A review of: Sparrow by Kim Todd. 2012. 192 pages. ISBN 978-1-86189-875-3. Reaktion Books, London. Buy the book.
“Picture the basic bird, the stripped-down, super-efficiency model, and a sparrow probably comes to mind.”
Sparrows are everywhere! They are varied in types and forms, offering a unique repertoire of opportunities to get to know and assess them, from their scientific study to the most diverse artistic interpretations. In Sparrow, award-winning, science and natural history writer Kim Todd, journeys through the “sparrow” concept in revealing ways.
As an urban ecologist, I’ve studied the house sparrow, the “agrarian” (as we call it in some Mexican regions), for over a decade now, and had never been aware of the infinity of human expressions related to sparrows in general. In this book, Todd gathers an impressive cumulus of facts, stories, and references to the generic concept of “sparrow” together with an exquisite palette of artwork by artists from around the globe.
“It’s hard to generalize about sparrows”, Todd argues while transiting spontaneously between their natural history, ecology, distribution, related art, references in stories and books, and shifting species to present different sparrows to the reader, making this book feel like an encyclopedia of sparrows.
“House sparrows are not picky (…) They are risk-takers.” Given their boldness, broad diet, and feeding and breeding strategies and behaviors, they have become one of the most successful invasive birds of the world. Albeit the current perception of the sparrow is, overall positive, it has not been so throughout time. Todd comprehensively reviews the metaphoric use of the sparrow concept in texts and shows that it has been associated with a wide array of perceptions that range from death to love and desire.
But sparrows have not only been on our minds and books, they’ve also been in our crosshairs and on our tables! Haunting images of sparrow hunting together with impressive data on their culinary use color Chapter 2, Sold for Two Farthings. One generally unknown fact related to sparrow massacre is summarized in this book: the massive killing of sparrows (together with rats, mosquitoes, and flies) in Mao’s Great Leap Forward sought to make China competitive industrially with Western nations. “Nature was the enemy of progress, and China would fight back with its most potent weapon—its large population.”
Cover image. U.S. Department of Agriculture leaflet, Kalmbach, E.R., 1931.
I must confess that, given my interest in the invasion of the house sparrow and its ecological effects in North America, my favorite part of the book is Chapter 4, The Sparrow War. Briefly, this section reviews the reasons behind the idea of introducing birds, including the “English sparrow” in New England. “Slowly, notes of doubt began to creep in. In 1867, Dr Charles Pickering gave a talk at the Boston Society of Natural History, warning of the evils of these introductions.” With a detailed walk-through of the social and environmental process, Todd describes the realization that bringing the sparrow to the New World was not a great idea at all.
By the end of the book, Todd describes the current history of house sparrow studies focused on its ecology and traits that make it an incredibly successful invader, as well as its role in contemporary art, including poetry and photography. “One reason for the sparrow’s success appears to be its flexibility in terms of behavior, particularly when moving to a new place. (…) All of these traits combine to make a very hardy bird. ‘They are survivors’, says researcher Denis Summers-Smith, who is known as the ‘sparrow guru.’
The final chapter emphasizes the environments that sparrows face at present, during the so-called Anthropocene. With the extinction of the dusky seaside sparrow, Todd’s view always contextualizes both the facts and the social perceptions. Finally, the current house sparrow paradox is set on the table, with it being a hyperabundant invasive bird in North America and with declining populations throughout Western European cities. Such a scenario is really intriguing, as no precise answer exists to date to solve the riddle.
To end with a golden snap, Todd wraps this singular piece with a Timeline of the Sparrow, going from “A sparrow ancestor begins to radiate out from the African tropics” 1 million BCE, to “House sparrows join the list of UK’s ‘Birds of Conservation Concern’” in 2002, providing a brilliant temporal synthesis of the book.
Ted R. Anderson’s 2006 Biology of the House Sparrow: From Genes to Populations gave us the first comprehensive radiography of the species from the natural sciences lens. With Todd’s Sparrow, we now have a thorough, yet subtle, expedition through the sparrow concept in an accessible book woven with natural history and cultural knowledge as approachable guiding threads.
Although, not without controversy, Assisted Migration is one tool in a larger toolbox of strategies that can be aided by more transdisciplinary collaboration as we work toward building resilience in and around our cities. It presents unprecedented and exciting opportunities.
In April of 2022, the New York Times ran a viral piece on its front page entitled Trying Everything, Including Lettuce, to Save Florida’s Beloved Manatees. It details a sordid tale of Floridian Manatees — sea cows — struggling for survival amid a riverine habitat polluted by industrial effluents and agricultural and stormwater runoff that was choking out the seagrass upon which they rely.
It spoke of an experiment that would be funny if it weren’t so tragic, of well-intentioned scientists and citizens dumping tons of romaine lettuce into local waterways as a last-ditch effort to curtail mass starvation events. It’s not every day that aquatic vegetarian mammals are graced with front page coverage in the Times, but it’s precisely these kinds of stories that are likely to persist in one form or another as we hurdle deeper into the 21st century. Perhaps even more than the memetic images of starving arctic polar bears clinging for dear life atop melting ice rafts, accounts of charismatic megafaunal plight in our own backyards seems to pluck at heartstrings in particularly visceral ways, and implore us to action.
AI-generated composition depicting “The Mass Movement of Species From Desertifying City” (by the Author via Midjourney)
Yet, somehow immediately, another image came to mind―not of emaciated sea cows, but that of an upside-down Black Rhino, blindfolded and dangling precariously from a helicopter as it hurdles toward a distant horizon. These are images depicting the early stages of another grand experiment―the Assisted Migration (AM) of species from one place to another.
African Black Rhinoceros in transit (Source: Atlas Obscura/Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine)
In the case of the critically endangered African Black Rhino, it entails a one-way trip for groups of selected individuals to various partner sites across South Africa with the goal of extending their range to well-suited and lesser-poached locales. Early data for the Black Rhinos are promising, with the WWF accounting for a 21% increase in South African populations since 2003. In the case of the starving Floridian manatee, it might conceivably entail a search for congruous aquatic habitats elsewhere in the US; For example, in and around the port of Galveston, TX, where, by all accounts, the seagrass is thriving by comparison.
But would they survive such a trip? Who would pay for it? Who would benefit? Would it be socially, ecologically, and politically viable? And what about the unanticipated problems of adjustment on both sides?
These are just a few of the complex questions that are implied by Assisted Migration (AM), an emerging practice for human-led adaptation. Contemporary examples of AM extend beyond just fauna to include many beloved or economically valuable plants and trees whose historic range is becoming untenable. Proponents of AM argue that if climate or anthropogenic pressures prove too high for a species to survive in situ, it may be possible to help them move to new, less risky locales. AM is controversial because it often conflicts with established conservation paradigms that favor maintaining the status quo of species ranges, and in situ management strategies.
Although there have been vigorous debates among land managers and conservation biologists in recent years, it appears to be a subject insufficiently interrogated here at TNOC, especially amongst designers, artists, and urban ecologists. It’s time we applied this topic not only to exceedingly exotic plants and animals, but to our own species, and our primary habitat: cities.
What are the implications of considering AM of cities? To cities? Within and for cities? And what does it mean for the future of nature in cities?
Assisted migration of cities
It is important to recognize that AM was largely a sociological notion before it was an ecological one. Before the 2000’s the use of AM in the English language refers primarily to the movement and displacement of human populations: across and within various regional and national borders and for various reasons not limited to climate risk aversion. It wasn’t until the late oughts and early 2010’s that interest (and debate) exploded among ecologists and conservationists (evidenced by analogous terms like facilitated migration, assisted colonization, species translocation).
AM of cities considers the possibilities for urban populations in risk prone areas, rather than investing in adaptation or mitigation (or continuously rebuilding in the same place), to pick up and move elsewhere. Starting in the 1960’s and 70’s, AM was used to describe efforts by federal and local actors to do just this.
Use of Assisted Migration (and analogous terms) over time (Source: Google Scholar)
Consider, for example, the case of Soldiers Grove Wisconsin, a small logging town established along the banks of the Kickapoo river. After decades of devastating flood events and expensive subsequent rebuilding efforts, local authorities began to plead for federal funding—not to simply rebuild after flooding or invest in expensive levee projects along the Kickapoo, but to shift the entire city further from the river and onto higher ground. In the late 1970’s, they finally received authorization and federal funds to relocate large portions of the residential and business district to an area better suited for long-term resilience, with the lowlands of the former settlement converted to public open space.
(Soldiers Grove, WI Newspaper Headline from 1970’s Source Madison.com)
Soldier’s Grove provides an example of what’s possible when local, state, and federal stakeholders work together on wicked challenges and think big. The question is whether the wholesale relocation of entire cities can or should be upscaled to other contexts in the face of climate change.
Today, this process is commonly referred to as “managed retreat” or “Climigration”, whereby entire communities are compelled (by legal and financial instruments) to move away from places threatened by floods, droughts, fires, and high temperatures. This usually entails a federally funded “buyout” of a homeowner’s property and assistance for relocation to a place of their choice. Unlike the case of Soldier’s Grove, a challenge often arises when some homeowners choose not to move or choose to move from one floodplain to another. There are many complex socio-economic factors at play, including questions of land dispossession through eminent domain, and the often-disproportionate impact these risks pose on already vulnerable communities.
To ensure such efforts are done equitably, with substantial subsidies to assist those who can’t afford it, managed retreat on a large scale entails enormous initial investment and the capacity for long term planning (not exactly the strong suits of contemporary American political system). Yet to date, the federal government in the US, primarily through the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has already spent billions of dollars relocating at-risk populations (from floodplains, coastal areas, superfund sites, etc.).
Federal buyouts to date in the US: Source: March, K et al. (2021)
But how might strategies for AM in the flood-prone parishes of coastal Louisiana look different from those targeting the high-end vacation homes in The Hamptons, on the coast outside of New York City? Notwithstanding the obvious logistical, geopolitical, and socioeconomic constraints, embracing AM of cities must contend with the reality that no place is really “safe” from the disruptions brought on by a rapidly changing climate.
The risks we face today extend beyond merely flood risk to include myriad challenges of drought, wildfires, agricultural failures, and civil unrest, among many others. The risks we face tomorrow will include those that we can’t currently anticipate, occurring in places we never thought they would.
Responding to these unpredictable patterns of disturbance may require that we collectively upend conventional models of home ownership and financial equity, which are currently based on long-term settlement in a single place. Resilience may soon entail frequent cycles of re-settlement in response to shifts in the geography of livability. In some ways the bourgeoning #Vanlife movement and the normalization of remote work and digital nomadism (for some) offer glimpses of the alternative models that may continue to set the stage for a more itinerant future. Will these trends remain reserved for the middle class with the skillsets and the means to move?
Or can we imagine it becoming a normalized reality for all?
If the assisted migration of entire cities seems far-fetched, it shouldn’t—especially if we pause to consider the estimated 250 million people globally living in areas that could be underwater by the end of the century.
Assisted Migration To (and Within) Cities
As with AM of cities, AM to and within cities is nothing new. For as long as humans have built and settled in particular places, we have been in the habit of moving things around and moving things in with us. We call it by a different name: Gardening. But gardening, perhaps, requires a more expansive definition as a process that includes not only conventional modes of planting selected species in our yards, but the various ways in which we curate plants, animals, and materials, and, in turn, how they cultivate us as humans. For thousands of years, we’ve harvested materials in some form or another from the larger landscape. Stone, mud, and timber are shaped into houses and temples and prisons. Even our sleekest modern buildings, rendered in steel and glass and gypsum are ultimately highly processed landscapes. In and around our built structures we cultivate our private and public landscapes in ways that reflect our norms and needs: For beauty, for shade, for food, for belonging.
We move species in and around with us in cities because they bring us joy. We own teacup yorkies and labradoodles that have been selectively bred to exhibit the traits we prefer. We plant begonias and lilies in our front yard to project an image of ourselves to the neighborhood. Many have known the pleasure of sneaking a clandestine cutting from a neighbor’s cactus and carrying it with the poise of an international spy, to plant one’s own garden (it’s a common theory in some urban gardening circles that stolen plants grow better). Gardening extends to commercial plant and animal trades, local seed banks and informal modes of seed exchange. Gardening includes the stowaway seeds we bring back with us on the soles of our shoes, embedded in the dried mud of a recent adventure abroad. Even our giving in to the allure of the latest houseplant (or pet spider) trend on social media often entails the mass movement of captives from some distant rainforest and into our bedroom.
Adding these exotic species to our urban landscapes often supplements, rather than supplants what was already there before. Invasiveness on the part of many common urban species is the exception rather than the rule. It’s by these means (and many others) that the vegetation observed in cities have grown to be, on average, more biodiverse than their surrounding hinterlands. This, of course, flies in the face of many tropes of city life as being somehow devoid of ecological complexity.
Cities are now home to a number of fascinating novel ecosystems (“freakologies”) that have arisen in tandem with our cities. From the thriving populations of escapee green parrots in the Telegraph Hill district of San Francisco to the Mexican Freetail Bats who’ve taken up residence underneath Austin’s Congress Bridge. These novel conditions are produced by (and generative of) many layers of social, ecological, and spatial complexity that were only beginning to understand.
Sometimes we go to extreme lengths, mobilizing considerable labor and resources to move species around. In 2014, private donors to the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business famously paid over 400 thousand USD to move a 250-year-old, 700,000-pound Burr Oak a single block to save it from the pressures of development. Salomé Jashi’s beautiful 2021 Documentary Taming the Garden depicts the movement of a single enormous tree across the Black Sea to a billionaire’s private garden in Georgia.
Film still from Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden Documentary (2021)
Whether by chance or by charter, we’ve proven ourselves capable of fundamentally altering the geography of other species. What if we embraced our capacity to cultivate novel urban ecosystems with more collective intention?
Assisted Migration For Cities
For better or for worse, the world we have inherited, the world we’ll leave to our children is an urban one. Recognizing the realities and disruptions of climate change means exploring new sets of intentions, new frames of mind, and new goals. Rather than fetishizing the protection or re-establishment (at all costs) of what thrived in a particular urban context in the past, we might instead invest our resources and attention on anticipating what might thrive there in the future.
AM for cities offers a hopeful conclusion to this triad and considers an alternative to the retreat of our own species away from cities. In an ironic twist on the very logic of AM, what if the intentional translocation of species in and to our cities help us to ultimately stay put?
AM for cities requires we look at species, not in terms of their geographic origins, but instead on their functional traits. Focusing on traits allows us to consider how and where those traits can be better leveraged in and around our cities and toward specific measures of socio-ecological resilience.
For example, in a hotter, drier future we might focus on drought-tolerant trees with big shady canopies which mitigate urban heat islands and maximize thermal comfort for the neighborhoods below. In an era of insect collapse, fast growing, perennial species with dense above-ground biomass might better support pollinators and viable habitats for other urban invertebrates. In an era of increasing urbanization, more intense storms and erratic stormwater runoff patterns, we must shape and plant our urban landscapes to better capture excess water and pollutants. In an era where human values will continue to matter a great deal, we must design planting and maintenance regimes that balance the need for urban beauty with the imperatives of ecological performance.
In some cases, finding appropriate species may require us to look far afield, and other times the answers may be right in front of us. As urbanization continues to shape the biotic and abiotic factors of terrestrial ecosystems, some common urban species that may be considered weeds today, may in fact become the keystone species of the future, providing a range of services that we don’t currently recognize.
Consider a recent example, beautifully documented by researchers Yuanquiu Feng and Yun Hye Hwang, detailing a dense Mangrove plantation intentionally introduced by informal occupants of a former landfill in the Baseco District in Manila, Philippines. Here, vulnerable urban communities recognized the need for an increased sense of community identity and ecological resilience along a riparian bank that was subject to frequent flooding during the seasonal monsoons.
Atop heaps of Styrofoam, plastic, and other discarded detritus, they cultivated the only space available to them, and it has grown over the course of just 10 years, into a thriving novel urban forest, offering provisioning functions to local residents and significant reduction in flood events. The success of these efforts has even sparked renewed interest in the revitalization of the larger Pasig River network (one of the world’s most polluted), with a number of other projects now underway.
Mangroves in the Baseco District of Manila, Philipines (Source: Yuanquiu Feng and Yun Hye Hwang for Places Journal)
Other higher profile precedents are being developed by Landscape Architect Kate Orff/Scape Studio. Visionary waterfront proposals like Living Breakwaters and Oyster-tecture propose a network of coastal “scaffolding” that allows various aquatic species (including Oysters), to move in and thrive, while simultaneously providing water quality benefits, economic opportunities, and coastal armoring against future storm surges. The bold idea implied here is that we design and provide an armature upon which novel ecosystems emerge over time. We can invite rather than prescribe. We can catalyze new ecosystems rather than merely mourn the loss of historic ones.
Some may dismiss these approaches as overly optimistic hypotheticals. Yet, they are not as untested as they may initially appear. Researchers at Arizona State University recently reported that sunken ships provide the ideal habitat for reef-building corals, citing decades of case studies where accidentally or intentionally sunken vessels have been overtaken by thriving aquatic ecosystems. Could a larger-scale, more intentional version of these approaches (seeded with translocated coral species that can thrive in warmer waters) potentially offset the mass die-off of coral reefs elsewhere?
Oyster-tecture (Source: Kate Orff/Scape Studio)
The Mesquite Mile, a project of which I am a co-collaborator along with Kim Karlsrud, Travis Neel, and Erin Charpentier, employs an AM approach for the purpose of urban afforestation. In this work, we focus on a single iconic species: the Honey Mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa).
The Mesquite has long been considered both a savior and a scourge for ranchers and farmers since the times of early Colonization across the southern High Plains region, providing needed shade and food for livestock during the hottest, driest stretches of summer, but quickly invading open grasslands and pastures when undigested seeds are deposited in the fertile droppings of cattle.
To contemporary farmers and ranchers in West Texas, the Mesquite is largely considered an invasive nuisance tree and is routinely removed through controlled burning, mechanical or chemical means in rural landscapes. Meanwhile, in nearby cities such as Lubbock, there exists an entirely different, and considerably more positive perception of this tree, its value, and its meaning. Urban properties in this semi-arid climate with any kind of tree come at a premium. It’s here in the city that the Mesquite, in particular, is widely known and celebrated for its lore, its delicate foliage, its pollinator-friendly yellow flowers, and its association with smoked meat.
It’s perhaps not surprising that urban trees are associated with increased property values, decreased heating and cooling bills, and higher urban biodiversity. But planting from a sapling can take decades to pay off (if at all). This high level of risk and lengthy time frame are more than many are willing to stomach. It’s this inverted perception of the Mesquite that drives our team toward a (provocatively simple) reciprocal bargain–to carefully facilitate the strategic relocation of these trees from one context to the other, and in so doing maximize their cumulative benefits over time.
Drawing upon over 4 decades of collective experience, we are exploring what is possible when Art, Design, and Science productively collide. Utilizing AM as a mode of public art and public placemaking, we are working with both urban and rural stakeholders to remove nuisance Mesquites from properties in the periphery of Lubbock county and replant them into volunteer front yards in the Heart of Lubbock neighborhood. To view footage of our pilot-scale assisted migration experiment, please follow this link.
These efforts, of course, are not without challenges. The success of any given transplant depends heavily on its size, the season in which it is transplanted (dormant defoliated is best), the underlying health of the tree, and the conditions of its new home. Another important factor is making these efforts palpable to the public by introducing conspicuous aesthetics of sustainability and supplementary programming alongside these interventions to encourage long-term care can be established. Public buy-in is an equally vital aspect of urban sustainability, without which even the best ecological intentions could fall flat. The long-term goal of these efforts is to invite communities to register these actions as contributive to a collective whole that extends beyond the purview of private landscape choices that currently dominate (and atomize) the identity of residential neighborhoods.
Stills taken from documentation of a transplanted Mesquite Tree from Tahoka to Lubbock, TX (Source: The Mesquite Mile, Travis Neel, Erin Charpentier with Commostudio)
We are currently seeking additional funding to increase the scale of our Mesquite migration efforts and amplify the scope of our community engagement. This includes the creation of a public website for the project, a multi-lingual survey assessing public perceptions and needs, and the creation of a larger-scale network of demonstration sites in areas of the greatest need. We intend to track how translocated trees contribute to local biodiversity, hydrologic response, and thermal comfort over time.
Moving into an unsettled future
If the past 200 years of our urban story has been largely about mastering the patterns of settlement, the next 200 years will be marked instead by the patterns and processes of unsettlement. Although, not without controversy, Assisted Migration is one tool in a larger toolbox of strategies that can be aided by more transdisciplinary collaboration as we work toward building resilience in and around our cities. It presents unprecedented and exciting opportunities for Designers, Artists, planners, policymakers, and scientists to take action together. The issues and examples raised here barely scratch the surface. Consider this a call to continue and expand the conversation, here on TNOC, and within our disciplines. How is it that you consider the ethics, aesthetics, and ecological implications of Assisted Migration of, to and for cities?
Compared with other countries, Russia came relatively late to the world of market economy. It was a quite painful process as the Socialist planned economy changed to the demands of the market and working with private investors. Rapid urbanisation and new rules of planning require searching for new approaches to design and management of urban green areas in Russian cities.
St. Petersburg is the second biggest Russian city, with 5 million people. The city is famous as the cultural capital of Russia with its unique historical monuments and museums. The whole central part of the city is protected by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, and there are numerous historical parks and gardens. Green areas cover 7,209 hectares.
Summer Garden is the oldest St. Petersburg green area founded in 1703
These facts leave a mark in policy discussions and require a special approach to the city’s development policy. The main task in central districts of St. Petersburg is, first of all, to protect existing green areas from densification and growing demand for parking. Compared to the central area, with its very dense built infrastructure, districts that were created later during the Soviet era have quite a high amount of green area. But after years of neglect and lack of management these green areas need extensive repair and improvements.
New residential areas constructed in recent areas are often lacking any greening. There is also another trend directly related to urbanization and globalization: a growing suburbia with individual houses that are “eating” surrounding green belt of native forests and coastal landscapes.
One of the Soviet time “microrayon”(microdistrict) founded in late 1960’sNew district constructed in 2000’sNew Russian suburbia in pine forest in the outskirts of St. PetersburgThe main and the oldest street of St. Petersburg-Nevsky ProspectThe Ring Road in St. Petersburg (finished in 2011)
St. Petersburg has experienced tremendous growth of private cars, which has resulted in incredible traffic problems. The Old Baroque city structure is really struggling to accommodate such a number of vehicles. Even construction of the Ring Road has not help to solve traffic jams in the City.
Another recent St. Petersburg phenomenon is directly connected to the new economic situation. Quite a few industrial factories in the central districts are closing and vacated areas are waiting for reuse. Looking at the plan of St. Petersburg it is quite easy to see the limitation of city’s growth. The most important is the Gulf of Finland and a big forest greenbelt.
Map of St. PetersburgPlan of St. Petersburg with Gulf of Finland and Forest Greenbelt
At the moment the most disadvantage of St. Petersburg is isolation of the small central green areas from suburban residential greening (microdistricts — “microrayon” in Russian).
All these factors are contribute to the need for a new strategy of green infrastructure development. We believe that the following principles should be considered for the new sustainable green infrastructure in the city:
Planning of green infrastructure should be an important and integrated part of the overall architectural and urban planning development strategy (master plan) of the city. It is a time for an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating principles of landscape ecology into urban design and planning. Principal St. Petersburg axes (along main streets) started in the central cities should have logical extension into suburban areas.
New infrastructure should not be a random mosaic of different green spaces but interconnected infrastructure. One of the proposals is to create a system of ecological axes along main urban axes. They would start in the city centre with a system of green streets and pedestrian zones, then continue to newer residential areas and finally create relatively large green areas on the intersection of such axes, or lines.
Strengthen the links within the green infrastructure through the development of linear green areas along the main city roads and river embankments. This strategic line has a lot of potential in St. Petersburg, even in the historical central part of the city through organization of pedestrian zones with pockets of vegetation.
One of the important principles of any new green infrastructure strategy is the relative autonomy of the individual parts of the green infrastructure elements. Different types of green areas should penetrate into the most important structural and functional urban planning in each of residential, industrial and recreational units.
The organisation of new park areas in existing residential areas and the newly built up areas.
Greening of embankments in St. Petersburg is restricted due to historical preservation. Most of Neva river embankments is covered by granite and is the part of the historical heritage. However there are still a lot of potential for river’s vegetation restorations of banks in smaller Neva’s tributaries and other minor rivers within city’s boundaries.
There is a lot of potential for ecologically effective and rational organization of inter housing estates (courtyards) which are primary units of green infrastructure in St. Petersburg. For example, even the city centre — very restricted by heritage status — has potential for increasing green areas ratio by introduction of new technologies (e.g., vertical and container gardening, “green roofs” and “green walls”).
Pedestrian Malaya Sadovaya Street in historic centreGranite embankment of St. Petersburg is the part of St. Petersburg Heritage SiteNew strategies for old embankment greeningNew strategies for old embankment greeningNew life of old St. Petersburg inner courtyardsOne of the few green roofs in St. Petersburg — created by enthusiastic citizens
One of the goals today is to increase the level of green areas of St. Petersburg by 150 percent (compared to the present status) by moving some companies and businesses from the historic centre to the suburbs and re-purposing these newly vacant lands. There are quite a few already demolished areas which are planned to become new park areas. This strategic process should include reclamation of areas of former industrial sites and landfills of municipal and industrial waste and their landscape development.
The formal cable factory of Edwards and Kavos in the surrounding park
The lack of land for urban development in St. Petersburg dictates another direction in green infrastructure planning: development of the coastal areas of the Neva River and the Gulf of Finland through the creation of new parks and gardens on the reclaimed lands. Park “300 years of St. Petersburg” is the most recent examples of such areas.
City of St. Petersburg has a lot of potential for designing green corridors along transport lines first of all railways and roads. Design peculiarities of public railroads spaces in St. Petersburg give the opportunities for introducing green areas. For example, spontaneously appeared parking facilities can be relocated to specially designed parking towers and the liberated space can be reuse for green recreational facilities. The most recent Ring Road (bypass) also great great potential by using motorway slopes for greening.
This parking lot could be turned to residential park if a parking tower was created for the cars.
The pressure for private housing developments in the unique forest belt zones required a reexamination of existing legislation and tightening of protections for remnants of native vegetation and nature reserves in general. Thus, we insist on the idea of including water protection zones, sanitary protection zones of enterprises, and protected natural areas into the united green infrastructure system of St. Petersburg.
Existing Network of Special Protected Areas in St. Petersburg in 2005
One of important tools for implementing a new green infrastructure strategy at intermediate scales in real neighboorhoods is using innovative approaches such as ecological design and low impact design principles of stormwater management.
In 2012 we used a typical St. Petersburg suburb, Novoye Devyatkino, as the first case study of implementing principals of Low Impact Development in Russia. Novoye Devyatkino has active residential construction and as a consequence its very limited green spaces face increasing pressure. The traditional approach to the design of the urban environment, promoted in Russia for the last 15 years, follows globalization trends and dramatically changes the face of the territory towards placeless landscapes. This approach usually does not take into account the character of the local plant communities and contributes to the creation of biologically unstable ecosystems.
Novoye Devyatkino site
Low Impact Design has been used in many European, USA, Australian and New Zealand cities. The key task of this design is to create a sustainable environment by using typical local plant communities. We also take into consideration the dynamic character of vegetation as well as respect the natural flow of water and its infiltration into the soil. The project has to deal with stormwater runoff without creating a network of traditional drainage systems, which in our case, is replaced by a chain of “rain gardens”.
One of the main challenges of our conceptual approach is abolishing the idea of a traditional lawn, which requires intensive management and maintenance (weekly mowing, very often herbiciding and pesticiding). Instead, the design proposes creating meadows, requiring a minimum of care and calling for the preservation of biodiversity. The project provides for the use of decorative groups of shrubs and trees, based on a mix of species from natural biomes, which will allow the creation of the “spirit” of the Karelian Isthmus.
Meadows with native plants is one of the design goals in Novoye Devyatkino
The project also proposes a “public garden” where residents of neighboring houses could grow common garden plants and vegetables without using pesticides and fertilizers. We also introduce interactive gardens such as a “Garden of bugs”, “Garden of touch”, and “Garden of Sounds”.
One of the Kew Botanic Gardens exhibits was an inspiration for Novoye Devyatkino designWorkshop with local residents in June 2012. The Novoye Devyatkino project involves local citizens in designing and implementation process and can be seen as a good example for other St. Petersburg areas.
Traditionally, the maintenance and construction of urban green areas in Russian cities is a task of specialized landscape companies (private or municipal). However the experience of European cities, for several years using the concept of ecological design, proves the success of direct involvement of local residents into the design, construction, and maintenance process. By introducing a similar approach we hope to reduce vandalism and increase social interest in maintaining and improving the status of residential areas.
Another positive aspect of this project is its cost effectiveness compared to traditional methods of improvement, as well as the possibility of preserving and increasing the biodiversity of the urban environment.
Maria Ignatieva, Irina Melnichuk & Andrei Bashkirov Uppsala, St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg
A view from the joint meeting of the San Juan ULTRA and the NATURA Early Career Network
Embracing Nature-based Solutions as part of the adaptation toolkit is not a panacea. Rather, it offers a way of thinking that seeks to work with nature rather than against it. Our commitment to transformative NbS likewise does not seek to resolve social differences but to embrace processes through which diverse perspectives and approaches lead to more robust problem formulations and potential solutions.
