Over the years walking the greenway, I’ve been taken with how much the beaver sculpture is loved by passersby. And how it might connect people who are otherwise disconnected from nature and even their neighbors.
In a previous essay, Size Doesn’t Matter, Really, I made the case that even small scraps of urban green, such as Portland’s one-square-block Tanner Springs Nature Park can provide significant benefits to a community. Located in the city’s intensely developed Pearl District, Tanner Springs provides access to nature to thousands of nearby apartment dwellers and contributes to urban biodiversity as well. In some cases, these mini-greenspaces are the only access to nature local residents might have in their everyday lives.
I also highlighted Heron Pointe Wetlands, a small remnant of green on the Willamette Greenway close to downtown Portland. With few riverine habitats remaining within the city limits, its importance far outweighs its half-hectare size.
Heron Pointe Wetland. Photo: Mike Houck
Located along the Willamette River, this postage stamp sized wetland is home to mature black cottonwood, ash, willows, elderberry and red-osier dogwood. Since the 1980s, there has been an ongoing conflict with the condominium owner’s association over the trees and native shrubs. Some in the association have an aversion to “messy” cottonwood seeds that waft onto balconies and the greenway path. Even as I write this, condo owners have launched another assault on the wetland vegetation, using the rationale that the Himalayan blackberry is an invasive weed on the city’s no plant list, despite the fact that the city has environmental policies in place that recognize even invasive species provide critical habitat on this reach of the Willamette River. But, along with the blackberries, they’ve also ravaged native stands of red-osier dogwood, willows, and native wildflowers, hacking limbs from the cottonwoods and ash trees to improve views to the river.
The Heron Pointe homeowners have cut both native and invasive species of shrubs and “pruned” trees as well. Photo: Mike HouckBefore “pruning”. Photo: Mike HouckLucy, Heron Pointe resident lecturing a group about the wetlands and her new beaver installation. Photo: Mike Houck
The ongoing conflict with the homeowners, more than three decades after having secured the wetland’s protection, is deeply frustrating. Often, however, when I’m at my lowest ebb, I get a shot of inspiration and a renewed passion for that miserable, scrappy little riverine preserve from an inanimate creature that occupies a place of honor along the greenway trail. A three-foot tall bronze beaver has captured my heart and apparently the hearts of passersby who cannot resist stopping to pat it on the head and leave small tokens of affection.
Ironically, the beaver was installed by a wizened, white-haired, wiry resident of the adjacent Heron Pointe Condominiums who was, by far, the most militant antagonist of the offensive, scruffy cottonwoods. Her name was Lucy. Lucy initially protested the trees blocked her riverine view. When that failed she insisted the air-borne, fluffy snow-like seeds were a nuisance. Her final gambit was to claim the trees exacerbated her asthma.
In one of my most memorable Lucy episodes, as I was being wired for an onsite television interview I told the cameraman and interviewer that it was highly likely she would appear to harangue me about the cottonwoods. Right on cue, camera and audio rolling, she appeared and proceeded to poke me in the chest, demanding we remove the offending trees. Looking over my shoulder I could see the TV crew doubled over In laughter. Alas, none of the footage was used. I’d give anything to have that footage for the archives. The point being, of course, that even though we’d managed to save this postage stamp sized wetland from development, so long as it was in private ownership its long-term fate was not assured.
While dogged and strident in her loathing of those cottonwoods, Lucy was also sweet as could be. In fact, tree averse as she was, she rallied her fellow condo owners to work with the city’s environmental services bureau to remove invasive plants and replant with native species a couple decades ago. Sadly, several years ago her husband died of complications of Alzheimer’s. To honor him she installed a cast bronze beaver, an animal abundant on nearby Ross Island and along banks of the Willamette River; and one especially fond of wetland’s native species. More recently Lucy herself moved to an assisted care facility. As testy as she was, I admit to missing her frequent harangues.
Another incident, with another condo resident drove home the fact that merely protecting a patch of ground, particularly if it’s privately owned, is insufficient in the long term. Ongoing public education and long-term monitoring are also needed. In this instance after installing a beautiful, information-packed interpretive sign were sitting on a nearby bench quaffing a couple magnums of champagne to celebrate three years navigating the city’s bureaucracy to get the sign installed.
A woman soon sidled up to the sign and expressed her love of nature and wildlife. Incredibly, she then asked us, “Is there anything you can do to help us cut these trees down?” I responded, “do you think the wildlife you see has anything to do with those trees?” She replied, “Oh, I never thought of that” and walked off. “What”, I responded to my colleagues, “Do we need to hire someone to sit here and quiz passersby If they get the connection?”
City of Portland staff, Linda Dobson, Steve Bricker, Jim Sjulin installing the interpretive sign on their day off as the wetland is privately owned and they were not allowed to do the installation on city time. The sign’s graphic designer was Martha Gannett, Martha Gannett Graphic Design, far right. Photo: Mike HouckThe Interpretive Sign. Photo: Mike HouckFall. Photo: Mike HouckSummer. Photo: Mike HouckChristmas. Photo: Mike HouckSpring. Photo: Mike HouckWinter photo. Photo: Mike HouckMardi Gras. Photo: Mike HouckNew Years 2014. Photo: Mike HouckFourth of July. Photo: Mike Houck
Over the years walking the greenway, I’ve noted how much Lucy’s beaver is loved by walker and cyclists many of whom are unable to resist giving the beaver a pat on the head or leaving small twigs, a flower, or some other token of their affection. One greenway habitue’ even took to décorating it with attired apropos of the upcoming holiday or passing of the season. While I always look forward to seeing the feisty Anna’s Hummingbird fiercely guarding his nearby perch on a red-osier dogwood, I am equally delighted to find some new trinket, beaver-chewed twig, or outfit has been festooned on the much-beloved wetland icon.
At the Interpretive sign. Photo: Mike HouckCyclists of three generations checking out the beaver. Photo: Mike Houck
After years of haggling over pruning, clear cutting non-native blackberry, and arguments over views versus trees, the fact remains that constant vigilance is necessary to truly protect this small riverside wetland. I’m hopeful that Lucy’s beaver will continue to prompt walkers, joggers and cyclists to pause a few moments, perhaps only because they are bemused by the sculpture’s accoutrements, or more hopefully to pause a few moments to enjoy the last little patch of green on this reach of the Willamette River. One thing is certain. Lucy would be amused had she known that a passing beaver stopped recently just long enough to climb the steep river bank and fell a cottonwood not fifty feet from her sculpture.
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle I no longer despair for the future of the human race. —H.G. Wells
Fast, efficient and individualistic, the bicycle is no ordinary mode of transport. It’s a church, a gym, a community creator, a cash printer, a protest placard, a dopamine generator, a mechanical expression of self-determination, an icon of hope. It is touchable, attainable freedom.
It is also a tool for nature conservation and one that the City of Cape Town—indeed, any city—stands to benefit from.
My father is a boisterous character, half-man half-bicycle. Last month, he cracked two ribs after tumbling over his handlebars. I profited from his misfortune by taking his place in the world’s largest individually-timed cycle race, the Cape Argus. Egged on by minstrel bands and reels of cheering supporters, some donning fancy dress, I joined over 30,000 competitors to pedal 110 km around the breath-taking Cape Peninsula. The race is a magnificent celebration of sport, healthy living, unity and nature. It physically exposes and connects people to the region’s awe-inspiring natural beauty. The organizers are well aware of this, having furnished all finishing medals with images of iconic local species and the words, “Our Natural Heritage”.
The experience left me wondering whether bicycles could meaningfully contribute to nature conservation in a broader sense. The answer appears to be multifarious.
1. More bikes = more connectivity, awareness, compassion, and innovation
Exposure to nature nourishes the soul and fosters compassion for wildlife (and for fellow humans), especially in children. Urban citizens who never encounter wildlife, who never marvel at the complexity and fragility of nature, may feel indifferent to its plight.
By liberating green space and enhancing mobility, bicycles can reconnect people to nature and to each other. On a bicycle, one cannot turn up the music, wind up the windows, lock the doors and adopt tunnel vision. On a bicycle, one is exposed and alert to their surroundings. One is manoeuvrable, approachable and distractible. One can divert, slow and stop to examine oddities, follow intriguing scents, chat to curious strangers, explore unchartered streets, or just quietly observe wildlife.
With eyes and ears on the ground, cyclists feel a greater sense of place and a stronger connection to their neighbourhoods. Such interaction may ignite compassion for a city, its nature and people; inspire innovations for improving urban liveability; and instil the motivation to set about doing so. Certainly, cycling can render us happier, healthier, wealthier and calmer with more time and money to spare for community-centred activities including nature conservation.
Imagine:
A community of cyclists, proactively interested in their city, its nature and its people.
The ideas they will devise, develop and share, aimed at improving their city.
Bicycles enhance our mobility and connectivity. They enable interactions that would otherwise be impossible. Photo: Georgina Avlonitis
2. More bicycles = more space for nature
I recently visited a suburb of Johannesburg. Ecologically dull, aesthetically grim, traffic congested, socially segregated, it is dominated by roads, car parks and shopping complexes—a superb example of bad urban planning, a suburb designed for cars not people. Yet it resembles much of the modern world—a world that is rapidly transforming through low-density car-infatuated urban sprawl.
A bicycle consumes only a slither of the space that a car does, both in terms of lane width and storage/parking area.
Imagine:
The potential for reducing traffic congestion by converting car drivers into cyclists.
The projected urban sprawl that could be averted and the natural habitats that could be saved.
The area of concrete and tarmac that could be reclaimed, liberated and transformed into ecologically-vibrant, socially-inclusive multifunctional public space.
3. More bicycles = less pollution, more resources
The life-cycle of vehicles and the road infrastructure that they necessitate is resource-ravenous and waste-flatulent. At the point of sale, a new car has already inflicted ecological damage globally not least through the extractive industries that support its manufacture. Regardless of manufacturing, conventional cars are woefully inefficient. Why do we need vehicles that are typically 25 times heavier than our own bodies? What a waste of natural resources! What needless environmental degradation!
Even if distant impacts are “out of sight, out of mind” then surely local impacts elicit concern. Vehicle emissions contribute to urban smog, impart respiratory illnesses and stain our lungs grey. Hydrocarbons, break fluids and other chemicals leak from cars poisoning our waterways. Noise pollution from traffic and road construction shakes the ground, awakens the sleeping and stresses the awake.
An average bicycle, on the other hand, produces comparatively negligible pollution. It weighs around one-sixth of our body weight and less than one-hundredth of an average car. It moves in silence, causing little disturbance to wildlife. Its full life-cycle impacts are dwarfed by those of a car.
Imagine:
The potential reduction in air, noise and water pollution by converting car drivers into cyclists.
The consequent enhancement of a city’s resource-efficiency and the reduction of its ecological footprint.
The water, mineral and energy resources that could be saved.
4. More bikes = more environmental justice
Green infrastructure generates multiple ecosystem services that support human wellbeing including education, recreation, spiritual fulfilment, storm water absorption, climate regulation, and food production. In an increasingly urbanized world, maintaining direct access to such benefits is challenging. Communities may suffer ‘nature deficit disorder’ which hinders child-development and induces psychological ailments. You are not alone if you can identify the logos of obscure commercial brands better than common bird or tree species. Affordable, safe public transport is not always available for carless families wanting to visit green spaces beyond walking distance.
Bicycles can address such environmental injustice: (1) by alleviating road traffic to allow for the establishment of additional green space; and (2) by extending one’s radius of accessible area to encompass otherwise inaccessible ecosystem services.
Imagine:
Establishing more equitably-distributed green space.
Enhancing the mobility of carless citizens to enhance the accessibility of ecosystem services.
Love is a dangerous game
Despite the enormous enthusiasm for cycling, so palpable at the Cape Argus, only a tiny, albeit increasing, proportion of Cape Town’s inhabitants dare to cycle on a regular basis. Their reasons appear multifarious yet rooted in fear: fear of colliding with reckless drivers (taxis deserve a special mention here for frequently endangering the lives of cyclists); fear of exposure to violent crime; fear of inhaling noxious traffic fumes; fear of arriving sweaty at work; and fear of being stigmatized.
These fears are legitimate, but all can be overcome. Local movements like the monthly Moonlight Mass and the annual Naked Bike Ride are helping to raise awareness of cycling in the city. For over a decade, NGOs like the Bicycle Empowerment Network have been addressing poverty and mobility through the promotion of cycling in low-income communities. However, the keys to a more bicycle-friendly city that reaps the aforementioned social and ecological benefits, lie primarily in the hands of the local government.
Thousands of cyclists gather under a full moon at Green Point in Cape Town, before cycling in mass through the city. Photo: Russell Galt
The City of Cape Town will become the 2014 World Design Capital presenting unprecedented opportunities to support urban initiatives fostering social and environmental progress; an opportunity to deploy the bicycle as an agent of urban transformation and as a catalyst for nature conservation.
To achieve this, the local government must:
Strengthen the protection of cyclists, better inform drivers, and enforce road safety;
Expand the network of formal cycle lanes and allow bicycles on board public transport;
Improve street lighting and tighten security to reduce crime;
Improve air quality by taking meaningful measures to reduce traffic congestion;
Launch a well-framed public campaign to promote cycling;
Incentivize employers to provide showers in the work place;
Identify and pedestrianize priority roads (e.g. Long Street and sections of Main Road).
By embracing the bicycle and its associated benefits, Cape Town will truly stand apart as a forward-looking, innovative city designed not for its cars, but for its people and the nature that underpins their wellbeing and prosperity.
Over time, cities originated wherever indigenous cultures agglomerated and planned links between their settlements and peri-urban ecosystems for the provision of water, food and other goods and services. Not by coincidence, these settlements often occurred in biodiversity hotspots—and we know that historically cities were hotbeds for innovation of all sorts. Yet indigenous knowledge on the sustainable use of biodiversity has largely been unutilized in city design. Here we propose to identify some “bright spots” in integrating traditional knowledge on environmental protection in cities.
Indigenous urbanization, problems and solutions
Like the rest of us, the majority of indigenous peoples all over the world now live in urban settings, and that proportion is increasing. Almost 60% of the indigenous population of Panama lives in its main city, as is the case of Maracaibo in Venezuela. Cities like La Paz (Bolivia), Santiago (Chile), San José (Costa Rica) and Fernheim (Paraguay) concentrate up to 40% of their country’s total urban indigenous population. This growing trend has implications for their lifestyles and culture, including risks of alienation and loss of traditional knowledge. Urban indigenous peoples often find it hard to pass these on to younger generations. Furthermore, many indigenous peoples in various regions are currently living in housing that is at odds with their cultural needs, which is evident by having to give up traditional and culturally specific housing when they migrate to cities. In fact, housing conditions offered to migrating indigenous peoples often do not meet even minimal local criteria for quality of life.
“…cities are not always the destination of opportunities for indigenous peoples. Some indigenous peoples arrive in cities compelled to leave their ancestral lands due to necessity. Escaping natural disasters, conflict or dispossession, caused by large-scale development projects, engulfed in urban extension, indigenous peoples find themselves deprived of their resources and unable to carry out their traditional occupations and livelihood. Limited socio-economic opportunities in the cities result in indigenous peoples’ exclusion from economic gains of the growing cities. Cultural distinctiveness from the majority populations can lead to discrimination and further marginalization from processes affecting urban communities.
Indigenous peoples do not constitute a homogeneous population. Worldwide there are 350 million indigenous people living in 70 countries, representing 500 distinct communities and speaking 400 different languages. In addition to culturally-driven discrimination, some indigenous populations also face the usual sex-, age-, disability-based discrimination. The disproportionate disadvantages affect women’s property rights and security of tenure; transitioning from childhood to adulthood, indigenous youth suffer face further transitions of reconciling the traditional ancestral ways with adaptation to the culture of the majority population. The work of UN-Habitat on urban indigenous issues seeks to explore ways to increase the socio-economic participation of indigenous peoples, improving the self-reliance of communities in urban centres and the realisation of their rights in cities.”
Cooperating with UN-Habitat, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the principal UN agency in the field of the environment, assisting governments to address global, regional and national environmental challenges. It has an active agenda on green cities and urbanization, and develops a series of activities with indigenous peoples around the world on several topics such as the Post-2015 agenda, human rights, pastoralism, climate change, ecosystems, poverty, REDD, and TEEB among others. However, the potentially positive influences of traditional knowledge in urban planning have not been studied or generally included in urban planning.
Value of past and present traditional knowledge: a “bright spots” approach
When producing the booklet celebrating the 2014 theme of islands for the International Day on Biodiversity with the Global Islands Partnership (GLISPA), the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD) was inspired by the “bright spots” approach proposed by Rare (“find what works and repeat it”). We’d like to propose the same reasoning to indigenous urbanization, as it can also present opportunities for traditional forms of land-use, ecosystem management and occupation of space to evolve into a source of new and creative ways for urban design and to achieve sustainable urbanization at a time cities around the world are facing the loss of their biodiversity. This will always be done through the full participation of indigenous peoples and traditional communities as urban citizens, planning urban spaces, diversifying landscapes and designing cities differently. In other words, traditional knowledge and diverse cultural identities have the potential to improve urban design, governance and enhance the quality of urban life inasmuch as indigenous peoples have the opportunity to fully participate in the city planning and governance process.
Our efforts are to identify best practices on how indigenous peoples and traditional communities urbanize with nature, incorporating biodiversity and more sustainable forms of socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes into the urban fabric, and linking peri-urban and urban ecosystems into innovative city design and planning.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) states that traditional knowledge is both an element of biodiversity and a tool for conservation of biodiversity and sustainable use of its components, which are two out of the three objectives of the Convention. Recent decisions of the Conference of the Parties (COP), which is the governing body of the Convention, provide a mandate for exploring ways and means for increasing indigenous engagement in urban planning and governance, as one of the steps to achieve Aichi Targets, especially target 18.
Traditional knowledge and practices can make a significant contribution to sustainable development. Most indigenous peoples and traditional communities are situated in areas where the vast majority of the world’s biological and cultural diversities are found. Many of these indigenous peoples and local communities have cultivated and used biological diversity in a sustainable way for thousands of years. Some of their practices have been proven to enhance and promote biodiversity at the local level and aid in maintaining healthy ecosystems.
Machu Picchu, Peru. Photo: Rodrigo AlvarezTenochtitlan was an Aztec city located on an island in Lake Texcoco. Today, its ruins are in a central part of Mexico City.
As mentioned, the contribution of indigenous people’s traditional knowledge to urbanization is historical. For example, in Machu Picchu (Peru) the Inca developed a successful method which allowed the construction of the city in a mountain top with seismic activity using the chips which they carved off of the stones in their construction and as a method to avoid mud and landslides, as well as flooding, and an agriculture sector, where extensive terraces were used for agriculture and sophisticated channeling systems provided irrigation for the fields. The terraces were used chiefly to drain and syphon the water from rain, as well as to hold the mountain in place. Each terrace was multi layered: first top soil, then dirt, sand and finally stone chips. This meant that water which sat on the terraces would sift downward into the mountain, as opposed to overflowing and running down the mountain.
Located on what today is in the central area of Mexico City, Tenochtitlan was the capital of the Aztec Empire and the largest city in pre-Colombian America with an estimated population over 200 thousand inhabitants by the time of the Spanish conquest. It had two double aqueducts, each more than 4 km long and made of terracotta, that provided the city with fresh water from the springs at Chapultepec for cleaning and washing. A complex system of canals, extending throughout the city, provided the infrastructure for an efficient approach to sanitation. Over one thousand people worked to collect waste nightly, using barges to recycle organic waste for cultivation and dispose of other forms of waste. Contemporary Mexico City has even begun to imitate its practice of recycling waste for the fertilization.
Tikal, Guatemala. Photo: Pedro Szekely
Over time indigenous peoples also accumulated knowledge from their failures in urbanization. Tikal, despite being one of the larger Mayan cities with almost 90 thousand inhabitants, had no water source other than the rain. For this reason its inhabitants built 10 reservoirs. However when the population reached its peak, most of it was urban. This led to intensive agriculture and environmental decline with erosion, deforestation and loss of nutrients leading to a subsequent population decline and the city collapse.
Cahokia, which was the biggest pre-Colombian city north from Mexico, suffered from lack of supplies and with the waste disposal which made the city unhealthy. Its decline is also due to deforestation and a subsequent lack of wood.
Cahokia Summit. Photo: Ian Holtzman
Today we see examples of communities in urban spaces that have gone ahead to secure their culture and livelihoods. In Cape Town, the NGO led project Healthy Streets – Healthy People: Mitigating the impacts of wild medicinal plant harvesting in Cape Town through research, engagement and inclusive partnership with Rasta herbalists brought conservation officials to work alongside Rasta bossiedoktors (bush doctors or herbalists) and other citizens to plant on the Seawinds open-access street garden. In this garden, 80-90% of the plants are indigenous. Developing a medicinal street garden in low income areas and strengthening biocultural ecosystem resilience built a communication and collaboration space for Rasta and conservation stakeholders. The gardens also add aesthetic, biodiversity, and direct use value to otherwise degraded residential streets.
It should be noted, however, that some considered this project to have had a negative impact on biodiversity in the area because of the not-always-sustainable harvesting of a variety of indigenous plants for sale rather than personal medicinal/culinary use. Still, it is clear that opportunities arise from engaging indigenous people in urban planning, design and implementation. Their traditional knowledge has proven to contribute to higher quality of urban life. It is a source of new and creative ways to sustainable development, planning urban spaces, diversify landscapes and designing cities differently.
Identifying these solutions can also be the task of indigenous universities, some of which in Latin America already offer degrees in city management. For instance in Mexico, the Universidad Autónoma Indígena de México offers a masters degree in municipal development. This program aims not only on those who work in the city administration but also in those who work on NGOs that deal with municipal development ensuring that indigenous peoples be prepared to participate in the city development in all levels.
We have selected some examples of local governments which were either able to engage indigenous people in their urban planning solution and add their views to the city project, or were able to identify traditional knowledge bright spots and apply then on their cities. While links to biodiversity are not always direct, the potential of such engagements is clear.
Auckland, New Zealand
Auckland’scharacter has been shaped by the shared experiences of Maori and European peoples. Maori see themselves as belonging to the land, as opposed to the land belonging to them, and the natural environment plays a significant role in defining the Maori sense of place. The city council has an Independent Maori Statutory Board, whose objective is ensuring that the Council takes into account Maori views in decision making. In order to do so, the board elaborates a Maori priority list of issues (including environmental ones) relevant to the Maori in Auckland that will guide the development of the board working programme. The city also has a Pacific Peoples Advisory Panel. The Panel identifies and communicates to the Council the interests of Pacific peoples living in Auckland regarding Council’s strategies, policies, plans and bylaws or any other matter the Panel considers of interests of the pacific peoples in Auckland. The city also has a Maori Strategy and Relations department, which takes care of its obligations towards the Maori.
With the participation of the Maori, the Auckland City Council developed an urban design framework, in which the number one goal is to reflect the city’s Maori, Pacific, and multicultural identity to be visibly identifiable as a place in the South Pacific. The use of Maori values in urban design and development is entirely consistent with low-impact urban design and development. The merging of Maori values, approaches and principles with Eurocentric based architecture, design, engineering, and planning disciplines results in greater integration between environmental aspects of urban design and more low impact, energy, resource and cost efficient design to achieve socially and culturally sensitive sustainable development in urban built environments.
Powhiri at Auckland University. Photo:: Kathrin Marks
Baguio City, the Philippines
With 60% of its total population comprised of indigenous peoples originally from Cordillera Villages, Baguio City has an indigenous mayor and is in the process of updating it Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP) and the amended zoning ordinance which serves as the CLUP’s implementing tool. The City Council decided to include an indigenous peoples sector in the CLUP, with the proposed policy that “ancestral lands in the city shall be respected and shall be accorded the same rights and responsibilities appurtenant to private titles. Hence, all registered owners of legitimate ancestral domain/land titles shall formulate their respective sustainable development, protection and management plans pursuant to the provision of Republic Act 8371 and other pertinent laws”.
Baguio Houses. Photo: “e.r.w.i.n”
Edmonton and Whistler, Canada
Edmonton has created the Edmonton Urban Affairs Committee and an Aboriginal Relations Office. Edmonton is bringing aboriginal perspectives on environment to city projects, among them the land use review of a portion of Whitemud Parkproposed by an indigenous organization to turn a farm site part of the park to become a permanent licensed site for indigenous activities. Another example of aboriginal perspective is the fund for the redesign of Walterdale Bridge in Rossdale, which is located near a traditional burial ground.
