at an alarming rate. In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a four-year study of the state of the world’s ecosystems involving more than 1,300 experts from 95 countries, reported that over 60 percent of the earth’s ecosystem services were already degraded. This negative trend, they concluded, was set to continue at an accelerating pace over the next half century [12].
Beautiful jellyfish in the cold Pacific Ocean waters. Photo: Deborah Kerr Designs
Climate change is exacerbating the degradation of ecosystems and the loss of ecosystem services [13]. Decisions concerning land acquisition and conservation strategies need to consider the potential impacts of climate change, and incorporate linkages and corridors to other natural areas for species migration. This approach suits a Nature Needs Half approach, which necessarily includes protection of priority areas and elements in an overall connectivity matrix [14].
The quote below highlights the value of protecting nature as a climate change strategy [15]:
Another important aspect of nature’s services is its “natural capital” benefit—or human valuing of nature’s economic contributions. Traditionally, natural capital services weren’t accounted for in the market economy, and so were often under-valued or treated as non-existent. However, this approach to natural capital is changing, as it is becoming clear that the services nature provides are extremely valuable in monetary terms” [16].
According to the David Suzuki Foundation, the establishment of greenbelts of protected forests, agricultural lands, wetlands, and other green spaces around cities like Toronto and Ottawa has helped to protect essential ecosystem services like water filtration and wildlife habitat [17]. The benefits provided by southern Ontario’s Greenbelt alone have been conservatively estimated at $2.6 billion annually.
The David Suzuki Foundation recently completed a landmark natural capital valuation study for the purpose of determining the non-market benefits provided by the natural capital within B.C.’s Lower Mainland (e.g. greater Vancouver metropolitan area) and its watersheds [18]. The report found that the top three benefit values provided by the study area’s ecosystem services were:
Climate regulation resulting from carbon storage by forests, wetlands, grasslands, shrub-lands and agricultural soils;
Water supply due to water filtration services by forests; and
Flood protection and water regulation provided by forest land cover.
The total value for all natural capital benefits provided by the study area was estimated to be $5.4 billion per year, or about $3,880 per hectare. This translated to an estimated value of $2,462 per person, or $6,402 per household each year [19].
Chicago’s GO TO 2040 Regional Plan proposes a green infrastructure network that follows waterway corridors, expands existing preserves, and creates new preserves in the region [20].It seems clear that the economic benefits of protecting nature outweigh the values derived from conversion into other uses. It pays to invest in “green infrastructure” instead of “gray infrastructure”—or put another way, it is more cost effective to invest in forests and other natural landscapes than human-engineered solutions to maintain natural capital benefits [21]. Adopting a Nature Needs Half approach provides considerable economic benefits by protecting and restoring the CRD’s natural capital wealth.
Migrating salmon in a clear, cold stream in the CRD. Photo: CRD Regional Parks
Supportive measures for a Nature Needs Half approach
A key consideration for governments and citizens is to understand what measures already exist to facilitate the protection and expansion of a green infrastructure network [22]. Fortunately, much work has been completed in this regard. For instance, the Green Bylaws Toolkit for Conserving Sensitive Ecosystems and Green Infrastructure advances policy goals, objectives, and criteria for protecting green infrastructure that resonates with a Nature Needs Half approach [23].
The Toolkit advances three broad goals:
Pine grosbeak in an Arbutus tree. Photo: Mary Sanseverino
Protect and maintain the integrity of sensitive ecosystems;
Restore ecosystems when opportunities allow; and
Ensure that green infrastructure plays a role in promoting fiscally responsible local government services and programs.
To achieve these goals, the Toolkit recommends pursuing seven objectives:
Contain urban development within a compact area;
Maintain environmentally sensitive lands outside urban containment boundaries as large lot parcels (20+ hectares), parks, or protected areas that are connected by greenways;
Prevent degradation and fragmentation of sensitive ecosystems and encourage connections among ecosystems;
Prevent development of subdivisions and individual lots on or near sensitive ecosystems;
Maintain the integrity of the ecological systems of which sensitive ecosystems are a part;
Restore degraded ecosystems;
Ensure adequate assessment of the impacts of development and carry out mitigation measures.
The Toolkit then lists two criteria that affect the ability of local governments to implement these objectives:
—Simplicity of administrative systems; and
—Good definition of the costs and benefits of ecosystem protection.
The Toolkit identifies a number of measures available to local governments for protection of green infrastructure [24]. Generally, these measures fall into five categories: land use instruments, fiscal incentives, liability limitations, market incentives, and increased education/capacity building [25]. Together these measures provide a suite of strategies that can be utilized on behalf of nature conservation.
Hikers enjoying a rest and the view in the Sooke Hills. Photo: Mary Sanseverino
Of course, there are many more exciting and innovative urban nature conservation strategies being implemented across North America and around the world. Many of these have been written about in other Nature of Cities blogs, such as the Biophilic CitiesInitiative, the Metropolitan Greenspaces Alliance, and the Green Seattle Partnership. All of these approaches are contributing to a growing network of global cities that are “fitting to place” accessible, healthy, and abundant nature in the midst of densely populated urban spaces.
Summary
Most of the world’s leading scientists and governments recognize that the escalating global ecological crisis demonstrates the insufficiency of our current conservation efforts and that we need to do more to stop this alarming trend. Fortunately, we possess good knowledge about the environment, especially about how much land and water we must protect to maintain the full range of biodiversity and protect human health. Research over the last 20 years or so indicates that we must set aside at least half of a given region for protection and we must work hard to interconnect core areas with other such areas to provide resiliency in the face of unprecedented environmental change [26].
Red-legged tree frog, native to Vancouver Island. Photo: Phil Petersen
Currently, approximately 19% of the CRD is protected as parks or restricted watershed, for a total of 47,826 hectares. While this percentage exceeds the current global protected areas standard (e.g. 12%), it falls far short of the 50% that conservation scientists believe is necessary to cope with emerging environmental and human health challenges. Fortunately, the CRD has adequate lands to protect half of our region for nature. Within the CRD can be found urban green features, local to federal park and trail systems, open space, resource lands, and wilderness. The CRD can create a sustainable future based on a Nature Needs Half approach given enough public and political will.
Mountain biker enjoying Hartland Mountain Bike Park. Photo: Jamie CameronCougar print in the mud. Photo: Nick Thompson
Although the CRD is committed to achieving regional sustainability, more work needs to be done to understand how to define and operationalize a Nature Needs Half approach for the region. Next steps in this regard could include:
—Ensuring that Nature Needs Half remains in the Regional Sustainability Strategy and is included in public dialogues about the region’s future;
—Holding focus sessions or other community engagement events where the topic of Nature Needs Half can be explored in more detail and the results analyzed and disseminated back out to politicians and the public;
—Interviewing others involved with a Nature Needs Half (or similar approach) to determine strategies, opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned, with applicability to the CRD.
—Developing a set of Nature Needs Half strategic priorities, with associated goals, targets, indicators, and milestones.
—Preparing a Nature Needs Half action plan and green infrastructure strategy.
The case is clear that infusing and protecting nature in and around our cities provides innumerable benefits for human health and well-being, as well as providing a lifeline for species and ecosystems that depend on our positive actions in this regard. We owe it to ourselves and to the incredible diversity of life on earth to act now to protect at least half the worlds’ lands and waters for nature. The CRD, in its own small way, can partially answer this larger call to action by adopting a Nature Needs Half approach for regional sustainability.
[1] Capital Regional District (CRD) is the regional government for 13 municipalities and three electoral areas on Southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. See the CRD website at: https://www.crd.bc.ca/about/what-is-crd.
[2] See The WILD Foundation at http://www.wild.org/.
[3] WILD Foundation, WILD Cities Project at: http://www.wild.org/main/world-wilderness-congress/wild10/.
[4] Wilson, E. O. (2003). The future of life. New York: Vintage Books.
[5] The Wild Foundation (2009). Nature Needs Half information sheet. Accessed on 3/14/13 at http://natureneedshalf.org/why-nature-needs-half/.
[6] Conceptual Green Infrastructure Network from the document: “Refinement of the Chicago Wilderness Green Infrastructure Vision, Final Report June 2012”, accessed at: http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/documents/10180/11696/GIV20_FinalReport_2012-06.pdf/dd437709-214c-45d6-a036-5d77244dcedb. The report defines the connectivity network as: “The building blocks of the network are “core areas” that contain well-functioning natural ecosystems that provide high quality habitat for native plants and animals. By contrast, “hubs” are aggregations of core areas as well as nearby lands that contribute significantly to ecosystem services like clean water, flood control, carbon sequestration, and recreation opportunities. Finally, “corridors” are relatively linear features linking cores and hubs together, providing essential connectivity for animal, plant, and human movement.”
[7] From CRD Regional Parks Strategic Plan 2012-2021 at: Regional Parks Strategic Plan at https://www.crd.bc.ca/docs/default-source/parks-pdf/regional-parks-strategic-plan-2012-21.pdf?sfvrsn=0.
[8] Regional Parks Strategic Plan 2012-2021, p. 16-17. See: http://www.crd.bc.ca/parks/planning/strategicplan.htm.
[9] See CRD Regional Growth Strategy at: CRD Regional Planning – Regional Sustainability Strategy at: https://www.crd.bc.ca/plan/planning-other-initiatives/regional-growth-strategy.
[10] Excerpted from “Refinement of the Chicago Wilderness Green Infrastructure Vision, Final Report June 2012”, (p. 7-8) at: http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/documents/10180/11696/GIV20_FinalReport_2012-06.pdf/dd437709-214c-45d6-a036-5d77244dcedb. Green infrastructure is defined in the report as: “The regional green infrastructure network provides multiple benefits. At its broadest, landscape‐ scale green infrastructure provides important ecosystem services like clean air and water, critical plant and animal species habitat, and wildlife migration corridors along with compatible working landscapes. At the regional scale, green space can help protect water quality and help ensure the availability of drinking water. Green infrastructure can also provide key recreational areas that link people to natural lands and facilitate the use of transportation modes other than automobiles to reach key community assets. At the site scale, green infrastructure enhances neighborhoods and downtowns through environmentally‐sensitive site design techniques, urban forestry, and storm-water management systems that reduce the environmental impact of urban settlements. All of these scales of activity can be linked together and can ensure sustainability in urban, suburban, and rural areas of a region.”
[11] IUCN (2013). Draft Concept (v. 10) for discussion: Building an IUCN Natural Resources Governance Framework.
[12] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Current state and trends, Volume 1. R. Hassan, R. Scholes, and N. Ash (eds.), Washington DC: Island Press.
[13] Wilson, S. J. and Richard J. Hebda (2008). Mitigating and adapting to climate change through the conservation of nature. The Land Trust Alliance of British Columbia.
[14] Ibid. p. v.
[15] Ibid. p. viii.
[16] David Suzuki Foundation, Sara Wilson (2010). Natural capital in BC’s Lower Mainland: Valuing the benefits from nature. Prepared for the Pacific Parklands Foundation. Accessed at: http://www.davidsuzuki.org/publications/reports/2010/natural-capital-in-bcs-lower-mainland/.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid. p. 8-10. Data based on 2006 census data of 2.2 million people within the study area with an average of 2.6 people per household.
[20] See the Go To 2040 Plan at: http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/about/2040/livable-communities/open-space.
[21] World Resources Institute (2011). Forests and water: Green infrastructure can be less expensive than gray infrastructure. Accessed at: http://www.wri.org/stories/2011/02/protecting-forests-protect-water-us-south.
