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.)
To ensure the sustainability of life in the city, urban green spaces must be accessible and exist in their multiple types, forms, and dimensions.
As urbanization intensifies around the world, and the devastating effects of global warming are increasingly evident, it is vital to promote urban ecosystems as a tool to achieve ecological balance within the city. Urban ecosystems are the base to guarantee healthy and sustainable places to live, work and visit. Urban settlements can exist in ecological balance and, in fact, without it, urban areas as we know them, have their days numbered. Ecological balance ensures urban developments are sustained and resilient through time.
Designing cities begins with planning at a larger scale. Nature is not governed by the administrative limits imposed by humans. Ecological limits have been thoroughly studied and it is imperative that we respect them. Cities must accommodate for the natural elements and cycles, not the other way around. It is essential to maintain, preserve, and even increase the area of existing rural and natural areas so that urban areas are surrounded by natural environments. In fact, natural areas must enter rural areas, and rural areas must permeate the urban space.
Green corridors bring the ecological structure to and through the city and are essential elements for the ecological balance of cities. The ecological link between the countryside and the city must be restored, promoted, and nurtured as if life in the city depended on it. Because it does! Human connection to nature has been the basis of our existence for millions of years and, in a world where the effects of climate change reign, it is of the utmost importance that cities position themselves in favor of the transition to more sustainable and resilient environments and where the ecological services biodiversity are promoted.
The success of cities, which want to be green and based on nature, is only possible through a better knowledge of the entire ecological cycle, including air, water, soil, plants, and fauna, and through careful considerations about environmental quality, sustainability, and the well-being of populations. Urban ecosystems and green corridors are key elements of the city’s infrastructure, offering technical solutions to complex problems, such as stormwater management, for example. They are social spaces that provide healthy, sustainable, and pleasant spaces for the population’s contact with nature and are a support for biodiversity.
Parque Urbano do Infantado, Loures. Photo: Maria Aragão
All elements of the urban green structure are an important part of the system, each contributing to the balance of the whole. Planted medians and islands, permeable pavements, and small landscaped areas around buildings don’t have much spatial expression on their own, but together are essential for the stormwater management of the city. Balconies and green roofs scattered throughout the city are crucial for insects on their pollen collection route and as resting places for birds on their migratory journeys. The large municipal park is as important to the urban ecological structure as the alignment of trees or the small residential garden. A balanced system works as a whole. As time passes, the greater or lesser capacity for resilience of the elements of the urban landscape is what allows, or does not, for the balance in the system, because this system is open, dynamic, adaptable, and in permanent transformation. The design, development, and evolution of the city must be guided by the pursuit of ecological balance. To ensure the sustainability of life in the city, urban green spaces must be accessible and exist in their multiple types, forms, and dimensions.
Justifiably, the Amazon region has been at the center of climate change discussions and negotiations since the late 1980s. It is not difficult to explain ‘justifiably’ when one is referring to a region of continental proportions, with unparalleled biological and cultural diversity, and whose biogeochemical cycles and atmospheric circulation processes influence the entire hemisphere and beyond. Few regions have changed so much and so fast as the Amazon, particularly the Brazilian Amazon. Urgency about the Amazonian cause is not an exaggeration! I often use Will Steffen’s concept of the ‘great acceleration’ to illustrate the rate and impact of these changes [see figure 1].
The nature of Amazonian cities is one where pollution and resource provisioning intermingle. But, the nature of Amazonian cities is also one of solidarity and hope.
Misguided and destructive development programs, an ingrained view of forests and forest peoples as “unproductive,” and a short-term, extractive mentality intended to feed commodity markets (all with plenty of government incentives) have fragmented and threatened the world’s largest tropical forest. Indigenous and local populations continue to be impacted and transformed, but they have also responded and become major players in territorial governance of the region. Indigenous and sustainable use conservation reserves represent over 40 percent of the Brazilian Amazon today. Yet, depending where one looks, the transformation of the region is just starting. Some estimates indicate plans to build over 330 new dams in the larger basin during the next 25 years. Prospects for expanding mining concessions are equally aggressive, while perspectives to address the region’s most pressing social needs and changing social reality are limited at best.
Figure 1. The great Amazonian acceleration
On a positive note, the region received strong attention during recent COP21 negotiations in Paris. There is wide recognition among the international community that the region’s ecosystems and peoples have a central role to play in global efforts to mitigate climate change. There were significant discussions and promises to slow and even halt deforestation, as well as promises and agreements to secure funds for carbon-based mitigation programs, including support for indigenous and local populations, conservation reserves and local municipalities. Kudos to these advances!
But, there is one important aspect of the region that has fallen between the cracks of public opinion, climate change conversations and—more broadly—discussions about regional sustainable development and futures. Why are ‘urban’ issues and the predicaments of ‘urban’ populations virtually absent from discussions regarding climate change, sustainable development and the future of the Amazon? As put by Brazilian geographer, Bertha Becker, as of the 1980s, the Amazon was already an “urban forest.” Today, anywhere from 76 to 80 percent of the regional population lives in cities, including an estimated 25 percent of the region’s indigenous peoples. The metropolitan regions of the state capitals of Manaus and Belem have each around 2.5 million habitants. The majority of the population in medium and large cities lives in areas considered “sub-normal” in census terms. The nature of Amazonian cities is not alluring!
From “green hell” to “the lungs of the planet” to “God’s paradise,” the historical popular imaginary of the region is obviously not an urban imaginary. When deployed, images of Amazonian cities often invoke the extravagant wealth and architectural features of the capital cities of Belem and Manaus during the rubber boom period (circa 1850 to 1910). The urban continues to be absent during this new phase of regional imaginary, defined by maps of carbon emissions and sinks.
The ways we see the Amazon continue to change. We have come a long way in recognizing the role of indigenous and local communities in shouldering the biggest share of responsibility to halt deforestation and to protect standing forests and water sources. The sophistication of deforestation monitoring and carbon-budget estimates, visible during COP21 and elsewhere online, shows important steps and advances coalescing around the protection of forests and carbon stocks in Amazon. Conversely and surprisingly, many, if not most, maps, charts, atlases and tools portraying the regional environment lack or pay minimum attention to the urban face of the region. In some cases, cities—from 760 to 792 of them (depending on where one puts the boundaries of the region)—are completely absent from maps portraying the anthropogenic transformation of the region.
Without undermining the relevance and importance of these analyzes, considering the demography and distribution of social conditions in the region, it is puzzling to observe this disconnection. One cannot help but be reminded of the 1970s military government development motto for the region—“a land without people, for people without land”—but in an ironic way: “a land [still presented] without people, for people without carbon.” While the “without people” of the 1970s ignored the thousands of indigenous groups and communities throughout the region, today it ignores 3/4 of the regional population, which is mostly very poor, living in even poorer urban conditions, surrounded by political disregard and hijacked by violence.
Figure 2: City centers and population distribution in the Brazilian Amazon. Image: IBGE census data2000- 2010; BF-Deltas Project. Map prepared by Andressa V. Mansur, CASEL, Indiana University.
In many ways, this disconnection between the regional urban reality, development needs and environmental discussions, including climate change programs and financing, is not surprising. This is also the case for the urban realities of other parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia. Urban problems, infrastructure deficiencies and social vulnerability in tropical areas, and in developing countries in general, have received scant attention from climate change policies and finances, at least when compared to concerns regarding carbon emissions and sequestration from ‘rural’ activities. The ‘urban’ remains the ‘elephant in the room,’ too messy to be addressed, yet, paradoxically, too easy to be ignored.
From “green hell” to “gray hell”: the threatening nature of Amazonian cities
The majority of Amazonian cities (81 percent) are small (fewer than 20,000 habitants), but 3/4 of the regional population lives in median and large cities [see figure 2]. Most municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon, and thus their ‘cities,’ are ‘young’ (between 30 and 50 years old). Older municipalities tend to be related to river ways, while younger ones have been created along roadways. Irrespective of how one interprets what counts as ‘urban’ or as a ‘city’ in the region, vis-à-vis other regions, and irrespective of age and size, these areas face an ‘urban’ reality common to many other parts of the world: exponential growth and growing population density, mainly very poor constituents with minimum service provision [see figure 3] and mostly informal employment, high levels of prostitution (particularly in larger cities), and even higher levels of violence related to drug trafficking.
Figure 3: Proportion of households in Amazonian municipalities and state capitals connected to sewage collection. Image: DATASUS 2013; BF-Deltas Project. Map prepared by Andressa V. Mansur, CASEL, Indiana University.
The face of Amazonian urbanization can look unmanageable, and perhaps because of that, it is ignored. Unable to cope with hyper-accelerated urban growth, the sanitation conditions of urban areas have hardly changed, in many cases, worsened during the past two decades. Infrastructural projects in large metropolitan areas such as in Belem and Manaus and others are often not concluded or maintained, increasing problems with flooding and health hazards. Fortunately, provisioning of water and energy has become much better. An analysis developed as part of the BF-Deltas project, focusing on 50 municipalities of the Amazon estuary and delta region, shows that, like the rest of the region [see figure 3], the vast majority of the urban and rural populations are not served by any sewage collection or treatment [see figure 4]. Spatial analysis of delta cities indicates that some form of sewage and garbage collection may be present only in older and historical parts of the region’s larger and older cities [see figures 5 and 6 for examples in Belem and Macapa]. Even though census data may show otherwise, garbage is largely disposed in open-air depositories, street corners, or in drainage channels and river ways. When combined with socioeconomic conditions, housing conditions and location, the majority of urban populations face high (and increasing) levels of vulnerability to flooding and storm surges [see figure 7]. This is the ignored face of climate change vulnerability in the Amazon, one that affects millions of people concentrated in “sub-normal,” lamentable urban conditions.
Figure 4: Sewage disposal in the Amazon Delta region. Image: DATASUS 2013; BF-Deltas Project. Map prepared by Andressa V. Mansur, CASEL, Indiana University.
Figure 5: Change in sewage collection in census sectors of two state capitals of the Amazon delta: Belem (Para) [top] and Macapa (Amapa) [bottom]. Images: IBGE census data2000- 2010; BF-Deltas Project. Maps prepared by Andressa V. Mansur, CASEL, Indiana University.More challenging yet, the nature of Amazonian cities is violent. Urban areas in the Amazon region have shown the highest increase in urban violence in Brazil, including by far the most significant increase in homicides since 2002. Estimates suggest that close to 37 percent of the urban population in Amazonian cities larger than 50,000 inhabitants live in areas controlled by drug traffickers. A recent report by a Mexican-based NGO [El Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y la Justicia Penal] places the Amazonian capitals of Manaus (23rd), Belem (26th), and Macapa (48th) among the 50 most violent cities in the world (41 of which are in Latin America). While figures are hard to come by, larger cities in the region have some of the highest rates of youth prostitution in Brazil.
Figure 6. Examples of sewage in Belem and Macapa. Photos: Andressa V. Mansur
The rural and urban intermingle
When observed from the perspective of families, the Amazon region is indeed a ‘rural-urban continuum.’ Family networks shape the urban and rural landscapes of the region, supporting intense patterns of circulation and exchanges across short and long distances. These networks allow people to maintain some level of access to urban services as well as access to rural resources and livelihood opportunities. More than half of the population in a substantial number of municipalities depends on government conditional cash transfer programs, which must be collected in urban centers. This arrangement has further attracted people to the surroundings of urban areas during the past decade, strengthening connections between ‘rural’ areas and cities.
While this reality is widespread, it is still evolving. Over 27 years ago, when I started to do fieldwork in the region (Amazon estuary-delta, the Transamazon, and other parts), transportation posed concrete limitations to mobility and circulation choices. Today, in many parts of the region, transportation is conditioned by seasonal changes (rainfall and flooding still rule), but it has greatly improved. The same is true for communication and access to energy, the Internet and a broad array of national and global media. Differences between urban and rural lifestyles are becoming less significant, but the city increasingly lures the rural youth, including indigenous youth.
It is not only access to services, education and economic opportunities that have attracted people to urban areas. No matter where or how poor or how violent a city locale, for many residents, a house in the city provides security—or at least a sense of security—from the uncertainties of rural life. The vast shantytowns (a term often avoided in the region in favor of more euphemistic ones) of Amazonian capitals or the mushrooming peripheries of medium and small towns are populated by families—who either lacked land rights or were ‘abandoned’ without infrastructure or social services in agrarian colonization settlements and indigenous areas—or people who otherwise completely lack opportunities to make a living and feed a family. Depending on the season, Amazonian forests and rivers can be plentiful or scarce. Having a place in the city represents having ownership of a roof, as well as access to schools, informal work opportunities, economic niches and social activities that give a sense of access to modernity, whatever people imagine modernity to be.
The fast urban growth of Amazonian cities is also a result of the changing expectations of Amazonians, particularly the youth, and increasingly the indigenous youth. As in other parts of the world, the region is experiencing its own ‘de-agrarianization’ process, changing forms of livelihood and social identities away from the peasantry (but not necessarily from indigenous identity). Much like in other parts of the world, moving to a city opens up opportunities for those previously trapped in sharecropping and indentured servitude, demeaned social identities, kinship obligations, and/or perverse gender relations. As bad as living over open sewage, surrounded by violence can be, cities are still places of opportunity, and offer no shortage of festivities.
The nature of Amazonian cities is one where pollution and resource provisioning intermingle, whether one fishes at the confluence of a sewage stream or wades polluted channels to access a palm tree bearing fruits. Pollution and garbage, even extreme amounts of it, are largely ignored, both by residents and decision-makers. The illusion that the mighty Amazon and its tributaries can absorb and dissolve almost all of the sewage and industrial pollution generated in the region offers a convenient excuse for not dealing with the problem.
The Amazon is often referred to as the land of NGOs and social movements. But very little attention is given to the predicaments of cities. While there is increasing mobilization related to housing rights, few organizations and social movements are concerned with environmental conditions in urban areas. The few heroes trying to advance the cause of urban ‘environmental violence’ face risks and threats. The sense that sewage and garbage pollution are secondary or ignored issues is mind boggling considering their implications for well-being and health of the largest portion of the Amazonian population.
Figure 7: Belem residents document flooding and spill of sewage drainage channels in 2006 (top), 2011 (middle) and 2013 (bottom). Photos: José Alexandre de Jesus Costa and members of the “Frente dos Moradores Prejudicados da Bacia do Una” Belem, PA, Brazil
It is important to remember that behind this reality are deeper structural issues. Most municipalities are insolvent and depend on transfers from the federal government. They are in perpetual deficiency when it comes to providing services for urban growth so accelerated that it can change the face of a city from year to year, or even from month to month. Many Amazonian municipalities struggling with deteriorating urban conditions witness strong, billion-dollar resource economies from agriculture, mining, forest products and fishing, and yet are not able to harness even the tiniest share of rent and taxes. Corruption is another problem, but it is too complex to fit in this essay. The take home point here is that municipal economies, and thus the economies of cities, are largely disconnected from resource economies of the region (including an increasing carbon economy), and are entangled in a historical, structural trap.
But, the nature of Amazonian cities is also one of solidarity and hope. I hardly remember listening about complains from the many migrants and urban residents I have worked with over the years. Regrets about lack of services, disregard and violence often give way to remarks about opportunities, popular culture and the privilege of owning a house. Family and kinship networks extend support to vast areas. There is never a closed door to a kin member in Amazonian houses. Fishes, fruits, shrimp, manioc flour and occasional bushmeat circulate widely. It is a society of reciprocity and reciprocity obligations. This explains, in part, the high density of urban areas, where multiple families share space layered with compartments and hammocks.
There are many faces of the nature of Amazonian cities that are bright and lifting, and I intend to focus on these aspects for my next essay. Here, my intention is not to perpetuate a sense of pessimism, but to recognize the urban as the ‘elephant in the room’ in sustainability and climate change discussions about the region. The face of urban conditions in the Amazon is the face of sustainability challenges and climate change vulnerability that we have not addressed, at least enough. This puts the question of climate change mitigation financing in a different perspective. While most attention seems to go to who would be paying for ‘it,’ less attention is focused on where and to what purpose these funds should be used. This is the underlying challenge of aligning climate change mitigation and the newly agreed Sustainable Development Goals.
I recently argued (at the Global Landscape Forum happening in parallel to COP21) that the sustainability of the Amazon as a region is and will be shaped by its evolving urban networks and forms of urban growth—in other words, by the nature, the networks of its cities. Amazonian cities are shaping the flows of people and resources and the conditions of local and regional ecosystems, and will continue to shape the region’s landscape in the next 20 years and beyond.
As is the case for most of Latin America, the most pressing and difficult sustainability challenge for the Amazon is to mobilize resources, visions, technology and political support to transform the nature of its cities.
Special thanks to Andressa V. Mansur for preparing the maps presented above and to José Alexandre de Jesus Costa, resident of Belem, and members of the “Frente dos Moradores Prejudicados da Bacia do Una” [an organization of harmed residents in the Una River watershed] for providing photographs.
Resources
Belmont Forum Deltas project: Catalyzing action towards sustainability of deltaic systems with an integrated modeling framework for risk assessment (BF-DELTAS). Support from the Belmont Forum funding agency to 24 collaborating international institutions. The US National Science foundation has funded research conducted by the author and colleagues at Indiana University (NSF # 1342898).
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In winter 2009, Houston Wilderness hosted an inaugural meeting of what would become the Metropolitan Greenspace Alliance. Today the Alliance is a national coalition of coalitions working in ecologically, culturally, and economically diverse communities across the US. Alliance members represent Portland, Oregon; Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, and Baltimore.
Over 80% of the population in the United States now lives within urban megaregions, and this trend of rising urbanization is similar in countries around the world. Amidst significant investments in “grey” infrastructure to support growing metropolitan regions, conserving nature is increasingly challenging. And, more often than not, the most significant challenge is protecting and restoring natural systems that provide clean air and water and other ecosystem services that nature provides us.
Metropolitan regions that effectively incorporate greenspace and Green Infrastructure into their urban fabric share several things in common, often including ample parks and natural areas, both in quantity and equitable distribution; innovative stormwater management; climate adaptation strategies; public transportation and recreational trail networks; and sustainable food production and delivery systems. Whether it’s Vancouver, Reykjavík, Malmö, Portland, or any number of cities around the world that are “green” or in the process of “greening,” the collaboration among governments, nonprofits, scientists, natural resource agencies, and urban planners is essential to transform a place from grey to a green, living, interconnected network of systems that benefit humans and the unique urban ecosystem they inhabit.
The following case study from Metropolitan Greenspace Alliance member Amigos de los Rios describes an almost century-long process of Los Angeles’ greening that should inspire other cities and metropolitan regions toward a greener future. The struggles faced and overcome are not unique to Los Angeles. This story is a glimpse into how universal urban sprawl and development are and the importance of incorporating Green Infrastructure principles into local and regional urban design.
Metropolitan Greenspace Planning in Los Angeles and Beyond
William L. Allen, III, The Conservation Fund
Claire Robinson, Amigos de los Rios
Green Infrastructure Visions for Metropolitan Greenspace Alliances. Credit: MGA
In the late 1920s, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce commissioned two highly-regarded landscape architecture firms to create a vision for the region. Leaders became deeply concerned that traffic, air pollution, overpopulation and a lack of access to parks would harm the area’s future.
Two firms—Olmsted Brothers and Harland Bartholomew & Associates—crafted a prescient plan focused on addressing a scarcity of playgrounds and parks, as well as burgeoning traffic, air pollution and a population rapidly swelling to over two million.
Original Plan Graphic, Credit: Olmsted-Bartholomew Associates
The plan wasn’t adopted, and today these challenges have grown exponentially as the county’s population surges beyond 10 million and the natural landscape is dramatically altered to meet the needs of more residents.
Los Angeles County spans 4,000 square miles and is home to 88 cities and more than 10 million people. Instead of capitalizing on its unique assets of ethnic diversity and picturesque geography, though, the county is cut off from itself. Between mountains and forests to the north and east, and beaches to the west, infrastructure is grey, freeways are gridlocked and quality of life is uneven.
There’s no other place in the United States quite like it; Los Angeles County on its own would be the eighth most populous state in the U.S. and the 88th most populous country in the world. The valley holds nearly one-quarter of California’s population and is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the nation. Its geology is unusual too. Framed by mountains and forests to the north and east, and beaches and oceans to the west, its interior is dominated by grey. Large-scale infrastructure supports a vast population, resplendent with gridlocked freeways, bustling ports, paved riverbeds, and concrete irrigation channels. In the city of Los Angeles alone, average life expectancy differs by 12 years from the lowest-income portion to the highest. Countywide, only 36 percent of children live within one-quarter mile of a park, compared to 85 percent in San Francisco.
The nonprofit Amigos de los Rios decided this could not go on. “We are in the middle of a quiet crisis,” said Claire Robinson, president of the Amigos de los Rios. “We’re not addressing public health, quality of life, and our relationship to nature.” As renowned urban planning writer Jane Jacobs once wrote: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
In 2005, Amigos began planning and designing a 17-mile loop of parks and greenways (often underutilized spaces owned by public agencies) along the Río Hondo and San Gabriel Rivers on the east side of Los Angeles that would connect nearly 500,000 residents. The plan’s parks and greenways provide desperately needed recreational areas for communities suffering from extreme density and urban decay, and the associated social and health issues.
The Emerald Necklace of east Los Angeles County. Credit: Amigos de los Rios
As part of this effort, Amigos has helped convene the Emerald Necklace Coalition, comprised of 62 member agencies with a connection to East Los Angeles. All Emerald Necklace Coalition members have signed the Emerald Necklace Accord, a legal document that pledges its signatories to work collaboratively to preserve and restore the Los Angeles and San Gabriel watersheds and their rivers and tributaries for recreational open space, native habitat restoration, conservation, and education.
In 2008, the vision was expanded to help unify a vast region of Southern California, from the desert through the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, by linking more than 1,500 acres of parks and open spaces along an interconnected greenway around the Río Hondo, San Gabriel, and the lower Los Angeles Rivers.
Initial Conceptual Map of Expanded Vision Plan. Credit: Amigos de los Rios
In 2012, Amigos de los Rios commissioned The Conservation Fund to take a fresh look at how to design and use Green Infrastructure to reconnect people and wildlife with the county’s lands and waters. Over the course of 18 months, the Fund worked with Amigos to convene focus groups, synthesize existing plans, analyze mapping data, and evaluate implementation strategies across the county.
The Fund found that despite the significant alteration of the natural landscape over the past century, many of the core recommendations of the Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan are as relevant today as they were in 1930.
The Emerald Necklace Forest to Ocean Expanded Vision plan, released just a few months ago, has created a contemporary vision—calling for a strategically managed and interconnected network of parks, rivers and lands, designed to re-create Los Angeles County as a better place to live, work and play for decades to come. Amigos and The Conservation Fund hope this ambitious expanded vision is a blueprint to unite the county. Rather than starting from scratch, it integrates common elements from existing plans and outlines specific implementation strategies to create a network of parks and public open spaces connected by greenways and trails.
Expanded Vision Plan Map. Credit: The Conservation Fund, Amigos de los Rios, Hawkins Partners
The plan focuses on eight mutually-reinforcing goals under a common vision. In addition to increasing access to a network of equitably distributed transportation—walking, biking and riding trails—it recommends the creation of functional and multi-purpose natural (“green”) and built (“grey”) spaces. The plan addresses the region’s critical water supply, identifying key recommendations to improve how this vital resource is managed to protect local water quality, and assure ample water supply.
The plan prepares communities to be resilient to inevitable effects of climate change, which can be fostered by a community-wide culture that embraces the benefits of conservation, restoration and recreation. Regional wildlife and natural area “anchors” will be enhanced and restored. Finally, the Plan aims for a robust and durable economy where jobs are created that support the multiple benefits of green infrastructure.
Despite the very clear collaborative priorities and strategies outlined in the plan, the key to lasting success will be if the plan is able to instill “a fierce sense of urgency” among the many partners in Los Angeles County that are needed to make this a reality. The plan encourages cities, counties, school districts, water agencies, public health and environmental groups to put a human face to infrastructure and accelerate improvements now for the benefit of Los Angeles County residents and its collective health.
It has been more than 80 years in the making, and it’s the second—and perhaps last—chance to get it right. It will take 20 to 30 years, cost between $200 million and $1 billion, and involve coordination and funding from the region’s 88 cities, private foundations, public bond issues, and public agencies like Caltrans, the US Army Corps of Engineers, Southern California Edison, and the LA Department of Water and Power. “There’s a full awareness that this would be a slog to get a lot of this done,” notes Will Allen, plan lead for the Fund. “There’s a lot of money out there. A lot is convincing people to invest in things that are multiple benefit.”
Expanded Vision Plan Map. Credit: The Conservation Fund
The City of Los Angeles is on board. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said: “The Emerald Necklace Expanded Vision Plan is a visionary framework to link important L.A. area watersheds and the communities they touch. Much in the way that our vision for the L.A. River encompasses its entire 51-mile length, both inside and outside our city limits, the Expanded Vision takes a regional approach to providing much needed open space in some of our most park poor neighborhoods.”
The Emerald Necklace Forest to Ocean Expanded Vision Plan for Los Angeles County, California is available for download here.
William L. Allen, III, Chapel Hill Claire Robinson, Los Angeles Mike Houck, Portland
Claire founded and serves as Managing Director of Amigos de los Rios. Her approach has led to Amigos de los Rios unique success in creating beautifully designed, culturally relevant green infrastructure in open spaces.
Mike Houck is a founding member of The Nature of Cities and is currently a TNOC board member. He is The Urban Naturalist for the Urban Greenspaces Institute (www.urbangreenspaces.org), on the board of The Intertwine Alliance and is a member of the City of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission.
Story notes: Federal regulations make clean drinking something close to a guaranteed right for residents of cities in the United States, but not all urban water systems are created equal. Last year, independent scientists and grassroots activists discovered a widespread problem with lead levels in the water pouring into the city of Flint, Michigan. Though local officials assured the public that Flint’s water supply was safe, independent tests revealed lead levels in the water flowing from some homes that were comparable to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s definition of hazardous waste.
This podcast episode, produced by Philip Silva, explores “citizen science” efforts to uncover the truth about lead levels in Flint’s water supply last year. Philip spoke with LeeAnne Walters, a Flint resident who struggled to make sense of the sudden unexplained illnesses plaguing her family shortly after Flint stopped buying water from the nearby city of Detroit and started pumping water directly from the polluted Flint River. Philip also spoke with Siddartha Roy, a researcher in the Flint Water Study at Virginia Tech, the lab that teamed up with local activists in Flint to independently measure the lead in the municipal water supply.
The collaboration between residents like LeeAnne Walters and the scientists at Virginia Tech revealed a municipal water quality crisis that now has cities across the United States scrambling to demonstrate that their water is, indeed, up to Federal standards. The World Health Organization and UNICEF estimate that 884 million people around the world lack access to safe drinking water. Yet most North Americans take for granted that government scientists and regulators are keeping a watchful eye on the quality of water that flows through municipal treatment and supply systems. Philip spoke with Caren Cooper, an expert on citizen science at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, to learn about the role that grassroots researchers often play in uncovering environmental injustices and keeping local regulators accountable.
Philip Silva
New York
We often think of the city and the country as separate, and that development planning and urban sustainability ends at the city boundary. But this isn’t true—in a planning and sustainability sense, the city and the surrounding rural areas are deeply linked. With this in mind, I would like to discuss a plan for the sustainable coexistence of a section of forgotten rurality near the megacity of Bogota, Colombia, and how a civic response is being molded to draw attention to the issues involved.
Safeguarding a section of the Bogota countryside should be a transversal management concern for all local public administrators.
Bogota’s metropolitan land area is 75 percent “rural” with 1 percent of the population and 99 percent is found in the 25th percent that correspond to the urban area. This scarcely-populated region of the countryside is home to the Sumapaz high mountain meadow (one of the largest in the world), which is the source of much of the water consumed by the city below; its soil yields abundant agricultural output, and it is a major ecological corridor in the region. At the moment, much of Bogota’s countryside is filled with agro/eco systems and nature reserves.
Bogota: Countryside and City. Image: Aerofotografia , 1960 – IGAC
The Thomas Van Der Hammen Nature Reserve is set within the Bogota countryside: this 1,400 hectare reserve, put into the Public Trust more than 15 years ago, serves as a green corridor that links the city’s eastern mountain border to its northern-perimeter marshlands and then makes its way to the banks of the Bogota River, which lies at the city’s western edge. This nature reserve environmental plan has been divided into 6 percent percent conservation area, 44 percent percent sustainable use, 40 percent restoration, and 10 percent for landscape protection. Its development will have an enormous impact on the region’s ecological future.