In 1997 the Resort Municipality of Whistler met with the Lil’wat Nation to consult about opportunities for the Nation’s participation and presence. Out of these discussions, the idea of a world-class cultural centre was born and a relationship in the spirit of goodwill and cooperation evolved. The Squamish and Lil’wat Nations built a Cultural Centre to house and showcase indigenous art, history and culture. Indigenous builders have treated the site with respect, building on the northern side of the property and leaving the forested area mostly untouched. The building is designed to evoke the longhouses of our Squamish people and the Istken (traditional earthen pit house) of Lil’wat people with a modern architectural interpretation. The structure was awarded the CBD’s 2010 Indigenous Tourism and Biodiversity Award.
Satoyama and satoumi, Japan
Other approaches can be inferred from the studies linked to “satoyama” and “satoumi” in Japan. Satoyama and satoumi are kinds of socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS), and are effective models for reaching biodiversity targets without damaging human production activities and originally. As a traditional practice,Satoyama landscapes in peri-urban areas have been faced with new challenges, including conversion of land into built-up areas and the loss of traditional knowledge to manage the landscape. This is significant because the area near Tokyo has maintained relatively higher species richness compared to non-traditional models, suggesting the importance of traditional knowledge for environmental management.
Satoyama – Inagi – Tokyo. Photo: Hajime Nakano
Nowadays satoyama landscapes in peri-urban areas in Japan have become very different from those in the past. Due to the breakup of nuclear families they are highly fragmented and there are fewer people who can continue farming and managing the forest. In urban settings, this traditional knowledge has been approached differently. Satoyama became an example of urban management and governance of a traditional knowledge bright spot that the local authorities have identified as offering a model to be applied by the city. Today it is largely applied by public authorities or urban volunteers, also in the designation as conservation areas or urban parks. It has provided opportunities where urban citizens can connect with nature and gain traditional knowledge.
SEPLS can take many forms around the world where a significant amount of urban food production takes place, making production areas that include human settlements more resilient and sustainable through effective management by the people who rely on their products for their livelihoods. Often relying heavily on traditional knowledge and institutions, or, in the case of satoyama in Japan, employing rediscovered and reevaluated knowledge for landscape revitalization and maintenance, they also serve to link and strengthen both cultural and biological diversity. Examples are being collected and further studied by the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), which hosts the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI).
Tjapukai Park in Cairns, Australia
Founded more than 25 years ago, Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park enables guests to immerse themselves in traditional Tjapukai culture with authentic music, dance and storytelling by the Tjapukai people. The world’s oldest living culture is brought to life by Aboriginal performances set in a uniquely sensitive architectural environment which highlights the central importance of biodiversity to ancestral culture. The Park has been built on traditional Tjapukai land in a beautiful rainforest setting. Since commencing operations, Tjapukai has been visited by more than 3 million people and injected in excess of $35 million to the local Aboriginal community in wages, royalties and through the purchase and commissioning of art and artifacts.
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Many more examples can be found. The City of Guatemala has important indigenous communities, which have also brought some aspects of traditional knowledge into their urban architecture and functionalities. In Bolivia indigenous urban communities can enjoy two separate and complementary institutional systems. In Santa Cruz de la Sierra, several indigenous communities cooperate on a “Being Indigenous in a City”. The main elements of the project include institutional strengthening, capacity building, a set of proposed urban laws and a communications campaign. Cities like Saraguro in Ecuador offer indigenous cultural experiences in natural settings as one of its key tourism attractions.
Conclusion
Mr. Lalande of UN-Habitat cautions that sustainable urban development models must take into consideration the diversity and possible sources of discrimination. A one size-fits-all approach to housing, urban policy and planning is not adequate to counter the inequalities apparent amongst the indigenous population of cities. However, theexamples of bright spots that we have seen above show that it is possible to engage indigenous urban people in urban planning in ways that both the city government and its indigenous citizens benefit.
These examples also indicate that urbanization of indigenous peoples does not necessarily mean only loss—there are gains where communities find their roots and apply their traditional knowledge to their new urban situation. We suggest that researchers look for even smaller scale solutions and analyze their success to apply to other places. One can apply the so-called ‘bright spots’ approach to finding solutions to using biodiversity in an urban context that come along with the (largely inevitable) challenges of urbanization of indigenous and traditional communities. This incubation of bright spots also means trying to further combine traditional approaches with new social-media empowered urban-community initiatives, and ask scientists and thinkers to look at what we can learn..
Questions to initiate a debate on this topic include:
There is an irresistible trend for the urbanization of indigenous peoples and traditional communities, with associated high risks of loss of traditional knowledge and social alienation. However, there are also significant best practices/bright spots/benchmarks of indigenous/traditional empowerment in urban design, social architecture, biodiversity-friendly urban landscape management, conservation partnerships and urban agriculture for food security. How could they be compiled and made available for replication?
Drawing on those examples, what guidelines and policies in community empowerment and governance systems could help mainstream these practices in biodiversity-friendly/sustainable design and construction guidelines related to landscape use, community area design and socio-cultural architecture originating from traditional knowledge into current urban design, construction and operation?
Could traditional practices associated with growing food and medicines in urban peripheries enhance a healthy diet for all city dwellers, conserve or even enlarge green spaces promoting biodiversity and also give indigenous families opportunities tosecure their livelihoods?
We’d like to invite the TNOC community and the wider expert group behind it to offer constructive suggestions on how to identify, describe and offer those solutions as models for others to use and benefit from.
Further on, in November 2015 in Montreal, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity plans to hold a workshop on the topic as a laboratory for discussion. It will reflect the expertise of the broad range of actors involved in urban indigenous peoples and local communities and their traditional knowledge of relevance to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, with a view to access the current status of traditional knowledge in the cities, identify synergies between different experts and contribute to the achievement of Target 18 of the Strategic Plan on Biodiversity 2011-2020. Target 18 reads as follows:
By 2020, the traditional knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, and their customary use of biological resources, are respected, subject to national legislation and relevant international obligations, and fully integrated and reflected in the implementation of the Convention with the full and effective participation of indigenous and local communities, at all relevant levels.
Viviana Elsa Figueroa is an Associate Programme Officer at the Convention on Biological Diversity, in the Traditional Knowledge, Innovations and Practice, Mainstreaming, Partnerships and Outreach Division.
Andre is a conservation biologist specializing in subnational implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity, seconded to the Secretariat for a third year by ICLEI.
FULL BIO
Oliver Hillel has been a Programme Officer at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD, administered by the United Nations Environment Programme) in Montreal, Canada, for the last 6 years. He is responsible for the issues of South-South cooperation, sub-national implementation (involvement of States, Regions and cities), Sustainable Tourism, and Island Biodiversity.
People of color are at the center of a demographic shift that will fundamentally change the global urban landscape. From the growing proportions of Latino, Asian, and African American residents in resurgent cities of the United States, to the diversifying capitals of Europe and the booming metropolises of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cities populated by people of color are emerging as the new global centers of the 21st century.
Rising income inequality and persistent racial inequity threaten to undermine the opportunities afforded by the urban renaissance and the diversity that draws and excites newcomers in the first place.
Full inclusion is a challenge in nearly all of these urban communities, as local leaders struggle to both address the needs and harness the talents of their diversifying populations. The challenge may stem from rural to urban relocation, historical and continuing prejudice, migration within countries, or immigration. In the United States, this challenge is characterized most noticeably by race and ethnicity.
Before the middle of this century, the United States will become majority people of color; many American cities have already crossed that mark. This seismic shift requires a redefinition of the meaning of success for cities. How will cities reflect and advance the world we want to live in? How will they foster health and allow all residents to reach their full potential? Fundamental to these questions is the issue of inclusion: how will cities engage those who have traditionally been marginalized, excluded, ignored, or reviled because of race, religion, ethnicity, caste, gender, or national origin?
The guiding principle must be equity, which my organization, PolicyLink, defines as just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential. As the United States undergoes historic demographic change and urban renaissance, it has the opportunity—indeed, the obligation—to model equity in its cities. Half a century of suburbanization has stripped inner cities of employment and investment, leaving many urban communities of color stranded in areas of concentrated poverty that are devoid of the kind of resources —e.g. jobs and career pathways, good schools and healthy environments— that would allow them to thrive. At the same time, urban centers are becoming a magnet for a young workforce comprised of all racial and ethnic groups, driving urban population growth and injecting new life, energy, and investment into America’s cities.
With communities of color driving population growth throughout U.S. cities, it becomes essential that cities prepare people of color to take—and create—the jobs of the future. Faced with this opportunity for urban renaissance and the challenge of persistent racial, ethnic, and economic disparities that are undermining growth and prosperity for many urban communities, cities are recognizing that they must invest in infrastructure that fosters opportunity and connection: public transit systems, inspiring architecture, strong community institutions, diverse economies and flourishing cultural centers. Cities are also recognizing that those investments must produce jobs and other benefits for the communities that need them most. The United States cannot afford to leave our fastest-growing populations trapped behind racially-constructed barriers to opportunity and inclusion. Racial and ethnic diversity gives the nation a competitive edge in a world without borders, but only if we leverage the strengths, skills, and energy of all people, especially communities of color.
All In Cities is a new initiative by my organization, PolicyLink, designed to seize this extraordinary moment to lay out a vision of equitable cities‑strong, viable urban centers wherein all people, including those who have historically often been marginalized, can find a place, reach their full potential, contribute, and thrive. The initiative seeks to embed a new aspiration for cities in our culture, structures, systems, and policies, developing a comprehensive policy agenda that will help local leaders create, support, and sustain efforts to build equity within their jurisdictions.
All In Cities builds upon lessons learned from decades of community-driven efforts to create healthy, equitable communities of opportunity, the essence of an equitable city. Those efforts have shown us the building blocks: pathways for all to earn a decent livelihood; access to the essentials for health and well-being, including healthy food, clean water, health care and education; ample decent and affordable housing within reach of job centers, good schools, and reliable transportation, for example. Above all, equitable cities are guided by policies, planning, and investment that are intentional about ensuring that no one, and certainly no group, is left behind or pushed out, including people of color.
All In Cities is not just about making sure that more jobs, apprenticeships, or affordable housing units are available to people of color. These are critical tasks, but insufficient goals. The initiative aims to fundamentally change the economy in ways that expand participation, opportunity, and power for communities of color, and to accelerate economic growth in cities, regions and the nation. To accomplish this, we must disrupt the structures, systems and policies that have perpetuated racial inequities and uneven growth in cities.
In practice, this means that cities must embed a commitment to racial equity throughout their operations and decision making. For example, Minneapolis is building equity into the DNA of its administrative offices, creating an Office of Equitable Outcomes that will assess how local government incorporates equity into its hiring, internal operations, and the regional partnerships it makes with businesses, non-profits, and philanthropic organizations. In Los Angeles, the city is using the construction of a $2.4 billion Crenshaw/LAX light rail line to connect neighborhoods—including the disinvested communities of color of South LA—to the airport, a major employment center. The city is ensuring that this project fosters job growth and economic security where it is needed most, not only by building a rail that will physically connect people to jobs, but by requiring that 40 percent of the estimated 23,000 construction jobs created by the project go to residents of very low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, with 10 percent of those jobs targeted at “disadvantaged” workers such as veterans, the long-term unemployed, and formerly incarcerated people. In Portland, the Inclusive Startup Fund, which provides capital, mentoring, and business advising to startups founded by underrepresented groups, is dismantling barriers to employment and business ownership.
These are just a few examples of cities modeling equity-driven development. Transforming low-wage jobs into good jobs with dignity, linking unemployed residents to jobs building vital infrastructure in their neighborhoods, ending police brutality, and ensuring poor children of color can access great public schools and the support they need to thrive from cradle to college to career—these are all integral aspects of a new kind of metropolitan development that builds equity into the business models, institutions, and policies that shape urban design, planning, investment, and growth.
PolicyLink is fully cognizant of the challenges facing such sweeping action. But reimagining cities without a front-and-center commitment to equity, including racial equity, is a recipe for failure. Unless equity is deeply held as a value and elevated as the primary driver of policy, it does not happen. Instead, America’s history of racial exclusion repeats and deepens itself as low-income people of color are displaced from newly chic neighborhoods, shut out of all but the lowest-wage jobs, and isolated in aging, disinvested communities—these days, in the suburbs. Rising income inequality and persistent racial inequity threaten to undermine the opportunities afforded by the urban renaissance and the diversity that draws and excites newcomers in the first place. These trends also jeopardize regional and national economic growth, as leading economists now recognize. If people of color are driving population growth, then it’s essential that people of color are equipped to take—and make— the jobs of the future
Growing diversity and urbanization are changing the nation and the world. People of all colors, nationalities, faiths, and incomes will share space, bump against one another, and rise or fall together. This heightens the need for all to join, as equal partners, in building equitable cities. The equity imperative illuminates the path to a stronger city—a thriving, resilient, just metropolis that works for all.
Ecologists who study how ecosystems change over time know there is a balance between resilience and adaptation. Resilience is a measure of how long it takes for an ecosystem to return to a previous state. For example, how many decades will it take for a forest to regrow after a fire? Adaptation is the transformation to an alternative stable state, better suited to the prevailing conditions. If the forest burns again, and then again, a meadow may replace the forest.
Ecologically speaking we need both forests and meadows. As a scientific matter we don’t prefer one over the other. With cool precision we measure which species gain and which species lose when a fire burns the forest down.
It is difficult to bring the same level of equanimity to the damage wrought by natural disasters on built ecosystems, that is, the communities where people live and work. Although of a different kind, cities also have dynamics of disturbance, resilience, and adaption. Part of what makes cities like New York so fascinating is the on-going changes within and among the city’s neighborhoods, unrolling across decades, even centuries. At the same time when sudden, catastrophic changes come, no one likes to see the human toll of suffering and loss associated with events like Hurricane Sandy, just over year ago.
Storm damage along the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, New York, as a result of Hurricane Sandy. Photo by Terah L. Mollise/U.S. Navy from Wikimedia Commons
Thus we have the Catch-22 of Resilience. As a larger community, we know that the city must adapt over time to changes in the environment, whether that environment is defined ecologically, economically, or socially. But when it comes specifying those potential alternative stable states, the loudest voices are the people who lost the most, and what they want is exactly what they had before. Who came blame them?
The catch is after natural disasters there is a rush to “rebuild the familiar,” as some scholars described the process in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. We can see it in many places up and down the coasts of New Jersey and Long Island today, and in parts of New York City, where largely the decisions about what to do have been left to individual property owners, some of whom had support from private insurance (if covered) and government intervention (if not). Most people, quite naturally, don’t want to move. Most wish that Sandy had never happened and that future storms won’t ever come back. Few anywhere want to tell them different, even though the scientific writing is on the wall.
The Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn, on the south side of New York City, as shown on an 1844 U.S. Coast Survey chart. The shoreline is highlighted with a dotted blue line. The Rockaway Peninsula and Pelican Beach, shown here, are both barrier islands and once hosted dunes. Behind them, salt marshes develop in the protected the water. The combination of beach-dunes-marsh is nature’s solution to coastal protection on the mid-Atlantic coast. Chart courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection.One principal quality of barrier islands is that they move, often in response to storm events, but also because of the daily action of long-shore currents. This chart shows the Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn in 1861, based on a U.S. Coast Survey chart. The blue line is the shoreline from seventeen years before. Chart courtesy of the NOAA Historical Map & Chart Collection.The Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn in 1882, based on a U.S. Coast Survey chart. The blue line is the shoreline from 41 years before. Chart courtesy of the NOAA Historical Map & Chart Collection.The Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn in 1924, based on a photograph from the Fairfield Aerial Company. The blue line is the shoreline from 80 years before. Photograph courtesy of Fred Mushacke at New York State Department of Environmental Conservation / georeferencing by Eymund Diegel.The Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn in 2012, based on a satellite imagery. Note the significant amount of development and coastal reinforcements placed during the twentieth century to hold the Rockaways in place. Engineering and civilization is trying to keep the barrier island from moving. How long can we keep it up? For reference purposes, the blue line is the shoreline from 166 years before. Note that Pelican Beach, as such, no longer exists. Imagery courtesy of Digital Globe, served by ESRI.
Unfortunately the realities of climate change mean living on a barrier island or atop filled coastal wetlands is becoming less tenable than it once was. Sandy was not the first, nor the last severe storm, to threaten New York. At least four hurricanes have made on direct hits on New York City over the last 400 years, while marsh sediments record numerous large overwash events extending back to at least the 1200s. Severe nor’easters are more common than hurricanes and can have storm surges of 6 – 8 feet. Climate change predictions for New York City suggest the future will see warmer temperatures, increased precipitation, and rising sea levels, not to mention, fiercer weather. There is every reason to believe that conditions will continue to change.
To break out of the Catch-22 of resilience, we need new ways to reconcile the democratic process with the reality of climate change, not only in areas vulnerable to hurricanes, but also in areas where fires, floods, and tornadoes occur.
There have been some interesting starts after Sandy. The public sector responded robustly, with major reports delivered at Federal, state, and city levels all within a year of the event, full of language promoting resilience. The very first recommendation of the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force (2013) is: “Promoting resilient rebuilding through innovative ideas and a thorough understanding of current and future risk.” To develop those ideas, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Rockefeller Foundation launched “Rebuild by Design”, commissioning ten “world-class, interdisciplinary teams” to develop “transformative planning and design approaches” after Sandy. Teams presented their first set of ideas around the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy in late October 2013. The US Army Corps of Engineers launched its own studies to promote resiliency of the North Atlantic coast, taking advantage of the large amounts of sand they dredge and move every year around New York Harbor. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration created “Digital Coast” a website designed help people “turn data into information they can use,” including county-level reports, a sea level rise and coastal flood impacts viewer, videos and a blog.
While important, these efforts focus on traditional models of public engagement, where experts create knowledge (like flood maps) or ideas (like novel architectural designs) that are subsequently communicated to the public. The public is conceived of as recipient, not a participant, in the process of understanding what resilience and adaptation means. That’s a problem. Researchers who study how the public understands science question whether the “Big Expert Speaks to Passive Public for Their Own Good” mode of knowledge creation really works, especially when changes in public behavior are necessary. More effective, they find, are shared, interactive modes of knowledge production, especially when dealing with complex, interdependent environmental problems, on the interface between science, society, and policy, like – you guessed it – “Big Storm Strikes the Shining City by the Shore (Again)”.
What does this mean for those of who care about nature in the city? It means that we need to take nature seriously in all its aspects. Yes, seeing redtail hawks in love, nesting on the ledges of apartment buildings along Fifth Avenue, is wonderful. But nature has its darker sides too. No matter how much we treasure our deeds of property, the fact remains that the wind and the waves do not care one iota for scratches on paper. Nature’s first and last lesson is no part of the universe is meant to last forever. We can see transience as a tragedy, or we can embrace it as part of the Earth’s dynamism, but in either case the place where adaption really needs to occur is in our hearts and our minds. Our social response after natural disasters like Sandy measures not only our toughness and resilience, but also our capacity for wisdom and growth.
In New York and elsewhere, restoring nature’s defenses (beaches, sand dunes, salt marshes, riparian corridors, bioswales, green roofs, etc.) will help us be more resilient to the next storm. Sandy has opened huge opportunities for nature restoration along the Atlantic shoreline. Nature can protect us through systems of its own making and ones we help nature make. The natural world overflows with advice about the strategies we can take to avoid and survive the next disaster. Even how not to have disasters.
The Jamaica Bay landscape on the south shore of Long Island in the southeastern corner of New York City, as shown on this 1844 U.S. Coast Survey chart, highlights nature’s plan for coastal storms. Broad beaches with dunes on barrier islands protect lagoons fringed with tidal salt marshes. Marsh islands, and possibly eelgrass meadows (not shown) grow in the interior. Chart courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection / digitizing by the Welikia Project.
But being resilient is not the only, or even the main, reason why nature in the city is important. Nature in the city is important because it enables us to see alternative ways of being, in our place, in our environment, in our cities, in our lives.
‘There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.’ —Buckminster Fuller
Architecture | Education | Landscape | Nature
It’s been six months since Sweet by Nature was penned and released into the ether and in less than a week’s time, my students at the University of Johannesburg (whose work was featured in the article) will submit their Masters projects for external examination. In that time, I’ve not only come to understand better what it is I’m supposed to be teaching them, but also where the potential gaps in the overall structure of architectural education—particularly in Africa—may lie.
One such gap has to do with ‘nature’ and specifically what we mean by ‘nature’ when we teach architecture. It may seem like an obvious point but education, even in the context of a semi-vocational/professional course like architecture, isn’t just about the delivery of an ‘approved’ curriculum, it’s also (perhaps more deeply) concerned with the transmission of values. In the context of Africa where the very idea of shared cultural values that transcend the specificities of place, language, history and even ‘race’ remains an elusive pipedream, the question of how we might teach an approach to ‘nature’ and by extension ‘landscape’ remains equally elusive.
By and large, African schools of architecture follow curricula handed down/derived or adapted from one colonial context or another—British, French or Portuguese. South Africa’s eight schools have an added Dutch/Afrikaans layer of cultural complexity to contend with, but I believe it’s fair to argue that African schools have yet to attempt the profoundly complex translation of indigenous, pre-European built environment beliefs, rituals and ways of seeing into a functioning modern architectural curriculum. Given the explosive nature (no pun intended) of urbanisation, the question of how we define, explore, protect and appreciate nature and landscape in relation to urban growth is particularly urgent.
In his ‘Preface to the Second Edition of Landscape and Power, the American scholar and art historian William Mitchell wrote, ‘if one wanted [to] insist on power as the key to the significance of landscape, one would have to acknowledge that it is a relatively weak power compared to that of armies, police forces, governments and corporations. Landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify.’ Although the terms ‘nature’ and ‘landscape’ are certainly not inter-changeable, for the purposes of this article at least, I’m drawn to a definition of both that is deeply intertwined, if not co-dependent. Edward Said’s notion of ‘imaginative geography’, the invention and construction of spaces that are mapped (and conquered) in the mind as much as they are in any geographical actuality is particularly useful. As he writes, ‘the great voyages of geographical from da Gama to Captain Cook were motivated by curiosity and scientific fervour, but also by a spirit of domination, which becomes immediately evident when white men land in some distant and ‘unknown’ place [the emphasis is mine] and the natives rebel against them.’
Augustus Earle, Distant View of the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, ca 1826-27, courtesy of National Library of Australia.
It isn’t possible to speak of ‘landscape’ in Africa without reference to ‘displacement’: the replacing of one geographical sovereignty over another. What isn’t as readily graspable is how to tackle the residual cultural/emotive struggles over territory, which involve multiple and often overlapping stories, memories, narratives, experiences and, all too often, physical structures. Here, as I alluded to in my previous post, ‘questions of ownership still dominate the discourse around “land” and “landscapes”: who “owns” the land, on whose terms, in whose image, according to whose beliefs and practices?’
South African cities, uniquely, can be defined in three quite distinct ways: township, city and suburb, and in each, nature plays a particular role. The leafy northern suburbs of the city constitute the world’s largest man-made urban forest, defined as a collection of trees that grow within a city, town or suburb (note: not township). In its widest sense, it includes any kind of woody plant vegetation growing in and around human settlements. In a narrower sense, it describes an area whose ecosystems are inherited from wilderness ‘leftovers’ or remnants. Johannesburg’s Northern Suburbs are said to contain between 6 and 10 million trees, and although the claim is often disputed, Wikipedia says it’s true.
Irrespective, as an outsider to Johannesburg in all senses of the word, it’s easy to see why the claim holds such sway. I don’t recall ever being in a city—anywhere—where the difference between two ‘faces’ of the city is quite so stark. Nature here, far from being the gentle pacific force that tempers hard (and often harsh) urban reality, is a weapon that distinguishes one profile from another, softens selectively and purposefully, rams home an insidious, unpalatable truth: nature isn’t for all; only for some.
Two-faced City, views of Sandton (LEFT) and Soweto (RIGHT). Photos: Lesley Lokko
Truth | Beauty
One of the most poignant conversations I’ve had in a long time—anywhere—was held a fortnight ago in Braamfontein, one of the inner city’s up-and-coming regeneration ‘success’ stories. I asked a young black architect what had ‘turned him on’ to architecture (as a possible profession).