1. Nature-based Solutions in the Context of San Juan, Puerto Rico
On a sunny day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, life is good. Along the beaches, crabs scuttle in the riprap next to beachgoers posing for selfies on the shore break. Others nap in the shade of fig trees or float in the warm Caribbean waters. Stand-up paddle boarders and kayakers explore the mangroves along the lagoons, where the city’s many small rivers enter the sea. Farther up in the watershed, abuelitas tend to the trees their grandparents planted along the lush riparian “bosques de galería” of the Río Piedras.
Connecting the center of the island to the beaches of San Juan, the Río Piedras watershed embodies both celebration and fear. Heavy rains occasionally transform its calm waters into torrents, inundating the city streets. And when hurricanes hit, the once tranquil sea metamorphoses into a tumultuous and vindictive paramour, unleashing its fury with relentless force.
Puerto Rico has a long history of adapting to and recovering from hurricanes. The devastating back-to-back storms of Irma and Maria in 2017 were unprecedented. They shut down the island’s entire energy grid for months, and nearly half the population lost access to water services. Over 60 people lost their lives during the storms, and while contentious, it is estimated that they led to over 4,500 premature deaths.
Not surprisingly, San Juan residents have a high demand for effective flood protection. They are not alone. In many coastal cities worldwide, these challenges are only increasing in magnitude. The effectiveness of coastal cities responding to the challenges of sea-level rise and extreme weather largely depends on their internal capacities and their relationships with larger networks of resources and expertise.
Nature-based Solutions (NbS)―such as restored agro-ecological systems, forests, wetlands, green roofs, and rain gardens―are increasingly considered as means to enhance coastal, urban, and fluvial flood resilience. Yet they must overcome unfamiliarity and an inertial preference for hard-engineered solutions, such as channelized rivers and sea walls, as well as address perceived conflicts over the use of space in dense urban environments.
In June of 2023, our global NATURA Network of early-career researchers and practitioners organized a workshop to examine how these dynamics play out in the context of San Juan, Puerto Rico. With a wide range of expertise ranging from ecology, art, and design to engineering, urban planning, and philosophy, the group has been focused on collaborative methods for NBS planning and design. In San Juan, they learned about and reflected on ongoing initiatives to co-plan and co-design NbS in the city against the backdrop of large-scale flood mitigation projects pursued by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). One such project centers on the Río Piedras, a biodiverse and socially valued river running through the heart of the city.
Participants of the Early Career Network workshop visiting the site of Río Piedras in San Juan.
2. Río Piedras case study
Following a series of devastating hurricanes in 1978, the Governor of Puerto Rico requested help from the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to design flood control projects across the island. In San Juan, USACE proposed a project to channelize several parts of the city’s main river, the Río Piedras. This “Río Puerto Nuevo Flood Control Project” was approved in 1984 after an Environmental Impact Assessment as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process. The project was subsequently shelved due to lack of funds.
In 2015, the Municipality of San Juan formed a special commission with interdisciplinary scientists who had conducted research on the social-ecological dynamics of the Río Piedras watershed through the San Juan ULTRA network. Their aim was to explore the utilization of green areas in flood management. This collaboration resulted in a municipal resolution that highlighted the importance of urban green areas for flood management, building upon the city’s 2003 Comprehensive Plan, which recognized the importance of ecological corridors as part of the city’s green infrastructure system.
Another outcome of this collaboration was forming the “Alianza del Proyecto de Canalización del Rio Piedras” (Amigos del Río Piedras) coalition. This alliance of NGOs, state and federal agencies, private practitioners, community-based groups, and residents aims to engage more sectors interested in the sustainable management of the watershed. After Hurricane María, the US Congress approved over $4.5 billion for recovery funds for Puerto Rico. Although the release of these funds has been much slower than in other US jurisdictions, with this funding in sight, the long-dormant USACE revived and reactivated its decades-old river channelization plans.
Many residents had forgotten about these plans, which came as a surprise to community members, many of whom did not even recall the over-30-year-old NEPA process being used for project approval. Thus, they were shocked when contractors began initial site investigations and bulldozers started clearing vegetation along the riverbanks. The USACE plan consists of channeling multiple parts of the Río Piedras, renovating and upgrading existing channels and drainage pipes, and removing the “bosques de galería”, all of which would reduce the ecological value of the Río Piedras, and fundamentally alter the beloved character of the river.
Despite being an urban river, the Rio Piedras has surprisingly high biological diversity; ecological surveys have found over 100 species inhabiting the river ecosystem, including rare endemic species like migratory freshwater shrimp, locally known as the Palaemon, which have endured urbanization but escaped the fate of other Puerto Rican rivers dammed for hydropower development.
The Río Piedras with a low water level and extensive herbaceous vegetation along its banks
To respond to the proposed alterations of the ecology and function of the Río Piedras, the Alianza advocates for a more equitable process to analyze the causes, impacts, and options for flood mitigation in the watershed. They aim to develop sustainable solutions that enhance overall climate resilience. But also, including the need for community gatherings, recreation spaces, and extreme heat mitigation documented in a series of publications about citizen knowledge systems and a collaborative knowledge-action network. Recognizing the importance of collaboration, they seek to engage with USACE to address the concerns of local communities through a collaborative process.
An ongoing challenge for the Alianza is ensuring the differences in how San Juan communities experience flooding, as well as their varying access to resources and ability to adapt, are heard and adequately addressed by the USACE and local government. Addressing these internal differences requires sensitivity to those needing immediate flood protection while balancing demands for alternative and greener solutions. Another challenge is the risk that opposing the USACE plan could forfeit funds to address current flooding issues. The Alianza navigates this delicate situation by challenging the project’s assumptions, seeking genuine participation, and ensuring that affected voices are heard.
The top sign warns of a fine for garbage dumping, the bottom sign mentions “The Ecological Corridor of Río Piedras” community project
The top sign warns of a fine for garbage dumping, the bottom sign mentions “The Ecological Corridor of Río Piedras” community project
The Alianza contests several assumptions underlying the USACE plan. Outdated projections for population growth, urban development, low-resolution characterization of land cover, and associated peak flood estimates all mean that the proposed concrete channel is oversized. The Alianza also contends that extensive concrete dikes will lower water levels within the river during dry spells, leaving much of the remaining flow to come from sewer systems that need their own upgrades.
Given USACE’s extensive technical expertise, the Alianza urges them to address these concerns within their modeling and design processes. They want the agency’s unit of “Engineering With Nature” (EWN) to review the project to determine if there are design alternatives to manage flooding in the Río Piedras that incorporate ecological components like green infrastructure. The EWN is becoming a global source of expertise actively seeking to incorporate Natural and Nature-Based Features into flood resilience projects (NNBF), even hosting a symposium in May of 2022. While initially resistant, USACE appears to be increasingly open to collaboration due to sustained pressure from community members, members of Congress, and federal agency representatives.
Broader changes are also at work as USACE’s approach towards flood mitigation evolves, they must also overcome perceived and very real barriers to building rapport and trust with communities that have been colonized over centuries and are skeptical of plans and projects imposed on them.
Overall, the Alianza and the local community are demanding fair and transparent processes for understanding the causes and impacts of flooding, including the relationship between flood mitigation options and the values, fears, and concerns of San Juan residents. These can be addressed by collaboratively building representations of the urban system, more broadly considering social-ecological relationships, and explicitly evaluating how citywide NbS fit within a more comprehensive climate resilience strategy.
This alternative approach contends that flooding of the river is not the main problem, but rather a more complex situation that cannot be resolved with single technological solutions like channelization. Turning the Río Piedras into a channel does not address the causes of flooding nor does it account for climate uncertainty. What’s more, while the Río Piedras channelization was conceived and proposed in isolation, it intersects with numerous other USACE projects for dredging in the San Juan Bay and restoring urban waterways. Nevertheless, the cumulative impacts of these projects on ecosystems or society have not been evaluated.
3. The NATURA Workshop
During the first day of the three-day workshop in San Juan, members of the ECN learned about various proposals for more integrated blue and green infrastructure solutions for flooding in other sections of the city. Several thorny wicked issues were exposed, namely that in very low-lying areas, green infrastructure will not be able to absorb projected flood waters without removing upwards of 30% of buildings within the district. Such wicked trade-offs will likely arise in other low-lying coastal areas, prompting tough conversations around planned retreat and large-scale urban reconfigurations. Cities that can engage in such projects proactively will have a much better chance of weathering accelerating rates of sea level rise and extreme weather than those that are forced to react.
Members of the ECN also explored strategies for collaborative framings of urban flooding challenges and collective envisioning of desired urban and island future scenarios. While the full report from the workshop is forthcoming, initial insights were that often the causes of urban flooding are not due to simple land use changes and hydrology, but rather the political processes that govern land use and flood management. In this view, human decisions around infrastructure and land used create uneven vulnerability and path dependency in how we respond to flood challenges. Similarly, explorations of future scenarios explored the connections between diverse economic sectors like agriculture, materials handling and recycling, manufacturing, and urban planning, and economic and political self-determination. One group even envisioned a resurgence of the Antillean Confederation, or a political organization of small island states in the Caribbean, which would organize for collective well-being through interdependent economic and political development.
Other elements of these futures included complete circular economic development, restoring fisheries by converting submerged buildings into reef habitats, building closed waste-to-energy systems, elevated cable cars and other mass transit options, and even an endemic freshwater shrimp (Palaemon) smart city disco. Such radical departures from the status quo may seem improbable to some, but if we learned anything in our time in San Juan, it is that those without dreams often have their lives dreamt for them. If cities around the world are to transform in advance of climate change, it will be through bold and visionary means that throw off the status quo of complacency in the face of bureaucratic and infrastructural inertia.
Preemptive adaptation in coastal cities requires a transformative approach, embracing the value of local community knowledge and legacies of uneven infrastructure. The power imbalances that skew decision-making processes need to be recognized and confronted. By acknowledging these imbalances, we can work toward developing alternative ways of managing urban watersheds that are more inclusive and equitable. Community members are local experts with memories and lived experiences that must be acknowledged within the development of NbS. Their insights can provide valuable guidance and ensure that solutions are tailored to local needs. Participatory design and planning methods, premised on the notion that local values, experiences, and priorities are legitimate and credible, can effectively help bridge the gap between local preferences and technical planning and design.
4. The Future of NbS in San Juan and Beyond
Against monumental challenges, Puerto Ricans find strength in unity. When the rains pour down and the streets become rivers, neighbors come together to help each other, forming human chains to pass sandbags and protect their homes from the rising water. They open their doors, offering shelter to those displaced by the storm, and share their food and water reserves. Volunteers from all walks of life, armed with shovels and tools, join forces to rebuild what was lost. When the rain ends, the city resonates with the sounds of hammers, saws, and laughter. Working together, communities construct sturdier homes and stronger foundations under the scorching sun and vibrant music, matching the loud colors of murals on buildings and overpasses. Boricuas are creative and resilient people; all they ask is to work together with federal agencies to collaboratively address their concerns while achieving USACE’s mission to protect their lives and property.
The flooding issues of the Rio Piedras are exacerbated greatly in the coastal zone. Like many coastal cities, it inhabits the junction between freshwater rivers, the built environment, and the ceaseless dynamism of the sea. Salt spray and pounding waves leave their marks on buildings and coastal infrastructure, rapidly aging new structures. Freshwater rivers provide a vital lifeline for humans and ecosystems alike can also be overwhelmed by heavy rains. Mangroves and salt marshes are in constant motion. Wave action relentlessly exposes the local bedrock until its erosive force is balanced by sediment delivery from streams and rivers. Coastal cities require continuous human interventions to maintain their form and character: washing the salt spray off the windows, filling the cracks in the sea walls, unclogging the sand from the stormwater system, and dredging harbor channels. Long-term solutions to coastal sea level rise must consider the balances of these titanic and microscopic forces and their relationships to the ecological and built solutions proposed for extreme weather and flood mitigation.
The residents of San Juan are not alone in their struggles. Coastal communities worldwide are grappling with interdependent challenges of rising sea levels, extreme weather, and constraints on resources and imagination available to respond to disastrous events. These factors combine to escalate the frequency and severity of coastal, pluvial, and riverine flooding, endangering lives, and the very fabric of cities, with varying impacts on humans, ecosystems, and the built environment. The coast has always been a dynamic environment; sea level rise exposes the weakness of existing infrastructures and the paradigms that design and maintain them.
Living in an era of unprecedented social inequality and environmental change likewise exposes inequalities in technical capacities and social power required to address climate justice. Embracing NbS as part of the adaptation toolkit does not offer a panacea. Rather, it offers a way of thinking that seeks to work with nature rather than against it. Our commitment to transformative NbS likewise does not seek to resolve social differences but to embrace processes through which diverse perspectives and approaches lead to more robust problem formulations and potential solutions. For better or for worse, coastal communities have always navigated these challenges; their prosperity is drawn from the sea even as they live in the shadow of its storms.
By continuing to build connections across countries, cities, and communities, we in the NATURA ECN hope to bridge dialogue from the global to the local. Our work, including the forthcoming Compendium of Participatory Methods for NbS, will continue to develop tools and approaches to improve human and ecological relationships in an era of unprecedented and rapid transformation.
Zbigniew Grabowski, Laura Costadone, Erich Wolff, Mariana Hernández, Yuliya Dzyuban, Marthe Derkzen, and Loan Diep Hartford, Norfolk, Singapore, Sacramento, Singapore, Arnhem/Nijmegen, New York City
Dr. Laura Costadone is an Assist. Research Professor at Old Dominion University for the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience. Laura brings her expertise in co-design and co-create pathways to uptake and implement urban sustainable development goals by engaging directly with municipalities, practitioners, decision-makers, and citizens.
Erich Wolff is a Research Fellow at the Earth Observatory of Singapore and the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore. His research delves into the challenges of implementing nature-based solutions in the Asia Pacific region and explores the role of communities in the development of green infrastructure.
Mariana Hernández is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Her areas of expertise include biodiversity conservation, multi-criteria analysis, vulnerability and resilience of complex systems, socio-environmental studies in global south cities, and scientific communication to inform decision-making processes and foster positive environmental outcomes.
Dr. Yuliya Dzyuban is a Research Fellow at Singapore Management University for the Cooling Singapore 2.0 project exploring the impact of vegetation on urban climate and perception of heat. Her area of expertise lies in using mixed-methods approaches to uncover relationships between urban morphology, microclimate, and human wellbeing.
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.
Loan is a researcher in environmental studies. Her work is centered on the development of cities that are green and inclusive of communities, most particularly those trapped in marginalizing systems. Her PhD focused on green infrastructure for rivers in informal settlements of São Paulo.
The NATURA ECN would like to thank Tischa Munoz-Erickson, Elvia Melendez, Miriam Toro Rosario, Cynthia Manfred (Guarda Río), and others in San Juan ULTRA and the Alianza for the opportunity to learn about flooding and NbS issues in San Juan.
Two typical views of San Juan’s ocean frontCoastal stormwater infrastructure bisecting one of San Juan’s sandy beaches.relic limestone and coral exposed along a sea wall in San JuanOne of San Juan’s numerous vibrant murals, “El Batey” (1976) by the artist Rafael Rivera
“We will never forget.” After September 11 (2001), this claim was made in countless political speeches, memorial eulogies, bumper stickers, carved stones, tattoos, and tee-shirts.
But we do forget. Time rolls on. We age. New people are born who have no lived experience of the tragic occurrences of that day. So too, does the landscape change. New buildings rise, trees grow, roads are built. We exist in an on-going cycle of disturbance and recovery. As such, our lives and our landscapes are constantly shifting in new and different ways.
So what happens to the places that were purposively set-aside as spaces of remembrance? How do they change or persist? What role do they play in the lives of their creators, their stewards, and their users as we move further in time away from a particular event? These are the questions that we are exploring as we re-visit sites associated with the Living Memorials Project. These sites are community-based memorials that use nature (from single tree plantings, to park dedications, to forest restoration projects, to labyrinths, to community gardens) to commemorate September 11, 2001.
Living memorials exist all across the country, but are concentrated in the areas surrounding the crash sites: the New York City metropolitan area, the Washington, D.C.-Virginia area, and near Shanksville, PA. Many of them were created in the immediate days and months following September 11, on much quicker timelines than the formal, state-led built memorials that are now dedicated and open to the public at these sites. The Living Memorials Project was funded by the USDA Forest Service to provide community grants to stewardship groups and conduct research to understand changes in the use of the landscape post-September 11. In many cases, the creation and maintenance of these sites was led by civic groups—from informal groups of friends to formalized nonprofits—who sought to create a more immediate, accessible, and local response to the event. (To search a list of these sites, visit the National Registry. To read 12 journeys through these Living Memorials, visit Land-Markings. To learn more about the social meanings of community-based memorials in the ‘pre-memorial period, read this article.) So, unlike the Gettysburg Battlefield or the built monuments on the National Mall that are meant to remain in perpetuity in a fixed image, these sites may be more malleable in response to local changes and needs—both because of their physical form as nature-based sites and because of their governance as often civic-led spaces.
The Living Memorials Project national map shows the spatio-temporal patterns of memorials across the country and over time, from 2002-2006. Map created by Urban Interface and the US Forest Service.
Starting next year, we plan to systematically return to a sample of the 113 stewardship groups that we interviewed and the nearly 700 sites that we documented nationwide. We began that process earlier this summer at the request of documentary filmmaker, Scott Elliott, who is creating a film called The Trees. In seeking to tell the story of the memorial forest at the World Trade Center, Scott learned of the hundreds of community-based sites that use trees, plants, and nature to memorialize the event and wanted to visit a few. So we selected two sites in the New York City area that we hadn’t formally interviewed or interacted with since 2006, not knowing what we would find.
The trip inspired us as researchers about the power of these sites and reinforced some important lessons about community stewardship as it persists over time. In particular, our visits to two sites have reinforced our appreciation for the persistence, responsiveness, and adaptability of civic stewardship. We see that community-managed spaces can be sustained throughout the passage of time, changes in leadership, changes in the economy, and even changes in climate. We’d like to share some reflections….
Tribute Park, Rockaway, NY
One common concern about community-led stewardship is that it is temporary or fleeting—as many informal groups are small in terms of staff and budgets, are volunteer-powered, and lack the institutional authority of government. Yet, Tribute Park shows the persistence of community stewardship even in the face of leadership transitions and major disasters.
The site was created, starting in 2002, by the local Chamber of Commerce. It was a vacant, waterfront lot, on the Jamaica Bay side of the Rockaway Peninsula. Just blocks from the busy, public beach on the Atlantic Ocean side, the Bay side of the Peninsula always offered a more quiet space for interacting with nature through viewing, fishing, and crabbing. On September 11, members of the public gathered along the bay, including at the vacant lot, to view the smoldering World Trade Center (WTC) towers. The Chamber of Commerce envisioned a contemplative space that would reflect the seaside character of the Rockaways and would uniquely commemorate the victims of the Rockaways. The peninsula lost a number of residents that day—including many members of the uniformed services—as well as downtown workers in New York City’s financial district.
Tribute Park site in 2002-2003. Credit: Living Memorials Project National Registry.
Since then, a new group has emerged to tend the site—The Friends of Tribute Park. Still powered by volunteers, many of whom are retired residents of the Rockaways, the care for the site is clear. They have added new elements to the park—including a piece of WTC steel that they had to go to court in order to secure and install. Every Tuesday morning, from 8:30-10:00am—in remembrance of when the planes struck the WTC towers, they hold volunteer stewardship days, where anyone from the public can come and help take care of the site. Bernie Coburn of Friends of Tribute Park called the site a “hands on park” that will keep changing over time as the group works to “maintain beauty with a personal touch.” When asked whether he considers the site a sacred space, he said that it was, because it is “a living project—I live for it.” Clearly, the ongoing stewardship and maintenance of the site—perhaps more so than the physical form or the symbolism or design—makes the site sacred.
Tribute Park in 2014, with members of Friends of Tribute Park, the documentary film crew for The Trees, and the Fire Department of New York. Credit: Living Memorials Project National Registry.
The site also endured and persisted through Hurricane Sandy, which inundated the entire peninsula of the Rockaways. While many residents were struggling to rebuild their homes and restore their lives, stewards also took the time to help restore Tribute Park—because they knew that the site was an important gathering space and community resource that merited rebuilding. In addition, the NYC Parks Department provided crucial personnel and heavy equipment, showing that civic stewardship does not work in the absence of government support. Indeed, the volunteers told us that NYC Parks’ crews visit the site weekly to assist with maintenance of the site. While the initial creation of the park was civic-led—with civic stewards operating as a unique form of “first responder” to the 9/11 tragedy, they still work in partnership with state through grant funding, regulatory compliance, and general maintenance. We see that these public-private partnerships exist at many scales and in many contexts. Just as the flagship parks of Central Park and Prospect Park have their prominent private partners—the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance, so too does this tiny, 30,000 square foot site have the Friends of Tribute Park, which ensures its care and upkeep.
New Jersey’s Grove of Remembrance, Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ
Community-based stewardship is often expressed in vacant lots and community gardens—sites that are outside the reach or care of the state or the market or that are deliberately managed via community control. Discussing the case of the North Brooklyn post-industrial waterfront in the 1990s, Daniel Campos writes about these moments in time and space as an “Accidental Playground”—where members of the public have the ability and autonomy to create, shape, and manage the use of space. Once the state and the market come back in, even in a case where a formal park is designated as it was in North Brooklyn—the role for the public tends to shift from creator/steward/manager to “user”. The Liberty State Park memorial, however, is a unique example of ongoing civic stewardship within a designated state park.
Liberty State Park planting day in 2003. Credit: Living Memorials Project National Registry.
When community stewardship occurs on parkland, it can range from one-time, large-scale volunteer tree planting days to decades long dedication by ‘friends of the park’ groups, alliances and coalitions. The Grove of Remembrance at Liberty State Park was born out of the spirit of long-time community stewardship and created via hundreds of volunteer arborists, 9/11 family members, New Jersey residents, and Friends of Liberty State Park who came together to help plant this 10 acre former brownfield site with 691 trees (to honor all of the New Jersey victims who perished). These volunteer events are filled with the excitement and energy of getting hands dirty and “doing something.” Indeed, both authors participated in the planting of this site, and we feel materially and physically connected to its creation.
The ongoing care and attention of the nonprofit New Jersey Tree Foundation (NJTF) over the past 10 years has created opportunities for the public to continue to be involved. NJTF is primarily responsible for the maintenance of the site, though it is on state land, so we see an example of hybrid governance at work. Thus NJTF uses its own staff and its partnerships with civic, private, and school groups to help maintain the site. For example, NJTF has worked with area schools to use the grove as a space for environmental education. Area students learn about the life cycle of trees and plants, starting seedlings in their classroom, and then coming to the grove to engage in planting and maintenance.
Another pattern we see repeated with these sacred sites of social meaning: people go above and beyond their traditional professional roles and see their engagement with sites as a form of ‘giving back’ voluntarily. Working via NJTF, the professional arborist and forestry community in New Jersey has effectively “adopted” the site—donating thousands of hours of services, labor, and expertise. Like Tribute Park, the waterfront Grove of Remembrance was also flooded and heavily affected by Hurricane Sandy. The site is directly adjacent to a marina and after the storm, entire boats were found stranded and overturned inside the grove. Heavy equipment was required to remove the boats, remove the downed trees that could not be saved, and right the trees that could be saved. Volunteer arborists were involved in all stages of the Sandy recovery of the grove, making tree assessments, removals, and continuing to monitor the site over time.
What is even more unique is when we see signs of individual acts of stewardship and care that occur outside the frame of these formal events and programs. The ability to embrace these acts as healthy and productive forms of engagement, rather than intrusion into the authorities of the land manager, requires an ethos that is open to community action, voice, and power. Lisa Simms of the NJTF showed us examples of “guerrilla plantings” that occurred in the grove—people have brought bushes and flowers and are planting in the understory to complete the grove through their individual acts. Lisa pointed out the flowers that she, herself, planted from her home garden. These are examples of the public intimately engaging with the space, adopting it, and transforming it. This type of engagement, regardless of whether it deviates from the master plan, is welcome in places like this as stewards are more interested in cultivating an attachment to place rather than viewing a ‘pristine’ ecological restoration site.
Liberty State Park in 2014. Top: Lisa Simms of New Jersey Tree Foundation speaks to the filmmakers. Bottom, left: guerrilla planting in the understory. Bottom, right: trees that sustained damage during Sandy. Credit: Living Memorials Project National Registry.
* * *
Through these visits, we can see the crucial connection between the need for unplanned space, the role for community stewards, and the ability for neighborhoods (people and places) to cope with change. Thus, stewardship can be understood as a mechanism for cultivating social-ecological resilience. While there are many forms of community stewardship in community gardens, street trees, waterways, and vacant lots—we know that these living memorials are special and even sacred places. They are imbued with the memories and intentions of their creators who sought to set aside land for remembrance, healing, and community cohesion.
One issue to explore in our ongoing longitudinal research is whether this persistence and adaptability is a broad-based trend. It is entirely possible that the need for and meaning of some sites is temporary and short-lived. Thus far, our investigations have found the opposite. Instead, we found a dedicated cadre of neighbors and friends keeping vigil in a waterfront park in Queens and a forest growing across the river from the former World Trade Center site. Finally, a key question is whether and how this sense of deep attachment to place and people can be cultivated, expressed, and celebrated outside of the context of disturbance and tragedy? What can we take from the horribly singular experience of 9/11 that translates to how we care for the land and its people every day?
Lindsay K. Campbell and Erika S. Svendsen
New York City
Dr. Erika Svendsen is a social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station and is based in New York City. Erika studies environmental stewardship and issues related to hybrid governance, collective resilience and human well-being.
“Happy Hour at the Green Man” by Kate Wing, read by Lucy Symons A small bar in the middle of the city has a portal to an ancient ghost forest.
“Where Grass Grows Greener” by Jenni Juvonen, read by Nora Achrati The narrator explores a forest and meets a fox.
The stories are read, and then authors Kate and Jenni are joined for discussion by David Maddox.
POSTPONED TO MARCH. Date TBD
Nora Achrati is a voice actress based in Washington, DC.
Voice over artist Lucy Symons has had a varied and peripatetic life – spending a couple of decades on the continent of North America and an equal number in Britain.
“Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour” is a monthly series of readings from TNOC’s collection of very short fiction about future cities. Each episode is 30 minutes and features two readings and then a conversation between the authors and an urban practitioner.The stories are drawn from the book of flash fiction (less than 1000 words) on future cities TNOC and partners created, called “A Flash of Silver Green”. Previously recorded Episodes can be explored also: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/conversations/
We read two stories: Claire Stanford’s “Neither Above Nor Below” and Elizabeth Twist’s “May Apple”. Both stories were prize winners in the original Stories of The Nature of Cities 2099 contest.
The Stories are read by actors Howard Overshown and Dori Legg.
Authors Claire and Elizabeth are then joined for conversation by ICLEI’s Paul Currie from the Biodiversity Centre in Cape Town.
“Neither Above Nor Below” Hasan chases a turtle around the waterways of a flooded Jakarta. Read by Howard Overshown
“May Apple” Sammie receives her seeds to look after on her 21st birthday. Read by Dori Legg
“Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour” is a monthly series of readings from TNOC’s collection of very short fiction about future cities. Each episode is 30 minutes and features two readings and then a conversation between the authors and an urban practitioner.
Elizabeth Twist writes speculative fiction, some of it dark, some of it dreamy. She loves the wobbly line that separates the known from the unknown. Her work has appeared in NonBinary Review, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, and most recently in The Fiends in the Furrows II: More Tales of Folk Horror. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Find her on Twitter @elizabethtwist.
Paul Currie is a Director of the Urban Systems Unit at ICLEI Africa. He is a researcher of African urban resource and service systems, with interest in connecting quantitative analysis with storytelling and visual elicitation.
The read stories are Rym Kechacha’s “Old Father Thames” and Alyssa Eckles’ “Uolo and the Idol”. The Stories are first read, then authors Rym and Alyssa then join David Maddox for conversation.
“Old Father Thames”by Rym Kechacha The narrator gets swept away by Old Father Thames after playing on a riverbank and ignoring a flood warning. Read by Lucy Symons (London).
“Uolo and the Idol” by Alyssa Eckles Uolo discovers an idol of a woman while fishing in the automobile reef. Read by Bernadette Dunn (New York).
“Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour” is a monthly series of readings from TNOC’s collection of very short fiction about future cities. Each episode is 30 minutes and features two readings and then a conversation between the authors and an urban practitioner.
Rym Kechacha is a writer and teacher living in Norwich, UK. Her debut novel, Dark River, was published this year by Unsung Stories. Find her on twitter @RymKechacha
“A Child of the Oasis” by Ari Honavar, read by Nora Achrati A mother and daughter meet an undocumented refugee on their annual ride to the father’s Remembrance Wall.
“Not Icarus” by Michael Harris Cohen, read by Dori Legg A grandmother defies social law by killing birds to try to save her granddaughter from disease.
The stories are read, and then authors Ari and Michael are joined by social scientist Laura Shillington, a researcher and practitioner whose work in Canada and Central America often concerns children and families.
Nora Achrati is a voice actress based in Washington, DC.
Dori Legg is an actress currently living in New York City.
“Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour” is a monthly series of readings from TNOC’s collection of very short fiction about future cities. Each episode is 30 minutes and features two readings and then a conversation between the authors and an urban practitioner.