At the moment, the future of this Nature Reserve is uncertain, due to the fact that the current Mayor of Bogota (as of 2016) has suggested he would like to modify the Reserve’s bylaws—which consecrate its exclusive conservation use—and open it to housing construction. The mayor’s proposal has been controversial: proponents and opponents are widely separated on the issue, with both claiming that judicial and institutional regulations support their respective viewpoints.
In this article, we will offer the Fundación Cerros de Bogota’s1 [Bogota Mountain Reserve Foundation] position on these issues. We believe that the Thomas van der Hammen Nature Reserve holds enormous potential for Bogota’s metropolitan population of 9 million people that can be turned into a public scenario for ecological and educational activities. Our goal is to protect the Reserve’s landscape and to work with all concerned so that this key urban and regional ecological resource does not become a hostile zone that pushes people apart. On the contrary, we, at the Mountain Reserve Foundation, hope to bring people together, in a peaceful setting, to actively, consciously, and constructively discuss the Nature Reserve’s future.
Starting points
Within our proposal, several transversal areas of thoughts that offer starting points for a long-term, structured vision:
The cultural value of Bogota’s countryside landscapes and activities associated with soil quality and cultural and agricultural value.
The resilience of a landscape typified by river and rainfall flooding.
The diversity of recreational and ecological activities for the region’s population.
The contribution of biodiversity and the economic challenge of preserving public nature reserves.
The nation’s population policies, which transcend this discussion.
Background
The founding of the Thomas van der Hammen Nature Reserve in 1999 marked a milestone for the defense of biodiversity; its ongoing conservation also bears testament to the success of grassroots ecological movements joined by the Colombian National Academy of Science in helping to establish a new urban development model. Their joint campaign to place the Reserve in the Public Trust began with its being approved first by the Regional Natural Resources Agency, or CAR, and later, by other pertinent governmental entities. At this moment, it is important to recall these legal underpinnings upon which the Reserve’s Public Trust rests when the public interest is being challenged by legal claims put forward by construction companies.
In contrast to the van der Hammen Reserve’s precise legal status, the case of Bogota’s eastern mountain border—the region’s greatest cultural and ecological patrimony—has been marked by a long period of official regulatory limbo that has allowed growing urbanization in a deteriorating landscape. We do not want the same thing to happen to our other public nature reserves.
The Thomas van der Hammen Nature Reserve holds enormous potential for environmental restoration, outdoor recreation, and public land use. Developing all of these would improve the quality of life and the availability of recreational activities for the people of Bogota, and at the same ensure the region’s ecological connectivity. Therefore, the van der Hammen Nature Reserve should be classified into both the city’s Ecological Master Plan and into its system of parks and recreation. Assignment to both categories is very important; even if it could sometimes bring about a clash of interests, these could eventually be reconciled as the resource-use policy is being put into place2.
Photo-montage superimposed on a Google Earth photograph that shows the Regional Natural Resources Agency´s (CAR) Master Plan. Prepared by J. Correa for Diana Wiesner
Currently, the Natural Resources Master Plan takes these two roles—ecological and recreational—into account. However, they need to be analyzed to a greater degree so that they can be successfully integrated into existing programs.
Current photo of the VDH Reserve as it reaches the Bogota River. Photo courtesy of Apertura VisualPossible inertial scene in the case that no action is taken. Photo-montage, Diana Wiesner; produced by Johan Correa
To make sure that this inertial situation is not the final scene—an outcome that neither those who favor housing construction in the van der Hammen Reserve nor those who oppose it would like to see—we have put together an image of what haphazard construction, carried out under the risk of floods, would look like and how it would degrade the landscape; something similar has already happened near the banks of the Bogota River. See Image No. 2.
The argument that allowing supervised building in the van der Hammen Reserve would help bring an end to the urban sprawl over most of the Bogota plateau is similar to the argument that if housing construction in the Bogota Mountain Reserve were permitted, then the Bogota countryside would stop being divided up into building sites—particularly in the satellite villages of Calera and Sopo. But we, as active and aware citizens, know how difficult it is to create and defend a Nature Reserve; therefore, we are making an urgent request to seek out alternatives to building inside a nature reserve. One such alternative would be to encourage greater housing density inside the city itself in central areas such as those around the Simon Bolivar Park where infrastructure and recreation facilities already exist, or in other zones near thoroughfares and ongoing urban renewal projects.
The effects of urban sprawl concern the entire nation, so whether the van der Hammen Reserve exists or does not is not truly essential to solving this issue, particularly in the case of the urban sprawl around Bogota’s satellite towns and cities on the high mountain plateau. Each municipality and city government have their own zoning laws. Therefore, what is urgently needed is a regional network of city governments working together to hold back urban expansion. This concept was put forward in the Regional Zoning Master Plan in 2004.
Let’s review a few examples of urban or suburban woodlands that have not been used for detaining urban development, but have, instead, contributed to the coexistence of a number of uses: recreational, productive, ecological. These forested areas function as nature reserves that benefit the local population affected by climate change—and in the conservation of eco-systems.
There are examples from China, Mexico, Argentina, Germany and Canada, to name just a few that illustrate how conservation can be integrated with sustainable cultural, patrimonial, educational, and scientific activities.
Xochimilco Park in the suburbs of México City. Floating fields (chinampas) where food and flowers are grown. Photo: Michael CalderwoodHountain Park in Shanghai, China. An industrial and agricultural zone with public access.Recuperation of Pre-Columbian agricultural techniques (camellones), amphibious parks and lakes in the Conejera marsh and along the banks of the Bogota River. Images by Diana Wiesner, production by AYP team.
Our proposals for the van der Hammen Nature Reserve echo the recommendations included in the Regional Master Plan: greater public access to the park, commercial agriculture with an experiment station, on-site research projects, and educational and training centers.
So that this Nature Reserve can be transformed into the park we have been describing, its land use titles need to be secured through binding agreements on the legal transfer of building and contractual rights, so that its long-term use for public and ecological services can be assured.
Grassroots organizations are invited to share their ideas on how to make the Reserve economically viable. These proposals should be placed within the proper legal framework and focus on serving the public interest.
Our public use proposals are centered on recreation, sustainability, and agriculture that will evolve in amphibian spaces, resilient landscapes, and naturally fertile meadows, instead of in the Reserve’s current kikyograss pastures; our fields would be seeded with wild plants, where pre-Columbian mounds could be built up and used for a number of purposes, including weekend family outings, school excursions, and as park facilities for residents in the city’s Northern Zone.
Recuperation of meadow lands for public use. Image by J Correa to Diana WiesnerWoodlands and lake project for recreation and bird watching. Produced by J Correa for Diana Wiesner.
Why only one piece of land?
Keeping the Reserve intact in one continuous land mass safeguards the area against flooding, provides generous spaces for sports and recreation, and enhances environmental conservation; but, above all, this unbroken land mass fulfills a cultural function by preserving the Bogota plateau landscape in the northern part of the city. It is important to keep in mind that any landscape should be regarded as a complex entity that combines natural and cultural values, both tangible and intangible. In this specific landscape, the rural past and present come together in the north of Bogota. We are encouraging citizen groups to take part in the protection of this irreplaceable piece in the local countryside.
A fertile and diverse gateway to Bogota. Produced by Diana Wiesner with the collaboration of Apertura Visual digital image.
In a final note, the plans for the highway system that would run through the Gateway to Bogota area in the north of the city should keep the region’s interlocking ecosystems in mind. This can be done by building overpasses in the Torca and Guaymaral marshlands.
These structures would stand as landmarks for a competitive city, one linked by functional and fertile thoroughfares that protect its socio-ecosystems. This socio-ecological asset, located on the Bogota Plateau, will be a cornerstone in future plans for Bogota and the region. Safeguarding a section of the Bogota countryside should be a transversal management concern for all local public administrators, and it should be included in the Regional Zoning Master Plan.
Projects for sports, camping, plant nurseries, flower shows and recreation. Produced by Johann Correa for Diana Wiesner.
What will the role of the countryside be in the city without borders?
Painting by Colombian painter of the Sabana de Bogotá: Antonio Barrera 1979
The Bogota Mountain Reserve Foundation is participating in the current debate on the future of the van der Hammen Nature Reserve, in part, because we feel it is important to defend community achievements. The people of Bogota should be supported in their search for legal counsel in preserving their environmental heritage—in this case, the van der Hammen Nature Reserve, which is part of the countryside in a fertile and biologically diverse city. We are putting together a participatory tool that will aid citizens when dealing with governmental agencies in the decision-making process on nature reserves. We believe that conservation of the countryside is of the utmost importance in a country that is committed to weaving a peaceful social fabric.
This article is based on a presentation given by Diana Wiesner-Ceballos at the Colombian State Council Forum, “Challenges for Bogota: The Bogota City Council Debates the Thomas van der Hammen Nature Reserve”, on April 18, 2015 in the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Library, Bogota.
References
1. Fundacion Cerros de Bogota: www.cerrosdebogota.org We belong to a group of civic volunteers whose representative is the Bogota Mountain Reserve Foundation (Fundación Cerros de Bogotá), a civic organization dedicated to the conservation, care and public use of the Bogota Mountain Reserve and a Member of the Verification Committee on the Council of State ruling.
2. Contributions of the Advisory Board for the van der Hammen Nature Reserve provided by our group team: Alberto Galan, Sabina Rodriguez Van der Hammen and Barbara Santos. www.reservathomasvanderhammen.co
* * * * *
La Ruralidad Olvidada: Un Caso Para una Gestión Participativa en la Sabana de Bogotá
La mayor atención de los estudios, planes de ordenamiento y la gestión territorial está concentrada en las zonas urbanas. Sin embargo, se ignora el papel y la importancia de las áreas rurales de las grandes ciudades, las cuales terminan siendo el resultado de la dependencia funcional con la ciudad y de los sistemas de servicios entre áreas urbanas colindantes. Por lo anterior, pongo a consideración un caso de la ruralidad olvidada en la Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia y la posibilidad de habilitar una herramienta de participación ciudadana que ponga en relieve la viabilidad y futuro sostenible de estas áreas en coexistencia con las grandes urbes.
Garantizar una pieza del Paisaje Rural de la Sabana dentro del área rural de Bogotá debe ser un propósito transversal a cualquier administración de turno y debe quedar incluida dentro del Plan de Ordenamiento.
En la ciudad de Bogotá, el territorio rural ocupa el 75% de su área total y contiene tan solo el 1% de la población capitalina. En esta área se encuentra uno de los páramos más grandes del mundo, el páramo de Sumapaz, el cual provee parte del agua que consume la región y el suelo de estas áreas rurales tiene una calidad alta agrológica y de conectividad ecológica. La principal función de las áreas rurales es para los agro ecosistemas y las reservas naturales. En contraste, el area urbana de Bogotá ocupa el sólo el 25% del área total del territorio y contiene con el 99% de su población.
Bogotá: Ruralidad y ciudad. Aerofotografia , 1960 – IGAC
En la actualidad la zona rural de Bogotá cuenta con la Reserva Thomas Van Der Hammen, ésta fue declarada por la Sociedad Civil desde hace más de 15 años y cuenta con una extensión de 1.400 hectáreas, siendo su principal función la conectividad ecológica entre los ecosistemas de los Cerros Orientales, la cadena montañosa que colinda con el borde oriental de la ciudad, los humedales del norte de la ciudad y el Río Bogotá, el cual bordea la ciudad al occidente. Esta Reserva tiene 6% de área de conservación, 44% para uso sostenible, 40% para restauración y 10% para protección del paisaje, tiene un enorme potencial para el futuro ecológico de la región.
Actualmente, el futuro de la reserva es incierto debido a que la actual administración distrital está planteando la posibilidad de modificarla para ubicar vivienda al interior de la misma, esto ha sido objeto de enormes polémicas en la ciudadanía, provocando una gran polarización respecto al futuro de la Reserva, haciendo que se afecte la institucionalidad y la estabilidad jurídica que permitió consolidar esta área. En el presente artículo se presenta la posición de la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá1 frente al debate del futuro de la reserva, la cual consiste en poner a consideración un imaginario del potencial que tiene dicha reserva para la población de la región: un área de uso público y aprovechamiento ecológico y pedagógico para los 9 millones de habitantes de la capital. La propuesta busca que la protección del Paisaje y que el fortalecimiento de la Estructura Ecológica Principal de la ciudad, y de la región, no se convierta en una confrontación ideológica que genere polarización, sino por el contrario que la coyuntura permita abrir posibilidades de enriquecer la discusión. Es por ello, que se hace una invitación a fortalecer un dialogo propositivo y una participación activa y consciente, acciones propias de una cultura de la paz.
Consideraciones iniciales
Dentro de la propuesta, se parte de unas consideraciones frente a temas transversales que deben ser tenidos en cuenta como elementos estructurantes del ordenamiento para una visión a largo plazo:
El valor cultural del paisaje rural de la Sabana de Bogotá y las actividades asociadas a la calidad del suelo.
La funcionalidad de un paisaje resiliente a la inundación congruente con la dinámica del río y las lluvias.
Una oferta recreativa y ambiental diversa en intensidades para la población de la región.
La contribución a la biodiversidad y el reto económico de garantizar la realidad de reservas Naturales declaradas.
La política poblacional a nivel nacional que trasciende esta discusión.
Consideraciones iniciales
Ante el debate acerca de la realinderación y sustracción de áreas en la declarada Thomas Van Der Hammen, ponemos a consideración los siguientes puntos:
La constitución de la Reserva Thomas Van Der Hammen en el año 1999 representó un logro ciudadano en la defensa de la biodiversidad, en este sentido, su conservación significa, también, el reconocimiento de los esfuerzos de la Sociedad Civil y de la Academia Nacional de Ciencia por la adopción de un nuevo modelo de desarrollo urbano. La propuesta técnica de la iniciativa ciudadana fue avalada por la CAR y por las instancias judiciales. Si se reivindica la seguridad jurídica para los empresarios, es igualmente válido brindar estabilidad jurídica para la planeación en las decisiones de interés colectivo.
Los cerros orientales, mayor patrimonio natural y cultural de la región ha sido víctima de un largo limbo jurídico que ha permitido mantener su presión de urbanización y deterioro. No queremos ese futuro para otras reservas declaradas.
La Reserva Thomas Van Der Hammen tiene un potencial de restauración, recreación y uso público, que contribuiría significativamente a mejorar la calidad de vida y la oferta recreativa de los bogotanos, al mismo tiempo permite que esa área favorezca en el futuro la conectividad ecológica regional. En este sentido, la Reserva es vista como parte de la Estructura Ecológica Principal y a su vez como parte del sistema de parques recreativos de Bogotá: dos valoraciones igual de importantes, que implican miradas diferentes, complementarias e integrales2.
Fotomontaje sobre imagen Google Earth con los tratamientos del Plan de manejo de la Car. Elaborados por J. Correa para Diana Wiesner
En el escenario actual, el Plan de Manejo efectivamente permite y contempla estas dos miradas, aunque es necesario profundizar en la coexistencia de los usos para recreación y las actividades existentes.
Foto del estado actual del sector hacia el Río Bogotá. Fotografía de cortesía de Apertura VisualPosible escenario inercial en caso de no hacerse nada. Fotomontaje de Diana Wiesner realizado por J. Correa.
Para evitar el escenario inercial que ninguna de las propuestas a favor de la urbanización o a favor de la permanencia de la Reserva quiere que suceda, se elaboró una imagen de lo que podría ser la construcción no planificada con riesgo de inundación y deterioro del paisaje como sucede en varios de los sectores de la Zona y Manejo del Rio Bogotá. Ver imagen N 2.
Frente a la posibilidad de urbanizar el área, se considera que defender la construcción planificada de la Reserva en aras de frenar la urbanización de la sabana en los municipios vecinos es equivalente a decir que urbanizar planificadamente los cerros garantizaría detener las parcelaciones campestres y urbanizaciones de los Municipios de la Calera y Sopo. En este sentido, como ciudadanos que sabemos lo que cuesta lograr un proceso de defensa como estos, solicitamos respetuosamente, agotar los escenarios posibles de densificación en lugares que ya presentan infraestructura y servicios recreativos como el área próxima al Parque Simón Bolívar, los corredores de movilidad y zonas de renovación urbana.
Asimismo, se considera que el tema de la expansión urbana trasciende a esferas nacionales, pues la existencia de la Reserva tampoco garantiza que el proceso de expansión urbana en los municipios circunvecinos de la Sabana de Bogotá se vaya a detener, debido a que ya existe una interdependencia funcional entre los mismos. En este sentido, se debe inducir la contención de dicha expansión como un tema prioritario de las agendas de gestión y bajo la estrategia de red de ciudades regionales y el Plan de Ordenamiento de la ciudad desde el año 2004.
Casos similares
Antes de mostrar el potencial que vemos en la Reserva, se revisaron ejemplos de bosques urbanos o periurbanos que no buscan ser contenedores de desarrollo sino mostrar la posibilidad de coexistencia de usos recreativos, productivos, reservas ecológicas en beneficio de una población y acordes a principios del cambio climático y de los servicios eco sistémicos. Ejemplos en China, México, Argentina, Berlín, Canadá, por nombrar algunos, demuestran la posibilidad de integrar usos de conservación con usos sostenibles de carácter cultural, patrimonial, educativo, científico, entre otros.
Parque de Xochimilco en los suburbios la Ciudad de México. Campos flotantes (chinampas) donde la comida y las flores crecen. Foto de Michael CalderwoodParque Hountain en Shanghái – China. Una zona Industrial y de agricultura recuperada para uso público.
Se pone a consideración un escenario que sigue las pautas de Plan de Manejo existente y potencia el mayor uso público posible en el área: proyectos-negocios de un gran parque fértil, de investigación, un centro de producción experimental, centros de formación y educación.
Recuperación de Camellones de Cultivo, parques anfibios y lagos para apoyar la función de humedal la Conejera y Rio Bogotá. Imágenes de Diana Wiesner elaboradas por equipo AYP.
Para que este gran parque sea viable proponemos estructurar una gestión integrada del suelo mediante diversos instrumentos tales como transferencia de derechos de edificabilidad y transferencia de cesiones, que garanticen a largo plazo la consolidación del uso público y la prestación de servicios eco sistémicos en beneficio de la ciudadanía.
Es igualmente importante, garantizar mecanismos participativos que permitan escuchar las diferentes propuestas ciudadanas que garantizan la viabilidad económica de la reserva, entre las cuales se incluye el respeto a la estabilidad jurídica y al interés colectivo.
Dentro de estas propuestas, sugerimos pensar espacios anfibios, resilientes, recreativos, sostenibles, agrícolas, praderas naturales fértiles que sustituyan en kikuyo en los cuales pueda haber un área de uso público. Los potreros pueden ser praderas silvestres entre camellones recuperados para diversos usos, desde zonas recreativas para los fines de semana de la familia, para el uso de colegios vecinos o vecinos de la desarrollada urbanización del Plan Zonal del Norte.
Recuperación de praderas para el uso público. Image by J Correa to Diana Wiesnerbosques y lagos proyectados para la recreación y la observación de aves. Elaborados por Johan Correa para Diana Wiesner.
¿Porque en un solo globo de terreno?
Un solo globo de terreno garantiza espacios de mitigación de inundación, brinda oferta recreativa en grandes espacios de múltiples usos, lograr mayor funcionalidad ecológica, pero sobre todo garantizar una única pieza de paisaje cultural rural de la sabana en la zona norte de la ciudad. Por lo anterior, entender el Paisaje como realidad compleja que integra valores naturales y culturales, tangibles e intangibles, e identifica el carácter rural de la zona norte, es fundamental para garantizar esta pieza del paisaje sabanero como el mayor logro colectivo para la región, invitamos a la ciudadanía a sumarse para consolidar una visión compartida y proponer el mejor escenario posible.
Umbral de Bienvenida a Bogotá como ciudad Fértil y diversa. Elaborada por Diana Wiesner apoyo Apertura Visual imagen digital.
Por último, la conectividad vial del Umbral de bienvenida de Bogotá debe darse en trazados coherentes con el respeto y conectividad de los ecosistemas mediante viaductos elevados que permitan la integración de los humedales de Torca y Guaymaral, y sean referentes de una ciudad competitiva, conectada funcional y fértil que protege sus socioecosistemas. Este valor socio ecológico de la Sabana es un componente fundamental para integrar dentro de las variables importantes dentro de la planificación de Bogotá y la región. Garantizar una pieza del Paisaje Rural de la Sabana dentro del área rural de Bogotá debe ser un propósito transversal a cualquier administración de turno y debe quedar incluida dentro del Plan de Ordenamiento.
Imaginario del área con zonas deportivas, camping, viveros distritales, exposiciones de flores y juegos. Elaborado por Johann Correa para Diana Wiesner.Espacios anfibios, paisajes resilientes y naturalmente fértiles con praderas públicas. Imagen de Apertura Visual para Diana Wiesner
¿Cual será el lugar de la ruralidad en una ciudad sin fin?
Pintura de Antonio Barrera de la Sabana de Bogotá – 1979
Para la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá, una parte importante del debate es la defensa de los logros de la sociedad civil, con lo cual se busca dar estabilidad jurídica a las decisiones tomadas y ampliar la participación de los habitantes en torno a sus patrimonios naturales, debido a que la reserva Van der Hammen es un acto ciudadano para una ruralidad y una ciudad fértil y biodiversa. En este sentido, se propone una herramienta de participación ciudadana para que cualquier ciudadano se pueda informar de la problemática y a partir de ello, pueda y poner a consideración de la actual administración sus propuestas con el fin de enriquecer democráticamente las desiciones sobre Reservas Naturales declaradas y que se logre una gestión y administracion que garantice su viabilidad. Lo anterior, permite que la ruralidad vuelva a tomar el espacio que requiere en medio de una sociedad que está tejiendo su proceso de paz.
Este artículo está basado en una presentación hecha por Diana Wiesner Ceballos en el debate de Control Político, “Retos de Bogotá: El Consejo de Bogotá debate la Reserva Thomas Van Der Hamen”, en abril 18 de 2015 en la biblioteca Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Bogota.
Referencias
Somos parte de un grupo de ciudadanos voluntarios representados en la Fundación Cerros de Bogota, organización ciudadana que vela por la conservación, cuidado y apropiación cívica de los Cerros de Bogotá y miembro del Comité de Verificación del Fallo de Consejo de estado.
Contribuciones de un grupo de pensamiento sobre la RVDH dadas por Alberto Galán.
Young people advocating for climate justice are co-creating new rules, norms, and imaginaries to institutionalize a culture of mutual care and challenge the culture of productivity.
Youth voices advocating for climate justice have emerged as a significant force for shedding light on the escalating challenges that climate change will create in their current and future lives. While adults often assume that young people are not interested in politics and/or are perceived to be less politically engaged, youth are not just influencing climate action across local, municipal, national, and subnational institutions but are also laying the foundation for long-term and just societal transformations that center mutual care.
Commoning
Youth — a group that continues to be ignored — today occupy political space, from courtrooms to the streets. Encouraging collective action, socializing, protesting, representing in decision-making bodies, having a youth advisory body, and partnerships are key ways through which young people cultivate intentional communities and work cooperatively to create and advocate for a lifestyle and policy that reflects their shared interests.
In The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, historian Peter Linebaugh refers to this phenomenon as “commoning”, where actors create new shared and relational processes, redesign institutions such as norms and rules around a shared interest to serve a common good, as well as develop new imaginaries of sharing and caring. The verb “commoning” is distinct from the noun “commons” that are traditionally understood as resources such as land, irrigation systems, forests, pastures, and catchment areas jointly held with formal or informal systems of property rights and enforced governance. Even for the governance of the traditional commons, Nobel laureate and commons scholar Elinor Ostrom found that community or some form of social organization is essential. Thus, according to Peter Linebaugh, there cannot be a commons without commoning.
Fundamentally, commoning claims the right for people to be more involved in direct governance, not just accepting government rules, but in co-determining rules to foster solidarity and ecological sustainability. It requires understanding the deep colonial roots of economic growth to actively disrupt past wrongs, build respect and humility, and envision a resilient, sustainable future. Some examples of commoning include cooperatively managed forests, citizen-managed urban gardens and community gardens, cooperative housing, open-source software, and social currencies.
Today’s youth equipped with the knowledge about how centuries of exploitation and systemic inequities have led to the climate crisis are commoning to advocate for climate justice. In this essay, I highlight the different ways that young people advocating for climate justice are co-creating new rules, norms, and imaginaries to institutionalize a culture of mutual care and challenge the culture of productivity.
Commoning for community
Community Climate Council (CCC), a Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) youth-founded, not-for-profit organization advocates for local climate action through enhancing climate literacy and political advocacy in Peel Region, Ontario. The Community Climate Council, co-founded by Miranda Baksh of Guyanese descent, aims to create a platform for community members to call for bold local climate action and policy change while also centering the community to develop community-led solutions. Thus, creating social and relational processes to create community around a shared interest in climate action or commoning is essential to the functioning of the council. One of the ways by which the council undertakes commoning is through monthly Climate Cafés, an event series that brings together community members to meet and discuss the intersection of climate change and community well-being. In one climate café that I attended, CCC members created an engaging and interactive environment to discuss local environmental issues and different ways of participating in local political processes. According to the CCC, knowing when to pause to prevent burnout, being cognizant that it takes a village to meet a goal, delegating and sharing their success with everybody, and building and maintaining relationships and partnerships has been essential for creating a culture of care.
Figure 1: The Community Climate Council running a Climate Café in March 2023. Photo: Praneeta Mudaliar
Commoning on university campuses
Climate Justice University of Toronto (CJ UofT), born out of the fossil-fuel divestment movement, is a grassroots student group advocating for a #FossilFreeFuture and fossil-free research by calling attention to the role money plays in fueling the climate crisis. Climate Justice UofT relies on a variety of strategies such as strikes, teach-ins for faculty to conduct fossil-free research, and campaign presentations. The most radical of their strategy involves disruptions at high-profile events to pressure the university to cut its ties with the Royal Bank of Canada, the financier of fossil fuels in the world since 2019, according to a report by Banking on Climate Chaos. The most recent win for CJ UofT was in April 2023 when the Board of Regents at Victoria College at the University of Toronto approved to divest from fossil fuels by 2030 after an 18-day occupation of Victoria College, the longest occupation in the university’s history. More than 250 students participated in the occupation, and more than 750 students, faculty, and organizations signed an open letter supporting the occupation.
CJ UofT attributes their success to intentionally creating a culture of care, centering community, and anti-racism work. Specifically, by providing fair compensation to members, centering junior voices as much as senior voices, making a concerted effort to provide space to historically marginalized members, creating institutional memory to institutionalize continuity with student turnover, frequent check-ins, and the opportunity to step back during burnouts has helped CJ UofT build sustainable relationships with its members. At the same time, CJ UofT is open about ongoing challenges such as power dynamics within the group and improving their allyship towards Indigenous groups, on and off campus.
Figure 2: CJ UofT Creating Community on Campus. Photo Credit: Mika Logue
Commoning for food justice
Shade of Miti is a small-scale, ecological farm on rented land in Caledon, Ontario. Run by 30-year-old Rav Singh, the farm specializes in growing South Asian vegetables such as bitter melon, cilantro, fenugreek, Chinese broccoli, and okra. Rav, of South Asian descent, started Shade of Miti with the goals of growing local food for newcomers and immigrants, strengthening the local food system, and creating a culture of knowledge-sharing and education.
Shade of Miti seeks to build relationships with immigrant and newcomer communities as well as the BIPOC farming community through a variety of ways. Although Rav Singh works on her farm by herself, she credits the success of her farm to “taking the time to build relationships, listening to each other, and collaborating with other young farmers”. By conducting outreach with immigrant and newcomer communities on the linkages between the climate crisis and food systems, listening to immigrant and newcomer communities, and sharing resources with other small businesses, Shade of Miti aims to center care for her community. For instance, during a community walk that I attended, Rav made sure to connect with two children, inspiring them to create a garden and learn more about different types of trees.
Figure 3: Shade of Miti connecting BIPOC and new immigrant communities to urban nature in August 2023. Photo Credit: Praneeta Mudaliar
Commoning as caring
Author and activist David Bollier writes that a key aspect of commoning involves caring through volunteering, altruism, selflessness, peer-assistance, and mutual support, which are essential survival strategies when the state or the market fails to provide for basic needs. For these three groups, sharing and caring involves redesigning norms and rules around labor to lay the institutional foundation and support for long-term systemic change. All three of our interviewees mentioned that they eschew the idea that every day must be a productive day. For them, commoning is about institutionalizing a culture of care because “without structures of care built in, the culture of productivity will eat your strategy for breakfast” (Erin Mackey, CJ UofT).