[22] “Measures” here refers to the range of incentives, markets, and practices that exist to protect green infrastructure.
[23] Green Bylaws Toolkit for Conserving Sensitive Ecosystems and Green Infrastructure. Available at: www.greenbylaws.ca.
[24] Ibid. pgs. 37-137.
[25] L. Yonavjak, C. Handon, J. Talberth, and T. Gartner (2011). Keeping forest as forest: Incentives for the U.S. South. Prepared for the World Resources Institute. Accessed at: www.wri.org/publications.
[26] Nature Needs Half at http://natureneedshalf.org/home/.
The vision for the Carbon Landscape? “It would have to be a thriving place, a green place, a place for people, for wildlife, for recreation, for health, all of those things.”
Less than an hour cycling out of central Manchester along the Bridgewater Canal takes you into a green and blue landscape. It only becomes clear that this is a post-industrial area when the infrastructure of a coalfield pithead rises up behind the trees. Further along the canal you encounter attractive lakes and could not guess by looking that these were created by subsidence due to coal mining. Other areas are characterized by peat bogs, which have been the object of extensive extraction, but now with restoration underway, are providing habitat for a range of species—and sequestering carbon and mitigating flooding.
Beyond the trees: a coalfield pithead. Photo: Joanne TippettPennington Flash. Photo: Joanne Tippett
Now thirteen partners spanning three different local authorities, local wildlife trusts, community groups, government agencies and universities are working together to give nature a helping hand, accelerating the restoration of habitats and creating connections not just between sites to create an ecological network, but between local people and the heritage of their landscape. The Carbon Landscape project is a five-year initiative funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
This initiative is taking an innovative approach to community engagement, drawing on the industrial heritage of the area to raise awareness about possible sustainable futures with the local community, organizations working in the area, and school children. This essay is a montage of many insights drawn from the decades of experience of the project partners that we interviewed in our research project. Many of them have been working and living in the region long enough to remember the coal mining and the vivid scars industrial exploitation left on the landscape.
Wigan Wetland and Woodland Custodians use Ketso (www.ketso.com) to explore what matters to them in their local landscape. Photo: Joanne Tippett
“I remember someone coming up with the idea that carbon is that unifying factor between the industry and the habitat,” said one of the originators of the Carbon Landscape project. The project emerged from several years of multi-stakeholder and community discussions about how to look after this special landscape. While some people were deeply engaged with the area’s wetlands and the species that inhabited them, many others saw little of value in this place on their doorsteps. Those involved in outreach activities frequently mention how “it’s surprising how people who live very, very nearby don’t know anything about it.” If they do have any thoughts on the area, they are often negative, describing it as: empty, inaccessible, inhospitable, frightening, polluted, scarred, and industrial.
The current landscape is now unrecognizable as the coal dust covered and smoke-besmirched place that fueled the industrial revolution and corresponding urban development in North West England. The industry and associated jobs have gone, but the towns remain and strive to recreate local economies and improve the health and wellbeing of their populations. The surrounding renaturalizing landscape is an important resource in this endeavor. It provides nearby nature for about one million people and interesting opportunities for social and economic development. Many, however, still regard the open space on their doorsteps as a wasteland or a reminder of what has been lost in terms of secure jobs, strong communities and pride. The Carbon Landscape project is trying to shift the narrative to one that incorporates both nature and industrial heritage and sees these as assets and inspiration for a bright future, rather than a story of loss.
Bridgewater Canal at Astley Green. Photo: Joanne Tippett
As another project partner describes, “I would say it was a landscape connected by carbon but carbon would mean different things for different parts of the landscape…it’s peat, and the carbon stored in that way, but as an ex-industrial landscape where carbon has been the driving force of that landscape for the last few hundred years, [there’s] a cultural heritage point of view from coalmining. So the carbon element ties current restoration work in the bogs and peatlands together with the historic aspects of coalmining in the region…But within that, a project that both tries to ensure that the landscape can adapt to future change, future climate change, and for nature conservation purposes, to facilitate species movement across the landscape, as species may need to move for climate change, in what is a quite fragmented landscape” in the only open area in this densely populated region lying between the urban conurbations of Manchester and Liverpool.
Visiting Little Woolden Moss with University of Manchester Students of Planning and Environmental Management, to explore what matters to them in their local landscape. Photo: Joanne Tippett
Even without climate change driven migration, this fragmented landscape needs reconnecting and this is an important aspect of the Carbon Landscape initiative. “We want to connect up islands of populations, we’ve got an island in one place, an island in another place and in between nothing at the moment. We want to try and fill the gaps in so that there’s ways the populations can mix,” says one project partner. Connecting up the different parts of the landscape in people’s perceptions is also an important part of the Carbon Landscape project.
The Carbon Landscape has three related but distinct landscape character areas: the Flashes (as the lakes formed by subsidence are known), the Mosslands with their peat soil, and the Mersey Wetlands Corridor bordering the Manchester Ship Canal which connected Manchester to the sea and facilitated its industrial growth—“and the factory is represented every time you go out, by the amount of strange alien weeds from America, that you find from the cotton industry, just growing in the pavement outside the building here.”
All of the areas provide habitat for internationally important species as well as significant recreational opportunities. The Mosslands are less accessible and considered less obviously attractive, as industrial scale peat extraction is only now drawing to a close, as a result of pressure from citizens and action on the part of local government. Peat extraction (for gardening use) along with drainage for agriculture has severely damaged and in many cases destroyed most of the lowland mosses in the UK, with only 3 percent of this habitat remaining, and not much of that in good condition. This has resulted in loss of habitat for a range of species, and other ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and flood mitigation. With interpretation and some access infrastructure, such as that available at Risley Moss, this 10,000-15,000 year old environment becomes an important and accessible recreational and educational resource. “It’s a fairly unique landscape I think, if we look at peatbogs, they tend to be very remote places in the middle of the countryside, in the middle of nowhere, it could be Scotland or the Peak District or the North Pennines. Whereas here, we’ve got that landscape but in a very densely populated area, …and actually, probably one of the most deprived areas in the country as well.”
With so many people living in and around the Carbon Landscape, its success depends on engagement of local communities and uptake of a different narrative about what the landscape means. Some people already have deep attachments to particular places and species, and have worked with others to protect these. There is a history of small groups of people being involved with looking after areas near where they live, often areas that may look quite ordinary to outsiders but where local people had noted the presence of particular species and characteristics. But for others it’s an unknown, and possibly frightening, place or a place with different meaning and uses.
“We sometimes forget in this industry that people don’t know about land biodiversity value, they don’t know about land ownership. If no one looks after it, it’s fair game, so they’ve adopted these landscape places as their own. Throughout generations they’ve gone up there, they’ve fished, they’ve used off road bikes, they’ve done shooting, they’ve just generally mucked around up there. That’s part of their individual story and heritage. For us to come in and take that away from them by putting up barriers without doing efficient community engagement gives a very damaging message in some cases. You have a love for the environment there, but it’s in the wrong perspective, it doesn’t align with our values. …My experience of doing community work is that kids…on nature reserves are seen as antisocial, so what everyone’s vision of what we’re trying to achieve is actually culturally not accepted anymore. If they’re mucking around on a nature reserve, it’s antisocial behavior (If they’re stuck on a computer, they’re ruining their future).”
Fear of antisocial behavior is a significant deterrent for many people in the area. They are wary of entering areas that appear uncontrolled or not looked after. Physical changes in the landscape may be needed to invite people in, as one project partner explained:
“At New Cut they put in this concrete tarmac path, and I was talking to some of the older people, they said, ‘we never used to come down here because we were scared, and now there’s a path and people are on their bikes and we don’t feel scared anymore, we can access this beautiful space’…it’s a change of cultural identity, I would say.”
While a perception of damaged communities in damaged landscapes brings with it many challenges, it also can be a motivator for engagement for some people.
“People get involved to do things if there’s a burning platform, if something’s broken, so one of the reasons we can be so successful with engagement right now is that people appreciate that this is broken, so there is a motivator for them to come out. Once we’re further down the line and things are starting to look good then you could argue that the motivation might drop, and I guess time will tell.”
Hopefully, as has been noted in other areas, seeing the positive results of their efforts will motivate engaged citizens to go further and hopefully attract others who needed to see that such work does make a difference.
Restoring pride is a key element in driving engagement with the landscape. As a project partner points out: “A lot of these communities have had a bad time in the past in terms of all sorts of issues. So it’s about pride in communities and there’s a lot of that going on in Manchester in different places, restoring pride in communities that have had a bad time. And the nature bits should be part of that as well, of restoring local pride.” Another says, “There are communities like ex-mining communities or agricultural communities in places like Irlam and Wigan where there’s real pride in that history and people maybe don’t still connect it with the landscape itself and that, that could be used to really benefit people in terms of having a sense of place of where they live and feeling proud about it.”
Linking this pride to the landscape can be an entry point for a better understanding of it. “I always say, do you know about these internationally important wetlands, we’ve got some species that are as rare as pandas, this is talking at a kids’ level, people connect to that, people like the thought of having super rare wildlife. It’s because it’s this post-industrial landscape that you won’t get these anywhere…this is unique round here and people like that story.”
People learn about what is special about this landscape through simple activities, as one project partner explains: “They didn’t appreciate how much was on those sites, and it was just a wasteland behind where they lived, and by going out and doing events like bioblitzes, walks, we slowly started to change some of those attitudes into there’s more here.” It is also important to start from people’s interests, which is facilitated by having multiple partners connected to different interests and groups of people (local communities, groups interested in cultural history, in protecting species and their habitats, in restoring waterways, etc.).
“You’ve got people who were already interested in recording wildlife and doing it that are now wanting to know more about what is the Carbon Landscape, why is that more important than somewhere else? What is the Greater Manchester Wetlands [of which the Carbon Landscape is part]? It spurs those kinds of conversations. And then the flip side of that, the community guys, they’re telling people the story and then they want to get involved. How can they get involved? There’s these opportunities to start recording, and that helps to write the story going forward.”
Coalfield pithead at the Lancashire Mining Museum at Astley Green. Photo: Joanne Tippett
“Starting to give that landscape scale picture [is important] as well. It’s not just this site, it’s how that links to the next site, and how that links to the next site.” Seeing the bigger picture helps people to understand that their efforts are part of something larger and impactful, which is an important source of motivation. But it can also be a challenge to get people beyond their local area. “We’ve had many attempts at getting the volunteers to be landscape scale volunteers, and it hasn’t worked yet, and I don’t know if it works elsewhere in the world, but the people from Woolston love Woolston, that’s why they’re volunteering, the people from Wigan Flashes love Wigan Flashes, that’s why they volunteer, et cetera, and the people from Wigan Flashes don’t want to go to Woolston any more than the people from Woolston want to go to Wigan Flashes, because if they’ve got some work to do [at their site], well it’s their volunteering time, they want to be there.”
It’s also difficult because people are often unfamiliar with the other areas of the Carbon Landscape. Greater access, connectivity and interpretation are needed to facilitate their engagement with it. The proposed Carbon Trail and Carbon Loops are seen as key vehicles for this. “One of the things I’m really looking forward to, to actually promote this as a landscape are the Carbon Trail and the Carbon Loops. I’m looking forward to those being in place so that I can advertise them as a Carbon Trail, and it’s the Carbon Landscape and this is the Carbon Landscape story. I know they’re still under development. I’m looking forward to cycling those myself so I can see how the different habitats and spaces blend as you move from the south up into the north.” This contact is expected to lead to engagement, “you’re opening it up and people are seeing things that they’ve not seen before, that makes people care about stuff.”