‘I grew up in the Cape Flats,’ he said, not without a trace of bitterness, ‘without a tree in sight, nothing but concrete all around us. I had my fifth birthday party in the garage of our house, not the garden. There wasn’t one. That’s what all the kids around me did. We had our birthday parties in our garages. I used to look at the city on the slopes of Table Mountain; look at those leafy suburbs and think, “I wanna live there. I wanna live like that. Those leafy suburbs. That’s what got me. Now I live in Melville. It’s leafy, real leafy. If you ask me what made me choose architecture, it was beauty, just wanting to live in a beautiful place. Yeah, beauty. Or maybe the lack of it, y’know?’
His comments stayed with me long after the conversation ended. As another South African once said:
‘The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.’
The Leafy Suburb, 4th Avenue, Melville, Johannesburg.
Mind the gap: drawing ambience
Having watched my students’ projects literally grow over the past six months, the question of drawing has stubbornly remained uppermost in my mind. How to draw? What to draw? What to expect from a drawing? What to explore, what to explain? Coincidentally (although I’m beginning to understand that nothing is coincidental), I’m about to leave for the U.S. to take part in a panel discussion at Washington University, on the pedagogy and practice of drawing and architecture worldwide.
The invitation comes at precisely the right moment: at the University of Johannesburg, a quiet-but-pivotal change is about to take place that connects the department of architecture to the panel discussion in an unexpected way. Organised in conjunction with the exhibition Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association, the Mildred Kemper Lane Art Museum in St Louis will ‘present the first public museum exhibition of architectural drawings from the private collection of the noted educator Alvin Boyarsky. Amassed during Boyarsky’s tenure as chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London from 1971 until his death in 1990, the collection features early drawings by some of the most prominent architects practicing today—Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, and Bernard Tschumi, among many others. Through a selection of approximately forty prints and drawings that constitutes the bulk of this collection, as well as nine limited-edition folios published by the AA—including works by Peter Cook, Coop Himmelblau, and Peter Eisenman—Drawing Ambience offers a rare glimpse into a pivotal moment in architectural history and the imaginative spirit of drawing that was and continues to be instrumental to the development of the field.’.
Boyarsky was the architect (no pun intended) of the now-famous Unit System of architectural education, which eschewed the traditional approach to teaching architecture in favour of a radical educational model that is now followed in architecture schools across the world. Instead of a standard curriculum, the Architectural Association (AA) allowed tutors to construct their own educational structures, with students free to choose the approach that most interested them. The AA thus heralded the move from modernist orthodoxy to a much more pluralist system. Boyarksy encouraged debate—and sometimes conflict—between the units, so that work was always subjected to a variety of opinions. The AA in the 1970s and 1980s also hosted key architectural lectures and debates, becoming an international hub for the development of architectural discourse. Many of the world’s most famous architects, including Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, emerged from the intense environment that the AA constructed.
As of February 2015, the University of Johannesburg will be the first school of architecture on the African continent to adopt the Unit System. Central to its success is an approach to drawing that sees the emphasis shift from ‘drawing-as-a-means-of-explanation’ to ‘drawing-as-a-means-of-exploration’. It’s an important distinction but a complex one and in order to make the point more clearly, I’d like to step sideways for a moment, and speak not of drawings but of novels.
When the word ‘novel’ entered the languages of Europe, via Don Quixote, considered to be the first European novel, it had the vaguest of meanings. It meant—as its name suggests—something new: a form of writing that was formless, that had no rules; that made up its own rules as it went along. It captured—and represented—the collision of a number of different forces: urbanisation, the spread of printing, the availability of cheap paper, and it began the tradition of an intimate reading experience that has endured to this day. For cultures without the written word—like the majority of African cultures—that relationship between intimacy (the solitary act of reading or drawing) and performance (those aspects of oral storytelling and communal building)—is one that we grapple with—or at least should grapple with—today.
But we don’t, at least not in any part of the African continent that I know of. In the context of African schools, like it or not, staff and students must necessarily act simultaneously as interpreters and investigators, explaining a world that is often invisible to Western-trained ‘eyes’, both to themselves and others, yet at the same time exploring it in all its depth. It’s a difficult, complex task. As I’ve written elsewhere, ‘there is something deeply interesting and complex happening here [in African cities] if we could only work out how to see it.’
Using the drawing as a means of exploring, not explaining, seems to offer African students (and let me only speak about students here, not practitioners or professionals) a way out. For me it represents a real triumph of will—not only in the context of global speculation about architecture and architectural education, but particularly in the context of Africa, which has never ‘deserved’ to be speculative. Too many toilets to be built, too many people to house, too much poverty and chaos, and too many problems for such esoteric speculation: that’s Africa for you. Well, for us.
But I’ve never held that view, not even as a student, and I certainly don’t know. There’s a lot of work to be done to reconfigure a curriculum that better serves our needs—and I’m not talking about sanitation upgrades or social housing—but rather that gap in the title of this section between exploration and explanation. For me, the speculative, deeply explorative space of design research begins with a new relationship to, and with, drawing. I don’t know about you—and I certainly don’t know yet about my students—but I’m hugely excited by the possibilities that a new relationship might bring.
‘Speaking in Tongues’, from the presentation to Construction Site/Chantier, a research proposal conceived and managed by Pfruender, G. & Kros, C., Johannesburg, forthcoming 2016.
Here’s where some of those drawings ‘grew’ to.
R Wilson Drawings 10/02/03
Rachel began the year exploring what she perceived as the breakdown in society between extreme consumerism and Johannesburg’s fragile ecosystems. In her final proposal, which she has re-named ‘The Sensitive Landscape’, she uses the drawing rather like a loom, shuttling back and forth between techniques, views, ‘man-made’ and ‘natural’ forms. In her own words, ‘this is a project that takes full advantage of the play between light and dark, secrecy and open-ness, obscurity and fame. Small pleasures, often unnoticed or forgotten, are rediscovered. The smell of a particular plant, placed at the entrance, or a light effect that occurs only under specific weather conditions allow the user’s consciousness to expand in small but meaningful ways.’
In many ways, her own drawings are analogies for the unfolding of her design: sub- and often unconscious, intuitive, expressive and sometimes ‘blind’, she has allowed a different language to enter the design process: in place of certainty and precision, she has made room for doubt, for accidental discoveries—a different technique, a particular quality of light, for example. Drawings that are literally full of the ‘small pleasures’ she sought to express.
Credit: Rachel WilsonCredit: Rachel WilsonCredit: Rachel Wilson
T Melless Drawings 01/02
In an even dreamier, drift-like and alliterative way, Tiffany eschewed the conventions of plan, section and elevation to allow a different built proposition to emerge. This is a project driven largely by intangibles: sight, sound, smell. At one level, the entire proposal is a route—through rituals, gardens, landscape and even the city. Frangipani plants sit next to mint: the combination of specific scents is intended to evoke specific memories. A stone wall becomes mossy over time; plants creep and curl their way around latticed screens, providing a dappled roof in Johannesburg’s high, sunny winter. You walk the drawings (some are up to 2m in length) in the same way you might walk through the site. There’s a clear relationship in Tiffany’s work between the site that exists out there, in the ‘real’ world and the site of her imagination: through these beautifully expressive drawings, she manages to pull the two ever closer together.
Credit: Tiffany MellessCredit: Tiffany Melless
G Coter Drawings 01/02
Gabi’s starting point for the year was a clinic. Under (gentle and then not-so-gentle) pressure, she began to move away from the conventional notion of a clinic, first through the use of a well-placed ‘’’ (‘Clinic’), then, slowly, through the use of a different type of drawing: needles and pins; ink and film; water and light, shadow and X-ray. In her own words, ‘this project seeks to understand landscapes not just as blank spaces to be gazed upon, but as territories imbued with their own meanings. With a particular emphasis on healing, regeneration and restoration, the design project attempts to restore memory and dignity within the Rietfontein Farm by investigating recycling, landscape fertilisation and restoration to imbue the site with new meaning and usage. Using the notion of the ‘clinic’ as its point of departure, the project develops a series of architectural interventions that can be found in the hints and clues about its past and past users: forgotten graves, abandoned buildings, a defunct hospital and wastelands.’
These drawings represent a radical departure from the conventional black lines-on-white paper that Gabi began the year with: burning, scoring, tracing, cutting, lacerating—these have become as much a part of her architectural ‘vocabulary’ as any CAD-generated section might once have, and the project is all the richer for it.
Credit: Gabi CoterCredit: Gabi Coter
Z Goodbrand Drawings 01/02/03/04/05
‘Average’ students typically take up half a room at project’s end: Zoë takes up two rooms, possibly more. This year, she has moved between model-making, conventional drawings, landscape urbanism, videos, montages, collages, city council meetings and texts to produce a body of work that is both astonishingly thoughtful and thorough, no mean feat.
Using scale as a means to organise her thinking processes and her representational choices (from regional through metropolitan to the neighbourhood and architectural scales), she has managed to extract a way of working—modeling, filming, mapping, planning, envisioning—that not only serves the four scales of her project exceptionally well, it has driven her design decisions: a cycle-in cinema; an allotment farm and market; a ‘kinetic’ forest that is at once landscape, art and education facility.
Although Wayne’s work wasn’t featured in my original post, in some ways, his ‘journey’ from convention to experimentation has been the most impressive. A former engineering student, in whose work traces of the impulse to structure, order, explain and classify can still be seen, he has learned to move sideways into slippery, unfamiliar and intuitive territory, allowing the drawing to ‘lead’ him, sometimes against his own will, towards an even more precise resolution of ideas than he might otherwise have thought possible.
His chosen site was an abandoned power station just outside Soweto: in a moment of almost Biblical calumny, halfway through the year the ruined power station collapsed as a result of illegal salvage operations: a metaphor for his own way of working. Phoenix-like, a new project has emerged, playful, dextrous and powerful at the same time, with a lightness of touch that surprises everyone who sees it. In this image taken during his final presentation, a ray of light pierced the examination room, casting a perfect shadow on the ground. A photograph led to a new drawing, which in turn led to a new model—the perfect synthesis of time, chance and place.
* * *
It’s hard to summarise a work that is still in progress: these five projects remain a snapshot of a desire that is still partially unfulfilled. In many ways, they have come about through acts of resistance: to convention, to orthodoxy, to established norms and expectations. They express (albeit tentatively) a desire to move beyond a known language into another, more ambiguous realm, neatly sidestepping the dilemma I sketched out earlier: the impossibility of being interpreter and explorer in one.
There’s a gap here, as I have already said, but the role of the school (the educator, the pedagogue) isn’t to fill it, or to answer ready-made questions. In my view, at least, our role is to protect and cherish that gap, so that the tentative propositions put forward through new ways of working/seeing/drawing and thinking will have acquired the maturity and sophistication of genuineknowledge, not open-ended, self-absorbed exploration.
Mind the gap. Caterpillars too have their own persuasive beauty. Just saying.
Belo Horizonte suffered severely with the floods in January 2020, particularly in the areas that had their rivers canalized under the pavement. But the areas with green and blue infrastructure were much more resilient.
Green and blue infrastructure (GBI), a form of nature-based solutions (NBS), can provide huge benefits for cities, as GBIs are innovative ways to connect biodiversity and people. Besides the direct functions that the infrastructure provides (e.g. flood prevention or cooling effect), there is also a series of co-benefits that nature in cities can have, such as the preservation of biodiversity and increasing environmental awareness. There have been several policies to promote GBI in cities, such as incentives for green-roofs, promotion of urban agriculture, and urban reforestation for cooling and buffer natural systems.
This essay is part of the IFWEN project.
Over the years, various cities around the world have developed a series of innovations to use GBI to provide services to citizens. However, the introduction of new ideas, such as GBI, does not always come easily. Innovations tend to suffer opposition from different fronts, as they can replace existing “gray infrastructure” solutions and consequently affect the organizations and individuals that benefit from them. On the one hand, there is an initial mistrust that the GBI solution would be as good as, or better than, the traditional infrastructure solution. The existing status quo of the regulations and standards tend to use the solution that already exists instead of trying something new, and sometimes uncertain.
There are risks involved as GBI is not a consolidated mainstream practice everywhere. The public bureaucracy is used to traditional engineering solutions, as it is the way they were trained to provide the solution to urban problems. One of the major challenges to advance GBI in cities is the need to provide evidence about the functions of the GBI as compared to the traditional gray (cement) infrastructure. As there are no agreed general standards for GBI, it is difficult to make comparisons with traditional infrastructure. For example, if a city needs infrastructure for flooding control, it could opt between a traditional underground pool to buffer the rainwater or an artificial wetland using GBI. The underground pool has technical engineering parameters that the city can use for specifying the terms of reference. There are agreed methods to estimate the volume of water that can be buffered, how the system would work, and even the amount of cement that will be needed for the size of the pool. In the GBI, there is no agreed methods for a technical estimation to determine the standards of the GBI, for example, the parameters for determining its size, what kind of plants should be used, and the amount of water it could buffer. Thus, the development of engineering standards for the various GBI is key for the widespread use of them in cities.
Photo: José Puppim
Another obstacle for the dissemination of GBI innovations in cities is related to the political economy of the transitions between gray and green and blue infrastructure. GBI innovations could replace or weaken the established organizations and individuals in the infrastructure sector. There are different kinds of interests that could be affected by the changes in GBI. In many cities, some of the most powerful economic and political actors are the construction companies, which build urban infrastructure. They employ a large number of workers and contribute to a significant part of the urban economy. Construction companies are also powerful political actors. They have close connections with politicians and bureaucrats. They generally donate to political parties and are linked to powerful lobbyists. GBI could imply cheaper solutions to urban problems, which would go against the interest of the construction companies if they are not prepared to take part in the GBI business. GBI also would require different kinds of professionals, such as experts in plants and ecosystems to plan, build, or maintain GBI. This could replace a large number of employees from the construction companies generating resistance from the worker’s group.
Therefore, the transition to the widespread use of GBI in cities is a long process of innovating and experimenting, as well as convincing the different internal and external actors about the economic and technical viability and potential benefits of GBI as compared to the traditional infrastructure. Thus, there is a need to have support from the city leadership and continuity in the process of change. Internal actors in the city government and administration would have to be convinced, and maybe see the political and economic gains, to support GBI innovations. Organizational arrangements would also need to change to allow for the use of GBI. External actors, such as financial institutions and construction companies, would need to be part of the innovation process as well. Finance institutions are conservative in the risk analysis of the investments and generally have strict rules for lending. Managers have fiduciary responsibility and are accountable for their decisions.
Photo: José PuppimPhoto: José Puppim
The example of the municipality of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, provides insights on this long process of innovation in GBI. The city started experimenting with certain types of GBI in the early 2000s and took more than a decade to establish a solid policy for prioritizing GBI as solutions for certain urban problems in a drainage program called DRENURBS. Belo Horizonte has developed an approach to avoid the canalization of streams and prioritize the use of green and blue infrastructure in the city’s drainage system. The approach was developed along the years with a series of interactions among the different stakeholders involved in the drainage infrastructure, such as different city government offices, financing institutions, such as the Interamerican Development Bank, and communities affected by flooding. The main innovation in the DRENURBS drainage program was the idea of resettling communities affected by flooding and creating drainage systems on the land using GBI, instead of the previous gray infrastructure approach that was to cover and channel rivers in underground pipes and resettle people back on the top. In the short term, this gray solution could work, but the experience in the city showed that, in the long-term, floods would happen again. The capacity of an underground river would not generally be able to canalize the increasing volume of water that would come with the impermeabilization of other areas in the region.
Photo: José Puppim
Over the years, the innovative policy of avoiding covering the rivers (DRENURBS), which was initially an experimentation, became mainstream in the city. A series of laws and regulations were developed to establish GBI as the main solution to prevent flooding of the rivers and other water bodies in the city. This policy also had an impact on innovation in public policies, by rearranging the relations among the different stakeholders and innovative financial mechanisms. The changes in the way of developing drainage systems also brought a series of investments in other areas that improved the quality of public services in the region. For example, sewage treatment, a state responsibility through the Minas Gerais’ water and sewage company, COPASA, was just ignored before and allowed to go untreated in the underground pipes. The use of GBI requires treatment of the sewage as there could be a health risk in the new parks. Thus, the city made an agreement with COPASA to invest city money in a sewage system in exchange for part of the water and sewage bills from the households in the city. They created a co-financing mechanism with part of the sewage bills collected by COPASA to invest in flooding prevention. The sanitation committee was strengthened with a sanitation fund with resources from the COPASA agreement.
The innovation using GBI could also generate various co-benefits for the communities around the river. The drainage infrastructure, besides flooding prevention, also offers space for recreation, generally in poor areas with a lack of green spaces, as well as centers for biodiversity education for schools and areas for biodiversity preservation. Many of the parks have a social function of bringing the community together for weekend activities. These benefits for the community reinforced the importance of DRENURBS.
Belo Horizonte suffered severely with the floods in January 2020, particularly in the areas that had their rivers canalized under the pavement, but the areas with GBI were much more resilient. Moreover, the initiation in Belo Horizonte changed the way IADB finances drainage systems. Initially, IADB was skeptical about the natural infrastructure for drainage but later was convinced about the benefits in terms of the costs and indirect impacts of the GBI. Nowadays, IADB finances such kinds of infrastructure in several countries across Latin America.
The implementation of the DRENURBS program required significant efforts in the articulation of the various organizations and changes in the way the city approached the solutions to urban problems. The traditional engineering approach of removing the communities temporarily for the construction work and bringing them back in at the end of the process was straightforward and well established in Belo Horizonte, like in many other cities of the world. The new approach needed a multidisciplinary approach with a length plan and long interaction with the communities. The values saved with the lower costs of GBI would not compensate for the need to acquire land to resettle the communities permanently around the area. There was a long process of negotiation with the communities affected by the intervention in order to convince them about the benefits of leaving their homes for new buildings in the region. There was a tremendous risk the process could be stalled for years, which also costs large amounts of money. However, over the years, the city developed the capacity to work with communities by building a more interdisciplinary team to deal with the new approach. The engineering solution of the past was replaced over time to become a multi-actor and transdisciplinary approach to the urban problem of flooding and rain drainage.
José A. Puppim de Oliveira, with Leon Norking and Carlos Rigolo
São Paulo
Carlos Eduardo Rigolo Lopes graduated in Social Science with a specialization in Environmental Management and is currently a master candidate in Public Policy and Management at Getulio Vargas Foundation. He is dedicated to understanding the governance behind urban rivers and works as a consultant supporting social-environmental commitments in Amazon.
Leon Norking Rangel holds a Bachelor’s in International Relations from the University of São Paulo and is currently pursuing the Master of Public Policy and Management at Getulio Vargas Foundation, with specialization in environmental policy. His main research interests are environmental restoration policies and the interaction between infrastructure and environmental politics.
Resilience is the word of the decade, as sustainability was in previous decades. No doubt, our view of the kind and quality of cities we as societies want to build will continue to evolve and inspire a new descriptive goal. Surely we have not lost our desire for sustainable cities, with footprints we can globally and locally afford, even though our focus has rightly been on resilience, after what seems like a relentless drum beat of natural disasters around the world.
It speaks to the question: what is the city we want to create in the future? What is the city in which we want to live? Certainly that city is sustainable, since we want our cities to balance consumption and inputs to make a footprint that can last into the future. Certainly it is resilient, so our cities are still in existence after the next 100-year storm, now apparently due every few years.
And yet: as we build this vision we know that cities must also be livable. Indeed, we must view livability as the third indispensible—and arguably most important—leg supporting the cities of our dreams: resilient + sustainable + livable.
For example, we can imagine sustainable cities—ones that could persist in resource, energy, and ecological balance—that are nevertheless brittle to shocks and major perturbations. That is, they are not resilient. Such cities are not truly sustainable, perhaps, but their lack of sustainability is for reasons beyond our usual definition of sustainability.
We can imagine resilient cities—especially cities that are made so through extraordinary and expensive works of grey infrastructure—that are not sustainable from the point of view of energy consumption, food security, economy, or other resources. They perhaps are not even resilient, but rather resistant, in the sense that they repel the shock rather than absorb and bend it to.
We can imagine livable cities that are neither resilient nor sustainable.
And, it is easy to imagine resilient and sustainable cities that are not livable—and so are not truly sustainable.
Where does your city, your neighborhood, fall in the three dimensions of resilience, sustainability and livability?
The point is that we must conceive and build our urban areas based on a vision of the future that creates cities that are resilient + sustainable + livable. Nooneof these is sufficient for our dream cities of the future. It is self-preservative, and indeed morally right to do so. Yet we often pursue these three elements on independent tracks, with separate government agencies pursuing one or another and NGOs and community organizations devoted to a single track. Of course, many cities around the world don’t really have the resources to make progress in any of the three.
How do we advance? I’d like to present six challenges about a resilience + sustainability + livability continuum, clarity about which could help us get there.
Challenge #1: Take the concepts of resilience, sustainability and livability beyond metaphorical status…make them operational by being specific
Resilience to what? Resilience for whom?
Everyone can agree that “resilience” is a good thing—but an operation definition is really about difficult choices. We have to be specific about the choices involved in increased resilience, first by asking what stress to want to be resilient to. Storm surge? Heat? Drought? Some of the things we could do to create more resilient cities are stuff we should do anyway. Other choices involve sacrifices, are terrible, difficult, or require enormous trade-offs. As societies we have to be explicit about these trade-offs—about their consequences.
When we are vague about what we mean by resilience, allowing it to stay in the realm of metaphor, we avoid having to face and discuss the possibility that there are real trade offs involved—that such choices may produce winners and losers.
This challenge is so rich in part because each of these words have many definitions, ones that vary by context and profession and community, and are vivid in the eyes of the beholders. It is why the words are so easily left in the realm of metaphor.
Challenge #2: Acknowledge and confront the differences between resilience, restoration and resistance
The classic definitions of ecological resilience and personal resilience both focus on idea that, in the face of stress, we bend but do not break—that our systems are elastic enough to deform and absorb the stress and then “bounce back” to the former state. At some level, though, high stress bumps the system to a new state, or new equilibrium—one we may not like. Resilient systems are those that can take a lot of stress before they are bumped to a new state. Marina Alberti wrote about this on this site.
New Yorkers exhibited a lot of personal and psychological resilience after Hurricane Sandy—they picked themselves up and started again, often rebuilding their lives in the same spot. This is true all over: people are resilient in the face of hard times.
However, cycles of damage and rebuilding is not ecological or system resilience. Restoration is an act of the community and can require great resources. We as a society may choose to rebuild, but it isn’t ecological or system resilience (although certainly suggests social resilience). Resilient systems are those, by nature of their design and function, that absorb shocks and at some point return to their original state unchanged. This is why green infrastructure is so often thought of as key to urban resilience: green infrastructure, both built and natural, absorbs the water, calms the waves, moderates the wind and heat, and bounces back. For cities that don’t have the money to build expensive grey structures to resist, this choice is crucial.
Challenge #3: Can we contribute to communities and social movements that include and engage people where they live?
Engagement is key at every level. Street trees everywhere have a known set of biophysical benefits, from storm water capture to air-cooling and biodiversity habitat. But to me perhaps the greatest brilliance of concerted tree planting projects such as Million Trees NYC and others in cities in the U.S., Europe, and around the world—perhaps unexpected and uncharted by the original creators of these programs—is the community building they engender through stewardship activities. These benefits are now well known and thoroughly part of such programs. For example, GreenPop in Cape town reports on their website 18,000 trees planted, 3,000 volunteers, and 100,000 people benefitting from a program that is just a couple of years old.
The same benefits accrue to other green and blue infrastructure programs that promote resilience, livability, sustainability and social engagement: people get locally engaged in projects that benefit them in multiple ways.
For example, my friend, architect and activist PK Das leads such an effort in Mumbai. Nallahs are open waterways that have largely functioned as open sewers that run through slums and other neighborhoods. Das’ Open Mumbai project blues these waterways, greens their edges, and opens their banks to people. The designers and stewards of these new Nallahs are the people who live there. This is an immense benefit in a city of 24 million with less than 1 square meter of open space per resident.
A Nallah in Mumbai before and (rendered) after. Credit: PK Das
Challenge #4: Mindfully create mosaics of communities and design elements that together add up to resilience + sustainability + livability
If there is one class of design element that embodies all three of these values—resilience + sustainability + livability—it is a community garden. Gardens contribute to a city’s resilience to storms by capturing water that otherwise might contribute to flooding and overloaded sewer systems. They produce food that otherwise would be imported from elsewhere. They are typically places of beauty where people gather and strengthen a community’s sense of identify and cohesion.