Michael Harris Cohen has stories in The Dark, F(r)iction, Catapult’s Tiny Crimes, and Conjunctions. He’s received a Fulbright grant and fellowships from The Djerassi Foundation, Art OMI, and Jentel. His first book, The Eyes, was published by Mixer Publishing. He teaches writing and literature at the American University in Bulgaria.
Laura Shillington is faculty in the Department of Geoscience and the Social Science Methods Programme at John Abbott College (Montréal). She is also a Research Associate at the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre, Concordia University (Montréal).
Stormwater is a topic of great interest, especially now that the plight of water has been heightened by environmental pollution, dwindling resources, and growing frequency of severe storm events. What was once considered to be a nuisance or of little consequence has become the focus of city leaders around the world, triggering a call to action to support the better management of the critical, life giving natural resource: water. Artful Rainwater Design: Creative Ways to Manage Stormwater is a timely book that provides insight into the strategies, implementation methods, design parameters, and amenities that creative stormwater design can yield.
The discussion of stormwater management has evolved over the past twenties years and with the emergence of Artful Rainwater Design (ARD), a rebranded, specialty focus of stormwater infrastructure, suggests that not only can we achieve improved utilitarian benefits from this form of engineering, but when integrated as a feature design element of open space, can provide an added amenity with a multitude of benefits to the community. To this point, the book looks at these two overarching themes of rainwater design—amenity and utility—as a means to isolate and reflect on the virtues of ARD within both pragmatic and social realms. Separating these two realms thereby allows the audience, whom the authors describe as “rainwater management designers”, to understand the information and become inspired by these implementable solutions, which are illustrated and explained through the collection of built project references.
Before diving into particular projects, the authors are careful to define the word ‘amenity’ as well as how it can be understood in context of ARD. For the sake of the book, they note that the definition has two “inherent limitations” based on 1) that attractiveness or value is based on human appreciation (as opposed to “wildlife”) and 2) the measure of attractiveness is based on our understanding of mainstream United States of America’s tastes in landscape beauty. This comment reveals that the target audience is not “rainwater management designers” generally, but those designers specifically practicing in the United States.
In this way, the book provokes the question–what are the aesthetic choices and values placed on working in the certain context of the United States vs. other places throughout the world? How do cultural values directly or indirectly identify a ‘sense of water’ through choices of design expression (form, material, texture, color, etc.)? In the case of ‘green infrastructure’, the added layer of plant material, as a designed ecology or part of a larger environmental restoration effort, has the opportunity to portray the intent of ARD and to suggest its belonging to a particular biome (riparian, coastal, wetland, dry wash, etc.) While the book provides a ‘toolkit’ of ideas to achieve amenity and utility driven goals, the challenge relies on the designer to recognize the importance of choosing the appropriate design solution and plant material(s) that are compatible with the frequency and volume of stormwater that the system is designed to manage. Additionally, the designer will need to make an aesthetic decision based on the client/owner’s cultural acceptance of ‘landscape’, and within that, the sense of beauty found within landscape which are designed to be ‘natural’ vs. ‘built’. While amenity is framed in a particular way related to ARDs, the more significant value is triggering one’s awareness that the ARD is intended to improve the management of stormwater and potentially create a reference for the user to engage with.
The book, which has the look and feel of a textbook (in a helpful reference sense), is divided into four parts—Part 1) History and Background, Part 2) Achieving Amenity, Part 3) Achieving Utility, and Part 4) Case Studies. The projects described in Artful Rainwater Design are repeatedly referred to throughout the various parts of the book, which serves the authors’ purpose: to reveal the multi-beneficial nature of ARD as well as to express how goals and objectives can be met through various stormwater management techniques. Midway through the book, the authors present a means to identify and cross correlate the goals, objectives, and techniques through a diagram (Table 3.1 The complex web of ARD utility goals, objectives, and techniques on page 103) which becomes the basis for explaining the assortment of techniques found in Part Three. I found this diagram to be particularly intriguing; it has the potential to serve as a key organizational feature for the book, suggesting a sense of decision making based on values from both amenities and utilities that the book offers.
Part 1: The History of Stormwater Management and Background for Artful Rainwater Design is an important beginning for readers to place stormwater management into a historical context. The authors trace the original aim of stormwater management, which was driven by basic engineering aims (drain water as efficiently as possible; protect from flooding) and narrate how the practice is moving towards a more holistic and less infrastructure-dependent practice. Motivated by early practices of “defensive planning”, stormwater management was formerly considered a means of protection against nature, delineating a defensive boundary to protect from flooding and, as a result, creating a hermetic seal around development. Echols and Pennypacker point to the change in attitude towards stormwater management that was triggered by the environmental movement of the 1960s, and that reached new heights with the release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969), both of which cast a greater awareness that water quality and environmental pollution were interconnected. The authors explain that this awareness by the science community and federal oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which led to the Clean Water Act in 1972, represented the initial steps to more widespread acknowledgement of and the development of a regulatory framework for non-point pollution. Non-point pollution would become the operative lens through which ARD approaches would unfold—finding a means to “green” more urbanized areas and to capture and treat the “first flush” (or first ½ inch to 1 ½ inches of rainfall) of pollutants before they made their way into the tributary system. With better environmental analysis and understanding of non-point pollution, ‘stormwater management’ came to include quality in addition to (flood) control, necessitating the rethinking of conventional stormwater management systems.
Towards the end of Part 1, the authors indirectly define Artful Rainwater Design (ARD) as a strategy that conceives of “…sustainable stormwater management that is not only visually appealing but also informative about the way it manages rain.” This strategy became a movement in the 1990s as the cities of Portland and Seattle sought to make their stormwater infrastructural systems more adept at achieving higher water quality for the sake of threatened environmental species, as well as to allow people to better understand and appreciate how water is handled in urban and suburban areas. While the word ‘artful’ may be subjective, the term “Artful Rainwater Design” provides a non-technical means of packaging the virtues of this new form of infrastructure, which can bring such amenities as community and social benefits. The term encapsulates the multi-beneficial aspects that Artful Rainwater Design can bring and the ideas it promotes, which readers can explore in their own work.
Amenity, expressed through Artful Rainwater Design. Image: Echols
Within Part 2:Achieving Amenity with Artful Rainwater Design, the authors discuss many so-called “amenity” goals found within the practice of landscape design. For the purposes of the book, the goals are specific to the ARD projects featured therein, including: Education, Recreation, Safety, Public Relations (PR), and Aesthetic Richness. Based on these goals, the authors gleaned specific objectives and associated them with the various techniques deployed in the ARD designs. For each goal, the authors provide a table breaking down the various objectives and coupling them with various design techniques, yielding a helpful quick reference for the reader. This design palette of techniques is subsequently translated through the case study projects, which illuminate the possible variation in creating amenities that transcend traditional realms of site design and move into realms of architecture, art, and street design.
Utility, diagrammatically portraying Artful Rainwater Design. Image: Echols and Maurer
Part 3:Achieving Utility with Artful Rainwater Design, begins with an overview of utility and how to distinguish stormwater management from stormwater treatment. Treatment is “a subset of management that addresses water quality.” I appreciated the author’s note that “..the utility strategies used in ARD are ones that promote stormwater management that clearly celebrates rain.” This is fundamental to their objective of creating awareness about water as a resource on which we depend; such awareness is greatly needed within our communities, particularly in our more urbanized neighborhoods. I would urge that ARD utility strategies are a celebration of water ; they promote and instill a sense of stewardship and a means of direct/indirect learning about how to support a healthier environment.
Part 4: Case Studies of Artful Rainwater Design, the appendix section, provides a helpful profile for each project included in the book. These profiles comprise: the background story (basis for the project, owner/client discussion, funding), both amenity and utility goals are identified as easily readable graphic icons, an in-depth description of both amenity and utility attributes of the project, concluding notes, and the sources for each case study. Information on the project site’s related climate data as well as the construction costs would be greatly appreciated addition for the book’s next edition. As a Southern California native,living with multi-year periods of prolonged drought, I would have found it interesting and beneficial for the authors to have included information on each project’s climate—particularly rainfall—and implementation costs. It is without question that water is everyone’s concern. However, for areas that see very little rainfall whatsoever, it is even more important to illuminate to the public and to convince landowners that every drop of water that lands on a site area needs to be accounted for. Any storm water management design should allow for the value of that water to be maximized.
This book achieves its goal—to explain and express the opportunities that are afforded by Artful Rainwater Design. As a landscape architect and urban designer, I hope that the authors return to this topic and take a deeper look at questions that arise in the (professional) industry, including performance metrics, cost-benefit analyses, and challenges placed on these systems over time. As many cities are faced with rising costs for maintenance and capital expenditures, providing both direct and indirect cost benefits (or means of describing these benefits in terms of their monetary value) to the policy makers along with a description of anticipated costs over the life of a project would provide the incentive to include these exciting advancements in stormwater infrastructure early on, enabling more creative design expressions while securing a healthier environment.
Overall, this book is a worthwhile read and a useful reference for “rainwater management designers”, including professional (and student) landscape architects, engineers, and architects. I am also hopeful that, given the book’s open-ended title, it will find its way into the hands of policy makers, city managers, and community builders at large here in the U.S.A. and abroad, providing more creative means to achieve a healthier, visually rich, water-responsive landscape.
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.
Pippin Anderson, Cape TownWe need to have an excellent plot, believable or at least striking characters, conflict (ok, no shortage of that in science), and (perhaps most relevant) resolution that gives hope, direction, and instruction.
Skylar R. Bayer, AnchorageDespite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Nic Bennett, AustinThere is already a lot of amazing fanfiction about science. People are literally writing themselves into science stories. Recognition by powerful institutions of these science story remixes would increase belonging in these spaces. Fanfiction about science, by people who don’t usually see themselves in science, has the potential to disrupt usual knowledge and power relations.
David Bunn, VancouverA truly social-ecological form of science will be able to combine the insights of data and of stories. As climate change forces species and populations to seek out new habitats, urbanizing populations on the edge of conservation zones, whether in Kenya, Brazil, or Nepal will increasingly seek out occult explanations for ecological phenomena.
Lindsay Campbell, New YorkI am humbled by what I have learned from curators and artists about how to convey ideas, emotion, and complexity in a way that grabs and holds the audience.
Marcus Collier, DublinThe ideal situation would be to bring the potency and alluring qualities of traditional storytelling together with the conveying of our scientific findings.
Sarah Ema Friedland, New YorkReality is much more interesting than oversimplified, packaged, and commodified stories. The stories we tell about reality, including and especially scientific reality, cannot be contained by formulaic storytelling. Instead, nuance and difference should inform the way we tell stories.
Bram Gunther, New YorkLike any narrative that is built around the unfamiliar, communicating our story of rewilding suburban yards, campuses, commercial, and institutional spaces, is challenging.
Madhu Katti, RaleighScience continues to hold the power to help humanity shape a brighter future. But scientists need to relearn the key elements of stories and tell good stories. Stories that don’t erase personalities and cultures, stories that evoke emotion in the listeners and draw them deeper.
Tim Lüschen, BerlinNew collaborators are essential. We should form partnerships that have not existed before, creating a novel effect for the audience. Why not collaborate with more-than-human beings? Let them take center stage in ways and media that have yet to be explored.
Paul Mahony, ManchesterSmall stories have real potential for carrying messages. Because they’re normal. Just like us.
Bethann Garramon Merkle, Laramie Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Claudia Misteli, BarcelonaNo matter what discipline or field of knowledge you belong to, have you never seen yourselves trying to explain complex ideas, and in the end, you realize that everything you have said sounds incomprehensible or unclear to others? We want people to understand us and to feel that we have the ability to transfer knowledge.
Steward Pickett, PoughkeepsieWhat keeps coming to mind are powerful moments of noticing. Perhaps that is because I believe science to be, at its heart, a particularly deep and careful way of noticing the world―sometimes even what is hidden behind the surface of the world.
Alice Reil, MunichIf many of us would share our personal stories and emotional connections to our natural surroundings with our neighbours, would we all be more motivated to protect them even more? I’m now visualising little printed stories scattered across communities, which enable neighbours or passers-by to read how a particular tree or green space is meaningful to fellow citizens.
Daniela Rizzi, FreiburgDespite its potential, storytelling is not widely utilized in scientific communication. However, science should not just be about cold facts and figures; it has the power to change lives, protect our environment, and shape our future. That sounds like a good story.
Kirsten Schwarz, Los AngelesFor me, the most compelling science stories are the ones that share the humanity of the work, the humanity of those doing the work, the humanity of those impacted by the work (for good or bad), the aspects that connect us, the emotions.
Priya Shukla, Davis Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Ania Upstill, New YorkScientific writing often seems to assume that for something to be taken seriously, it must be dry and fact-based. The more seriously written something is, the more true it is. But what if that wasn’t the only way to go about it?
Evelyn Valdez-Ward, Kingston Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, ParisMark Fisher famously wrote that it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what comes after it. I wish that more scientific literature embraced speculation and affabulation as methods to talk about the worlds that we want; help us imagine a diversity of (past, present, and future) non-extractive worlds.
Ibrahim Wallee, AccraThe people’s voice matters in validating development outcomes, be it positive or negative. Telling their story is essential and even more crucial in building trust.
Tommy Cheemou Yang, New YorkStorytelling asks us to see that change does not come from the expert but from the mundane acts that cascade into large movements creating change.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director.
What if we explored a rich storytelling approach to knowledge from science and practice? Human-scale stories. Stories with emotional resonance. Dare I say it? Even entertaining stories. Stories that connect to people who perhaps are not “experts” in whatever field, but nevertheless have a real stake in the decisions and outcomes.
There are five key elements to just about every story: plot, setting, characters, point of view, and conflict (that is, a tension that presents itself). We typically use all of these when we recount a story or event to our family and friends, at least subconsciously. (“Hey mom, I went to the corner store for milk and ran into a weird scientist planting a red maple tree. Turns out he is my Uncle Bob. I didn’t know I had an uncle. What’s up with that?”) Beyond these five elements, there are many different ways to tell a story, in various formats or styles. Mystery. Surprise. Comedy. Tragedy. Graphic. Theatre. Fiction. Direct address. Song. Folk tale. There are, as we all know, many kinds of “story”.
But we don’t use such techniques in science. Why not? Work in science and practice contains much important and interesting information for a general and policy-making public that is larger and wider than traditional scientific modes of delivery reach (e.g., journals, scholarly books, reports, case studies). Much of it lies fallow, only available to small groups of “experts”. Journalism has been one route to wider audiences, but it is limited. Science has lost its knack for communicating with the public just when we need it most.
What if we explored a rich storytelling approach to knowledge from science and practice? Human-scale stories. Stories with emotional resonance. Dare I say it? Even entertaining stories. Stories that connect to people who perhaps are not “experts” in whatever field, but nevertheless have a real stake in the decisions and outcomes, and so deserve to have access to the knowledge that supports (or does not) decision making.
Examples of storytelling approaches to science exist, but they are rare compared to the total volume of output in science. Could we take something from this approach to communicate science and practice to a wider audience?
At TNOC we have been very interested in fiction-based or art-centered storytelling about issues based in science and practice. Our recent NBS Comics project (“nature to save the world!”) is an example, and in a previous roundtable we explored visual storytelling as an evocative approach to environmental and social justice conversations. Entertaining and human-scale stories can be satisfying sources of basic knowledge and inspiration. For readers interested in more, they can also be doors through which people can pass into realms of more technical knowledge. This is the approach we take in our art exhibits as well, so that they become art[+science+practice] exhibits.
Examples of storytelling approaches to science exist, but they are rare compared to the total volume of output in science. Could we take something from this approach to communicate science and practice to a wider audience?
So, we asked a group of scientists, practitioners, and artists this: If you were to approach some aspect of a work of science or practice — perhaps your own work — as a story, what would you do? What form would you use? Would you seek out new collaborators? How would you tell the story of your work?
What could we achieve with such a novel, more “popular” approach to science communication?
It is as if we have come to believe that for a science story to be true it must sober and direct, humorless and impersonal; complicated and technical. Such an approach underestimates the general public. What if, as Ania Upstill asks in this roundtable, we stretched our imaginations beyond what we think a story of science should be, to what such a story could be?
Pippin Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, is an African urban ecologist who enjoys the untidiness of cities where society and nature must thrive together.
FULL BIO
We need to have an excellent plot, believable or at least striking characters, conflict (ok, no shortage of that in science), and (perhaps most relevant) resolution that gives hope, direction, and instruction.
I agree stories bring in magic that is missing in science reporting
I was a young graduate student and attending my first conference (it was the annual meeting of the South African Association of Botanists, I think). The last presentation in the session had been by a professor who was well known to me from my own undergraduate days, and it was just one of those presentations that “pops”. This professor had been an excellent lecturer, and a firm favourite with every class, which I had always put down to his colossal intellect. I was in the bathrooms just after the presentation and overheard some women talking outside my stall: “Eish, that Prof Bond, he always tells a lekker* story. I could listen to him all day.”
I was dumbstruck. That was his trick — he was a storyteller! It had never occurred to me but the magic he was weaving was stories. He was managing to take fire ecology, evolutionary theory, or reproductive ecology, and weave in a protagonist, a challenge, disappointment, and resolution, all in a manner that was so cunning and skilled that we never even noticed. This was the first time it occurred to me that good science is even better when packaged in a format that draws the reader effortlessly along.
I think we do tell stories
Later, while still a graduate student (it seemed to go on for years), I got a job with University of Cape Town’s Writing Centre. After serving time at the front of house, I moved to focus on postgraduate writing. I was introduced to the “Once upon a time …” exercise, used to guide postgraduate writers in preparing their papers or thesis chapters. Here it was Professors Arlene Archer and Lucia Thesen (perhaps the fairy godmothers of my own story) who reminded me that science is best presented as a story. They made me aware of the relationship we have with our readers and the responsibility of fulfilling promises and expectations in the often-opaque writer-reader contract. They introduced me to this exercise to use with postgraduate students and it is one I have pulled out every single year since then (see the image).
But are we really fulfilling the story element? Are we enthralling our readers, making them come back for more, and getting our final point to a wider audience?
The ‘Once upon a time …’ exercise.
But we tell them badly
The “Once upon a time …” exercise is a good one and a useful reminder of the expectation of scientific writing. But we are falling short in our story-telling abilities (responsibilities?). While we are told that a good story has plot, characters, conflict, and resolution, evidently there must be more than this to really draw in one’s audience. We need to have an excellent plot, believable or at least striking characters, conflict (ok, no shortage of that in science), and (perhaps most relevant) resolution that gives hope, direction, and instruction.
Indeed, in science writing, we are often told not to provide resolution, but to keep an open-end to allow for a natural point of departure for the next paper. We foster a soap-opera culture, where sometimes it feels the story will never end.
Good stories are well written. Heaven knows we are all familiar with a poorly told story. Of course, the apprenticeship lies in reading good stories. Humbling ourselves in acknowledging that just the science is not enough. And perhaps, finding a sidekick, a true storyteller, to assist us in our quest in turning our science into a good story. Or perhaps (better still) to actively assume the role of a subordinate character in our own stories and guide the hero, the storyteller, in the quest of turning our science into gripping and compelling stories.
Just as we assign roles to our characters, so too must we assign storyteller and story-listener roles
And of course, relevant to any good story, is who gets to tell it. Who has license to tell this story? We all know that every telling of a story will differ. Sometimes ever so slightly and sometimes by vast leaps of faith. It is important to ensure that there are lots of stories and lots of voices and that we watch out for whose story is loudest and be sure to hold our heads at just the right angle to hear the quiet stories. The stories whispered to us from the corner of the room. From across the crowd. Every good story is matched by true listening. If you can’t get the story, there is as much glory in being a true listener.
Skylar Bayer is a marine ecologist and science communicator. Currently a marine habitat resource specialist in the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office, she received her PhD from the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences for research on the sex lives of scallops and is a producer for the Story Collider.
Skylar R. Bayer, Evelyn Valdez-Ward, Priya Shukla, and Bethann Garramon Merkle
Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved.
Sharing Science Through Shared Values, Goals, and Stories
Effective science communication relies on understanding the values of the people we aim to engage with. By identifying shared values, we can communicate effectively using storytelling to achieve our science communication goals. Acknowledging our own goals, informed by our values, helps us recognize the importance of understanding others’ values as well.
A conceptual flow chart of how to start the process of reflecting on values that inform your goals and how both interact with stories to share science. (Figure from Merkle, Bethann Garramon; Valdez-Ward, Evelyn; Shukla, Priya; and Bayer, Skylar R. (2021) “Sharing Science Through Shared Values, Goals, and Stories: An Evidence-Based Approach to Making Science Matter,” Human-Wildlife Interactions: Vol. 15: Iss. 3, Article 27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26077/9wss-av78.)
Respecting each other’s values is crucial because a mismatch of values can lead to information being disregarded, misinterpreted, or poorly received. This is particularly significant in ethical science communication, where our goals include co-produced science and ensuring that study results are understood and applied by those who can benefit from them.
To communicate effectively, it is essential to build relationships and recognize the value of diverse perspectives and knowledge. Science has a long history of extracting information and tangible resources from people, especially historically marginalized communities. To communicate effectively, it is critical to take a step back and build relationships that recognize everyone has valuable perspectives and knowledge. Thus, as communicators, we cannot simply enter communities and expect our information to be readily received or their knowledge to be readily shared with us. Engaging in activities such as round table discussions, consensus processes, and community events facilitates knowledge-sharing from multiple viewpoints. These interactions should prioritize listening, respecting, and valuing others’ perspectives to establish mutual trust.
As relationships develop and we understand the values of the people we engage with, we can reflect on our own values and seek out areas of overlap. This process requires revisiting our communication goals, which may evolve as we connect with different topics and address people’s concerns and priorities. This approach, known as “backwards design,” starts with shared goals and values and guides the development and implementation of effective communication strategies.
Storytelling is a very powerful tool to achieve many different communication goals. Despite science’s emphasis on analytical thinking, storytelling remains compelling, memorable, and easy to understand and relate to when personal or engaging characters are involved. Importantly, stories also embody shared values, making them an effective means of conveying key messages and reinforcing connections.
Crafting a resonant story begins by considering the goals derived from shared values. Sharing a personal story that holds significance to the communicator can foster a connection with those listening or engaging to the story. Identifying the main characters and describing the conflict and climax of the story further engage them. Exploring the consequences of the conflict reinforces the stakes of the story.
Once the story framework is outlined, drafting and practicing the story with others is necessary. Candidly describing emotions, internal thoughts, and the setting allows listeners to fully immerse themselves in the narrative. Testing the story with others, seeking their feedback, and noting their reactions helps refine the story for maximum impact. Iterative drafting and practicing stages are necessary for this process.
Ultimately, science communication can be significantly enhanced by leveraging the power of storytelling and understanding shared values. By employing a thoughtful approach and aligning goals with the intended audience, science communicators can foster engagement and create meaningful connections that drive positive change.
For a more comprehensive understanding of the tools, worksheets, and detailed steps involved in this framework, we invite readers to explore our published, peer-reviewed, open-access paper titled “Sharing science through shared values, goals, and stories: an evidence-based approach to making science matter”. The paper provides additional resources, examples, and step-by-step guidance to aid in applying this approach effectively.
Dra. Evelyn Valdez-Ward (ella/she) is a Mexican Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Switzer Foundation Fellow. Her research focuses on marginalized scientists' use of science communication and policy for social justice. She co-founded the ReclaimingSTEM Institute, addressing the need for inclusive science communication spaces.
Priya is a PhD candidate in Ecology at UC Davis and Science Engagement Specialist with the California Ocean Science Trust. Her research explores the effects of climate change on shellfish aquaculture in California and she is an active science communicator who is deeply invested in improving the accessibility of marine science.
Bethann Garramon Merkle, MFA, is a Professor of Practice at the University of Wyoming, where she is the founding director of the UW Science Communication Initiative. She also co-founded the Ecological Society of America's Communication & Engagement Section.
Nic Bennett (they/them) researches power, ideology, and belonging in science communication at The University of Texas as a doctoral candidate of the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations. They engage arts- and science-based research and practice to critique, disrupt, and reimagine science communication spaces. Alongside scientists, artists, activists, and community members, they hope to expand the circle of human concern in science communication and STEM.
There is already a lot of amazing fanfiction about science. People are literally writing themselves into science stories. Recognition by powerful institutions of these science story remixes would increase belonging in these spaces. Fanfiction about science, by people who don’t usually see themselves in science, has the potential to disrupt usual knowledge and power relations.
A Fanfiction of Belonging, for Science
Can thinking like a fanfiction writer help science be a place of belonging?
Fanfiction is stories based on previously existing works. It’s anything that you make to celebrate a piece of culture you love. And it’s not just making your favorite Star Trek characters kiss (although that is awesome), it is a powerful form of participatory culture.
The popular imagination usually pins fanfiction as “lowbrow”, but “classics” like the Aeneid, Romeo and Juliet, and Lord of the Flies are all examples of fanfiction. We must also think critically about what we call “lowbrow”. This elitism is usually lobbed at marginalized groups to portray their culturally relevant creative expressions as “less than”.
Is science a fandom? And, if so, does it have fanfiction?
In this short post, I want to argue that thinking about science’s fanfictions is a useful way to think about how to transform science’s culture into one of belonging.
Using this lens, we might notice that most mainstream science communication kind of looks the same: journalistic, cheerlead-y, and very white. Narratives of scientific certainty have been historically (and currently) used as a tool for othering (e.g., IQ tests, scientificracism, race-based medicine). A fanfiction of science reimagines that.
Fanfiction, as an act of science storytelling, might disrupt this. When queer audiences don’t see themselves in a franchise they love, they write themselves in. Fanfiction about science, by people who don’t usually see themselves in science, has the potential to disrupt usual knowledge and power relations.
Thereisalreadyalotofamazingfanfictionaboutscience. People are literally writing themselves into science stories. Recognition by powerful institutions of these science story remixes would increase belonging in these spaces. If fandom is an expression of the collective self, how can our narratives of science serve as imaginal and transformational tools?
Opening up and considering science as culture, as more like a fandom than an elite institution, could widen the circle of human concern. We must push hard on the boundaries of what we include as science storytelling. Fandom allows for both individual expression and communal belonging, and a radically re-imagined science fandom has immense generative power. Let’s write ourselves in.
David Bunn is an interdisciplinary South African scientist and public intellectual. He joined UBC very recently from a position as a senior research scientist in the Natural Resource Ecology Lab at Colorado State University. Before that, he was a senior professor and head of school at South Africa’s largest university, and served in the second generation of South Africa’s post-apartheid government, helping to frame new national policies for arts and tourism funding and the archiving of indigenous knowledge.
A truly social-ecological form of science will be able to combine the insights of data and of stories. As climate change forces species and populations to seek out new habitats, urbanizing populations on the edge of conservation zones, whether in Kenya, Brazil, or Nepal will increasingly seek out occult explanations for ecological phenomena..
These Data, This Life: Ecological Science and Evidence of Stories
Science would like to use stories to better communicate with broader audiences. Unfortunately, with some singular exceptions, scientists are seldom very good at storytelling. Typically, when stories are deployed, they are frequently only illustrative and seldom advanced as a form of evidence. The world of stories, to put it another way, rarely impinges on the domain of data.
The problem is exemplified in my most recent research. I am currently directing a NASA-funded project looking at changes in land cover and animal habitat over 30 years in and around South Africa’s iconic Kruger National Park. We make extensive use of remotely sensed vegetation data, from the workhorse Landsat satellite to NASA’s new GEDI LiDar instrument. Significantly, we also have to take into account the rapidly urbanizing borders of Kruger National Park: over 2 million people live within 30 kilometers of Kruger’s western fence, with 40% unemployment. We are attempting to understand both social and ecological edge effects in this system; increasingly, this has led us to the evidence of stories.
So, bear with me. I’ll tell you a brief story.
Charlie Nkuna
In an early precursor to our current project, I was leading a study on human-animal conflict on the Kruger National Park boundaries. Our data were derived from camera trap analyses of lion occupancy, but we also did a series of oral history interviews. One main informant was Charlie Nkuna, an African field ranger who had lived and worked in Kruger Park for 50 years. He told me this story:
One day in 1973, the family discovered that their eldest daughter Senana had disappeared. (This was not in itself unusual: many kids her age would become bored with life in the conservation zone and run away to relatives in the neighboring urban areas to the west.) The next evening, there was a lion attack on a cattle enclosure, but the herders managed to defend themselves and the lion was wounded. Villagers asked Charlie, as the senior field ranger, to track the lion down. Following a blood spoor through the dewy grass the next morning, he came upon a sight no parent should ever have to confront: the head of his missing daughter, who had been silently dragged away and eaten some days before. Charlie and his family had lived in the Kruger Park for decades. They had walked everywhere unarmed and never had any problems with lions before. I asked him why he thought this sudden horror had occurred. His answer changed the way I understand the role of evidence in social-ecological systems thinking.
“The lion . . .,” he began, and then paused. “The lion,” he continued, looking closely at me, “was sent.”
In my scientific work, it is not so much stories that are important; rather, it is what is technically termed narration. In the act of telling, and in the pause, Charlie was judging his audience and switching to another form of explanation: the language of the occult. He knew of my interest in shifting carnivore habitat and range. However, he also clearly felt the need, in that moment, to turn the focus to the complex social dimensions of these changes. For that, he needed a different kind of language that referenced the uncanny, and that required a different kind of trust from his audience, one that he assessed briefly in the pause in his narration.