The Carbon Trail will connect gateway sites with the different areas of the Carbon Landscape. There will also be several interpretive walking trails, ‘Carbon Loops’ that will tell the stories of the different character areas, including a story of sustainability that illustrates what has occurred in this landscape in the past and how it can be transformed in a more sustainable future. These will be based on the RoundView, a way of navigating towards a sustainable future that is being used in community and school workshops in the Carbon Landscape to link our modern understanding of the environmental problems unleashed by the industrial revolution to an inspiring vision for the future, where human activities fit well within the landscape. The RoundView traces the long history of the landscape from the formation of peat and coal through the industrial revolution. It conveys that all of these events, and particularly the anthropogenic effects, are very recent chapters in the history of the planet. It describes how the process of change continues, and with it the opportunity for humans to do things differently in the future.
The Carbon Trail will bring people into the landscape so that they begin to know, use and care for it, and it will also establish connections among the surrounding towns by linking up and signposting active travel corridors. But some partners are concerned about conflicts between access and connectivity for people and for wildlife: “I would love to see proper links in the landscape being developed. Proper wildlife corridors, so that the landscape is working for wildlife. A by-product of that in my world, but equally valid, is that if it’s working for wildlife, it’s probably working for people. Because porosity is porosity. The only problem I have, is as soon as I mention the word, green corridor, somebody says, you can put a cycleway along that, and I instantly lose my green corridor. So, that’s why I separate the two to some extent, my green corridor is primarily the way that hedgehogs, newts, willow tits move through the landscape. Its secondary function in my world, is as an access for people.”
This discussion about the Carbon Trail and connectivity surface a dynamic tension in the Carbon Landscape project, that of balancing protection of nature and access for people. Some people argue that unless people get into this landscape and care about it, it won’t be protected for other species. A lot of the land is privately owned, demands for housing are very high, new economic opportunities are much needed. There is a tension between conservation and development to improve access and also to provide a funding mechanism to finance restoration work, through for example building new homes on the edges of the mosslands.
Discussing the intense pressure for development in the peri-urban landscape, one project partner said: “At the end of the day, if we want to achieve our goal, we have to engage local people, we have to engage people from further afield. We have to make these sites accessible. They are urban, so we have to create a relationship between people and biodiversity.”
“It’s about ensuring, from a sustainability point of view, that the landscape is treasured for its original assets, its natural assets and what that has provided for us, but it continues to evolve to meet the needs of future society, so that they then continue to value it.”
As the Carbon Landscape acts as an illustration of this history of change, including destructive changes, so can it act as a demonstration landscape for different practices that work for both people and nature. Opportunities for more sustainable livelihoods are emerging, including those related to heritage/eco-tourism and sustainable agriculture. The narrative of this region also includes innovation, and that element too can be called up in support of sustainable transitions. “This area used to be the most innovative region in the industrial revolution. We were frontline of technology and the way people were living their lives and thinking. It’s been overtaken now by modern life, but we have an opportunity again to grab that innovation and lead the way to create a green corridor and more sustainable way of living, a happier, healthier community…focusing on the innovation and wanting to change what connects people with their environment…I feel like a story of our site is about innovation into nature.”
Coal mining waste being restored at Bickershaw, Country Pary. Photo: Joanne TippettWetlands regenerating at former site of Bickershaw Colliery. Photo: Joanne Tippett
The vision for the Carbon Landscape? “It would have to be a place that was a thriving place, a green place, a place for people, for wildlife, for recreation, for health, all of those things.” Through innovative community engagement, active volunteering and working with partners and cities to improve our scientific knowledge of restoration of post-industrial landscapes, the Carbon Landscape project aims to inspire a step-change in the landscape and to bring hope for a sustainable future.
Many thanks to participants from Cheshire Wildlife Trust, City of Trees, Environment Agency, Greater Manchester Ecology Unit, Inspiring healthy lifestyles, Lancashire Mining Museum, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester Museum, Mersey Rivers Trust, Natural England, Peel Land and Property, Salford Council, The University of Manchester, Warrington Council, Wigan Council, Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester & North Merseyside and Woolston Eyes Conservation Group.
Rererences
Carbon Landscape Partnership (2016). The Carbon Landscape. Landscape conservation action plan part 1. Preston: The Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Greater Manchester & North Merseyside.
Great Manchester Wetland Partnership Technical Group (2014). The Carbon Landscape interpretation Report, 28 May 2014.
Tippett, J. & How, F. (2018). “The SHAPE of Effective Climate Change Communication: Taking a RoundView.” In W. Leal Filho et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Climate Change Communication: Vol. 2: Practice of Climate Change Communication, 357–72. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70066-3_23.
Tippett, J., Farnsworth, V., How, F., Le Roux, E., Mann, P. & Sherriff, G. (2010). Learning to embed sustainability skills and knowledge in the workplace. Manchester: Sustainable Consumption Institute. http://www.roundview.org/background/research/
Dr Joanne Tippett is a lecturer in Spatial Planning in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. Action research funded by the Sustainable Consumption Institute and 250 staff in Tesco led to the creation of the RoundView Tool for Sustainability [www.roundview.org].
Although there is a clear move by many cities to recognize that nature is essential to enhance their resilience to face climate challenges, there is still a lack of a wider understanding of the immense benefits they may bring to urban environments.
After more than 15 years of teaching, researching, consulting, and advocating for nature-based solutions (NBS) in Brazil, it’s really fulfilling to see NbS becoming nationally recognized and adopted in several Brazilian cities.
In this essay, I present my view of the process that led to this moment. It has had ups and downs, successes, and frustrations (especially related to the city of Rio de Janeiro, which up to this date has ignored NbS in urban public plans, programs, and projects). I will focus on the ups and successes. To wrap up, I present two cities that are front runners in Brazil.
Learning, educating, and raising awareness about nature in cities
The first time I had contact with green infrastructure concepts and applications was in a workshop at the University of São Paulo (USP), organized by Prof. Paulo Pellegrino and the American landscape architect Nate Cormier in 2006. Paulo has been one of the pioneers in teaching and researching landscape ecological planning (ELP), he is co-coordinator of the LabVerde (Green Infrastructure lab that is responsible for the ―a scientific journal). I met him in a master’s program in 2005, when he invited Prof. Jack Ahern from UMass for an intensive course on ELP at USP. I believe this class was a seed that germinated and flourished in other universities in Brazil.
Some of the actions I have participated in during recent years in Brazil are:
In 2009, I co-founded the Inverde Institute to educate and advocate for the need of nature for sustainable and resilient cities. I have written about our work in previous pieces here, at the TNOC. We have contributed to spreading the word on green infrastructure and contemporary ecological and social challenges with 4 years of monthly lectures with Brazilian and international invited speakers and roundtables, around 10 years of seminars and several short courses, and active participation in the Environmental Council of Rio de Janeiro City, among other initiatives.
I launched a Master’s program on at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, together with in 2016. The course was interdisciplinary, with the participation of professors from diverse departments of PUC-Rio: geography, biology/ecology, social services, law, and my department: architecture and urbanism. Also, we had the contribution of Osvaldo Rezende, professor of hydrological engineering at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). Several lecturers came to talk about soil, urban mobility, urban agriculture, and sustainable cities (e.g., C40 and ICLEI representatives), among other relevant themes. Many of our former students are working in city departments and in other organizations related to NBS.
During the pandemic (2020-2021), we organized with national and international invitees, when the university had more than 2.600 registrations. People from all over the country and abroad attended.
Nature-based Solutions taking central stage in the last years
The synergy with other initiatives started to fructify in 2018 when I was invited to collaborate on and III on NBS, promoted by the European Commission―Directorate-General for Research and the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation, and Communications. Two bilingual publications, in Portuguese and English, were products of those dialogues. The first is (2019) and the second is (2022). Both are available for download. The first two seminars on NbS that happened in Brasilia in 2018 and 2020 were under the umbrella of the Sector Dialogues, in collaboration with other organizations.
There were two more recent international webinars on NBS organized by the Centro de Gestão e Estudos Estratégicos (Center for Strategic Management and Studies―CGEE), and several active partners that focus on NBS in Brazil. The 4 presential and online events have reached hundreds of city officials, decision-makers, academia, researchers, and other people interested in the theme.
The is a platform that has a wide reach and one of its themes is NBS, with several case studies in Brazilian cities. It has also been an important means of dissemination. The initial case studies that are listed on their website are also products of the Sector Dialogue III.
Several organizations, Brazilian and international are responsible for diverse actions and programs to develop NBS in cities: Fundação Grupo Boticário de Proteção à Natureza (FGB ― Foundation Boticário Group for Nature Conservation), CGEE, Rede Brasil do Pacto Global da ONU (ONU Global Compact Brazilian Network), ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), a Plataforma Brasileira de Biodiversidade e Serviços Ecossistêmicos (BPBES ― Brazilian Platform of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), o WRI Brazil (Word Resources Institute, o Painel Brasileiro de Mudanças Climáticas (PBMC ― Brazilian Panel of Climate Change) and The Nature Conservancy Brazil (TNC). They constituted the Bioconexão Urbana (Urban Bioconnection), a consortium that targets to accelerate NBS, give more visibility, and reach wider audiences and more cities.
A new product of the Bioconexão Urbana is an NBS Guide for the media. The consortium is doing a countrywide research on the perception of the Brazilians regarding climate change and nature-based solutions. Also, they are interviewing 100 city managers to understand what they think about climate change and if NBS is part of the solution. The results will be presented at CoP 28, UN Climate Change Conference, at the end of 2023.
WRI and FGB have launched to prepare city officials to develop urban projects to be funded. The call received about 80 proposals of NbS in ideation in Brazilian cities, the number of applications was astonishing for the expectations. For phase 1, ten projects were selected by a jury to be further developed with the technical support of specialists in all areas. The final two selected projects are now in phase 2 until April 2024, with the support of experts in financing.
Those are some of the initiatives that are underway in Brazil.
Campinas and Niterói: two front-runner cities
I chose the two cities because I have been following their engagement and continuous commitment, and work for urban enhancement with the introduction of nature-based solutions.
Campinas
Campinas is the third most populated city of the State of São Paulo with more than 1.2 million inhabitants, located about 100 Km from the State Capital, São Paulo city―the largest Metropolitan Region of South America with more than 22 million inhabitants. The city has been one of the pioneers in Brazil to address and plan for biodiversity and nature-based solutions to adapt to climate challenges and the need for environmental justice. Plans, programmes, and actions are progressive and being implemented on multiple scales.
Campinas Metropolitan Region (RMC) is composed of 20 municipalities. Reconecta RMC program is led by Campinas with all other municipalities, the aim is to restore the metropolitan ecological infrastructure through the riparian corridors of the regional rivers by ‘promoting local fauna management and biologic diversity; recovering riparian corridors, protecting and restoring water springs and ecological corridors; enhancing existing protected areas and create new ones, with better conservation units management (including new ones), and conserving strategic forest remnants. In this manner, the region will have increased water security and resilience to face climatic events. It has a ground-breaking ‘Action plan for implementation of the Connectivity Area of the Metropolitan Region’ (Plano de Ação para Implementação da Área de Conectividade da Região Metropolitana de Campinas) (Fig. 1). This plan was elaborated in collaboration with ICLEI and WRI, it is a comprehensive green infrastructure plan, with multiple NBS to be implemented in all cities of the Metropolitan Region. This program is part of the Campinas Metropolitan Region Urban Integrated Development Plan (Plano de Desenvolvimento Urbano Integrado da Região Metropolitana de Campinas), still not approved by the State Representative House. It is a systemic program, that oversees the complexity of the social-ecological-technological regional system, and the potentialities to achieve the desired objectives to adapt to the changing climate with a focus on biodiversity enhancement to provide numerous ecosystem services with multi-scale reach.