Photo: David Maddox
Of course not every type of useful infrastructure or project functions at all three levels. But areas—neighborhoods, zones, or watersheds, etc.—must have multiple projects that add up to all these functions. Paul Downton, in a previous TNOC blog post, spoke of fractals: the idea that each minimum operational geographic scale (e.g., a neighborhood) should have all desirable elements of nature and infrastructure represented. The same is true in this context. Every neighborhood should be planned with all of the resilience + sustainability + livability elements: community gardens, parks, street trees, bioswales, mixed transportation, storm surge barriers (if on the coast), walkable streets, and so on. Green and functional infrastructure, justly delivered.
This point circles back to Challenge #1: resilience for whom? If every zone or neighborhood is planned with a complete set of resilience + sustainable + livable values, then perhaps we are less likely to find that projects that create more resilience for one set of people means less resilience for another.
Challenge #5: What do different types of cities have to say to each other?
There are a few handfuls of cities around the world with the resources to create or buy the resources, structures, and experts they need to solve their resilience, sustainability and livability challenges. But there are, depending on how you count, over 3,000 cities in the world with more than 150,000 inhabitants.
How can people in these cities find the information and inspiration they need to effect positive urban outcomes and green solutions for resilience, sustainability and livability? Cities often have more problems—and solutions—in common with each other, even across political boundaries, than they do with rural areas nearby. International meetings and paid consultants are beyond the reach of most communities. How can they share knowledge and best practices? How can they learn what works well in other cities?
Solutions to urban problems ultimately must be adapted and implemented locally. Because urban problems often have roots in global issues, and the problems are often shared widely, an accessible and practical idea and knowledge-sharing platform is critical. This platform needs to be person to person so that thinkers and doers can share and learn, so knowledge can propagate and spread. Local solutions can thereby be shared globally and then re-localized, in new places.
TNOC and partners are planning such a platform.
Challenge #6: Can we create a unified definition of resilience + sustainability + livability?
Photo: MillionTreesNYC
Why not? In essence, I believe the key is in operationalizing a resilience-sustainability-livability connection—taking it out of pure metaphor. In so many individual places and programs this is happening already, and these triumphs needs to be celebrated and multiplied. Since there are increasing numbers of grass roots examples, real progress may accelerate when, as the people lead, networks spread and the governments follow in supporting the local actions and projects.
Many of the natural features that provide buffer and shelter (i.e., resilience) are also features that improve quality of life, health, have economic value, etc.: parks, street trees, bioswales, gardens, green roofs, etc. Such natural features reduce the economic costs of catastrophic change, certainly, but their benefits extend well beyond, into the very idea of the kind of city we want to create, the city that we all want to live in.
A closing idea from Buzz Holling
One key [to resilience] is maybe best captured by the word “hope”.
Although Buzz Holling was an original elucidator of the ecological resilience concept, here he used a word that is fundamentally a human concept. What does it mean to hope? At its most basic, it is a desire for and the belief in a certain good outcome.
We hope for life. We hope for a certain stability without destructive change. We hope for a future that is at least as good as the present.
We hope to reside in cities that are resilient. Are sustainable. And above all, livable.
We deserve, and with the right choices, can have all three.
Story notes: (See the companion essay here.) Bees have always been a part of the city landscape. But something is happening in the world today that’s making their presence more noticeable. Whether it’s because people love honey or want to better understand bee behavior or are looking for sustainable ways to support the vital pollinator ecosystem, people’s interest in bees is on the rise. As a result, more beehives are popping up in cities around the world.
This podcast episode, produced by Jennifer Baljko, profiles beekeeping projects in Barcelona, Beijing, New York and San Francisco to get a better idea of how this trend is evolving. As she finds out, each project—and each beekeeper—started in a different way, and each has a sweet story to tell.
Sahra Malik, co-founder and chief executive officer of the social enterprise Shangrila Farms, explains how her family’s interest in rural beekeeping led to the creation of a yearlong urban beekeeping training program in Beijing.
Meanwhile, in Barcelona, Jaume Clotet, a mechanical engineer-turned-beekeeper who runs Mel.lis Serveis Apícoles, discusses how urban beekeeping initiatives can expand beyond honey production and into artistic, cultural, educational, and research applications. OpenBeeResearch is one such example, and in this case, a hive on a museum rooftop has been hooked up with sensors. It’s a perfect citizen science project that will provide insight into the health of the cities and the bees, says Josep Perelló, an associate professor with the Physics Faculty at the Universitat de Barcelona and the project leader for the university’s multi-disciplinary OpenSystems research group.
And, lastly, San Francisco-based Terry Oxford—a beekeeper, an artist and an environmental activist—advocates for supporting the vital pollinator ecosystem, in which honeybees play a critical role. Through her UrbanBeeSF project, Oxford promotes sustainable, environmentally friendly urban beekeeping and city pollination practices, and provides practical tips for people who want to help keep urban bees healthy.
This episode was produced by:
Jennifer Baljko Barcelona
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.
The way in which we imagine and understand cities and define their boundaries influences how we think about governing the city, and planning adaptation and resilience strategies, which become increasingly important in the era of the climate crisis.
“…they do not belong to our neighbourhood and are located outside the administrative jurisdiction of Bangalore; hence we do not work on those lakes…” This was the comment made by a representative belonging to a prominent lake conservation group in the city, presenting a focused definition of a city as a territorially bound space, limited to its administrative (municipal) boundaries. This statement reflects a widespread point of view, raising numerous questions regarding how residents of fast-growing cities of the global South ― where de facto boundaries regularly outpace de jure boundaries ― view their cities, whether as discrete units with sharply defined boundaries or as interconnected systems that connect the wider landscape and region within which the city is embedded.
This may seem like a purely academic question, but it goes well beyond such a limiting focus. The way in which we imagine and understand cities and define their boundaries influences how we think about governing the city and planning adaptation and resilience strategies, which become increasingly important in the era of the climate crisis. Cities in the global South are growing exponentially, much faster than the present governance arrangements and infrastructure are able to adapt. For India, in particular, cities are crucial as they hold one-third of the country’s population and contribute to nearly two-thirds of India’s economic output. Thus, understanding urban boundaries is critical to planning and preparing for climate shocks.
Despite many years of work on ideas of resilient, smart, and sustainable cities, we have been caught unprepared for what the Anthropocene has wrought. Beginning with the pandemic, the 2020s have shown us that global environmental change is not a distant future threat, but something that is taking place in the here and now, impacting our daily lives and ways of living. The UN Habitat Report 2022 indicates flooding as the most common risk to urban ecosystems. An increase in the intensity of rainfall, coupled with the concretization of cities and inadequate planning, has led to flooding in nearly every major city across the globe. On July 10th, 2023, the Indian capital city of Delhi was in the news for receiving 153 mm in 24 hours (15% of the total monsoon rainfall of the city).
Figure 1: Glimpses from the recent flooding in Delhi (2023) and Bangalore (2022) (source: licensed under Shutterstock)
This increase in the intensity of rainfall holds true for multiple other cities, both in India and elsewhere. Bangalore received 132 mm of rainfall on 5 September 2022 accounting for about 10% of the total seasonal rainfall of the city. This led to flooding of low-lying areas and localities which were built on lakebeds as shown in Figure 1. The State government started removing encroachments and demolishing structures built on lakes and stormwater drains. Yet, little regard was given to landowners who purchased their property in good faith without knowing that they were built on lake land, while the slips in policy and governance that allowed such widescale violations to take place, often in collusion with builders and land sharks, have not been addressed. Cities like Bangalore have focused almost myopically on economic development, without consideration of the impacts that can arise when city planners and builders ignore the importance of the city as an interconnected ecosystem, embedded in the topology of the surrounding landscape and linked to regional watersheds. This goes against the principles of resilience thinking, which focuses on the need for complex adaptive thinking and managing connectivity for building the resilience of a system.
Multiple criteria have been used to define a city, leading to numerous definitions. Though there is an attempt to develop a standard definition by various international agencies, there are limitations to this standard definition being applied across regions. Economic theories seem to take precedence here, leading to many cities being defined by criteria such as population density, economic development (GDP), and access to infrastructure. These approaches seek to define a city as the spatial production of an agglomeration — but they ignore the spatial ecological and environmental relationships between the city and the larger region within which it is embedded. Even with these criteria, it is not easy to find globally consistent definitions of cities. Different countries use a range of terms such as city, metropolitan area, and urban agglomeration, by combining various definitions.
As an initial exploration, we asked residents of Bangalore a simple question ― “What is a city?” We spoke to 25 opportunistically selected residents of Bangalore: men and women, from varied socio-economic backgrounds (doctors, students, researchers, IT employees, and local business owners), living in different parts of the city, peri-urban, and rural areas. We asked each person to define a city, and also give us five words that come to their mind when they think of cities. The responses we got were distinct but connected to ideas of cities as engines of growth, economic development, job opportunities, and infrastructure (schools, hospitals, restaurants, shopping malls, roads). Alongside, an interesting set of responses we received from a quarter of our respondents indicated that they also thought of the city as a temporary place of residence, a place they wished to “escape from” to lead a life. Some defined the city as a “lonely place” and others said it was “sometimes comforting but away from roots”.
Not all perceptions of cities were negative. Some of the people we spoke to said a city was a “safe space”, “a place to find your tribe”, “modern”, “organized and fast paced”. However, most people viewed the city as a place that enabled them to participate in the benefits of economic development, which they felt to be missing in rural regions.
Figure 2: Word cloud of respondent views on what defines a city (source: developed by authors using wordcloud.com)
What everyone forgets is that a city is not an isolated space but, an interconnected space, which is dependent on its surrounding areas. This leads to a consideration of the city to be indistinct from the urban, based on the structuralist point of view that the “city” and the “urban” are territorially bound entities.
Continuing with the example of the metropolis of Bengaluru, also considered the IT capital of India the city: it was once known as a city of a thousand lakes. The population has increased from around 5 million in 2000 to over 13 million in 2023. There is no major river located in the region and the city developed along a series of human-made interconnected system of lakes. This system was designed keeping in mind the undulating surface of the city, where overflowing water from one lake flowed into the next, and thus, the region thrived as smaller settlements since the Stone Age. All this changed with urban expansion when many of Bengaluru’s largest lakes were filled in, some converted into a bus station and a sports stadium. The same blindness to the importance of topography and local water resources continues to this day, where lakebeds and the interconnected water channels (as is seen in Figure 3) that feed the lakes are encroached and converted into built spaces such as malls, corporate campuses, and apartments.
Figure 3: Encroachments along the channel connecting two lakes in the city
Today, urbanisation patterns globally and in India increasingly challenge the seemingly self-evident distinction between city and countryside, urban and rural spaces. Especially in the global South, urban transformation has led to the formation of peri-urban spaces, often viewed as a “place in-between”. They have fluid characteristics of both urban and rural areas and have the highest dynamicity in land cover change and population growth. This is mainly due to the process of urbanisation, where both megacities and their surrounding spaces are linked to each other. Research in peri-urban areas has shown that there is a mutual dependence between the surrounding areas and the urban centres. It is usually the case, where cities import resources, such as water and food, and export their waste and wastewater into these surrounding areas. This is in line with Lefebvre, for whom the urban condition has gone beyond the boundaries of the city and brings together distant spaces, events, and people. Thus, urban can be considered as a set of processes that links places across space and is defined by connectivity. Urbanisation involves the movement of people from rural to urban areas leading to changes in land use influencing the functional capability by impairing the provision of ecosystem services with impacts on the local ecology, biodiversity, hydrologic regime, and other factors. Urban transformation as a process involves a fundamental change in the dominant structures, functions, and identity of urban systems, leading to new cultural, structural, and institutional configurations. This understanding leads to a different framing of urban areas, as complex adaptive “systems-within-systems”.
Unplanned urbanisation does not integrate local ecosystems and local needs of communities alienating people and their vital association with ecosystems. This affects people’s access to resources in addition to influencing ecosystem functions both within and outside the jurisdictional boundaries of the city. Policy decisions regarding urban growth are often top-down, devoid of stakeholders’ participation, and lack consideration of ecosystems. This is highlighted by numerous cases across Bangalore, where actions by the state and non-state actors have been undertaken without consideration and discussion with the communities (traditional users) residing along them, raising questions of equity. This is being replicated across areas under urban transformation, an example is the comment by a member of the community in peri-urban Bangalore (shown in Figures 4 & 5), where a lake is being restored “…they [the company who prepared the detailed project report] indicated that they would make space for our cattle to drink water but look they have not made any provision for it. They have built an embankment of stones along the lake, how can our cattle drink water now… once the beautification is completed, the lake will be fenced (Figure 6), and we won’t be allowed to come here”. There are also documented cases where the area surrounding the lakes which were once used as common grazing lands have been converted to urban uses such as playgrounds and parks, thus alienating the traditional users (Figures 7). These approaches have created imbalances within the existing ecosystem and livelihoods of communities, especially the vulnerable. Unprecedented increase in population and the consequent demand for land, and unplanned policy interventions with fragmented governance are threatening the natural ecology of the area.
Figure 4: Grazers with their cattle in the peri-urban lake. Pic by AuthorFigure 5: Cattle grazing in the peri-urban lake. Pic by AuthorFigure 6: Fencing of the lake and development of walkways in the urban lakes. Pic by AuthorFigure 7: Exercise Park developed along the lakebed in urban lakes. Pic by Author
Our recent research along the urban-rural spatial gradient highlights how the actors work within their defined administrative boundaries when working on an interconnected common pool resources such as lakes. Actors typically work on single lakes, creating a disjoint/fragmented effort that does not appreciate the fact that lakes are hydrologically and ecologically connected within watersheds within the region of greater Bangalore. For our research, we selected lakes that fall within a single watershed. Thus, forming an interconnected system where water from upstream urban areas flowed into the downstream peri-urban and rural areas. Further, the selected lakes are located within the administrative boundaries of Bangalore Urban District, but the peri-urban and rural lakes fall outside the limits of Greater Bangalore Municipal Corporation. This provides us with contrasting cases, located within a single watershed but fragmented and bound within administrative boundaries, along an urban-rural gradient with an interconnected lake system. Applying network analysis to capture the role of social actors in governing a connected ecological resource, we see that there is no interaction between actors along the peri-urban gradient – as can be seen from Figure 8, which depicts the number of actors actively involved in the de facto management of eight lakes along the urban-rural gradient As is seen, the actors involved are fragmented within their respective administrative boundaries, indicated in the figure by vertical dotted lines.
Figure 8: Fragmentation of Networks of actors involved in lake management along a rural-urban gradient. Network developed using GEPHI
There is a clear difference in the number of actors along the urban-rural gradient, with a higher number of actors in the urban core, due to the increased presence of non-state actors (community associations, corporates, researchers, and academics). Non-state actors other than the local community seem missing in contrast in the peri-urban and the rural lakes which are located downstream of the urban core. This increase in the number of non-state actors in the urban core and not in the peri-urban and rural areas indicate that actors involved in lake management bound themselves to work on lakes based on their neighbourhoods and localities with specific administrative boundaries. Non-state actors do not work outside of the administrative boundaries of the city as they “feel that they might not have a say in the issue” as they are not from the vicinity of the lake. The lakes outside of the urban core are managed by the village panchayat or the revenue department and not by the Greater Bangalore Municipal Corporation. As numerous representatives of lake groups have indicated, “the city corporation has been working with citizens since 2010 and we know what to expect and how to work with them”. Thus, the non-state actors choose not to deal with the unknown, unless they find a local leader or representative who will take the lead in dealing with the local administration, which they have no experience working with and have no understanding of the dynamics and power asymmetries among the actors, thus avoiding working in areas beyond their experience and vicinity.
Though we do not capture the presence of direct interactions between actors across the urban-rural gradient, information disseminated on social media seems to play an indirect role in fostering connections. Thus, one community member working on a rural lake said, “…we see how city dwellers are working with the local government and protecting their lakes, we want to do the same.” Information exchange (though unintentional) has helped break certain barriers of the bounded city, by encouraging actors to explore new possibilities to protect their lakes.
In summary, these explorations ― though initial ― show us the importance of expanding our understanding of a city, from a territorially bound and well-defined space based on economic theories of growth, towards incorporation of the city’s ecological and social characteristics, consider a city as a system-in-a-system, interconnected to its peri-urban and rural spaces based on the concept of agglomerations across a landscape. Thus, viewing the city not as a bound entity based on economic definitions, but as a spatially fluid, dynamic distribution of people, processes, and activities connected with ecological systems, which then leads us to consider a city as an interconnected entity. Such an expansive understanding of cities as a connected and complex system will be important if we are to devise strategies to adapt and build resilience in our cities.
Harini Nagendra is a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. She uses social and ecological approaches to examine the factors shaping the sustainability of forests and cities in the south Asian context. Her books include “Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities” and "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities" (Penguin India, 2023) (with Seema Mundoli), and “The Bangalore Detectives Club” historical mystery series set in 1920s colonial India.
“Urban commons: the goods, tangible, intangible, and digital, that citizens and the Administration, [through] participative and deliberative procedures, recognize to be functional to the individual and collective wellbeing…to share the responsibility with the Administration of their care or regeneration in order to improve [their] collective enjoyment”
—From Section 2 of the “Regulation On the Collaboration Among Citizens and The City for The Care and Regeneration Of Urban Commons”, City of Bologna, Italy
When the ecologist Garret Hardin wrote his much celebrated essay in 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, no one would have imagined that the concept of the commons would apply to the built environment. Yet today, the “urban commons” is increasingly embraced by scholars, activists, citymakers, policymakers, and politicians. These urban commons can include a range of resources in cities—including parks, community gardens, streets, neighborhood infrastructure, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings. The urban commons also include the intangible aspects of city living, such as culture and heritage. Characterizing these resources as urban commons re-imagines the city as a collection of shared resources and its residents as potential collaborators in generating, utilizing, and managing these resources.
When widely and intensely shared urban resources increase solidarity and generative potential, they can invert the tragedy of the commons paradigm.
But why exactly are these urban “commons” or common goods? These terms are not always subject to precise definition. The term urban commons, in fact, can give rise to more questions than answers. What is the difference between natural resources (traditional commons) within cities and abandoned buildings or vacant lots that are turned into a common pool asset by urban residents? What is the difference between privately governed open access spaces and cooperatively governed open access spaces—are they both types of urban commons? Can certain kinds of infrastructure—broadband infrastructure, do it yourself “mesh” networks, new forms of energy (like microgrids), housing cooperatives, etc.—be considered common goods? These are important questions to answer if this framework of the urban commons is to have any lasting impact on our discussions about what cities can or should become as we undergo intense urbanization in the next few decades.
Let’s begin with Hardin’s original, though simplistic, conception of the commons—an open access natural resource. Hardin’s tale of “Tragedy” unfolds in an open pasture in which individual herdsmen bring their cattle for grazing until their combined actions lead to overgrazing, essentially depleting the resource entirely. There are, of course, traditional, open access natural resources in urban environments, around which cities have been built and are now part of their ecological landscape. Lakes, rivers, and wetlands in and around cities are certainly a type of “urban commons”, as Harini Nagendra’s wonderful work and blogging illustrate. The degradation and destruction of these resources as a byproduct of urban development is a concern for the sustainability of cities at a time of obvious climate change. New Orleans, for instance, was built on a marsh and is surrounded by the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. It is not difficult, for instance, to trace the loss and destruction of coastal wetlands over the course of a century (or more) to the devastating flooding that occurred in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans, surrounded by Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, CC BY-SA 3.0
Moreover, much of the infrastructure of a city is an open-access commons—including its streets, parks, plazas, and squares. It is not difficult to imagine how many of these open access, public spaces can result in an urbanized version of Hardin’s Tragedy—overconsumed, degraded, or destroyed. This “tragedy” was arguably reflected in the decline of many open spaces in U.S. cities in the 1970s and 1980s, which left many streets, parks, and neighborhoods unsafe, dirty, prone to criminal activity and virtually abandoned by most users. Much of this decline in the urban commons was attributable not only to over-consumption and degradation, but equally to the onset of local fiscal crises and decline in city appropriations to care for and regulate these spaces, arguably sealing their fate for at least a decade or more.
Most of the focus on the urban commons, however, is not about threatened or endangered natural resources in cities, nor about the tragedy of the urban commons. The push to recognize the built environment as constituting a variety of urban commons is more about opening up access to, and generating, essential resources for a broader class of individuals than is fostered by current urban growth and consumption patterns. This recognition resists the threat of enclosure of the city resources and assets— parks, public spaces and institutions, vacant and abandoned land, underutilized structures, among others—by either public or private appropriation and control. Exclusive public or private management and control tends to monopolize these resources and subject them to domination by elite interests or to the speculative market. The enclosure of these elements of the urban mosaic by narrow interests and capital markets prevents the kind of sharing and pooling consistent with the idea of a commons as a collective, shared resource.
Let’s return for a moment to parks, streets, neighborhoods, and other infrastructure in cities and flip the script from Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” to what Carol Rose calls the “comedy of the commons.” These open access spaces in cities are where the proximity of different kinds of people coming together creates the culture and “vibe” of a city and strengthens social ties within communities. It is this interaction among urban dwellers that makes public space so valuable in cities, and in communities. This openness is crucial to the ability of great cities to thrive amidst tremendous human diversity. As such, increased use and even congestion in open access, interactive spaces are what gives urban commons their value as a shared resource. The more of the public that participates or joins in to utilize the resource, the more valuable the resource is to the individuals or communities that use it. As Carol Rose argues, rather than tragedy in these spaces, we are more likely to find that the “more the merrier” is a better description of high consumption activities in the urban commons. In other words, the more that people come together to interact, the more they “reinforce the solidarity and well-being of the whole community.” Thus, instead of the potential for overconsumption and ruin, we can also imagine the potential for solidarity and the generative potential of the urban commons to create other goods that sustain communities.
The most transformative vision of the urban commons is a recognition that common goods can be cooperatively or collaboratively produced and managed by urban residents in ways that are more attuned to the needs of those users and more inclusive of their input. When residents clear vacant lots and construct community gardens and urban farms on them, they not only facilitate and reinforce their solidarity, but they also produce a host of other goods (public safety, outdoor green space, fresh food) necessary to function and to flourish in healthy, sustainable communities. When activists occupy and squat in foreclosed and abandoned (and often boarded up) homes or public housing units as a means to convince municipalities to clear title and transfer these homes into communal forms of ownership and management, they do so to take the properties out of the speculative real estate market and create limited equity housing or long-term affordable rentals. Transferring previously held structures to a community land trust, or converting them into deed-restricted housing, would keep these properties perpetually affordable for low- and moderate-income households and would allow the residents to self-manage them as an urban commons.
Housing cooperatives have a long history in American cities. However, the use of community land trusts (or CLTs) and other cooperative ownership structures that separate land ownership from land use transform what might otherwise be a collection of individuals owning property (in the typical cooperative ownership model) to a collaboratively governed institution which manages collectively shared goods. Land owned by a CLT is removed from the real estate market and put into a legal structure that is democratically governed by a diverse membership open to people from across the city or a specific community. For example, community land trusts can manage housing, commercial real estate, green space, small businesses, and indeed an entire urban village as in the celebrated example of the “urban village” managed by Dudley Street’s Neighborhood Initiative in the Boston area.
Image: The NYC Community Land Initiative
The emergence of collaboratively generated and cooperatively managed regimes to take care of and regenerate the urban commons is very reminiscent of the groundbreaking work of Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom. In her classic work, Governing the Commons, Ostrom identified groups of users all over the world who were able to cooperate to create and enforce rules for sharing and managing natural resources—such as grazing lands, fisheries, forests, and irrigation waters—using “rich mixtures of public and private instrumentalities.” In such frameworks, we see novel applications of collaboratively managed infrastructure and goods and services that have typically been provided as either public or private goods. There are many emerging examples of the creation of common goods in the environmental, housing, digital, and cultural arenas.
In New York City, there is an emerging “real estate investment cooperative” (or REIC) to finance the transformation of vacant publicly owned buildings for community, commercial, and manufacturing spaces. All of the spaces that the NYC REIC finances will be transformed into permanently affordable space. There are also efforts underway to create new forms of collectively owned and cooperatively managed urban infrastructure, particularly in socially and economically vulnerable communities. For example, community wireless mesh networks (as in Red Hook, Brooklyn) can bring internet service to communities and populations that lack broadband access. These networks can help to bridge the digital divide and promote what some call “network equality”, as well as providing resiliency in case of a climate event. Similarly, and also to address resiliency to climate change in neighborhoods less likely to withstand climate change impacts, some communities (as in West Harlem New York) are exploring installing cooperatively owned microgrids as a way to transition towards more resilient communities.