According to Miranda Baksh from the CCC when members started burning out, they decided to slow down. She said, “It took me about a year to adjust to a slower pace. Initially, it felt strange, not diving into weekly meetings, launching projects rapidly, and expecting immediate results. But I recognized that not every volunteer could, or even wanted to, maintain that pace. Overburdening myself only led to stress and stifled my creativity. So, we decided to take a step back, pause, and reflect. We took that break from December to May, which is quite unconventional for nonprofits or any organization. This pause, a kind of anti-colonial approach to operations, allowed us to recharge and return with renewed energy”.
Erin Mackey from CJ UofT saw that burnout coupled with the existential dread of climate change was overwhelming volunteers. She said, “I think [it’s about] making sure that we are being really clear about what our capacity is, being honest with each other, and knowing that there is zero judgment if someone who previously was super active needs to take a step back because they’re really busy with school, life, or whatever it is”.
Similarly, Rav Singh from Shade of Miti said that given the unpredictability of the current times, care is about “letting people show up however they want to show up and letting them show up whenever they want to show up…Of course, there’s something to be said about accountability and showing up when you need to show up, but I don’t know what’s going on with people sometimes. That’s cool. That’s again, full circle going back to trust and community. You do what you can, and I trust that there will be others to pick up the pieces and step in when you can’t”.
Disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, gas explosions, and pandemics, as tragic as they are, also result in the emergence of temporary bottom-up, decentralized practices of reciprocal care and mutual aid networks. However, as David Bollier questions: “how sufficient institutional support for commoning can be developed so that it won’t fade away as the red-alert consciousness of the moment dissipates”. In these commoning examples, all three groups, co-incidentally led by young women, are working toward an ethic of care by institutionalizing a way of being to create a foundation for long-term transformational change. By attributing their success to the culture of care, they demonstrate an alternative to neoliberal capitalism that is relational instead of transactional. Through commoning, young people are well on their way, putting into place their ideas and practices of care toward co-creating a future that actively challenges productivity-centric ideologies in their advocacy for climate justice.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
James Bonner, GlasgowHow do we get to that more reflective appreciation of nature that we are part of, including the language we use? Perhaps, rather than seeing Nature-based ‘Solutions’ in terms of an ‘answer to a problem’ can we think of ‘solution’ in its more watery terms?
Harriet Bulkeley, DurhamWhat if we view mainstreaming differently, perhaps even as nature intended?
Tam Dean Burn, GlasgowHow do we get to that more reflective appreciation of nature that we are part of, including the language we use? Perhaps, rather than seeing Nature-based “Solutions” in terms of an “answer to a problem”, can we think of “solution” in its more watery terms?
Stuart Connop, London Local mainstreaming is critical if we are to reach a tipping point whereby NBS becomes so embedded in our local urban landscapes that people stop noticing it as something risky and unusual, and instead, it becomes something expected, and desired, in urban design.
Bryce Corlett, NorfolkSeveral critical obstacles must be overcome to operationalize NBS at a scale that can reverse the degradation of natural resources and provide an adequate level of climate change resilience.
Laura Costadone, NorfolkSeveral critical obstacles must be overcome to operationalize NbS at a scale that can reverse the degradation of natural resources and provide an adequate level of climate change resilience.
Olukayode Daramola, SurreyWe suggest that efforts to increase public acceptance of NbS in urban design will involve more specific communication about what the solution involves and the types of problems it seeks to address ― including societal co-benefits that this might afford.
McKenna Davis, BerlinWe have the power to change the discourse and eliminate the need for terms like “nature-based solutions”, instead making these solutions the default and new normal to prioritise solutions working with nature.
Gillian Dick, GlasgowA park has been in my town for many years, providing positive social and environmental NbS benefits. The difference now is that because the esplanade is also called a road it has been mainstreamed and has a maintenance budget and some positive financial benefit calculations on the council books. The large park is seen as a negative equity on the books, as all that is accounted for is the maintenance costs.
Loan Diep, New YorkOne of the powers of NbS resides in the fact it can give us clarity on where the greening and the “right to the city” agendas might be in conflict.
Niki Frantzeskaki, MelbourneNature-based solutions have the potential to be expanded in urban development, but only if coupled with biodiversity conservation, restoration, and protection programs as a key part of building more livable and resilient cities.
Zbigniew Grabowski, StorrsWe must remember that the current push for NbS is inherently restorative ― cities and the infrastructures they rely on all occupy (often colonized!) ecosystems and have developed in ways that required and reinforced social injustices and inequalities.
Perrine Hamel, SingaporeParticipation is key to effective and sustainable implementation of nature-based solutions. But if communities supposedly benefiting from a project don’t understand what it could entail (trade-offs and benefits to them, to other human and non-human communities, governance issues, etc.), how are they supposed to meaningfully participate in the conversation?
Mariem EL Harrak, ParisNbS challenge our business-as-usual thinking and call for a transformation of governance, investment, and decision models, in terms of inclusion, scale, and/or mindset. In terms of what it will take to get there, the main question is: will we allow NbS to change us?
Cecilia Herzog, Lisbon/RioMainstreaming requires that diverse actions and activities converge to promote interdisciplinary knowledge and common ground to a wide range of stakeholders and agents: public and private, individuals and organizations (formal and informal).
Nadja Kabisch, HannoverNature-based solutions have the potential to be expanded in urban development, but only if coupled with biodiversity conservation, restoration, and protection programs as a key part of building more livable and resilient cities.
Doris Knoblauch, BerlinWe have the power to change the discourse and eliminate the need for terms like “nature-based solutions”, instead making these solutions the default and new normal to prioritise solutions working with nature.
Frédéric Lemaître, ParisNbS challenge our business-as-usual thinking and call for a transformation of governance, investment, and decision models, in terms of inclusion, scale, and/or mindset. In terms of what it will take to get there, the main question is: will we allow NbS to change us?
Paola Lepori, BrusselsIn the quest to mainstream an idea and turn it into a default option on the ground, each of us needs to engage with those within our reach, speaking their language, understanding their narratives, needs, and concerns, creating alliances and partnerships, cultivating new ambassadors.
Patrick Lydon, Daejeon If the ancient biodiversity hotspots in urban Japan are any indication, the sacred is not likely the enemy of the scientific but might be its best possible partner.
Israa Mahmoud, MilanIt will take a bit more than the EU Nature Restoration Law to be passed to make sure that cities prioritize a nature-based solutions approach for nature-human approaches.
Timon McPhearson, New YorkNature-based solutions have the potential to be expanded in urban development, but only if coupled with biodiversity conservation, restoration, and protection programs as a key part of building more livable and resilient cities.
Seema Mundoli, BangaloreNbS as a neutral term has the potential to enable greater acceptance of multiple uses of urban nature among planners and decision-makers. But the challenge is in making this a reality.
Harini Nagendra, BangaloreNbS as a neutral term has the potential to enable greater acceptance of multiple uses of urban nature among planners and decision-makers. But the challenge is in making this a reality.
Caroline Nash, LondonPerhaps the question shouldn’t be “how to mainstream?”. Instead, it should be “how to remember and reconnect communities with old traditions?”
Neville Owen, MelbourneA concerted effort between research, advocacy, and government sectors is essential to overcome the barriers and to enable NbS transitions to be widely adopted and implemented.
Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman, College ParkMainstreaming NbS is going to require us to use novel and direct approaches to connect people to these attributes of urban nature.
Eleanor Ratcliff, SurreyWe suggest that efforts to increase public acceptance of NbS in urban design will involve more specific communication about what the solution involves and the types of problems it seeks to address ― including societal co-benefits that this might afford.
Kassia Rudd, FreiburgIt is corny, but mainstreaming requires working NbS into the tapestry of a city or region. It can’t be only one thread or motif―NbS must be woven into everything. Cities like Quito can help us figure out how best to get there.
Valentine Seymour, SurreyWe suggest that efforts to increase public acceptance of NbS in urban design will involve more specific communication about what the solution involves and the types of problems it seeks to address ― including societal co-benefits that this might afford.
David Simon, LondonPublic awareness and understanding of the concept in different countries and contexts will largely depend on finding locally appropriate terms to substitute for the bland and abstract umbrella label of ‘nature-based solutions’, with illustrative examples.
Takemi Sugiyama, MelbourneA concerted effort between research, advocacy, and government sectors is essential to overcome the barriers and to enable NbS transitions to be widely adopted and implemented.
Morro Touray, SurreyWe suggest that efforts to increase public acceptance of NbS in urban design will involve more specific communication about what the solution involves and the types of problems it seeks to address ― including societal co-benefits that this might afford.
Ibrahim Wallee, AccraThe lack of clarity with the term mainstreaming in the context of NbS stifles initiatives that focus on sustainable city planning and green technology appropriation.
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.
There has been what seems like a lot of work on Nature-based Solutions.
There has been great enthusiasm among NbS professionals for “mainstreaming” NbS into urban practice. We generally mean one of two things when we say mainstreaming NbS: (1) making NbS more widely known in the general public (like, say, “climate change” is…maybe); and (2) making NbS the default or common practice among urban professionals. The two are perhaps related, but the audiences for such social change are not exactly the same. Plus, NbS professionals are often a little vague about which element of “mainstreaming” they are talking about.
As contributor Harriet Bulkeley says: what does it mean to become mainstream?
The answer seems simple, until we actually start talking about it.
The mainstreaming we need may be an old idea, not new one: reconnecting humans to nature.
Now, this is certainly a matter of “communications”: tactics about how to effectively spread the good word about the cultural and environmental importance of NbS. This is important. But it is not only communications. It is also a matter of how the frames we use for indicating “NbS” reflect deeply on what we believe is important in weaving environmentally friendly and effective design into notions of science, society, and place: what NbS installations do; how they fit into the social fabric; the equity challenges of who gets to choose and benefit; their direct economic benefits; how NbS designs occupy a fizzy boundary between ecological and social value and meaning.
What are the wicked problems for which we need “solutions”? They are found embedded in both social and environmental challenges, which are difficult to disentangle. Maybe they should remind entangled, so we an seek and find rich cross-sectoral solutions and then find language to talk about them with everyone.
As contributor Gillian Dick points out, there is a park near her house with a road through it. The park has provided benefits since long before there were called NbS. The road is counted in the government’s books as an economic benefit. The park just counts as a negative because the only thing they count in the budget is the maintenance cost, not the harder-to-quantify social and environmental benefits. Indeed, as several contributors point out, across many years and nomenclatural evolutions, much of what we need is to re-maintream an older idea of human connection to nature.
What are the wicked problems for which we need “solutions”? They are found embedded in both social and environmental challenges, which are difficult to disentangle. Maybe they should remind entangled, so we an seek and find complex solutions. These are questions that firmly reside in the emerging New European Bauhaus mission.
So, OK, we asked 33 people professionally engaged with NbS in one way of another: from scientists to practitioners, from grant makers to artists. What do you mean by “mainstreaming NbS”? And, if the goal is to mainstream NbS in the way you desire, what will it take to get there?
This roundtable is a co-production of Network Nature PLUS (in which TNOC-Europe is partner), which is funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 887396; and by by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee under grant No 10064784.
Dr. James Bonner is a Research Associate at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. His interests and background are in a range of interdisciplinary research issues and themes including water, trees, place and mobility. He is particularly interested in the relationships between people and society to the places and spaces they inhabit and encounter.
How do we get to that more reflective appreciation of nature that we are part of, including the language we use? Perhaps, rather than seeing Nature-based “Solutions” in terms of an “answer to a problem” can we think of “solution” in its more watery terms?
It is looking at how we ARE nature, and finding the solutions in nature to some of the challenges we face. Trees are the thing that connects us two in the ‘Every Tree Tells a Story’ project, but also all of us. They are maybe our closest allies in nature. If we develop our relationship with them, and then other elements they interact with ― like the mycorrhizas ― fungi they are connected to, and the water, and ultimately the wider ecosystem ― then we facilitate that conversation and thought process: recognising that we are part of, and interconnected within nature. Connections we can make in the city, as much as anywhere else.
Tam Talks Trees
One way to do this could be changing to think and operate around the lunar cycle, rather than the solar cycle. A consequence of climate change and warming temperatures will mean that days are going to become more difficult to operate within, so might we need to shift more activity to the night? How can we become more in tune with nocturnal nature? And can we build a flourishing nighttime economy around this, powered by solar panels from our days?
Consider that the monthly cycle of the moon means that there are periods when it is darker at night, and others in which is lighter ― the waxing and waning from dark to full moon. We recognise the power of the latter. How can we also align with the dark moon? The solarising of the moon, by giving the sun its symbolic ritualistic ruling over us has been a process over fairly recent time, roughly the last 3000 years. But there are other, older ways of thinking that recognise the value of lunar cycles as a way to think of time and our own being.
By thinking in more lunar cyclical ways can we rethink ideas of death and rebirth, rediscovering ways of seeing life and death as interconnected. Compared to trees, for example, who experience a seasonal cycle of life and death, it is in the moments of ‘death’ (in autumn) that they regenerate to become new life.
What do we mean by mainstreaming NbS and what will it take to get there?
The very word “mainstreaming” struck us as having water connections― and water, aside from trees, is a thing that also connects us. (Tam’s surname “Burn” is a Scottish term for a small stream ― so both fire and water elements ― and in name terms “by the river”. James’s research background considers the social and cultural values of water. We are both watery Zodiac signs― Cancer and Pisces!).
Connecting to water and trees
Is a way of mainstreaming NbS to rediscover old myths about nature and our interconnection to it, or recognising words, terms, and things like the animalistic roots of our alphabet as being part of that? Is it also something to do with ensuring the NbS process is not top-down, but rather from the bottom up, and potentially female-led, recognising the links between the feminine and the lunar― the very embodiment of such a cycle?…
Thinking of water reconnects the link to the lunar― the moon having control over the ebb and flow of the tides. How do we get to that more reflective appreciation of nature that we are part of, including the language we use? Perhaps, rather than seeing Nature-based “Solutions” in terms of an “answer to a problem” can we think of “solution” in its more watery terms? Where a solution is a mixture of different substances, and water is the solvent in the process. By thinking in terms of water, do we open up multiplicity and plurality?
Tam Dean Burn has been a professional actor across platforms for over forty years and a performer, particularly of musical varieties, for even longer. He is also a very active activist in local, national and international campaigns. Most recently he has led a successful campaign to press Glasgow City Council to drop the plan for entry charges to the iconic 150 year old Kibble Palace in the city’s Botanical Gardens.
Harriet’s work is concerned with the politics and governance of environmental issues. She has a particular interest in climate change and the roles of cities and other non-state actors in responding to this global challenge. In her work on urban sustainability, Harriet has focused on questions of energy, smart grids, infrastructure, housing, mobility, waste and most recently nature and biodiversity. Throughout her work, questions of social and environmental justice are to the fore.
What if we view mainstreaming differently, perhaps even as nature intended?
Towards Nature’s mainstream?
What does it mean to become mainstream? Intuitively the idea of the mainstream seems straightforward. It’s the centre of things. What we do every day. What it means to be normal. And calls for nature-based solutions to become mainstream have this core intent. That, rather than being side projects to the main game, nice to look at but stranded in the financial, political, and cultural backwaters the call is to bring nature-based solutions into the flow of policy-making, urban planning, community life, and business “as usual”.
That nature-based solutions need to be mainstream now has significant support, with advocates including no less than the United Nations and European Commission, many national governments and multilateral donors, philanthropists and private sector companies, and countless communities and individuals. Yet, for the most part, the intention here is to bring nature-based solutions into the mainstream ― to insert ways of working with nature for sustainable development into dominant flows of knowledge, practice, and values. This approach to mainstreaming requires that nature-based solutions be made to fit with existing paradigms of urbanism and development that have been built on concrete understandings of how, for example, costs and benefits should be measured, return on investment calculated, the division between the public and the private sphere, and how risks should be gauged. As Adrian Smith and Rob Raven put it in their 2012 article in Research Policy, here mainstreaming requires that nature-based solutions ‘fit-and-conform’ to existing institutions and dominant political economies of the urban arena. With the result that countless papers and policy briefings seek to focus on how we can rub the awkward and messy corners off nature-based solutions ― their uncertainties, their multiplicities, the unruly dynamics of nature itself ― and improve our calculations of their service and value towards particular defined ends and for key stakeholders, notably the private financial sector.
Yet what if we view mainstreaming differently, perhaps even as nature intended? Few people can have survived the school geography curriculum without encountering the odd oxbow lake or two. Relic features on the landscape, oxbow lakes stand as a reminder of where the mainstream used to be. As rivers form a new mainstream, the channels that previously served them well have to be left behind.
Oxbow lake, Yamal Peninsula, Russia. Photo: katorisi
Making nature-based solutions a new mainstream from this perspective requires a focus on two key things. First, on how we create the openings, the grit in the mill if you like, through which enough friction starts to be made in existing mainstreams that opportunities for a new channel start to emerge. With Laura Tozer and colleagues, our paper in Global Environmental Change explores the ways in which we can focus on moments of catalytic change as ways of opening up pathways for nature-based solutions. Second, and equally important, we need to be able to leave behind the existing mainstream. This will mean challenging existing taken-for-granted ways of operating, knowing, and valuing urban planning, practice, and everyday encounters. Rather than asking the value of, for example, green roofs or street trees, we might do well to pose the question of what kind of contribution is a concrete pavement or flat grey roof providing towards the sustainable development goals, public goods, or community life? Rather than securing the park gates or allowing for private gardens safe in our existing paradigm of public space, we might ask instead what these green spaces in cities are supposed to do and be for. Making a new nature-based mainstream requires that we bring more friction into the urban milieu and make space for new and unexpected flows to emerge.
References
Smith, A., & Raven, R. (2012). What is protective space? Reconsidering niches in transitions to sustainability. Research policy, 41(6), 1025-1036.
Tozer, L., Bulkeley, H., van der Jagt, A., Toxopeus, H., Xie, L., & Runhaar, H. (2022). Catalyzing sustainability pathways: Navigating urban nature based solutions in Europe. Global Environmental Change, 74, 102521.
Dr Stuart Connop is an Associate Professor at the University of East London's Sustainability Research Institute specialising in biomimicry/ecomimicry in urban green infrastructure design.
Local mainstreaming is critical if we are to reach a tipping point whereby NBS becomes so embedded in our local urban landscapes that people stop noticing it as something risky and unusual, and instead, it becomes something expected, and desired, in urban design.
Having worked on a number of nature-based solutions research and innovations projects, including one specifically targeting the goal to ‘mainstream NbS’, I have spent many hours contemplating the question of: what do we mean by mainstreaming NbS? For me, NbS will be mainstreamed when we reach a point whereby ecological restoration and protection become the de facto starting point for any policy and planning decisions. In other words, mirroring how carbon impact is becoming a foundational component of cross-sectoral policy and practice decisions (no longer just within the environment sector), mainstreaming NbS is the situation whereby nature-positive outcomes are embedded as standard. This would mean:
ensuring no net-harm to nature is the absolute red line for policy and planning;
that nature stewardship and restoration is considered a key target for policy, planning, finance, and business strategic development decisions;
AND
that the “values” that nature provides (ecosystem services) are considered as a first point of call for solutions across the spectrum of societal challenges that underpin policy and practice objectives.
Only by reaching such a situation are we going to be able to tip the scale of global biodiversity declines towards one whereby we halt global loss and start restoring nature to a state where it underpins a healthy & stable global ecosystem able to support itself, including humans as part of that ecosystem.
In terms of how to get there, that is a huge question, a question I’ve found challenging to answer in several of my past publications, let alone in a short one like this. However, here is my attempt at a short answer: it requires different actions across different scales. At the largest scale, it requires reconnecting our communities with nature and supporting them in understanding the key role that nature plays in keeping planetary systems balanced and us all healthy and happy. That starts with the early years of education and development but needs to continue through secondary and higher education, and even into life-long learning. Human rights, equality, inclusivity, and diversity are fundamental components of mandatory life-long learning approaches in the workplace, why not the rights of nature too, and its value in supporting every aspect of our lives? And why stop there? NBS mainstreaming also needs to be embedded in corporate social responsibility. If an individual is struggling with the cost of living, they can’t be expected to make decisions based on what is good for the planet, or good for wildlife, they need to be making decisions that are good for themselves and their families. Responsibility therefore needs to be shifted from the consumer to the producer: the businesses, governments, and financial markets. Only by doing this can you ensure that all decisions, whether driven by desperation or decadence, are fundamentally linked to the protection of nature.
Whilst the global NbS community continues to push for this incremental large-scale change, there is also a need to consider the small-scale incremental change that unlocks local mainstreaming. Local mainstreaming is critical if we are to reach a tipping point whereby NBS becomes so embedded in our local urban landscapes that people stop noticing it as something risky and unusual, and instead, it becomes something expected, and desired, in urban design. There have been many studies that have explored the barriers and drivers to unlocking NbS scaling, with many identifying similar governance, policy, and financial levers. However, in addition to these usual suspect barriers, there is also a need to listen to local practitioners to understand their needs for delivering NBS mainstreaming.
A recent study I was involved in collaborated with practitioners to explore barriers to the roll out of small-scale Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) in London and the River Thames catchment. Whilst some of the barriers identified represented the usual suspects (access to funds, cost to maintain, and ownership, issues), the study also identified some surprising patterns: Insurmountable barriers for one individual were often not perceived as a barrier at all by others. Overall, the research found three key themes in relation to barriers perceived by participants: people-related elements, limiting practicalities, and informational factors. However, by far the simplest solution to unlocking many of the barriers to locally mainstreaming SuDS could be solved by becoming better at communicating and sharing knowledge and innovative practice. A simple example of this? Why do we give awards for the prettiest SuDS and not the ones that share the most information on how they were delivered? Or the ones that drive the most sector-wide exchange? And, on the subject of being better at communicating to unlock mainstreaming, I must get back to getting that study written up!
Dr. Laura Costadone is an Assist. Research Professor at Old Dominion University for the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience. Laura brings her expertise in co-design and co-create pathways to uptake and implement urban sustainable development goals by engaging directly with municipalities, practitioners, decision-makers, and citizens.
Several critical obstacles must be overcome to operationalize NbS at a scale that can reverse the degradation of natural resources and provide an adequate level of climate change resilience.
The urgency of implementing nature-based solutions (NbS) is higher than ever, especially in coastal areas where cities consistently face growing challenges. Coastal cities must build resilience not only against increasing extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, storms, and urban heat island effects but also against sea-level rise. Although these challenges have global origins, their impacts are acutely experienced at the local level, requiring local governments to take a leading role in devising and executing adaptation strategies. Despite notable research progress demonstrating how impactful NBS can be in addressing the biodiversity and climate crisis, critical obstacles persist, hindering the translation of scientific knowledge into practical projects on the ground.
The scope of our work at the Institute for Coastal Resilience and Adaptation is to help strengthen resilience and adaptation in underserved local communities. Here in Virginia, as in many other places, adaptation choices are often dictated by local priorities and capacities. Yet, the implementation of NBS is often still limited by the inherent preference for gray infrastructures. Based on our experience, several critical obstacles must be overcome to operationalize NBS at a scale that can reverse the degradation of natural resources and provide an adequate level of climate change resilience.
In coastal cities, the growing risk of flooding posed by sea-level rise provides opportunities for proactive planning at the local and municipal levels. However, it also presents the formidable task of prioritizing among numerous pressing concerns. As a result, planning efforts in response to climate change tend to be either deficient or inadequate due to the significant challenges that emerge when attempting to advance climate adaptation while simultaneously addressing other competing priorities and agendas. Local decision-makers need to optimize budget allocation by making targeted investments, and cost-effectiveness remains a key driver of their decisions.
As a research extension institute, one of the initial requests we receive from local government officials and regional land managers is for more comprehensive cost-benefit analyses to justify the implementation of NbS projects. To address this need, one important step we are taking is to identify and quantify the tangible and intangible ecosystem services and benefits that arise from the implementation of NbS. Developing a robust methodological framework that can be applied from the design phase to account for the monetary value of ecosystem services, including recreational services, urban heat island mitigation, nutrient flood reduction, and biodiversity, is critical in mainstreaming NbS into urban practice.
Regulatory and financial limitations are also significant hurdles that impede the implementation of ecosystem-based projects. Government jurisdictions, particularly in coastal areas, can be intricate and overlapping, requiring integration across various government levels, extensive involvement of stakeholders, consensus on perceived risks and practical solutions, and policies that support desired actions. There is an urgent need to implement soft policy instruments to facilitate the process of mainstreaming nature and biodiversity into all aspects of the city’s urban planning.
Promoting a different approach to support sustainable urban development might not be enough. We also need to address a critical question: Where can we integrate nature into highly developed urban environments? In urban areas, space is often limited, and in coastal urban areas, the lack of room to migrate to higher ground as sea levels rise exacerbates the problem. To tackle this challenge, we will need to make some trade-offs, in some cases, give up space, upgrade existing infrastructure, and consider hybrid solutions for projects such as transportation, redevelopment, housing, water, and sewer. To transition to governance more suited to NBS mainstreaming, we need transformational changes that begin with cultural values, economic mechanisms, infrastructural, and technological systems.
Dr. Bryce Corlett, PE, has nearly 15 years of diverse experience in the climate change arena, ranging from identifying sea level rise acceleration along the US east coast to discovering an Arctic current to strategically guiding local, state, and national organizations through climate adaptation, wetland, beach and shoreline restoration, and water/sediment quality analyses.
A park has been in my town for many years, providing positive social and environmental NbS benefits. The difference now is that because the esplanade is also called a road it has been mainstreamed and has a maintenance budget and some positive financial benefit calculations on the council books. The large park is seen as a negative equity on the books, as all that is accounted for is the maintenance costs.
Everybody wants to mainstream Nature-based solutions. It’s appearing everywhere. It’s the “it” word of the moment. But when you talk to communities — professional or specialist — about NbS there is a lot of confusion. Most forget or don’t know that it is a holistic approach. They think it’s all about the nice to have stuff. It’s about planting trees here or pretty flowers with seeds there. Or you’re asked, “don’t you mean green infrastructure or ecosystem management?” Over the last few years, I’ve been challenged about why I keep banging on about Nature-based Solutions. I talk about taking a place-based approach using nature-based solutions to create climate adaptive places. I talk about what does it take to make a space become a place that you are attached to. I also take inspiration, as a Town planner, from Patrick Geddes when he said, “It is interesting sometimes to stop and think and wonder what the place you are currently at used to be like in times past, who walked there, who worked there and what the walls have seen.”
If we stop and really look around we will start to see Nature-based Solutions all around us. Victorian communities created open spaces to give workers somewhere to relax and get fresh air in their time off. Hospitals were built on the edge of towns as fresh air was viewed as good for your health and most of our medicines are developed from herbs and plants that grew near where we lived and worked. So, when I look at where I live in the West of Scotland I see a wide esplanade that also acts as a flood plain; dock leaves growing near nettles and large public parks with trees for shade and areas to play in. All of these are Nature-based Solutions. All provide a positive benefit for social cohesion, health & wellbeing, economy, environment and biodiversity all at the same time. The difference now is that because the esplanade is also called a road it has been mainstreamed and has a maintenance budget and some positive financial benefit calculations on the council books. The large park is seen as a negative equity on the council books, as all that is accounted for is the maintenance costs, litter picking and dealing with expected anti-social behaviour.
But increasingly the noise for mainstreaming Nature-based Solutions is getting louder. The parks, street trees, soils, rivers and lochs are starting to show their value. If we need to reduce the carbon in the air, then lock it in the ground or in the vegetation. If we want to improve educational attainment and health / wellbeing, then get outside and engage with nature. Understanding the significance of nature in urban areas and recognizing the multi-benefits it provides is crucial. Nature-based Solutions provide us with an opportunity to restore the bond between people and nature. It provides an opportunity to make our communities more resilient and resourceful.
Loan is a researcher in environmental studies. Her work is centered on the development of cities that are green and inclusive of communities, most particularly those trapped in marginalizing systems. Her PhD focused on green infrastructure for rivers in informal settlements of São Paulo.
One of the powers of NbS resides in the fact it can give us clarity on where the greening and the “right to the city” agendas might be in conflict.
When the concept of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) started to popularize among IUCN and its circles in the 2010s, many asked what new doors it could possibly open that had not already been pushed by its predecessors “ecosystem services”, “green infrastructure”, “ecosystem-based adaptation” (to name a few, in case they have already been forgotten…!).