In the 1970s, Charlie recalled, a war in Mozambique produced a flood of refugees and increasing poaching from the growing urban population to the west. He himself had been very effective in arresting poachers. So, in one sense, the lions were changing their behaviour in response to increasing human encroachment. Yet perhaps, he suggested, these were not really lions at all but sorcerers from neighboring villages who had changed themselves into lions to enact revenge on him for his past policing successes. Newly urban attitudes to wealth accumulation and the waning of customary authority in the bordering towns produced a form of social rupture from which this malevolent carnivore emerged.
Stories about uncanny animals out of place should be considered as data. Narratives about lions moving out of Kruger, or leopards in the northern suburbs of Mumbai, are evidence of the way many urbanizing populations explain ecological phenomena like edge effects or fragmentation. In the manner of their telling, however, they also speak eloquently about shifting consumptive patterns in emerging secondary cities. A truly social-ecological form of science will be able to combine the insights of data and of stories. As climate change forces species and populations to seek out new habitats, urbanizing populations on the edge of conservation zones, whether in Kenya, Brazil, or Nepal will increasingly seek out occult explanations for ecological phenomena.
As scientists, we have time-honoured ways of collecting data about species and climate change: we can catalogue edge effects in fragmented forests that bring benefits to certain guilds and disaster to others, for instance, or the phenological shifts for which migrating caribou herds are now unprepared. Ideally, though, when considering these phenomena from the perspective of social and ecological explanation combined, the object of analysis itself will become something different. When communities speak about the declining salmon population and increasingly negative encounters with grizzly bears, they are speaking about a ten-thousand-year history of human-mediated systems in which other beings are ancestors and kin. Stories about these beings also reveal changes in commodity culture, gender dynamics, property relations, and the migration of local youth to regional cities.
These stories have great potential, and they hold the key to more convivial forms of local conservation management. In the manner of their telling, they are all scientifically insightful tales.
Lindsay K. Campbell is a research social scientist with the USDA Forest Service. Her current research explores the dynamics of urban politics, stewardship, and sustainability policymaking.
I am humbled by what I have learned from curators and artists about how to convey ideas, emotion, and complexity in a way that grabs and holds the audience.
To tell a better story about care, I work with artists and curators.
I experienced this firsthand when we were trying to communicate the importance of our Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) to civic groups across New York City. As researchers, we were showing up at workshops and public events with our typical 1-sheet and trying to recruit people to participate in our social science survey. But we weren’t capturing the heart and soul of why stewardship matters. And people were passing our table by.
So, we worked with the artist Carmen Bouyer, who developed a stewardship storytelling exercise. With a series of open-ended prompts, a print map, and a deck of cards of stewardship actions, we suddenly had a meaningful and easy way to interact with stewards. We asked them to share a place and way in which they helped take care of the local environment and to mark it on a map. While conceptually Carmen was asking the same questions we were, she did it in a way that was tactile, playful, and accessible. It didn’t take a 20-minute survey to get on her stewardship map, just a few moments of writing or speaking. If you were stumped for ideas or embarrassed that you didn’t think you made a contribution, you could flip through the card deck for ideas or inspiration.
We took our stewardship storytelling “on the road” with everyone from seasoned urban forestry professionals to local youth. We elicited heartfelt stories of environmental caretaking―large and small. Community clean-ups, tree planting, starting new educational NGOs, water quality testing, composting… as people added their stories to the map in real-time, they could watch the accumulation of these practices and feel a part of the community that we observe so vibrantly in our research, but that can be hard to see as a collective force.
Working with Can Sucuoglu, we incorporated stewardship storytelling as a digital map in our exhibit Who Takes Care of New York? at the Queens Museum and later as an online exhibit at The Nature of Cities. Our goal with each of these stewardship storytelling efforts is to make care and connection to place more visible and valued.
In addition to being inspired by the stewards themselves, I take my inspiration from visionaries like artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles whose Manifesto for Maintenance Art makes clear the importance of caretaking to the functioning of our world. Overall, I am humbled by what I have learned from curators and artists about how to convey ideas, emotion, and complexity in a way that grabs and holds the audience. These are often afterthoughts in science; we are not taught to be effective communicators.
Marcus is a sustainability scientist and his research covers a wide range of human-environment interconnectivity, environmental risk and resilience, transdisciplinary methodologies and novel ecosystems.
The ideal situation would be to bring the potency and alluring qualities of traditional storytelling together with the conveying of our scientific findings. We have seen some examples, but it is still a huge area yet to be discovered, and it offers good storytellers a lifeline as well as an opportunity to expand their range and to become more central in the era of social media.
Myths and Legends | Facts and Figures
In Ireland, storytelling has had a very long tradition and also a strong social currency. For centuries, it has been the main mechanism for imparting information, though it often included an augmentation of facts for entertainment purposes. I have recently been reading stories of Irish Myths and Legends to my 8-year-old grandson. They, like such stories from many other cultures, often contain dramatic amorous convolutions, monsters and magic, and a smattering of war and decapitation―something for everybody! It is not so different from many Hollywood sci-fi fanaticise blockbusters. Interestingly, my grandson prefers to have the stories read to him over watching screen adaptations of them. He claims that he likes to “see” the action in his mind, and we often discuss some of the issues that arise from the story in question―ethical, social, and so on. However, he often stops me to fact-check something about the landscape or location, and to ask if this animal or that bird is still common. In other words, in his mind, these stories are a mixture of social and ecological facts as well as fantasy (for more on this have a look at Liam Heneghans’ excellent Beasts at Bedtime). So, it is clear to me how valuable a story is, however real or imaginary, for imparting factual knowledge. In fact, I was also amazed how I still remember the stories, having heard them read to me at the same age, I venture to suggest that everyone reading this also remembers such stories. Storytelling still has this potency as well as a currency.
Though I am an academic who originally worked in the NGO sector and before that in the Arts sector, I feel that communication of scientific or project findings is still as perplexing and as frustrating as ever. One of the main issues is the precise level at which findings should be pitched. We want to pitch just once and not spend our precious time creating several narratives for diverse communities of interest―planners, policymakers, managers, the public, diverse ages, ethnicities, abilities, and so on. Luckily, science has changed radically in recent decades. It is no longer purely science for curiosity, rather we are in the era of engaged science in a time of crises. This means that we highly value citizen participation and co-creation in identifying pathways for dealing with multi-faceted issues such as biodiversity loss, climate crisis, resilience, and becoming more nature positive. Citizen science has the potential to change scientific investigation in the same way that citizen journalism has changed the media (for good as well as ill), and citizen science may be able to deliver the co-benefits of science better. These benefits include communicating to wider society by making scientific findings relevant as well as acceptable. The citizen-centric approach in science is also tailor-made for a new era of dramatic storytelling to enable more engagement and participation in science. We still have that childhood curiosity to fact-check fairy tales and legends.
The ideal situation would be to bring the potency and alluring qualities of traditional storytelling together with the conveying of our scientific findings. In recent years, we have seen some examples, but it is still a huge area yet to be discovered, and it offers good storytellers a lifeline as well as an opportunity to expand their range and to become more central in the era of social media and distraction.
Why stop at storytelling? All the arts have equal opportunities here―music, dance, design, and so on. If you create the right story, you can engage with a much wider audience and if my own experience is to count, people will remember the facts for a lot longer. This is how we will enable the kinds of behaviour change that will help us be more sustainable and more resilient, but as we say in Gaelic: sin scéaleile (that’s another story)!
Sarah Ema Friedland is an NYC based film and media artist and educator. She is currently working on a feature documentary titled Lyd, which she is co-directing with Rami Younis, and which was selected to pitch at the DocCorner Market at the Cannes Film Festival and Days of Cinema in Ramallah. Friedland is a member of the Meerkat Media Collective and the Director of the MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute at Skidmore College where she is also a Teaching Professor in the MDOCS Program.
Reality is much more interesting than oversimplified, packaged, and commodified stories. The stories we tell about reality, including and especially scientific reality, cannot be contained by formulaic storytelling. Instead, nuance and difference should inform the way we tell stories.
As someone who makes and teaches non-fiction filmmaking and runs a residency for non-fiction storytellers, storytelling makes up the joys and frustrations of my daily grind. I love a good story, I love being taken on a journey and hearing/seeing/reading powerful descriptions of places and people. However, I am also annoyingly aware of the ways constructed stories can trap and oversimplify reality.
As a film student, I learned that good storytelling follows a three-act structure –– beginning middle, and end –– with rising action, stakes, conflict, and resolution. Joseph Cambell’s “Hero’s Journey” was dragged out so often as evidence that this is the way that stories have always been told and therefore the bestand only way to tell stories, that even the scholar of mythology himself would have rolled over in his grave at the ways his life’s work has been oversimplified to package and commodify storytelling. Reality is much more interesting than the Hero’s Journey and the stories we tell about reality, including and especially scientific reality, cannot be contained by formulaic storytelling. Instead, nuance and difference should inform the way we tell stories.
The science fiction/ fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin offers another way of shaping stories in her influential essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” She bases her preferred shape for a story, the carrier bag, on what anthropologists have cited as the first tool: not a weapon, but a bag, used to gather, keep and hold dear items of both necessity and joy. Narratively, this bag is a bottomless vessel for the valuing of experiences, ways of being, and conceptions of time.
Scientific Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing applies Le Guin’s theories to science, “Science in the broadest sense of the term refers to knowledge that we can collect, collate and put in our carrier bag. And this broad sense of knowledge creation involves all the kinds of observation and noticing that we could do. For our times, facing the climate crisis, the extinction crisis, all of those other environmental catastrophes that surround us, we’re going to need a lot of kinds of science.”
And we are also going to need lots of different kinds of storytelling that reflect science and scientists with rigor and complication. Science and non-fiction storytelling center observation and allow us to see differences, but the most dominant forms of storytelling tend to act as a strainer of those observations, sifting out the hard-to-swallow, but juicy lumps of life and leaving behind a homogenized liquid that can be easily digested.
What is the danger in this? If we allow singular conceptions of what storytelling should be to sausage-factory-afy science and make uncomplicated heroes out of scientists, then we may jeopardize the work itself. If conflict is accentuated for a story’s sake, the importance of careful and slow investigation may be minimized for fear of it being perceived as boring storytelling. Human heroes may be prioritized, leaving behind teams of people who collaborate, and further sidelining the non-human lifeforms that should be at the center of scientific inquiry. And the importance of failure might be shoved aside in order to reach a nicely tied-up resolution.
Fascism is resurgent, the climate is in crisis and economic exploitation is reaching new heights. To organize for a more equitable and livable planet, we need to envision it in all its complexity and in all its forms. If we do not make space in science and other all disciplines for storytelling that centers the collective in addition to the individual, collaboration and compromise in addition to conflict, and journeys that do not only march forward in time toward a neatly tied-up resolution, facing these stakes will be a lonely, rigid, divisive and devastating journey indeed.
Bram Gunther, former Chief of Forestry, Horticulture, and Natural Resources for NYC Parks, is Co-founder of the Natural Areas Conservancy and sits on their board. A Fellow at The Nature of Cities, and a business partner at Plan it Wild, he just finished a novel about life in the age of climate change in NYC 2050.
Like any narrative that is built around the unfamiliar, communicating our story of rewilding suburban yards, campuses, commercial, and institutional spaces, is challenging.
At Plan it Wild, a sustainable landscaping company based in Westchester County, NY and Fairfield County, CT, we are disrupting the landscaping industry, elevating its value from merely the indiscriminate “mow and blow” to be “synonymous with ecological restoration”— a phrase coined by leading ecologist Doug Tallamy, who also is a Plan it Wild science board member.
Like any narrative that is built around the unfamiliar, communicating our story of rewilding suburban yards, campuses, commercial, and institutional spaces, is challenging. People are confused by the somewhat foreign concepts of adding biodiversity, native plants, new habitats and natural growth to their backyards, fields, and patches. Consequently, our dilemma is to compellingly retell the story of landscaping in these ways:
Style. Yards look different after a patch of lawn is turned into native habitat. They look wilder and less overtly ornamental. Rather than paint this atypical picture, a better approach could be to talk about the transformation from lawn to forest and meadow as the new normal in that mirror’s a region’s ecosystems and habitats.
The lawn is obsolete. Not all of it. Open flat space is necessary for recreation, but a high percentage of can go native. We need to tell this story without preaching or condescension ― as if there is no choice but to do this ― but rather by its benefits; for instance, public health and helping to reduce the effects of climate changes are parts of the answer.
The yard as bigger than just what we see. How can one yard, one campus be meaningful in a huge global movement? The appropriate depiction is to talk about the yard as an essential piece of the whole. Our partners at the Aspetuck Land Trust have called their overarching land conservation campaign the “Green Corridor” and have framed it so that every yard counts towards creating the corridor. It’s a good way to talk about rewilding the suburbs ― as a form of interconnectivity.
Science. Although broad data on environmental benefits can be helpful in getting people to shift their lawn perspectives, it’s too abstract. A better story would include descriptive and easy to understand examples and metaphors. Plan it Wild is creating a biodiversity tool to measure the impact of rewilding in urban and suburban spaces so we can talk about the science through specific imagery and data points for an individual yard or patch of land.
Cost. Although there are many obvious benefits of restoring nature in your backyard ― it is a moral and community-minded thing to do; it can result in more family activities, like gardening and rewilding together; it improves the beauty of your home ― rewilding is a complicated project. And when we tell potential clients how much rewilding will cost, they often suffer sticker shock, because regular lawn maintenance is so cheap. To overcome this reluctance, we need to craft a better story that portrays the real value at any price of natural habitats and the cleaner air and water that comes with restoration. And we must tell them that our goal is to create year-round green jobs for land stewards instead of one-off day labor for undocumented and unprotected workers.
Plan it Wild launched a campaign called “Less Lawn, More Life” to get people into their yards to observe their nature through the iNaturalist app. Through this program, we hope attitudes will change, and rewilding will become more commonplace and familiar. This citizen-science effort will also feed data into our biodiversity measurement tool, which in turn will yield us simple language and numbers to show the benefits, values, costs and necessity of bringing back nature.
To make our story better, we’d find a short clear emotional but logical way to tell the story that includes all the pieces above. What do you think?
Madhusudan is an evolutionary ecologist who discovered birds as an undergrad after growing up a nature-oblivious urban kid near Bombay, went chasing after vanishing wildernesses in the Himalaya and Western Ghats as a graduate student, and returned to study cities grown up as a reconciliation ecologist.
Science continues to hold the power to help humanity shape a brighter future. But scientists need to relearn the key elements of stories and tell good stories. Stories that don’t erase personalities and cultures, stories that evoke emotion in the listeners and draw them deeper.
Saving the Story of Science
Once upon a time there was no division between science and fiction. Human beings loved to tell stories about things they had seen, experienced, discovered, imagined, or invented while going about the world. Stories helped form and nurture bonds of friendship, family, and community, share the joys and perchance ease the pain of loss that is inevitable for anyone living in an indifferent universe. These stories carried information about how people thought things worked in the world, and shaped how they were expected to carry themselves in society. Some of this information was factual, backed by evidence should a listener challenge the storyteller and seek to verify the information, while some was imaginary, intended to fill gaps in understanding and to help the listener make sense of the world. Or to escape the troubles of the world altogether for a brief moment. And sometimes the stories were false, intended to mislead listeners in order to strengthen the storyteller’s power and influence. In either case, these stories also had the power to change reality by influencing the mind and actions of the listener.
As our understanding of the natural world deepened and our social systems grew more complicated, the nature of our stories also changed and became more complex. Over time some people who paid close attention to stories and storytelling realized that there are repeated patterns and rhythms to how we tell stories, and eventually some of them (let’s call them humanities professors) discovered, as our good host David reminds us, that every good story has five key elements: plot, setting, characters, point of view, and conflict. Regardless of the storytellers intention to convey factual or imaginary information, to tell truths or lies, to help build community or to break it, all good stories tend to be built around these five elements. The best of such stories exerted great emotional power on the human mind and were able to change the way people saw and interacted with the world and with each other.
Meanwhile, some other people who called themselves natural philosophers (ancestors of scholars we now call scientists) became obsessed with the facts conveyed through stories, and focused their minds on finding ways to gathering evidence to verify the facts and thence to assemble the facts into new stories about how the universe really worked. In their obsession with facts and evidence, and the desire to see the world as it truly is outside of human consciousness, natural philosophers sought ways to remove the biases resulting from the limitations of human senses as well as emotional states and cultural preferences. The resulting new kind of storytelling they came to call science, which focused on conveying factual information, sought to limit human bias, and eschewed emotion which can cloud our perception and judgment of reality. Of the five essential elements of good stories, scientists came to be trained to suppress two in particular: character and point of view.
The scientific tradition of storytelling refined this emotionless impersonal form and developed it into a tool of great power in not just conveying evidence-based factual information but also in discovering the laws of nature and in developing tools to manipulate nature for the benefit of humans. Science had thus refined the power of stories to shape our very reality, taking humanity all the way to splitting the atom and changing the global climate, to devastating effect. Scientists, harnessing the power of the scientific method of story-making and storytelling, helped etch humanity’s signature into the very rocks layering the earth, marking a distinct human-dominated geological epoch, now labeled the Anthropocene.
The story of science became abstracted from the stories of the varied individual human beings who did the work of discovering facts and gathering evidence and verifying the stories. The distinct characters of individual scientists were erased to create, in the public imagination, the mythical “scientist” with unruly hair wearing a lab coat and carrying test tubes bubbling with steaming liquids. This scientist came to be imagined mostly as a man, and mostly a white one at that. Similarly the scientific story also flattened diverse points of view into an objective “view from nowhere”, with even the writing style forced to remove the central protagonists, persons doing the science.
As powerful as science was, its new tradition of storytelling ended up confusing people who were not scientists, and therefore could not find any emotional connection with the “nobody” telling the story from no particular point of view. It didn’t help that these stories also contained a lot of big words made up by scientists to convey information more precisely. To no one’s surprise but the scientists, the general public began to lose track of all the new factual information, preferring instead the better told fictional stories with characters and points of view they could see in themselves. The growing division between the factual stories of science and the stories that shaped the popular imagination also left scientists at the mercy of rulers and traders, politicians and businessmen who were able to co-opt the science for their own power and profit.
Frustrated by how the natural world was being degraded by those pursuing immediate profits and amassing power in society, some scientists attempted to convey their knowledge directly to the public and to warn them of the dangers of reckless use of science. But they had forgotten how to tell good stories, and instead of engaging the imagination of their readers and listeners, they came across as shrill Cassandras, purveyors of a doom and gloom only they could see coming when the world still looked sunny to uninformed eyes. People already confused by the language and grammar and peculiar rhythms of the scientific story became even more suspicious of the scientists telling them, in turn falling prey to the power-hungry politicians and businessmen manipulating them with imaginary tales of glory.
And this is how the world came to be in its present predicament, poised on what scientists believe to be the edge of a sharp precipice, staring into an unknown abyss and a murky future. Science continues to hold the power to help humanity peer into the murk and shape the future to be a brighter one. But for that to happen, scientists need to relearn the key elements of stories and learn how to tell good stories. Stories that don’t erase the personalities and cultures and identities of the protagonists (and antagonists), stories that don’t hide specific and distinct points of view but instead uses those to evoke emotion in the listeners and to draw them in deeper so they are also able to learn the facts and learn to apply the lessons from these stories to shape better futures.
Relearning the art of storytelling requires scientists to first unlearn the constraints of the formal science story drilled into them through years of schooling. It requires paying attention to the details not just of the phenomena they study, but also the identities and cultural backgrounds and histories of fellow scientists. This should also help open the eyes of the dominant white scientists to the work of people whose contributions have hitherto gone unrecognized, and to the injustices their science may be perpetuating in the wider world. Learning to tell good stories also means listening deeply to other stories of facts and imagination outside the realm of science. Of course, most scientists may not be able to become good storytellers, but their stories can still be shared by others as long as the scientists are willing to share.
As this very gathering of minds at this virtual round table shows, there are many who love to tell stories and are committed to shaping humanity’s collective imagination towards creating a more hopeful brighter future. After all, hope, when it spurs positive actions, is the best antidote to the doom and gloom stories that continue to flow from science. As the saying goes: it will all be alright in the end, and if it isn’t alright, it isn’t the end.
Tim Lüschen is working at the intersection of deep participation and sustainability transformations. His interests lie in different ways of knowing, human-nature connection, facilitation, systemic constellations and new combinations of art and sustainability.
New collaborators are essential. We should form partnerships that have not existed before, creating a novel effect for the audience. Why not collaborate with more-than-human beings? Let them take center stage in ways and media that have yet to be explored.
One essential aspect of my work is the story of the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. It involves highlighting our unawareness of our connection and being-as-nature, as we tend to focus so much on our separation and division, creating an illusion that we can completely dominate and control “nature”.
How can we bring more awareness and foster discussion on this topic? How can we perceive ourselves and the rest of the world as nature-culture? What kinds of stories can we tell? Hopeful stories? Warning stories? And what medium should we use? Paper, a stage, the internet, a forest, film, a podium, tape, or a crossroads? How can we effectively convey a compelling story based on scientific and philosophical ideas?
In my view, new collaborators are essential. We should form partnerships that have not existed before, creating a novel effect for the audience. Why not collaborate with more-than-human beings? Let them take center stage in ways and media that have yet to be explored. For instance, in the French documentary film “Le Chêne”, an oak tree and its inhabitants serve as the main characters over the course of a year, without any narration. It is a good example of how to incorporate the latest scientific knowledge about different living organisms, while at the same time allowing them to reveal themselves by simply BEING themselves.
Another novel approach to communication would be to focus on conflict. By illustrating the conflict of perceiving the more-than-human world as alive and autonomous entities, as their own subjects, we can address a long-standing suppression. Numerous conflicts, both conscious and unconscious, arise within ourselves when we broach this topic. Therefore, it is crucial not to depict this conflict as stagnant, but as fluid and open, with possibilities leading in various directions and opening up new vistas.
Consider the Greta and the Fridays for Future movement as an example. After seemingly being stuck for a prolonged period in the discussions about the climate crisis, with no progress being made, the silenced future generations suddenly demanded a voice in this process―naming the concrete conflict present, and the injustices included in it. With this, a shift occurred, and a new normal emerged.
However, this conflict involves many other voices that have been silenced. What if other suppressed voices begin to demand attention and lay their fingers on the other wounds that we were ignoring before? The voices of plants, animals, and the broader earth? Let them express their points of view—their sufferings, joys, and experiences.
Such storytelling has the power to stir people, connecting new brain functions and reactivating old ones. The animalistic spirit, inherent in all of us, could howl once again, and with that comes conflict. Conflict arises with those who benefit from suppressing this perpetually-present perception of the world. Conflict arises from past traumas and difficulties associated with this perception. Conflict arises regarding new decisions and how to make them.
Once again, it would be helpful to view the more-than-human beings as collaborators rather than enemies. Portray them as real, well-defined personalities, just as detailed as any main actor in a compelling story and encompassing a vast array of different characters―a world of difference within sameness, just as in our human world. Such storytelling has the potential to be more alive and resonant, connecting with the entirety of the human being, rather than solely engaging the left part of our brain. It has the capacity to evoke something within people that has not been stirred before. Let’s open up the box.
Paul is General Manager of Oppla, the EU Repository of Nature-based Solutions (based in the Netherlands), and Creative Director of Countryscape: part design agency, part environmental consultancy, based in the UK and Estonia. He has over 20 years’ experience in communications and knowledge exchange within the public and private sectors.
Small stories have real potential for carrying messages. Because they’re normal. Just like us.
Stories are how we understand the places in which we live, work, and play. I mean, really understand and connect to them. As people.
And as people, it’s not always the biggest and most exciting stories that grab and hold our attention. Sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, it’s the smaller, more personal, and private stories that resonate with us the most. Because we can relate to them in the context of our own lives; and because we all enjoy glimpses of other people’s lives, even the things that others might consider mundane. Everyday life is, after all, something that we all share and experience every day.
The power of ‘small stories’ is an approach that myself and colleagues have used successfully in the tourism industry. We developed what’s become knowns as the Sense of Place Toolkit method whereby we encouraged small, often rural businesses to tell their own stories through their marketing. To make a USP of their authenticity and relatability. To express their love of the landscape in how they communicate with customers. We piloted the idea with a small community in Lancashire, UK, and it proved highly successful (we came second in an international award to the Grand Canyon! A story in itself…). And it made me realise that small stories have real potential for carrying messages. Because they’re normal. Just like us.
What am I getting at here? Well, sometimes those of us working to “save the world from imminent environmental catastrophe” have a habit of hyperbole. Of telling the biggest stories we possibly can. Of going into battle ― and it is sometimes a battle ― with the baddest, burliest headlines that we can muster. It’s what we see in the news, right? It’s what turns people’s heads and gets their attention. It’s why Hollywood movies fill theatres. But are those big stories really what makes people stop and think? Perhaps they are too big. Too fantastic. Too remote and unrelatable to our everyday lives. Who among us are the Hollywood action heroes capable of responding? (ok, maybe you…).
So, I think we need to be telling more small stories in the environmental space too. In fact, only yesterday while the news media was ablaze with imagery of Rhodes on fire during a heatwave, I had a conversation with my dad about why his vegetable garden is looking out of season, and I think, just maybe, he nudged a little closer to accepting that the world might be changing after all. Not because Rhodes is on fire, but because his beans aren’t what they should be this year.
TL/DR: Sweat the small stuff. Put it to work. Because sometimes when your message isn’t getting through, you need to dial it down and not up.
Social communicator, journalist and social designer, interested in how design, communication and social innovation can shape and reshape a more resilient and sustainable future. A strong believer that empathy, creativity, cooperation and the force of landscape opens up infinite opportunities to build better societies, more connected to nature and people.
No matter what discipline or field of knowledge you belong to, have you never seen yourselves trying to explain complex ideas, and in the end, you realize that everything you have said sounds incomprehensible or unclear to others? We want people to understand us and to feel that we have the ability to transfer knowledge.
Let’s get metaphorical when it comes to science or practice
Our brain and how we process our experiences are deeply linked to storytelling and how we understand the world.
For example, if we read an article about what metamorphosis is applied in the life cycle of a butterfly, yes, we are informed, and we have an idea of what it is; we retain it but without much more significance than keeping the information.
Maria Sibylla Merian – Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung (The caterpillar and its marvelous transformation)
However, if someone later tells us the “story” of how a caterpillar made a silk egg in the garden, and how a child visited it every morning to witness its transformation and even describes the scents of the roses in the garden and the singing of the birds. Doesn’t that change everything? What happened to you when you read or heard this story?
Without having been in that garden, you have smelled the scent of the flowers, imagined the chirping of the birds, and witnessed in your imagination how that multicolored butterfly took its first flight. You may even have projected a familiar landscape or even the place where you grew up.
What has just happened in our brains? More brain areas have been activated, and more powerful connections have been made. The areas of language comprehension and processing have been involved, as well as the sense of smell, sight, taste, and even motor areas if you have even seen yourself walking through that garden.
Yes, storytelling is a powerful tool to tell better stories and make issues (even complex ones) understandable to various audiences. It is indeed a resource that democratizes knowledge.
Storytelling + metaphor + science = a great story!
No matter what discipline or field of knowledge you belong to, have you never seen yourselves trying to explain complex ideas, and in the end, you realize that everything you have said sounds incomprehensible or unclear to others? Indeed you have explained it technically, based on data and scientific arguments. And, of course, there is nothing wrong with it. But we want something else. We want people to understand us and to feel that we have the ability to transfer knowledge.
Let’s go back to the example of the butterfly. In this story, we are trying to explain the biological evolution process in the life of this winged insect. We have previously used storytelling, but what if we add to this the metaphor resource?
Let’s imagine we are in a science class with a group of children. We create a model where a garden is represented. Each of the participating children will represent one of the stages of the butterfly (egg, larva, pupa, and adult). Another child will represent the predators, for instance, a lizard, another the flowers, and another the river, or even a stone, so the whole class will recreate the ecosystem that makes the life of this winged insect possible.
The metaphors of the butterfly ecosystem act like a shortcut, embedding insight as a deep understanding rather than a rational cognition. Children will feel they understand, even if they can’t describe it directly. This is an example in a classroom with children, but it works just as well with people of any age.
Why is this relevant in science communication?
We want people to understand what we are trying to say. Realizing that the way something is told directly impacts the result of someone else’s understanding, we should make the best use of this knowledge if we want to achieve the insight of others.
As scientists, practitioners, and people interested in fostering better cities for nature and people, it is our capability and, thus, a duty of mission to ensure that our ideas are effortlessly understood.
When we use the term nature base solutions, for example, to people not related to the term, we could instead use a metaphor framed in storytelling, not necessarily through speech but through theater, video games, co-creation sessions, poetry, and even comics (a beautiful example are the comics (Nature To Save the World). At some other TNOC round table, I was invited to talk about landscape initiatives, and I participated in sharing how the Latin American Landscape Initiative (LALI) operates. I created a metaphor of how LALI acts precisely like a living cell: “A landscape initiative is like living cells. Cells have all the equipment necessary to carry out the functions of life. A cell can move, grow, transform, adapt to environmental changes, and even replicate itself. A cell has life in itself, but cells have much more power when they group themselves to form something else, something bigger and more complex.” Nowadays, LALI is often introduced to the world with this metaphor; for people utterly unrelated to landscape. Why? Because we want the concept of landscape initiative to expand and reach new audiences. In this way, we transfer knowledge, but at the same time, we open the door to receiving other insights different from the usual ones.