Finally, beyond particular urban commons, the city itself is a commons—a shared resource that is generative and produces goods for human need and human flourishing. The city as a commons means that the city is a collaborative space in which urban inhabitants are central actors in managing and governing city life and urban resources—ranging from open spaces and buildings to neighborhood infrastructure and digital networks. Moreover, the city (as a public authority) can and should be one partner in a polycentric system creating conditions where urban commons can flourish.
This idea of the city as a commons is motivated by the ongoing experimentation process of establishing Bologna, Italy, as a collaborative city, or “co-city.” As part of this process the city of Bologna adopted and implemented a regulation that empowers residents, and others, to collaborate with the city to undertake the “care and regeneration” of the “urban commons” across the city through “collaboration pacts” or agreements. The regulation provides for local authorities to transfer technical and monetary support to reinforce the pacts and contains norms and guidance on the importance of maintaining the inclusiveness and openness of the resource, of proportionality in protecting the public interest, and of directing the use of common resources towards the “differentiated” public. The specific applications of the Bologna regulation are just now undergoing implementation, as the City has recently signed over 250 pacts of collaboration, which are tools of shared governance. The regulation and other city public policies foresee other governance tools inspired by the collaborative and polycentric design principles underlying the Regulation.
The Bologna regulation, and the related co-city protocol designed by my colleagues at the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons (“LabGov”) are illustrative of the kinds of experimentalist and adaptive policy tools which allow city inhabitants and various actors (i.e., social innovators, local entrepreneurs, civil society organizations, and knowledge institutions willing to work in the general interest) to enter into co-design processes with the city, leading to local polycentric governance of an array of common goods in the city. This process of commons-based experimentalism re-conceptualizes urban governance along the same lines as the right to the city, creating a juridical framework for city rights. Through collaborative, polycentric governance-based experiments we can see the right to the city framework be partially realized—e.g., the right to be part of the creation of the city, the right to be part of the decision-making processes shaping the lives of city inhabitants, and the right of inhabitants to shape decisions about the collective resources in which all urban inhabitants have a stake.
From my office, on the 9th floor of a tall building in an academic campus in Bangalore, I have a birds-eye view of the city’s peri-urban surroundings. To the west, I can see a 6-lane high-speed highway choked by traffic, full of people frenetically commuting from their homes in city to their jobs in the globally famous Information Technology campuses located just outside. To the east, I am fortunate to witness a completely different picture. A tranquil marshy wetland and freshwater lake, with dozens of cows grazing and cooling down in the water while the mid-day sun blazes overhead, accompanied as companions by hundreds of cattle egrets feeding on the insects that annoy the cattle. This idyllic picture of cooperation, mutualism, and rural bliss has evolved and been sustained over centuries in Bangalore. (Bangalore’s lakes are not natural, but were created and maintained by local communities, with a history that can be traced as far back as 450 AD.) Yet even this picture is marred by construction and dumping of large mounds of debris onto the wetlands at one side of the lake.
Manjunath B—An intact peri-urban lake managed by the local village
Such contradictions of livelihoods and lifestyles, urbanity and rurality, shared cooperation and rampant self-interest, may be typical of many Indian cities but are certainly not unique to India. Certainly, the situation I have just described in Bangalore could be familiar to people in many other countries, even continents. Conflicts such as these just described have given rise to, and are exacerbated by, some of the worst inequities that the world has ever experienced. A recent Oxfam report, released on the occasion of the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, quotes a staggering figure: the world’s richest 85 people now collectively own as much money as the world’s poorest 3.5 billion! In a world that seems to be moving towards increasing self interest, and growing private control of the environment and natural resources, how can we ever hope or plan for a better future?
Following the example of Elinor Ostrom, who received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her pioneering work on the commons, we need to enlarge our discussion of models of urban governance to include a third alternative to the commonly espoused twin pillars of private and government administration, i.e., that of the community. Research from case studies in diverse contexts across the world has now proven clearly that multi-level collaborations between local community groups, civic society actors and government administration are essential for the effective, equitable and sustainable governance of natural resources. For such collaborations to be effective, they should however enable the scope for negotiations on an equal slate between different groups, such as high income apartment owners and slum residents, that are likely to have very different power structures. Developing the platform to allow negotiations at an equal level is particularly challenging in cities given the underlying context of high economic growth, which puts natural resources at stake. The imbalance between power structures becomes every more stark when natural resources are monetized, whether in the context of fracking and industrialization in China and the USA, or ground water withdrawal and water privatization in Latin American and Indian cities.
The recently restored Kaikondrahalli lake in Bangalore restored with community participation. Photo: Harini Nagendra
Effective governance is the key, obviously. Yet, to address these thorny challenges requires an adequate appreciation of the complexities of politics and political science, which is often lacking in approaches adopted by governments, influential thinktanks and international policy makers. Clearly, in today’s information age, lack of information does not constitute a barrier. More likely, it is the lack of dialogue, exacerbated by the imbalance in power, that creates barriers to cooperative governance for inclusive cities. It is the same lack of dialogue and imbalance in power between the urbanized landscape to the west of my office (with its character shaped by the shared use of large roads by high speed traffic), and the rural landscape to the east (with its character shaped by the shared use of wetlands by cattle and people), that leads to the dominance of the road over the lake, of the need for speed and linear growth over reflection and an appreciation of the cycles of life. Such an imbalance in appreciation, in ideology, almost inevitably leads to the disappearance and decay of these commons in urban areas. Cities thus become oceans of gray in a quest for endless economic growth, swallowing up all the little islands where commoners once thrived and flourished in respectful contestation and adaptive dialogue with nature.
A formerly large lake which has dried up due to encroachment of the water channels that feed the lake. Photo: Harini Nagendra
Our studies, as well as practical experience with community governance in the context of Bangalore’s lakes, has strongly highlighted the role for dialogue between communities and city government in providing the conditions that are inductive for effective co-management. This is particularly important in high growth urban contexts, which face political economic challenges of rent seeking, corruption and economic profit-making that can bias planning towards short term profit seeking, at the expense of long term sustainability. Fortunately, Bangalore seems to doing well in this regard, with a number of lake communities coming forward to reclaim derelict lakes in their neighborhood, supported by civic action in the form of Public Interest Litigations and an active judiciary that places pressure on city administration.
Such initiatives cannot be taken for granted, however, and are few and far between at the national level in India and indeed, in most countries with fast growing cities. Our only hope for scaling up such action is to enable outreach at a mass scale, through interdisciplinary education that crosses boundaries, engages with students, local communities, policy makers and private actors, and facilitates respectful contestation across groups of actors joined in the common goal of seeking equitable pathways towards greater urban sustainability. Engaging with problems of sustainability in an equitable, fair and just manner will require the fresh perspectives engendered by such discussion.
Note: This blog post draws substantively on the article ‘Reflections’ by Harini Nagendra in The Commons Digest: Publication of the International Association for the Study of Commons, Spring 2014: Number 15, pp. 15-18.
Investing in the world’s people, regardless of the color of their skin or the accident of where they were born, means that everyone—poor and rich, American or otherwise—can have markedly better lives in the future.
Donald J. Trump’s administration has been very obliging in providing content for environmentalist outrage, never in short supply. In a bit more than six months, Mr. Trump put an anti-EPA litigator in charge of the United States Environmental Projection Agency, sanctioned hunting of bears and wolves in Alaskan wildlife refuges, approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil and gas pipelines, and to top it all off, pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords.
President Donald J. Trump’s policies, and the nationalist policies of others in Europe and elsewhere, could double the human population by century’s end. Photo: Gage Skidmore
But environmentalists, and indeed the President, are missing the biggest, most serious, and longest lasting, unintended consequence of the Trumpian agenda: he and his nationalist, anti-immigrant allies in Europe and elsewhere are putting the world on track to nearly double the human population by 2100.
Demographers have an open secret. The global population growth rate is slowing; in fact, it has been dropping since the 1960s. Most of the advanced economies of the world (Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) have population growth rates that would be flat, in decline, or almost so, were it not for immigration.
The world’s most populous nations, China and India, are well on the way through the so-called “third phase of the demographic transition”, where fertility rates fall to balance mortality rates already brought low by modern medicine. As populations urbanize and gain access to the global economy, busy young adults have fewer incentives to raise large families. Women with more income tend to have more rights and more control of their lives and bodies. Family planning and education are easier to access in urban areas than rural ones. Urbanization is the prime mover of these changes, simultaneously increasing incomes and decreasing the marginal cost of providing public services.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world today where mothers on average have more than four kids over a lifetime, rather than the 1.9 kids for an American mom or 1.5 for a European one. Even in Africa, total fertility rates have dropped 25 percent since 1960. Yet many African cities continue to under-deliver the economic and demographic benefits other regions have seen, hampered as those cities are by corruption and poor governance.
The world population continues to grow because legions of youngsters are just now entering their child-bearing years, but demographers no longer debate if the global population will stabilize. The questions now are: When will it peak? And at what height?
To suggest such answers, an interdisciplinary group of scientists has been working to explore, in the deathless prose of the science, “shared socioeconomic pathways” (or SSPs) to test how policies regarding healthcare, education, trade, immigration and urban development might affect long-term demographic outcomes. They developed scenarios of national and international policies that might plausibly take root in the twenty-first century (references are included below). No one knows what the future will hold and so these different alternatives are not predictions so much as thought experiments with data. Nevertheless the results are startling. They work out five paths, but I think here we should focus on the two most extreme.
The shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) indicate how policies toward urbanization, immigration and education could lead to dramatically different total world populations by century’s end. SSP 1 is pro-urbanization, immigration and education; SSP 3 is the opposite. Data from IIASA’s SSP Database, v 1.1 https://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at/SspDb/dsd?Action=htmlpage&page=about. Image: Eric Sanderson
SSP1 (“The Green Road”) is the most optimistic. It models a world that invests in its people through cities, healthcare, and education, while adopting generous trade and immigration policies. The developed world helps the developing world. Urbanization leads to smaller families and better investments in every child. This pathway leads to a peak population of 8.5 billion around 2050, followed by a slow and natural decrease, such that by century’s end, the world population is a bit less than today.
SSP3 (“The Rocky Road”) tests out Trump world. As Brian O’Neill and colleagues wrote in Global Environmental Change:
A resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security, and regional conflicts push countries to increasingly focus on domestic or, at most, regional issues. This trend is reinforced by the limited number of comparatively weak global institutions, with uneven coordination and cooperation for addressing environmental and other global concerns. Policies shift over time to become increasingly oriented toward national and regional security issues, including barriers to trade…
The upshot of SSP3 is a world of 12 billion people by 2100 with the peak still to come in the 22nd century.
Why does nationalism lead to a more crowded world? First nationalists want to shut down immigration. Migrants who come from faster growing regions to slower growing ones tend to take on the demographic characteristics of their new society. That is, immigrants coming to Europe or North America tend to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have in their countries or origin; and their kids have demographics indistinguishable from or lower than the rest of the population. So it was in the first wave of immigrants to the US in the nineteenth century, and so it has been in the second wave of immigration during the 1980s – 2010s. Second, trade and investment from developed to developing countries increases economic opportunity and rewards for education, as societies urbanize, industrialize, and globalize. China and India are the leading examples at the moment and Africa is slowly if unevenly on the same trajectory. Higher incomes and more education in these countries is hastening the demographic transition (think Rwanda); decreasing these public goods leads to bigger families and more people (think Niger).
One needn’t be an environmentalist to be concerned about these different future paths. A world of twelve billion is a script for a horror show—global shortages, mass starvation, increased conflict, greater radicalization, and, by the way, destruction of the biosphere. Cities expand viciously to swallow the nature nearby, and people starve for lack of water and bread. Climate change only makes it worse, exacerbating the already explosive differences between the haves and the have-nots.
In contrast, a world that peaks at 8.5 billion isn’t easy, but it means adding only about a billion more souls to the 7.4 billion we have today, while creating a world that is dramatically less poor, productively employed, and safely housed in pleasing towns and cities. Cities are catalysts of economic activity and socio-cultural transformation. Urbanization is driving out extreme poverty on a global scale, as recent studies by the World Bank have shown. In the more distant future, the only way one can imagine finding some kind of harmony between its people and the rest of nature is for the human population to stabilize.
Imagine a world with 7.4 billion people, 80% of whom live in towns and cities, and none of whom are extremely poor. In such a world, nature might recover and expand, helping suck carbon out of the atmosphere, much as forests today are expanding across the northeastern US or Eastern Europe, but on a global scale. In a world where urban places are where most people choose to live, towns and cities interlaced with green spaces and filled with wildlife have a chance to demonstrate the interdependence of human life and natural cycles that underlies pro-environmental practices and policies. Here is a road, if not to paradise, to something closer to it than humanity has seen in a very long time.
The US President prides himself on a being a deal maker. Well, here is the deal of the century. Someone with the presidential prowess to pull this one off would make Misters Washington and Lincoln (or Churchill or Gandhi, take your pick) look like provincial amateurs in comparison.
Investing in the world’s people, regardless of the color of their skin or the accident of where they were born, means that everyone—poor and rich, American or otherwise—can have markedly better lives in the future. And not just us. Tigers, elephants, rainforests, coral reefs, a life-sustaining climate, and the nature of cities, all depend on the deal ahead.
Eric W. Sanderson is a senior conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society and adjunct faculty at New York and Columbia Universities. Opinions expressed are solely his own and do not express the views or opinions of his employers.
Note: To read more about the socioeconomic pathways, check out:
Jiang, L., O’Neill, B.C., 2015. Global urbanization projections for the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Global Environmental Change 42, 193–199. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.03.008
KC, S., Lutz, W., 2017. The human core of the shared socioeconomic pathways: Population scenarios by age, sex and level of education for all countries to 2100. Global Environmental Change 42, 181–192. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.06.004
O’Neill, B.C., Kriegler, E., Ebi, K.L., Kemp-Benedict, E., Riahi, K., Rothman, D.S., van Ruijven, B.J., van Vuuren, D.P., Birkmann, J., Kok, K., Levy, M., Solecki, W., 2015. The roads ahead: Narratives for shared socioeconomic pathways describing world futures in the 21st century. Global Environmental Change 42, 169–180. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.01.004
A review of Wild by Design: Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes, by Margie Ruddick. 2016. ISBN: 9781610915991. Island Press, Washington, DC. 264 pages. Buy the book.
This book, Wild by Design, is written from the perspective of a landscape architect, Margie Ruddick, who designs cityscapes and individual lots in such a way as to integrate ecology and to reconnect people with their natural heritage.
While Ruddick’s book encourages authentic progress, implying that highly maintained “nature” is a move towards sustainability is problematic.
Full disclosure: I am an urban wildlife ecologist and my review is colored by this. Working in urban areas for over 20 years now with the intent of conserving natural resources, I know the importance of informing and engaging decision-makers in the ways they can incorporate ecological principles into city design and management. For example, yards, cumulatively, can have a huge impact on natural resources (e.g., water, energy, and biodiversity). Without homeowners changing their ways, cities remain unsustainable. I have tried and been involved with similar projects that Margie Ruddick discusses throughout the book. One of the goals for this book was to convey five design principles that help to create more sustainable landscapes. While I applaud Ruddick’s intent, I will comment on the functionality of the examples and fundamental design principles that address the nexus between art and ecology.
The overall goal of the book is to show alternative urban designs that help to conserve natural resources. In her Preface, Ruddick states, “I hope this book will give readers an idea of how they might try to bridge the two realms that were traditionally held distant: the hyper-orderly and aestheticized world of designers, and the sometimes mucky but exquisitely beautiful world of ecologists.” Being an ecologist, that piqued my interest. She goes on to write, in the first chapter, “Landscape architecture. Is it art? Is it ecology?” Again, I perked up and thought to myself, “Aha, a conundrum worth addressing in this age of sustainability. Is there a middle ground?”
Ruddick begins to make the case that creating spaces that are sustainable requires having a cultural component to “…make a landscape that people will internalize, make their own.” While I agree that people need to know what the place was designed to do, I am not sure artful design alone will engage them. I agree, cultural norms do affect whether a community accepts a non-conventional yard. For example, a native woodlands yard, with little lawn, may sequester carbon, provide wildlife habitat, help with water quality, and more, but these qualities don’t mean it will be accepted by the neighbors. My attempts to let my own yard go has, at times, prompted comments from my neighbors, and they were not of the encouraging kind!
In addressing a more ecological landscape, Ruddick says that design took a back seatin the 1990s and the ecological approach had become a more prominent “nondesign approach.” I was a bit taken aback by this, as I have rarely seen an “ecological” approach in urban-based designs, particularly residential neighborhoods. Anyway, I would argue that having areas with “no design” is actually a design choice.
The author goes on to state that for a wild look, you need to walk a thin line between chaos and order. The first chapter delves into her discovery of walking this line when doing her own yard. I read with interest because, as I mentioned above, I have done a similar thing to my own yard. Notably, her use of the word “invasive” in this chapter means plants that spread rapidly and mess up the yard design. This is different from what ecologists consider as “invasive.” As ecologists, we think of “invasive” exotic plants as those plants that are not native and that spread into natural areas, disrupting natural ecosystems. For example, in certain states, the Norway Maple (Acer platanoides, which is in the author’s yard) is listed as an invasive exotic and a threat to natural ecosystems; it should not be planted (USDA Noxious Weed List). I do love that the author highlights that there is less lawn and more structure in her design for her yard. But from her photos, I did see a lot of “showy” exotic flowers. It seemed like much of her yard had exotic plants, which is not good habitat either for insects or for birds. She did leave “snags” in her yard (these dead trees provide habitat for birds and insects, particularly woodpeckers) and talked about wildlife habitat. Ruddick seems very interested in creating an unconventional yard. Her writings about her yard and her experiences with neighbors and the local weed judge were engaging.
The rest of the book discusses a design process that incorporates fundamental principles. Her design process was broken down into five parts: Reinvention, Restoration, Conservation, Regeneration, and Expression. Below, I give my impressions of each section.
Reinvention: The idea here is to think outside the box. As a case study, the author offers up a reinvention of Queens Plaza in Long Island City. First, this project is really a hardscape reinvention and more about people, cars, and noise abatement. The images were beautiful and the landscape plan combined some vegetation with re-designed bike trails and automobile roads. I especially liked the vegetative catchments, designed to capture stormwater. However, the interventions could have gone further. For example, the large concrete curbs could have had cut outs to allow stormwater to infiltrate, a first step in transforming these areas into raingardens. Instead, I assume the vegetation had to be irrigated.
Restoration: I never knew that restoration is considered by some landscape architects as “ … what people with no imagination did.” In my experience as an ecologist, “restoration” refers to a very complex process that requires lots of imagination, historical knowledge, and creativity. I do like, though, that the author mentions the importance of restoring ecological processes in the landscape. However, a concern I have is with some of the definitions the author uses. It was unclear to me whether Ruddick knows the difference between exotics and exotic invasives. She writes, “They [other researchers] argue that plants formerly called ‘invasive exotics’ may not prevent the local ecosystem from functioning. If the food web is functioning so that most species can be sustained, then a plant that is exotic may not be so bad.” Exotic plants that did not historically occur in the area can be solely exotic, without having the additional characteristic of being invasive (i.e., impacting local ecosystems by spreading throughout natural areas). I sense confusion here, as I often do on this subject with some landscape architects—an exotic plant is only an exotic plant, and could theoretically be planted in an area without substantial impacts to surrounding ecosystems. I also get the impression that the author thinks of an invasive as a plants that escapes its landscaped area and goes into other areas of the landscaped area (which is NOT how ecologists think).
Elsewhere, Ruddick talks about using invasive exotics to remove pollutants in contaminated areas. “But where a system has been messed up, and you need to bring in the big guns that can pull contaminates out of the water or soil, invasive species are the star of the show.” Here, the author is thinking at a bigger scale about invasive exotics and that they should be contained. However, I would caution that these invasive exotics, by their very nature, escape and spread. Often, native alternatives exist and could be explored.
Ruddick provides several wonderful examples (especially Living Water Park in China) that involve local communities in the described projects and draw from their experiences. I do agree with the author’s sentiment that designs need to incorporate local people’s wants and ideas.
Conservation: As ecologists, we stress that conservation is the most important step when trying to conserve biodiversity. It is much easier to conserve than to restore (imagine trying to grow a 70 ft.-tall tree!). I like that the author emphasizes this. It takes a huge amount of effort and time to restore a piece of land, but conservation is relatively cheap and, if done correctly, can really make or break a project in terms of sustaining natural resources. As the author suggests, ecologists should be involved in design processes to make this happen. The chapter discusses many ecological principles. However, the case example that Ruddick gives is of a home landscaping project that was not a conservation example at all. Rather, the project was about conserving desert landscaping in “principle”—even though no native plants were there to begin with. It felt a bit out of place.
In another case study concerning a resort landscape plan that was going to be compact (for economic reasons), the author argues about constructing over a larger area to take “ … advantage of the diverse landscapes and to ensure that being out in the landscape would be an integral part of one’s stay.” As an ecologist, to conserve the “wild,” we often recommend that a development should be more compact, not less. This minimizes impacts; spreading the development out typically causes more harm to ecosystems. While I do appreciate the notion that people visiting a compact resort may be exposed to fewer ecosystems, a dispersed design may come at the cost of destroying these ecosystems. If a design truly were meant to conserve natural resources, then, in most cases, I would recommend that it be compact.
Regeneration: The central idea here is that one is setting in motion a set of processes that will restore something that is lost. I agree with this sentiment, as one needs to understand that landscape change, even in an area as small as a city lot, happens over a long period. And I like that the author talks about using local knowledge and establishing partnerships with local people. However, I did not see this as separate from the Restoration section and was confused about why the author chose to separate the two.
One neat example in this chapter came from Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ. They designed bird blinds that became living walls. I thought this was a fantastic way to combine bird watching with creating habitat.
Expression: This chapter was the most informative to myself as an ecologist, because I am very interested in what makes landscape architects “tick.” While I play lip service to aesthetics in my own work, I read this chapter with deep interest. According to the author, landscape architects’ motivations revolve around the desire to employ creative powers that express beauty or touch emotions. The goal is to create beautiful places, and the author noted that most people came to the landscape profession through art (Is that true in others’ opinions? I did not see a reference for the notion). But, is beauty not in the eye of the beholder? I mean, an ecologist’s definition of beauty in a landscape could be quite different than a non-ecologist.
The examples the author gives in this section are a mix of formal and wilder gardens, but they tended to have symmetries, straight lines, and manicured vegetation. To me, as an ecologist, beauty looks more like “controlled chaos,” where patches of chaotic, native vegetation are mixed in with a few exotics and mowed or trim edges. However, in my view, the controlled areas should be a minimal part of the landscape. Overall, this chapter tended to cover formal gardens and designs that occur inside built areas. It emphasized plant sculptures and building shapes that resembled “wild critters” but, in itself, it was not about conserving natural resources as much as it was about representing the wildness around us. Again, I noticed that some of the example gardens used invasive plants, such as Snake Plant (Sansevieria hyacinthoides), in a Florida landscape, which gave me pause about how much impact these areas would have on surrounding natural landscapes.
Reading this book was informative for an ecologist that works in urban areas. It helped me understand more about how landscape architects think and the possible synergies among humans, wildlife, and art/creativity. The whole book is full of great illustrations, photos, and case examples.
The author’s overarching message may be that people feel deeply connected to wild landscapes, and that a design should reflect this. However, I came away concerned that people would read this book as truly incorporating ecological principles into city landscapes. In my opinion, green development is a continuum of doing nothing to doing the whole thing. Almost all efforts are somewhere in between. This book moves the needle towards a more sustainable, wild, and natural way. But it did not go far enough and had some examples that could actually cause more harm than good.
My other worry is that design is not enough; long-term management is critical. This book offers little thought or concern for what happens over the long term. For example, those critical habitat patches in the middle of a subdivision could be compromised by what is put in each of the built lots nearby. If invasive exotic plants in yards were not managed through removal, they would escape and spread into nearby wildlife habitat. Ruddick ends her book by talking about promoting stewardship, and I agree that we need more environmental stewards. My concern is that the designs offered up in her book may demonstrate or reinforce the opinion that highly maintained “nature” is Nature, when it could more accurately be described as highly maintained art.
It is easy to be somewhat critical of different projects using hindsight. However, the devil is in the details and while Ruddick’s book encourages authentic progress in some areas, several of its shortcomings—e.g., not fully addressing ecological concerns—still give me pause. The recommendations and designs contained are not truly “wild.” I hope that as we move down a path of sustainable landscaping, people will appreciate and see the beauty in the “ordered chaos” that is Nature.
The phenomenon of water scarcity and access to safe drinking water as a life-saving resource is a significant concern for human survival and should be recognized as such.