Figure 1 – RECONECTA RMC – Biodiversity Connectivity Area (Source: Prefeitura de Campinas, Secretaria do Verde, Meio Ambiente e Desenvolvimento Sustentáve, 2018)
The Municipal Strategic Master Plan (Plano Diretor Estratégico do Município de Campinas, lei 189/2018), incorporates the protection, enhancement, and connectivity of the biodiversity in the city.
A new NBS and environmental resilience municipal plan will soon be released. The spatial plan aims to be systemic and has been elaborated with the transversal participation of all 27 city departments, as well as diverse public and private stakeholders and residents. Once the plan is created by Municipal Decree to guarantee long-term reach (independence of the political shifts), it is flexible and adaptable during the process of elaboration only, but it is a long-term plan.
The city of Campinas has a plan of 43 linear parks along urban rivers to build an urban green infrastructure, which was developed after mapping the areas with less green areas and the lower family income. The parks aim to offer better and more resilient environment for their inhabitants once they are planned for the poorest populated neighbourhoods. The first is already implemented.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed in the new plans and programs, also they are aligned with regional, national, and international progressive agendas (highlighting NBS).[i]
Niterói
Niterói is located in front of Rio de Janeiro city, on the other side of the Guanabara Bay. It has almost 500.000 inhabitants, in an area of 1290,3 Km², only 2 meters above sea level in the lower areas. It is an important city in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro.
In the last few years, the city has focused on sustainable development in expanding areas. The program, has started to enhance urban mobility and the ideation to requalify the Jacaré River that contributes to the Piratininga Ocean Lagoon. The river restoration faces many challenges once it flows through urbanized areas that are illegally occupied and the legislation doesn’t allow removing people from their homes, even if they are in vulnerable areas.
The most ambitious fully implemented NBS project in Brazil up to this date is the Parque Orla de Piratininga (POP―Piratininga Lagoon Front Park―named Alfredo Syrkis, after the death of this green activist and politician) (Fig. 2). The lagoon receives polluted waters from its affluents, being the Jacaré River the main one. It had a circular canal that captured the contaminated waters before flowing to the lagoon. The water body was polluted and hidden from the residents by tall grasses and invasive plant species, it was very neglected. The urbanized area has a diversity of social income in diverse residential clusters and, in some parts, the parallel power (militia and drug dealers) is still present.
The development of the park is very inspiring for students and professors. In 2017 Raquel Cruz, a student of the PUC-Rio Master Program on Landscape Ecological Planning and Design, proposed a multifunctional park in her final project. At that time, she worked for Niteroi, starting as an intern, after some years she became the Director of Urban Ecology and Climate Change of Niteroi, as the Secretary of Environment, Water Resources, and Sustainability. Her proposal was the seed for the recently implemented park. It has an area of 685,000 m², with built wetlands that treat the polluted waters that flow from the rivers (Fig. 3), bioswales to collect the contaminated run-off from the streets, and a myriad of recreational, sportif, and cultural activity areas. It is a successful and inspiring case that has gained a lot of visibility nationally and internationally. Has so far, received the awards: Sustainable Cities 2023 (Fig. 4) and Smart Cities Congress Mexico City, and was a finalist in the 2023 Green Infrastructure World Congress (WGIC ― Berlin).
Figure 2 – Piratininga Lagoon Front Park – Alfredo Syrkis (credit: city of Niteroi)Figure 3 – Built wetlands to treat polluted water before flowing into the lagoon (Credit: Ecomimesis)Figure 4 – Axel Grael, mayor of Niterói, receives the 2023 Sustainable Cities Award. Photo: Flavia Abranches
In both cases, Campinas and Niterói, urban residents were actively engaged with workshops and other means of interaction. The involvement of citizens is critical so they can value and praise the urban greening, giving sustainability to the implemented projects.
Final thoughts
Climate crisis is impacting cities all over the world, and in Brazil, the outcomes are especially dramatic. Nature-based Solutions are gaining more relevance once the decision-makers understand their potential to build urban resilience and offer a better quality of life and well-being to their residents.
As it is mentioned above, diverse institutions are devoted to enhancing the knowledge and skills of public servers and decision-makers, motivating them to adapt to the changing climate to face the current social, ecological, and economic challenges through the introduction of biodiversity, opening room for rivers and creeks, increasing permeable areas in the urban built desert. The results are fructifying, qualified and committed city officials are pushing NbS agendas all over the country.
Although there is a clear move by many cities to recognize that nature is essential to enhance their resilience to face climate challenges, there is still a lack of a wider understanding of the immense benefits they may bring to urban environments. Residents, decision-makers, and other relevant actors need to be educated to value nature in cities, developing their biophilia and systemic understanding of the challenges we are facing. It is beneficial not only to their close environment, but it is also essential to contribute to a paradigm shift to a regenerative culture.
[i] More about Campinas NbS actions: Neves, G.D.M. et al. (2022). The Implementation of Connectivity Area in the Metropolitan Region of Campinas (São Paulo, Brazil): Biodiversity Integration Through Regional Environmental Planning. In: Mahmoud, I.H., Morello, E., Lemes de Oliveira, F., Geneletti, D. (eds) Nature-based Solutions for Sustainable Urban Planning. Contemporary Urban Design Thinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89525-9_7
A review of Still the Same Hawk, edited by John Waldman. 2012. ISBN: 9780823249893. Fordham University Press, New York. 160 pages.
“Dualism is the defining quality of urban nature.”
Thus begins John Waldman’s introduction to Still the Same Hawk, a grab bag book of “reflections on nature and New York” from eleven different authors. For some readers new to the topic, the very notion of “urban nature” may be a dualism in and of itself: a pair of words missing a conjunction to make them make sense. Urban and nature. Urban or nature. But urban nature? What on earth is that? Waldman and his colleagues set out to find out.
Robert Sullivan literally wrote the book on what he calls “nature that people would rather not think about”—a 256-page meditation on a horde of rats living in an alley at the southern tip of Manhattan. Sullivan’s essay focuses on the nature that thrives and prospers in cities, “…the nature that everyone is not looking at, the nature that Ansel Adams avoided, that people don’t use as screensavers or put on the side of their coffee mugs.” Nature isn’t missing from cities, Sullivan argues. We just refuse to acknowledge it because it’s unexceptional or unappealing. Rats and roaches, rotting trash and roosting pigeons. He challenges us to pay closer attention and, in doing so, transform the unexceptional into the sublime.
The book takes its title from Sullivan’s observation that a hawk nesting on the windowsill of an Upper East Side apartment is a newsworthy event, while a hawk perched on a cliff in the Catskills is, well, just another hawk. And yet, as the book’s title tells us, it’s “still the same hawk.” Same species, different context. We humans choose to focus on the former and shrug at the latter. Our expectations shape our perceptions, and vice versa. In short, we can choose to see nature and the city in a different light. If there’s one theme that runs through all the essays in this potluck collection, it’s probably summed up by two simple words: pay attention.
William Kornblum, a researcher and writer based at the City University of New York, struggles to craft a coherent “land ethic for the city” in his essay on teaching undergraduate environmental sociology at Queens College. His class wanders outside to explore the landscape surrounding the campus. They discover a tight grid of row houses overlooking the sunken six-lane Long Island Expressway before scurrying along to find a patch of urban greenery in nearby Kissena Park. Like an ersatz Socrates strolling outside the walls of Athens, Kornblum peppers his students with questions as they make their way through the neighborhood: “Why is the land here so elevated?” “What happens when it rains or snows and the water runs off the streets?” “What do land uses at three of these corners have in common?”
The students, Kornblum admits, “seem perplexed” by his questions. So, too, is this reviewer. It hardly seems fair to ask questions that most students are unlikely to be able to answer without some prior knowledge of the topic. This isn’t maieutic teaching; it’s uninformed guesswork. These students may see the things Kornblum points out, but, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, they aren’t invited to observe. Though his meanderings are well meaning, Kornblum fails to deliver a cohesive land ethic for urban life by the end of his essay—an unfortunate disappointment, given how beautifully he writes about New York harbor in his 2002 book At Sea in the City.
David Rosane, another educator, recollects a series of personal interactions with New Yorkers confronting the dualism of urban nature. He casts a spotlight on three New Yorkers in a mini-drama with a raccoon in Central Park: an uptight white woman from the Upper East Side who frets about rabies, a sharp-tongued and world-weary Latina who shrugs off the white woman’s warnings, and a timid Asian woman who wonders aloud if raccoon meat makes for good soup. Rosane is well-meaning in his enthusiasm for New York City’s multiethnic mosaic—we all discover nature in our own unique ways!—but the stereotypes are distracting and do little to advance his message.
Devin Zuber’s essay redeems the theme on teaching and learning that pops up again and again throughout Still the Same Hawk. Good teaching often follows the same rules as good writing, and the axiom “show, don’t tell” aptly summarizes Zuber’s strategy as he invites students at the City University of New York to investigate and interpret the city on their own terms. They find arresting moments of beauty in their everyday experiences of the city, linking small and tangible objects to big and abstract ideas about urban ecology. Like Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Zuber’s students venture out in search of the sublime and come back having transcended the divide between nature and the city.
Zuber argues that imagination and an appreciation for beauty are integral to understanding the complexity and richness of nature in unnatural settings. It takes a wild mind to see the ghost of Minetta Stream still trickling under the asphalt of Downing Street in the West Village; to see a line of street trees in Midtown as a single small copse in a sprawling rectilinear urban forest; to see the whole of New York City as a palimpsest landscape first etched upon more than twenty thousand years ago by a massive ice sheet travelling south from the Arctic Circle. Imagination, in this sense, is the practice of speculative transformation, of picturing what could be and what could have been.
In her Corner Garden, Dara Ross recalls a small group of imaginative neighbors in Brooklyn that transformed a garbage-strewn vacant lot into a lush community garden. Ross offers a dialogue-driven glimpse at mundane moments in the garden’s history. We overhear Zora and Alma, two of her neighbors, reflecting on the day the garden got started:
“R.C. was out there cleaning up that nasty-ass mess but so was JoJo, Liliana, Lester, Calvin, Sherrie, NayNay, and even that lazybones Willie…” Zora recalls.
“Shoot girl, now I know that was a lot of work,” Alma replies.
“Sho’ nuff it was,” Zora confirms.
These aren’t caricatures like the ones we find in Rosane’s essay; they’re full-blooded characters, each unique and fully alive on the page. We eavesdrop on their chitchat and discover the truest value of community gardens in their deliberations and debates, reminiscences and remonstrations.
Kelly McMasters offers up a similar mini-memoir of her time living in a basement apartment near an abandoned moonscape in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her essay inventories the utopian schemes projected onto a parcel of land contaminated by the residue of a manufactured gas plant from the Gilded Age. This “section of land in Brooklyn where the Gowanus Canal curves like a comma” would see plans come and go for a public park, a high-tech vertical farm, and any number of competing proposals for new housing. The winner, in the end, was a hybrid of sorts: gardens, parks, and a cluster of condos slated to open in 2017. “This block will be the most expensive in the neighborhood soon,” McMasters’ landlord declares, his imagination running free. “You watch.”