The means are infinite; the tools are the same: storytelling and metaphors.
What next idea or concept do you want to share, and how can you transform it into a metaphor?
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.
What keeps coming to mind are powerful moments of noticing. Perhaps that is because I believe science to be, at its heart, a particularly deep and careful way of noticing the world―sometimes even what is hidden behind the surface of the world.
Future Poets: Please Pay Attention
I am convinced that scientists need to tell better stories. But I have struggled to settle my mind on an example for this roundtable on something from my own work that invites a story. Instead, what keeps coming to mind are powerful moments of noticing. Perhaps that is because I believe science to be, at its heart, a particularly deep and careful way of noticing the world―sometimes even what is hidden behind the surface of the world.
Recently, I read an interview of the poet Abram Van Engen by Tish Harrison Warren in the New York Times (16 July, 2023). Here’s a line from Van Engen that connects my feeling of science as deep noticing with attention in poetry:
“I think of poetry as the art of attention. It’s the ability to pay attention to the world and produce for the world the name of something that must be known.”
The triad sounds loudly: attention; urgent knowledge; producing. This chord could be a part of some great symphony of science as well as a harmonious representation of poetry.
I am perhaps cheating in thinking about poetry here, rather than a true narrative story. Of course, some poetry―epics come to mind―are as much stories as anything else. But how many (and indeed how) do poems engage all the five elements of story that the prompt lists? Depending on the poem in question, one or more of the elements may exist. But without trying to analyze what narrative elements might exist in it, here’s the piece of my writing, undated but more than a decade old, that kept coming to mind as something outside the usual formulation of science that still somehow emerged from understanding within science:
Spring: To a Poet of the Future
Spring came this year
with a violence
worthy of Stravinsky’s rites.
Liner notes once said
winter was replaced so suddenly
in the Russian taiga
that the music was hardly surprising.
Here, the green rose hard
from the insistently moistened ground.
Rain cold and constant
fed a fierce flowering:
Spent petals piled in deep drifts;
Pollen dusting any surface
dark enough to show it
and tinting windshields
yellow.
Is this the deconstructed spring?
Rain, temperature, and length of day
reassembled in some new way
ordered by a change in climate?
A new rhythm
overlapping beats
unexpected fierceness.
Future poets,
please pay attention.
Let us know.
Are centuries of metaphors
of soft temperate springs
just so many discarded petals
piled up like debris
no longer decipherable as flowers?
Well, there you have it. Something to say about science, in a way that is not science. Maybe the start of a story rather than a story.
Another quote from the Van Engen interview: “Poetry is much more about undergoing something rather than understanding something.”
How do we turn things from science―understanding―into things like stories and poems that help people undergo something in their relationship to the worlds of nature in cities or elsewhere?
Alice Reil (she/her) is an urban geographer who strives to bring more biodiverse, urban nature into public spaces. She led the biodiversity and nature-based solutions team at ICLEI Europe, a global city network, and now works at the City of Munich’s green space planning department.
If many of us would share our personal stories and emotional connections to our natural surroundings with our neighbours, would we all be more motivated to protect them even more? I’m now visualising little printed stories scattered across communities, which enable neighbours or passers-by to read how a particular tree or green space is meaningful to fellow citizens.
I just started a new job in which I am tasked with coordinating the local implementation of urban nature interventions through a European Union-funded project. This project aims to generate more scientific evidence as well as practical experience around inclusive and just access to ecological spaces for all in cities. At the same time, these interventions should help reduce pollution and promote biodiversity. On the one hand, this new role puts me at the receiving end of someone else’s―the project authors’―vision and narrative. On the other hand, it is my responsibility to create and adapt the reasoning for and activities of the project for local audiences. In other words, it is about the story I want to tell.
Over the past weeks, I have been asking myself: How can I translate 200+ pages of project description into a tangible narrative for myself, but also for those that we as the city department want to reach? How can we detach ourselves from keywords and turn our vision and activities into a story, which mobilises citizens to renature their neighbourhoods together with us?
I do not have the answer, I just have ideas. And I also recognise my limitations, as my education and work experience has always been tied to the written word. I would certainly seek collaborators from visual, art, or play-based backgrounds as well as “living experts” from those that we are trying to reach through the project, i.e., kids and youth as well as elderly citizens. I also recognise, that not all of these are homogenous groups, yet we would try to reach and tailor our interventions to their needs as much as possible.
For neighbours and (aspiring) history buffs it might be interesting to connect nature interventions with local history, both that of the neighbourhood as well as personal connections to the community. I take some inspiration from the Melbourne Urban Forest project, which mapped all city trees, and gave them an email address―and the trees promptly not only received maintenance requests but also love letters and personal anecdotes. The City of Glasgow, together with regional partners, was recently inspired by this Australian approach. The team created “Every Tree Tells A Story” and provides educational material and social media channels for Glaswegians to share their love of trees. If many of us would share our personal stories and emotional connections to our natural surroundings with our neighbours, would we all be more motivated to protect them even more? I’m now visualising little printed stories scattered across communities, which enable neighbours or passers-by to read how a particular tree or green space is meaningful to fellow citizens.
Urban nature helps create and design public spaces. Often enough, though, art and untamed, wild nature are neglected, yet very organic elements in creating aesthetic, welcoming spaces. There is a growing number of cities that have street art walks. (If you’re ever in Ghent, Belgium, make sure to take a stroll of the open-air gallery of its many murals!) How could we combine nature and urban art in our public spaces and for sure thrill youth, kids, and art-loving residents? I have experienced art walks and always found them especially memorable such as the Rehberger Way in the southwest of Germany. I also know of artists who use natural materials to make sculptures of varying sizes. Yet this “ecological art” is often set in or against the backdrop of landscapes and I haven’t yet seen good examples that really weave art and nature together in an (often confined) urban setting and that tell stories linked to the importance of biodiversity for instance. Whilst I continue my search, there is a growing body of comics showcasing the state of nature as well as current challenges and how we are or could be solving them. You might have already come across the nature-based solutions comics curated by The Nature of Cities itself together with the EU-funded project NetworkNature.
Whilst these are just ideas, we certainly need different approaches to enthuse all about nature―or at least about the need to protect and promote nature. Just recently I came across the term “plant blindness”, which describes the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment. In turn, this makes it very difficult for humankind to realise the importance plants and the natural environment in general play for us and our planet. On a recent trip to the local art exhibition “Flower Power” on the role of flowers in art and culture, I saw Tracey Bush’s work called “Nine Wild Plants”: she uses collages of famous brands to depict local plant species. She wants to raise awareness that the average Western citizen knows many more brand names than they know local plants.
Perhaps we should take a break from our (project) work occasionally and go on a good, old (or GPS-supported geocaching) treasure hunt of plants and other living things and use the funny and surprising anecdotes of those plants and our experience along the way to reconsider how we approach our work. Next onto the groundwork in neighbourhoods and cities, we should strive to design projects which create scientific evidence, but also inspire everyday action―or at least awareness and create space for playful, artistic interventions. For this, we need to engage with fellow artists and work with funding bodies to allow for better, more convincing, and fun stories of and with nature.
Architect/urban planner (Faculty of Architecture & Urbanism of the University of Sao Paulo). Holds a doctoral degree in landscape architecture and planning (Technical University of Munich). Senior expert on Nature-based Solutions and Biodiversity at ICLEI Europe (ICLEI Europe).
Despite its potential, storytelling is not widely utilized in scientific communication. However, science should not just be about cold facts and figures; it has the power to change lives, protect our environment, and shape our future. That sounds like a good story.
Imagine reading a scientific paper filled with jargon, complex terminology, and dense data charts. It can feel like deciphering a secret code! Scientific communication, as we know it, tends to be quite formal and even a bit rigid, focusing on presenting information objectively and relying on data-driven analysis. While this approach is essential within scientific circles, it often fails to captivate a wider audience or pique their interest in highly relevant societal topics. To truly engage a broader audience, we need to go beyond the dry and detached approach. We must find ways to connect with people on a personal level, appealing to their interests, emotions, and experiences. It’s about telling stories that make relevant data relatable and accessible.
Storytelling offers a powerful avenue to connect with people on an emotional and narrative level. It is a timeless art that has been used for centuries to captivate audiences and convey meaningful messages. When we hear a compelling story, we become invested in the characters, their experiences, and the journey they undertake. It evokes emotions, sparks our imagination, and leaves a lasting impact. Despite its potential, storytelling is not widely utilized in scientific communication. However, science should not just be about cold facts and figures; it has the power to change lives, protect our environment, and shape our future. So, it is extremely important to consider a storytelling approach in science communication to bridge the gap between experts and the general public. Stories also allow complex ideas and information to be conveyed in a relatable and accessible manner. By incorporating elements such as plot, setting, characters, point of view, and conflict, scientific information can be presented in a more engaging and memorable way. Scientific works can become captivating stories that grab the listener’s attention and take them on a thrilling journey.
Even if you think you can’t do storytelling, it’s just about starting. Anyone can become a storyteller. I wasn’t one, but I became one. Today, when I talk about nature-based solutions to a wider public, I instinctively try to identify the key elements that can make it a relatable and compelling topic. A personal connection to the subject matter also adds a layer of depth, as people can recognize passion immediately, and it resonates with them. Maybe this is the reason why I have gained a substantial number of followers on a professional social media platform. My posts breathe my genuine enthusiasm for nature-based solutions, capturing the hearts and minds of my audience. I share my journey, narrate the challenges I encountered, the obstacles I overcame, and the lessons I learned along the way. It’s like painting a vivid picture of the discoveries I made, unveiling the hidden secrets and unravelling the mysteries that lie beneath the surface. By infusing my story with this personal touch, I create a narrative that not only showcases expertise and achievements but also breathes personal interest and commitment. It humanises my work, making it relatable and inspiring to others who share my passion.
By adopting a storytelling approach to science communication, we can potentially achieve greater accessibility, engagement, and understanding among a wider audience. By making science feel relevant and impactful, we can capture the attention of even the most sceptical listener. This approach has the potential to unlock the valuable knowledge and insights from scientific work that often remain confined to specialised publications and limited audiences.
To approach my own investigative work as a story, I would need to identify the key elements that make it compelling. Picture this: instead of drowning readers in technical jargon, I would use language that everyone can understand. I would weave together narratives, visual aids, and real-life examples that ignite curiosity and spark imagination. It might also involve seeking out new collaborators from different disciplines or backgrounds to bring diverse perspectives and expertise.
So, let’s break free from the constraints of traditional scientific communication. Let’s embrace storytelling, engage our audience’s emotions, and make science an exciting and accessible adventure. Together, we can unravel the wonders of the natural world and inspire a lifelong curiosity about the mysteries that science seeks to uncover.
Kirsten Schwarz is an urban ecologist working at the interface of environment, equity, and health. Her research focuses on environmental hazards and amenities in cities and how their distribution impacts minoritized communities. Her work on lead contaminated soils documents how biogeophysical and social variables relate to the spatial patterning of soil lead.
Kirsten Schwarz
For me, the most compelling science stories are the ones that share the humanity of the work, the humanity of those doing the work, the humanity of those impacted by the work (for good or bad), the aspects that connect us, the emotions.
A More Compassionate Science Can Bring Us Better Storytelling
The person that taught me the most about science and the importance of storytelling wasn’t a scientist, but a human that dedicated his life to compassion, David Henry Breaux. He stood on a street corner in Davis, CA asking people that passed by to reflect on the concept of compassion and share their personal definition. At the time of his murder, he had been doing that work for almost 14 years. Many came to David to extract information, to find answers. But David didn’t provide answers, he listened, deeply and empathetically. And he demonstrated with that deep listening you likely already held the answers if you were still enough to hear them. And, through that deep listening, he also showed us that we have a lot in common with one another if we’re willing to slow down, reflect, be vulnerable, and share our stories.
At the time I met David, I was a postdoc at UC Davis. As I reflected on my thoughts on compassion, I realized that in my experience of science, compassion was not valued in a meaningful way. It wasn’t centered in the process of doing science, it wasn’t considered in the process of sharing science, and it wasn’t a requirement for advancing one’s career. David helped me see that if I was going to continue with a career in academia, I was going to have to center compassion not only in my life, but also in my science.
Stories help us do just that. We need stories to share our science because stories connect us. Science may help us better understand our world, but stories help us empathize, they connect us to our world. We need stories to make our science more compassionate, inclusive, and impactful. We need stories so we can more easily connect our science, and the people doing science, to the human experience.
For me, the most compelling science stories are the ones that share the humanity of the work, the humanity of those doing the work, the humanity of those impacted by the work (for good or bad), the aspects that connect us, the emotions. Science is sometimes described as a systematic approach to answering a question. That’s often not a very exciting story. But in practice, science is a messy wandering adventure that often leads to more questions than answers, the entire process guided by perfectly flawed humans. It’s the parts we don’t often share that make great stories.
Stories are also our legacy. Thousands of people have a story of David. His story didn’t end when his life ended. His work continues, more important and needed than ever. I’ve thought a lot about my definition of compassion since David was taken from us. I think it’s creating the conditions in your life to see more clearly, to slow down, to reconnect to the stillness and compassion in your heart. It’s an active practice, it won’t always be perfect, but it will always be there. And it’s part of everything, including science. Centering compassion in our science makes sharing our stories a natural extension of the work that we do, central to our mission as scientists. And as humans.
Ania Upstill (they/them) is a queer and non-binary performer, director, theatre maker, teaching artist and clown. A graduate of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre (Professional Training Program), Ania’s recent work celebrates LGBTQIA+ artists with a focus on gender diversity.
Scientific writing often seems to assume that for something to be taken seriously, it must be dry and fact-based. The more seriously written something is, the more true it is. But what if that wasn’t the only way to go about it?
As an Applied Theater maker, in addition to the five key elements of stories pointed to above, I’m also interested in what form a story takes. Is it told live to an audience? Is it told via printed media? Is it told as an audio story or a podcast? Is it a play, or a song? Is it, perhaps, told by puppets?
I am intensely interested in this question. Despite the “Theater” in the name, in Applied Theater we don’t assume that a traditional theatrical performance is the best way to tell a story. Instead, we utilise a variety of frameworks to engage participants, from Theater of the Oppressed―where audiences step into roles to attempt to change outcomes―to Theater-in-Education pieces that use artifacts to engage young audiences, and many more. In my work as a theater maker, I have also utilised a variety of forms, from circus to music, in order to best fit the content of the story that I’m telling. For something highly emotional, music is a powerful tool. For something that requires a sense of magic or awe, circus is incredible. For something that needs to invoke a sense of curiosity, there’s nothing quite like clowning.
With stories, I believe that humans want to be moved and entertained. This might be especially true for theater, but I think that it’s true for all stories. Scientific writing often seems to assume that for something to be taken seriously, it must be dry and fact-based. The more seriously written something is, the more true it is. But what if that wasn’t the only way to go about it? As children, we learn lots of incredibly valuable information from picture books or from puppet shows about, say, the importance of brushing our teeth. I’m curious about how different forms of storytelling can be used to reach new, different audiences. What if scientific knowledge came through a poem? Or a song (like in the They Might Be Giants album Here Comes Science)? Reading Rainbow was popular for decades, and is still enjoyed by audiences. Part of the show’s success, I believe, is that instead of simply recording a child’s storybook, it used a compelling host who provided a contextual frame for each story. It’s also telling that they stopped producing new episodes in response to the many new types of media that were becoming available. If one of the most successful children’s shows was responding to the times, shouldn’t we?
I would love to see more writers exploring using different forms to tell their stories, especially around science. Facts deserve to be delivered in a compelling and interesting way so that they can really be heard. I’m interested in what could happen if we stretched our imaginations beyond what we think a story should be, to what a story can be. One of our powerful tools is form, and I challenge us all to consider which of our many exciting storytelling mediums best suit the stories we’re trying to tell.
Stéphane Verlet Bottéro (b. 1987) is an artist working at the intersection of social practice, installation, education, writing, gardening, and cooking. He is interested in the entanglements of community, materiality, body, and place. Based on site-specific research and durational interventions, his practice seeks to open spaces to unlearn and unsettle ways of inhabiting the world.
Mark Fisher famously wrote that it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what comes after it. I wish that more scientific literature embraced speculation and affabulation as methods to talk about the worlds that we want; help us imagine a diversity of (past, present, and future) non-extractive worlds.
Having had an education in both (ecological) science and (visual) arts, I am interested in how in spite of generating knowledge by different means, they both operate as storytelling practices. An author that has changed my understanding of science as a practice of creating world-making stories, is Donna Haraway. For me, anyone interested in what tales can science tell should read her book Staying with the Trouble, in which she develops the ideas of SF as a method.
The acronym SF is polysemic: string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism. SF extends beyond the traditional genre of science fiction literature and delves into the realms of science as fact but also as fantasy and fable. Speculative thinking and writing are playful tools to challenge dominant paradigms, envision alternative paths for coexistence and flourishing, and imagine different futures.
The feminist ethics of SF are particularly useful to think about whether science-fact/fiction can be told using terms that recognize individuals, communities, and their environment’s relations of interdependence and mutual care, rather than using terms that reinforce dominant individualistic and exploitative models that often characterize technology and society. It reinvigorates what Deleuze said about the virtual―that it has the ability to change the real.
Key to this ethical and methodological framework is Haraway’s notion of response-ability. It acknowledges that we are not isolated individuals but part of complex webs of relationships and ecosystems, which implies that our choices and actions require a mode of attention that values such interconnectedness. This has important consequences in terms of how the way science is narrated may influence engendering other futures.
Equally, the books of Octavia Butler have had a huge influence on me, in particular through her ability to draw from science and technology in order to invent worlds in which oppressive divides between constructed categories (natural/cultural, masculine/feminine, …) are no longer relevant. I wish that more scientific literature embraced speculation and affabulation as methods to talk about the worlds that we want. Mark Fisher famously wrote that it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what comes after it. I believe that more storytelling would help us imagine a diversity of (past, present, and future) non-extractive worlds.
Ibrahim Wallee; is a development communicator, peacebuilding specialist, and environmental activist. He is the Executive Director of Center for Sustainable Livelihood and Development (CENSLiD), based in Accra, Ghana. He is a Co-Curator for Africa and Middle East Regions for The Nature of Cities Festivals.
The people’s voice matters in validating development outcomes, be it positive or negative. Telling their story is essential and even more crucial in building trust.
In today’s contemporary world, the emergence of participatory communication, a bottom-up dialogic communication model in the development field, introduced in the 1950s by the Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire has evolved into the preferred communication model. This communication medium is deployed in pursuing development as social change, giving voice to the people, and empowering communities sociocultural and economically. As an influential proponent of the participatory communication theory and practice, Freire’s focus on dialogical communication, emphasizing participatory, and collective processes in research, problem identification, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation of change, is instructive (Mefalopulos & Tufte, 2009). His critique of extension works (1973) and a book on liberating pedagogy (1979) emphasize a close dialectic between collective action and reflections and work towards human empowerment (ibid: 3).
The participatory communication model engenders resonance with the plight of the vulnerable, acceptability, and a broader reach of new audiences within the development ecosystem. The model appeals to social context and cultural sensitivities and enriches development outcomes by promoting ownership and communal participation. For development practitioners to demonstrate value to beneficiary communities, this model remains an inclusive and effective tool that unpacks the complexities of development discourse to bridge the knowledge gap and elicit an understanding of the value proposition in its social and practical context.
It is worth recognizing that sociocultural context matters to development practice because human identity, socialization and cultural sensitivities, relative to language and value propositions, play an important role in gauging the effectiveness of development outcomes. Irrespective of the contentions and the problematization of the concept of development and its imperial leanings espoused by Arturo Escobar and Henry Veltmeyer, to mention a few. It is where participatory communication empowers people in its two-way dialogic medium of interactions. It allows society to establish substance and affirm a sense of ownership and value in the interaction of practitioners with beneficiary communities, leading to an appreciation of contributions to the growth of the knowledge economy and its relevance to social change and economic empowerment. The people’s voice matters in validating development outcomes, be it positive or negative. Telling their story is essential and even more crucial in building trust. Hence the need to recognize that people are voiceless not because they have nothing to say but because nobody cares to listen to them (Malikhao & Servaes, 2005: 91). This is why participation promotes listening, builds trust, and facilitates equitable exchange of ideas, knowledge, and experiences (ibid). Paulo Freire refers to this as “the right of all people to individually and collectively speak their word” (Freire, 1983: 76). He emphasizes that it is not the privilege of a few but the right of every man to do so. “No one can say a true word alone, nor say it for another prescriptively, robbing others of their word (voice)” (ibid). Freire’s postulation depicts not only the empowering but liberating nature of participatory communication and its receptive outlook towards diversity and multiplicity of views, including conflicts, to inspire efforts at addressing contemporary challenges of society.
The inclination to choose participatory communication in telling a story of development practice that reaches new audiences, far and wide, stems from the above enumerations of this dialogic communication model’s value and substance. Even more imperative is that the inherent conflicts associated with the concept of development as a practice are subjective. The diversity of thoughts and views on development discourse adds to the vortex of the complexity and challenges that require a multidisciplinary approach to proffering solutions to achieving and validating desired outcomes. It is where using collaborative channels of communication that bridge the gaps between the technical, innovative, and inspiring discourses reaches an extended audience within the public sphere. Every voice matters and deserves listening, reinforcing Freire’s insistence that dialogue is not false participation but an indispensable component of learning and knowing.
References:
Escobar, A. (1999). The Invention of Development. Current History, 98(631), 382-386.
Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
Malikhao, P., & Servaes, J. (2005). Participatory communication: the new paradigm? Media and Global Change: Rethinking Communication for Development, 91-103.
Mefalopulos, P., & T. T. (2009, June). Participatory Communication; A Practical Guide. World Bank Working Paper No. 170, pp. 1-50.
Veltmeyer, H., & Parpart, J. (2018). The Development Project in Theory and Practice: a review of its shifting dynamics. ResearchGate, 1-52.
Tommy Cheemou Yang is an indigenous Hmong designer, researcher, and educator focused on insurgent urban and architectural transformations, utilizing inter-disciplinary methods such as fieldwork, oral/public history, and radical mapping. His current work challenges architectural and urban design epistemologies, cultivating conversations on identity, social action, resiliency, and insurgent placemaking.
Storytelling asks us to see that change does not come from the expert but from the mundane acts that cascade into large movements creating change.
Reviewing and connecting my work around this notion of “storytelling,” I am reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The danger of a single story. The longstanding rituals of stories carry wisdom and worlds that are non-linear and changing. It cascades as it weaves through communities and urges us to refute the linear and flat histories created by contemporary design and data-driven thinking. If we want to make deep and lasting changes around equity and environmental justice, we can no longer accept that the content of knowledge remains within the hands of the “expert.” Storytelling asks us to see that change does not come from the expert but from the mundane acts that cascade into large movements creating change.
Yet, it is remarkable how little attention is given to storytelling as a method of inquiry within the realms of design and the sciences. I argue for the establishment of storytelling central to our field of investigation, dissemination, and pedagogy. Inspired by Gunderson and Holling’s theory of Panarchy―the introduction of an ethnographic method to succession, scales, and belonging can frame how the life and stories from communities cascade into large urban transformations [Fig. 1].
Figure 1: Introduction of Storytelling
Among my work, I listen to HMoob remaking home in Wisconsin, spend days walking using film and photography to capture small practices of stewardship in New York Chinatowns, and visit how urban villagers of Chiang Mai are maneuvering the top-down planning of the city. This slice of my research utilizes multi-sited ethnography to thread stories across territories revealing how ordinary citizens use tactics of homemaking to deal with current large systemic issues.[1]
Within this process it soon became clear that I must make my work accessible to others beyond experts in order to initiate a multi-dimensional analysis, thus inspiring a path for research into the potential of oral storytelling, comics, and animations. For example, my work with HMoob stewards in Wisconsin was woven into an array of Hmong Radio Documentaries exploring the meaning of home, identity, and ethnic belonging beyond the domain of the house [Fig. 2].[2]
Figure 2: Hmong Radio Documentaries
Figure 3: Students Doing Field Work Chiang Mai
Accessibility in research led me to teach designers ethnographic methods that would expand the domain of communication nurturing non-conventional techniques to counter map, legitimize, protest, and make apparent frictions of the city. The following figure illustrates students’ field explorations in Chiang Mai, Thailand held with Brian McGrath in 2020 capturing the lived realities of village compounds [Fig. 3]. Using the multi-sited case studies, the same pedagogy cascaded into an array of designers learning to see and hear their environments in Pittsburgh where I am currently teaching at Carnegie Mellon University [Fig. 4].
Figure 4: Student Fieldwork and Mapping of Pittsburgh
From my perspective, research must be deciphered not just through jargon, graphs, and numbers, urging an innovative potential of the literal reading of our environments as narratives.[3] As Shannon Mattern reminded us, our contemporary world is planned and designed drawing upon layered histories, meanings, and symbolisms.[4] By recognizing these patterns, it builds empathetic approaches―a vital restoration to increasingly prevalent number-driven models in research.
To speak about that location from which work emerges I choose familiar politicised language, old codes, words like “struggle, marginality, resistance”. I choose these words knowing that they are no longer popular or “cool”―hold onto them and the political legacies they evoke and affirm, even as I work to change what they say, to give them renewed and different. – Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness, Bell Hooks 1989
Paying attention to the field not only as an object of analysis but a classroom where scholars and communities produce empirical comprehension advocate for embodied practices―linking effect, labor, histories, and resistances as forms of knowledge.[5] It puts differences at the heart of inquiry, a radical openness to accommodate and evolve with the things we see or hear in the field.[6]
[1] Marcus, George E. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155931.
[2] The Field School was founded by Dr. Arijit Sen, using participatory action-research to explore how cities have changed over time and their local histories. http://thefieldschool.weebly.com/
[3] Barthes, Roland, and Lionel Duisit. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” New Literary History 6, no. 2 (1975): 237–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/468419.
[4] Mattern, Shannon. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
[6] Hooks, Bell. “CHOOSING THE MARGIN AS A SPACE OF RADICAL OPENNESS.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36 (1989): 15–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44111660.
The premises on which we build our cities and construct civilisation, and the extent and means by which we include nature in our cities depends on what values we choose to adopt. Our capacity to engage with the processes of nurturing the nature of our cities depends on how we see our roles as members of society.
Consumer or citizen?
When teaching tertiary students in the subjects of ‘Urbanity and Landscape’ and ‘Urban Ecology’, I would often ask a class whether they thought of themselves as consumers. Everyone would raise a hand. When I asked who thought of themselves as citizens, out of a class of around sixty I’d be lucky to see half a dozen hands go up; this was in the second or third year of university amongst the best educated young people of an ‘advanced’ western democracy — all putative young professionals likely to be charged with the significant roles in the ongoing development of our built environment.
Pursuing the point, I would try to open up some discussion by asking what rights one has as a consumer or as a citizen. The answers pretty much boiled down to the right to return faulty goods or not to buy things you weren’t satisfied with (as a consumer) and the right to vote (as a citizen). Going a little further and asking about responsibilities, I generally drew blanks.
Straw polls these may have been, but this is worrying stuff because I think it flags clearly that something is amiss in the body politic.
I don’t have the data to prove it (who would fund such a study?), but I am certain that billions of people around the world now see themselves primarily as consumers rather than citizens. They understand ‘freedom of choice’ to be about choosing from products on offer, be they from car manufacturers, washing powder purveyors or political parties. The concept of active citizenship is tenuous, if it exists at all.
The consequences of this are far-reaching and disturbing and affect the nature of cities.
Consumption or conservation?
What product do you offer a consumer that gives them the choice to value nature for its own sake? There are a handful of well-intentioned products that, as part of their cover price, offer to save whales or plant trees or whatever, but most cash-strapped consumers buy on price, not a sentimental regard for nature. At the same time, the nature of the marketplace is predicated on the consumption of natural resources in a way that precludes systemic change towards a system that values the conservation of resources. Scarcity adds value to resources and enhances them as targets for exploitation.
It’s an approach that didn’t help the Dodo, and it isn’t doing any favours to African elephants or Asian tigers. Their increasing scarcity renders them ever more valuable and as their value rises the incentive to hunt them is increasing. In a similar way the ecology of the Canadian wilderness is despoiled because its intrinsic value counts for nothing against the dollar value of the resources buried within it. As oil becomes more scarce its value is rising and it is becoming more and more ‘economic’ to employ expensive and destructive means to release oil from tar sands. In each case, as the perceived monetary value of elephants, tigers and tar sand wilderness increases, their intrinsic value counts for nothing.
It’s a vicious circle against which the consumer system provides no defences. Its hapless targets are either given little value unless they can be exploited, or great value as they become exploited. The values assigned by the market system work in direct opposition to almost all aspects of intrinsic value.
Development, and collective benefit
Land itself is only valued as it is developed and becomes developable. Notwithstanding cultural undercurrents that have long struggled to see recognition of the intrinsic merits of ‘wilderness’ it remains clear that wild nature has no monetary value until it can be consumed. A piece of prairie, stand of forest, or basin of wetland is seen as worthless unless and until it can be turned into ‘real’ estate. Once human ingenuity introduces the tools and processes capable of manipulating the landscape into usable real estate its monetary value rises. As a rule, its value continues to rise as its capacity to support living systems is diminished. The most valuable real estate is in the most built-up areas of heavily developed urban systems.