Framing NbS as an “umbrella concept” by the big players was a smart move that essentially helped sweep up all the other ones that had already done the hard work of opening up the way towards a greener societies. It has worked pretty well. NbS has already conquered many academic, governmental, non-governmental, and other public and private spaces of most regions of the world. But certainly not all…why?
For a start, the idea of “widening public acceptance” of the NbS concept ― of any concept in fact ― is a misconception, and it surely should not be the goal. The notion of public acceptance is one that carries heavy assumptions. It conveys the idea that the public, as a single homogenous entity, is out there waiting to be convinced (controlled?), largely by those in charge “above” and/or the “experts”. It is a famous rhetorical strategy to portray the public as unaware, unknowledgeable, not interested, or sometimes rebellious, and where the means are justified under the putative argument that “it is for society’s own benefit”. Many have used it to push for the NbS agenda.
And there we went again: the usual greenwashing suspects entered the game and integrated NbS into the same dualistic and hierarchical structures that create exclusionary patterns. These dynamics, we know it, clearly emerge where greening agendas are pushed by governmental institutions supported by big financers, and lead to evictions, land grabbing, gentrification and displacements. Nothing we don’t know. Yet, it keeps happening.
Vila Nova Esperança is a perfect example of the power of international green discourses over everyday lives, and which can be particularly damaging for those living on the edge (metaphorically and not). Because Vila Nova Esperança settled in proximity to an environmentally protected area, this community living on the margin of the city of São Paulo has been threatened with eviction. To resist, their community leader engaged in a series of initiatives to prove the community’s alignment with environmental values (Photo). This helped the community build a counter-narrative, a tool for resistance.
Vila Nova Esperança’s community garden, in São Paulo, created to resist evictions and build an ecological citizenship counter-discourse.
While the political visibility that these actions attracted has enabled Vila Nova Esperança to survive, other communities have not met the same fate. Green projects supposedly aimed at helping the most vulnerable, have commonly ended up creating more issues because of the set of assumptions they are based on in relation to human-nature relationships. Dobson’s Ecological Citizenship theory reminds us that environmental rights and duties are disproportionately owed in society. In its mainstreaming quest, NbS first needs to resolve such non-reciprocity.
If we have learned anything from attempts to mainstream other concepts, it is precisely that mainstreaming can be the enemy of transformational change. If mainstreaming NbS comes with a process of letting the usual suspects in power to (re-)appropriate concepts precisely developed for the purpose of changing what “mainstreamed” concepts failed to address, we are simply repeating history.
NbS helping us put a finger on multi-scalar politics could be its greatest strengths. One of the powers of NbS resides in the fact it can give us clarity on where the greening and the “right to the city” agendas might be in conflict. If NbS brings nuances to dualistic worldviews, it can break barriers that place people and nature in opposition. Only then we will be in position to explore the innumerable possibilities of truly integrating them. Rather than seeking wide acceptance of the concept, understanding its resistance might be where we learn from it the most, dig into the heart of the problems, and finally move forward.
Dr. Zbigniew J. Grabowski (Z or Zbig for short) is an Extension Educator in Water Quality at UConn’s Center for Land-use Education and Research (CLEAR). Z’s primary work is to support just transformations of land systems. His work focuses on green infrastructure, just transitions, and systems approaches to address intersecting social and environmental challenges.
We must remember that the current push for NbS is inherently restorative ― cities and the infrastructures they rely on all occupy (often colonized!) ecosystems and have developed in ways that required and reinforced social injustices and inequalities.
Mainstreaming NbS vs Just Transformations: A perspective from a water person
What does it mean to mainstream? As a kayaker and canoer, mainstreaming implies riding the deepest and dominant current ― the one following what hydrologists call the ‘thalweg’ ― a German word translating to the ‘valley way’ where the current is shaped by the landscape and in turn, shapes the river bed. Sitting in an eddy, amidst the chaos of a big rapid, you can observe the mainstream and study its habits. When it’s time to go, you know you’ve hit the mainstream when you cross the turbulence of the eddy line, feel that bump under your boat, and rapidly accelerate down river. Mainstreaming then, is finding the path of maximum flow, or the path of least resistance defined by how the structures surrounding the flow ― be they rocks, institutions, or built infrastructures ― and the force which is flowing itself ― be it water, ideas, or money. As we move towards mainstreaming NbS, I urge my fellow researchers and practitioners to keep this duality in mind: we are both shaping and being shaped by social currents and structures.
We have a tremendous and historical opportunity to green cities, accelerate circular bio-economies, and engage in just transition work with NbS. And yet we must remember that the current push for NbS is inherently restorative ― cities and the infrastructures they rely on all occupy (often colonized!) ecosystems and have developed in ways that required and reinforced social injustices and inequalities. Restoring ecological systems in cities and transforming technological infrastructures causing harm to human and ecological health are vital and necessary tasks. And yet I deeply question if these tasks can be accomplished through the current structures that have shaped our cities. In over 17 years of experience working on different dimensions of sustainability transitions, urban greening, and ecological restoration and conservation, I have come to believe that the dominant institutions cannot be trusted to enable, steward, or catalyze the necessary transformations, primarily because of their intractable desire to control the flows of ideas and resources. In short, our current landscape of institutionalized inequity is shaping the mainstreaming of NbS, and it will take seismic changes to enable the just transition.
The primary obstacle to just transformations in cities, infrastructures, and landscapes is overcoming the inertia in the political and financial structures directing flows of ideas, material wealth, and labor. This inertia also permeates the academic establishment, which has an uneasy relationship with change. On the one hand, universities are epicenters of the critical thinking and innovation that emerge from concentrations of inquiring minds. On the other, they are the bastions of the prestige economy, the largest gatekeepers of credibility. Funding for research has become progressively more inequitable in the USA, UK, and elsewhere, with funding and collaborations driven by elite institutions and established networks.
To be effective in pushing these larger systemic transformations, the research and practice communities must individually and collectively address our own biases and personality issues that pervade the social hierarchies that delineate which approaches are acceptable and which ones are not. Elsewhere co-authors and I have called for convivial pluralism in developing the NbS agenda, and to their credit, networks like NATURA attempt a broadly inclusive approach but mirror the larger inequities in NbS research and practice (e.g., limited representation from the Global South and minoritized peoples).
Like water flowing down river, the barriers and boundaries, the eddy lines if you will, can be subtle and deep, and we would be wise to keep an open heart and an open mind to identifying and dismantling them before we rush downstream with the dominant flow. The massive inflow of federal funding through ARPA and the IRA in the US, and from the EU for the Green New Deal and circular bioeconomy all have stated agendas to support equitable transformations of these systems. The mainstream is being pointed at challenges of sustainability and resilience that have been created by the structures still directing the flow.
In a river, change can be subtle, slow, and somewhat predictable ― when the Marmot Dam was removed as part of the Bull Run Decommissioning on the Sandy River outside of Portland Oregon, the movement of sediment downstream behaved in accordance with well-understood physical principles, for the most part. This was despite heavy rains during the initial removal accelerating the initial clearance of the former reservoir, and a somewhat unexpected backup at the river’s mouth compounded by static infrastructures including a highway bridge (I-84), rail line, gas pipelines, and a heavily modified floodplain. In contrast, across the Columbia River gorge, the removal of the Condit dam on the White Salmon proceeded with a violent explosion of sediment which temporarily blocked river access for the Native community of fishers downstream and may have removed vital cold water habitat adjacent to the Columbia mainstem, also because of a state highway bridge blocking the river’s mouth. While these types of large dam removals are heralded as major successes for ecological restoration, they can still overshadow the persistent calls for Indigenous environmental justice finally being acknowledged by the US government.
All over the world, we see technological infrastructures and political institutions limiting the effectiveness of ecological restoration, compounding internal issues in the restoration community of overreliance on technical expertise rather than community knowledge exacerbated by funding territorialism. In our rush to accelerate NbS, we must take care to not only ‘include’ Indigenous, minoritized, and marginalized populations, as well as minority viewpoints within the field, but to support their resurgent leadership towards a just world characterized by flourishing biocultural relations. This task runs deep, and yet without it, the mainstream will only perpetuate the injustices we say we are trying to solve.
Perrine is an Assistant Professor at NTU’s Asian School of the Environment. Her research group examines how green infrastructure can contribute to creating resilient and inclusive cities in Southeast Asia. Prior to joining NTU, Perrine was a senior scientist at Stanford University with the Natural Capital Project.
Participation is key to effective and sustainable implementation of nature-based solutions. But if communities supposedly benefiting from a project don’t understand what it could entail (trade-offs and benefits to them, to other human and non-human communities, governance issues, etc.), how are they supposed to meaningfully participate in the conversation?
Mainstreaming nature-based solutions is a good thing, right? Of course, it is. Nature-based solutions are key to addressing the climate and biodiversity crises, and perhaps one of the most promising solutions when it comes to balancing local and global benefits. Mainstreaming nature-based solutions will help to have more decision-makers demand such solutions, and more practitioners effectively respond to this demand. Mainstreaming is also key to inclusion in the process of nature-based solutions design and implementation. As the IUCN Standard highlights, participation is key to effective and sustainable implementation of nature-based solutions: if communities supposedly benefiting from a project don’t understand what it could entail (trade-offs and benefits to them, to other human and non-human communities, governance issues, etc.), how are they supposed to meaningfully participate in the conversation? With these two benefits in mind, upscaling and inclusion, no wonder that many of us researchers and practitioners spend time developing decision-support tools (e.g., to quantify benefits of nature) or heuristic frameworks (e.g., to communicate the complexity of nature-related values) to “mainstream” such solutions.
If mainstreaming is in theory a good thing, what are the implications in practice? An important aspect to consider is that mainstreaming likely means simplifying. Communication Science 101 would tell us that effectively reaching larger groups requires understanding one’s audience and avoiding jargon. Yet with such an umbrella term as “nature-based solutions”, whose strength is to be a boundary object (making it easy for engineers, policymakers, ecologists, etc. to work towards a common goal), the audience is extremely broad. In addition, jargon is bad, we all agree, but it exists for a reason: Communities of research and practice found the need to use jargon to discuss important nuances and complex issues in a specific area (I’m not cynical enough to assume that it’s just to make ourselves sound important!).
If mainstreaming partly means simplifying, the problem is that nature-based solutions are the exact opposite of simple. There’s a phrase tossed around in ecology circles: “Ecology is not rocket science. It’s much harder”. Being trained as an engineer and having spent the past decade in the field of socio-ecological science, I have to agree with that statement. It implies that implementing nature-based solutions requires the understanding of extremely complex, socio-ecological urban or rural systems and their local specificities. With that in mind, simplifying but not oversimplifying the realities of nature-based solutions seems to be the way forward, and to do so narrowing down the audience enough so that the nuances of a specific implementation can be understood and explained.
Finding the right balance between simplification and oversimplification takes skills and time.
Skills are valued, such that people have incentives to work on them. Time, however, is not. Using the example of research and implementation grants, KPIs typically involve workshops with “stakeholders”, outreach, etc. that can be achieved with sufficient project management, facilitation, and communication skills. However, KPIs rarely involve the “number of coffees/teas drank with stakeholders”, or the “amount of time spent on Zoom to resolve misunderstandings” … These are imperfect yet relevant indicators of how one builds a shared understanding of a complex system (building, neighborhood, city) and the issues nature-based solutions are supposedly improving. Would shifting our mindset towards this shared understanding be key to mainstreaming?
Cecilia Polacow Herzog is an urban landscape planner, retired professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She is an activist, being one of the pioneers to advocate to apply science into real urban planning, projects, and interventions to increase biodiversity and ecosystem services in Brazilian cities.
Mainstreaming requires that diverse actions and activities converge to promote interdisciplinary knowledge and common ground to a wide range of stakeholders and agents: public and private, individuals and organizations (formal and informal).
The Cartesian/Mechanistic vision of urbanization that intended to control natural processes and flows has been dominant, mainly since the mid-XIX Century. The current globalized neoliberal economic system has accelerated the exploitation of natural and human resources mainly in the Global South, causing heavy impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity. Sprawling urbanization is an outcome of this predatory paradigm, causing the eradication of natural and agricultural areas, with landscape transformation leading cities to extreme climatic vulnerability.
This year the critical acceleration of the climate impacts, and the evident changes in the Earth’s system functioning, have led to the speed of the implementation of responses to mitigate the impacts of human activities in many spheres. In this context, mainstreaming nature-based solutions is urgently needed to shift to a new regenerative paradigm.
I have been researching, teaching, and advocating for the adoption of NbS in urban areas for the last 15 years. In my experience, which I consider quite successful, mainstreaming requires that diverse actions and activities converge to promote interdisciplinary knowledge and common ground to a wide range of stakeholders and agents: public and private, individuals and organizations (formal and informal). In this manner, people work together with mutual and complementary interests to regenerate the landscape, urban or not.
I have been in close contact with individuals and grassroots movements that are transforming the pervious and sterile landscapes into urban oasis, with the introduction of pocket forests, biodiverse rain gardens, food gardens, and also, the restoration of urban springs and creeks in parks and in small sites and organizing collective tree and food plantings in dense urbanized areas, besides other communal activities. After more than a decade of intense mobilizations and actions, they are resisting to further eliminate nature-urban assets with judicial actions, halting new constructions in ecologically valuable sites. Furthermore, they are promoting policy changes. The media finally is giving place to those committed, courageous, and noisy urban heroes.
Looking from the top-down perspective, the articulation of several NGOs and academic institutions with the same goal to mainstream NbS is key. They are the ones who give technical and scientific support to city officials to develop robust plans, projects, programs, and policies. The NGOs are also important agents in pushing the mainstreaming of NbS in traditional and social media.
The role of visionary decision-makers is to be drivers of actual landscape transformations. They are the ones who have the capacity to foresee the benefits of their choices when introducing NbS in their cities to mitigate, adapt, and build resilience, as well as enhance the quality of life and well-being of their citizens.
The innovative NbS projects bring people to enjoy the “natural” places, so they can value nature close to where they live.
The fertile soil that enables all the above outcomes is education! So, mainstreaming NbS is only possible with cascading processes to develop research, active learning, and co-creating spaces of exchange of experiences and knowledge. Nature-based solutions are the way forward to face the present systemic and frightening challenges. Let’s definitely enter the new regenerative paradigm that focuses on the life of humans and non-humans, fauna and flora!
This year, climate emergency and Earth’s planetary system’s extreme stress are evident. After years of advocacy for protecting, conserving, and regenerating nature all over the world, nature-based solutions have become the bright star in multiple agendas, from ecological, to social and economic perspectives. But to really mainstream NbS there is an urgent need to have people prepared to plan, design, implement, manage, and monitor nature in and out of the cities.
In the last century, there was a belief that development and growth of the economy, where the dominant elites could and should exploit natural and human resources to achieve a better future, and then the benefits would be shared by all. This definitely didn’t happen. The externalities of this worldview are huge. We are on the brink of the Earth’s system collapse due to a misguided vision of the world as a machine, that people are like clocks, all made of separate parts that could be studied separately to understand the whole.
Mainstreaming Nature-based Solutions in Brazil has been an intricate combination of bottom-up and top-down myriad of actions and activities. It has succeeded, NbS have gained traction in Brazil in the last years. I believe the successful outcomes are related to the synergistic work of many people and organizations (non-profit and public) focusing on cities and citizens, as well as climatic challenges calling for a paradigm shift, among other local triggers.
About 10 years ago many individual and collective (grassroots) movements sprouted in cities, especially in large metropolitan areas where green areas are scarce and neglected, and where the water courses had disappeared causing heavy floods in urban areas. Using social media, activists gathered thousands of people in their urban interventions, which were replicated in cities across the country.
Scientific knowledge has been developed in a few universities in the country, especially at the University of São Paulo, where LabVerde and GIP-SbN. Those programs are attracting more and more people, with an interdisciplinary view and inclusive learning.
In December 2009, a lecture on green infrastructure with Jack Ahern, which I organized, gathered about 130 people, which was a total surprise. It was the starting point for a small group of passionate people to co-create the Institute Inverde in Rio de Janeiro. There were 2 primary activities, firstly we organized monthly lectures for more than 4 years with national and international speakers from diverse fields of knowledge to present, discuss, and propose innovative interventions in urban areas to bring nature back to the concrete jungle. Second, Pierre-André Martin and I started giving short courses on green infrastructure and sustainable urban development. Hundreds of people came from different states of Brazil, and later from other Latin American countries. It was wonderful to have a mix of students, researchers, practitioners, decision-makers, with diverse backgrounds and ages with the same interest. The courses had a theoretical introduction followed by a workshop in an actual local watershed, with a site visit and then the atelier to develop landscape proposals to face the challenges of climate change and improve the quality of life and well-being of all residents.
In 2016, Pierre and I started a Master’s program on Ecological Landscape Planning and Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Puc-Rio). There was a great interest in the program, with students coming from a wide range of fields, even with PhDs. Many of our former students are now working in and for cities, international organizations, private companies, or continuing their studies in landscape urban planning the nature-based solutions field in various countries.
During this period, ICLEI pioneered working with cities, as the successful case of Campinas showcases. Fundação Grupo Boticário (FGB)and WRI-Brasil, are two of the most active NGOs, among others. Besides working directly with cities, FGB has launched a booklet to communicate with the media about NbS. The launch was on October 31st, 2023. Almost 300 people attended the virtual event.
Some cities are leading the way to enable inspiration and replication of their successful projects, programs, and policies, such as Campinas, Niterói, Sobral, Recife, among others. Virtual and presential events proliferate.
NbS is gaining media attention, social media repercussions, top-down, and bottom-up planning and interventions.
In many pieces that I have written forTNOC, I have discussed the pathways to develop NbS in Brazil.
Doris Knoblauch joined Ecologic Institute in 2006 and is a Senior Fellow and Coordinator for Urban & Spatial Governance. She focuses on green urban environments, local climate protection as well as public participation, amongst others. Doris is currently part of the Horizon Europe-funded INTERLACE project.
We have the power to change the discourse and eliminate the need for terms like “Nature-based Solutions”, instead making these solutions the default and new normal to prioritise solutions working with nature.
What if trees and plants came to mind when searching for shade instead of buildings, even in the middle of a densely populated city?
What if we could enjoy fresh air blown right through our city centres, having been filtered through an urban forest?
What if that forest wrapped around and wound through the city, interwoven with parks, meadows, rivers, ponds, and lakes?
What if this green and blue belt offered sanctuary and recreational opportunities for animals and people alike? And was accessible and safe for everyone to escape their busy city lives and find some peace of mind?
What if these green and blue areas were filled with local trees and plants that are resistant to a changing climate, ensuring the chances of their sustainability in the long term?
What if some of these spaces could function like a sponge, capable of absorbing water during heavy rains and storing it for periods with less rain?
And what if all of these places could attract people of different ages, cultures, genders, and economic backgrounds to freely meet and exchange, to reconnect with and recharge in nature, and to form and build a community… our community?
By embracing these dreams and transforming our “what ifs” into practical actions, we have the power to jointly shape the cities of the future… cities that have reduced heat stress and can move away from inefficient and expensive air conditioning, cities that nourish our physical and mental health and well-being, cities that decrease water stress and incurred damages from extreme weather events, and cities that support the biodiversity upon which we all depend ― all by letting nature play a stronger role in providing the multifunctional solutions to these key challenges.
And importantly, we have the power to change the discourse and eliminate the need for terms like “nature-based solutions”, instead making these solutions the default and new normal to prioritise solutions working with nature. By moving past discussions of “if” and “why” and instead focusing on “how”, we could finally accomplish a true mainstreaming of nature-based solutions and achieve the large-scale potential just waiting to be tapped.
McKenna Davis is a Senior Fellow at Ecologic Institute in Berlin and coordinates the Institute's activities on Nature-based Solutions (NbS). Her work focuses on the science-policy-society interface and bringing different perspectives, types of knowledge and values into the NbS discourse and decision-making processes.
Frédéric Lemaitre is the operational manager for society and policy impact of Biodiversa+, the European Biodiversity Partnership. He is experienced in European project management, international environmental affairs and science-policy-society interfacing, and is knowledgeable about European research and innovation on biodiversity and nature-based solutions.
NbS challenge our business-as-usual thinking and call for a transformation of governance, investment, and decision models, in terms of inclusion, scale, and/or mindset. In terms of what it will take to get there, the main question is: will we allow NbS to change us?
We’ve both had the chance to work together with experts from science, policy, and practice to co-develop a shared vision and roadmap to 2030 of key action areas for research and Innovation (R&I) on NBS in Europe. That shared vision is for European R&I to empower policy, practice, businesses, and citizens in mobilizing the full potential of NbS in achieving a sustainable and just transformation of society, building on robust evidence, and expertise. This is a vision of NBS driven by knowledge of people and nature, with people and nature, and for people and nature.
So, what would we mean by mainstreaming NbS in urban design? In our opinion, it’s about advancing NbS as credible, functioning, and natural options to consider when addressing urban challenges, alongside other intervention approaches, such as so-called grey or mixed infrastructures.
But what would it take to get there?
What we’ve learned from the R&I roadmap work and vision is that it takes nature and people. By nature, we think it is about understanding, mobilizing, and positively contributing to ecological processes at work around us, and by people, it’s about participatory and inclusive governance approaches, which appear to be key in NbS implementation. But both aspects challenge our capacity to understand and manage the diversity of co-benefits and co-beneficiaries, and trade-offs of NbS interventions. Often because we can’t measure or even more so capture these benefits and trade-offs in our decision systems. Not all are monetary or have market value, not all people give the same values or have the same use of nature, and not all ecological interventions deliver or are resilient to extreme events and slow onset changes (e.g., Climate change).
The solution would be to have better socio-ecological knowledge at the service of more effective and resilient NBS, right? But beyond understanding socio-ecological processes and valuation of NBS co-benefits and dis-benefits, mainstreaming NbS means we need standards and tools to assess them. A key aspect for R&I is around the development of evidence-based and accepted standards of NBS design and implementation. However, the vision carried in the roadmap is also about helping to empower society on NbS.
Beyond standardized methods and tools, NBS driven by society will likely not happen without participatory governance systems and structures that can allow effective planning and implementation of NBS, notwithstanding working business and investment models for NBS, nor competencies to implement them. This also raises questions as to the foreseen and unforeseen variation in the performance of any socio-ecological system, and the inherent variability in terms of NbS intervention’s success or failure. Somehow public and private decision-makers deal with uncertainty every day, based on evidenced and perceived risks, potential gains, and importantly insurance in case of failure. The development and operationalization of knowledge and skills came out strongly in our work when it came to advancing financial and investment mechanisms supportive of NBS implementation.
Lastly, if we take a step back, for us there is a critical challenge to achieve the mainstreaming of NbS, which is the chicken or the egg of seizing NbS’s transformative potential. NBS challenge our business-as-usual thinking and call for a transformation of governance, investment, and decision models, in terms of inclusion, scale, and/or mindset. We require proof that they are effective and credible to make these changes, yet we cannot realize their full potential and make them effective and credible interventions without changing.
So, in terms of what it will take to get there, we believe the main question is: will we allow NbS to change us?
Mariem EL Harrak is a Project Officer for the European Biodiversa+ partnership. She is responsible for supporting activities related to nature-based solutions and the valorisation of biodiversity in the private sector. She participates through her missions to the involvement of Biodiversa+ in the NetworkNature project, a European platform on nature-based solutions.
Paola Lepori is a Policy Officer for Nature-based Solutions at the European Commission, DG Research & Innovation. Her core professional objective is building alliances to trigger transformative change towards an inclusive nature-positive future.
In the quest to mainstream an idea and turn it into a default option on the ground, each of us needs to engage with those within our reach, speaking their language, understanding their narratives, needs, and concerns, creating alliances and partnerships, cultivating new ambassadors.
When I try to explain what I do for a job―and it’s never easy because the role of policy officer is somewhat hazier than more tangible professions like architect or farmer—I usually mention that part of it is contributing to “mainstreaming Nature-based Solutions in policy and practice”.
My understanding of “mainstreaming” reflects the Cambridge Dictionary definition: “the process of becoming accepted as normal by people”. Where it gets complicated is in the how to make that happen. What concrete steps lead to something becoming accepted as normal by people and who are these people whom we want to accept nature-based solutions as normal? Lastly, how do we measure success?
I know this roundtable includes brilliant contributors who are going to adopt a much more scientific and grounded approach than I could ever hope to achieve, so I won’t delve into specific mainstreaming strategies and the theoretical approaches behind them. My starting point is imagining and visualising a world in which NBS are “mainstream”.
Imagining a certain kind of world is the very first step towards bringing it into existence. So, I imagine cities where the green, and all the colours that beautifully dot the green, are widespread and accessible regardless of the social stratification of urban areas. Cities where rivers and streams are not bridled but can regain their space and follow their natural courses, truly integrate natural features of the urban landscape rather than constrained sources of potential danger. Cities that are not exclusively human settlements, but where life forms other than us can reclaim space and coexist comfortably, rather than at the margins; and an urban built environment that lives in partnership and symbiosis with vegetation.
While this image seems to convey just an aesthetic idea, it’s actually the visual representation of an urban landscape in which nature-based solutions—which embody an alliance on equal footing between nature and human societies that is not based on exploitation but on mutual benefit and on re-internalising the notion that human beings are, in fact, part of nature—help us tackle a myriad of pressing and even existential challenges that we face today in our city life, mostly due to the combined and interdependent effects of human-induced climate change and biodiversity loss.
This visualisation represents the end goal. How do we get there? The grand objective that seems so far away it’s almost unreachable can only be achieved by breaking it down into smaller components and fostering collective efforts where each contributes according to their skills, expertise, inclinations, and network.
Where can I hope to achieve the most impact? How do I prioritise where to invest my energy? Given my access to EU policymaking in different fields, I’m in a privileged position to raise awareness of nature-based solutions within my organisation—this big and complex public administration that serves half a billion people in Europe—with all the firepower provided by the knowledge produced by the NBS community with (but also without) EU funding, with the ultimate goal to create an EU-level policy and regulatory framework that is conducive to the uptake at the scale of NBS. (In this, I’m encouraged by the words of former EU Commission climate chief Timmermans who said that “we will promote nature-based solutions as much as possible”).
My point is that in the quest to mainstream an idea and turn it into a default option on the ground, each of us needs to engage with those within our reach, speaking their language, understanding their narratives, needs, and concerns, creating alliances and partnerships, cultivating new ambassadors.
Mainstreaming NBS may seem like a vague and far-away objective but it’s already happening and if I can add one last word, ultimately, I don’t even care if people call it NBS; my main concern is seeing the future I describe materialise.
DISCLAIMER: These views are expressed in a personal capacity; they are not meant to represent the official position of the European Commission.
Patrick M. Lydon is an American ecological writer and artist based in Korea whose seeks to re-connect cities and their inhabitants with nature. He writes The Possible City series, is co-founder of City as Nature (Daejeon). He is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
If the ancient biodiversity hotspots in urban Japan are any indication, the sacred is not likely the enemy of the scientific but might be its best possible partner.
In search of ancient NbS: urban biodiversity for a thousand years
The term “NbS” urges us to recognize that something is missing. A missing element, not just from our professional practices, but from our daily lives.
What is missing is not a method nor a mantra, but a meaningful relationship with nature. Absent this relationship, history would instruct us that NbS stand little chance of mattering in the long run.
Those who consider ‘biodiversity’ a somewhat recent, fashionable term, might be surprised to know that Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in urban Japan have long been the keepers of sacred biodiversity, sometimes for hundreds or thousands of years. Indeed, some of the oldest and most biodiverse ecosystems in Japan today are not in far-off mountains or pristine wilderness, but actually in sacred forests located inside cities and towns that people have inhabited for millennia.
It seems unfathomable, yet these sacred forests — called Chinju-no-mori ( 鎮守の森 ) — have been maintained through wars, uprisings, and countless changes of leadership. They continue to exist today in highly urbanized areas not because some calculations were made about their value as ecological solutions, but for precisely the opposite reason.
The main bridge and moat which denote entrance to the sacred space of Sumiyoshi Taisha, a 1,800-year-old Shrine in Osaka, Japan, the grounds of which are home to several small forests and a 1,000-year-old Camphor tree. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
A sacred relationship exists here, between people and the forest. Though there may be logical reasons for this, the relationship is not based in logic and reason. It is instead based in a cultural identity and associated habits. These habits are reinforced through one’s daily actions. Perhaps this means two claps and a bow as we pass a sacred tree, or perhaps it means festivals that celebrate community and their connection with the seasons. These habits and festivals exist not within the mundane everyday world but within the space of the sacred, the incalculable, the unseen which dwells in between and manifests this tangible world.