Phillip Lopate tackles one of the most enduring contradictions between American environmentalism and urban design: our love/hate relationship with the sort of dense development currently sprouting up along the Gowanus Canal. Lopate argues that naturalists and urbanists should be friends—that high-density cities are more energy efficient and take up less space than the suburbs designed to replace them. “I don’t know when God declared that there should be no skyscrapers in Brooklyn,” Lopate writes, challenging high-minded NIMBYists in a low-rise borough of brownstones to think of the benefits that come with well-planned density. That’s the kicker, though. In the rush to redevelop, cities like New York have seen density increase without a corresponding investment in infrastructure and municipal services. Skyscrapers are fine, but without affordable rental units, reliable subways, well-maintained parks, excellent schools, and access to a decent grocery store, city dwellers may end up striking out for the suburbs after all.
In Monarchs of the Urban Mind, Betsy McCully focuses her imagination backward to “mentally excavate layers of time and space ever deeper” to discover a New York where “continents docked and drifted, mountains rose and eroded, glaciers advanced and retreated.” McCully sees a region that was already on the move long before Henry Hudson floated into the harbor or Peter Minuit put a down payment on the island of Manhattan. “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it,” O. Henry wrote about New York more than a hundred years ago, long before skyscrapers and superblocks. McCully, reflecting on the cyclical rhythms of butterflies and horseshoe crabs migrating in and out of the city’s harbor, helps us see that New York is a great place because they never finish it—they being the gods of old who cause mountains to rise and fall and rivers to change their course and the demigods who’ve built canyons of concrete and steel, highways and harbors and railroads and acres and acres of parks.
Stewart Brand, an iconoclastic environmental thinker with an unapologetic love for cities, calls this sort of perspective “long now” thinking. It forces you to look past the trivia of daily life and situate yourself in a broader, more consequential view of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. While McCully digs deep into the long now of New York’s past, Anne Matthews scans and summarizes a stack of scholarly reports forecasting the city’s future and identifies four basic scenarios. The first is a “dystopian battleground of civic chaos and decay, a Bladerunner vision of New York” in a warming and increasingly crowded world. The second is a “milder edition of this chaotic future”—a sprawling megalopolis with creaking infrastructure and ecosystems on life support. Things get better in the fourth scenario: the city is retrofitted for environmental sustainability and resilience in the face of climate change. The fourth is a mix of the preceding three: New York as an archipelago city, surviving though its geography and its infrastructure are altered by rising seas. Which scenario will become a reality?
If McCully and Matthews bring the “long now,” then essayists Tony Hiss and Christopher Meier bring the “big here.” In their Welcome to the H20 Region, Hiss and Meier invite residents of New York to think of the region surrounding the city’s harbor as a “second address” filled with rivers and streams, beaches and wetlands, forests and mountains and valleys to rival any National Park way out west. If the residents of San Francisco and Berkeley and San Jose and Sausalito can all claim the “Bay Area” as their home, why can’t the people of Middletown and Newark and Fort Lee and White Plains picture themselves belonging to a larger “Harbor Area” with New York City at its center?
Frederick Buell does a fine job of summing up the book in his essay on the cultural history of nature in New York. Buell argues that we are living through a slow motion environmental apocalypse. There’s no going back to the way things were, and surviving the future will likely involve exploring and appropriating the contradictions between cities and nature that governed our thinking in the past. In the future, nature will be both nowhere and everywhere—not just because of the radical changes from climate change that already in the pipeline, but because we will have learned to think of nature in a different way.
Still the Same Hawk raises more questions than it answers—a fitting tribute to the complexity and chaos of an urban ecosystem that refuses to settle down into anything vaguely resembling a climax community. Though the quality of the essays varies, the book includes some truly thought-provoking treasures that are easily paired with longer classics such as Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon or The Granite Garden by Anne Whiston Spirn. Sullivan’s essay, for example, deserves a place on any undergraduate environmental studies syllabus. Ross’s essay should be required reading for anyone in the ever-growing urban agriculture movement.
Waldman deserves credit for compiling the first approachable attempt at deconstructing the idea of nature in the context of New York. Every big American city should have a similar collection of essays to call its own. So who’s next?
Whilst urbanization has brought many benefits to society, it increasingly denies people of opportunities for the mental, spiritual and physical health benefits from nature. Over the last decade, there has been an alarming global increase in diseases such as heart diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes [Note 1]. The risk of these non-communicable diseases is linked to a number of factors, including physical inactivity. Simultaneously, we are just beginning to appreciate the wealth of human health benefits that stem from experiencing nature and biodiversity [2]. A wide range of positive mental and emotional effects have been found to be associated with human exposure to nature, such as on general health, stress reduction, increased physical activity, and reduced incidence/levels of cardiovascular, intestinal, and respiratory diseases.
There is a growing body of research demonstrating the positive influence of nature on human health and well-being.
Natural areas within and around cities restore and safeguard nature and biodiversity, and are critical for healthy and sustainable communities. There is a growing body of research demonstrating nature’s positive influence on health and well-being. Coming into regular contact with nature has been found to reduce stress levels, increase concentration, stimulate exercise, promote social cohesion, and help to treat diseases and disorders. These positive influences on mental and physical well-being in turn lead to substantial economic benefits, by increasing economic productivity and reducing health-care costs.
Nature Rx, a grassroots movement dedicated to informing people about the healing aspects of nature, created a great campaign to remind people about how enjoyable and vital nature really is. They attract attention with innovative and captivating slogans such as “nature, a non-harmful medication,” “side-effects may include spontaneous euphoria and being in a good mood for no apparent reason,” and “ask your doctor if nature is right for you.” Watch one of their videos here.
Nature Rx
Chris Ives, a Nature of Cities author from Leuphana University in Lüneburg, recently shared some interesting insights on how reconnecting people with nature can help transform society towards sustainability and emphasizing that cities are key places for reconnecting people with nature.
When ecosystems are degraded and disturbed, biodiversity is often lost, as is human health. Protected areas and natural areas within and around cities restore and safeguard nature and are critical for healthy and sustainable communities. In an urbanizing world with a growing population, protected areas are natural solutions for securing our health and well-being, while providing many other benefits such as adapting to the impact of climate change and ensure clean drinking water supply.
Parks, people and health
Representatives of Parks Agencies, cities, governments, civil society groups and international organizations, such as ICLEI, the World Health Organisation, Conservation International and IUCN, were hosted by the Salzburg Global Seminar at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg in November 2015 for “The Parks for the Planet Forum.”
Salzburg Global Seminar – Parks for the Planet Forum, Photo: Ela Grieshaber
This initiative builds on “The Promise of Sydney,” the key outcome of the IUCN World Parks Congress 2014, which presents an ambitious agenda to safeguard the planet’s natural assets, ranging from halting rainforest loss in the Asia-Pacific and tripling ocean protection off Africa’s coasts to a business commitment to plant 1.3 billion trees along the historic Silk Road. “The Promise” includes pledges from governments, international organizations, the private sector, Indigenous leaders, community groups and individuals. It highlights the need to invigorate global efforts to protect natural areas, including scaling up the protection of landscapes and oceans. It includes commitments to boost investment in nature’s solutions to halt biodiversity loss, tackle Climate Change, reduce the risk and impact of disasters, improve food and water security and promote human health. It also aims to inspire people around the globe, across generations and cultures, to experience the wonder of nature through protected areas.
Protected areas are by far the best investment the world can make to address some of today’s biggest development challenges and nature—and nature connectedness—can and must be deployed to tackle impacts on human health and well-being linked to rapid urbanisation.
The discussion during the Parks for the Planet Forum in Salzburg revolved around urban and youth engagement in building appreciation for an access to nature; strategic coalitions for health, cities and nature; the business case for urban transformation in support of health and well-being; and communication with the purpose of improving the understanding for the value of nature for human well-being. The rich discussions during the Forum, show that while the value of nature for health and wellbeing remains highly invisible, there are opportunities and developments that show how we can bring people closer to nature, even in our rapidly urbanising world, and what we can do to spread great ideas.
Indigenous communities make no distinction between culture and nature—they are one. Today, however, we see a growing disconnection from the natural world, with children spending more and more time indoors and names of particular plant species disappearing from our dictionary. Eleven- to 15-year-olds in Britain now spend, on average, half their waking day in front of a screen [3]. According to George Monbiot, losing their contact with nature, the next generation will not fight for it. In Salzburg, Daniel Raven Ellison presented his visionary and hope-giving idea for making London the first National Park City, described as: “A city where people and nature are better connected. A city that is rich with wildlife and every child benefits from exploring, playing and learning outdoors. A city where we all enjoy high-quality green spaces, the air is clean to breathe, it’s a pleasure to swim in its rivers and green homes are affordable. Together we can make London a greener, healthier and fairer place to live.”
Gil Penalosa, Executive Director of 8-80 Cities, explained how Mexico City has benefited from unconventional partnerships between public and private sector partners to expand the resource base for improving the value its largest natural area in the city, Chapultepec park, for citizens and visitors. A group of citizens together with City officials and Park Administrators came up with a Master Plan and set of actions to restore the park. Half of the financing for restoration has been collected from donations, including one million donors at metro stations and supermarkets, and private donations by corporations and important donors. The Chapultepec park is a great example that shows how citizens care for their city and in particular their green spaces and how the impossible can be made possible.
As part of the Promise of Sydney, the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas has established a joint task force with the IUCN Commission on Education and Communication on Inspiring a New Generation. This will have a strong emphasis on reaching out to young people but also urban communities, to strengthen the linkages between people and nature as young people represent more than half of the world’s population, making this a significant group as a living and breathing force of great potential whose voices must be heard.
How nature can improve physical and mental health
To investigate the impact of urban nature on childhood asthma in New York City, researchers at Columbia University conducted a study on the correlation between the number of neighbourhood street trees and incidence of the disease (Lovasi et al, 2008)[4]. The study indicates that adding an additional 343 trees per square kilometer decreased the asthma rate by as much as 24-29 percent among children aged 4 and 5.
Public health and the environment are intrinsically linked. Environmental degradation has negative impacts on human health, whilst the conservation of nature and green spaces can deliver multiple health benefits. A study for the European Commission, led by IEEP – Institute for European Environmental Policy, explores these links and how they could be integrated into public health strategies. Marianne Kettunen, Principal Policy Analyst of IEEP, explained at the Parks for the Planet Forum that green areas, rich in biodiversity, in the direct living environment can decrease the incidence and prevalence of allergies and higher levels of exposure to green spaces are associated with improved cognitive development. She emphasized the need to combine evidence with demand and start offering solutions and rightfully stated that “A bit of biodiversity a day keeps the doctor away!”
The European Union Health Strategy 2008-2013 acknowledges the need for action to tackle climate impacts on health. The impact of heat waves is particularly strong in cities and towns. The so-called ‘urban heat island effect’ which describes the increased temperature of the urban atmosphere compared to its rural surroundings, can cause a growing risk of death from heat stress, in particular for elderly people in our ageing urban societies. The URBES – Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services project has analysed the climate regulation function of green infrastructure in four case study cities, Berlin, Helsinki, Rotterdam and Stockholm (Larondelle and Haase, 2013)[5]. The results of this study confirm that green infrastructure can significantly reduce the urban heat island effect.