The consumerist economic system adds value to land in the marketplace in inverse proportion to the ability of that land to sustain life. A – Undeveloped land B – Land division + road = $ C – Reticulated power + water = $$$ D – Building + wider road = $$$$$ E – More building + more road + more power… = $$$$$$$$$$$ Credit: Paul Downton
It’s one of the ironies of mass industrial society that its preferred economic framework is focussed on satisfying the consumptive desires of ‘the individual’. This is where the fundamental value base of the consumer and the citizen, of necessity, diverge. The idea of being a consumer is exclusive. It is explicitly not about the greater good, it is about satiating individual desire and pandering to individual whims and the dictates of fashion for perceived personal benefit.
Consumers compete. Conversely, the idea of being a citizen rests on concern for the collective. Citizens make cities.
In order for any individual to gain advantages from it, a city first requires the creation of collective benefits. City infrastructure is a shared resource that contains such thoroughly mixed contributions from so many people that their individual contributions cannot sensibly be identified. Before any individual can walk down the sidewalk or drive along the road there has to be collective effort and acceptance of shared costs to create the sidewalk or roadway. It would be nonsense for any one individual to try and walk along only that part of the pavement, or drive down only that part of the road they paid for.
Archaeologists study the ruins of cities to gain insight into how people organised their lives in much the same way that a pathologist studies a corpse. A city is a social construct and every element of it betrays some information about how its people lived. This great construction depends on coordinated and productive behaviour by the individuals who bring it into being and maintain it.
A living city is no more a collection of buildings, roads and sewers than a living person is a mere collection of limbs, organs, arteries and veins. It is something that transcends the tribe as much as it transcends the individual.
Exchanging the wealth of human experience
Cities are places of exchange. That is their essence, their fundamental purpose; but the exchanges they foster and facilitate extend far beyond buying and selling in the marketplace. Social and cultural exchanges can, and do, exist without being tied to financial transactions. The value of cities cannot — should not — be measured only in monetary currency.
Unless you believe that all we are good for is to buy and sell goods and services, then reducing all relationships to mercantile exchange is to diminish what it means to be human. At best, it’s like marrying for money — it more or less guarantees a relationship empty of love, life and meaning. At worst, it is de-humanising, reducing the wealth of human experience to simplistic, one-dimensional measures of worth.
And it dangerously diminishes our capacity to appreciate the value of nature.
The same mindset that reduces the value of nature to what it’s worth in monetary terms is the one that speaks of valuing ‘natural infrastructure’ on the same basis as power grids and gas pipelines. If they deliver services, they have value. If they don’t, they’re worthless. In the monetary system a forest may have value as a stand of timber that’s worth more wood-chipped and dead than alive. Valued as natural infrastructure, a forest might be viewed as a useful part of a catchment that provides water for a city with a dollar value that reflects how much the water supply is valued by the markets at any given time. The rub is that in a monetary system the value of the forest varies in relation to changes in human affairs, distorted through the cultural prisms of the mercantile class, all bearing no direct relation to what the forest does in its natural state as part of the skein of living systems.
Understanding the value of nature in, and of, cities requires acceptance of its intrinsic worth as part of our life support system. The nature of cities can be measured in dollars or Yen or RMB, but that does not capture its worth.
Commodification of nature does not capture its true value. Credit: Paul Downton
To say that a tree provides services which clean and oxygenate the air, absorb stormwater and provide shade that are altogether worth $xxx simply commodifies the tree and enables it to be listed in a set of financial accounts. But the merit of those accounts varies.
This is not to say that there is no merit in valuing ecosystem services in monetary terms, but the inherent danger in accepting commodification of the living world to any degree is that in an almost completely mercantile environment the commodified value becomes the only measure that is accepted in wider discourse. There is no actual equivalence between say, a thriving temperate rainforest (such as in Tasmania’s Tarkine region) and an open-cut mine, or between a Tennessee snail darter and a hydroelectric dam, and once the debate about their value is reduced to dollars, the argument about worth becomes subject to the vagaries and distortions of the marketplace and insidious assertions that ‘making a living’ is somehow more important than maintaining life.
Painting a picture
In any mercantile system ‘value’ varies. Perceived worth is negotiable. The coinage is based on fantasy — literally, on phantasms of the mind, albeit ones that a society chooses to share. The measures of worth derive, not from any absolute or grounded measures of things but from agreements to set a value on one or another aspect of human mental construction. Thus a 67 cm x 56 cm piece of canvas smeared with pigments and stretched across a timber frame may be valued at perhaps $80, or it may be valued at more than $80 million. Doing nothing but occupying space in a vault or hanging on a wall, over 20 years or more its value might rise from $80 million to nearly $150 million. Such has happened to the Portrait of Dr Gachet by Vincent Van Gogh (who never benefited personally from this perception of value and died in relative poverty).
Wheatfield with cypresses by Vincent Van Gogh 1889, said to be worth $91.5 million. Credit: Wikipedia Commons
This kind of perverse valuation can be seen again, all too clearly, when a two-dimensional representation of the complex, multivalent reality of nature using canvas and pigments possesses more dollar-value than the nature to which the artist was doing homage. One could buy many wheat fields with cypresses with the $91.5 million at which Van Gogh’s painting of that name is currently valued.
Dead as a Dodo. Painting of a Dodo head by Cornelius Saftleven 1638, believed to be one of the last illustrations made of a live Dodo. Credit: Wikipedia Commons
The nature of a city, in every sense, ultimately rests on the quality of its governance. That governance is informed by the values of its citizens and what they choose to prioritise. As consumers within the framework of the world financial system we choose to create socially agreed (if morally questionable) values for works of art that represent nature. Although our species is presently responsible for the biggest wave of mass-extinctions since the dinosaurs disappeared, as citizens and city-makers, we need to both identify and defend the full intrinsic value of nature within the framework of the city-making that represents our global civilisation.
The vagaries of the modern marketplace make it open to manipulation to a quite astonishing extent. The stock exchange crashes of recent and past history provide prodigious proof of that. What is worth a dollar today may be worth twice as much tomorrow — or not — but the value of nature is intrinsic. It is about living systems. Ultimately, it is about survival and if we allow the nature of our cities to be valued in terms of the marketplace rather than its integral necessity to our collective health and well-being, there is nothing to prevent it from going the way of the Dodo.
In cities throughout the United States, thousands of people are gearing up for another busy summer of growing vegetables in community gardens and caring for street trees planted along the sidewalk’s edge. Self-organized, volunteer-based, and focused on improving both communities and the environment, these “civic ecology” practices often pick up where municipal governments and larger non-profits leave off. Marianne Krasny and Keith Tidball, founders of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University, have done important work summarizing and describing the different reasons why volunteers engage in these practices. They’ve also noted the wide range of benefits that likely result from activities like gardening and tree care; benefits that can accrue to individuals, neighborhoods, and, perhaps, even whole cities.
This blog post explores some issues around the political economy of civic ecology practices before moving on to consider three attitudes that may help make these practices more successful. I’ve chosen to focus on community gardens and street tree stewardship because they are the practices I know best, through both personal experience and academic research.
In both good times and bad, volunteers are essential to the tasks of creating and maintaining green spaces in North American cities. In a robust economy, city governments can afford to support volunteers with training programs, technical assistance, and warehouses full of tools and materials. During lean times, governments cut spending on these initiatives and volunteers find themselves managing an ever-widening portfolio of projects with little help from on high. In both circumstances, volunteers take on tasks that might once have been handled by municipal employees earning living wages and pensions. Some argue that shifting the burden of environmental maintenance on to volunteers in urban communities is an unjust abdication of government responsibility for the common good. Others make the case that volunteers derive benefits from doing the work that may outweigh the costs.
Good or bad, it seems that affluent neighborhoods can more easily afford to pick up the government slack, writing checks for private environmental maintenance services when public funds run dry. In cities, special Business Improvement Districts levy supplemental taxes to pay for things like street sweeping, plaza maintenance, tree care, and ornamental landscaping. Public parks have their own version of this scheme, with independent Conservancies and “Friends of…” organizations raising large sums from wealthy donors who benefit heavily from having a well-kempt park in their own back yard. This arrangement works nicely in pockets of the city with ample money to donate. It falls short in other neighborhoods with too few businesses to finance an Improvement District and even fewer deep-pocketed donors to bankroll the upkeep of a local park.
I don’t mean to denigrate the good work that both Business Improvement Districts and Parks Conservancies have done to make large patches of cities in the U.S. safer, more inviting, and more environmentally enlightened. Looking back over the past thirty years we see some of the most ambitious and extravagant versions of these strategies at work in New York City. Celebrated public spaces like Central Park, Times Square, and The High Line would look radically different without the private money that pays for their ongoing maintenance and improvement. Though there is plenty of nostalgia for that bygone gritty New York, it’s difficult to imagine anyone would elect to change a place like Bryant Park back into an open market for shady drug deals. I doubt anyone wishes Prospect Park Alliance would close up shop and leave its Olmstead-designed namesake to fall back into disrepair.
That said, not every neighborhood in New York City—or in any other city, for that matter—is able to pick itself up by its bootstraps with the leavening help of local cash. In many cases, parks far away from the center of town remain unkempt and underwhelming. Street trees die soon after they’re planted for lack of regular care. Community gardens struggle to find new members to take over the work of older generations. Neighborhoods that have overcome these odds have done so by pitching their own volunteer labor into ongoing maintenance and, at times, by organizing to demand more capital investments in parks, trees, and gardens from city hall. Those that can’t muster volunteers or political clout are often left to do without.
Clearly, I’m ambivalent.
In the best of all possible worlds, city dwellers would share equitably—if not equally—in both the benefits and the burdens of urban life. In reality, some neighborhoods pay for supplemental services while others are forced to turn to volunteers to fill in the gaps. For most readers of this blog, none of this is news. In New York City, the first modern community garden and the first organized street tree stewardship initiative were set up roughly forty years ago during a prolonged period of decline in municipal fortunes. We’ve all had time to learn to live with the contradictions inherent in the neo-liberal city. We may not like this arrangement, but most of us work within it anyway.
For many of us directly engaged in a civic ecology practice (I count myself as an erstwhile community gardener and sometime street tree steward), the issue isn’t whether or not to do the work. We just take for granted that it needs to get done. Rather, our burning question is how to do the work so that it actually has a positive impact on our communities and the local environment. We find no shortage of solid information out there on best practices in gardening, tree care, or any other kind of horticultural practice you can think of. We attend master gardener training programs and adult continuing education classes at botanic gardens; we scour our local libraries and log hours on cooperative extension websites from Land Grant colleges throughout the country. It is relatively easy to find places ready to teach us the skills and conceptual knowledge necessary for doing this work.
But what about the attitudes that make civic ecology practices in cities successful? Jane Vella, a leading figure in informal adult learning, likes to say, “Attitudes are caught, not taught.” You can describe an idea and demonstrate how to use a tool, but people develop their own outlook on an issue in their own time. What, then, are some attitudes we might hope to see develop in and around civic ecology practices that happen in cities?
I have my own personal perspective on the values that matter most in successfully caring for a community garden or a row of street trees. The following three themes keep popping up in my own practices. I should stress, however, that none of these thoughts or observations are based on sustained, empirical research. Take it or leave it, these are just opinions I’ve formed over years of working alongside other gardeners and tree stewards around New York City, talking and reflecting on our efforts together.
Take a cue from street art and embrace the city
In the United States, cities have long been seen as a necessary evil of a capitalist economy—denigrated, tolerated, and rarely celebrated. Writing at the turn of a century that gave the world its first industrial megacities, Thomas Jefferson had this to say: “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.” His was by no means the last word on the subject. A hundred years later, urban planners and political reformers set themselves to the task of making American cities a little less, well, urban, paving the way for high-rise housing projects and metastasizing suburban sprawl. The modern environmental movement has roots in this tradition, with an anti-urban streak that has only recently been brought into question by increasingly subtle ways of looking at the relationship between cities and nature (an exciting theme that runs through many of the essays written for The Nature of Cities blog).
I think community gardening and street tree stewardship practices are strengthened when they work past these longstanding biases and wholeheartedly embrace the contemporary city. Though we often use terms like “urban farming” and “urban forestry” to categorize these practices, we shouldn’t let our rural analogies run ahead of reality. Community gardens are like farms—but, then again, they’re really not. They have uniquely urban commitments that run far beyond the garden gate and into the heart of the neighborhood. A street graced with a dense tree canopy is like a forest in some ways, and the analogy has helped many people make an emotional connection to what otherwise may feel like a scattered jumble of individual trees. Yet street trees are just one of many ingredients in a subtle recipe for designing safe and vibrant sidewalks. Despite their rural corollaries, these practices are wholly urban, and they reach their greatest potential when they work with the city rather than against it. When we use trees and gardens to solve urban problems, we need to remember that the solutions to those problems will almost always involve betterurbanism—not lessurbanism.
To that end, I think both gardeners and farmers can draw inspiration from street art, a creative practice that takes artwork out of its native habitat and stitches it directly into the city.
Photo: Philip Silva
Street art takes a number of different forms, from wheat paste posters and stenciled spray paint to chalk murals and multi-media installations. Sometimes it is earnest and political. Sometimes it is ironic and playful. It often incorporates elements of the physical city, transforming urban infrastructure into canvas, medium, gallery, and artwork all at once. Street art is rough around the edges, comfortable in messy environments, and relaxed in its ephemerality. You don’t get lost in street art; it doesn’t try to transport you away from the city. Instead, it roots you even more firmly in the radical uniqueness of a particular urban place.
Photo: Philip Silva
When I hear community gardens described as “oases” of nature in the city, I can’t help but cringe a little. Some of the most resilient, interesting, and exciting gardens I’ve come across in New York are the ones that happily submit to their urban surroundings. At Espiritu Tierra garden in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, plastic bodega bags serve as scarecrows and two colorful murals tell the story of the neighborhood’s struggles and victories over the years. In the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, residents fashion street tree guards out of old refrigerator shelves, air conditioner grills, and chicken wire, decorating their bricolage with a mosaic of broken ceramic and tile.
These do-it-yourself approaches to gardening and tree care may not look like something out of the L.L. Bean catalogue, but they get the job done. Though the results may not be beautiful in the conventional sense, they’re almost always meaningful. They have that scrappy quality you see in layers of decomposing street art, reincorporating bits and pieces of the city’s flotsam to create something that surprises the eye and captures the imagination.
Photo: Philip Silva
I believe the Guerilla Gardening movement, which got started in London and spread throughout the world in recent years, points us in an exciting direction. Quirky, resourceful, and even sometimes confrontational, Guerilla Gardening weaves a patchwork of greenery into unlikely places throughout the city. It doesn’t try to transport you to another place. Instead, it invites you to discover and, perhaps, create a new found love for the place you find yourself in right now.
What might happen if gardeners and tree stewards adopted these attitudes toward their work? How would their practices change? What would be the long-term result? My hope is that a street art approach to both practices would help make urban gardening and forestry more approachable and engaging for a greater diversity of people—especially those of us who deeply love city life.
If any readers have examples of these attitudes already in action, I eagerly welcome them to share their stories in the comments section below.
Brooklyn Bridge replica. Photo: Philip Silva
Tree sweater. Photo: Philip Silva
Take it slow and work for the long haul.
For anyone involved in an environmental management practice, it often feels as if time is running out. Temperatures are rising, glaciers are melting, forests are shrinking, and species are disappearing. Sometimes it seems as if the urgency with which we work to delay, pause, or reverse these trends is, in itself, unsustainable. At best, we burn ourselves out and force ourselves to take a break for a little while. At worst, we recapitulate the shortsightedness and callousness that got us into many of these messes in the first place. Though we find ourselves in a growing heap of environmental crises, we can’t let the pace of our responses overwhelm us.
“Garden,” my friend John likes to say, “is a noun and a verb.” John and I belonged to the same community garden in Brooklyn, and I was always inspired by the slow, thoughtful approach he took to the tempest-in-a-teapot politics that would occasionally stymie everyone’s efforts to work together. The more excited everyone grew in a debate over cutting down a tree or creating a new vegetable bed, the calmer and quieter John became. And then he’d remind us, in a low voice—garden is a noun and a verb. On any given day, the garden might look like a solid and predictable presence in the neighborhood. Yet it was always changing, sometimes slowly and imperceptibly and other times in quick and disruptive bursts.
Creating and caring for gardens, stewarding street trees, maintaining parks, restoring urban waterways—all of these practices are what Myles Horton might have called “long haul” work. They’re never really done, and any effort to rush toward a feeling of completion usually ends in frustration and failure. Instead, these ongoing practices ask for an attitude that combines patience and faith in processes that take their own time, no matter how long that time may be.
In recent years, some cities have sprinted to quickly plant millions of new trees on sidewalks and in public parks. Efforts to organize and mobilize volunteers to care for these trees have struggled to keep pace with the swift planting schedule and thousands of new trees have likely died for lack of adequate stewardship. I’ve heard some residents complain that “the city” foisted new trees on them without consultation. As a result, these citizens bear little responsibility for the long-term survival of these new additions to the urban forest.
Contrast this quick-hit urban forestry strategy to the efforts of the New Jersey Tree Foundation, where staff organizers work closely with residents of neighborhoods in cities like Newark and Camden to prioritize and design new tree planting projects. In order to get trees from the Foundation, neighbors must come together to select new planting sites, secure stewardship commitments from local residents, and host a block party on the day the trees are planted. Slowly and deliberately, the Foundation and its neighborhood partners build excitement and investment in the new trees. As a result, one Foundation staff person I’ve spoken to estimates that 95 percent of the trees they’ve planted have survived well past their first year near the curb. They may not plant thousands (or even hundreds) of trees at a time, but they’re working for the long haul. Time will tell which strategy has a more lasting impact as the years go by.
Facts all come with points of view
In recent years, environmentalists of all stripes have put a lot of effort into quantifying and monetizing the value of things like gardens and parks, street trees and greenways. The theory behind these efforts is straightforward. In a society that measures costs and benefits in monetary terms, anything that lacks a price tag is, effectively, counted as worthless. Drawing on the concept of ecosystem services, advocates have crafted rigorous methods for calculating the dollars and cents worth of benefits these things create in order to make their value literally count.
Take the case of urban forests. Trees soak up carbon dioxide. They trap storm water and prevent it from polluting urban waterways. They save electricity by shading buildings and reducing the need for air conditioning. You can assign a dollar value to each of these benefits and tally it all up like savings in your bank account.
Yet throughout history, people have made compelling cases for creating and taking care of urban greenery without relying on sophisticated accounting tools to boil it all down to money. I’ve spoken to a number of community gardeners who are reluctant to estimate the monetary value of their work because they feel some values just can’t be quantified. Farming Concrete, a citizen science initiative developed and tested in New York City, offers gardeners a rigorous toolkit for weighing, tracking, and estimating the market value of the vegetables they grow together each season. For some gardeners, seeing that dollar amount at the end of the summer is an epiphany. It shows that their work really does add up in a tangible way. Yet the people who created Farming Concrete never meant for that one metric to become the onlymeans by which we value community gardens.
What if a garden has a bad harvest one year? Does that mean we should value it less than in previous years? What about the intangible benefits that come out of community gardens? How do we calculate the value of a well-organized and politically engaged group of neighbors? How about the value of an informal public space that lets people come together without having to pay to get in? Even if we develop clever proxy measures to quantify these hard-to-grasp concepts, there’s a pervasive sense that the whole will always be greater than the sum of its parts. Tally up all the ways gardens or trees have an impact on the city and you’re still left with an incomplete balance sheet.
This “something special” that exists beyond the explanatory power of numbers is, I think, best captured in stories about the impacts of gardens and trees in cities. Policymakers may ask for “just the facts” about the costs and benefits of caring for a city’s living systems. But as David Byrne once cautioned in the lyrics of a popular song, “facts all come with points of view / facts don’t do what you want them to.” Sometimes numbers, presented all on their own, really can’t tell the whole truth.
Stories, on the other hand, needn’t be completely factual to be accurate. They don’t rely on an exhaustive account of every quantifiable benefit created by a garden, a park, or a tree to render a resonant argument about the value these things bring to the city. Stories can start from the assumption that these things are priceless, not worthless. Moreover, storytelling is a skill available to everyone. Gardeners and street tree stewards shouldn’t have to wait for a technical expert to measure the value of their work.
As part of the Five Borough Farm initiative sponsored by the Design Trust for Public Space, my colleague Liz Barry and I are developing a toolkit that helps New Yorkers tell accurate stories about all the good things happening in their gardens. Though the tools and methods we’re developing focus on collecting quantitative data, this is just a first step in the storytelling process. Instead of simply generating a spreadsheet of raw facts and figures, we hope gardeners will use the data to tell rich, complex, and compelling stories about the value of their work. Though the data they collect may never completely capture all of the good that comes out of gardens, the stories they go on to tell will more than make up the difference.
* * *
These three attitudes—embracing the city, going slow, and valuing stories—are by no means the only attitudes with the potential to strengthen civic ecology practices like community gardening and street tree stewardship. What other attitudes might we add to the list? What new or unexplored perspectives can we consider as we look to volunteers to make cities more environmentally resilient? I hope you’ll add your thoughts in the comments section below and kick-start a new conversation.
China’s rapid urbanization in the last 30 years has brought about many problems. The country is now facing a huge challenge to balance economic development with environmental conservation and social stability. Sustainable development is in the spotlight: how can we build a better city that can provide a better life for its citizens?
The ecocity seems to be one of the solutions. Since the concept of “Eco-Civilization” was advocated by China’s central government in 2007, local governments have responded actively to the appeal. By 2011, 90% of Chinese cities at the prefecture-level and above had proposed ambitious goals to build eco-cities (XIE and ZHOU, 2010). However, in China and throughout the world, the ecocity is still in its preliminary stage, without a mature theoretical basis and systematic exemplary practices. Local governments in China are encouraged to learn by exploring sustainable development models through ecocity construction.
Different people hold different opinions on the concept of an ecocity. By now, there has been no globally recognized definition for an ecocity. In China, a representative definition is: an Ecocity is a composite human settlement system combining balanced socio-economic development with healthy ecological objectives to achieve the harmonious coexistence of man and nature.
Ecocity features
Area
Characteristics
Philosophical base
• Ecological theory, system theory, sustainable development theory
• Ecological view of nature
• Scientific outlook on development
Development background
• The acceleration of global urbanization process since 1970s
• Human beings are facing the dual pressure of resource deficiency and environmental deterioration
• The rise of ecology research
Concept discrimination
• A composite human settlement system combining balanced socio-economical development with healthy ecological objective to achieve the harmonious coexistence of man and nature
Objectives
• To construct a new type of city features efficient economy, harmonious society, conservative resource utilization, progressive technology, innovative system and sustainable development
Main development areas
• City planning, eco-community, green building, green transportation, eco-infrastructure, energy use, water resource use, waste disposal, eco-industry, digital city, eco-ideology and behavior model, institutional support system.
Means of realization
• (In China) Led by the Government, top-down guidance
Development stage
• The concept of ecocity has been proposed for some 40 years. In the past 10 years, the research of ecocity theory and practice has gradually heated up. In China, the so called “ecocity boom” is around the corner. However, as there is no mature ecocity theory and practice now, everything is still in the exploration stage. Eco-city is more an advocate or idea than a reality. Until now, no city could label itself a globally recognized ecocity. Uncertainty exists in its future development.
There are generally two types of ecocity initiatives in China: new ecocity projects (e.g. Sino-Singapore Tianjin, Caofeidian, Beichuan, Chenggong, Yuelai etc.), and eco-remodeling of existing cities (e.g. Huainan, Tangshan, Shenzhen, Miyun, Anji, etc.). Many of these remodeling projects are implemented in resource-based cities that need urgent ecological renovation.
There are 118 resource-based cities in China with a total population of 154 million. Located in central Anhui Province some 980km from Beijing, Huainan is an industrial city and an important Chinese energy producer, with significant coal, electricity generation, and chemical industries. It is one of the largest coal producing areas in China. The estimated coal reserves are 44 billion tons, making up 19% of all the country’s total coal reserves. The city has a population of 2 million an area of 2121 km2. In the last 10 years, Huainan has been striving to develop into an environmentally friendly and resource conserving ecocity. Its development mode was hailed by the central government, and it was selected as one of the best practices for sustainable urban development in China.
Urban-Rural integrated planning
China has adopted a policy of urban-rural dual structure system since the founding of the Republic in 1949. The system is urban-biased in economic, social and infrastructure development. This has brought about many problems triggered by urban-rural separation and inequality. It creates a serious obstacle for sustainable urban-rural integrated development.
Huainan has taken the lead to change this situation through its “Urban-Rural Integration Plan 2011”. Upholding the idea of an integrated Huainan, the plan features comprehensive treatment of coal subsidence areas; promotes intensive and compact development of urban and rural land, maintains five balances of urban-rural planning, industrial development, infrastructure, public service, employment and social security. Altogether, the plan supports an urban-rural integrated development model of “industry promoting agriculture, city helping town, town helping village and city-town interacting with each other.” There is an ecocity indicator system tailor-made for Huainan, which sets targets and provides an assessment tool for each stage of development.
Long-time coal mining results in subsiding land, which in effect destroys the local environment. Main ecological restoration techniques of mining subsidence areas include improvement of soil, re-vegetation and application of soil micro-organisms (LIU and LU, 2009). According to Huainan’s “Eco-city Construction Plan 2005” the local government will by 2020 invest 10 billion RMBuan in ecological restoration, infrastructure and slum reconstruction. An important feature of the Eco-City Construction plan is that ecological renovation goes hand in hand with infrastructure improvement, human habitat environment upgrading and industrial transformation.
Huainan’s coal mines have been exploited for 500 years and mining subsidence areas exist in many places of the city. In 2007, the city launched an ecological restoration project of the Quanda region, 1,250,000m2 in area and with 250,000 inhabitants. The coal has long been exhausted there and the land was abandoned, leaving a wasteland of mining subsidence areas. In compliance with the topography of the region, the government divided it into four sub-areas for ecological restoration, and reconstructed them with different characteristics.
These four sub-areas include reservoirs, wetlands, residential areas and mountains. The wetland area centers around the Datong mining subsidence, where the environment is most seriously damaged and in need of urgent remediation (e.g. construction of wetland parks and public facilities, closure and relocation of heavily polluting enterprises, vegetation restoration and landscaping etc). In 2010, with the completion of the restoration project, the Quanda region was revitalized and became a new urban center for living, working, transportation and recreation.
Mining subsistence areas, before and after restoration.
Comprehensive utilization of resources
Coal-mine gas
Coal mines emit gas containing mainly coal mine methane (CMM). It poses the biggest risk to coal mine safety, and it is one of the major greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global warming. However, if the coalmine gas is comprehensively utilized, it can be converted into a source clean energy.
Huainan is the forerunner of comprehensive coal mine gas utilization in China. Its coalfield is rich in CMM resources and has large-scale CMM drainage. Huainan Mining Group is in charge of the effort to comprehensively utilize the drained CMM and ventilation air methane as green energy resources. The National Engineering Research Center for Coal Gas Control is established in the city. According to market conditions in the region, the most practical utilization option for CMM is use as household fuel, and secondarily for power generation. The household utilization project mainly uses CMM recovered from the seven permanent gas drainage systems (USEPA and CCMC, 2001). The Huainan mining area is divided into the Panji and Xinxie Blocks, and CMM in these two blocks is supplied to residents in Huainan City through the gas storage and distribution system and pipeline network, serving 100,000 households. In addition, the CMM is used to generate 47,646,000kwh of electricity each year. The CMM recovery method adopted in the Huainan mining area is underground gas drainage. The total CMM drainage was 49.4 Mm3 in 2000 and reached 416 Mm3 in 2010.
CMM Drainage of the Huainan Mining Area
Year
Methane drainage (Mm3)
1990
5.06
1995
5.00
1998
22.60
1999
37.60
2000
49.40
2002
100.00
2006
172.00
2010
416.00
Huainan CMM drainage Corp.
Household use of gas
Reading meters
Mine water utilization
During coal mine operations, a large amount of mine water is discharged. It not only causes environment pollution to surrounding mining areas, but also wastes a lot of precious natural resources. Comprehensive utilization of mine water is needed for the sustainable development of coalmines. Appropriate utilization of mine water enables us to achieve the multiple goals of economic, social and environmental benefits.
The mine water is classified into five categories according to qualities and characteristics. Different techniques are used to treat each category of water. After the treatment, the water is suitable for industrial and domestic use. In 2007, Huainan Mining Group processed 15.1 million m3 of mine water with a utilization rate of 61%, saving 12.8 million RMB a year.
Mine water utilization process in Huainan. (CHENG and HU, 2005)
Cultural and creative industries
Huainan is a coal-dependent city and its leading industries are coal mining, electric power generation and chemicals. To achieve a balanced industrial structure and sustainable development, the restructuring of its industry is necessary. Economic development plans were made and industrial parks were established to encourage economic developments and a diversified industrial structure.
Today, apart from coal mining, electricity and chemicals, more and more industries are represented in its economy, including pharmaceuticals, construction, textiles, machinery, electronics, light industry, high technology and cultural and creative industries.
Huainan has a long history. It was once the capital city of the state of Chu (one of the major powers in ancient China) during the Warring States period (475BC-221BC) and the city has kept its prosperity ever since. Now, Huainan has many historic sites, like Bagong Mountain where the famous Feishui Battle was fought in 383AD along with the ancient Chu state capital and the tombs of many historical figures. Since 2000, the local government has made plans to boost its tourist industry. Large investments have been made on tourist infrastructure upgrading and service improvement. Income from tourism has increased sharply since 2001.