The growing significance of sachet water in Ghana — the machine-sealed 500ml plastic bags of drinking water, known in local parlance as “pure water” — as a primary source of drinking water for households is important. It has a major impact towards the achievement of universal access to improved drinking water in the country (Sustainable Development Goal, or SDG, 6) and should not be under-emphasized. Nonetheless, its end product of plastic pollutants poses an environmental menace to Ghana’s ecosystems and requires a balanced solution to curb the dilemma of water scarcity and ecological stewardship. Though not sustainable, the increased production and consumption of sachet water as a primary source of drinking water is an inescapable reality in rural and urban communities of Ghana today, irrespective of households’ differential experiences with accessing this product.
Granted, with surging urbanization, it is unlikely that Ghana will meet the required capacity to provide universal access to safe drinking water by relying on its piped water supply network (Moulds et al., 2022), as envisaged by SDG 6. The emergent dominance of sachet water in Ghana’s water supply landscape represents an insoluble dilemma of plastic pollution and access to safe drinking water to address the challenge of water scarcity, especially in urban communities where 51.5% of households depend on it as a safe drinking water source (GSS, 2022). It further inhibits efforts to establish the principle of water as a public good and providing access to safe and affordable drinking water as a public service.
In Ghana’s capital city, Accra, 78% of households use sachet water as a primary drinking water source (Moulds et al., 2022: 14). The ubiquity of the product in Accra and its growing presence across the country suggest that sachet water is an indispensable part of Ghana’s water landscape (ibid). As Justin Stoler (2017) posits, the ability of many West African states, including Ghana, to achieve universal access to safe drinking water depends on their willingness to incorporate the sachet water industry into an integrated drinking water platform. The significant contribution of the sachet water industry toward achieving SDG 6 is apparent. The earlier the government recognizes this and embraces a more holistic approach towards addressing the utility of sachet water and its nuisance as a plastic pollutant to the environment, the better.
There needs to be a stress on the quagmire and potentially conflicting public policy interventions to address the challenges of environmental degradation, preservation of water bodies, and the scourge of plastic pollution as an ecological and sanitation problem in Ghana. Against the background of the destruction of water bodies and the ecosystem through indiscriminate surface mining activities, popularly known as “Galamsey”, the odds are against the government finding a way out of this conundrum. The proliferation of bottled and sachet water manufacturing companies in the country adds to the problem, coupled with the general households’ preference for this product over pipe-borne water, which is perceived to be contaminated. This further compounds the issues and must be addressed effectively. Nonetheless, the official public lamentation of households’ preference for sachet water as a safe drinking water source speaks to the counterintuitive narrative of the denial of the polluted state of pipe-borne water. It is unacceptable.
Pipe-borne water is unsafe in Ghana
The argument that pipe-borne water is the safest source of drinking water in Ghana is risible. According to UNICEF, “seventy-six per cent of Ghanaian households are at risk of drinking water contaminated with faecal matter (UNICEF, 2023)”. Even more worrying is that “only four per cent of households in Ghana treat water suitably before drinking and ninety-three per cent of households do not treat water at all” (ibid). These facts reveal the limitations of the Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources’ recent public denial of the country’s contaminated state of pipe-borne water, arguing that it is the best source of drinking water. She asserts that reliance on the sachet water is a personal choice Ghanaians make, as if it is a matter of choice rather than necessity.
A girl drinks from a hand pump in the village of Moglaa, Ghana on Thursday, November 11, 2010. Source: (UNICEF/UN309598/QUARMYNE)
It cannot be true that the pipe-borne water produced and delivered to Ghanaian homes by the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) is the safest source of drinking water when, contrary to the Minister’s assertion, the 2021 population and housing census data report showed that 51.5% of urban households in the country depended on sachet water, while 33.6% of rural families survive on borehole/tube wells as a source of drinking water; compared to the 33.7% of urban families depending on pipe-borne water and 28.8% of rural households using same as their drinking water sources (GSS, 2022). The growing faith in and preference for the general population for less sustainable alternative sources of drinking water to pipe-borne water points to a critical failure of the water resource governance system in the country. This requires critical thinking to build back better and find a lasting solution to impending water scarcity and the ecological menace of the pollution that results from the mass production of plastics in the booming sachet and bottled water industry.
A woman carries a basin of water on her head as she heads back home in Savelugu, Ghana on Wednesday, November 10, 2010. Source: (UNICEF/UN128745/ASSELIN)
The phenomenon of water scarcity and access to safe drinking water as a life-saving resource is a significant concern for human survival and should be recognized as such. The politicization of this glaring problem of the contaminated state of pipe-borne water in the country is both baffling and worrisome. Access to safe drinking water is central to the sustainable development aspirations of Ghanaian households, and it is crucial it is for public health, socio-economic development, and healthy ecosystem development (UN, 2023).
The challenge of the unsustainability of sachet water
Indeed, reliance only on sachet water as a source of safe drinking water is unsustainable, but clearly depicts a much broader problem of the deplorable state of affairs in the wake of water scarcity, the contaminated state of pipe-borne water, and water system governance paralysis in the country. A few decades ago, access to pipe-borne water significantly meant access to clean water and governments in West Africa prided themselves on delivering access to pipe-borne water in homes and businesses as remarkable achievements worth commendation. Today, access to pipe-borne water in Ghana means nothing more than another contaminated water source. The worst is that plastic bottled and sachet water, regardless of its consequential end product of a disposable pollutant in our environment, is perceived as a safe alternative water source in our homes compared to tap water.
How did we end up here? The answer to this question is plausible: pipe-borne water is not a reliable source of safe drinking water anymore.
The mass production of plastics and pollution
The worrisome media report of a booming global plastic water industry with over one million bottles of water sold every minute worldwide in an industry that shows no sign of slowing down speaks to a catastrophic consequence of pervasive pollution of our ecosystem. The situation in Ghana is the same. Talk less about what the increasing patronage of packaged water products does to our psyche and the further emphasis on these sales doubling by 2030, according to a report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UN, 2023).
A chocked drainage of plastic and domestic refuse at Chorkor, a Suburb of Accra, Ghana. Source: (AUCC community project, 2019)
This calls for our attention to environmental stewardship, considering the threats mass production of single-use plastic poses to our environments, such as water quality degradation, blocked drains, localized flooding, and ecological degradation (Moulds et al., 2022). Wardrop et al. (2017) estimate that Ghana produced 14,000 tons of plastic waste in 2015, consuming 8.2 billion packaged water (ibid: 17). Given the current growth of the sachet water industry, we must activate our commitment to environmental stewardship, to protecting the environment and hold in check the desire to profit from a booming industry while recognizing the need not to undermine public water utility, the traditional notion of water as a fundamental human right, and establishing a system of water governance which views water as a public good (Moulds et al., 2022: 17).
Common sense solutions are valuable
Finding balanced solutions to the dilemma of increased plastic waste generated from mass production and consumption of sachet water and the utility of the product as an alternative and complementary choice of safe drinking water source requires a holistic view and approach to the compounded issues enumerated above.
Essentially, I subscribe to the idea of Gillian Tett (2021) that finding solutions for public sector challenges requires a much broader view of the problems than relying on hard science and one set of limited intellectual tools to solve them. Beyond the reliance on hard science and big data for effective responses to fast-moving challenges, such as lack of access to safe drinking water and the plastic pollution menace, it is crucial to recognize the significance of what she calls the “soft” science to understand human behaviour and culture. Tett (2021) posits that it is a profound mistake to consider relying on one set of intellectual tools deployed with tunnel vision to solve public policy problems. A lateral vision is needed to appreciate the broader human context and how elements outside the model of the extensive data set or scientific trial could affect what is happening (ibid).
An interview with a surface mining project supervisor at Anyinam community, Eastern Region of Ghana. Source: (AUCC Field Report, 2019)
Drawing insights from her postulation gives me the optimism to grasp the possible solution to the paradox of “faith in sachet water” in Ghana. Building partnerships with the private sector stakeholders, civil society groups, and the local communities and resorting to commonsense approaches, such as intensive plastic reuse, recycling, and innovative use of plastics for household needs, such as “trashy bags” initiatives, would go a long way to address the environmental challenge and re-establish public confidence in the water and sanitation management systems in the country.
Likewise, our society’s imprudence of a preference for a source of life-threatening breeding pollutants that endangers biodiversity, aquaculture, and animal species with a bearing on our survival as humans. Such a call for a diverse spectrum of commonsense solutions and efforts at building resilient partnerships helps create local coping mechanisms to address the myriad problems crippling the water governance system of the country. It will inure to the advantage of the government to move from denialism to making efforts to renew public confidence in tap water quality as a priority to promote water security. This is not aberrant with the SDG 6 advocacy for strengthening local community participation in water and sanitation management. Such participatory water governance mechanisms offer the best chance to re-establish the principle of providing water as a public service (Moulds et al., 2022: 18).
Moulds, S., Chan, A., Tetteh, J., Bixby, H., Owusu, G., Agyei-Mensah, S., . . . Templeton, M. (2022). Sachet Water in Ghana: A spatiotemporal analysis of the recent upward trend in consumption and its relationship with changing household characteristics, 2010-2017. PLOS ONE, 17(1), 1-22.
Stoler, J. (2012, December). Improved but unsustainable: accounting for sachet water in post-2015 goals for global safe water. Journal for Tropical Medicine and International Health, 17(12), 1506-1508.
Tett, G. (2021, December ). Listening to Social Silence: Anthropology is vital for building back better. Finance and Development, 37-39.
(2023, April 8). Retrieved from UNICEF Ghana: https://www.unicef.org/ghana/water#:~:text=Seventy%20six%20per%20cent%20of,not%20treat%20water%20at%20all.
Wardrop, N., Dzodzomenyo, M., Aryeetey, G., Hill, A., Bain, R., & Wright, J. (2017). Estimation of packaged water consumption and associated plastic waste production from household budget surveys. Environmental Research Letters, 12(7). doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aa751f
Zurek, K. (2022, February 24). Sachet water main source of drinking water in Ghana – Census Report. Accra, Greater Accra, Ghana. Retrieved April 9, 2023, from https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/sachet-water-main-source-of-drinking-water-in-ghana-census-report.html#:~:text=The%20census%20data%20also%20found,was%20used%20by%2028.8%25%20of
It is time to see the change, make the change and realize the potential of multicultural inclusiveness in building resilient and just cities.
This article describes a new approach to graduate studies, that works at the dynamic intersection of environmental issues and social justice. The Master of Arts in Education with Urban Environmental Education program out of Antioch University in Seattle, has attracted a very diverse student body, who illuminate daily the challenges, struggles, and strategies unique to people of color striving to enter the environmental field. If cities are to be places where all thrive, unraveling inequity, exclusion, and discrimination is paramount. Diverse voices and experiences will build resilient cities.
I spent 2014 doing the market research for a new Master’s degree in Environmental Education for IslandWood, an environmental non-profit on Bainbridge Island. As part of the process, we convened several groups in Seattle and New York City that included community leaders, activists, and organizers in the design effort. The participants were asked one question: “What is the work that needs to be done in urban areas?” Maketa, a graphic facilitator, and I collected their thoughts and translated them into the graphic representation below. The shape of the program is new and refreshing. Traditional environmental education was turned on its head. Launching a program that would prepare a new and diverse cadre of environmental leaders emerged as the unanimous goal.
Capturing the imporant threads of the new program. Image: Maketa Wilborn, Graphic Facilitator, Seattle, WA (www.maketawilborn.com)
The graphic representation above, captured the important threads of the new program:
The world is changing: More live in cities, and they are increasingly diverse culturally and racially.
Cities matter as they represent the greatest hope for long term planetary survival, sustainability, and resilience.
Education has the power to transform the way that people live in cities.
Urban communities will only thrive if they are engaged collectively from the inside out or the ground up.
Urban solutions depend upon the preparation of a diverse cadre of environmental leaders.
The three strands described below shape the pedagogy, practice, and outcomes of the Urban Environmental Education program.
Use the City as a Learning Platform. Place-based and experiential approaches to urban environmental education are aimed at connecting people to the biosphere, to place, to intersecting natural and human-made systems, to change and impacts, to cultural perspectives, and to identifying power, voice, and agency as urban stewards.
“Empty lots are more than just ‘holes’ in the urban façade. They represent the character of a resilient ecosystem, a possibility for vibrant green space in the making. As educators, we help make these possibilities visible and highlight their importance to community strength, health, and resilience.” -Tiffany Adams, Alum of UEE Cohort 2
Focus on the complex socio-ecological dynamic of the urban environment, which includes the ecological, social, political, and economic forces that shape it. Urban environments are ecosystems in which human and ecological health is heavily interdependent.
“Classes are carried out in the city, on the streets, observing and investigating through the perspectives of those who live there. I’m learning to design educational strategies that prepare community members to recognize and act on the impacts of climate change, to identify impacts on environmental health, and employ sustainable practices that lead to the creation of equitable and just solutions.” -James King !!!, Alum of UEE Cohort 3
Develop cultural fluency among environmental educators. Urban areas are dense and increasingly diverse. We seek to engage all people as urban stewards, and its practitioners must represent the diversity of racial, cultural, and ethnic perspectives that live and work in cities. The full story of the urban landscape as a complex socio-ecological place means grappling first-hand with issues of inclusion, equity, and justice.
“Providing intentional voice to environmental justice means that I have personal work to do…studying my culpability, my entanglement. It means integrating issues of power, access, privilege, and fairness into thinking about how I educate others.” -Danielle Nicholas, Alum of UEE Cohort 3
This new approach to Urban Environmental Education intentionally integrates issues of environmental and social justice into the narrative of every academic course and practical experience. Students actively apply the dynamics of equity, privilege, and power as they wrestle with environmental issues. Students insist that they are ‘expanding’ the dominant paradigm of environmental education to include multiple racial, cultural, and ethnic perspectives and experiences.
“The dominant environmental narrative in the US is primarily constructed and informed by white, Western European or Euro-American voices. The black experience of nature always bumped up against social, economic, and historical processes that serve to remind them that their map of the world, while fluid, demands a particularly fine-tuned compass that allowed them to navigate a landscape that was not always hospitable. In the future, environmental programs must address the connections linking race, identity, representation, history, and the environment to awaken from our historical amnesia and create a more inclusive, expansive environmental movement devoid of denial and rich in possibility.” -Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
Place-based urban environmental mapping with students. Photo: IslandWood Communications and Marketing
We found that most urban communities are exhausted by universities who use them for their own ends. One of the most powerful parts of the program is the 40-week course in Participatory Action Research culminating in a Legacy Project. Students are hired by community organizations in a research capacity with the intention that their research serve the community directly. The research is defined through the ‘eyes’ and interests of the people who live there. The integrity of the research is guided by Paulo Freire‘s approach to community engagement and education. We embed our students in urban communities, to listen closely and without judgment to the everyday experiences, struggles, and solutions percolating among the people who live there.
The UEE program integrates a different set of elements to “nature interpretation”, which includes high-density residential and commercial infrastructure, transformed waterways, waste streams and paved surfaces, air and water quality, and access to healthy food, shelter, and green space. Understanding urban complexity and the interdependence of the natural and the built environment is key to our work. Cities are becoming places of “new nature”, a shifting perspective that is not always green. Understanding the nature of a city requires an intentional shift in environmental perception and educational practice. It requires a new conceptual and pedagogical frame for environmental education that influences the way theory and practice are conceived and delivered.
Historical Ecology in Pioneer Square in Seattle. Photo Khavin Debbs, UEE Cohort 3
“There is a serious disconnect between the changing demographics in our country and the lack of diverse leadership and staffing at organizations that protect our health and the environment.” -Mustafa Ali, Senior Vice President of Climate, Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization with the Hip Hop Caucus
As a learning group, we peel back the layers of the city by walking them, talking with residents and listening to those who live there. Urban ecology is a deep study of the ways that people and nature intersect, influence, and support each other. The students remain our best teachers. The majority are people of color from the guts of cities around the country.
Rasheena is from Chicago, Tiffany is from New York City, James is from Atlanta, Niesha is from Los Angeles, yet they find common ground in their experiences as people of color and as environmental leaders. Every day they, not so gently, open our minds to see a different reality that has actually been there all along. This new environmental lens is one that most of the students live every day, one that transforms the traditional white wilderness model of environmental education to include a parallel awareness of environmental racism, inequity, and exclusion. As one student exclaimed, “I’ve been here all along, you just haven’t and don’t see me.”
In our classes, the realities of race, equity, and environment are a constant theme, sparking hard conversations about power and privilege, barriers and misconceptions, assumptions and implicit bias. Students of color, for the most part, are for the first time in their lives the participating majority in classes. When invited to bring their ideas, feelings, perceptions, and experiences forward, they feel safe and supported. What we hear from them deserves a voice in the larger arena of the environmental field and yet, finding a foothold in environmental organizations continues to be difficult despite the multiple initiatives to create diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mission statements.
Excursion to Danny Woo Gardens in the International District, Cohort 1. Photo: IslandWood Communications and Marketing
The traditional white wilderness model bit the dust early on. Communing with pristine nature is replaced with finding the assets in neighborhoods where most people live including city parks and green spaces. The overwhelming message is that not all people have the means, the power or the voice to ensure the environmental vitality of a place. Social justice plays a big role in determining how people live and thrive in cities.
“As educators, long-term results rely on building trust among constituents, learners, and community members. First, we build relationships…authentic and real relationships. Relationships are key to the longevity of any environmental solutions. We need to step outside of our personal assumptions, our biases, our stereotypes and listen to the stories from inside a community. The real experiences of everyday people shine a light on the environmental issues they face. Embedded in those stories are the keys to building stewards of urban places”. -Jess Wallach, UEE alum Cohort 1
This new program design is cohort based. We live and learn by working through the layers of experience, multiple perspectives, disparate values, and visions of how cities might work better for everyone. The first three cohorts have drawn 60 percent diversity, bringing African American, Hispanic, Asian, and White educators together for 15 months of study and practice. The definition of environmental education has expanded. The traditional environmental education values and goals are consistently questioned and reformulated. Our work is to better understand the nature of cities (rather than nature in the city) from the perspectives of those who live deep in their communities.
“I continued on for years feeling like an outsider in search of environmentalism as a Black woman who grew up partly in inner city Chicago. That was until I realized that I was on the wrong journey. I realized that I hadn’t shown up late to the party, but I had unknowingly stumbled into and was asking to be let into the wrong party. The environmentalism of John Muir and Aldo Leopold was indeed not my environmentalism—not my Chicago community’s environmentalism and not my family’s environmentalism. To be a Black environmentalist means reconciliation with the land and reconstructing the perceptions of nature. It means embracing the toiling of my grandmother in her Chicago backyard urban garden, stepping beyond the nature documentary dreams of my grandfather, and embracing that we too have always been and are environmentalists who may not always fit ‘the mold’.” -Rasheena Fountain, Climate Conscious Collab April 21, 2018, UEE Alum Cohort 2
Group Portrait of Cohort 1. Photo: IslandWood Communications and Marketing
“Leadership will never be measured by what one person is able to accomplish as a result of his or her talents and abilities alone. It can’t be. The word itself implies the existence and participation of motivating and moving with others.” -CJ Goulding, UEE Alum Cohort 1
On an unrecognized and nearly invisible plane, there exists a parallel universe of environmentalists who add important perspectives, approaches, and styles of leadership to a notoriously white profession. It’s time to see the change, make the change and realize the potential of multicultural inclusiveness in building resilient and just cities.
Leading an urban nature hike in Seattle. Photo: IslandWood Communications and Marketing
The students want their stories to be accepted and as well known as Muir and Leopold. Following their lead, traditional approaches to EE are “unpacked” and reworked into a radical intersection of environmental leadership and social justice. Their thinking is fresh and drives educational practice to dance on a necessary edge. These newly recognized voices are rising and challenging us to consider new ways of thinking about old ways of being.
“I hope I am working to add to the plurality of perspectives and stories of relationships with the land. It’s a bridge that I and other environmentalists of color are working hard to build. For this reason, no matter how dissonant it feels, I will keep uttering the phrase ‘I am a Black environmentalist’, even if my dreams may be deferred.” -Rasheena Fountain, Climate Conscious Collab, April 21, 2018, UEE Alum Cohort 2
We experience the city through our senses. When we walk along city sidewalks or in parks, we can feel the city—we hear sounds, feel the materiality of the pavement or grass, and smell the car exhaust or freshly cut grass. These ‘sensual’ experiences of urban space are referred to as sensory engagements. Sensory engagements are those interactions with places, people, objects, animals, events, etc. as experienced through/with our senses.
We need to take sensory engagements seriously in the city, and in urban planning.
Senses, Bull et al. (2006) write in their introduction of the inaugural issue of the journal The Senses and Society, “mediate the relationship between self and society, mind and body, idea and object. The senses are everywhere. Thus, sensation…is fundamental to our experience of reality.” The senses are part of our bodily states and processes. We generally think of senses in terms of the five main senses: hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste. But the senses are much more than what we hear, see, touch, smell, and taste. There are also other “senses” that are considered key to our perceptions of the world: pain, balance, sense of motion, sense of time, sense of temperature, and sense of direction.
Moreover, what counts as the “senses” is never universal—it has multiple forms and is constantly changing. Geographer Nigel Thrift writes:
The sensory orders of cultures can vary radically and so, therefore, can the expectations of what counts as perception and experience. …There is no need to think that what we name as the senses has a predetermined or stable character. In all likelihood, the constellation of senses and what we may consequently regard as sensations goes through regular periods of redefinition and re-embedding (2007).
In this regard, the senses cannot always be assumed to be “a ʻnaturalʼ or intrinsic part of bodily experiences.” Rather, they are “highly acculturated” (Longhurst et al. 2009). That is, what counts as the senses and our understanding of sensual experiences is socially constructed. Sensory engagements are different for different people in diverse places: sensations are culturally, historically, and spatially constructed.
The physical experience, of course, is not constructed. To feel is a very material experience in our bodies. These embodied or corporeal ‘senses’ produce and are very much entwined with emotions, feelings, and affect. Emotions can be understood as physical manifestations of sensory experiences. Our sensory engagements with the world and the emotions that we experience depend on where we are, what is around us, language, our bodies, etc.
This article explores the question of how we experience the city through senses and emotions. Paying attention to emotions and sensual experiences enlightens our understanding of what it means to be in, to live in, and to make the city (and world). As such, there is a need in urban planning to take sensory engagements seriously in the city. This is particularly important when considering issues of social and environmental justice.
Scenes from Villa Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, a neighborhood of Managua, Nicaragua, in close proximity to a Big Cola bottling plant. Photos: Carolina de los Angeles Espinoza Ruiz (FUNDECI)
But acknowledging senses and emotion is not easy. How do we adequately represent the senses and emotions of people, especially since language cannot fully express the depth of feeling and emotional meaning? One way is to start paying attention to how people feel about the city—what are their emotional reactions? How do they feel about where they live, their homes, the areas around their homes? How do they experience everyday urban worlds through their senses—touch, smell, sight, and the myriad other senses? We are very good at paying attention to the visual in cities, but the senses comprise much more than what we see. Urban planners should remember more often that the city is not just a planned space, but a lived space (over four decades ago, Henri Lefebvre point out the importance of everyday living and perceiving in cities as critical to the production of urban space). People have everyday routines that take them through the city—they feel the city in complex ways.
We also need to remember that planning itself is rooted in the sensory engagements of planners (most planners are people living in cities!). The emergence of the field of modern urban planning has its roots in sensory engagements with the city. The industrial cities of Paris and London produced so-called sensory overloads: they were crowded and full of smells (raw sewage, body sweat, animals, etc.), disease, contaminated air, poverty, and a host of other characteristics that produced many emotional responses (disgust, sadness, empathy). Modern urban planning emerged with the aim of addressing the unhealthy sensory environment and so-called moral disorder of the city. The aim of modern urban planning at the time was to rid the city of bad natures—to remove the unhealthy physical and sensory engagements—and to transform the city into a sanitary, ordered space. For example, the creation of urban zoning to separate residential spaces from industry has been a key element in creating an ordered city. The physical and emotional responses to industrial cities were an integral part of the production of knowledge about cities and the creation of what we now know as the modern city. The very people who first implemented what we now know as modern urban planning lived in the industrial city and based their efforts to improve it on their daily experiences. We cannot, therefore, separate emotions and senses from rational planning, since they are intimately entwined.