The world in which we dwell.
The world which dwells in us.
Correcting our failure to relate
Our failure to bring about a world where humans and the rest of nature have some sort of accord has always been in the failure to put this relationship — the one between us and the rest of the living world — at the center of decision making and actions.
To enjoy the kind of longevity that Japanese shrines and temple forests have enjoyed, NbS cannot be only about solutions. It must be focused on maintaining the kinds of relationships from which proper, equitable solutions grow in the first place. Call these relationships what you want, they must be first and foremost, meaningful to the everyday lives of everyday people.
While this is a long path to walk, the clear first step is to acknowledge that the sacred — not just from the aforementioned examples, but from whatever personal or cultural practice it hails — is not likely the enemy of the scientific but instead may just be its best possible partner.
Israa Mahmoud is a polyglot Architect and Urban Planner. She is an Assistant professor in urban and regional planning at Urban Simulation Lab, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of Politecnico di Milano. She is lately involved in the National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC) as a researcher on co-creation and co-governance themes related to urban biodiversity in living labs.
It will take a bit more than the EU Nature Restoration Law to be passed to make sure that cities prioritize a Nature-based Solutions approach for nature-human approaches.
Mainstreaming NbS for a shared governance of urban biodiversity, intertwined concepts
In the latest academic debate, the shift from nature-based solutions to a more generic approach on urban biodiversity has emerged after the definition of UNEA-res 5.5. on NBS that encourages a comprehensive approach to embrace NbS versatility. Meanwhile, the missing part of the puzzle is the technical, financial, governance, and spatial possibility of rolling out NbS in different contexts as a “Passepartout” key concept that fits all climate, social, and environmental challenges.
Indeed, several research articles criticize the “right message” to convey on NbS in a mainstreaming policy era in which the use of NBS is considered a magical solution to solve both climate change and urban biodiversity challenges (Seddon et al., 2021; Xie & Bulkeley, 2020). Nonetheless, the reframing of the current governance mechanisms towards urban biodiversity seems an intertwined concept with the possibility to mainstream NBS across scales and levels of implementation in cities which is challenging on so many levels (Kowarik, 2023).
Even with the adoption of novel concepts in urban planning such as co-creation processes (Cortinovis et al., 2022; Łaszkiewicz et al., 2023; I. H. Mahmoud et al., 2021; I. Mahmoud & Morello, 2021) the challenge remains on the level of readiness in which the citizens are ready to be engaged within the process. Also, another challenge is the inclusivity level at which these processes are initiated and executed. The NBS mainstreaming processes require technical and political support from the local municipality authorities which they currently do not possess in place coherently (Hölscher et al., 2023). Another major challenge is still a comprehensive framework that assesses the NBS co-benefits to convince decision-makers to adopt NBS as the longer-term solutions taking into account not just the environmental assessment but also the social return of investment.
What will it take to be there? In my opinion, it would take a bit more than the EU Nature Restoration Law to be passed to make sure that cities prioritize a nature-based solutions approach for nature-human approaches. Our relationship with nature is valuable and unless there is an evident prioritization across many sectors, we might not get there, yet!
References:
Cortinovis, C., Olsson, P., Boke-Olén, N., & Hedlund, K. (2022). Scaling up nature-based solutions for climate-change adaptation: Potential and benefits in three European cities. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2021.127450
Hölscher, K., Frantzeskaki, N., Collier, M. J., Connop, S., Kooijman, E. D., Lodder, M., McQuaid, S., Vandergert, P., Xidous, D., Bešlagić, L., Dick, G., Dumitru, A., Dziubała, A., Fletcher, I., Adank, C. G.-E., Vázquez, M. G., Madajczyk, N., Malekkidou, E., Mavroudi, M., … Vos, P. (2023). Strategies for mainstreaming nature-based solutions in urban governance capacities in ten European cities. Npj Urban Sustainability, 3(1), 54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-023-00134-9
Kowarik, I. (2023). Urban biodiversity, ecosystems and the city. Insights from 50 years of the Berlin School of urban ecology. In Landscape and Urban Planning (Vol. 240). Elsevier B.V. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104877
Łaszkiewicz, E., Kronenberg, J., Mohamed, A. A., Roitsch, D., & De Vreese, R. (2023). Who does not use urban green spaces and why? Insights from a comparative study of thirty-three European countries. Landscape and Urban Planning, 239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104866
Mahmoud, I. H., Morello, E., Ludlow, D., & Salvia, G. (2021). Co-creation Pathways to Inform Shared Governance of Urban Living Labs in Practice: Lessons From Three European Projects. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 3(August), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2021.690458
Mahmoud, I., & Morello, E. (2021). Co-creation Pathway for Urban Nature-Based Solutions: Testing a Shared-Governance Approach in Three Cities and Nine Action Labs. In A. Bisello et al. (Ed.), Smart and Sustainable Planning for Cities and Regions (pp. 259–276). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57764-3
Seddon, N., Smith, A., Smith, P., Key, I., Chausson, A., Girardin, C., House, J., Srivastava, S., & Turner, B. (2021). Getting the message right on nature‐based solutions to climate change. Global Change Biology, 27(8), 1518–1546. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15513
Xie, L., & Bulkeley, H. (2020). Nature-based solutions for urban biodiversity governance. Environmental Science and Policy, 110(December 2019), 77–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2020.04.002
Dr. Timon McPhearson works with designers, planners, and local government to foster sustainable, resilient and just cities. He is Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Timon McPhearson, Nadja Kabisch, and Niki Frantzeskaki
Nature-based solutions have the potential to be expanded in urban development, but only if coupled with biodiversity conservation, restoration, and protection programs as a key part of building more livable and resilient cities.
Effective nature-based solutions won’t just happen. Seven insights to move the NbS agenda forward
Our vision for cities in the future is ambitious ― a just, equitable, resilient, and sustainable landscape of virtuous relations among people, nature, and infrastructure ― and not one where nature and its benefits in cities are sporadically located or only available to a subset of population groups. This vision requires rethinking, retrofitting, and redefining cities (and their connected regions) as social-ecological-technological systems that have at their core a network of nature-based solutions. These networked NbS must be implemented and maintained, operate at city scale, connect, restore, and reinforce social-ecological flows, and provide multiple ecosystem services and co-benefits for health and wellbeing that are deeply inclusive in ways that improve and foster equity and justice.
Nature-based solutions have the potential to be expanded in urban development, but only if coupled with biodiversity conservation, restoration, and protection programs as a key part of building more livable and resilient cities. In our recent open-access edited book, Nature-based Solutions for Cities, with contributions from over 60 authors, we provide a critical starting point for developing and implementing a livable global urban vision that puts nature and people at the center of how we re-imagine, retrofit, build and redesign cities.
The key insights and next steps for urban nature-based solutions drawn from findings across all the book chapters are presented below:
Insight 1:Put nature-based solutions first in adaptation to climate change in cities
Nature-based solutions are affordable and effective in delivering protection from extreme weather events. As such nature-based solutions are “safe-to-fail” infrastructures in design and management. This is the case because nature-based solutions are more flexible in responding to shifting risk profiles or environmental changes and in accepting changes to system design and management than traditional gray infrastructure.
Insight 2: Make equity and justice central in design, planning, management, and governance of nature-based solutions in cities
From ideation to maintenance of nature-based solutions, all phases must put equity and justice at the center of, and as necessary conditions for, efficacy. This goal can be safeguarded through careful consideration and design of how participation is organized, who is represented, and how representation overall is facilitated, as well as ensuring accessibility and openness in processes and attention to distributional aspects of co-benefits or disservices of nature-based solutions.
Insight 3: Ensure biodiversity is a priority in urban planning for nature-based solutions.
Biodiversity aspects such as species richness or traits that are well studied and manageable, should be part of a NBS selection process by practitioners. Often, local knowledge provides important expertise to support species selection and maintenance decisions for resilient and sustainable long-term nature-based solutions.
Insight 4: Employ and design nature-based solutions to improve human health in cities.
Nature-based solutions are an important contribution to keeping urban residents mentally healthy, and to help them adapt to and mitigate a potentially stressful life in the urban landscape. Thus, extensive urban planning and decision-making efforts are needed to bring nature into the city and to increase nature quantitatively but qualitatively by considering the needs of a diversity of user groups.
Insight 5: Realize nature-based solutions in cities with inclusive urban planning, and innovative governance approaches that respond to local context dynamics.
To realize nature-based solutions in cities, urban policy, planning, and governance need to map and assess the local context while critically unpacking local dynamics to respond to the quest for justice and inclusivity for planning with nature-based solutions. NBS should be selected and developed to be adapted to current but also future climate conditions keeping in mind the local biodiversity.
Insight 6: Assess the holistic value of urban nature to make a case for nature-based solutions in cities.
Assessing the value of urban nature can support building a case (or a business case where needed) for investing in urban nature and restoring it or enhancing it with nature-based solutions. As we advance the science and practice of nature-based solutions, a holistic assessment of their value that is contextually informed or nuanced is the way forward. We must ask: Nature for whom? Who and how is the value of urban nature recognized and appreciated?
Insight 7: Bring art into nature-based solutions and position art as a nature-based solutions in cities
Artists can express through creative processes the emotions and relations or loss of relations with urban nature but also showcase new relations with it. Ecological art that addresses environmental issues or is situated in urban green spaces can play a crucial role in advocating for and implementing nature-based solutions. Innovating the practice of nature-based solutions should make artists more central to nature-based solutions design, planning, and implementation.
Nadja Kabisch holds a PhD in Geography. Her special interest is on human-environment interactions in cities taking co-benefits from nature-based solutions implementation for human health and social justice into account.
Niki Frantzeskaki is a Chair Professor in Regional and Metropolitan Governance and Planning at Utrecht University the Netherlands. Her research is centered on the planning and governance of urban nature, urban biodiversity and climate adaptation in cities, focusing on novel approaches such as experimentation, co-creation and collaborative governance.
Seema Mundoli is an Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Her recent co-authored books (with Harini Nagendra) include, “Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities” (Penguin India, 2019), "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities" (Penguin India, 2023) and the illustrated children’s book “So Many Leaves” (Pratham Books, 2020).
NbS as a neutral term has the potential to enable greater acceptance of multiple uses of urban nature among planners and decision-makers. But the challenge is in making this a reality.
The challenge and opportunity of mainstreaming NbS in the urbanizing Global South
For rapidly urbanizing countries in the Global South, such as India, Nature-based Solutions are still an emerging concept both in urban sustainability research and when it comes to urban planning and policy.
At the same time, cities in the Global South have a variety of urban ecosystems. These include conventional trees, parks, forests, ponds, lakes, and wetlands as well as unconventional spaces such as cemeteries, remnant grazing lands, and community woodlots. This nature in cities provides ecosystem services that are accessed at different scales―from the household where urban ecosystems such as wetlands support provisioning services enabling livelihoods of farmers, fishers, and grazers to city-scale regulating services of wetlands in water purification.
As the concept gains popularity, the concern is that NbS in its interpretation and implementation does not prove detrimental to existing urban ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide in the Global South. And also, ensuring the meaningful incorporation of NbS into urban planning and policy without worsening existing inequalities in access to nature.
Wetlands in peri-urban Kolkata that perform the function of sewage treatment plants for the metropolitan city—free of cost. How can they be incorporated into city plans as an effective NbS? Photo: Seema Mundoli
These concerns are not unwarranted. In the context of India, smart cities are one example. Smart cities, an idea that originated in the urban Global North, was a very catchy term and promised not only smart but also sustainable cities. In India, the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) was launched in 2015 to set up an initial 100 smart cities across the country. But as we have seen in our research (Mundoli et al 2017), the conceptualization and implementation of the SCM failed to consider how existing urban ecosystems are being accessed by local communities. Under SCM nature was prioritized mainly for recreational purposes to the detriment of other uses. For example, the rejuvenation of water bodies involved creating built infrastructure such as walkways, amphitheaters, eateries, and so on but failed to consider them being accessed for provisioning services. This resulted in the alienation of users from urban ecosystems adversely impacting livelihoods and subsistence, especially of the urban poor. Smart cities, a Western import into India, both in phrasing and in implementation were not inclusive of the varied interpretation and uses of nature in the context of Indian cities. The concern is whether NbS too will be co-opted to initiate projects for urban sustainability but result in alienating those dependent on urban ecosystems.
Unconventional urban spaces such as Lakshmipuram cemetery in Bengaluru that are of ecological, social, and cultural significance for some communities—Challenge of conceptualizing NbS with these varied uses of green spaces in the Global South. Photo: Seema Mundoli
The Global South already has urban ecosystems that are providing multiple solutions to urban sustainability. But these often go unrecognized when it comes to urban planning and policy. NbS as a neutral term has the potential to enable greater acceptance of multiple uses of urban nature among planners and decision-makers. But the challenge is in making this a reality. For this the existing ecosystem services provided by nature in cities must be highlighted, but, in a context-specific manner i.e., as they are used and accessed by urban residents in Global South cities. Here the focus of research on urban ecosystems and communicating that research in a manner accessible to different stakeholders will play a key role.
Clearly, when it comes to mainstreaming NbS there are both concerns and opportunities in the context of the Global South. There is also much work that needs to be done if NbS needs to be leveraged to effectively address urban sustainability challenges, and to ensure that NbS is not relegated to either being a buzzword or being co-opted to the detriment of cities and its residents.
Reference:
Mundoli, S., Unnikrishnan, H., Nagendra, H. 2017. The “sustainable” in smart cities: Ignoring the importance of urban ecosystems. Decision, 44(1): 103-120.
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.
Caroline is a Research Assistant in the Sustainability Research Institute at University of East London, working primarily on biodiversity and urban green infrastructure design
Perhaps the question shouldn’t be “how to mainstream?”. Instead, it should be “how to remember and reconnect communities with old traditions?”
The question shouldn’t be “what will it take to get there?”. The question should be “what will it take to get back there?” Nature-based Solutions are not a new innovation or a new technology. Whilst some of the ‘solutions’ being developed incorporate new technologies or approaches (like Living Pillars and “Smart” SuDS Planters) the solutions themselves are all based on historical traditions of stewarding and nurturing the land so that it nurtures us back.
Examples of nature-based solutions can be found throughout history:
Many human settlements were built on rivers and estuaries because flowing water represented a multifunctional solution: providing a means to move resources in and out, a source of clean water, and a source of food.
Agricultural land was managed sustainably using crop rotational patterns as far back as 6000 BC so that plants could be both consumed and used to retain soil quality and fertility.
Urban trees have a long history of being used to create attractive and shady spots to escape the summer heat with tree-lined streets part of standard urban planning by the 19th
Using earth that vegetated (green roofs) to provide shelter for dwellings has been recorded as far back as Neolithic times.
As has the practice of coppicing woodlands in a sustainable manner to produce uniform-sized rods for construction.
A traditional timber and turf church at Hof, Iceland, built by a local carpenter in 1883–1885. Photo: Ira Goldstein. Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12038391.
Working on an early nature-based solution Horizon 2020 project, Connecting Nature, one of the objectives the research team was tasked with was supporting NbS mainstreaming in a series of ‘front-runner’ cities that were spearheading NbS mainstreaming. For one of those cities, Poznań in Poland, members of the project team were getting to grips with the concept of NbS. However, for their colleagues in the city authority, and for local communities and other stakeholders across the city, NbS was an entirely new term for them. It wasn’t even one that translated particularly well… So, the task of how to communicate it, let alone mainstream it, seemed substantial. However, a visit to the city and discussions with stakeholders about historic city planning soon revealed that, whilst the term NbS was new, the concept of NbS was what the city had been founded on. The entire city was based on a ‘green wedge’ concept with four tendrils of greenspace shadowing the river corridors that ran through the city, connecting the city centre to peri-urban and rural areas surrounding the city.
Poznan’s green wedge urban design.
City design also included large pond/lake areas that historically managed, and provided, water sources in the city. Despite protection, pressure on the green and blue spaces within the wedges from development was growing. Fortunately, an abundance and deep-seated culture of urban allotments, combined with areas where development was unsuitable, had meant that much of the green wedges had survived. The tendrils tapered the closer they got to the historic centre and, as the green wedge disappeared, the challenges of climate change adaptation worsened: the closer you got to the high-density urban centre, the greater the problems of extreme temperatures, air pollution, and flooding. This made the messaging simple. NbS was a return to the historic way of designing and managing the city, an approach that could keep the city healthy and prosperous. An NbS catalogue followed that presented the context, examples from the city of how nature supported the citizens’ lives, and examples of how new green NbS innovations represented a mechanism for supporting and restoring the green wedge system on which the city was based. This was a great success and supported developing a shared vision across city departments, developers, and local communities. Within the project, a city-wide project of natural playspaces at kindergartens was rolled out and, the legacy of the project continues to grow. So, perhaps the question shouldn’t be ‘how to mainstream?’, instead, it should be ‘how to remember and how to reconnect communities with old traditions?’.
Dr. Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. He is an ecologist studying the interactions of decision making, design, and environmental change on ecosystem processes in urban landscapes.
Mainstreaming NbS is going to require us to use novel and direct approaches to connect people to urban nature.
Mainstreaming Nature-based Solutions is a systemic change to how we design and manage cities — and a systems approach requires us to think holistically. Systems thinking teaches us that we cannot solve a complex problem with just one approach, just one actor, just one viewpoint. So, mainstreaming requires targeting both urban professionals and the general public. Systems thinking also emphasizes relationships ― so while we address multiple actors in cities and urban practice, we also must consider how they connect and interact ― (how) do they see the nature and the scope of a problem, solution, and how they observe improvements and changes.
Through the process of mainstreaming ― demonstrating the environmental, health, resilience, and economic benefits of using NbS we also will learn about trade-offs and limitations. Systems thinking is ultimately going to reveal that a portfolio approach is needed that includes both NbS and grey infrastructure. For example, infilling a neighborhood with bioswales and rain gardens may not bring enough infiltration and storage capacity to mitigate the most extreme rainstorms that are to come. We have to be careful that mainstreamed NbS doesn’t mean you have a hammer (NbS), and every problem is then a nail. We need to recognize and understand the limits of NbS or run the risk of overselling this solution.
We also need to think more clearly about links between what people want in their built environment and then how NbS can be applied there. To foster the view that nature in cities is common, desirable, and default component of urban systems really is going to require a multi-front approach ― working at a granular level in neighborhoods while others work with broader policy, economic, and planning strategies and levers. Mainstreaming NbS will require thinking about outreach and engagement in new and creative ways because knowledge alone doesn’t lead to changes in behavior and practice ― this requires meeting people where they are, engaging them through their prior experiences and biases, and doing it in a way that is active, not a passive information dump. On top of that, the language that we use as academics and professionals to build and share that knowledge ― mainstreaming, coproduction, governance, ecosystem services, etc. zzzzzz ― is dull and can often rob NbS of their power to grab people.
Nature is messy and wild and awe-inspiring ― it can make some feel deeply connected and others feel something alien and foreign.
Mainstreaming NbS is going to require us to use novel and direct approaches to connect people to these attributes of nature. For some this is going to be through art ― for example, artist Bruce Willen uses “ghost rivers” to show residents where streams used to flow in their neighborhoods ― highlighting the intersection of nature, built environment, and histories.
Ghost River Project Credit: Bruce Willen
For others, we might need to get their hands in the soil or feet in the water through direct experiences. This can be done by showing people that the nature right here in our neighborhoods is awe-inspiring and wild.
We need to recognize that a system’s change like mainstreaming NbS is going to require many intervention points and at different scales. Ecological monitoring, policy change, and economic analysis alone will not be enough to get there without also giving space for the wild and awe-inspiring nature of nature.
Eleanor Ratcliffe is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Psychology, School of Psychology, and a Fellow of the Institute for Sustainability at University of Surrey. She is a Board member of the International Association of People-Environment Studies (IAPS) and programme lead for Surrey’s MSc Environmental Psychology.
Eleanor Ratcliffe, Morro Touray, Olukayode Daramola, and Valentine Seymour
We suggest that efforts to increase public acceptance of NbS in urban design will involve more specific communication about what the solution involves and the types of problems it seeks to address ― including societal co-benefits that this might afford.
Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining attention in the fields of health, well-being, and engineering, among others, to address a range of socio-environmental problems. In this roundtable, we suggest ways in which NbS can become more widely accepted by urban planning practitioners, policymakers, and urban residents. Here we draw on our different disciplinary perspectives as Fellows of the University of Surrey’s Institute for Sustainability these are all based on the One Health model which emphasises the interconnected health and well-being of people, animals, and the environment.
“One Health Triad” (c) by Thddbfk is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
What do we mean when we talk about NbS, and who are they for? Eleanor Ratcliffe
Making NbS more mainstream requires specific communication of what the ‘umbrella term’ means in specific contexts and for different audiences. A solution that makes use of biomimicry in building design (e.g., passive ventilation inspired by termite mounds) is very different from street greening as a sustainable urban drainage system (e.g., Meristem Design’s Community Rain Gardens). A key part of this focused communication may be to clarify the problem that an NbS is trying to solve and what exactly the nature-based part of the solution involves. Further, NbS are often framed in terms of solving environmental or engineering problems, with somewhat less attention towards outcomes for people: e.g., health, psychosocial, economic, or cultural benefits (Raymond et al., 2017). Increased promotion of these co-benefits may support public acceptance and relate strongly to holistic models of health (e.g., One Health). Below we provide two examples of NbS aligned to One Health.
NbS use in social prescribing and to tackle childhood obesity Morro Touray
Integration of NbS into social prescribing is a transformative healthcare approach that can also combat childhood obesity. Social prescribing involves healthcare professionals prescribing non-medical interventions (see Drinkwater et al., 2019) like green exercise and nature-based activities. Beyond conventional treatments, these interventions address physical, mental, and social health dimensions. Parks combat sedentary lifestyles, encouraging outdoor activities and community building. School gardens and outdoor learning enrich education, promoting activity and healthy (food) habits. Nature-inspired playgrounds engage active play, while access to fresh produce through markets supports balanced diets. Nature exposure in social prescribing reduces stress, impacting eating habits indirectly. Community gardens offer therapeutic benefits, fostering a sense of community. Therapeutic gardening, nature retreats, and camps provide tangible, transformative solutions. Integrating nature into social prescribing and tackling childhood obesity initiatives embodies a holistic well-being approach, empowering individuals to enhance overall health and societal connection.
NbS can increase public health awareness regarding parasites and drug resistance Olukayode Daramola
Zoonotic parasites can infect humans and animals via various means such as contaminated water and food, direct exposure to a parasite infective stage, and disease vectors, etc in the environment. To control these parasites, we use various drugs in humans and animals. However, overreliance on drugs constantly presents drug resistance issues at a worrying rate. While we are currently working to develop new drugs, in other to effectively control parasites, there is a need to identify sustainable alternatives to the growing drug use for disease control. Improving public awareness of zoonoses and associated environmental issues, and government provision of adequate public health interventions to urban and neglected communities will be vital in disrupting the parasite life cycle and reducing human and animal infection levels. In other to achieve these goals, collaborative efforts are needed across stakeholders to improve public health.
Citizen science: A collaborative call to action for NbS Valentine Seymour
Citizen science can be broadly defined as the engagement of citizens in scientific research in partnership with scientists, encompassing a variety of topics. In the past decade, we have seen a growth in the number of citizen science projects helping to shape the NbS agenda as well as expand our knowledge of health and planetary wellbeing. Public engagement in these projects helps to broaden community understanding with respect to NbS issues. Some examples of these NbS citizen science projects include the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH)’s iRecord programme, FreshwaterWatch, NatureScot’s NbS citizen science programme, the Woodland Trust’s Natures Calendar project, The Conservation Volunteers’ Green Gym, and Biodiversity Action Team programmes, as well as the EU-funded Connecting Nature project.
Conclusion
The term “Nature-based Solution” can be seen as broad, context-free, and therefore relatively difficult for people to engage with. We suggest that efforts to increase public acceptance of NbS in urban design will involve more specific communication about what the solution involves and the types of problems it seeks to address ― including societal co-benefits that this might afford. We provide two examples of NbS that seek to address human and non-human environmental health challenges within the One Health framework. Engagement of the publics and stakeholders in NbS is crucial to their success, and we suggest citizen science methods as an important mechanism for not only increasing acceptance of NbS but actively involving communities in co-design and production.
Morro ML Touray works as a Research Fellow in Health Economics at Surrey Health Economics Centre, University of Surrey. He also works as a Postdoctoral Researcher for NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (Kent, Surrey, and Sussex) in the Health and Social Care Economics Theme and holds a visiting researcher post at Cardiff University.
Olukayode Daramola is a Lecturer in Veterinary Sciences and Education at the Department of Comparative Sciences, School of Veterinary Medicine, and a Fellow of the Institute for Sustainability at the University of Surrey. As a researcher he is interested in understanding molecular and evolutionary biology of zoonotic parasites, to provide sustainable control measures in animals and humans.
Valentine Seymour is a Lecturer in Sustainability Assessment at the Centre for Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey. Valentine’s research interests focus on the interface between human health, policy and the natural environment, more specifically the inter relationships between various stakeholder groups and the natural environment.
Kassia Rudd joined ICLEI in March 2022 and plays a leading role in communicating ICLEI's work on nature-based solutions. Kassia leads strategic communication for multiple EU projects committed to furthering sustainability and justice via urban greening, leveraging her professional and academic experience in public health, community outreach, sustainable agriculture, and restoration ecology to render project results accessible, engaging, and meaningful to a broad audience.
It is corny, but mainstreaming requires working NbS into the tapestry of a city or region. It can’t be only one thread or motif―NbS must be woven into everything. Cities like Quito can help us figure out how best to get there.
To answer this question, I have to start with the definition of mainstreaming. What do we mean by the term, and do we all mean the same thing? For me, mainstreaming means that an idea or process has become the default, not the exception. That it is interwoven into everything we do. For Nature-based Solutions (NbS) to be mainstreamed, they cannot be extra, additive, or nice to have. Rather, NbS components must be integral to urban and regional planning, and key components of all construction plans. Increasing awareness is essential because as many have said before me, to change something, we first need to name it. For behavior to change, people must understand, value, and feel empowered with the knowledge, skills, and monetary resources necessary to integrate NbS across the planning and political landscapes.
Based on my work with cities, effective mainstreaming generally involves (1) education at all levels (community, primary, university, professional); (2) practitioner accountability via integration into standards and policy; and (3) financial incentives such as equipment/tax rebates or grants.
These components operate at the individual, community, and governance levels. Effective mainstreaming cannot rely solely upon single initiatives that live or die by champions but must instead provide the scaffolding (education and funding) for grassroots success, but also integrate top-down pressure via political mandates and standards. This is seen again and again in the school garden sphere, where an individual teacher invests time and energy in a garden, but there is no one to fill any gaps should the individual retire or simply experience reduced capacity. We need champions, but we need them to operate as a network supported by a facilitating political and financial framework.
I am smiling now because I recently visited a city that is turning the tragedy of the champion story on its head. Quito, Ecuador, is a city of Champions. The cast of characters includes Yes Innovation, a dedicated duo (individual level) furthering innovative architecture and urbanism via NbS; the residents of the San Enrique de Velasco Neighborhood (community level) who gather regularly to discuss greening their streets; and the office of the Secretary of the Environment, City of Quito (individual/governance level). CLEVER Cities (financial incentive), a Horizon 2020 project supporting the integration of NbS into urban planning helped bring these actors together but these champions worked together to integrate NbS into the new local blue-green ordinance (accountability/governance level). More recently, they wrote a Spanish language guide to NbS for the city of Quito (education), which will soon be translated into English. While the CLEVER Cities project is ending this November, many of the resources guiding NbS Mainstreaming can be found on the CLEVER Guidance, and will also be permanently housed on the NetworkNature resource platform.
At their core, NbS are a holistic approach to a variety of social, economic, and environmental problems. Using NbS, Quito is actively generating benefits for communities such as flood management, water conservation, and protecting biodiversity. While important, any one piece of Quito’s approach would not be mainstreaming, but because Quito is working with the community, has local businesses involved, and is integrating NbS into policy, slowly but surely, NbS is on its way to being normalized. It isn’t the norm yet, as evidenced by the recent destruction of a community rain garden along a seldom-used and often-flooded dirt road in favor of a non-porous pavement. Despite setbacks such as this, Yes Innovation, in partnership with the neighborhood and Secretary of the Environment, are mainstreaming NbS in their own sphere, and reminding the city at regular intervals of the positive impact local NbS could have on recurrent flooding and community cohesion.