Due to the growing number of people in Europe and the U.S. dementia is one of the most critical health challenges. The Nature Assisted Health Foundation, a Swedish/Dutch initiative which translates scientific research on nature and health linkages into concepts for improved health and wellbeing promotes the need for stronger evidence of the benefits of nature to tackle the problem of dementia. Experiments with dementia gardens in Sweden and the Netherlands have demonstrated improvements in quality of life and a reduced need for medication resulting in a substantial reduction in health-care costs.
Partnerships for action
There is a clear scientific understanding of the human need for, and connection to, nature as well as its physical, mental, social and spiritual health and well-being benefits, which the World Health Organisation underlines. However, greater global action is needed to strengthen the evidence base on the connection between nature and human health and well-being and incorporate it into policy and practice, and in particular to engage the health sector, as nature can contribute to reduce health costs substantially. To realise this opportunity, the protected areas, health and business community need to collaborate and work closely together with researchers, governments and NGOs to create a new approach that ensures that nature can help people thrive.
Most of Bogota’s water originates high above the city in Chingaza National Park. The Agua Somos mechanism is a private-public partnership that finances the conservation of moors, forests and rivers that generate water resources in the Bogota region, ensuring not only water supply to more than 10 million people but also the wellbeing of the communities located in the area. This allows users of the water resource to compensate the efforts of both private owners and protected areas to preserve vegetable plantations, forests, and soil that protect watersheds that supply the city, ensuring its quality, quantity and regulation. Owners and protected areas do not have adequate resources to preserve forests and moors that produce the water for Bogota, but they do have restrictions on land use. The Agua Somos mechanism is an interesting alternative as it can provide the necessary funds in order to develop the conservation activities required.
Chingaza National Park, Colombia. Source: www.nature.org
To improve health and well being, we need to strengthen the evidence to show how nature affects health and promote preventative health contribution made by protected areas and urban green spaces. This entails mapping, assessment and quantification of the qualities and functions of urban and peri-urban parks and green spaces for specific cities and improved understanding of the connection between urban green elements, biodiversity, and human health and wellbeing.
Healthy Parks Healthy People was created by the Australian park agency Parks Victoria in 2000—it has been highlighted before on The Nature of Cities by Kathryn Campbell, the Manager of the initiative—and explores the links between nature and human health. They have published a report this year that reviews the post-2008 literature that examines the health benefits of parks and natural spaces. The wealth of global evidence connecting parks and their value for improving human health highlights the need to promote and invest in parks to ensure the benefits are realised across all communities.
The potential for improving health through use of parks can be enhanced in many ways. This includes park managers, researchers and policy makers promoting the health benefits of nature. The challenge is how to combine a compact city with the need for green space near where people live and the connection between nature in cities and in the surrounding areas is essential for securing the many ecosystem services that benefit urban citizens and means involvement of all relevant planning as well as other stakeholders active at the larger landscape scale.
Central Park, New York City. Photo: Chantal van Ham
Taking action starts with awareness of the values of nature. A contribution to the World Forum on Natural Capital from the Town of Gibsons, a coastal community north of Vancouver, showed how this municipality not only identified the value of its natural capital, but also made them part of urban decision making. They are pioneering a so called “eco-asset strategy” as an effective financial and municipal management approach that focuses on identifying existing natural assets such as green space, forests, topsoil, aquifers and creeks that provide municipal services such as storm water management; measuring the value of the municipal services provided by these assets; and, making this information operational by integrating it into municipal asset management. The innovation in this strategy is that it helps to explain the value of natural assets in terms of financial and management strategies.
We all know that connecting with and spending time in nature is beneficial for our health. To demonstrate how nature can be used to improve physical and mental health for urban citizens, it is crucial for the nature conservation community to strengthen awareness and knowledge of the values of biodiversity and ecosystem services and to develop a strong business case to improve the connection with non-conventional partners, policy makers and practitioners, the public health sector and urban planners to create opportunities for deploying nature-based solutions to health and well-being challenges.
The partners who participated in the first Parks for the Planet Forum made a joint commitment to find ways to identify and promote mutual co-benefits of nature, health, and a new urban generation. Cities will be usedities as the starting point for the conversation with communities that will provide support to optimize the value of the mutual benefits of nature and human health wellbeing. Turning these ideas into action, we hope to work together closely with the partners The Nature of Cities network to give nature the place in society as miracle medicine it deserves.
Jane Jacobs said: ‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.’ To embrace this idea that everyone has to be involved in creating cities is to recognize the vitality of neighborhoods as the scale at which most people relate to the city in their daily lives. Neighborhoods are, in effect, the places where we live and where we tend to spend most of our time, even if much of that is within our private dwellings. They are the places we know best, where we come home to, and where, as the urbanist Lewis Mumford (1954: 269) said, we can ‘recover the sense of intimacy and innerness that has been disrupted by the increased scale of the city’.
Although Mumford and Jacobs sparred often, their thinking can be seen to converge on the question of how neighborhoods matter for city-building. Urban residents are concerned with their neighborhoods because what happens at this geographic scale affects their everyday experience and quality of life. People tend to be invested in and relate to the ‘local’ scale of the neighborhood in a more direct way than cities or metropolitan regions as a whole. In short, the neighborhood is an ideal scale for engaging citizens and undertaking community-based planning, design, and development, and if we co-produce them in new and innovative ways with civil society, our neighborhoods can transform our cities.
In this first of three blog entries on the topic, we present a case for renewing neighborhood planning for more resilient and livable cities. The paradox is that ‘good’ neighborhood planning—as it was done in the past—can be to the detriment of the overall nature of cities for people. It can be divisive both spatially, by setting clear geographic ‘limits’ that signal exclusion or exclusivity, and socially, by putting local interests ahead of broader interests of urban connectedness and complexity.
Two basic questions structure the argument we present in the three blog entries:
• Why do neighborhoods matter for city-building? We consider positive and negative aspects of neighborhood-scale planning with particular attention to strengthening the complementarity and interdependence of civil society and the state. This blog entry focuses on this fundamental question.
• Why should we plan neighborhoods differently and more authentically engage civil society? In our next two entries, we’ll explore how we can create better cities by bringing neighborhoods back into focus while linking them to broader visions and strategies for progress toward ‘wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts’. Civil-society leaders and civil-society organizations (CSOs) can play a pivotal role in developing ‘nested’ neighborhood plans to strengthen cities and to drive innovation for positive social change.
Our forthcoming second entry will outline four key components linking neighborhood-scale planning to the work of ensuring better outcomes for the city as a whole: (1) social innovation, (2) community development praxis, (3) neighborhoods without borders, and (4) a vision of ecological democracy. The third and final entry will tell a story from Montréal about a place-specific approach to neighborhood planning—the Green, Active, and Healthy Neighborhoods project—and explore what can be learned from the first five years of this place-specific work.
Why is the neighborhood scale important for building better cities?
There are good reasons to plan at the neighborhood scale—such as improving the physical environment, building social capital, collectively recognizing community assets, and advocating for public space investment—but we cannot lose sight of the overall city context nor compromise on wider global issues. If we are to succeed in creating more resilient and livable cities, we must renew planning processes at the neighborhood scale, where people already engage with the city on their own (domestic) terms around the world.
Let’s consider some of the many benefits to planning at the neighborhood scale before commenting on some of its drawbacks. In liberal democracies, helpful roles can be played by civil society organizations (CSOs) interacting with the state (government institutions, including municipalities and local councils). Two premises are key here. First, making the leap from the cities we have to the cities we want requires social change, which includes citizens expecting more from their cities and contributing in new and creative ways. This can take root at the scale of the neighborhood—and new approaches to neighborhood planning can help catalyze social change. Second, neighborhoods are both highly-valued home landscapes and ideal spaces for effecting change. People invest themselves in the places they live, even when they don’t intend to do so. Everyday life in a setting builds familiarity and affection, care and concern, as empirically demonstrated by generations of urban scholars from Cook (1988), Fried (1963), Gans (1962), and Hester (1984), to Blake & Arreola (1996), Blokland (2003), Cloutier-Fisher & Harvey (2009), Duncan & Duncan (2004), Feldman (1996), Gallacher (2004), Lewicka (2009), Rollero & De Piccolia (2010), and Woolever (1992).
Neighborhood planning is not a modest endeavor, nor is it new, but it has been neglected in recent decades. By contrast, some of the most dire societal problems in the past century were addressed through neighborhood-focused efforts in the Anglo-American world, such as poverty, crime, alienation, perceptions of powerlessness and political apathy, environmental degradation, and economic marginalization (Rohe 2009). Historically, there have typically been three overall aims: (1) to articulate a shared vision for the future of an area, (2) to guide future growth and development, prioritizing actions and improvement projects that make sense at a local scale, and (3) to determine what is needed to implement the plan. Its proponents identify the following benefits (Jones 1990, Peterman 2000, Rohe 2009, Rohe & Gates 1985):
• Increasing the likelihood that neighborhoods can seize opportunities as they arise to carry out physical improvement projects or pilot initiatives;
• Success in engaging more citizens than broader city-scaled planning processes, because they focus on smaller geographic areas that are ‘everyday environments’ of live, work, and play;
• Increasing social capital by fostering expanded interactions and networks of people involved in the plan;
• Improving the capacity of residents to work together to address complex problems;
• Creating stronger links between neighborhood leaders and citywide decision-makers on urban affairs;
• Improving citizen access to and trust in local government;
• Enhancing knowledge and understanding of local people regarding their own neighborhood’s role and relationships with other neighborhoods and the wider city; and
• Fostering community development.
These are all examples of how neighborhood-based planning can work well, but history has shown that in each instance, the opposite can be true. Among the risks and drawbacks of neighborhood planning are: (1) an overly prescriptive emphasis on physical attributes, (2) the inherently divisive nature of neighborhood-scaled units, which can easily become enclaves, and (3) non-altruistic motivations for citizen involvement.
The first drawback calls for a quick lesson in planning history. Ask most practitioners in the field about neighborhood planning and they will probably mention Clarence Perry (2007 [1929]), whose ‘neighborhood unit formula’ had a huge influence on city-building in North America in the 20th century. Initially a response to pressing social problems in industrial centers, particularly New York City, Perry’s approach is emblematic of an over-emphasis on prescribing ‘ideal’ physical attributes in the name of neighborhood planning. The merits are clear, given the social conditions at the time and place of their origin, but the ‘neighborhood unit’ was based on narrow cultural worldviews that are unsuitable for increasingly pluralistic urban societies. We now recognize the flawed physical determinism on which this approach was based, for example, that residential and commercial land uses ought to be separated; certainly, it is of limited use in already-built urban neighborhoods where billions of people currently live, as well as informal settlements throughout the world.
The conventions of neighborhood planning have evolved and changed since Perry. More recent prescriptions are the Congress for the New Urbanism’s traditional neighborhood development (TND) concept (cf. Duany et al. 2000), the US Green Building Council’s LEED framework for Neighborhood Development (cf. usgbc.org/leed/nd/), the British ‘urban village’ concept (cf. Biddulph 2001), and the sustainable neighborhood concept (cf. Farr 2008). These approaches tend to prescribe a set of desirable physical and functional attributes for neighborhoods, such as population range, spatial area, type of boundaries, proximity to services, and predominant land uses.
Great neighborhoods don’t necessarily make for great cities, as Biddulph (2001) has demonstrated. For cities to be resilient and livable, great neighborhoods must be well-connected, and even overlapping.