More scenes from Villa Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. Photos: Carolina de los Angeles Espinoza Ruiz (FUNDECI)
Of course, modern urban planning did not create perfect cities. Many contemporary cities have far better environments than industrial cities of the turn of the 20th century, but all cities have social and environmental issues—as the articles on TNOC attest. One problem in most cities is that urban planning tends to ignore sensory engagements in the city. If planners or other city officials attempt to address sensory engagements in their ideas and plans, they are usually sidelined in favour of economic concerns. Urban sensory engagements often come into the spotlight when groups of individuals call attention to particular issues that affect them. Environmental justice issues, for example, are in many cases noticeable when people’s physical health is affected, such as asthma from living too close to freeways or health problems from contaminated water (consider the recent case of Flint, MI). Radical physical changes in an individual’s health engender very emotional reactions. Changes in an individual’s everyday environment can also bring about environmental justice concerns; for example, increasingly bad smells from nearby industry or noise from traffic. Such everyday sensory experiences can accumulate and create larger environmental and health issues.
There is also the problem of privileging certain sensory engagements over others. Because sensory engagements are culturally, historically, economically, and spatially constructed, they are different for different people in diverse places. The ordered city that emerged out of the chaotic and dirty industrial city embodied the visions of certain people who had the power and desire to change the city. The idea of participatory urban planning did not exist at the time, and contemporary urban planning in most cities is rarely participatory; as such, the city is designed to create particular sensory environments. If large, green parks are viewed by planners as the best way to create space for urban inhabitants to enjoy nature (the sounds, smells, and visual calmness), these spaces will, perhaps, be privileged over smaller, neighbourhood-level programmes that assist individuals in maintaining trees and other plant life in their own yards. Many studies have examined how large green parks in cities are surrounded primarily by upper-middle and upper class housing; lower-income residents have to travel much farther to be able to enjoy these spaces, reducing their ability to experience sensory engagements with urban nature.
These two issues in contemporary planning—the sidelining of sensory engagements and the privileging of certain sensory environments—are magnified in many cities of the global south, where class differences are highly spatialised. In some cities, the urban landscape has been produced through a combination of modern urban planning and informal development practices. Managua, Nicaragua, is one such city. In the 1950s, modern urban planning sought to zone the city in a similar manner to that of U.S. cities such as Miami and LA, while informal residential, commercial, and industrial development occurred simultaneously. This combination of formal and informal urban development created a patchwork urban landscape with informal residential settlements sandwiched between middle and upper class housing, industry, North American-style strip malls and, more recently, gated communities. The patchwork has resulted in residential neighbourhoods (most often lower income) emerging adjacent to factories. This has been especially common along the lakeshore, where large industry has been located for decades because of its close proximity to Lake Xolotlán (easy access to discharge waste). Zoning in the city has frequently been defined after areas are already well established, resulting in conflicts between residents and industry. Much of this conflict arises out of unwanted sensory environments for residents. I want to explore one example of a current environmental justice conflict that has arisen because of the creation of an uncomfortable and unhealthy sensory environment.
This particular conflict involves the large multi-national bottling company, Big Cola and residents living beside one of the bottling plants in Managua. Last winter, while I was in Managua finishing research on the cultural ecology of Lake Xolotlán, my long-time collaborator invited me to her house. She wanted to show me what has become a serious conflict between her neighbourhood, the city, and Big Cola. The bottling plant is located across a small canal from the residential area of Villa Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. While the plant is across the canal, it is only 5 metres from the door of the first street of houses. However, this canal is the boundary between the residential and industrial zones.
The plant began operating in 2010 and, after several months, residents started to notice annoying sounds and vibrations. The bottling plant operates 24 hours a day and, as such, creates a constant vibration that can be felt inside the houses located along the first two streets of the neighbourhood. Along with the vibrations, the bottling plant generates interminable noises that fluctuate in volume depending on the time of day. The plant also discharges liquid waste into the concrete canal that separates it from the residential area; at certain times of the day, the liquid waste emits strong-smelling odours.
Discharge of liquid waste from the Big Cola bottling plant in Villa Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. Photo: Carolina de los Angeles Espinoza Ruiz (FUNDECI)
The impacts of the bottling plant are felt in people’s homes throughout the day and night—their everyday lives have been interrupted by the presence of the plant. At first, residents found the pattern of noise and vibration just extremely annoying, but three years after Big Cola began operating this plant, the residents of Villa Pedro Joaquín Chamorro also started to see health effects. Some residents on the street closest to the plant have had their sleep interrupted. The constant noise has, at times, exceeded 170 decibels, which is almost four times the desirable upper limit set by the World Health Organization. As a result, there are already people who are suffering from emotional stress , migraines, insomnia, and tinnitus (a constant ringing or buzzing in the ears). Some residents have also experienced skin and respiratory problems from the emotional stess.
The residents of the neighbourhood have formed a citizens group to try to shut down the plant. They approached the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in an attempt to environmental laws. However, the main concerns about vibrations and noise are not ‘strong enough’ to shut down the plant. The Ministry never conducted an environmental assessment when the bottling plant was installed, nor did they grant the company an environmental permit to discharge liquid waste into the canal. As the bottling plant is located in an industrial zone, any excess of untreated waste into the canal only results in a large fine for the company (as per current environmental laws). If the company is fined a certain number of times, there is the potential to shut the plant. At present, the company has not discharged excess amounts. The noise and vibrations do not fall under the jurisdiction of environmental laws, so the residents have little leverage to insist that the plant close. Moreover, the bottling plant creates jobs for dozens of residents of Villa Pedro Joaquin Chamorro and other surrounding neighbourhoods. There is a conflict between economic development, employment, and everyday comfort of residents. In a country where economic development dominates urban interests, arguing to close a bottling plant because of emotional stress and “sensory” pollution (noise and vibrations) is not convincing enough to bring about any change.
The case of Big Cola’s bottling plant and Villa Pedro Joaquin Chamorro broaches a complex question: what counts as environmental pollution in Managua? Since the 1970s, noise pollution has been considered a serious problem in many cities, but what counts as noise has also changed since then. The constant hum of traffic is, for some urban residents, background noise (‘white noise’). Yet, there is growing research and media attention on emotional well-being. Emotional stress is now understand as a key cause of physical ailments. The sensory environments that have been created in cities shape emotional well-being. Urban planners would be wise to pay attention to how people sense the city and the emotional responses to the sounds, smells, sights and other intricate ways of sensing and feeling of humans (and other animals).
Video data gathering captured the spatial and temporal distribution pattern — the flux/flow — of the ecology of small lanes in Bangkok. It suggests that we should stop seeing cities in terms of centers and peripheries, a residual concept of colonial metropolitanism, but as patchy distributive ecological systems, where every point in the system has value.
Sois, or lanes, are the capillaries of Bangkok, Thailand. Like rectangular blocks in New York City, or piazzas in Rome, they constitute the architecture or the DNA of the city. For anthropologist Erik Cohen, a Bangkok soi constitutes an overlooked “semi-autonomous ecological sub-system” which comprise the “interstitial hinterland” between the dominating lines of urban development and expansion. As the megacity of Bangkok continues to grow along ribbons of wide roads, sois are the informal, unplanned, in-between micro spaces that still make the city varied, interesting and livable. The Bangkok soi remains a particularly revealing unit of analysis to understand the nature of fast-growing Southeast Asian cities like Bangkok.
Cohen conducted his fieldwork during the summers of 1981 through 1984; co-author McGrath lived in Bangkok between December and May from 1998 to 2007; and Diwadkar just arrived in December 2020 in time for the city’s first COVID lockdown. McGrath’s field research chronicled both the centripetal growth of the center of the city with the construction of the first mass transit lines and the extensive centrifugal expansion of the city with the construction of an outer ring road at the beginning of the millennium. In the decade between Cohen’s and McGrath’s longitudinal fieldwork, Thailand was the world’s fastest-growing economy before the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Between 2006 and today, Bangkok has been the scene of continuing political conflict, including two military coups. At the time of Diwadkar’s arrival, COVID shut the entry doors to one of the world’s most visited tourist hotspots and dampened ongoing street protests.
View of Soi Ratchawithi 6, still from walk-through video shot by Bung, one of the students in the workshop (January 2021).
The ecology of Bangkok’s sois have continued to adapt and change in a way Cohen could only begin to imagine in the early 1980s. Sois remain bounded physical environments condensing both social contact and ecological interactions. As Cohen noted, they mark the transitions of rural patterns of canals, pathways, and fields that become unevenly urbanized during various periods of development. As such, they constitute a dynamic and heterogenous patch matrix of social, built, and vegetated structures that often temporarily revert to flooded waterways during rainy season.
Affinities between the architecture and ecology of the city can advance urban ecology beyond social metaphors. The concept of the metacity, postulated in both urban design and urban ecology, positions the science and design of cities up-close embedded within complex lifeworlds, but also reflects on patterns and processes with objective methods remotely. A metacity approach has the potential to address both the cultural and ecological dimensions of environmental justice and the climate crisis by making accessible the descriptive ecological and projective architectural tools through everyday handheld digital videography to collect data information on patterns, micro-climates, movements of the city, in both biophysical and social science senses.
The Bangkok Metropolitan Area: Inside-out
The two authors returned to the topic of the ecology of Bangkok’s sois during the city’s first COVID lockdown in January 2021, as part of a ten-day remote design experiment workshop (DEX), for Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Architecture. We had the unique experience of understanding Bangkok through the simultaneous social-ecological observations of ten students participating in the workshop, locked down in the immediate areas around their dormitories or family homes across the entire Bangkok metropolitan area. Their video data, gathered over a few days, sheds light on the validity of Cohen’s initial fieldwork but also can be evaluated in relation to the centripetal and centrifugal forces of development that transformed both the city’s center and periphery, as documented by McGrath.
We organized the Design Experiment Workshop into two video exercises derived from The Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies definition of ecology. The first videoed a 5-minute walk down a soi near their place of residence in order to study the processes influencing the spatial distribution, abundance, and interactions among and between organisms. The second exercise required visiting one ecological “hot spot” on the soi, framing the transformation and flux of energy, matter, and information from multiple camera positions and different times of the day. The workshop employed data gathering through the architectural application of film framing and editing techniques first described in the textbook Cinemetrics. Videography of everyday life is ubiquitous in an age of YouTube and Tik-Tok, but with a systematic framing method, pictures and sounds can create, in the words of philosopher Gilles Deleuze “sets of information”. We offer four examples of this fieldwork, from two students locked down in Bangkok’s periphery, and from two students in the central city. We use students’ nicknames to preserve their privacy.
Google Earth view of Bangkok Metropolitan Area showing the location of the following four examples from workshop. Hong and Oat from the western and northern periphery, and Bung and Toon in the city center. We use the student’s nicknames to protect their privacy.
1. Two 5-minute walks in Bangkok’s Periphery
As documented by McGrath and Thaitakoo’s survey of the construction of Bangkok’s outer ring road, the centrifugal expansion of the metropolitan region has been conducted primarily through highway construction across agricultural land. The ribbon pattern that Cohen described in the urbanization of central Bangkok in the 1980s continues on the periphery today, as large areas between highways remain unplanned. Both housing estates and industrial zones are constructed as gated enclaves on patches of converted farmland between the commercial ribbons. The path of the ring road crossed huge tracks of wet rice fields to the north and east, major trunk canals that fill and drain the fields, fish farms and prawn fields near the coast to the south, and old fruit orchards to the west. The ring road crosses the mighty Chao Phraya River twice but also bridges several of the canals that follow the old course of the river.
Key map of Bangkok’s outer ring road survey by McGrath and Danai Thaitakoo, 2005.
Hong’s walk down Soi Phetkasam 88
In the western periphery, Hong documented the “interesting ecological heterogeneity” along the “interstitial hinterland” of Soi Phetkasam 88, a very dynamic soi crossing a former fruit orchard area and an irrigation trunk canal. The soi connects to an exit from the recently completed 12-lane Western Outer Ring Road, making it a shortcut by-path for many vehicles, including delivery cars, trucks, taxis, and buses.
Google Earth view of Soi Phetkasam 88 with 5-minute walk indicated in yellow.
Hong’s 5-minute video walkthrough along Soi Phetkasam 88 records the ecology of a soi filled with middle to low-income housing, interspersed with multiple shops. The shops occupy quickly built, one-story sheds, and sell both village craft production, such as straw brooms, but also car mechanics, and, as everywhere in Bangkok, street food. At the end of the walk, a small bridge crossed over the Bangchak Canal, which continues to feed remnant fruit orchards as support older villages and new informal settlements.
Video of Hong’s 5-minute walk along Soi Phetkasam 88
Mining the information on their video, students were asked to make a “soi shed” diagram. If a watershed map documents the catchment area of a river system, a soi shed maps the distribution, abundance, and interactions of sound, energy, material, organisms, and information encountered along a five-minute walk. Additionally, students were asked to construct four architectural cross-sections at key “hot-spots” of ecological interactions captured in their 5-minute video. The video itself is seen as a “moving section” through the soi, capturing 30 frames per second. Each drawn section shown is one of 9,000 possible cross-sections captured in the video. Each video frame can be seen as a slice of ecological information rather than a visual picture, and much like in an MRI scanning a living body, video frames can be analyzed as frozen moments of space/time.
Hong’s soi shed map on the left, and cross-sections at two hot-spots, at a local market and crossing the canal, along the soi
Along Soi Phetkasam 88, there are temperate and tropical plants of various sizes and species competing with each other to grow as well as the colorful competition of various signs, flags, and awnings. There are all kinds of different residences, from one-floor and two-floor houses, shophouses, and small apartment blocks. There are no sidewalks, and all kinds of objects line the soi: cars, signs, waste containers, tables, sandbags, traffic cones, and merchandise for sale. Convenience stores line the soi, providing a small income and activity for older citizens who stay at home. Interestingly, as you walk along the path, there are also many car repair garages located next to the convenience stores. Here, the soi is a little livelier, with human interactions around the stores and garages, in combination with the chirping sounds of the birds.
Oat’s walk down Soi Sinsapnakorn
The northern periphery of the city has experienced development longer than the western frontier, especially following the expansion of Don Mueng, Bangkok’s first international airport, after World War II. This area was first developed for export rice field production, but became the location of inexpensive, densely packed single-family houses in gated communities when rice farmers sold land to developers from the 1960s. Soi Sinsapnakorn is the main lane of such an older suburban community.
Google Earth view of Soi Sinsapnakorn with 5-minute walk indicated in yellow.
Oat’s walk starts at the back south end of the soi and crosses six blocks of tightly packed single-family, walled, and gated homes along the soi to the west, and attached row houses further east. Potted plants, well-maintained gardens, and mature trees attract songbirds throughout. On the left, just before the soi crosses the Lam Phakchi Canal, there is a play and sports ground, occupied in the afternoon and early evening by a market.
Video of 5-Oat’s minute walk along Soi Sinsapnakorn
The Lam Phakchi Canal is a major trunk canal, a remnant of the irrigation system for export wet rice production. Along the soi, north of the canal, are four townhouse blocks with front extensions used for hanging laundry, car parking, or gardens. Some have been adapted to shophouses occupying the sidewalk with goods for sale. At the intersection with the 6-lane Thep Rak Road, there is an empty booth no longer occupied by a security guard. The soi is no longer gated since a new road was built as a cut-through to the south.
2. Two 5-minute walks in Central Bangkok
Central Bangkok has experienced an explosion of high-rise condominium, hotel, office, and shopping mall construction following the introduction of mass transit at the beginning of the millennium. The first two lines of the BTS Skytrain system, the Silom and Sukhumvit lines, meet at Siam Central Station, adjacent to Chulalongkorn University property. In addition to the research on Bangkok’s developing agricultural periphery along the outer ring road, from 2000 to 2005, McGrath also documented the transformation of this central node in Bangkok following the opening of the Skytrain. Data on the construction of shopping centers in the area since 1960 was compiled on a 3D digital model that also included a timeline that demonstrates the impact mass transit infrastructure had on the urban adaptation of the public realm of Central Bangkok.
Digital timeformations model showing the evolution of Bangkok’s central shopping district between 1960 and 2005., The completion of Siam Central Station at the intersection of the first two BTS Skytrain mass transit lines in 2000 led to the explosive developments that followed.
Bung’s walk down Soi Ratchawithi 6
Soi Ratchawithi 6 is one of many sub-sois off Ratchawithi Road, a major east-west road that leads to Victory Monument. The BTS Skytrain Silom line skirts around the monument’s roundabout. Ratchawithi Road parallels the San Sem canal, a major waterway connecting to the royal garden district of Dusit and the Chao Phraya “River of Kings” further east. The elevated Sirat Expressway crosses Soi Ratchawithi 6 near the canal. The area is densely urbanized containing a mix of single-family homes, shophouses, and many small affordable dormitory apartment buildings for workers and students.
Google Earth view of Soi Ratchawithi 6 with 5-minute walk indicated in yellow.
Video of Bung’s 5-minute walk along Soi Ratchawithi 6
Soi Ratchawithi 6 is crowded with local shops, supplemented by many street vendors, some conducting business from the back of pick-up trucks. All this retail activity supports the workers and the students living in small, single-room apartments along the soi. It is a pedestrian-friendly space with motorcycles occasionally weaving through. Vending and advertising trucks give way to occasional cars for the few single-family residences that still line the soi. Residents, outside of these few family houses are not car owners, so motorcycle taxis drive clients to nearby mass transit spots.
Toon’s walk down Soi Sawasdee, Sukhumvit 31
Soi Sawasdee lies north of Sukhumvit Road, a main commercial corridor of central Bangkok. It can be also accessed from Asok Montri and Petchburi Roads, while also connecting to multiple other sois, such as Sukhumvit Soi 23, 31, 39, and 49, all the way to Sukhumvit Soi 51, known as Thong Lor. The Asok Skytrain stop is just a short motorcycle taxi ride away. Toon has witnessed rapid development in the past decade that she has been living here. She observes that there is a wide range of different levels of income and expenses on this soi, and it is truly an “interstitial space”.
Google Earth view of Soi Sawasdee, Sukhumvit 31 with 5-minute walk indicated in yellow.
Walking east, on the right-hand side, is a relatively expensive sit-in restaurant which has recently set up a takeaway booth offering cheaper prices to help people out during the pandemic. On the opposite side of the road are commercial shophouses which are mostly medium to high-end restaurants. Visitors usually come from more distant areas, but now mostly delivery motorcycles can be seen here. On the right is a government school called Sawasdee School, so the 7-11 and the street food vendors are usually packed with school kids during after-school hours. A large number of parents of this school ride motorbikes, so there are street barriers set up for dropping off students. Despite the density of tall condominiums, the heat island effect is not very severe here as there are a lot of family homes with mature trees. There is also a small canal, roughly a meter wide, running parallel to the soi.
Video of Toon’s 5-minute walk along Soi Ratchawithi 6
Further down the soi, there are three interconnected, made-to-order, street food vendors open daily from 6:00 AM to 1:00 PM, except Mondays, when they are prohibited. The local motorcycle taxi station is located across the street, serving residents, school kids, and teachers. The inhabitants of the soi are reflected in the mixture of restaurants serving Thai, Western and Japanese food. On the right is a construction site for yet another high-rise condominium that has been in the process for the last three years. Around 5:00 to 6:00 AM when workers commute here for work there is a large flux of bicycles.
Detail of Toon’s soi shed map on the left, and cross sections at three hot-spots, showing top to bottom, a vendor’s street cart, the sidewalk food vendors across from the motorcycle taxi stand, and below the raising of properties to avoid flooding on the bottom right.
The drainage of the soi has always been problematic, and during rainy season it always floods so every entrance to a shop or a compound will have a slope up to prevent water from entering the property. At the end of the walk is a plastic bottle collector, who comes once a month. On the right is a high-end, high-rise condominium that just opened last year, while on the left is a French bakery and patisserie shop. The flux of visitors typically come from Thai youth who appreciate the European look of the shop and the authentic pastries.
3. Four Ecological Hot-Spots
The second phase of the workshop furthered the ecological study of a soi by applying the Cinemetrics multi-dimensional approach to examine micro-level studies of one ecological “hot spot” on each soi. Through systematic video framing, soi hot spots were systematically “scanned” or “sensed” over several daily cycles in order to compile robust qualitative and quantitative data sets. Students videoed a hot spot from three angles at a close, medium, and long-range according to the multiple still framing technique of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu. From this information, an interactive 3D digital model was constructed that could also visualize changes over time. Like corresponding architectural drawings plans, sections, and elevations, video frames are seen as 3D data, framing space, but also the transformation and flux of energy, matter, and information, which constitutes the ecological metabolism of the soi.
Plan analysis of the first four shots of Yasijiro Ozu’s film Early Sping. (Drawn by Brian McGrath, 2006). Ozu’s 1956 film opens with two households which share a small alley. Through the film, we see the city of Tokyo undergoing a massive post-war transformation from the inside out.
Car Repair Shop, Soi Phetkasem 88
As Hong noted in her walkthrough, the presence of car repair shops has emerged as a distinct characteristic of Soi Phetkasem 88. These shops play an integral role in the ecological interactions on this soi and are hot spots of social, material, and informational flux. Cars are parked on the soi, and the mechanics cooperate with local convenience stores and food vendors nearby and offer their expertise to the local residents. The interaction of this ecosystem includes a complex social pattern of both the cooperation of the businesses and among the residents of the soi.
Hot-spot video of a car repair shop, Soi Phetkasem 88
Hong documented the affection and attention that the mechanics have for their work. They demonstrated expertise in repairing motorbikes, trucks, racing cars, antique cars, as well as small motor parts. The car repair activities sometimes pollute the soi with oily residues and aerosol spray painting. However, the social care offered by the workers in these shops seems to offset the toxic residue for their soi neighbors.
Hong’s hot-spot digital 3D model of a car repair shop showing social and material interactions, transformations, and flux over time.
The auto repair and the convenience shop workers, as well as residents, demonstrate these caring relationships that were built up over time. This explains why people do not complain much about polluting activities such as spray painting or oil changing. Even though there are residues, wastes, as well as some toxic substances being left behind, other businesses such as restaurants, grocery stores, hairdressers, and cafes are able to thrive due to the influence of the repair shops as it becomes an active hub for automotive work.
Afternoon Market, Soi Sinsapnakorn
With the opening of a new connecting road, an afternoon market has emerged next to the Soi Sinsapnakorn community play and sports area at the Lam Phakchi Canal bridge. Vendors wait for the temperature to drop in the early evening to prepare snacks and take-away meals for students after school, residents out for exercise, or people returning from work. There is a cooperative and complementary spirit among the vendors as each specializes in one course, beverages, or dessert, but they share a seating area and customers.
Video of afternoon market at Soi Sinsapnakorn
Oat observed only exercise activity in the park during his first morning walkthrough, but by returning at different times of day, he was able to document the vendor’s preparation and clean-up, and the portable architecture that they deploy. Interestingly, Oat observed not only human activity at the market, but the relationship between the vendors and the customers with street dogs and birds. Many people fed dogs table scraps, and pigeons and sparrows enjoyed overlooked crumbs on the ground.
Oat’s hot-spot model of the afternoon market documented the interspecies relationships between humans, dogs, and birds.
Street Vendors in Soi Ratchawithi 6
Bung’s morning walk through Soi Ratchawithi 6 showed the leisurely pace of a few students picking up some snacks for breakfast. However, in returning over the course of the day to a particularly dense concentration of mobile street vendors, he was able to document the tightly packed choreography of pedestrians, pick-up trucks, motorcycle taxis, and cars. Soi Rachawithi 6 is a narrow soi that effectively slows vehicular travelers down, as there is no way to quickly traverse the lane in a direct line.
Video of street vendors on Soi Ratchawithi 6
From his video over the course of several days, Bung was able to map the dance between the moving parts in the soi and even document how residents help to direct traffic during times of peak activity. In addition to slow traffic, the soi is also a place to enjoy slow food. Bung’s video documents how each dish is freshly prepared according to the customer’s direction – spicy, sour, sweet, or salty.
Map of mobile street vendors on Soi Ratchawithi 6
Cross-soi cooperation on Soi Sawasdee
Soi Sawasdee, like most of the sois off Sukhumvit, has many high-rise condominiums and commercial buildings as well as older detached houses with gardens, town and shophouses, and construction sites for even more towers. One particular cross-section of the soi, just south of the school, is especially active. A row of three food vendors work opposite a motorcycle taxi station. Both provide essential services to inhabitants and workers in this area, but they also help each other out, exchanging labor, on the part of the motorcycle taxi drivers, with food and drink provided by the vendors.