While there is still a long road ahead for Quito, substantial change has already taken place. There is awareness at the community level that NbS can provide solutions to local challenges and improve quality of life. Community interest is a key component of mainstreaming, and essential for innovative NbS implementation. At the end of the day, NbS works best when communities decide what they need and how they want to get there, effectively becoming living labs for non-conventional and inspiring NbS.
“What do [future generations] have to learn in order to take care of the planet? We want to generate awareness so that [future generations] can take care of the earth. We would like everywhere to have this policy. The planet is calling, and we want to answer this call” -INEPE Director, Quito, Ecuador.
This is true for all of us, yet awareness is only one step. It is corny, but mainstreaming requires working NbS into the tapestry of a city or region. It can’t be only one thread or motif―NbS must be woven into everything. Cities like Quito can help us figure out how best to get there.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Public awareness and understanding of the concept in different countries and contexts will largely depend on finding locally appropriate terms to substitute for the bland and abstract umbrella label of “Nature-based Solutions”, with illustrative examples.
The timing of this Roundtable is perfect in terms of being able to address both questions simultaneously. Public awareness and understanding of the concept in different countries and contexts will largely depend on finding locally appropriate terms to substitute for the bland and abstract umbrella label of ‘nature-based solutions’, with illustrative examples. I find this helpful even in my university teaching, although the nature of my courses means that I can and do use illustrated examples from around the world.
One of my current favourites is the highly successful rehabilitation of the Cheonggyecheon Stream running through a densely populated and congested part of central Seoul, Republic of Korea. As a result of progressive encroachment and deterioration through waste dumping and contaminated run-off, it was covered over in the 1970s, with a double-decker highway constructed above it to ease traffic congestion. This, in turn, contributed to air pollution in the resulting ‘urban canyon’ created by the tall buildings lining both sides and further declines in the neighbourhood. Proposals to demolish the highway and redevelop the stream proved highly controversial but provided a popular election platform for a mayoral candidate and the project was subsequently undertaken, with the rehabilitated and decontaminated waterway being opened in 2005. Despite some early criticism, it has been improved and both terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity enhanced over the years. Today it is a well-used and attractive recreational walkway, within the constraints of the sunken nature of the site (Figure 1). Historico-culturally referenced tile murals decorate the sides (see Choi 2010; Simon 2024: 68-71).
Figure 1. A well-vegetated section of the Cheonggyecheon Stream. Photo: David Simon
My other example is collaborative work underway at present with Runnymede Borough Council (RBC), the local district within which Royal Holloway (RHUL) lies and which is the local planning authority within the county of Surrey’s two-tier local government structure. In line with central government policies consistent with its international commitments to net zero and biodiversity conservation, all local councils must develop a green-blue infrastructure (GBI) strategy, while new development schemes and projects have to demonstrate biodiversity net gain. RBC is currently holding an early stakeholder consultation on its high-level outline GBI strategy, prior to further development work, leading to full public consultation on the entire strategy, any required revisions, and then adoption.
Since RHUL is one of the largest institutions and private landholders within Runnymede and I have led the formation of a strategic partnership between RHUL and RBC, I drew together a small group of appropriate specialists of both academic and professional service colleagues to assess and feedback on the draft. Biodiversity net gain and other current priorities are integrated into the document. An additional important innovation is that the policy seeks to ensure overall voluntary co-ordination and integration of GBI across both public and private waterways, wetlands, and land within Runnymede. This should maximise wildlife corridors and habitat restoration, while promoting ‘soft’ approaches to sustainability and flood resilience over ‘hard’ engineering designs that tend to displace floods.
Since another strand of the strategic partnership involves helping RBC set up a deliberative democratic ‘citizens’ panel’ next calendar year, this will provide an ideal forum for engaging different stakeholders and communities in seeking to bridge the classic divides between the Council and these residents and landholders, helping to forge more of a shared vision and understanding of biodiversity enhancement and GBI as part of sustainability and net zero transitions, as well as resilience in relation to existing local flood risk on the River Thames and some of its local tributaries.
References:
Cho, M-R (2010) The politics of urban nature restoration: The case of Cheonggyecheon restoration in Seoul, Korea. International Development Planning Review 32(2): 145-165. Https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2010.05
Professor Takemi Sugiyama is the leader of Healthy Cities research group in the Centre for Urban Transitions. Building on his background and research experience in architecture, urban design and spatial/behavioural epidemiology, he explores how urban form (building, neighbourhood environments) can be modified to encourage active living and enhance population health.
A concerted effort between research, advocacy, and government sectors is essential to overcome the barriers and to enable NbS transitions to be widely adopted and implemented.
Coordinated action by researchers, advocates, and policymakers can drive transitions to Nature-based Solutions: tobacco control in Australia is a salutary precedent
The increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and the interrelated need for actions on environmental sustainability are two of the major challenges that our society is facing today. Chronic diseases (e.g., type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and major cancers) are the biggest killers, accounting for three-quarters of all deaths worldwide (WHO, 2023). They are influenced significantly by, along with other causes, physical inactivity, and air pollution (WHO, 2023). It is also highly urgent to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit further global warming.
“Healthy Cities” provides an umbrella set of potential solutions to address these issues (Giles-Corti et al., 2016). A primary target in the promotion of healthy cities is to change how people move across cities, in a context where urban development continues to depend on cars for transportation. Under the global trend of urbanisation, cities expand horizontally, with large segments of the population living in sprawling urban conurbations. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have accelerated this trend due to more people working from home and requiring more space at home (Sisson, 2022). Urban sprawl and the fossil fuel demands of private motor-vehicle transportation (all too easily construed as reflecting individual consumer preferences and discretionary lifestyle choices) continue to drive major threats to human and environmental health.
Urban-built environments can be highly resistant to change for multiple and complex reasons, including challenges to entrenched economic interests, complex dealings with many stakeholders, and large-scale expenses for governmental instrumentalities that will be borne by taxpaying and voting constituencies. Efforts to address car dependency are fundamental to achieving healthy cities, but complementary approaches are also needed to drive the impetus for transitions to healthy and sustainable urban environments.
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are a promising approach to address these challenges since urban greenery is known to be beneficial to both human and environmental health (Hunter et al., 2023). However, implementation of NbS is still “limited to isolated demonstration projects, and without attention to long-term management and maintenance” (Hölscher et al., 2023). There are structural barriers, such as the vested interests of existing systems, that prevent NbS from being integrated into core urban development practices (Dorst et al., 2022). A concerted effort between research, advocacy, and government sectors is essential to overcome the barriers and to enable transitions to be widely adopted and implemented.
Public health efforts to reduce smoking in Australia provide a prime example of large-scale societal transitions. The proportion of regular smokers declined from 35% in 1980 to 13% in 2019 (Greenhalgh et al., 2023). Tobacco control initiatives produced a nationwide shift not only in smoking behaviour but also in people’s attitudes toward it (Borland et al., 1990). The efforts were successful due to coordinated action between researchers, advocates, and government officials. Namely, researchers produced a robust evidence base, which advocacy groups disseminated to relevant stakeholders, and policymakers implemented evidence-based approaches in collaboration with advocates.
Policies and regulatory initiatives that radically changed the social and environmental contexts of cigarette smoking included tax increases, advertising bans, plain packaging, the introduction of smoke-free work environments, and the ubiquitous availability of quit-smoking services, all supported by and advocated for with compelling research evidence.
These changes were in some dimensions incremental but also included a striking instance of successful litigation followed by strong regulation to address the health impacts of passive smoking in the workplace and other settings (Chapman et al., 1990; Greenhalgh et al., 2023). It is now the social norm not to smoke in public places in Australia.
Such strategies have the potential to be applied to NbS. Researchers must generate scientifically strong and policy-relevant evidence on urban nature and its impacts on human health and environmental sustainability. Such evidence must be translated into forms that are readily understood and accepted by the public and appealing to decision-makers and regulatory bodies. In the case of tobacco control in Australia, the Cancer Council and Heart Foundation were key knowledge brokers who played a critical role in pushing the anti-smoking agenda by supporting politicians and policymakers to make wide-reaching evidence-based decisions, often in the face of well-funded pushback by pro-tobacco lobby groups and their front organisations (Chapman and Wakefield, 2001).
NbS also require powerful advocacy groups that can bring researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders (e.g., community groups, environmental organisations, media) together with a view to facilitate coordinated action to underpin the pursuit of new (and in some of their strongest dimensions potentially contentious) NbS approaches.
References
Borland, R., Owen, N., Hill, D., Chapman, S. (1990). Changes in acceptance of workplace smoking bans following their implementation: A prospective study. Preventive Medicine, 19(3), 314-22.
Chapman, S., Borland, R., Hill, D., Owen, N., Woodward, S. (1990). Why the tobacco industry fears the passive smoking issue. International Journal of Health Services, 20(3), 417-27.
Chapman, S., Wakefield, M. (2001). Tobacco control advocacy in Australia: Reflections on 30 years of progress. Health Education & Behavior, 28(3), 274-89.
Dorst, H., van der Jagt, A., Toxopeus, H., Tozer, L., Raven, R., Runhaar, H. (2022). What’s behind the barriers? Uncovering structural conditions working against urban nature-based solutions. Landscape & Urban Planning, 220, 104335.
Giles-Corti, B., Vernez-Moudon, A., Reis, R., Turrell, G., Dannenberg, A.L., Badland, H., . . Owen, N. (2016). City planning and population health: A global challenge. The Lancet, 388(10062), 2912-24.
Greenhalgh, E.M., Scollo, M.M., Winstanley, M.H. (2023). Tobacco in Australia: Facts and issues. Cancer Council Victoria. https://www.TobaccoInAustralia.org.au
Hölscher, K., Frantzeskaki, N., Collier, M.J., Connop, S., Kooijman, E.D., Lodder, M., . . . Vos, P. (2023). Strategies for mainstreaming nature-based solutions in urban governance capacities in ten European cities. Urban Sustainability, 3(1), 54.
Hunter, R.F., Nieuwenhuijsen, M., Fabian, C., Murphy, N., O’Hara, K., Rappe, E., . . . Kahlmeier, S. (2023). Advancing urban green and blue space contributions to public health. The Lancet Public Health, 8(9), e735-42.
Professor Neville Owen is a National Health & Medical Research Council Senior Principal Research Fellow, Head of the Behavioural Epidemiology Laboratory at the Baker Heart & Diabetes Institute, and Distinguished Professor in Health Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. His research links urban-environment attributes with physical inactivity, too much sitting, and risk of developing diabetes and heart disease.
Ibrahim Wallee; is a development communicator, peacebuilding specialist, and environmental activist. He is the Executive Director of Center for Sustainable Livelihood and Development (CENSLiD), based in Accra, Ghana. He is a Co-Curator for Africa and Middle East Regions for The Nature of Cities Festivals.
The lack of clarity with the term mainstreaming in the context of NbS stifles initiatives that focus on sustainable city planning and green technology appropriation.
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have been keenly debated over the years as a concept with great potential to serve as a cost-effective means for nature to aid humanity in curbing climate change, biodiversity loss, and other rapidly escalating environmental problems (Ghosh, 2023). NbS and climate change are interdependently linked, and efforts at practically treating these concepts independently, irrespective of their conceptual nuances, are counterproductive because they reinforce each other. Unsurprisingly, commitments towards mainstreaming NbS have yet to gain the recognition they deserve to engender public confidence and broad acceptance. That will lead to a universal commitment to embracing NbS as a bridge for the gap between urban functionality and human survival in the global community.
Mainstreaming NbS into city and national policy planning for practical environmental project implementations at the community and national levels is a challenge due in part to the ambiguity of the definition of the concept of mainstreaming as it is conflated with other related change processes and concepts (Frantzeskaki et al., 2023). This situation undermines the planning and implementation of urban design projects and initiatives that promote resilience-building and environmental sustainability efforts, especially in the global south. The lack of clarity with the term mainstreaming in the context of NbS stifles initiatives that focus on sustainable city planning and green technology appropriation. It further fuels the scepticism about the effectiveness of NbS as a sustainable city development solution.
Indeed, there is a global swell of scepticism about the potential for misuse and abuse of NbS, with critics describing it as “a green-washing mechanism by businesses to offset their ongoing carbon emissions without curbing them” and as “a market mechanism to commodify and put a price tag on nature (Ghosh, 2023)”. These scepticisms militate against the general desire to mainstream and promote NbS as a default practice to address environmental crises.
It is a relief that part of the definitional problem was settled at the Fifth Session of the United Nations Environmental Assembly (UNEA5) in March 2022, where the United Nations (UN), through its environmental agency and global partners came up with a multilaterally accepted definition of nature-based solutions (NbS) as: “actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage natural or modified terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems, which address social, economic and environmental challenges effectively and adaptively, while simultaneously providing human well-being, ecosystem services and resilience and biodiversity benefits” (UNEA, 2022).
The universal acceptance of this definition contributes towards mainstreaming NbS as a preferred eco-friendly and resilience-building climate change mitigation and adaptation strategy at the community and national levels. NbS actions are underpinned by benefits that flow from healthy ecosystems and target significant environmental challenges like climate change, disaster risk reduction, food security, water security, and health. These are critical for the achievement of the sustainable development goals. It makes sense to strive towards promoting its acceptance by a significant constituent of the voice of reason within the public sphere through effective citizen engagements.
However, the term mainstreaming in the context of NbS needs to be clarified. It begs for further conceptual clarifications from similar actions and concepts and remains the pathway to promoting global acceptance of NbS interventions. Recognizing the need for clarity as a cause for potential misdirection of planning and implementation of NbS interventions, as posited by (Frantzeskaki et al., 2023), is the first step in remedying the situation. Besides, NbS mainstreaming is affected by low climate literacy in sprawling slums and informal settlements within the urban landscape. This trend perpetuates hierarchies in urban communities and stifles efforts at building an inclusive society. It builds up the pressure of civil unrest based on divergent views and preferences for the acceptance and prioritization of green space development as an effective NbS intervention for sustainable city development and eco-friendly environmental sustainability.
The solution to the above-enumerated challenges to mainstreaming NbS lies in enhanced citizen participation to promote transparency, break down socially constructed hierarchies, demystify the complexities of NbS interventions through climate literacy engagements, and further recognize local knowledge as a capacity for inclusive development and resilient systems-building. It further promotes inclusive development and convergence of views and aspirations for green space city development landscapes for sustainability and resilience-building through NbS initiatives.
References:
Frantzeskaki, N., Adams, C., & Moglia, M. (2023). Mainstreaming nature-based solutions in cities: A systematic literature review and a proposal for facilitating urban transitions. Land Use Policy, 130(106661), 1-14.
Frantzeskaki, N., Tsatsou, A., Pergar, P., Malamis, S., & Atanasova, N. (2023). Planning nature-based solutions for water management and circularity in Ljubljana, Slovenia: Examining how urban practitioners navigate barriers and perceive institutional readiness. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 89(128090), 1-11.
Gaspers, A., Oftebro, T., & Cowan, E. (2022). Including the Oft-Forgotten: The Necessity of Including Women and Indigenous Peoples in Nature-Based Solution Research. Frontiers in Climate, 4(831430), 1-6.
UN. (2022). Resolution adopted by the United Nations Environment Assembly on 2 March 2022: Nature-based solutions for supporting sustainable development. Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Retrieved November 17, 2023
On the opening day, The Nature Conservancy invited politicians from Water, Urban Administration and Housing Construction divisions, press, and professionals across sectors of the city to bear witness to this innovative project. The green rooftop became not only a living space for nature, but also a living space for communities.
Shenzhen, a coastal city located in Southern China, exemplifies the idea of rapid urbanization. In just 40 years, Shenzhen has transformed from a fishing village to a bustling megalopolis. Today, about 50% of Shenzhen’s 13 million residents live in its urban villages. These urban villages are some of the few places left in the city that provide affordable housing. Urban villages used to be “real” villages, but rapid development has turned the farmland that once surrounded them into high rise buildings.
Aerial View of GangXia Urban Village. Photo Credit: The Nature Conservancy
Urban villages are characterized by their dense living conditions, where resident buildings are built so close together that neighbors can shake hands with one another from their windows. Inside the villages, the streets are filled with markets, restaurants and shops, making people’s lives convenient. However, very few green spaces, such as parks or gardens, exist inside the villages. Gangxia Village in Futian district is one of them, where the high density of built environment has replaced nearly all vegetation. Coupled with a limited underground sewage system, during the city’s six months long wet season, urban villages like Gangxia are especially vulnerable to floods.
Dense, urban environment inside the Village. Photo Credit: The Nature Conservancy
To address this problem, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), along with other key partners, launched an innovative pilot project— Green Cloud —on an old building in Gangxia village, transforming its rooftop into a “living sponge” space. The project utilizes three-dimensional light steel structures that are simple to construct and have the capacity to hold over 420 plant containers filled with plants mostly native to Southern China. The original concrete rooftop is transformed by vegetation, which is capable of absorbing and preserving rainwater, creating a nature-based stormwater management system for the residential building, achieving a 65% of run-off control rate. As a result, a living “green cloud” is formed on a rooftop of Gangxia village.
The Green Cloud Project became a prominent example of the “Sponge City” initiative, a Chinese national policy framework that focuses on sustainable urban stormwater management led by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. In 2016, Shenzhen became a pilot city of the “Sponge City initiative. Since then, TNC has been working with the local government to help urban communities in Shenzhen become more resilient to urban flooding through the utilization of green infrastructure.
Green Roof Construction in Progress. Photo Credit: The Nature ConservancyThe Green Cloud Project. Photo Credit: The Nature Conservancy
The green roof not only serves as a sponge for rainwater, but it is also a sponge for community engagement, education, and culture, even when things don’t go as planned. During the first two weeks of construction, neighbors filed complaints as many thought the renovation taking place was illegal construction. Due to the housing shortage in urban villages, it was not uncommon for land owners to build additional floors to existing buildings.
After receiving complaints, local authorities arrived asking for an approval document in order to continue contrusction. However, the concept of a sponge roof was still so new that approval papers do not yet exist within current government agencies, and unfortunately, the construction of the green roof had to be temporarily shut down. To resolve the problem, TNC made various visits to local community centers, street government offices and bureaus to explain the project and its objectives in further detail. After many such meetings, TNC and its partners established a relationship of trust with the local stakeholders, and the project was given the green light for construction to resume. Realizing the importance of community and local support, TNC took the lead in engaging many university students, residents and youth volunteers in Shenzhen to come together and be a part of building the Green Cloud Project.
Stakeholders were invited to participate in the opening ceremony of the Green Cloud Project. Photo Credit: The Nature Conservancy
On the opening day, TNC invited politicians of Water, Urban Administration and Housing Construction divisions, press, and professionals from across different sectors of the city to bear witness to this innovative project. The green rooftop became not only a living space for nature, but also a living space for communities.
Live classical music concert held on the green roof, allowing nearby neighbors to listen in. Photo Credit: The Nature Conservancy
Even with just one rooftop, the possibilities for community-building are endless. One idea that was transformed into reality was a live musical concert on the green roof. With the support of a local youth education center, students volunteered to organize a concert for the residents of Gangxia village, many of whom may never have the means or time to attend a classical concert. So, one summer evening, a group of young musicians used the rooftop of an urban village as their stage and performed a classical music concert while sitting among native plants. The surrounding residents simply came to their windows to listen in, and the proximity between neighbors in this dense urban village suddenly became an advantage.
During the summer, the green roof becomes a place where urban youth can learn about nature (Photo Credit: The Nature Conservancy)
The Green Cloud Project has also had a positive impact on youth and their perception of nature. For the past two years, the green roof becomes an outdoor classroom for nature education every summer, where children take classes to learn about subjects such as biology, water and conservation. To provide urban youth with the opportunity to soak up knowledge while reconnecting with nature would be the project’s ultimate long-term achievement.
Aerial View of The Green Cloud Project. Photo Credit: The Nature Conservancy
In 2019, the rooftop was incorporated into Shenzhen’s Eco-Discovery Route by CityPlus, an official guidance platform of Shenzhen municipality, as the only sustainable architecture featured in the guide. It is open to visits by the public twice a week. By recreating community spaces such as the Green Cloud project inside urban villages, TNC hopes that they can become “green sponges” for culture and community —— where relationships between neighbors are rebuilt and the sense of community is re-cultivated while enjoying nature. This project has demonstrated the multifaceted benefits that green infrastructure can provide in improving the urban environment and people’s lives. In the future, TNC will continue to work towards building healthy cities through the integration of green infrastructure and community engagement. Vivin Qiang, Fish Xin Yu
Shenzhen
Xin Yu (aka Fish) is Shenzhen Conservation Director and Youth Engagement Director of The Nature Conservancy China Program. Since 2017, he has overseen TNC’s first City project in Shenzhen, China, focusing on Sponge City
For the first time in our history, more people live in urban vs. rural areas and humans continue to move into cities. Cities have huge impacts on our natural resources. Urban dwellers consume vast amounts of energy, produce waste, and alter landscapes to the point where native plant and animal populations decline precipitously. As cities grow, people have pondered – can we develop land without destroying our natural heritage?
While conventional development has years of inertia behind it, there is a movement afoot to design and manage growing cities in a more sustainable fashion. You most likely have heard the buzzwords – green development, new urbanism, smart growth, conservation development, etc. Urban communities have and will continue to expand, and the aforementioned concepts attempt to reduce our collective impact on local and surrounding environments.
This logo for a development near Melbourne, Australia depicts the sustainability goals for the project. Courtesy of VicUrban.
Why are green developments different? The goals are conservation while providing a unique living experience, which includes energy efficiency, alternative transportation, livability and walkability, and water conservation. Biodiversity, however, often is lower on the totem pole of priorities and is not explicitly addressed in urban development plans, unless an endangered species is identified. And even then, it may not be addressed adequately.
Biodiversity, which refers to variety of life and its processes, is unique to each region and country. Metropolitan areas are embedded in natural systems, and the urban matrix dissects and sometimes surrounds natural areas. Often the end result is the homogenization of species within cities. As one travels from one city to the next, exotic species dominate; from turfgrass to ornamentals, it is often difficult to distinguish one city from another. Further, cities impact natural habitats near and far away. For example, both animal and plant invasive exotics can overrun natural environments, and theses invasives (e.g., Burmese pythons and Chinese tallow trees) often originate from peoples’ yards.
Homes can be nestled in amongst the trees and native plants used as landscaping. Photo Credit Steve Allen.
As an urban wildlife ecologist, I have been involved with a number of green development projects, not only conducting research but also implementing outreach programs and consulting with planners, developers, and citizens. Often, there are many connections between biodiversity conservation and energy, water conservation, transportation, and walkability strategies. Examples include conserving native trees near buildings (which provide shade to reduce energy consumption during the summer) and clustering homes to reduce vehicle miles traveled (which conserves open space for wildlife habitat). From my experiences, though, many green development projects fail to meet the test of time and the original intent is lost, and the community becomes dysfunctional, at least in terms of biodiversity conservation.
In the community of Prairie Crossing, Illinois (USA), lots and common spaces are landscaped with native plants. Photo Credit Vicky Ranney.
Of course, site design is very important and one must conserve the appropriate green infrastructure, which translates (among other things) to a compact design where significant natural areas are conserved and connectivity is built across landscapes. Whatever is on paper, though, is only the first step. Construction activities can destroy the conservation areas carefully identified during the design phase. A host of contractors and sub-contractors, with a variety of equipment and heavy earthwork machines, can wreak havoc. Examples include:
• Earthwork machines run over the root zones of conserved trees, effectively killing the trees.
• Construction vehicles park or drive through natural areas, compacting the soil and even spreading invasive exotic plants.
• Silt fences are improperly installed and managed, causing nutrients and sediments to choke nearby wetlands.
• Chemicals and materials on site are improperly managed, changing soil chemistry and killing conserved vegetation.
Even if the design and construction phases went well, over the long term, successful biodiversity conservation is dependent on how people manage their homes, yards, and neighborhoods. The below actions can dramatically compromise the biological integrity of a green community:
• Large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides applied on yards, causing the pollution of bodies of water and killing non-target species (e.g., butterflies).
• People release invasive exotic plants and animals, including cats, killing wildlife in nearby habitats.
• Homeowners remove native plant landscaping and replace it with turfgrass and exotic plants.
• Conserved areas are compromised by improper recreation activities, such as people riding ATVs throughout a designated conserved area.
A Way Forward
How do we create functional, biodiverse communities? First, a range of stakeholders must understand the dynamic relationship among the three phases of development: design, construction, and postconstruction. Policy makers, planners, regulators, tree survey companies, and green certification agencies must not only create the enabling conditions for a good design, but set in motion incentives and regulations to promote good construction and postconstruction practices. Built environment professionals (including landscape architects, contractors, civil engineers, etc.) need to adopt alternative design, construction, postconstruction practices.
Most importantly, each of us needs to know how to evaluate the “greenness” of a community in order influence future green developments. Collectively, through purchasing power, negative and positive feedback will help raise the bar on what is a green development. The “functionality” of a green city or neighborhood is directly dependent on our actions, and we should reach out to neighbors to share and demonstrate green ideas.
In order for urban communities to conserve biodiversity, a range of stakeholders must be engaged. In this heuristic model, policy makers, developers, and residents constrain and influence each other in dynamic ways. Policy makers constrain the decisions made by developers through regulations. Developers constrain the decisions of residents by how the communities were designed. Residents, though, because of voting and purchasing power, can influence the decisions made by developers and policy makers. In addition, developers wielding economic power can dramatically influence policy depending on local political conditions.
I am utterly convinced the way forward is dependent on creating working models of “green” developments, from whole subdivisions to individual yards, in each county and neighborhood across the country. Do not underestimate the power of a local example. Nothing speaks more to increasing the uptake of alternative designs and management practices than examples that people can see and discuss. I have found building that first, local green subdivision helps to showcase green development practices and provide a catalyst for future developers to adopt new practices. To help promote biodiversity conservation in subdivision development, I recently have written a book titled, The Green Leap: A Primer for Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development (University of California Press). This book contains a host of strategies and case studies to create model conservation developments.
The time is ripe for action; the current low in the housing market allows some breathing room to discuss and set in motion new ways for communities to grow. The leap towards a new path is not complicated, but it will take a concerted effort from a variety of folks. I welcome comments and even examples of urban biodiversity conservation in your towns and neighborhoods.
Mark Hostetler
Gainesville, Florida USA
Editor’s note: this blog was also published as a Huffington Blog post
Diverse scientific evidence suggests that interaction with nature is essential to achieving the New Urban Agenda’s goal of health, and policymakers should explicitly say as much. Without nature, the “urban century” will fail.
As readers of the Nature of Cities are no doubt aware, we are living in what could rightly be called the urban century, with 2.4 billion more people forecast to live in cities by 2050. In a recent essay in Sustainable Earth, my coauthors, Tim Beatley, Thomas Elmqvist and I reviewed three different academic disciplines—urban economics, environmental health, and ecology—to understand what role nature might play in this urban century. Taken together, trends in these three disciplines suggest that the urban century needs nature to succeed. We then compared quantitative global datasets of land cover and urban population to understand whether the cities we are actually building incorporate nature in a meaningful way.
The first discipline we reviewed was urban economics. As a whole, the field is strongly (although not entirely) focused on the positive benefits to individuals, firms, and societies of life in urban settlements. Edward Glaeser, a chief exponent of this view, even referred to cities as mankind’s greatest invention [1]. Economists have traditionally talked about the economic benefits of urban life to production, such as the way that proximity of people and firms enable sharing of infrastructure and resources. In recent decades, economists have also focused on the economic benefits of urban life to consumption, as proximity enables it financially viable for cities to support unique consumption opportunities, from baseball stadiums to libraries to zoos.
The major theme of all this economics literature is that proximity—the increased potential for interaction inherent in living at higher population density—has its benefits. Perhaps one of the most famous recent analyses in this vein was by Luis Bettencourt and colleagues [2], who compared lots of metrics of urban activity with population size, to see how activity scaled with city size. Economic productivity, patent generation, and innovation all scale supra-linearly with city size. Bigger cities, with presumably more potential for interaction, are better for those metrics. Aristotle famously referred to human as a social animal [3], by which he meant that our unique skill and love for interacting with one another is part of species essence. In cities, one could argue we are creating the perfect space for social interaction. Cities could therefore be seen as quintessentially human, an expression of our deep need for social interaction.