A second potential drawback to neighborhood planning is that it can be internally divisive by precluding or severing relationships among people and institutions, both in spatial and political terms. The historic insistence on delineating clear boundaries results in neighborhood ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ as well as those ‘on the margins’. This has produced cities such as Pittsburgh and Toronto with wonderful neighborhood ‘enclaves’ separated by low-quality ‘no-go’ spaces, as so evocatively described by Neal Stephenson in his dystopic 2000 novel Snow Crash. Planning at the neighborhood scale can support the development of enclaves, which have a number of environmental and social drawbacks. Residential enclaves are not positive for the overall social development of a city and they can lead to unfavorable conditions outside the neighborhood borders, such as lower quality environments and higher traffic streets. Even so-called ‘green neighborhoods’ can work against creating better cities, because they are often built on greenfield sties, rolled out as low-density, single-use subdivisions lacking a fine-grained mix of housing types and other activity spaces, thus forcing their users to be heavily dependent on the car for daily life.
The third risk in neighborhood planning arises because the motivations for citizen involvement are as unique as individuals. In some cases, people get involved in neighborhood planning for non-altruistic reasons, such as ‘NIMBY’ efforts to prevent what they consider to be undesirable change—for instance, increased residential densities and/or a wider diversity of housing types. Empirical examples of this abound: Hester (2006) found in a US study that people who claim to dislike higher densities prefer neighborhoods with clear boundaries, marked by social homogeneity and visual uniformity; Blake & Arreola (1996) and Feldman (1990) have reported similar findings. These preferences are not congruent with the small-scale diversity, complexity, and uncertainty that have been found to be important to more resilient and livable cities through empirical evidence spanning decades. Hester’s study also revealed that people are nevertheless more likely to accept higher density if it is associated with well-designed neighborhood parks and increased greenery.
The roles and relationships of civil society and the state have significant implications for neighborhood planning processes and outcomes
Neighborhood plans take a variety of forms, focusing on different kinds of issues:
• Conserving the built and natural heritage of an area
• Developing sustainability policies and initiatives
• Improving access to local democracy, social services, and government institutions
• Addressing sector-specific issues such as housing or economic development
• Enhancing opportunities for active transportation by changing the physical treatment of neighborhood streets and public spaces
What most neighborhood plans have in common is that they provide recommendations for improving a given area of a city based on an analysis of data collected, an assessment of possible alternatives, and a plan for implementation, including assigning who will be responsible for what. City governments have most often led neighborhood planning in the US, although civil-society organizations (CSOs) have also played pivotal roles in some of these processes through a range of engagement methods and often complex and nuanced power relations between civil society and state agents. These relationships merit close consideration because they directly influence the nature, content, quality, implementation, and outcomes of a neighborhood plan. They are also important to examine because CSOs increasingly lead neighborhood planning, with varying levels of involvement of city governments.
Civil society leaders and CSOs operate in a contested in-between space that Margaret Ledwith (2005) refers to as a space of ‘community-development praxis’. It is the site of continual negotiation between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ forces. Similarly, John Friedmann (1989) and Leonie Sandercock (1998) speak of CSOs as ‘tightrope walkers’ in a radical planning theoretical framework, while many of the essays collected by Moulaert et al. (2010) stress the potential of CSOs as ‘change agents’ in driving social innovation in neighborhood contexts. In the ever-changing frames of reference that they occupy, CSOs are sometimes considered as ‘honest brokers’ especially for the all-important work of dialogue and negotiation that define planning and policy-making power relationships between citizens and the state. To be healthy, the space of contestation between top-down (state) and bottom-up (grassroots or CSOs) should be in dynamic equilibrium, for the moment it becomes uncontested, one must question what has gone awry.
The specific nature(s) of the roles to be played by CSOs and the state in neighborhood planning to best serve local and citywide interests must be understood as context-dependent. We are not advocating an anti-statist approach, for government must typically play a role in neighborhood planning (notably for the provision of technical assistance and information, so that plans can be implemented, and to ensure that processes are institutionalized and just according to the legal regimes in place). In some cases, the state may play a central but nuanced role, such as the case of Seattle where neighborhood planners were employed by the City to serve local district-specific interests. This city-led planning process was empowering to local citizens, and the municipal officials responsible for neighborhood planning were able to intermediate trust among highly diverse and often contentious community associations, city departments, business interests, and policymakers (Sirianni 2007). In countries or contexts where the state lacks legitimacy for its citizens, the role of trusted civil society leaders and CSOs is of vital importance to neighborhood planning.
The institutionalization of neighborhood planning is helpful to the extent that it is supportive of processes and learning between groups, neighborhoods, and cities, but it should be set up carefully so that innovation is not stifled. While institutionalization can bring negative effects on innovation in movements for social change, some degree of sustained and visionary involvement of the state is warranted if the goal is for various local neighborhood plans to ‘add up’ in sum to resilient and livable cities. Moving beyond the current situation in most places of one-off ‘showcase’ projects to transformative change is a long-term endeavor that requires substantial commitment to shape policy and practice in ways that transcend changes in political leadership. An inspiring example of this began in the 1960s in Copenhagen, as documented by Jan Gehl (2010), where studies of public space and public life were the basis for tracking and assessing progress over time toward Copenhagen’s policy aim to become a great human-scaled city.
Saint-Viateur Street in the Mile-End neighborhood of Montréal, where local residents and merchants come together to organize summer festivals called ‘Journées des bon voisins’ (2010). Photo: Nik Luka
A different approach: Neighborhood planning as central to resilient and livable cities
Cities can be more inclusive and provide something for everybody, as Jane Jacobs said, but only if everyone has a voice—a role—in their creation. This can happen at the neighborhood scale. In our second blog in this series on Neighborhood Planning for Resilient and Livable Cities, we propose four vital components linking neighborhood-scale planning to the work of ensuring better outcomes for the city as a whole. We will propose a diametrically different take on neighborhood planning, which—when combined with deliberative community-development strategies—can affect social movements for the betterment of living conditions and life opportunities. We are intrigued by the capacity that neighborhoods demonstrate to build and sustain social movements. Positive change can be effected when civil society and the state collaborate, when diverse stakeholders are given active roles, and when the relationships of power among those stakeholders are balanced vis-à-vis just, equitable neighborhood planning for cities that are truly resilient and livable.
Nik Luka is a professor of urban design who specialises in transdisciplinary approaches to understanding urban form and cultural landscapes with a particular interest in the everyday interfaces of nature and culture as experienced by individuals.
References
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Is neighborhood planning worth doing? We argued in our last blog entry (Part 1 of this series) that neighborhood planning has the potential to be transformative in improving community resilience, but that it also has a dark side. It can be divisive both spatially—by setting clear geographic ‘limits’ that signal exclusion or exclusivity—and socially, by putting local interests ahead of broad concerns such as urban connectedness and complexity. In this follow-up blog, we propose that neighborhood planning is worth doing if it integrates four key components of ‘nested’ neighborhood planning that link neighborhood-scale planning to the work of ensuring better outcomes for the city as a whole: (1) social innovation, (2) community-development practice integrated with theory, often simply termed ‘praxis’, (3) neighborhoods without borders, and (4) a vision of ecological democracy.
These four components are based on our practical experience with neighborhood planning and our examination of academic and professional literature on planning and community development. We speak normatively here, in terms of what ought to be done. We outline a multi-scalar approach that links dimensions of thinking, planning, and building which are often disparate: integrating scales from the neighborhood to the city to the city-region, integrating action across domains of civil society and the state, and integrating value systems of urban ecology and participatory democracy. In our next and final blog entry of this series, we will present a Montréal case study, and examine whether nested neighborhood planning can offer building blocks for better cities in a wide range of geographic, political, and cultural contexts, if all three types of integration are present.
Neighborhood planning component 1. Social innovation
Social innovation is both a new label for old practices and a significant new notion. As a concept, it has evolved in two important ways: (i) to make the connections between tangible ‘bottom-up’ actions where people take their own initiatives to effect change and much-needed transformations in governance; and (ii) to provide meaning that is both usefully ideological and critically robust, so that it can play an active role in debates of politics and social science (Nussbaumer and Moulaert, 2007: 73-78; in Moulaert et al., 2010: 7). How can we understand the dynamics of social innovation at the neighborhood level? Useful frameworks are found in a collection edited by Moulaert et al. (2010) titled Can Neighbourhoods Save the City? Community development and social innovation, in which contributions from various authors uncover the conditions and prerequisites for making neighborhood-scale initiatives pertinent at the city scale and beyond. The editors contend that ‘socially innovative neighbourhood initiatives’ share three objectives:
to satisfy human needs which are unmet by the state and markets;
to provide access rights which enhance human capabilities and are empowering to people and social processes; and
to change social relations and power structures that lead to more inclusive governance.
In their case studies from 10 European cities, the authors show how neighborhoods can be pivotal sites for driving social innovation, which typically happens through civil-society organizations (CSOs) working not only within local neighborhoods, but also working to connect them with the broader urban context, building bridges to the political realm. A vital success factor in the cases was a capacity and perspective of glocalism, or integration of spatial scales from neighborhood to city to global. A glocal perspective reminds us that ‘localist’ initiatives hold local culture and community interests as exclusive or predominant forces for determining development; this hinders the trans-local relationships, policies, and processes crucial for resilient and livable cities (Rohe, 2009; Moulaert et al., 2010).
City Mine(d) and its urban pop-up projects in Brussels, London, and Barcelona provide an example of ‘glocal’ action, as an international network of individuals and collectives involved with city and local action. Photo: citymined.org
In our own work, we have found another key reason that socially innovative organizations are poised to contribute to resilient and livable cities through neighborhood-based planning. We call this the expectations-motivation differential. This refers to a dichotomy: it is often in the (rational) interest of state institutions to keep the expectations of citizenry low, whereas progressive civil-society organizations seek to ‘raise the bar’ by inspiring people to have higher expectations for the collective work of city-building. In this perspective, the aim of planning is to inspire and educate people about possibilities for the city, and to explore the possibilities for learning and positive change at the local scale. When ordinary people feel empowered to plan for change in their own neighborhoods by critically assessing the current context, analyzing power dynamics and external forces, understanding that ‘a different city is possible’, and planning for a better future, it stands to reason that they will be more likely to take part in collective action for social change, thereby contributing to creating a more resilient and livable city.
Neighborhood planning component 2. The praxis of community development
The notion and praxis of ‘community development’ can be defined as thoughtfully designing, continually learning from, and creatively acting on processes of collective engagement associated with neighborhood planning. In other words, we need to strive for social learning by designing engagement processes that lead to knowledge creation, which can be translated into action that will feed the continued refinement of engagement processes.
Our notion of community-development praxis is influenced by work found in several bodies of literature including collaborative and participatory planning, community development, education and social science. We particularly value the idea of ‘phronesis’ or ‘practice-based wisdom’. To unravel what we mean here, we draw on Ledwith (2011a) to start with the notion of praxis as a synthesis of practice and theory, reflection and action, thinking and doing; we can then speak of critical praxis, which refers to the collective endeavor of making sense of the world and our own actions in order to transform it. Through praxis people gain critical awareness of their own condition and collectively work to shift balances in relationships of power in order to work toward social justice, empowerment, and liberation.
Paul Piccone calls praxis “that creative activity which reconstitutes the past in order to forge the political tools in the present to bring about a qualitatively different future” (1976: 493); similarly, Innes and Booher (2010: 89) suggest that
“… [e]ffective collaboration depends on praxis. That is, it depends on extended practical experience deeply informed by theorizing and reflection. Those who engage in collaboration build their capacity and intuition about how to proceed, while at the same time building theory about when and how collaboration can work. Praxis is practice interwoven with theory and theory informed by experience in the spirit of pragmatism.”