Huainan’s tourist industry is associated with rich cultural activities. Known in China as the birthplace of Tofu, each year Huainan hosts the Chinese Bean-Curd Cultural Festival, which has been held for 19 years. Nowadays, eco-tourism and agri-tourism (agri-tourism includes a wide variety of agriculturally-based activities, such as picking fruit, buying produce direct from a farm, feeding animals and farm stay etc.) are very popular in the city. Moreover, one of Huainan’s industrial ambitions is to develop the animation industry. The local government has invested 6 billion RMB to build an animation industry park in the city. These rising “smokeless” industries have the potential to contribute to the ecological transformation of the industrial structure, and will help to deliver a more balanced form of economic development to Huainan.
Slum reconstruction
It is a general consensus that social equality is a prerequisite for ecocity development. Huainan’s local government has worked hard to help underprivileged citizens improve their living conditions. An important component of Huainan’s public welfare program involves slum reconstruction.
From 1950s onwards, many shanty towns have established alongside the coal mines to accommodate miners. In the planned economy period (1949-1978), the government focused on production rather than on consumption. Miners’ quality of life was neglected. They lived in slums with primitive conditions and a bad environment, posing a threat to local security and having a negative impact on urban development.
In 2003, under the leadership of the local government, Huainan Mining Group launched a campaign to progressively reconstruct slums in the city. The plan called for an investment of 13.9 billion RMB to build a total of 8.7 million m2 affordable housing in the following 10 years, altogether benefiting 250,000 people. In 2007, the 1st batch of residents moved in to the new housing with consummate infrastructure and social amenities. Slum reconstruction has revitalized the local community and is an important function of the city’s sustainable development.
Before and after reconstruction-a comparison of the slum and new resident community
Capacity building
Capacity building is one of the most important components of ecocity development. The stakeholders include city decision makers, companies, public service departments, public organizations, social associations, individual households and residents. Huainan focuses its efforts on the establishment of proper government management systems, information dissemination, along with education and training for residents.
Local laws and regulations were made to promote and guarantee ecocity development in Huainan. These laws include the “Regulation on Environment Protection of the Development and Construction Projects”, “Regulation on the Restoration of Coalmine Subsidence Areas” and “Management Ordinance of the Recycling of Renewable Resources.” Relevant plans were compiled to guide its development, like the “Ecocity Construction Plan 2005”, “Urban-Rural Integration Plan 2011”, “Master Plan for Mineral Resources”, “Public Transit Plan” and “Master Plan for the Tourist Industry.” Enforcement and implementation of these regulations and plans were greatly enhanced by revising the political achievement assessment system for local government officials, effectively moving from a GDP centered system to a more comprehensive assessment of environmental, economic and social balanced development. Better enforcement was also achieved by increasing the public participation in the compiling, implementation and management of the whole planning process. The local government has also worked to expand urban financing channels by exploring new models like PPP, BOT, BT to raise funds for the construction of eco-city infrastructure projects, in addition corporate investment construction and government repurchasing.
People’s habits, behavior and life style choices have a deep impact on ecocity development. Dissemination of information, education and training for the public all plays a significant role. Huainan has established a National Education Base for Eco-Civilization, a platform for eco-education. Local government tries to foster an ecocity, eco-community and eco-family culture by organizing training seminars and activities such as “City Car-Free Day” and “Low-Carbon Eco-Family,” thereby publicizing ecocity concepts to residents from all walks of life.
Discussion and Conclusion
Huainan’s remodeling efforts cover 6 major areas of ecocity development as shown below.
Major areas of ecocity development in Huainan
Huainan’s experience shows a vivid picture of ecocity remodeling practice in a resource-based city. Through Hainan’s example and Chinese understanding of the definition of an ecocity achieves a balance between the environment, natural resources, industry, and social equity.
There is no fixed and unified model for ecocity development. Residents in different cities hold different opinions on what makes an ecocity. However, they tend to agree on some important areas of ecocity development. According to a questionnaire survey conducted in eight Chinese cities of vary size and regions (in total, 788 respondents), the most important factors influencing sustainable urban development are the natural environment, housing, income and employment, transportation, and social security.
Ecocity development in resource-based cities involves a lot of aspects. It cannot be conducted in all-round manner, and it can’t reach its final goal in one step. Each city must examine its own individual characteristics, and concentrate their efforts and to make those defining characteristics the highlight of their city. Then cities should spread their relevant experience points to other areas. In other words, be sure to avoid aiming too high beyond one’s reach in an attempt to gain quick success and instant benefits.
Ecocity development is not the end product, rather, it is a long-time systematic process towards sustainable urban development. We shouldn’t dwell on the terminology the ecocity, as it is no more than a useful phrase to express people’s aspiration on an ideal city, like the “Garden City” term used over a hundred years ago. What is far more important is to witness the city’s actual progress on the road towards urban sustainability.
Acknowledgement: Thanks to Jack Maher (PIA fellow at NRDC) for the English editing.
References:
CHENG Xuefeng and HU Youbiao (2005) Quality Characteristic of Mine Water and its Utilization in Huainan Mining Area, Journal of Anhui University of Science and Technology (Natural Science),3:5-8
LIU Fei and LU Lin (2009), Progress in the Study of Ecological Restoration of Coalmine Subsidence Areas, Journal of Natural Resources, 4:612-620
USEPA (2001), Investment Opportunities in Coalmine Methane Projects in Huainan Mining Area, Huainan Mining Group Ltd.
XIE Pengfei and ZHOU Lanlan, et al. (2010) Research on Eco-city Index and Best Practices, Urban Studies, 7:12-18
ZHU Xiaohui and DUAN Xuecheng (2009) Study on Developing Tourism in Resources-Based Cities—A Case Study of Huainan City, Journal of Shanxi Agriculture University (Social science edition), 2:216-219
We hope that this paper will inspire and initiate a Gen-Z led movement for advocating towards the urgent actions needed for restricting the frequency and severity of such epidemics globally.
The lessons learnt by teenagers today will assist us as global leaders of tomorrow, to make better and more informed decisions to prevent any such future epidemics. The Covid-19 crisis and widespread epidemic has infected more than a million people and is increasingly causing agony to billions. While the severity of epidemic is reflected by rapidly increasing numbers of infected cases, the perception towards its impacts and effectiveness varies from country to country and with age group. A unique and key respondent group includes teenagers as the most upcoming global citizens, whose experience with and opinions on today’s events could be a resource for governments to combat such situations in future.
Foster Street, New Haven, US No people visible in the otherwise lively East Rock Neighbourhood. Photo: Sabrina Liang
Kamothe, Navi Mumbai, India The extremely busy Khandeshwar station road, now empty and vegetation in the Khanda Lake beside it. Photo: Anvay Akhil Palherkar
What do teenagers think about the crisis? This essay captures the perception of a focus group of 12 current teenagers from different cities in a few impacted countries namely: New Haven, New Jersey and Amherst in the United States, Belfast in the United Kingdom, Stockholm in Sweden, Delhi and Mumbai in India, Hunan and Nanning in China, and Mexico City in Mexico. Building on the valued suggestions of these teenagers, the paper aims to serve in a way as a time capsule for our future governments and education systems to look back and reflect on their views. The author constituted a panel by identifying and inviting teenagers from among the recent and past social contacts established while residing in the US, UK and India. All the panellists are high school students or have recently started college education and are aware and concerned about the pandemic and its impacts within their country and globally.
The methodological approach included a few online focus group discussions organised during the ongoing lockdown period through participation of the panel of teenagers from the cities mentioned above. Discussions were initiated with a focus on first noticed impacts in each panellist’s city and changes they experienced in daily routine during quarantine. Further, the discussions focused on a few overarching questions relating to the linkages between Covid-19 epidemic and nature, decisions taken by governments and societal differences, coping mechanisms adopted by schools, and impacts on global and local economies. Outcome of the online discussions have been analysed and further complemented through review of a few relevant publications.
This paper acknowledges the participation of Ms Sabrina Liang (Amherst, US), Ms Anna Kolosenko (Stockholm, Sweden), Ms Ayla Leval (Stockholm, Sweden), Mr Matthew Alexander (Belfast, UK), Mr Luis Fernando Sobrino (Mexico City, Mexico), Ms Matilda Debesai (Stockholm, Sweden), Ms Nikita Agarwal (New Jersey, US), Ms Katherine Van Tassel (New Haven, US), Mr Anvay Akhil Palherkar (Navi Mumbai, India) and 2 anonymous teenagers (from Hunan and Nanning, China), in the online focus group roundtable discussions structured and moderated by Mr Vishisht Singhal (Delhi, India).
Mexico City, Mexico An empty market road in the otherwise very busy Mexico City. Photo: Luis Fernando Sobrino
Covid19 – a natural calamity or a manmade disaster? Have we completely failed in human-nature interactions?
The panel acknowledged that while there are many theories revolving around how the coronavirus came into being and spread to humans, one aspect is confirmed that viruses spread from animals to humans due to our poor human-nature interaction such as wildlife trade, poaching, and forest fragmentation.
A report from the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2020) also indicates that new viruses emerge when destruction and encroachment of wildlife habitats, forces the wildlife to initiate unwanted dangerous interactions with humans causing the spread of unique and infectious diseases from species to species.
Research by Shereen et al (2020) mentions that COVID-19, which is a highly transmittable and pathogenic viral infection, emerged in Wuhan, China and is related to SARS-like bat viruses, thus drawing an inference that bats could be the possible primary reservoir. Shereen et al reiterate that the rapid human to human transfer of virus has been confirmed even while the intermediate source of origin and transfer to humans is unknown.
Hillsborough neighbourhood in New Jersey (USA) has cleaner sky with no traffic and noise pollution. Photo: Nikita Agarwal
The teenage panel was in consensus that the spread of Covid-19 is an example of poor human wildlife interactions. The panellists felt that in general people have been rapidly straying from natural lifestyle and consuming food items that are exotic and are sometimes substandard modifications of age old food traditions and practices. It is evident that this has resulted in new and never before faced diseases affecting humans with no immunity against it and the rapid interspecies spread of such diseases. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention also highlights that this phenomenon has happened in past as reflected through the spread of Ebola and HIV/AIDS (CDC, 2019 a, b).
The panellists from India and Mexico raised that significantly higher number of Covid-19 cases are being reported from metropolitan cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Mexico City mainly due to rapid spread of the infectious virus among highly dense population living in and around such cities. Such cities are already home to even denser pockets of slums such as Dharavi in Mumbai and Ciudad Neza in Mexico City where, due to poor living conditions, the community is more vulnerable to such epidemics.
We should definitely be more proactive in the future. Stricter food regulations and improvements to sanitary conditions may minimize the number of infected individuals.—Katherine Van Tassel (New Haven, US
These panellists shared that during the lockdown and quarantine period, however, better air quality is being reported in these cities, mainly due to very restricted traffic and footfall. This situation has led to decreased consumption of crude oil resulting into noticeable reduction in carbon and greenhouse gas emissions that shall also slowdown the rate of climate change. Entire panel was in consensus that several anecdotal evidences were reported in media about nature’s revival reflected through increased bio-diversity coming towards cities. Low levels of sound, air and water pollution due to limited anthropogenic activities, show signs of increased flora and fauna within cities, a phenomenon that was earlier rarely observed. However the panel speculated that unfortunately this shall be mainly limited to the lockdown period. The teenagers advocate that governments of all countries should substantially amplify measures to enhance planetary health and environment especially to meet climate goals after the pandemic is over and not wait for nature’s such unfavourable reactions.
Stockholm, Sweden. A gloomy Sunday morning on the busy Drottninggatan Shopping Street in Stockholm. Photo: Ayla Leval
Government strategy and the influence of societal difference: How proactive and effective have strategies by the government been? Do these reflect societal characteristics?
Completely empty Stockholm Metro, even during peak hours. Photo: Ayla Leval
In India, China, and the UK, the governments have taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to tackle the Coronavirus pandemic by introducing the most restrictive mass quarantines. The panelists from these three countries felt that these measures were imposed mainly to keep the country’s population—specifically poor, uneducated, and elderly population—far from the grips of the highly infectious Coronavirus. The panel was concerned that in developing countries such as India, the health care system is extremely weak and fragile. Thus, an epidemic of such severity could result in complete breakdown of the health care system.
The panellists from India offered that society in the country is structured in a way that many social activities occur engaging large numbers of people, ranging from religious activities to open markets and a generally densely packed housing system in large metropolitan cities. The panellists thus strongly felt that in India, such an outbreak, if uncontrolled, could grow to an exponential level infecting a huge population in a matter of days.
Sweden has ultimately saved our society from collapsing by still granting us our freedom.—Ayla Leval (Stockholm, Sweden)
On the contrary, panellists from Sweden highlighted that the Government of Sweden has come up with a unique strategy that appears to be focusing on the herd immunity that emphasizes on creating a large number of people immune to reduce the future risk of spread to non-immune individuals. They feel that their government considers that citizens are highly educated and hence their strategy had been limited to just recommending a quarantine instead of forcing the nation into a lockdown.
I trust the government and all of their decisions. If Swedish government feels that a balance between the economy and healthcare must be made, then I trust that’s what we should do.—Matilda Debesai (Stockholm, Sweden)
These panellists were of the opinion that government has done this to ensure the survival of small businesses that are given high importance by the government to keep country’s economy in balance while maintaining the social order. They felt that while this strategy appears to be liberal, the panellists trust the government and their decisions as they felt that their government is much aware of all negative consequences extreme quarantine would have on their mental health and societal function.
The Indian culture establishes cleanliness as a key aspectsintertwined with every aspect of one’s life thus perhaps reducing the spread of this disease drastically.—Anvay Akhil Palherkar (Navi Mumbai, India)
The teenage panel was concerned that Mexico and India are under an unusual threat. Since there are few social safety nets, unemployment in Mexico for daily wage labourers or those having small businesses, the panellist from Mexico felt that the income sources of such labourers will be completely halted during the quarantine leading to an uncertain future and many hardships.
Under such pandemic situations, the Government of the US and other impacted countries must prioritize providing necessary healthcare to their citizens as opposed to focusing on economic growth. —Nikita Agarwal, US.
Similarly, the panellists from India were of the view that India, being home to a large population living below the poverty line, weak and unenforced unemployment schemes may also lead to a challenging time for the majority of the poor population. The panellists highlighted that this aspect is only partially being addressed by the State governments in India. Likewise, the World Economic Forum (2020a) highlights that the existing social safety nets in the US are also facing challenge due to around 20 million (as of 16 April 2020) citizens applying for unemployment benefits.
The Government of Mexico should provide aid to low income homes and inform the population about situations of this type, mostly for them to know how to react and avoid panic.—Luis Fernando Sobrino (Mexico City, Mexico)
The discussion between the panellists uncovered that the Government of Mexico has adopted measures that are mainly observant in character with a nation-wide lockdown but without any legal enforcement. Despite this, people of Mexico have chosen to stay inside. In China, first country combating Covid-19 epidemic, the country’s economy has been crippled while the country now appears to be moving towards normalcy. The panel is of the opinion that the approach of lockdown and quarantine that has been adopted by the governments in India, UK and China is very effective and shall prevent the number of infected cases to rise giving a control over the pandemic and shall result in economies being able to open sooner. The steps taken by various governments that panel appreciated are the efforts towards management of misinformation spread via social media and other sources during the lockdown period.
Experimental schooling during quarantine:
It’s definitely not ideal or sustainable but online classes help me and my friends keep on track with schoolwork.—Anna Kolosenko (Stockholm, Sweden)
Will online schooling continue to serve as a means of alternative education, keeping at par with the established institutions?
The global pandemic has led to everyday activities grinding to a halt with uncertainty about resumption. This has led to a huge impact on the teenage population as well as the entire student community, as their schools and leisure activities cannot continue due to the fear of the spread of the virus.
Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, UK. Increased traffic at a checkpoint despite lockdown in place. Photo: Matthew Alexander
A common approach adopted by the school education systems globally is a shift towards or extensive use of an online teaching and learning system. In Sweden, the schools have successfully managed to keep their students and teachers in a “lockdown” situation without enforcing it simply by encouraging them to opt for an online education from the comfort of their homes. The panellists from Sweden felt that the online schooling is more engaging, comprehensive, and at par with face to face learning and will result in students being able to concentrate more on studies than the fear of getting infected. However, the panellists from India, Mexico, and the UK have contrary views on online schooling, mainly owing to technical glitches, such as poor internet connections due to which the lessons they feel are less interactive. The panelists further highlighted that poorer households mostly even do not have money to pay for the basic needs thus paying for internet, computer or any technological service is impossible for them and they are inevitably left out of the online school setup.
The online classes definitely do not meet the same standards as face to face teaching. It makes asking questions a lot harder and limits the details that a teachers can explain.—Matthew Alexander (Belfast, UK)
Globally, the university entrance examinations such as GCSE, SAT, JEE and many more were postponed, resulting in stress, anxiety, and confusion over immediate future prospects for the currently quarantined high-schoolers. The panellists felt that authorities should place very high importance to conducting such exams and sharing the information relating to their scheduling/rescheduling. Overall, the panellists felt that greater emphasis on online education during the lockdown period, if continued, may result in developing countries like India and China realising the need to strengthen their rural education. This may in turn result in higher literacy rates and people having greater exposure to the thoughts and ideas of the global community.
Kamothe, Navi Mumbai, India Generally Crowded and High Density Neighbourhood in a Greater Mumbai suburb, now with deserted roads. Photo: Anvay Akhil Palherkar
Economic side effects of Covid-19: Economy or public health, can there be a balanced approach?
The ongoing Covid-19 outbreak has proved severely detrimental to the global economy and is likely to push it towards recession. While most governments around the world are primarily focusing on facing the current and future challenges of epidemic, the discussion among panelists indicates that some countries such as Sweden and some states in the US are parallelly focusing on their economy. The discussion highlights that in most of the impacted countries whether lockdown had been enforced or not, small businesses, hospitality, tourism and entertainment sectors have been completely shut down even if not ordered to close down, mainly due to the impact of self-quarantine of people and/or lockdown ordered by the law. The panelists reiterate the fact that losses in these sectors are directly contributing to the plummeting GDP in all impacted countries. While acknowledging this aspect, the entire panel strongly feels that public health must be prioritised over the economy. The World Economic Forum (2020b) also advocates for giving prime focus on public health through government and business partnerships to prevent a short-term recession from becoming a global depression.
The report by UNCTAD (2020) speculates that since India and China had taken timely decisions to combat the epidemic, their economies may face milder impact. The panelists from Sweden felt that their Government’s efforts to save economy against realising urgency of the epidemic may however result in a surge of infected people as in the US, but will be handled by their healthcare system as long as older population is kept completely out of contact. The panelists from the UK and Mexico were of the opinion that to reduce effects of pandemic, their governments seem to have compromised with potential losses in GDP. They felt that while this shall cause huge losses in their economy but they may be able to prevent the infection spreading altogether and have comparatively easier economic recovery with time. The entire panel perceived that Covid-19 epidemic has led to significantly reduced social interactions between people with increase in digital transactions that may lead to increased transparency, better management of currency and faster transactions thereby increasing business outputs after the pandemic is over.
Innovation and connectedness is what defines our generation and is the quality that will guide us through tomorrow’s challenges.—Vishisht Singhal, Delhi
Learnings for the post Covid-19 era
The author feels that teenagers are the most immediate generation who would shape the way governments shall form decisions in future to tackle such epidemics. Although quarantines and their varied impacts have been tracked for years, this event is unique as an entire generation is experiencing this globally for the first time. A new perspective is formed and therefore it will be useful to understand and take cognizance of our opinion.
Indirapuram, Delhi National Capital Region, India A high rise neighbourhood with empty streets in a suburb of Delhi NCR. Photo: Ashim Bhattacharya
Based on analysis of varied aspects as deliberated by teenage panellists and through review of relevant articles, the author summarizes here the derived learning and his observations for the future:
This is the time that global leaders of various countries must forget differences and significantly increase their cooperation in order to best prevent and manage any such global epidemic in future.
With an aim to enhance social justice, the governments of all countries must make momentous progress towards providing adequate inexpensive health care services for the disadvantaged population. Effective measures must be in place for spreading awareness especially amongst the rural and impoverished urban population. This must include simple basic acts like maintaining hygiene, cleaning surroundings, and reducing consumption of non-indigenous material. Our unsustainable consumption over time has resulted in nature retaliating, this needs to change substantially.
The governments of all countries must establish advance early warning systems for people to quickly adapt in order to prevent an epidemic. Governments must give more attention to advance research for drug discovery such as creating adaptive vaccines for viruses in order to overcome adaptive diseases like influenza, COVID-19, Ebola and others.
The governments of all countries must establish advance early warning systems for people to quickly adapt and prevent an epidemic.
More interconnectedness between the global scientific community shall lead to greater and more efficient results in creating solutions for epidemics in the future.
Continue to advance research for creating adaptive vaccines for viruses in order to overcome adaptive diseases like influenza, COVID-19, Ebola, and others.
Based on success in a few countries, it is necessary to initiate schemes by governments to provide subsidies for essential items like sanitizers, masks and medicines during pandemic situations. Governments should also keep dedicated funds for medical supplies and for additional support to health care workers mainly for epidemic situations.
It is essential to enhance the shift towards digital financial transactions leading to increased transparency, better management, less printed money, faster transactions and minimised person to person contacts.
Schools must create better learning strategies for students to engage in classrooms even without physical presence. Not much change has been brought into the mainstream schooling system since the past 50 years whereas society has progressed greatly ever since.
It is also important to continue with the already initiated transition towards online lifestyles even in the rural areas of developing countries by increasingly making technological services affordable and accessible through government interventions, particularly the online schooling. This way even a crisis situation shall not hamper the education of children in future.
Government often refuses to take the younger generation seriously. —Sabrina Liang, Amherst, US
The author hopes that this paper will inspire and initiate a Gen-Z led movement for advocating towards the urgent actions needed for restricting the frequency and severity of such epidemics globally. The steps that are taken now would result in a future that each one of us can live in without constant fear and hostility. We hope that the solutions to this virus are collectively found through combined efforts of global community. Our connectedness and unbroken faith in wake of this crisis has shown how much we can accomplish.
World Economic Forum, 16 April 2020a, Coronavirus: Over 20 million Americans have now applied for unemployment benefit, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/united-states-unemployment-claimants-coronavirus-covid19/
As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, I thought I would tell a story from back when the City of Portland (Oregon) first was beginning to grapple with the implications of the listing of a species found in our urban environment.
In 1993 residents of the Pacific Northwest had just lived through the spotted owl wars, a decade of conflict where activists literally took to the trees to protect the last of our majestic old growth forests. That spring President Bill Clinton travelled to Portland to hold the Northwest Forest Summit to develop a plan to resolve the forest conflicts. More than 50,000 people rallied in Portland’s Waterfront Park to the music of Neil Young, Phish and others to greet him and raise their voices for the trees. We were still half a decade away from the first listings of salmon and steelhead that would fundamentally change the way we think about our urban waterways. Bald Eagles were slowly making a comeback, but you still had to travel to a local wildlife refuge to see one nesting. Endangered species were something that residents of Portland cared deeply about, but they were still something that was “out there.” Most people had never seen an endangered species.
It was under these circumstances that a pair of peregrines took up residence on Portland’s Fremont Bridge, a giant arch that dominates Portland’s downtown skyline. Although peregrines had been listed under the Endangered Species Act for more than two decades, we had only a handful of nesting pairs in Oregon at that time. The Fremont Bridge pair was OE 26, signifying the it was the 26th eyrie (nest) to be established in Oregon since peregrines began their long road to recovery from the ravages of DDT.
Portland’s Fremont Bridge. Photo: Bob Sallinger
Adult falcons on the Fremont Bridge. Photo: Mary Coolidge
Their arrival was met with….secrecy. Biologists, used to keeping the location of wild land nest sites confidential, applied the same logic to falcons on a downtown city bridge. They watched quietly as the falcons courted and played house throughout the 2003 nesting season, but went away disappointed when no eggs ever materialized. However, in 2004, the falcons produced a single eyas (nestling) on a steel plate on the underside of the bridge, high above Portland’s east side industrial area. Rather than gravel, peregrine’s preferred nesting substrate, they hollowed out a scrape (nest) amid hard balls of pigeon poop that had accumulated on the bridge structure.
Peregrine eyases on Portland’s Fremont Bridge. Photo: Bob Sallinger
That first year of nesting, their nestling fledged prematurely. On the cliffs that peregrines typically nest upon, air currents rise in updrafts and tend to keep young peregrines ledge-bound until they are ready to fly. However on bridges, the cold water moving below causes downdrafts. As young peregrines become more active, the combination of descending air currents and poor nesting substrate tends to suck peregrines off the ledge and out of the sky.
Adult falcon protecting nest during banding. Photo: Mary Coolidge
Years later, a worker beneath the bridge would tell me of this young bird’s adventures when she first hit the ground. I was struck by how knowledgeable and aware of the falcons the local workforce appeared to be—truckers and dockworkers below the bridge were often a good source of information on the comings and goings of the falcons. Apparently she landed among small mountains of sand and gravel being loaded onto barges below the bridge, the last flecks of white down still covering the top of her head. Several workers noticed her on the ground, and gave her a wide berth. One shift supervisor, however, decided to get a closer look. Despite the admonishments of other workers to “just leave her alone” he made his way over to her. As he towered over her, falcon looking up and man looking down at falcon, mom came screaming out of the sky in a full stoop (dive) and cold clocked him. Chuckling, the worker who told me this tale, noted, “Any bird that knocks my boss on his ass is okay with me.”
Young falcon learning to fly among the rubble. Photo: Bob Sallinger
Closer-up. Photo: Bob Sallinger
Truckers watching peregrines beneath the Fremont Bridge. Photo: Bob Sallinger
That bird did eventually get airborne, but a week later she slammed into the window of a Rolls Royce dealership a few miles from the Fremont Bridge. She was reported by a homeless person who borrowed change to use a payphone. By the time the information was relayed to me at Audubon, a true game of “telephone” had occurred–all we were told was an that there was an injured falcon standing on the sidewalk somewhere near downtown Portland. We were pondering this information when the phone rang again. This time it was my friend Rick Yazzalino, a keeper at the Oregon Zoo. He shrieked into the phone that a peregrine had hit a window near downtown Portland.
“Yeah, we got that call too,” I told him, “but we don’t know the location, and it probably isn’t a peregrine…you know there is only one pair in the city.”
“Oh its a f@#!ing peregrine all right,” he screeched back, “and it’s in my back seat coughing up blood all over the place.”
We were able to repair that bird and successfully return her to her parents within a few weeks, but the travails of 1994 had left their mark. In the ensuing year, serious discussion began about removing either the eggs or nestlings from the Fremont Bridge and fostering them into a remote nest site on the Mt. Hood National Forest. Peregrines were too precious to be left to the vagaries of the urban landscape.
Audubon pushed back hard on this proposal—after years of battles over spotted owls, we felt that it was important that urbanites not only have the opportunity to see an endangered species, but also to participate in its recovery. Eventually the decision was made to leave the falcons on the bridge. Audubon agreed to monitor them and try and keep them out of trouble during the hazardous fledging process, although we had little idea of what that might actually entail. Also, in a decision that seems obvious with nearly two decades of hindsight, but which was debated at the time, we decided to do public outreach and introduce the community to the falcons nesting in their midst.
In 1996 the falcons moved their nest from the east end of the bridge to a mirror site on the west end of the bridge. Whereas the east side of the river is industrial and blue collar, the west side is much more white collar and in 1996, was on the precipice of exploding into Portland’s most trendy, upscale neighborhood, the Pearl District. A small stretch of the Willamette River Greenway runs beneath the bridge, extending out about a quarter mile or so before dead-ending. The Willamette River Greenway aspires to be a continuous riparian buffer and trail extending the entire 187-mile length of the Willamette River, but in Portland, it is disjointed and fragmented. This particular stretch is really not much more than a sidewalk running atop a seawall. There is little that is green. For most of the year it is used primarily by old men fishing for sturgeon and office workers on their lunch break.
In 2006, however, hoards of birdwatchers descended upon this stretch of asphalt. Audubon volunteers set up spotting scopes and an information table. The local media climbed on board with stories with titles like “Falcon’s Crest.” Hippies gathered to play drums and watch falcons hunting pigeons. Fishermen rolled their eyes at first, but eventually grew to enjoy their status as minor celebrities as the assembled throngs would ooh and ahh every time they pulled a prehistoric fish from the primordial muck below.
Peregrine Watchers beneath the Fremont Bridge circa 1996. Photo: Bob Sallinger
In late May of 2006, three young falcons began appearing on the girders and I-beams that extend outward from the steel plate on which the falcons were nesting. Still covered in a thick layer of down on top of their emerging feathers, they would scurry about, often trying to pass one another on beams that were too narrow for one falcon let alone a traffic jam. As the days went by, they grew more active, furiously flapping their wings and rising a foot or two above the smooth steel…and then scrambling furiously to regain their footing. People began showing-up throughout the day to keep a vigil on the high wire act—would they fly or fall?