The second discipline comes from environmental health studies of the urban health penalty. This term was first coined in the study of communicable diseases and death rates in European cities in the 19th century. In England, for instance, death rates were substantially higher in cities than in the countryside. The last century, however, has seen a transformation to what one scholar called the “sanitary city” [4], where clean drinking water is piped into homes and wastewater is piped out. This transformation, along with environmental regulations on air quality, have for many urban dwellers (although certainly not all) reversed the urban health penalty: those in cities live longer on average than those in rural landscapes.
However, two major health issues are still worse in cities that in rural areas, on average. Obesity in many countries is more prevalent in cities where a lower fraction of people works active jobs, although sometimes the ability of urbanites to walk while commuting on going about their daily life can counteract this tendency toward obesity. More to the point of this essay, there is a clear trend toward an increased prevalence of some mental health disorders in cities. For instance, Sundquist and colleagues [5] studied more than 4 million adults in Sweden, finding a significant increase in the incidence of psychosis and depression among populations living at higher densities in cities than those living in more rural areas. There are multiple possible pathways by which the urban environment and its increased pace and interaction can increase stress and the prevalence of some mental disorders. Cities create a local environment with far different environmental conditions than the ones we evolved as a species to handle. Thus, in this sense, the urban environment can be shockingly inhumane, by not being in accord with our organism’s design and capacities.
This unnatural environment is now the norm for our species. Global population data suggests than 3.7 people live at population densities that exceed 800 people per square kilometers, densities at which Sundquist and colleagues [5] began to detect an urban psychological penalty. If this finding from Sweden were to apply globally (and that is a big if!), then close to half of humanity is living at urban densities that significantly increase to risk of mental health problems. This urban psychological penalty will arguably be harder to get rid of than other facets of the historical urban health penalty. Crowding and the increased interaction of cities is part of what makes cities our greatest invention, yet it is also part (although only a part) of why the urban psychological penalty exists.
The third discipline we reviewed is one that is perhaps most familiar to the Nature of Cities readers. The central idea of this literature, coming out from the ecology and health fields, is that interacting with nature has health benefits. This occurs through multiple pathways. For example, parks and open space can help encourage recreation, which can help reduce obesity. Trees can help clean and cool the air, while natural habitats can reduce the risk of flooding. Most relevant to this essay, there are a growing number of studies that show a psychological benefit of interaction with nature.
Some studies have taken an observational approach, analyzing large population datasets to show the association between nature and health. For instance, using data over time from the British Household Panel Survey, Alcock and colleagues [6] showed that those who moved from a neighborhood with less nature to one with more nature showed an increase in mental health. Recently, Cox and colleagues [7] studied individually in southern England, a dose response of nature exposure: neighborhoods with more than 20% forest cover had a 50% lower incidence of depression and 43% less stress. Similarly, a study of more than 260,000 Australians found that those with a greater green space within 1 km had lower rates of psychological distress as well as higher rates of physical activity, suggesting that recreation in greenspace may be a causal mechanism improving mental health [8]. A study in Brisbane, Australia found a dose-response effect, with visits to outdoor greenspaces of 30 minutes or more per week resulting in 7% less depression and a 9% reduction in high blood pressure [9].
These results from observation studies are also supported by available experimental studies. There is now a large number of studies that show that interaction with nature can reduce stress, whether measured through self-reporting or from levels of cortisol. One recent experiment [10] in Philadelphia randomly selected vacant lots for clean-up and (in some cases) increased greening. Neighbors near vacant lots that were greened had an improvement in self-reported mental health over vacant lots that weren’t cleaned up, with lots that were cleaned up but not green intermediate in effect. My own organization, The Nature Conservancy, is working with the University of Louisville on the Green Heart Project. This neighborhood-level, controlled experiment seeks to quantify health benefits from an increase in urban tree canopy in the intervention neighborhood, relative to the control neighborhood.
Knowledge of the dose-response curve of nature’s effect on mental health is still imperfect. Available studies are culturally biased, for example, tending to be in the U.S. and Europe. Still, given that humanity is in the midst of the fastest period of urban growth in our species history, it seems worthwhile to ask: what fraction of the world’s urbanites get enough nature now? To address this question, we examined forest cover data for 245 cities globally.
Currently, only 13% of urban dwellers live in neighborhoods with more than 20% forest cover, the amount found by Cox and colleagues that provides a protective affect against depression and stress. Despite our growing scientific knowledge of the value of nature for mental health, our urban world remains mostly gray.
Knowledge of the state of global urban forest canopy over time is spotty. In the U.S., at least, urban forest canopy seems to be in decline. Nowak and colleagues looked at urban and community areas in the United States and found an 1.0% decline in forest cover from 2009 to 2014, which amounts to an annual loss of 36 million urban trees [11]. A lot of this decline seems to be due to systematic under-investment by the public sector in tree planting and (especially) maintenance. There has been a 25% decline in per-capita spending on urban forestry by municipalities since the 1980s.
So, what can be done to change this picture, to make the urban century greener? The most important step is perhaps to recognize that nature in cities is not a mere amenity, a “nice to have” thing on par with other urban amenities. Rather, nature in cities is a way to counteract the inevitable psychological downside of increased interaction in cities. Nature in cities is a way to have our cake and eat it too, to have the benefits of an urban world while still having a more humane, more natural life. Nature for urban dwellers then seems more like an essential feature of successful urban century.
In our essay, we explore three particular policies or programs that might help with this change in mindset. One of the ideas is a Green Prescription program, as exemplified in a program in New Zealand of the same name. Doctors can write prescriptions for patients, requiring a certain period of time outdoors in a park or natural area. For every ten green prescriptions written, participants achieved 150 minutes of exercise, which was associated with a 20-30% reduction in all-cause mortality. Overall, the program has been shown to be a cost-effective way to improve public health.
Another, complementary route would be to incorporate nature into our urban form, more deeply into the fabric of our daily lives. This leads to the idea of biophilic urban design, that integrate natural elements from the building scale to the scale of neighborhoods, cities, and regions. One commonly cited example of such a strategy is Singapore, which requires new building, to at least replace 1-to-1 the nature lost at ground level with nature on roofs or walls. One remaining challenge for biophilic design is to develop examples that work in less affluent settings (the Global South), which will likely require different kinds of biophilic design than those that work in richer cities like Singapore or San Francisco.
Finally, we argue that international policy can help as well. UN Habitat’s New Urban Agenda points to the role of ecosystem services in risk reduction and natural resource management. These are important goals, but we believe natural features are needed also simply to make our urban home more humane. We believe the scientific evidence suggests that interaction with nature is essential to achieving the New Urban Agenda’s goal of health, and policymakers should explicitly say as much. If we do not build some nature into our cities, we risk creating an inhumane, grey world for ourselves. Without nature, the urban century will fail.
Glaeser, E., Triumph of the City: How our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. 2012, New York: Penguin Books.
Bettencourt, L., et al., Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2007. 104(17): p. 7301-7306.
Aristotle, Politics. circa 330 BC.
Melosi, M.V., The sanitary city. 2008, Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press.
Sundquist, K., G. Frank, and J. Sundquist, Urbanisation and incidence of psychosis and depression. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2004. 184(4): p. 293-298.
Alcock, I., et al., Longitudinal effects on mental health of moving to greener and less green urban areas. Environmental science & technology, 2014. 48(2): p. 1247-1255.
Cox, D.T., et al., Doses of neighborhood nature: the benefits for mental health of living with nature. BioScience, 2017. 67(2): p. 147-155.
Astell-Burt, T., X. Feng, and G.S. Kolt, Mental health benefits of neighbourhood green space are stronger among physically active adults in middle-to-older age: evidence from 260,061 Australians. Preventive medicine, 2013. 57(5): p. 601-606.
Shanahan, D.F., et al., Health benefits from nature experiences depend on dose. Scientific reports, 2016. 6: p. 28551.
South, E.C., et al., Effect of Greening Vacant Land on Mental Health of Community-Dwelling Adults: A Cluster Randomized Trial. JAMA Network Open, 2018. 1(3): p. e180298-e180298.
Nowak, D.J. and E.J. Greenfield, Declining urban and community tree cover in the United States. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 2018. 32: p. 32-55.
A review of Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities, by Alexander Garvin. 2010. ISBN: 0393732797. New York, USA: W. W. Norton & Company. 224 pages.
And City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts, by Catie Marron. 2013. ISBN: 0062231790. New York, USA. Harper. 304 pages. Buy the books.
The last part of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st represent a new “Golden Age” for city parks. Certainly, looking at the American and international urban landscape, beautiful and expansive new public parks have popped up all over, while many historic parks first created in the 19th century, have been restored through novel public-private partnerships. Why is the creation of big new parks happening in so many cities, and what does this portend for global social trends? In my view, this “peacetime arms race” for bigger and better parks reflects several goals—parks are important parts of making cities more environmentally sustainable and people healthier, but they are also magnets that attract both investment and newly mobile tech workers, who can work anywhere but are choosing cities for quality of life. Parks—and the lifestyles they enable—are part of the attraction, and in the global competition for the young and the talented, parks are part of the winning formula for cities.
Parks are essential to human interchange and to the growth of the human soul.
As parks have become touchstones, defining and enabling the resurgence of cities, several authors have tried to document that phenomenon. Two books published in the last five years provide a fresh perspective on parks around the world and across centuries. One book focuses on the common factors that make great city parks, addressing many of the practical “mechanics” that lead to good design and management of parks; the other likewise builds the case for parks as an attribute of livable cities, but mostly from the point of view of untrained, but highly perceptive, park users. Both attempt to get “inside” parks, but one comes in more through the brain, the other through the heart and soul.
Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, 2009. Photo: Alexander Garvin
“Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities”
Alexander Garvin, who describes himself as a “strategist of the public realm,” is the CEO of AGA Public Realm Strategists. The Yale-trained architect and city planner has worked extensively in both the public and private realms and has also taught at Yale for more than 45 years as an adjunct professor. Among his many professional accomplishments was the development of an innovative plan to try to lure the 2012 Olympics to New York City (which ultimately went to London), and many master plans for communities across the country, including a plan for the Atlanta Beltline.
Millennium Park, Chicago, 2008. Photo: Alexander Garvin
It is clear from this book, and from his many projects, that Garvin adores parks and sees them as essential keystones to livable cities. Garvin, whose professional focus has been on larger-scale cities and communities, rather than on individual parks, sees landscape architects as planners and, perhaps, planners as landscape architects. In fact, he dedicates his book to Frederick Law Olmsted, stating that Olmsted “conceived of parks as an essential component of metropolitan living.” “That is a metropolitan planner’s conception,” Garvin adds, “taking the same comprehensive approach to urban and suburban planning to which I, as a planner, am committed.”
Derby Arboretum, Derby, 2007. Photo: Alexander Garvin
Garvin provides a great resource to professionals in the park and city planning, design and management realms, as well as to citizen activists and civic officials, beginning with a concise but illuminating history of the emergence of public parks in Europe and the U.S. In that initial chapter, he tries to answer the question about what is the world’s first public park. While he argues that the first purpose-built public parks are either the Derby Arboretum or Birkenhead, both in England, he also makes the case for much earlier royal parks and pleasure grounds that were at least partially open to the public prior to being fully opened or owned by the public. He follows this historical introduction with thematic chapters that manage to encompass his notions about the common elements that make great parks, while also providing a “user’s manual” for how to develop, design and manage parks, from “Site Selection” to “Finance and Governance”—two of 12 chapters that are replete with examples and beautiful color photos taken (mostly) by Garvin himself.
Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, 2007. Photo: Alexander Garvin
While the chapter headings thematically group parks, the chapters act as ample vessels for taking the reader around the world in 80 parks (or so), allowing Garvin to explicate, from a city planner’s perspective, how parks both define and are defined by the cities in which they are created, and how different circumstances—such as abandoned rail lines and industrial sites—can be reborn as magnificent new parks (as in the now well-known High Line in New York City, as well as less-well-known but equally compelling urban trail parks, such as the Cedar Lake Trail in Minneapolis, and Boston’s Southwest Corridor Park, built over an underground subway line that replaced an old elevated rail line).
Cedar Lake Park Trail, Minneapolis, 2007. Photo: Alexander Garvin
While Garvin’s global gallivanting to provide examples is enjoyable, those who work in the park management realm may find his four concluding chapters, which address Stewardship, Finance and Governance, the Role of the Public, and Sustainability, to be most illuminating. In those chapters, Garvin neatly summarizes the many strategies developed in recent decades to create, restore, fund and manage parks—no small trick when many pressing needs absorb the bulk of the urban treasury. With some focus on examples in New York City—where the park conservancy model was born and perfected—and also with a diverse set of examples from cities across the U.S., Garvin explains the many different funding and management models, from more traditional public funding, to business improvement districts and conservancies that belie the notion that cities can’t afford to have great parks. Though Garvin provides excellent examples of the mechanics of designing great city parks and restoring and managing them, it is clear in his summations that these mechanics, and indeed the parks themselves, are in the service of a larger goal—livable cities. The book’s concluding paragraph enumerates “the roles that every great park must play: enhancing well-being and improving public health, incubating a civil society, sustaining a livable environment, and providing a framework for urbanization.”
“City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts”
Catie Marron, philanthropist, former chair of the New York Public Library, and current chair of the Friends of the High Line, also takes readers on a tour of parks around the world, but she does so not through the mind of a professional planner, nor exclusively through her own mind. Instead, she visits parks near and far through the experiences of others, mostly highly regarded authors of fiction and non-fiction, but also a movie star, a world-renowned architect, and the 42nd President of the United States.
Whereas Garvin takes a thoroughly professional, mostly distant perspective on the parks and related themes he writes about, Marron’s approach is highly personal. She is joined in the endeavor by photographer Oberto Gili, who took pictures of the 18 cities (and 22 parks in those cities), and more importantly, by the 18 authors of the essays about the parks.
The result is a highly entertaining set of personal excursions into space, but also into time and emotion. They are wide-ranging: President Bill Clinton’s essay is a functional combination of personal experience and history in Dumbarton Oaks, the spectacular but intimate private garden designed by Beatrix Farrand, America’s first great woman landscape architect, which is now open to the public (though it is not technically a public park). President Clinton mixes unveiling personal memories of visiting Dumbarton Oaks as a college student at Georgetown and, later, with his wife, Hillary, but also tells the story of how the mansion that the garden surrounds was the site of the WW II-era Dumbarton Oaks Conference, held by allies to plan what was to become the United Nations. President Clinton, in his short essay, takes great pains to point out that the garden was the product of the efforts of the two “strong women who created it,” Farrand and then-owner, Mildred Bliss—and one can’t help but notice a bit of “product placement” for “strong women.”
The High Line, New York City. Photo: Oberto Gili
Most of the other essays are by professional writers of both fiction and non-fiction, and though the approaches vary, the quality is mostly high. I most enjoyed Andre Aciman’s essay on the High Line. Aciman, a New Yorker and prior documenter of the role of parks in the lives of the locals, uses a “then and now” narrative to call out not only the history of the area, but also the contrast of the functional, muscular steel framework of the former freight rail viaduct to the contemporary “high-tech, new-age, eco-friendly, cutting-edge green park” that was inserted into it. In gazing at the old warehouses and factory buildings that still surround the High Line, Aciman conjures some images of the paintings of Edward Hopper, but mostly of fellow NYC painter John Sloan: “This is Sloan country. If while staring north on the High Line, I can no longer dispel John Sloan, and if John Sloan intrudes on my vision, then his paintings become the visual equivalent of a soundtrack.”
Protestors in Grant Park, Chicago 1968.Grant Park today. Photo: Oberto Gili
Some of the others are even more personal. Historian Jonathan Alter recalls his childhood in Lincoln and Grant Parks in Chicago, including the checkered history of Chicago parks that involved a race riot in 1921, the police beatings of protestors in 1968, and the culminating historic moment on Election Night, 2008, when President-elect Barack Obama gave a victory speech outdoors, “quoting Lincoln in Grant Park.”
Griffith Park, Los Angeles . Photo: Oberto GiliVilla Borghese, Rome. Photo: Oberto Gili
When people think about or write about their personal experiences with parks, loved ones often intrude, as in Candice Bergen’s hilarious memory of her grandmother, Lillie Mae, who took her on visits to LA’s Griffith Park. Bergen’s grandmother protected her “incredibly pale skin” with a hat made from the grocery store paper bag she had used for bread crumbs to feed the ducks, fashioning a “humiliator” that mortified the young Ms. Bergen. And invariably, the “romantic landscapes” of many parks both spark romance and bring back memories of love—familial, unrequited, lost, found, or re-found. Zadie Smith summons up a trip with her elderly father to Florence, and an ultimately unsatisfying trip to the Boboli Gardens that occurred shortly before her father’s death; she also documents finding relief in mourning her father’s passing in the wild beauty of Rome’s Villa Borghese park.
Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris.
Both Andrew Sean Greer and Amanda Harlech summon up very personal, deeply felt memories of romantic encounters in the Presidio—not yet then the refined National Park it has become in San Francisco—and in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris, respectively. Recalling the specific walk in a park and an unrequited love that failed to blossom on the other end, Harlech writes:
I have never forgotten that morning in May in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Often when I’m staying in Paris I will retrace that walk and stand, lost in the passing moment of the past, in the beat of the present—in the rain, in the magnification of snow, in early spring when the orange trees and palms are brought out and unwrapped from their winter cladding, or in the blinding blue of July—and sense the haunting of first love in Paris.
For that is the intangible power of parks. In her introduction, Marron notes that “each park has its own soul, one that has profoundly influenced the culture of its surroundings and the multitudes who enjoy it. Yet the parks’ similarities speak to the fundamental needs of urban dwellers workdwide. Parks are essential to city life, and they have been since the mid-eighteenth century, when cities became crowded and people needed an escape from the tussle and bustle of chaotic, noisy, dirty street life.” As the writers of these essays universally imply, each in a different way, parks are essential to human interchange and to the growth of the human soul.
A review of The High Line. By James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofido + Renfro. 2015. ISBN: 9780714871004. Phaidon Press. 452 pages. Buy the book.
New York City’s High Line Park, once a rusting relic of abandoned freight rail transportation infrastructure, has become arguably one of the world’s best-known urban parks, and possibly the single most visited park in the United States—and perhaps the world—on a visitor-per-acre basis.
The High Lineis, in the end, a sensual experience reflecting its creation, design, and current reality.
As I travel across the United States, speaking with audiences of planners, landscape architects, park aficionados, and interested lay people, informal polls reveal that more than half have visited the High Line. It has become both a major tourist destination and an economic development magnet of unprecedented proportions, attracting at least 40 new residential and office buildings and spurring a reported $4 billion economic impact. It has also spurred at least 60 similar projects in cities around the globe, and it has been lionized (and occasionally reviled) as an apotheosis of urban design and placemaking.
How the High Line became the singular phenomenon it is, and, in particular, how it evolved from condemned ruin to celebrated masterpiece through finely honed design, is documented in this recent book by the project’s principal designers, landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations and architecture firm Diller Scoffidio Renfro. This handsome, massive “doorstop of a book,” as landscape architect and co-author James Corner referred to it, is beautiful to look at and to feel (its cover is embossed and textured like the precast planks that make up the High Line’s flooring). As with many books about architecture, whether monographs of an architect’s or firm’s work, it is replete with delicious color photographs and renderings, sections and, axonometrics. But this book, in some ways like the work it describes, resembles high-end erotica—like the “art” books of the 1960s that arrived in “plain brown wrappings”: architectural glamour of the highest order.
As someone closely involved with the preservation, planning, design, construction, and management of the High Line, I recognized early on that this was a park of a completely different order than any New York City park of the last century or more. I served as New York Parks Commissioner during most of the life of the project to nearly the completion of its second phase, and worked closely with Robert Hammond and Joshua David and the Friends of the High Line, who conceived of and fought for the project, and City government colleagues, including City Planning Chair Amanda Burden and the Economic Development Corporation, under the direction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a major supporter of the project.
From the project’s inception, I had a sense of its subtle sexuality. That sexuality is cited often in this book, both overtly and by implication, and it could be argued that the High Line is the first “Out” public park landscape. Further, the sexuality of the concept and its environment were evoked in the sensuality of the design of its landscape.
The sexual aspects of the High Line (and this book) are apparent in the book’s design. Like old issues of “Playboy” magazine, it has foldouts—not one, but scores, sumptuous photos and renderings laid out in graphic detail for landscape architecture and architecture aficionados to pore over. And both in photos of the High Line neighborhood’s recent “seedy “ past and in conversations between the project’s designers transcribed in the book, the sexual aura of both the High Line itself and its neighboring buildings is laid bare. One photo shows a group of apparently trans individuals, one with bare breasts protruding from a shirt. Another suggests a prostitute, conversing with a potential customer in a car. The Meatpacking district surrounding the abandoned High Line was well known for prostitutes of various sexual persuasions and identities, for sex clubs catering to a variety of clients and preferences, and for the abandoned piers that were locales for mostly gay sexual assignations, at a time when homosexuality was still vilified by many and openly gay people were at risk for harassment and much worse.
Also thoroughly documented in the book is the design competition sponsored by the Design Trust for Public Space, a non-profit group that was an early supporter of the High Line; one imaginative concept turned the elevated rail line’s “basin” into a linear swimming pool, and a rendering shows a naked, muscular man climbing out of the pool. Later, after the High Line opened, so did a sexy new hotel designed by Polshek Partners, situated directly over the High Line, with its legs towering over and astride the park. Almost immediately after it opened, there were reports and salacious tabloid news items about people having sex or parading nude behind the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows (and the book contains several pictures of both).
The park’s designers, in conversations transcribed in the book, discuss the sexual aspects of the High Line, as well as the hotel and the other buildings so close that you can almost touch them (and certainly engage in casual or studied voyeurism of the “Rear Window” variety with them). In the opening conversation, “Forethoughts”, Elizabeth Diller describes the “illicit quality of the place”, when it was still a post-industrial ruin, and Matthew Johnson discusses the sociological conditions as the neighborhood evolved from industry to “queer subcultures…sex workers and cross-dressing kids sharing the streets with meatpacking workers and longtime tenement residents.”
Later in their accounts, after the High Line has been built, the sexuality of the new park becomes more pronounced as the designers see it: “We never imagined the High Line would become a place of romantic intimacy…” says Diller. “It’s considered the make-out park in New York City. I took a walk on a nice night recently and counted twenty-three couples passionately kissing.”
The designers understand that they created a new form of public stage for seeing and being seen. “On the High Line, the close proximity of others attracts a strange sort of public intimacy,” says Diller. “The voyeur and the exhibitionist have a consensual relationship. The pleasure of watching people is matched and perhaps exceeded by the pleasure of being watched.” Johnson confirms: “Encouraged by the many extra eyes on the High Line exhibitionism seems more publicly embraced than ever.”
But I would argue that the ultimate product, both the design and the completed work, is actually more sensual than sexual, and the details of that sensuality are gloriously covered in the book. For starters, everything in the park was unique—no off-the-shelf park furniture for this new form of park. The chapter headed “Design” may be the most explicit for lovers of architectural detail. It contains numerous foldouts with renderings of different areas—the pinups you are tempted to pull out and put on your wall. The foldouts include typical sections and details galore, including the more than 50 different types of precast concrete aggregate planks that make up not just the High Line’s “floor” but also the stunning “peel-up” benches that seem to grow out of the deck like wind-stunted pine trees growing from rocky crevices.
In addition to the three sections of interviews, the book contains seven chapters. “Found” documents what the design team, also including gifted planting designer Piet Oudolf, discovered in the summer of 2004 when they first hopped off a concrete deck of an abandoned warehouse into chest-high mugwort and wildflowers, like explorers debarking into an abandoned ruin, with both large-scale photos in the foldouts and small scale snapshots at measured distances. The large photos include walls with huge, faded graffiti murals, and found objects—a bucket of spray paint cans, a mannequin torso, a package of strawberry-flavored sexual lubricant, a robin’s egg in a nest.
The “Archives” chapter is rich with historical artifacts—documents, plans, and working drawings for the original High Line, including sections, details, and isometric drawings of constructions joints. It is apparent that Master Builder Robert Moses was constructing for the ages in this ambitious project to lift freight trains above 11th Avenue and onto a massive, functional steel structure capable of holding two fully loaded freight trains simultaneously. “Archives” also includes photos and other documents of the neighborhood’s transformation from industrial, to post-industrial, to chic, and brings the project up to the point of the Design Trust for Public Space report.
The “Concept” chapter explores the design completion, focusing on the eventual winning team’s entry, and the initial design development. One concept sadly missing from the final design and realization was a combination pond/pool and elevated beach; the pool would have turned into a skating rink in winter!
The “Design” chapter lovingly details the entire design, with plans, sections, and renderings for each of many segments, and you can see the eventual High Line really taking shape. This is the phase I most remember from my days working with the team—many long design meetings, including one where we examined and debated for several hours the different possible subtle configurations for the pre-cast planks. Among the delectable details of the “Design” are those of all the furnishing and fences, as well as the more than 50 types of pre-cast planters. Also here are Oudolf’s planting plans, and color photos of more than 400 plant species actually growing on the High Line—200 perennials, 36 grasses, 12 vines, 50 bulbs, and 100 varieties of trees and shrubs.
“Construction” documents in burly, large-format color photos the transformation of ruin to glorious completion, and “Walk” is just that, a walk through the newly complete High Line, compressing 5 years of opening three separate segments between 2009 and 2014. “Walk” is bookend to “Found,” with both large-scale photos of the completed park in full use in all seasons, along with smaller snapshots at almost the same measured distance as the initial chapter, so one can do almost perfect “Before and After” comparisons.
The final chapter, “Unforeseen”, documents the unanticipated uses and phenomena of the High Line. There is artist Patty Heffley doing performances on her fire escape, drawing attention to the fact that she has now completely lost her privacy to millions of annual visitors. There are the myriad events—official and spontaneous; the arts installations and musical performances organized by the Friends of the High Line—who, by then were completely managing the park, and funding its operations; weddings, stargazing, the topless reading group, and, of course, the exhibitionists in the Standard Hotel, parading their nudity or having sex in the windows. “Unforeseen” also documents the perhaps not completely unforeseen mushrooming of development with at least 40 new buildings, many by world-renowned architects, along with the 60 similar adaptive reuse projects around the world, many apparently inspired by the High Line.
Reading—really, “looking at”—The High Line is, in the end, a sensual experience reflecting its creation, design, and current reality. Its 452 pages and scores of foldouts offer great delights, and encourage many repeat visits—as with the High Line itself.
Citizenship is derived from city, and floristry from forest or jungle. Forest and human being live a socio-ecological pact in which the forest becomes a new citizen respected in its integrity, stability, and extraordinary beauty. Both benefits, as the utilitarian logic of exploitation is abandoned and the logic of mutuality is assumed, which implies mutual respect and synergy. — Leonardo Boff[1]
2020 has been a year full of uncertainties for the whole world. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to change our perception in many aspects of daily life.
This work is long and has not been easy. Sometimes we are discouraged by lack of resources and understanding, by violence, by increases in poverty, by politics, by the realities of Colombia. But our hope is still alive, and we remain motivated to contribute our little piece of peace to the life of this beloved corner of the hills of Bogota.
In times of compulsory quarantine, we citizens of Bogotá have had to look to the hills again. The over 13,000 hectares that makeup Bogota’s Eastern Forest Protection Reserve, commonly known as the Eastern Hills[2]—in which the localities of Usaquen, Chapinero, Santa Fe, Candelaria, San Cristobal, and Usme are located—seem unperturbed by what is happening in the city, in the country, in the world. It seems as if this piece of the Andean mountain range is statically watching over the life of its inhabitants from its 3,600 meters of altitude.
The country’s capital is a privileged city, as it is surrounded by a majestic mountain range, a set of moorlands[3], peaks, and multiple watercourses that have unfortunately been barely accessible to its inhabitants.
Bogotá. Photo: Fernando Cruz
This low access is a subject of reflection and action for those of us who are part of the Bogota Hills Foundation (Fundación Cerros de Bogotá) and for the various groups formed for the defence and the informed and sustainable use of the hills. We assume ourselves as citizens in the high plain tropical forest in the region of Bogota. We extend this type of citizenship “inter-retro-connected” in a new civilizing narrative. In an area of transition between the city and the forest reserve, we promote ways of relating to others and nature in an urban-rural peace process within a city of more than eight million inhabitants, and in a country that is still trying to understand what this means on a national scale. That is why we are agents of peace.
We are part of the ecosystem as citizens of the forest. Source: own elaboration from photos by Leonardo Centeno. Editing: Gabriela Fernández.