Margaret Ledwith (2011b) describes community development praxis as a ‘contested space’ between top-down and bottom-up approaches in which state and civil society participants continually negotiate their ways of working together and challenging one another. Drawing on Flyvbjerg (2001), she has argued that praxis ought to intermingle with phronesis, an approach to social science that emphasizes practical knowledge and practical ethics, which are based on context-dependent, pragmatic action and practical value-rationality (Ledwith, 2011a). Thus, the praxis of community development is unabashedly value-laden. Its aim is collective action for social change, and it is principled on social justice and a sustainable world, a critical analysis of power, and popular education for participatory democracy (Ledwith, 2011b; Ledwith and Springett, 2010).
Playscapes are ‘natural playgrounds’ designed by kids and landscape architects at Groundwork UK. They provide great neighborhood spaces for creative urban explorations. Photo: Groundwork UK Playscape project
If neighborhood planning processes are to be transformative in their capacity to contribute to more resilient and livable cities, they must be based on a strong ethos of community development (comprising both physical transformations and the qualitative development of individuals). If community development is to be carried out effectively, sustainably, and in a transformative way, the associated processes of local governance must be participatory and collaborative, building improve neighborhood capacity to manage change over time. This means that neighborhood planning processes must enable community members to mobilize their existing skills, reframe problems, work cooperatively, and use community assets in new ways. Principles of self-help, self-organization, and participation can guide flexible processes of revisiting neighborhood plans over time in order to identify concerns, continue dialogue, explore alternatives, reconsider priorities, and take effective action.
Neighborhood planning component 3: Neighborhoods without borders
A neighborhood plan typically defines an urban district and its boundaries (which might be natural or built elements, such as rivers, steep slopes, railroad tracks and/or large parks). Often the ‘official’ limits for planning follow some kind of public right-of-way, such as streets, roads, and highways. Municipal boundaries often run down the middle of rights-of-way, thus dividing these public spaces into separate jurisdictions. The logic here is not merely convenience or efficiency; it has long been presumed that clear neighborhood edges are needed in order to make neighborhoods ‘legible’ and to provide distinct, easily-recognized character (see e.g. Banerjee and Baer, 1984; Lynch, 1981; Perry, 2007 [1929]).
Our proposition of ‘neighborhoods without borders’ challenges the conventional wisdom of neighborhood planning in North America—that is, the usual prescription that neighborhoods be clearly demarcated by physical edges (usually arterial roads), derived from Clarence Perry’s ‘neighborhood unit’ as discussed by Banerjee and Baer (1984), Greenberg (1994), and Keating and Krumholz (2000). Instead, we argue that neighborhoods should be defined to encompass not only a range of activities, including housing, businesses, and community services, but also the public spaces of arterial and commercial streets often relegated to the outside margins. Neighborhoods defined as overlapping or nested configurations prevent the ‘spaces in between’ prone to becoming zones of social and spatial marginality. This situation is often exacerbated by superhuman-scaled arterial roads that can threaten the safety of residents and urban quality of local neighborhoods, contributing to health problems through pollution and accidents while often reducing opportunities for better integration of nature and biodiversity in dense urban environments.
The conventional 20th-century ‘superblock’ configuration should give way to a more integrated pattern of neighborhoods without boundaries. Credit: Nik Luka
Some argue that the spaces ‘separating’ neighborhoods should be a different category of space unto itself devoted to serving larger city functions. The logic could be seen as that of the ‘city efficient’ of the early 20th century, where activity areas were separated from transportation zones containing high-capacity roadways (see e.g. Van Nus, 1979). We instead argue that these ‘in-between zones’ should be defined as part of neighborhoods, enabling stakeholders to challenge the power structures that govern these spaces based on an understanding of how they are integral to creating better neighborhoods and cities. In a city of neighborhoods characterized by resilience, livability, and people-centered urban design, the whole cannot be greater than the sum of its parts. Cities must be seen holistically as containing overlapping and nested neighborhoods. Those parts should include a range of uses and street types; they cannot be an expression of formally or informally ‘gated’ enclaves—the solipsistic ‘burbclaves’ chillingly described by Neal Stephenson in his dystopic 1992 novel Snow Crash.
Good neighborhood plans should strengthen the public realm of neighborhoods. These shared spaces tend to garner attention, enthusiasm, and collective action, and we cannot forget that the largest share of public space in cities is occupied by streets. It could be argued that neighborhood streets represent the greatest opportunity for transformation in policy and practice toward building better cities. By rethinking our streets and the wide set of externalities that result from their construction, configurations, and use, we can reimagine how these spaces can provide all sorts of beneficial functions: more space for people walking and bicycling; vegetation and other forms of biomass, including urban agriculture and biodiversity corridors; playgrounds and the urban ‘living rooms’ seen in great cities large and small around the world (for examples, see Beatley, 2011; Gehl, 2010; Newman and Jennings, 2008; Register, 2006; Whyte, 1980).
Streets in Letchworth Garden City have extra wide sidewalks and shared space for community events. Photo: Jayne Engle
This prescriptive component is about rethinking how public spaces—specifically streets—in cities are used in an attempt to reverse over time the tendency to carve up cities with highways and instead to think of how these spaces can better integrate neighborhoods to redefine routes in cities so that they can better serve not only the needs of people walking, cycling, and using mass transit, but also as routes that can better facilitate increased nature and biodiversity.
It is important to clarify what we are not arguing. We do not contend that cities ought not to have clear edges. Clear boundaries around cities can be vital to contain urban sprawl and to provide good access to nature and biodiversity. We do not argue that resilient and livable cities must be based on specific templates for neighborhood design. Rather, we are asserting that the neighborhood is an appropriate scale to effectively plan for better cities, particularly in already-built contexts.
There is far more to resilient and livable cities than physical attributes. If there is no mechanism for the democratic engagement of citizens at the neighborhood scale to create better cities, no combination of good policies and planning will make a difference. Setting a vision for a better city from a neighborhood perspective is critical to bringing people together to organize collective action that will bring about social change. Neighborhood plans should contain a practical utopian vision for the neighborhood within the larger city, which is translated into medium-term policies and programs but also actions that can be taken on a short-term timeframe.
A holistic vision for a resilient and livable city is one of integral neighborhoods within an ecological democracy. By integral neighborhoods we mean what Richard Register and Paul Downton call ‘urban fractals’ or “portions of the city that embody the essential functions of the whole city on a smaller scale” (Register 2006: 128). Integral neighborhoods contain a mix of land uses to provide for housing and jobs, shops, and small manufacturing facilities. Key attributes include compact urban form, socio-economic diversity, organic agriculture, rooftop uses, and pedestrian-oriented streets. The natural and neighborhood environments relate synergistically, and biophysical characteristics, such as sun and wind conditions, play central roles in architectural and urban design and contribute to energy conservation. Compact design and mixed land uses provide for access by proximity, meaning that safe, affordable housing is provided near employment and services in ways that minimize car dependency and energy use (Register, 2006; UNEP, 2012).
Rather than being a traffic sewer, a major street can act as a seam with stacked functions and a mix of activities suitable for the neighborhoods through which it passes. Credit: Nik Luka
Randolph Hester’s (2006) notion of ecological democracy is the joining of urban ecology with participatory democracy; in the specific endeavor of designing better neighborhood and city form, it is particularly useful for our discussion:
“Ecological democracy, then, is government by the people emphasizing direct, hands-on involvement. Actions are guided by understanding natural processes and social relationships within our locality and the larger environmental context. This causes us to creatively reassess individual needs, happiness, and long-term community goods in the places we inhabit. Ecological democracy can change the form that our cities take, creating a new urban ecology. In turn, the form of our cities, from the shape of regional watersheds to a bench at a post office, can help build ecological democracy.”
How is the neighborhood scale important to the lofty aspirations of ecological democracy? Hester (2006: 32) argues that this is the “domain of deliberative face-to-face ecological democracy.” It is through everyday experiences in the everyday environments of neighborhoods that social change occurs. However, given that the concept of (radical) ecological democracy may not be workable within the context of many countries, is it helpful to bring this vision into the dialogue of neighborhood planning processes?
We argue that it is precisely through participatory practices such as neighborhood planning for resilient and livable cities that we can raise expectations of the public and work to bring about social changes necessary to realize the kinds of neighborhoods for the cities we need. In his book Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright (2010) sets out a set of models for social transformation that are instructive for thinking about how we can achieve better cities. Depending on the wider political and institutional context of a place, strategies for transformation will vary. In most cases strategies can be seen as processes of change in which fairly small transformations contribute cumulatively to a qualitative shift in the logic and dynamics of larger social systems. In terms of neighborhood planning, these metamorphoses occur in what we have described above as the contested space of community development praxis between top-down and bottom-up. This is the space where civil society and the state meet—and cooperate (or not) to some degree, even if certain citizen stakeholders are sometimes completely excluded from official planning processes. Exactly how social transformation comes about is highly context-dependent.
Whatever the political, cultural, or institutional context, most people around the world live in some form of neighborhood. The variations are great in terms of what those neighborhoods look like, how they function, and whether they contribute to creating better cities. What is true for all neighborhoods is that they are fundamentally defined by (and for) people. When people decide to come together to work for change, great things can happen.
In our final blog entry (Part 3 of Neighborhood Planning for Resilient and Livable Cities), we will examine how a Montréal civil-society organization successfully undertook neighborhood planning and what can be learned from this experience for making better cities around the world.
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Nik Luka is a professor of urban design who specialises in transdisciplinary approaches to understanding urban form and cultural landscapes with a particular interest in the everyday interfaces of nature and culture as experienced by individuals.
A bit of background: 
As mentioned before, though, not all the stories are about animals that might normally be considered “wild.” One story that hit me especially hard was “Falling Apart,” by Tom Montgomery Fate. It is a heartbreaking sketch of a family in a time of crisis: their beloved cat, Rosie, is dying. At the same time, a family friend passes away, family member is hospitalized, and a nephew is born. It is the family’s love for Rosie, and their grief at her passing, that keeps them together through this emotional tug-of-war. It is an intimate, heartrending glimpse into a raw emotional state, so beautifully written I can’t possibly do it justice here. I mention this story not to bum you out, but instead to illustrate the wondrous range and scope of “City Creatures,” and to demonstrate its aforementioned ‘human’-ness.
Nature Needs Half is now being implemented across all jurisdictional scales, and in surprising and sometimes novel ways, in cities and countries around the world. The core concept of protecting half of an area for nature is being “fitted to place” by governments seeking to find workable solutions to preserving the natural world and providing for human needs.
Nature Needs Half is a simple concept to understand—put most succinctly, it means saving half of the world’s lands and waters for the protection of nature. Nature Needs Half was developed by the 
Understood in this way, governance, including how it shapes and is shaped by the political economy of local, provincial, and national decision-making, is a critical determinant of the effectiveness and equity outcomes of biodiversity conservation, and of the contribution that abundant nature makes to people’s well-being, empowerment and sustainable development.
Another important aspect of nature’s services is its “natural capital” benefit—or human valuing of nature’s economic contributions. Traditionally, natural capital services weren’t accounted for in the market economy, and so were often under-valued or treated as non-existent. However, this approach to natural capital is changing, as it is becoming clear that the services nature provides are extremely valuable in monetary terms” [16].
According to the 
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