Photo: William Hall
The first fledgling hit the ground on June 4th and he picked the worst possible time to drop. Other than sturgeon, peregrines and a quiet place to eat lunch, the only other thing that draws people to this little patch of greenway is the annual Rose Fleet Parade—a procession of military ships that dock in Portland for a few days to signal the start of summer. The Rose Festival was started at the turn of the twentieth century by civic leaders who wanted to establish Portland as the “summer capital of the world.” Today our civic leaders have a more modest aspiration of celebrating Portland’s “volunteerism, patriotism and environmentalism” so maybe this little falcon was onto something after all.
Skulking falcon. Photo: William Hall
I arrived to find the falcon wandering about on the ground among a sea of parade watchers, his parents flying just above the crowd in tight circles, his siblings watching from the girders far overhead. At nearly that same moment, a SWAT team of uniformed Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officials also arrived on the scene. One of them turned to me and said, “I knew we should not have left those damn birds in the middle of the city.” It was determined that the falcon was only a day or two short of being able to take its first flights and the best thing to do was to leave it alone and let its parents care for it on the ground.
I was assigned to do crowd control and was sent off with the quintessential tool of urban endangered species management: yellow caution tape. I quickly set about dividing the greenway into two areas, one for peregrines and the other for people. I spent the rest of the afternoon fielding questions from the public along the lines of “tell me again why we can’t cross this line because of a bird?” and “Does the Audubon Society actually have the authority to shut down the greenway?”
Photo: Bob Sallinger
The indelible image from that afternoon that sticks with me to this day is of the young falcon skulking around on the ground—ground-bound peregrines are a very different creature than the agile fliers they soon become after taking to the air—with a cadre of four uniformed Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officials tiptoeing along in single file about 200 feet behind him. From my vantage point guarding the yellow caution tape, I would see the little falcon periodically emerge or disappear from behind a building or a dumpster or any number of industrial artifacts that lined the riverfront with the ODFW team a minute or two behind in stealth pursuit. And so it went for the next several hours.
Late that afternoon, my reverie was broken by the sudden appearance of Joe Pesek signaling in the distance for me to come down to where the ODFW team had assembled at the edge of the river. Joe had been our ODFW regional biologist as far back as I could recall. Audubon archives have pictures of generation after generation of Audubon staff working with Joe through the decades. Normally staid and laid back, Joe was about as animated now as I had ever seen him.
“The falcon is gone!” he announced.
“What do you mean he is gone Joe?” I asked. “You all have been following him around like deranged bird stalkers all afternoon.”
“He’s gone,” he insisted. “He just disappeared.”
As best we could tell the falcon had not fallen in the river and he was too young to really take to the air. But as night fell, our bird was still nowhere to be found.
I arrived back at the bridge the next morning about a half hour before sunrise. I wanted to get there when it was still quiet and watch for the parents coming down to feed our missing bird. I wasn’t alone however. As I stood at the edge of the river scanning with my binoculars, a steady procession of homeless people emerged from the shadows. One at a time, they made their way to the northernmost part of the greenway, where it terminates under the bridge, and disappeared for several minutes into a small thicket of shrubs that separate the greenway path from the seawall.
As the sun rose over the river, I decided to investigate. Behind the shrubs I found a long narrow crack in the earth, only a few feet wide and perhaps 6 feet long and 7 feet deep where earth had collapsed landward of the seawall. The local homeless community had been using this hole as a latrine. Toilet paper hung from the jagged cement and rebar that jutted out into this gash. At the bottom was a liquid puddle of human feces, and there staring up at me was our missing peregrine.
Joe Pesek pulled in a few minutes later. “I found our bird, I announced as he got out of his car.
He looked at me for a second, and then said, “He’s in that hole full of shit, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I replied, “down at the bottom.”
Joe sighed, “Well one of us is going to have to go get him.” Joe looked me up and down. I was a good forty years younger and 100 pounds lighter. Without any further discussion he announced, “I will get you a pair of gloves.”
The thing I remember most about that hole is Joe’s voice reverberating above, “Oh my God that looks horrible…oh that is horrible” as the falcon flapped its wings and scurried into the furthest, darkest recesses of the hole, kicking up a small storm of dust and excrement. I held my breath, reached into the darkness and felt a pair of talons latch onto my glove.
45 minutes later, I was sitting on the doorstep of one of our volunteer veterinarians with a five week old peregrine sitting on my lap. She joked that she should probably call the health department to have us both examined. However we both checked-out more or less okay and within days we were able to reunite this young falcon with his parents and siblings.
Author releasing falcon back to parents in 1996. Photo: Elisabeth Neely
18-years later, endangered species are no longer an anomaly on our urban landscape. For better and for worse, they are very much part of the fabric of our existence. Peregrines have been delisted and they now inhabit half a dozen local bridges. The Fremont Bridge nest site has fledged more than 55 young and is recognized as the most productive nest site in Oregon. Bald eagles too have returned to our skies. They nest along our river and we get a growing number of reports of them showing up in backyards. The most common injury we see with eagles is from territorial fights between eagles competing for nest sites. We struggle with our role in recovering federally listed salmon and steelhead knowing that our degraded urban waterways create significant impediments to restoring runs on the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. A new listing is on the horizon—streaked horned larks, a bird that most people have never hear of that nests in disturbed grassland habitats near Portland’s airport and industrial area, is proposed for listing.
The days when we debated whether endangered species belonged in the city seem long ago, but not so far away.
What is particularly of concern is the lack of action in many disadvantaged communities where historic and current inequities in funding, decision-making, siting of industrial and transportation facilities, and access to nature make residents especially vulnerable to climate impacts.
Looking out from my office in lower Manhattan, preparations for rising seas and coastal storms are becoming real. As I type these words, construction crews are cutting scores of mature trees that once graced the local parks to make room for a system of about five-meter-high berms, flood walls, and deployable barriers. Together with dry- and wet-proofed buildings and infrastructure, these measures are intended to prevent damage from coastal flooding for five kilometers of the City’s shoreline.
Losing precious greenery in our city is never easy. The initial plan put forward by the city government and a state-run development authority sparked community concern and opposition. It’s a fair argument to say that renaturing and retreating from one of the most densely developed business districts on the planet was not really an option (at least for now). And, ultimately, given local memory of flooding from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the resources available for this neighborhood, a modified plan is going forward. It provides for the replanting of trees and shrubs as well as new landscaping that will help integrate the new coastal infrastructure into the neighborhood and people’s lives. It’s a sad day for the trees and the wildlife and people (like me) who enjoyed their benefits, but it’s also true that these changes are relatively minor notes in the long story of our ever-changing urban waterfront.
Our seas are expected to rise by at least two meters by 2100 and the probability and reach of coastal storms are increasing as well. But not all the people and neighborhoods that line the Hudson River estuary in New York and New Jersey are currently considering safeguards like the ones I see being erected in Manhattan’s financial district. What is particularly of concern is the lack of action in many disadvantaged communities where historic and current inequities in funding, decision-making, siting of industrial and transportation facilities, and access to nature make residents especially vulnerable to climate impacts. These communities are some of the places most in need of shoreline enhancement.
But our experience is that, if offered support, these communities are eager to engage and take part in developing a response to climate change. A recent targeted grant program instituted by the Hudson River Foundation offers some insight into how community-led efforts can be supported.
Brooklyn’s Coney Island, a neighborhood that also experienced devasting floods in 2012, is a case in point. Despite a number of City and State-led initiatives to address long-term resiliency in the area, the plans for shoreline berms and possible tidal barriers on Coney Island Creek have not advanced. To be sure, protecting the people, homes, and businesses on this former barrier Island is a complex technical challenge that has been the focus of government-led planning efforts. But in the eyes of community leaders like Pamela Petty-John of Coney Island Beautification, the cause for inaction is also a disconnect between community needs and desires and the will and ways of government.
City of Water Day on Coney Island. Credit: Coney Island Beautification Project
Indeed a key objection of a coalition of community organizations and environmental groups to the concepts being discussed in the United States Army Corps of Engineers Harbor and Tributaries Focus Area Feasibility Study (HATS) is that the Corps’ existing cost-benefit calculations reinforce existing inequities by “undervaluing” waterfronts features in poorer neighborhoods and not addressing community-expressed needs. Specifically, the Corp’s process relies on calculations of existing property values and public parks, an impediment for neighborhoods suffering from a legacy of institutional disinvestment. As a result, the study, which is key to unlocking billions of federal, state, and local capital dollars, is missing an opportunity to address flooding issues of concern to community members as well as other potential co-benefits ― remediation of water quality issues and providing waterfront access.
Bridging this gap requires making community knowledge and values an integral part of data gathering, project formulation, design, implementation, and on-going monitoring and management. Such understanding reflects the observations and lived experiences of people living or working in the project location. This is especially important for initiatives located in or otherwise intending to serve disadvantaged communities. Too often a lack of access to planning processes, political power, and cultural differences has disconnected residents and businesses in these areas from these decisions. The result can be poorly conceived projects, or decision-making paralysis resulting from disagreements between the responsible government agencies and local stakeholders. Our changing climate makes getting things right ― and quickly ― an urgent need.
To help meet this moment, the New York – New Harbor & Estuary Program (HEP) has sought to advance climate resiliency planning and education through a series of grants that prioritized disadvantaged communities. A collaboration of government, civic organizations, and university scientists established by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the states of New York and New Jersey, HEP and our hosts at the Hudson River Foundation, have a long history of supporting partnerships in estuary management.
The creation of this program, which resulted in more than one hundred proposals from local stewardship organizations or their partners, are small snapshots into the expressed needs of frontline communities for assistance and provide a framework for how funders can advance community-led resiliency initiatives.
Our effort is the result of recent federal initiatives in the United States to accelerate the pace of coastal investment and adaptation, funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Acts. Importantly, this includes significant funding for advancing projects outside of the strict context of disaster recovery/rebuilding or even hazard mitigation. This presents opportunities to advance proposals featuring natural and nature-based resiliency features, or otherwise delivering important water quality, habitat, public access, and other benefits for the local community. Specifically, Executive Order 14052, the Justice40 Initiative, mandates that at least 40% of this funding reach disadvantaged communities.
Thanks to the federal funds provided by the IIJA, HEP recently released its RFPs to underwrite community-led resiliency efforts aligned with our collaboration’s water quality, habitat enhancement, and public access goals. To ensure that the terms of the RFPs would be responsive to the needs of communities, HEP engaged in a series of conversations with local and national environmental justice leaders. Based on that input, we relied on multiple definitions of “disadvantaged communities” to identify qualified communities, incorporating federal guidance, state definitions (that incorporated race as a criterion), and HEP’s own definition (that reflected inequities in access to water). The RFP process itself was structured to provide low barriers to entry (with an initial letter of inquiry, standard forms, and transparent criteria). Expenses for organizational capacity building and administrative expenses, especially hard to fund for groups in poorer communities, were allowed.
Our goals were explicit as well:
Enable disadvantaged communities in the Hudson―Raritan Estuary to fully participate in planning and decisions about coastal adaptation, habitat enhancement, and other infrastructure projects being advanced by federal, state, and local agencies. Proposals that can describe how community input could be incorporated into the federal, state, or local decisions or otherwise demonstrate coordination with the lead project agency were particularly encouraged.
Advance community-initiated projects that will enhance climate resiliency, including shoreline improvements, stormwater management measures, and natural and nature-based resiliency features. We were especially interested in projects that will help communities gain access to future federal and state infrastructure funding opportunities and demonstrate how to incorporate social vulnerability of communities to make better-informed decisions.
Address gaps in data and knowledge that will improve community and agency understanding of baseline conditions, the current and future impacts of climate change, community values, and/or the effectiveness of alternative adaptation measures and management strategies. This could include efforts to assess the state of existing knowledge as well as the development, implementation, and evaluation of educational programs. Projects that engage community members to participate in the co-production of required data and knowledge are especially encouraged.
Demonstrate the power of collaboration between community, government, independent scientists, and/or utilities. Addressing climate change and enhancing habitat in our urban estuary requires a team effort. Proposals that engage multiple stakeholders or seek to establish successful community involvement in such partnerships are highly desired. Using the arts, recreational programs, and experiential learning to bring messages about climate change and resiliency to local waterfront parks and public spaces is appreciated.
The response was great, reflecting the appetite of community-based organizations. Altogether, we received 107 requests for assistance totaling $ 4.1 million. To date, and based on currently available funds, we are able to support about a third of those organizations with 35 grants totaling $ 612,000 for projects ranging from support for co-producing data on flood risk to community-managed engineering consultants to community-led tree planting and habitat restoration efforts to arts-forward community engagement programs. Additional funding anticipated from the IIJA over the next three years will enable us to meet more of this documented need from current and new partners.
While our programs are certainly not the biggest source of assistance available, what we gleaned from the process points to needs, challenges, and opportunities that are also confronting much larger public and private sources of philanthropy for community-led efforts.
For most community organizations, the focus is on authentically and accurately articulating their problems and needs to community stakeholders and the relevant authorities: What are the climate-driven risks? Who will be impacted? What are acceptable solutions/what is the desire for other improvements? How can we effectively organize to ensure these needs are met? These organizations help co-produce needed knowledge, bringing community understanding to the problems confronting the waterfront while at the same time building community support for the proposed solutions.
Another key challenge is about process. Many community members are wary (and weary) of the usual workshops and engagement tactics. Just too many past experiences of public planning efforts going nowhere. Right-sizing engagement efforts and making it easy and even fun to be part of the conversation is key. The familiar community organizing maxim of engaging local residents and businesses where they live is critical, including leveraging existing forums and community festivals. Using cell phones and social media to document the issues and bringing discussion of the issues to existing community institutions and events can help keep the usual suspects engaged and bring new voices to the discussion.
Of course, enabling the community to move from conversations to seeing positive changes on the ground is the best way to avoid the risk of planning fatigue. Ensuring that expressed needs are incorporated in the design, and the final engineered and permitted project requires honesty and transparency in the process. Enabling community organizations to have the means and, importantly, the internal capacity to hire and manage their own trusted technical consultants can help ensure that viable solutions are fairly considered. Just as important, it can allow for unrealistic expectations to be forthrightly addressed early in the process. Every construction project ever conceived requires on-going compromise in terms of design, budget, and delivery. However, bringing and keeping the community and agencies together can help ensure that those changes do not derail the effort or the people who have to live with the results.
Coney Island Creek. Credit: Ed Rainer
We are proud to say that HEP is now supporting the important work of groups like Coney Island Beautification. Building on their history of effective organizing around the development of public parks, water quality improvements, and community greening, the community-based Coney Island Beautification has established an effective partnership with the New York Aquarium/Wildlife Conservation Society and engineering consultants which are lending technical support and additional capacity for this work. They have started hosting community meetings intended to establish a resiliency vision from the ground up, incorporating multiple means of resiliency and potential co-benefits of public access and water quality from the start. The intent is for this conceptual plan to provide a framework for recasting (and hopefully advancing) the many prior government plans in the area.
Of course, these conversations are just starting, and Coney Island is still years away from implementing specific measures. But taking the first steps with the community (as opposed to in or even for the community) is offering some promise for our precarious future.
As the introductory chapter states: “Sustainability is everywhere.” Indeed, what did we do before the introduction of the term? Sustainability in the Global City engages with the concept of urban sustainability from a sophisticated, skeptical, but sympathetic perspective. Through multiple case studies, it shows the complex and contradictory tensions that emerge in the concepts and practices for implementing greater sustainability. The programs described in the book are organized to highlight the ways in which sustainability initiatives impact social justice and equity, showing how, in some cases, it can entail positive change,yet increase domination by organized economic interests.
One of the major contributions of this book is the use of ethnography to create detailed accounts of local histories, cultural meanings, and everyday lives. Embedded in the larger context of history, social and cultural expectations, norms, and political rules and organization, this perspective provides an understanding of how urban dwellers interact with the sustainability discourse, and how the programs can disguise otherwise purely modernist projects of displacement. The anthropological voice is welcome in uncovering the tensions and contradictions that emerge from sustainability initiatives.
The introduction does an admirable job of revisiting the origins and history of sustainability, placing it squarely in the negotiated outcome of the collapse of communism and the unfettered rise of neoliberalism. While it backs away from claiming that sustainability and sustainable development are fully co-opted concepts, better placing their origins provides greater understanding of how and why upscale, cosmopolitan, and politically liberal urbanites tend to be attracted to sustainability.
Chapters are organized into four parts: Building the Myth, Branding the Green Global City; Planning, Design and Sustainability in the Wake of Crisis; Everyday Engagements with Urbanity and “Nature;” and Cities Divided: Urban Intensification, Neoliberalism and Urban Activism. I liked that some chapters were theoretical and academic, drawing on literature, and that some were simple and direct vignettes. Cities from around the world are included and each place illustrates a different face of urban sustainability endeavors, from modernizing traditional laundries in Delhi and the impacts on the Dhobis (washer-people) and water resources, to ethnographic research on bicycling in Los Angeles and Seattle. The common thread throughout is that sustainability policies and programs affect people and communities differently depending on their status and degree of activism.
I highly recommend this collection of essays, and hope to have a chance to use it in teaching. It provides insightful and nuanced perspectives on how the language of sustainability is used, how programs get deployed, and their differential impacts on communities. The sophisticated way in which the concept and its origins get unpacked offer an important corrective to some of the dominant paradigms and definitions of sustainable development and sustainable cities that then allow a more critical rethinking of the terms and direction. By such thoughtful engagement, we may have a chance to reexamine sustainability, to develop more precise terms, and examining the full impacts in order to emerge to the next set of alternatives that can be more just. There is no doubt that integrated, less resource intensive, more human- and nature-oriented development and redevelopment is necessary. This volume helps us be more alert to unintended consequences and to the need for greater equity going forward.
We’ve seen a surge in new open space design initiatives here in New York City in the past decade, with projects as big and bureaucratically complex as the 2,200-acre Fresh Kills Park on Staten Island and as small and locally focused as the Bedford-Stuyvensant Community Garden in Brooklyn. Many of these initiatives are designed to make New York City more environmentally sustainable and ecologically resilient in response to the disturbances that will come with a warming climate.
Nature isn’t absent in the works of Charles and Ray Eames, but it’s never intended as a replacement for design.
But much of what passes for examples of “ecological,” or “sustainable,” or even “resilient” design in cities makes it seem as if the ideal urban landscape is one that resembles a post-apocalyptic Eden made perfect by the absence of actual human beings. When people do pop into these beautifully rendered images, they often look as if they just finished hiking the Appalachian Trail or rafting the Colorado River. They’re outdoorsy, effervescent, and earnest. There’s no sign of the frazzled morning commuter ascending from an overcrowded morning metro ride, or the disheveled pedestrian jumping over black pools of melting sidewalk snow. No anger or irony or humor. No graffiti. No panhandlers or pizza rats. No street meat vendors or aluminum can scavengers or cops giving teenagers a hard time for sneaking a toke of weed behind the bus stop. No humanity.
Sarah Lidgus and Sam Holleran (not photographed) lead a participatory design process in 2014 with residents of Queens, New York to imagine new futures for Flushing Meadow Corona Park, a project of the Design Trust for Public Space. Photo: Sam Holleran
Nature, it seems to me, is an impoverished source of inspiration for the design of urban landscapes. We think of nature as something out there beyond the boundaries of human culture, a standard for how things ought to be that both predates and excludes people. Nature, in this sense, derives its authority from its essential lack of humanity. It sits in judgment apart from the messiness of human life. It bears the responsibilities of a god, and all of its pronouncements from on high seem to tell us that the solutions to our problems can be found in abandoning our humanity, retreating from society to find holiness in the purity of streams and meadows, forests and mountains.
This deity we call Nature really doesn’t like cities, and when pressed to come up with something useful to say about careful urban design, its dismissive response is, invariably, “Make them in my image.” Nature, though, is what we make of it. “Our experience of nature is rarely direct,” the geographer Noel Castree reminds us. “Rather, it is thoroughly mediated for us.” The wisdom we claim to find in nature is really a refraction of our own culture—our hopes, anxieties, prejudices and beliefs bounced back at us from the horizon of our limited understanding. Nature, by definition, has no language. Or, put another way, Nature does not speak in any language humans will ever understand on its own terms. We are the wizards behind the curtain, pulling levers and talking into a megaphone to make an otherworldly Nature talk. The real trick, though, lies in convincing ourselves that the rumbling voice we hear is not our own.
Residents of neighborhoods surrounding Flushing Meadow Corona Park in Queens survey the outcomes of a participatory design process for the future of the park. Photo: William Michael Freericks
None of this is to say that cities don’t need functional green space or that designers shouldn’t be conscious of environmental concerns. Parks and gardens and trees are essential building blocks in cities, both aesthetically and because of the ecosystem services they provide. And landscape architects, urban designers, engineers, and planners of all stripes have much to learn from mimicking the technics of environmental processes. But in both cases, we’re talking about applying good design practices to urban problems—a thoroughly cultural process, no matter what inspiration we draw from that tangle of concepts and creatures we persist in bundling under the heading of “nature.”
Where do we turn to discover good design processes? We turn to good designers. Let’s consider, as an example, the design processes of Charles and Ray Eames, the mid-20th century husband-and-wife architect-and-painter team that put research, learning, and holistic thinking at the center of their practice. You won’t find much having to do with unspoiled nature in the Eames design archives, but you’ll find plenty of projects tackling breathtaking concepts in science, engineering, and technology—all branches of knowledge at the core of any effort to create more sustainable cities. You’ll also find a sincere appreciation for the simple beauty of living things, for things that grow and change, for leaves and flowers, trees and tumbleweeds. Nature isn’t absent in their design, but it’s never intended as a replacement for design.
There was nothing Ray and Charles seemed to love more than a solving a puzzle—other than explaining the solution and its underlying logic afterward. They were humanists, through and through, betraying a love for every dimension of human culture in their educational films, covering topics that included tops and trains and trigonometry. Charles once made a short film that investigated the flow of sudsy water washing across the surface of a blacktop playground, just because the patterns of movement fascinated him. They loved the stuff of daily human life, the stuff Charles named “The New Covetables” in a lecture at Harvard in 1981: bolts of wool and spools of twine and reams of unused paper, all made valuable by their unreleased creative potential. Ray and Charles were also inveterate aphorists, leaving behind a trove of pithy slogans and sayings about design that give us a peek into their creative process and what it has to say to contemporary urban designers and landscape architects in search of a more sustainable future. Here are just two to get started.
Residents of Greensboro, North Carolina come out to enjoy a revamped public sidewalk as part of the Kit-o-Cart project commissioned by the Elsewhere Museum as part of South Elm Projects. Photo: Mitchell Oliver
“Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.”
Charles and Ray were “systems thinkers” before there was a popular phrase to describe that way of looking at the world. They were ecologists in the sense that they were sensitive to connections, seeking out surprising links between seemingly unrelated “people, ideas, objects” and exploiting those connections to arrive at better design. Urban designers and landscape architects won’t create more sustainable cities by simply filling every downtown with more trees and grasses and greenery. They need to take the time to consider the emergent and unintended consequences of their designs—how “everything eventually connects.”
Take the case of Los Angeles, where an ambitious “Million Trees” planting campaign initiated by former mayor Antonia Villaraigosa came up nearly 600,000 saplings short by the end of the mayor’s second term in office in 2013. In arid cities like LA, costly investments in lush greenery can make the landscape less sustainable over the long term by making them less resilient in the face of drought and more reliant on water piped in from far-off sources. “By ignoring these technical details,” wrote one local critic, “The Villaraigosa program evokes an earlier generation’s deliberate rejection of environmental realities in favor of imported cultural norms.” And yet it was all done under the guise of “bringing nature back” to the city, as one community group involved in the project claimed.
“Take your pleasure seriously.”
Ray and Charles Eames were playful in their approach to working through design challenges. They loved children’s toys and circuses and every day they hosted a picnic on the lawn behind their sunny Los Angeles studio. “Take your pleasure seriously,” they admonished other designers, inviting them to find joy and satisfaction in complex projects that could demand iteration after iteration of backbreaking failure before arriving at a winning solution.
Residents of New York City’s Lower East Side enjoy the On a Fence installation by Chat Travieso and Yeju Choi at Pier 42 on the East River. Photo: Chat Travieso
Nothing dour ever came out of the Eames studio at 901 Washington Boulevard in the quirky, seaside neighborhood of Venice. Compare the colorful cacophony of an Eames design (be it a bookcase paneled in bright primary colors or a thirteen-minute seven-screen multi-track film about life in the United States in the 1950s) to the flinty renderings of new parks and open space projects that unspool from so many large-format plotters in design firms across the land. These designers certainly take their work seriously, but there’s little evidence of any pleasure in the product. Urban design and landscape architecture in the service of sustainable cities need to make space for solutions that pop up from having a healthy dose of wild fun. For example, check out studios like the Hester Street Collaborative in New York City’s Lower East Side or recent work from designers like Chat Travieso, Sarah Lidgus, or Sam Holleran for an idea of what this joyful approach to crafting sustainable and inclusive cities could look like. Lively, participatory, and grounded in local culture, the work produced by these designers often concerns itself with nature in cities, but doesn’t assume that nature is the antidote to urban life. Instead, Chat, Sarah, Sam, and the growing team at Hester Street all start from the core belief that cities are beautiful and worth celebrating. The rest flows from there.
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Urban designers and landscape architects can’t ignore human culture in their efforts to make environmentally innovative cities. Every attempt to turn to nature for broad brushstroke solutions is really a turn toward a particular idea of nature—nature as the absence of human intention, human meddling, human design. Yet design is inevitable, even if we’re talking about the design of trees and grasses and greenery, and even the most conservative urban conservation project can never actually put things back they way the were before humans showed up. There is no way to go but forward. “We are as gods,” Stewart Brand likes to say. “We might as well get good at it.”
Sustainable infrastructure design—from water, energy, material flows, built systems—is the art of seeking solutions that address ecology, engineering and culture as interconnected realms.
In the past, civil engineering was the transformer of the natural environment to meet development and human needs. In doing so, engineers blindly trusted technique as a pillar, repeated recipes, disregarding the importance of understanding each intervention site as a unique living system. Multiple evidence around the world shows that, in many cases, engineering has been responsible for more environmental problems than for solutions.
In this book S. Bry Sarté calls us to design structures for the future that will be effective in the next century, reconnecting strategies that worked in the past with new methods.
An engineer himself, S. Bry Sarté graduated from the University of California. He is founder of Sherwood Design Institute, a non-profit research and policy group. Through his collaborative projects around the world, and in lectures and conferences he has addressed the urgent need for a new paradigm and has this influenced urban planning and management in a very positive way.
Sustainable infrastructure. The guide to green engineering and design, belongs to a constellation of books such as Green Infrastructure: Linking Landscapes and Communities (M.A. Benedict and E.T. McMahon, 2006) andGreen Infrastructure: A Landscape Approach (D.C. Rouse and I.F. Bunster-Ossa 2013) just to mention two. All these works are aimed at demonstrating the value of ongoing collaboration among architects, engineers, planners, ecologists and many other people.
This book is structured in three parts and nine chapters. The first part introduces the reader to the New Paradigm for Design, which is essential for this new era: the Anthropocene. In the present age, the social, economic and environmental issues surrounding infrastructure are too complex to be left to engineers alone, as it has been practiced in the past century. Today these multiple and multifaceted problems need to be solved in an interdisciplinary and collaborative fashion, if we want to make our habitat more livable. This part of the book there are two key chapters, describing the process and frameworks of sustainable design, explaining the new paradigm for an integrated approach to sustainable design at different levels.
The second part, comprising four chapters, describes water and energy management, as well as sustainable site planning and materials flow.
The third part of the book gives many examples across different action scales, which at the end are always intertwined: the urban (chapter 7), community (chapter 8) and site scale (chapter 9). Through case studies around the world, most through the experience gained by the Sherwood Design Engineers Institute, the author shows how sustainable design can provide system models for integrated win-win management programs.
This book is easy to read. It explains paradigms and strategies, providing a practical guide for planners, landscape architects, educators and students. It is an excellent inspiration to students and professionals, inviting them to integrate existing concepts in new ways.
The author succeeds in passing on an important message: design should deliver systems that are useful and also beautiful, so that people can connect with them, giving them value and understanding. He emphasizes the responsibility that citizens have in their everyday life choices to ensure the sustaining of life on Earth.
This book is an important reference, highly recommended.
Ana Faggi
Buenos Aires
To buy the book, click the images below and go to Amazon—part of the proceeds return to TNOC.
As an urban ecologist, I’ve studied the house sparrow, the “agrarian” (as we call it in some Mexican regions), for over a decade now, and had never been aware of the infinity of human expressions related to sparrows in general. In this book, Todd gathers an impressive cumulus of facts, stories, and references to the generic concept of “sparrow” together with an exquisite palette of artwork by artists from around the globe.
Connecting the center of the island to the beaches of San Juan, the Río Piedras watershed embodies both celebration and fear. Heavy rains occasionally transform its calm waters into torrents, inundating the city streets. And when hurricanes hit, the once tranquil sea metamorphoses into a tumultuous and vindictive paramour, unleashing its fury with relentless force.
Overall, the Alianza and the local community are demanding fair and transparent processes for understanding the causes and impacts of flooding, including the relationship between flood mitigation options and the values, fears, and concerns of San Juan residents. These can be addressed by collaboratively building representations of the urban system, more broadly considering social-ecological relationships, and explicitly evaluating how citywide NbS fit within a more comprehensive climate resilience strategy.
Urban-Rural integrated planning 
Slum reconstruction 
Sustainable infrastructure design—from water, energy, material flows, built systems—is the art of seeking solutions that address ecology, engineering and culture as interconnected realms.
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