Video of sidewalk food stalls and motorcycle taxi stand on Soi Sawasdee
There are two food and one drink stall with some seating areas on one side, sharing several sun-shading umbrellas. They have an interconnected relationship with the motorcycle taxi drivers on the opposite side. Some drivers help the food stalls set up at 4:00 AM in trade for lunch. People in this area are regular customers for both services, commuting to-and-from the Skytrain with the bikers, and crossing the road to get lunch with the vendors. The food vendors have everything you’d crave in a made-to-order meal. Aunt Jong has a papaya salad shop and another station grills pork neck on a little gas top. On the opposite side, the motorcycle taxi station uses matching green umbrellas. The water tank behind the drivers also gets refilled by the food vendors.
3D model showing video shooting locations at different times of day.
Some customers have built a close relationship with the food stall owner, even dining on the table with cooking utensils to have casual chitchats with Aunt Jong. She hosts a true “chef’s table”. Later in the afternoon, around 2:00 PM, when there are no more customers, the vendors will start to pack up. Dishes are cleaned in the basin by the station. Umbrellas are knocked on the ground to remove leaves. Then everything gets put away through the gate to the house behind the fence, where one of the stall owners lives and works as a maid. Heavier things are packed and rolled away on a cart, again with the help of the motorcycle taxi drivers. Only the drink stall remains for a few more hours, and a couple of motorcycle taxis still operate late into the evening.
Conclusion
Parallel to the concerted efforts by global alliances and nation-states to confront the twin crises of climate and inequity, there are countless undocumented micro acts of ecological stewardship and social cooperation. Any locality can be seen as a spatially and temporally heterogeneous social-ecological system, and as such, can be analyzed as a hot spot of the potential integration of the architecture and ecology of the city. The metacity framework, explored in the Ecology of a Soi workshop, introduces ecological concepts into everyday architectural contexts in order to begin the process of coordinating and quantifying everyday transformation and flux of energy, matter, and information as important contributions to a just climate transition.
The students’ video data gathering captured the spatial and temporal distribution pattern of human and non-human organisms (plants and animals), their aggregation/abundance, as well as the bidirectional relationships between organisms and flexible self-built environments. They also measured the flux/flow of information, energy, and matter with a focus on processes, interactions, and relations. We present this distributive architectural system of local urban ecological data gathering as fundamental in collectively addressing the twin crises of social justice and climate change. It suggests that we stop seeing cities in terms of centers and peripheries, a residual concept of colonial metropolitanism, but as patchy distributive ecological systems, where every point in the system has equal value.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank INDA Program Director Surapong Lertsithichai, Deputy Director Sorachai Kornkasem, and Third Year Coordinator Scott Drake, as well as the students who participated in the workshop, Aticha Thanadirak, Pattraratee Keerasawangporn, Buris Chanchaikittikorn, Pittinun Tantasirin, Nichaporn Atsavaboonsap, Pheerapitch Phetchareon, Nisama Lawtongkum, Nicha Vareekasem, Raphadson Saraputtised, and Pannathorn Amnuaychokhirun. Special thanks to Dr. Steward Pickett for the many fruitful discussions about integrating the architecture and ecology of the metacity.
Brian McGrath andVineet Diwadkar New York and Bangkok
Vineet Diwadkar is a designer and urban planner working at the intersection of technology, ecology and policy. He is currently Associate Director with AECOM, Primary Investigator with the Terreform Center for Advanced Urban Research, and Adjunct Faculty at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Vineet works with communities, governments and multilateral organizations, infrastructure owners and operators, and researchers to deliver strategic planning and policy, cross-sector infrastructure and development, and to strengthen livelihoods through ecological and heritage conservation.
In a previous article I proposed that we adopt a perspective on preservation that allowed for transformation and change of what is to be preserved. This type of change has a more precise definition: iteration. To iterate means to “cover the same ground twice”, using feedback from the result of previous attempts and from environmental change to improve the result. In this article I mean to demonstrate how the phenomenon of iteration creates complexity and explains the form of our cities, how it relates them to the morphology of nature, and how to use it to reshape the cities we inherited from the static, final plans of 20th century modernist design.
Complex things can have very simple foundations. Natural world morphology and even pure abstract ideas like mathematics are full of very simple iterations—repeated fractals—that rely on the impact of time and the abundant data of physical matter to produce very complex forms.
How complexity is made
Fractal geometry has infiltrated popular culture since it was formalized in the early 80’s from the works of Benoit Mandelbrot. While it has been used mathematically to study the form of cities by researchers such as Pierre Frankhauser and Michael Batty, the insights to be drawn from this research have not yet penetrated the field of practical urbanism, defined as the construction of cities. Connecting the fractal city by Nikos Salingaros approaches the topic by asking what type of city is fractal, without going into depth as to how a fractal is made. Christopher Alexander, in The Nature of Order: The Process of Creating Life, begins to develop profound ideas on the topic.
The basic quality of fractal geometry is that it is iteratively-defined geometry; it must be described in terms of steps involving the result of previous steps. Euclidean geometry, in comparison, is built up by combining basic elements into different, higher-dimension shapes. A point becomes a line, which becomes a triangle, which becomes several different kinds of polygons, and so on. Fractal geometry does not take this approach of combination. Instead of using a triangle to make a square, in fractal geometry we use a triangle to make more triangles, such as this Sierpinski triangle, below.
Sierpinski triangle.
At each step we use the results of the previous step and repeat some procedure, in this case either adding two copies of the previous object below the current one (composition) or replacing the three large triangles each by a copy of the whole object (decomposition). Both approaches will generate the Sierpinski triangle over an infinite number of repetitions.
It is generation and infinity that make fractal geometry so different from euclidean geometry, which can be drawn instantaneously and linearly. Because fractal geometry is recursive, it is in theory infinitely complex, and the only way to see what a fractal object will look like is to run the computation that generates it until we grow tired of watching the process unfold.
Objects substituting themselves for copies of themselves are all around us. It is the basic process that underlies all living things. In a living system a starting point, the embryo, contains a program, DNA, that will be multiplied into trillions of cells. The cells follow the transformations described by their DNA codes by taking certain actions depending on their environmental factors and previous states. Christopher Alexander uses the example of a bone, whose shape evenly distributes structural stress across its surface, by claiming that the form of a bone emerges from a program telling cells to add bone mass where the stress is most intense. It is physical and structural feedback that shapes the bone.
Benoit Mandelbrot wrote The Fractal Geometry of Nature, a book that pretty much started the fractal revolution by providing a mathematical framework for understanding real physical space. He also used fractals to describe the movement of stock prices. In his honor, a mathematician named a curious mathematical object the Mandelbrot set, which you are likely to have heard of or seen before.
For given coordinates in the plane made up of the normal and complex numbers (basically an x and y graph, where y is that funny number i, the square root of -1), each coordinate sum will either spin forever in the orbit of radius 2, or escape after a determined number of iterations. The coordinates which never escape are defined as being part of the set, but they are actually not that interesting. What is interesting is what happens when we count iterations and use the results to color the graph.
If, each time we throw out a pair of coordinates (absolute value bigger than 2 at any iteration), we assign to it a number equivalent to the number of iterations it took to figure out it didn’t belong in the set, we will form groups of iteration equivalence. And once we apply a single, shared transformation (a “DNA code” for the chaotic equation) to these sets, in this case defining a specific color for each iteration that threw out some coordinates, applying this color to these coordinates while drawing the Mandelbrot set, we will generate this kind of geometry:
The total Known “Mandelbrot set” in black. Shades of colors are brighter the more iterations it took to determine they were not part of the set. Image: Wolfgang Beyer, WikimediaStep 6 of a zoom inside the edge of the set. A self-similiar set appears, surrounded by complex shapes. Image: Wolfgang Beyer, Wikimedia
The construction of the Mandelbrot set pictures is a fascinating exercise in computer art, especially since it is so simple but generates practically infinite geometry (the computer eventually runs out of cycles calculating all those iterations at the edge of the set, but a stronger computer can always go deeper).
But before we start thinking that this is only a weird property of iterating over complex numbers, we can simplify the generation of fractals even further. Let’s not complicate things with two dimensions and color. Let’s have only one dimension (a line) and show each succeeding iteration as another line.
Stephen Wolfram wanted to figure out what could happen if he tried every possible combination of the most simple program he could imagine. This is one combination of the program, which he called Rule 30 (or 00011110): This diagram describes the following computation: for each row, observe the cells from the left, middle and right neighbor of the previous row, and select the matching color in the rules.
This is the output of running the program, line-by-line:
Iterate infinitely, get infinate complexity.
Here is what happens when the rule changes from 30 (00011110) to 90 (01011010):
These discoveries led Wolfram to write A New Kind of Science, inviting scientists to study pure computations as a model for understanding the physical world. What we should learn from it is that natural world morphology and even pure abstract ideas like mathematics are full of very simple iterations that rely on the impact of time and the abundant data of physical matter to produce very complex forms. Once we start looking at things through the lens of iteration, we start to see how they might have started very simply and been generated.
Geometric depth from the iteration of technologies
I don’t believe that there is a strict separation between a supposedly modern and traditional architecture. Instead there exist different geometric processes, and while traditionally builders have employed nesting and fractal processes in their work, for perhaps no other reason than that it came naturally to them, modern builders have restricted themselves to linear geometric processes due to drawing their inspiration from Cartesian science and engineering. They then created tools, such as drafting tables and computer-aided design software (drafting tables with an undo button) to make linear processes more efficient.
There are only so many tricks that one can perform with linear geometry, although computers have extended the reach of those tricks. But the confusion of modern architects becomes even more obvious when they ascribe artistic merits to traditional builders who never aspired to be artists at all. One such instance is the introduction by present-day star architect Jean Nouvel of a biography of the 18th century French military engineer Vauban. Nouvel describes Vauban’s fortresses as an early form of land-art and morphing, then asks: could a man be an artist without being aware of it?
Vauban was not an artist at all. Military necessity led him to employ geometric processes that significantly increased the complexity of fortifications, and it is incidental that today we find his projects to have artistic merits. The process through which Vauban’s work became worthy of architectural praise provides the key to the distinction between linear and complex geometry, and the process of iteration of new technologies. We see in the construction of star forts the impact of evolving technology and obsolescence on the landscape of cities. That it had no aesthetic purpose makes it even more interesting.
Vauban was not the inventor of the star fort. Those had been around for more than a century when he began his career for the army of Louis XIV. The basic star fort was a simple concept: the old masonry walls with towers of the medieval age had shown themselves obsolete with the advent of cannons, and they had been replaced with thick banks of earth dug out of trenches. The major flaw of this design, it was soon discovered, was to provide space out of reach of defensive fire at its corners. In the first iteration of the design, the corners were extended into diamond-shaped turrets, introducing a first level of nesting geometry and beginning the genesis of a fractal.
Military engineers kept improving on the star fort technology’s effectiveness by correcting their vulnerabilities. And so, iteration by iteration, the geometric depth of the star fort concept increased.
Vauban’s supposedly great invention was nothing more than repeating this process of increasing geometric complexity by iterating again and again, ultimately creating what many now consider to be his masterpiece, the Citadel of Lille, a showcase of complex geometry made from the refinement produced by centuries of iteration of the star fort concept.
Citadel of Lille, and……the system of fortification of the City of Lille, as designed by Vauban.
It is important to note that the Vauban extensions to star fortifications did not mean that the simple early star fort became obsolete. In fact many simple star forts were built in the 18th and 19th century in America as the military threat was low and simple forts much cheaper to build. The difference between a simple fort and Vauban’s complex fort is one of depth and effectiveness, not technology, and there is a real cost-benefit choice to make. The star fort only became completely obsolete when the concrete bunker replaced it, and the early bunkers reset the process of complex geometry generation to its starting point by being simple concrete shells.
When we seek to create symmetry in an urban environment, we want buildings to be as alike as possible while allowing for adaptation to context. If we understand geometric depth we can build in such a way that poor and expensive buildings have the same basic design in their first levels of geometry, but expensive buildings have many more scales of geometry nested within that basic design. It is not necessary for an entire city to be made of the same materials, for instance. Materials are one of the last visible scales of geometry, and so we can have a city of mud bricks and marble buildings that nevertheless share 95% of their geometry and beautifully complement each other to create an emergent structure, while both poor and rich citizens have a home adapted to their situation.
We can look at these examples from Korean traditional architecture for an illustration. The first image (below) is a simple house and the second is the tomb of a great king. Both buildings use the same design, but the building on the right has much greater depth in this design.
Another interesting comparison is between the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco and the Verrazano Narrows bridge in New York.
The bridges start off from the same technology, but the Golden Gate bridge develops into more depth and detail within this foundational design, and is for this reason the more famous of the two bridges. That doesn’t mean the Verrazano Narrows bridge isn’t beautiful on its own.
Golden Gate bridge, San Francisco.Verrazano Narrows bridge, New York.
And to make things as simple as they can get, we can compare a Sierpinski triangle with four levels of iteration with one that has six levels.
The fractal on the right has all the same elements as the one on the left, but also has more.
The framework of analysis presented here gives us a very powerful instrument through which to understand the shapes of buildings and open spaces of cities and measure their complexity. It does not, however, sufficiently explain what can make a city appear to be a natural object over greater scales.
I will cover another aspect of iteration, one that occurs in a sequence of fractal objects growing together in an ecosystem, in a following article.
In the Lille citadel example that we saw in the previous part, we could observe a building technology achieving greater complexity over time, as each iteration survived or failed a new series of tests. Another aspect of the complexity of a geometric process seen in the Lille citadel example is its contextual adaptation. The shape of the city and the surrounding landscape is chaotic, and the encircling fortifications bend to match this randomness, leading to Nouvel’s claim that it is an early example of morphing. But again there is no deliberate attempt at morphing going on. Since each component of a star fort is defined as a recursive transformation of the basic wall corner, Vauban only had to design the wall and the other parts aligned themselves as a result of the wall’s configuration. If the outcome has artistic value, it is only incidental.
Nesting idiosyncratic details inside commonly shared building plans was how every building in a city was tied together in a web of geometric relationships; these relationships give cities their quality of wholeness and beauty. Forests patterns are similar.
So how did human creations stop being natural art? We look at a tower block, a subdivision or a shopping mall parking lot and see the worst of industrial civilization translated into form. We tolerate them as necessary to achieve the material comfort we expect of our civilization. Those human settlements that are still natural we grant special protections through UNESCO and historical preservation laws. We do not have a law that promotes the creation of new historic settlements because we are not quite certain about how they are made.
I believe that our mistake is not in the things we make, that there is nothing unnatural about a shopping mall parking lot from a functional point of view. What makes the shopping mall parking lots we build so unnatural are errors in configuration of the design elements. To understand this, one must understand the difference between design and configuration.
Adaptation to chaos and complex geometry
A chaotic configuration of a standard design. Source: http://emergenturbanism.com/2008/11/06/design-configuration-and-natural-form/
The form of a tree is an ideal example to illustrate the difference between the two concepts. Any particular species of tree will have a design that is essentially the same from one tree to the next, minus small genomic variation. In fact trees can be cloned, sometimes to such an extent that most of the world’s bananas are produced from the DNA of the same original individual. The design elements in the tree are all the named parts: trunk, branch, leaf, root, bark, and so on. These parts are organized into complex relationships with the whole tree and with each other. Such a relationship is a design solution that achieves a specific result. However, the shape and position of any of the parts is not fixed. In the DNA of the tree are rules that instruct cells to adapt themselves to the larger context the tree finds itself in, through feedback loops from environmental stimuli. The different configuration of parts that result from this cellular action will therefore adopt a position that reflects the particulars of time and place, ensuring that the tree’s form is constantly adapting to its environment, as well as the history of its growth. No two branches or two leaves will be identical, even though the cells operate on identical DNA.
When we look at a traditional village, we find that the same house design is repeated time and time again, but configured in such a way that it is differently adapted than the other houses, like leaves from the same tree. The reiteration of an often very simple design is all that it takes to create a natural landscape, so long as each house is configured to adapt to its context in time and place, and the design elements of the house are themselves configured to adapt to these adaptations.
Palaos Panteleimonas, a mountain village in Central Macedonia, Greece; the same house design is repeated time and time again, but configured in such a way that it is differently adapted than the other houses. Source: http://emergenturbanism.com/2008/11/06/design-configuration-and-natural-form/
Even today this kind of natural adaptation takes place in modern settlements where planning regulation is loose enough or constrained by historical land usage patterns.
The Monaco skyline. Source: http://emergenturbanism.com/2008/11/06/design-configuration-and-natural-form/
This is the skyline of Monaco, which by necessity of the small size of the city had to be built piecemeal but yet is still made from a modern building stock. The piecemeal process allowed each building to be configured to its site and thus, despite the fact that the buildings’ design is very basic modern architecture, the whole landscape looks natural.
Rochina favela, Rio de Janeiro. Source: http://emergenturbanism.com/2008/11/06/design-configuration-and-natural-form/
This the Rocinha favela of Rio de Janeiro. Here the building design is as bare as could be made, the houses being built by poor residents with little capital to invest, but investing it over a long time. The resulting configurations adapt perfectly to the shape of the hill and the other buildings, and the overall look of the place is that of a human jungle. The buildings in Rocinha are just as natural as the trees.
And here is the rule 90 cellular automaton that we previously saw making a Sierpinski triangle, but this time started from a randomized line of black and white cells.
We see the program attempt to generate the fractal, but become constrained by neighboring attempts, and starting the process over. The end result is a chaotic, complex texture.
How do we translate these facts back into our shopping mall parking lot? It means that although the relationship between the parts, for example the lanes, the spaces and the paint that demarcates them, must be defined, the length of the spaces or the thickness of the demarcations do not have to be identical from one element to another. The chaos of natural and historical context requires that they be slightly different from one to the next to properly fit in their environment, and that means the people who build them must be able to make decisions while they are building, integrating the information from the real world at that moment into the planned design. Simply translating an AutoCAD drawing made in an office onto the physical landscape is unnatural, and to demonstrate that the builders typically begin by wiping away anything that might confuse the plan (“grading”).
The design must be expressed into a language that instructs the builders to make configuration choices while constructing the defined forms. This kind of language is how builders have made star forts, traditional towns, and how DNA becomes organisms. It can be as simple as rules of thumb passed orally, or as sophisticated as a procedural model simulated on a computer. What it needs to be is fractal and adaptive.
Path dependence
What does the Lille citadel look like in the present day?
Satellite imagery of Lille citadel. Apple Maps.
As fortifications became obsolete with the invention of artillery, many cities found themselves encircled with open spaces that served no purpose. Some cities took advantage of the situation to expand significantly, as was the case with the Eixample (extension) district of Barcelona, built out of the open space the Spanish military had claimed for a clear line of fire around the city. In some instances the demise of fortifications coincided with the need for larger-scale transportation, and the walls were replaced with boulevards. In other instances walls filled in a more urgent need for recreational green space. But in almost all instances the traces of the walls still remain, the energy being necessary to fully remove such large structures being out of consideration. The conclusion is that the configuration of a whole city is dependent on its past iterations, much like the configuration of a living tree.
Path dependence affects us at any scale that makes energy conservation necessary. The neighborhood scale is particularly affected, since buildings grow and die essentially at random. A single street can see households move in, leave, break apart and form, shops open and close, with no predictable pattern. Buildings must adapt to these circumstances. In order to create something harmonious, a new building may have to find symmetrical elements with neighbors that are 10, 50, 100 and 500 years old.
We find ourselves facing these historical constraints at every iteration in the process of urban growth. But each generation the constraints come from a newer form of obsolete technology. Today our constraints are the inheritance of post-WWII suburbanization. Elevated highways are crumbling and we must decide how or if to rebuild them. Whole subdivisions must renew themselves because the first generation of children who grew up there have now become adults. Shopping malls and other retail enterprises who dominated the late 20th century are shutting down under intense competition from internet commerce. It is the older cities that are adapting the fastest to these trends, mostly because they have already had to adapt to the previous cycle and adaptation is now integrated to their system.
But our grim reality is that at least half of our urban heritage is automobile sprawl, and we do not have the energy to replace it whole. We now must find a way to increase its depth, to repair it and allow it to become something new. We must do this against the resistance of the system of planning that created it in the expectation that the plan would be final and perfect.
What should a natural urban design movement be about?
Classicism describes itself as the imitation of nature. Complexity, on the other hand, does not imitate. It is nature, or perhaps nature imitates complexity. To create a natural urban design movement requires not adopting a certain style or program, but ensuring that any style or program can be adapted to a particular context. What that requires us to do is use different tools than what we have grown accustomed to.
The tradition of teaching the classical orders in architecture was once an imperfect approach to granting architects this skill. The classical orders are one form of geometric substitution system, where large-scale elements are decomposed into smaller-scale elements which form the whole column structure. Thus when many architects, trained to share this system as part of their skill set, worked on completely different buildings, their work could easily form a larger whole; whenever they hit similar problems, they would employ the similar solution they were trained to employ. While two buildings may have completely different sizes or roofs, or one could have a bell tower while the other didn’t, if both buildings had windows and columns, the windows and columns would be made the same way, and thus symmetrical to each other. Nesting ornamental symmetries inside economically-necessary building plans was how every building in a city was tied together in a web of geometric relationships, and it is the density of these relationships that gave cities their quality of wholeness and beauty.
In the early 20th century, a movement in architecture started by Adolf Loos began to denounce the use of classical patterns in architecture, considering it immoral to increase the cost of buildings with columns that had no tectonic purpose when what the modern world needed was efficient construction relying on new technologies. What it was denouncing was a practice we could compare to building a medieval castle inside a star fort, an expensive folly that would be militarily disadvantageous. On that point we must agree with it.
Art Deco was a step in the right direction in adapting ornamental technology to contemporary construction technology, but the technological basis of architecture soon shifted again to glass, concrete and metal construction. This rapid rate of technological obsolescence was in itself turned into an ideology (modernism), then a counter-ideology (post-modernism) and finally the computer-aided confusion we live in today.
There is a glimmer of hope that the process of technological iteration is still working to create complexity. Streets that were deadly automobile speedways are now being converted into complex superblocks and shared spaces, highway underpasses turned into recreational areas or nature preserves, shopping mall parking lots turned into fairs. The modern autotopia is iterating and growing more complex as its first life runs its course. Inevitably, those systems that are not complex, such as zoning codes, are straining and becoming complicated to the point of failure under the pace of change. Their failure will accelerate.
Life finds a way. The metal, glass and concrete structures we build tomorrow may be as marvellous as the Mandelbrot set fractal. The IKEA parking lot may be a pleasant place to meet someone for a morning stroll. The subdivision neighborhood may become a complex tapestry of gardens and shops. Time and change is the only necessary ingredient, every other obstacle comes from a belief we must unlearn.
(This article has gone through many iterations, and began as a series of blog posts in 2007-2008. It will likely be iterated on again and again.)
People of color are at the center of a demographic shift that will fundamentally change the global urban landscape. From the growing proportions of Latino, Asian, and African American residents in resurgent cities of the United States, to the diversifying capitals of Europe and the booming metropolises of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cities populated by people of color are emerging as the new global centers of the 21st century.
Here’s where some of those drawings ‘grew’ to.
For example, we can imagine sustainable cities—ones that could persist in resource, energy, and ecological balance—that are nevertheless brittle to shocks and major perturbations. That is, they are not resilient. Such cities are not truly sustainable, perhaps, but their lack of sustainability is for reasons beyond our usual definition of sustainability.
Challenge #1: Take the concepts of resilience, sustainability and livability beyond metaphorical status…make them operational by being specific
Challenge #2: Acknowledge and confront the differences between resilience, restoration and resistance
The same benefits accrue to other green and blue infrastructure programs that promote resilience, livability, sustainability and social engagement: people get locally engaged in projects that benefit them in multiple ways.
Ruddick begins to make the case that creating spaces that are sustainable requires having a cultural component to “…make a landscape that people will internalize, make their own.” While I agree that people need to know what the place was designed to do, I am not sure artful design alone will engage them. I agree, cultural norms do affect whether a community accepts a non-conventional yard. For example, a native woodlands yard, with little lawn, may sequester carbon, provide wildlife habitat, help with water quality, and more, but these qualities don’t mean it will be accepted by the neighbors. My attempts to let my own yard go has, at times, prompted comments from my neighbors, and they were not of the encouraging kind!
, a book that pretty much started the fractal revolution by providing a mathematical framework for understanding real physical space. He also used fractals to describe the movement of stock prices. In his honor, a mathematician named a curious mathematical object the Mandelbrot set, which you are likely to have heard of or seen before.
This diagram describes the following computation: for each row, observe the cells from the left, middle and right neighbor of the previous row, and select the matching color in the rules.
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