Quarantine does not stop life in the hills
During this year, which has been full of uncertainties, intimacies revealed in virtual meetings, and work with people who only know each other through a screen, the strength and passion of a group of florestanios (“citizens of the forest”) added to the fears derived from the scarcity of opportunities or resources and generated a challenge of creation and intense movement.
The quarantine, which has just been lifted in Bogotá after six long months, shows the impact that the pandemic has had on the streets, on businesses, and on meeting places. We can now see the citizens, almost hidden behind their masks, walking at a different pace of life.
Despite this landscape, life buzzes in the Eastern Hills. Nourished soils and others in the process of regeneration, species of fauna and flora as well as the bodies of water that surround it give life to the city, clean the air, provide a sense of well-being, and reaffirm the sense of belonging.
Apart from the importance of their very existence, the hills are also subjects of reinvention. Coinciding with our 11th birthday, as Bogota Hills Foundation, we decided to launch the campaign: The Hills Save Us to highlight the vital and protective role of the hills for the city and reiterate the importance of complying with the ruling of the Council of State that ordered the creation of a social, ecological, and recreational corridor. A need that became more evident in these times of pandemic and quarantine. #LosCerrosNosInspiran (#TheHillsInspireUs) #VozCerros (#HillsVoice) #VisionCerros (#HillsVission) #LosCerrosNosSalvan (#TheHillsSaveUs).
During these six months, we worked intensely to launch the largest platform with complete information about the Eastern Hills, its people, its flora, its fauna, its moors, and its water basins. In addition, citizen initiatives, projects undertaken with children, footpaths, historical studies, and neighbourhood histories are shown there. The citizens will be able to take the hills home thanks to the drawings we designed to download and colour, and, in the process, learn names, toponyms, and sacred places.
Graphic piece Sofía Estrada Photography: Juan Amarú RodríguezBogotá Campaign with and without the mountains. Photography: Pouya Razavi. Graphic piece: Erika Tovar.
A socio-ecological project that cannot be postponed
As “florestines” citizens, we have witnessed the changes that have altered the ecosystem of our hills, and, perhaps pretentiously, we have always said that the mountain needs us for its restoration. We make plans and talk about how necessary these actions are to recover the biodiversity lost by the construction of the city. But at this historic moment, after having spent six months in quarantine, we have seen from our windows the wonderful chain of life. We have breathed the fresh air; we have rediscovered the landscape and only now do we realize that it is not we who will save the hills, but they are the ones who can save us.
In light of the current crisis, the need for green spaces in urban environments – for us and for the whole world – has become clear and precise. People from different latitudes found there a source of strength to face the crisis. However, in other cities, perhaps in too many, the deficiency of safe and accessible green spaces that affect the improvement of the physical and mental health of the communities became evident.
To corroborate this statement, it is interesting to mention a survey carried out by Greenpeace Colombia, as a result of the isolation, in which it was found that 41% of the people interviewed currently value public green spaces more and consider it important to expand, take care of and protect them for the good of the people and the communities, in addition to promoting their sustainable use. Likewise, according to what was observed by the Bogota Hills Foundation at this time, the pressure from citizens to walk the trails, even at the risk of safety, shows the acute need for natural spaces without congestion.
It is precisely this scenario that has motivated us to insist on the possibility of building a shared vision and comprehensive management for the city’s eastern hills. The Foundation dreams of creating a socio-ecological corridor in the Adjustment Strip that restores existing trails with native species and integrates new public spaces. The dream also involves neighbours and hill leaders in the care and management of this new urban ecosystem (what the Foundation calls neighbourhood pacts). The neighbourhood pacts will be trained guides and share stories about ethnobotany, geology, and environmental history at lookouts, among native species as cedars, tibars, tunos, and amargos[4], through visible and clean streams, while spotting Andean guans, hummingbirds, weasels, and frogs.
This affectionate and productive coexistence of the citizen with the imposing Eastern Hills, utopian or risky for some, is already becoming a reality through a small living laboratory in the three hectares of the Civil Society Natural Reserve called Cultural Threshold Horizons. There, with the collaboration of volunteers and experts, talks, collaborative restoration with native species, orchards, and composting processes have been carried out, forming a pilot project that can be replicated as private property for public use.
The Natural Reserve acts as a laboratory of collaborative transformation and, through a volunteer program, we have been carrying out participative restoration for five years now (730 plants of more than 33 different species)[5]. We also generate collective works such as the creation of barriers and filters to retain plant material, mitigating the impact of rain on the area; we produce land art, and offer weekly talks on urban ecology called Cátedra Cerros Bogotá (Bogota Hills Chair) in which the mountain takes the stage.
We, at the Land art workshop. Photo: Lauryn García.The mountain takes the word all fridays in the Bogotá Mountain Classroom #CatedraCerrosBogota Photo: Carlos LinceGraphic piece: María Paula Guerrero for the “Fundación Cerros de Bogotá”. Photograph: Leonardo Centeno.
This work is long and has not been easy. Sometimes we meet walkers who do not fully understand our work. We are discouraged by the lack of resources or frustrated by the slow progress of our activities. We are also overwhelmed by the reality we live in our country, the violence, the attacks on environmental leaders, the increase in poverty, and the generalised pain of a country that resists change, even though it tries hard. We are sometimes saddened by the lack of will and political action to restore the Eastern Hills to its role within the community. However, our hope is still alive, and we remain motivated to contribute our little piece of peace to the life of this beloved corner of the hills of Bogota[6].
[1]Boff, Leonardo. “Florestanía” in FLORÆ Magazine # 1. Bogotá: Flora ars+natura, August 2015.
[2]The hills shelter 91,444 inhabitants (2018) distributed in 64 neighbourhoods between the localities of Usme, San Cristóbal, Santa Fe, Chapinero, and Usaquén.
[5]According to records published in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
https://www.gbif.org/, the Bogota’s Eastern Forest Protection Reserve, as of August 2020, has 1673 species of flora and fauna, of which 137 are endemic, that is, their geographical distribution is limited to this area.
[6] This article is a tribute to that passionate group that has accompanied me this year and whom I thank from the heart to continue increasing the population of “florestanios”: Maria A. Mejía, Lucía Martínez, Isabela Uribe, Jorman Romero, Gabriela Fernández, Miguel Leguízamo, María Paula Guerrero, Nicolás Bazzani, Adriana Cabrera, Mateo Hernández, Ricardo Gamboa, Francisco González, Martha Gómez, Santiago Rosado, Leonardo Centeno, Fernando Cruz, Carlos Lince, Mateo Hernández, Leonardo Villa, Lina Prieto, Jaime A. Vargas, filmico. col, Laura Gómez, Elsa Rey, Carolina Fiallo, Ingrid Obando, Juan Camilo Cruz, Byron Calvachi, Johanna González, Lina Prieto, Andrés Gómez, Juan Camilo Castro, Sebastián Cerquera, María Alejandra Peña, Ana Puerto, Luisa Castro, Juan Pablo Rojas, Nicolás Barrero, Jacqueline Vargas, Erika Tovar, Sofía Estrada, Mark Skepasts, Elizabeth Barragán, Ivone Malaver, Nathaly Ortiz, Gabriela Fernandez and Lauryin García.
* * *
Los cerros nos salvan
Ciudadanía se deriva de ciudad, y florestanía de floresta o selva. Floresta y ser humano viven un pacto socioecológico en el que la floresta pasa a ser un nuevo ciudadano respetado en su integridad, estabilidad y extraordinaria belleza. Ambos se benefician, pues se abandona la lógica utilitarista de la explotación y se asume la lógica de la mutualidad, que implica respeto mutuo y sinergia. —Leonardo Boff[i]
2020 ha sido un año lleno de incertidumbres para el mundo entero. La pandemia derivada de la enfermedad denominada covid-19 nos ha obligado a cambiar nuestra percepción en muchos aspectos de la vida cotidiana.
Este trabajo es largo y no ha sido fácil. A veces nos desalienta la falta de recursos y comprensión, la violencia, el aumento de la pobreza, la política, las realidades de Colombia. Pero nuestra esperanza sigue viva, y seguimos motivados para contribuir con nuestro pequeño trozo de paz a la vida de este querido rincón de las colinas de Bogotá.
En tiempos de cuarentenas obligatorias, los ciudadanos de Bogotá hemos tenido que volver a mirar a los cerros. Las más de 13 000 hectáreas que componen la Reserva Forestal Protectora Bosque Oriental de Bogotá, comúnmente conocida como Cerros Orientales[ii], en los se ubican las localidades de Usaquén, Chapinero, Santa Fe, Candelaria, San Cristóbal y Usme parecen imperturbables ante lo que ocurre en la ciudad, en el país, en el mundo. Pareciera como si ese pedazo de cordillera de los Andes vigilara estático, desde sus 3600 metros de altura, la vida de sus habitantes.
La capital del país es una ciudad privilegiada, ya que está rodeada por una cadena montañosa majestuosa, un conjunto de páramos, picos y múltiples cauces de agua que han sido, infortunadamente, poco accesibles para sus habitantes.
Bogotá. Foto: Fernando Cruz
Ese bajo acceso es un tema de reflexión y de acción para quienes hacemos parte de la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá y para los diversos grupos conformados para la defensa y el uso informado y sostenible de los cerros. Nos asumimos como ciudadanía en la floresta tropical de altiplano, en la región de Bogotá. Ampliamos esta forma de ciudadanía «interretroconectados» en una nueva narrativa civilizatoria. En un área de transición entre la ciudad y la reserva forestal promovemos formas de relacionarnos con los otros y con la naturaleza en un proceso de paz urbano-rural dentro de una ciudad de más de ocho millones de habitantes, en un país que aún trata de comprender lo que esto significa a escala nacional. Por ello, somos agentes de paz.
Somos parte del ecosistema como ciudadanos de floresta. Imagen de elaboración propia con fotos de Leonardo Centeno. Montaje de Gabriela Fernández.
La cuarentena no detiene la vida de los cerros
Durante este año, que ha estado lleno de incertidumbres, de intimidades reveladas en reuniones virtuales y de trabajos con personas que solo se conocen a través de una pantalla, la fuerza y la pasión de un grupo de «florestanios», sumadas a los miedos derivados de la escasez de oportunidades o de recursos nos generó un desafío de creación y de movimiento intenso.
La cuarentena, que recién se levanta en Bogotá, después de seis largos meses, permite constatar el impacto que la pandemia provocó en las calles, en los negocios, en los escenarios de encuentro. Podemos apreciar ahora a los ciudadanos, casi escondidos detrás de sus mascarillas, caminando a un ritmo de vida diferente.
A pesar de este paisaje, la vida bulle en los Cerros Orientales, suelos nutridos y otros en proceso de regeneración, especies de fauna y flora así como los cuerpos de agua que la rodean dan vida a la ciudad, limpian el aire, brindan una sensación de bienestar y reafirman el sentido de pertenencia.
Aparte de la importancia de su misma existencia, los cerros también son sujetos de reinvención. Coincidiendo con nuestro 11.º cumpleaños, como Fundación Cerros de Bogotá decidimos lanzar la campaña: Los cerros nos salvan, a fin de resaltar el papel vital y protector de los cerros para la ciudad y reiterar la importancia de cumplir el fallo del Consejo de Estado que ordenó la creación de un corredor social, ecológico y recreativo, una necesidad que se hizo más evidente en estos tiempos de pandemia y de cuarentena. #LosCerrosNosInspiran #VozCerros #VisionCerros #LosCerrosNosSalvan
Pieza gráfica: Sofía Estrada Foto: Juan Amarú Rodríguez
En estos seis meses trabajamos con intensidad para lanzar la mayor plataforma con información completa sobre los Cerros Orientales, su gente, su flora, su fauna, sus páramos, sus cuencas hídricas; además, se muestran allí iniciativas ciudadanas, proyectos emprendidos con niños, senderos, estudios históricos e historias de barrios (https://cerrosdebogota.org/). Los ciudadanos podrán llevar los cerros a su casa gracias a los dibujos que diseñamos para descargarlos y colorearlos, y de paso aprender nombres, toponimias, lugares sagrados.
Campaña de Bogotá con/sin sus cerros. Foto Pouya Razavi. Montaje Erika Tovar.
Un proyecto socioecológico impostergable
Como ciudadanos «florestanios» hemos presenciado los cambios que han alterado el ecosistema de nuestros cerros, y, tal vez pretenciosamente, siempre hemos dicho que la montaña nos necesita para restaurarla. Se hacen planes y se habla de lo necesarias que son estas acciones para recuperar la biodiversidad perdida por la construcción de la ciudad. Pero en este momento histórico, luego de haber pasado seis meses en cuarentena, hemos visto desde nuestras ventanas la maravillosa cadena de vida, hemos respirado el aire fresco, hemos redescubierto el paisaje y recién ahora nos damos cuenta de que no somos nosotros quienes salvaremos a los cerros sino que son ellos los que nos pueden salvar.
A la luz de la actual crisis, la necesidad de los espacios verdes en los entornos urbanos —nuestros y de todo el mundo— se ha vuelto clara y precisa. Habitantes de distintas latitudes encontraron allí una fuente de fortaleza para enfrentar la crisis; sin embargo, en otras ciudades, tal vez en demasiadas, se hizo evidente la deficiencia de espacios verdes seguros y accesibles que inciden en el mejoramiento de la salud física y mental de las comunidades.
Para corroborar esta afirmación, es interesante mencionar una encuesta que realizó Greenpeace Colombia, a raíz del aislamiento, en la que se encontró que un 41 % de los interrogados valora en este momento más los espacios públicos verdes y considera importante ampliarlos, cuidarlos y protegerlos para el bien de las personas y de las comunidades, además de promover un uso sostenible de los mismos. Así mismo, según lo observado por la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá en esta época, la presión de los ciudadanos por recorrer los senderos, inclusive corriendo riesgos de seguridad, evidencia la necesidad acusiosa de contar con espacios naturales y sin congestiones.
Es justamente este escenario el que nos ha motivado a insistir en la posibilidad de construir una visión compartida y una gerencia integral para los Cerros Orientales de la ciudad. La Fundación sueña con la creación de un corredor socioecológico en la Franja de Adecuación que restaure a su paso los senderos existentes con especies nativas e integre nuevos espacios públicos. El sueño también involucra a los vecinos y líderes de los cerros en el cuidado y manejo de este nuevo ecosistema urbano (lo que la Fundación llama pactos de vecindad), quienes serán guías capacitados y compartirán relatos sobre etnobotánica, geología e historia ambiental en miradores, entre cedros, tíbares, tunos y amargosos, a través de quebradas visibles y limpias, avistando al tiempo pavas de monte, colibríes, comadrejas y ranas.
Esa convivencia afectuosa y fructífera del ciudadano con los imponentes Cerros Orientales, utópica o riesgosa para algunos, ya viene haciéndose realidad mediante un pequeño laboratorio vivo en las tres hectáreas de la Reserva Natural de la Sociedad Civil denominada Umbral Cultural Horizontes. Allí, con la colaboración de voluntarios y expertos, se han llevado a cabo charlas, restauración colaborativa con especies nativas, huertas y compostaje, conformando un proyecto piloto replicable como predio privado de uso público.
Grupo de colaboradores en el Taller El arte de la Tierra en la Reserva Horizontes. Foto Lauryn García.
La Reserva Natural actúa como un laboratorio de transformación colaborativa y mediante un voluntariado llevamos ya cinco años de restauración participativa (730 plantas de más de 33 especies diferentes)[iii]; generamos, además, obras colectivas como la creación de barreras y filtros para retener material vegetal, mitigando así el impacto de las lluvias sobre la zona; producimos obras de arte de la tierra (LandArt), y ofrecemos charlas semanales sobre ecología urbana denominadas Cátedra Cerros Bogotá en las que la montaña se toma la palabra.
La montaña se toma la palabra los viernes en la Catedra Cerros Bogotá” Foto: Carlos LincePieza gráfica: María Paula Guerrero para la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá. Foto de Leonardo Centeno.
Este trabajo es largo y no ha sido fácil. A veces nos encontramos con caminantes que no comprenden bien nuestra labor, pasamos sinsabores por la falta de recursos o nos frustra el bajo eco que a veces tienen nuestras actividades. También nos apabulla la realidad que vivimos en nuestro país, la violencia, los atentados contra líderes ambientales, el incremento de la pobreza y del dolor generalizado por un país que se resiste a cambiar, aunque lo intenta con fuerza. Nos genera tristeza a veces la falta de voluntad y de acciones políticas que le devuelvan a los Cerros Orientales su papel dentro de la comunidad. Sin embargo, nuestra esperanza sigue viva y seguimos motivados por contribuir con nuestro pedacito de paz a la vida de este rincón amado que son los cerros de Bogotá.[iv]
[i] Boff, Leonardo. «Florestanía» en Revista FLORÆ # 1. Bogotá: Flora ars+natura, agosto de 2015.
[ii] Los cerros albergan 91 444 habitantes (2018) distribuidos en 64 barrios entre las localidades de Usme, San Cristóbal, Santa Fe, Chapinero y Usaquén.
[iii] Según los registros publicados en la Infraestructura Mundial de Información en Biodiversidad (GBIF)
https://www.gbif.org/, la Reserva Forestal Protectora Bosque Oriental de Bogotá, a corte de agosto de 2020, cuenta con 1673 especies de flora y fauna, de las cuales 137 son endémicas, es decir, su distribución geográfica está limitada a esta área.
[iv] Este artículo es un homenaje a ese grupo apasionado que me ha acompañado este año y a quienes agradezco de corazón seguir adelante aumentando la población de «florestanios»: María A. Mejía, Lucía Martínez, Isabela Uribe, Jorman Romero, Gabriela Fernández, Miguel Leguízamo, María Paula Guerrero, María Elvira Talero, Nicolás Bazzani, Adriana Cabrera, Mateo Hernández, Ricardo Gamboa, Francisco González, Martha Gómez, Santiago Rosado, Leonardo Centeno, Fernando Cruz, Carlos Lince, Mateo Hernández, Leonardo Villa, Lina Prieto, Jaime A. Vargas, Laura Gómez, Elsa Rey, Carolina Fiallo, Ingrid Obando, Juan Camilo Cruz, Byron Calvachi, Johanna González, Lina Prieto, Andrés Gómez, Juan Camilo Castro, Sebastián Cerquera, María Alejandra Peña, Ana Puerto, Luisa Castro, Juan Pablo Rojas, Nicolás Barrero, Jacqueline Vargas, Erika Tovar, Sofía Estrada, Mark Skepasts, Erika Barragán, Ivone Malaver, Nathaly Ortiz, Elizabeth Barragan,Gabriela Fernandez, Maria Jose Velasco y Lauryin García.
“And what can you do, as an individual, to clean up the spaces around you? How can you show your family and community the value in protecting the nature, the forests and the sea you all say you love?
We walk through Mashhad, Iran, and start giggling like children.
“Look how clean everything is! There are trash bins, and parks with good exercise equipment, and wide sidewalks you can actually walk on without being sideswiped by motos, rickshaws, bicycles and cows! Oh, how nice… they painted the park benches! And, people are sitting on the grass, having a picnic, enjoying their public spaces! And, are those birds singing?”
Iranians love their city and national parks and open spaces. We found many people strolling their clean paths, using the exercise equipment, and camping in their gazebos, which is permitted in many cities. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
Lluís and I fully savor these small pleasures as if we are experiencing them for the first time. We will have the same reaction with almost every city we pass through during our approximately 1,500-kilometer, 2.5-month walking journey in North Iran. The shellshock from seven months of exhausting, psychologically-scarring walking in filthy, noisy, chaotic, overpopulated and overwhelming Bangladeshi and Indian cities, finally, starts to fade.
But, the high we feel from being in Iranian cities, where access to public spaces appear to be a priority and where many crews are hired to keep these spaces clean, lasts only in the cities.
Out in nature—along the roads beyond city limits, on the main thoroughfares cutting through national parks and at Caspian Sea beaches—we see a significant disconnect. Piles of trash, usually picnic-related trash, litter the landscape. It’s disappointingly heartbreaking.
The piles of litter and remnants of past picnics makes it hard to enjoy the beautiful green open spaces outside Iranian cities. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
We find ourselves asking over and over, who are these people who are leaving behind their soda and doogh (a local yogurt drink) bottles, disposable picnic tablecloths, and styrofoam food trays with grains of rice and grilled chicken bits? How can they be the same people who keep their homes and cities practically spotless? How can the Iranian love of picnicking anywhere in the outdoors where the mood strikes—one of the most social aspects of Iranian culture we have partaken in and enjoyed immensely—be such an enemy to the country’s natural beauty?
We posed these questions informally to people of all ages and economic status along the way. When they ask us how we like Iran, we answer, “You have a beautiful country filled with wonderful, generous and kind people. But, honestly, the trash left behind from your picnics is a real eye sore. As much as we wanted to enjoy your very pretty Golestan Park or beaches, we found it difficult to look beyond the trash. How can this be?”
Iranian picnic lunch. Photo: Bargkok Barcelona On Foot
People shrug their shoulders. They sigh a deep sigh filled with lament, regret and resignation.
“Yes, it’s a big problem. People throw their trash out of the windows as they drive by. These just don’t care about nature,” some people say, shaking their heads, ashamed.
Others add with a hint of dismissiveness, “If there is no trash bin exactly where they are sitting, people won’t look for one.”
Iranians are expert picnickers and enjoy being outside during the warm weather months. They throw down their blankets and set up their steam pots wherever the mood strikes—in city parks, along the road, out in nature, on the beach. Photo: Bargkok Barcelona On Foot
Several get defensive, “We take our trash with us and throw it away when we see a container or when we get home. We don’t know why others can’t do the same!”
“What can we do?” some ask us, hoping that the foreigners can bring insight to a matter they interpret as beyond their control.
Maybe the wild boars are the only ones who enjoy the trash left behind from Iranian picnickers. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
We are quick to say that our countries are not much better than Iran, and that we too struggle with this same dilemma. We applaud how much Iranians use their open spaces and really appear to enjoy being outside in nature. We come up with ordinary solutions such as putting more bins in places where people gather, imposing a heavy fine for littering, organizing community clean-up days, and educating people about how to better manage their own waste.
There’s a suggestion to return to the “old ways.”
Glimpses of Iran’s beautiful national Golestan Park. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
“Historically Iranian people had cloth bags to carry their stuff, but, nowadays, they have forgotten their traditions. Unfortunately, they prefer to clean their own house without any notice to the state of their environment,” says Eskandar Gordmardi, director of natural habitats of Iran’s North Khorasan province, adding that municipalities and the Department of the Environment can only do so much in public places and that individuals need to take more responsibility for their behavior.
Gordmardi’s comment reminds us of the neon-colored reusable baskets we saw some Iranians use. They load up these trendy baskets with real dishes and glasses, and haul them home to wash post-picnic. Making a picnic a fashion statement may help usher in new thinking around product reuse, but, still, disposable plastic is easier and vastly more convenient for a significant number of people.
Several people, including a park ranger we spoke with, emphasize the generational gap around environmental consciousness.
Glimpses of Iran’s beautiful national Golestan Park. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
It will take time to fix this issue, the ranger tells us over tea at an aid station near the park. He says, “I think we don’t have enough culture about nature and picnics in nature. On the other side, we don’t have enough training about how [to engage] with nature and we have to put some courses about this topic in … high school and elementary school.” Older people, he says, think it’s OK to leave their trash wherever they want, and don’t see it as a problem. The younger generation is much more aware of this, and are more sensitive to it, he adds.
We feel that to be true.
We sat in on group conversations and oral presentations at an English school where the topic of the day was taking care of the environment.
These teenagers and young people spoke, with high English fluency, about the dangers of polluted water and forests and the consequences of not having clean green spaces in areas beyond municipal jurisdiction. They eloquently suggested tighter government controls, more corporate accountability and responsibility, and city-level recycling programs.
We agreed that those measures are necessary, but we wanted them to also have a personal stake in the world around them.
We walked with new friends in a green area near the city of Gorgan, and ended up collecting dozens of pieces of plastic and bottles that we put in the bin at the park’s entrance. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
“And, what can you do, as an individual, to clean up the spaces around you? How can you show your family and community the value in protecting the nature, the forests and the sea you all say you love? What can you do in your city, today, right now, that can be replicated in natural areas outside your city?”
Their responses were as ordinary as ours were. Pick up the trash after we picnic, and dispose of it properly. Separate recyclables. Be an example to others and not accept that throwing trash from car windows is OK.
We nudged them to think about other things that could have a lasting impact. We, too, wanted to hear about and consider innovative ideas. This is, after all, not only an Iranian issue. Every country we walk through, and every country we have ever visited or lived in, is dealing with these same problems and addressing them largely in the same way—at a relatively basic level.
Our time runs out, with questions lingering and answers pending.
We walk on, kicking through other people’s trash and wondering how to reconnect the joyful picnickers with the delicate urban and rural spaces around them.
Biodiversity-positive design is a response by landscape architects to enhance biodiversity in their work in cities. Perhaps the most important contribution that landscape architects make to enhancing biodiversity in their projects is their interpretation of biodiversity for the specific site context.
Biodiversity is receiving much attention at the moment, not least among landscape architects in Australia. In 2018, David Maddox on this website posed the following provocation: “Landscape architects are the practitioners of biodiversity’s meaning through their acts of shaping nature into ‘spaces’. They have their hands on definitions of biodiversity that they use in their work, and that we experience in the landscapes they create. But they aren’t necessarily the same definitions as a scientist’s. Or even a regular person’s. So, how do landscape architects view the word ‘biodiversity’? How does it find meaning in their work?” Twelve landscape architects from around the world responded in a fascinating variety of ways.
I came upon this roundtable when considering the importance of a single definition of biodiversity to guide landscape architects’ work, a definition also shared with other professions. The roundtable showed that landscape architects thought of biodiversity and how it informed their work in different ways. Nevertheless, every response acknowledged the importance of increasing the abundance of all floral and faunal species in the landscape.
There is no single definition of biodiversity. It is a contraction of the term “biological diversity”, initially used by T.E. Lovejoy in 1980 in The Global 2000 Report to the President. It was first defined, in this extended form, in 1992 by the United Nations Convention of Biological Diversity. The convention’s current formal definition, dated 11.2.2006, is “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine, and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems”. In contrast, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) defines biological diversity, or biodiversity, as “the variety of life on Earth and the natural patterns it forms. The biodiversity we see today is the result of 4.5 billion years of evolution and, increasingly, of human influence as well. It forms the web of life, of which we are an integral part and upon which we so fully depend”. These contrasting definitions, even within the United Nations, illustrate the lack of consensus.
Does it matter that there is no single, shared definition of biodiversity? Ian Swingland in 2001 asserted that “biodiversity is a populist word invented for convenience” and as such is indefinable. Three years earlier, Michèle Kaennel had referred to the “utopia of a non-ambiguous definition”. Nevertheless, both regarded the definition of biodiversity as essential to guide natural resource management, which requires measurable attributes. This is where the commonly quoted UN definition falls short. It also doesn’t clarify how to deal with non-indigenous or exotic plants. Do these contribute to biodiversity?
Landscape architects work with both natural and man-made landscapes. Man-made landscapes, especially in cities, often include exotic plants. There has been quite a vigorous discussion in scientific literature about what constitutes biodiversity. In 1994, Paul Angermeier distinguished native and artificial diversity. He argued that total biodiversity includes aesthetic, utilitarian, and ecological values, to which artificial diversity contributes. However, “in most cases, especially valuable elements are natural products of evolutionary processes and are therefore components of native diversity” (p. 601). He concluded that native diversity should be the focus of conservation efforts, continuing that “[a]rtificial diversity is no substitute for native diversity in terms of societal value or ecological function, and it should not be considered a substitute for native diversity in conceptions of biodiversity” (p. 601). Indeed, artificial diversity, such as invasive alien species, can contribute to biodiversity loss. In contrast, Don Delong included all biotic communities, including those altered by humans, in his definition of biodiversity, published in 1996. Given the activity of landscape architects across natural and man-made landscapes, on projects with a huge variety of objectives, which might specifically include conservation and natural resource management but might not, his definition of biodiversity seems most useful:
“Biodiversity is a state or attribute of a site or area and specifically refers to the variety within and among living organisms, assemblages of living organisms, biotic communities, and biotic processes, whether naturally occurring or modified by humans. Biodiversity can be measured in terms of genetic diversity and the identity and number of different types of species, assemblages of species, biotic communities, and biotic processes, and the amount (e.g., abundance, biomass, cover, rate) and structure of each. It can be observed and measured at any spatial scale ranging from microsites and habitat patches to the entire biosphere” (p. 745).
Its usefulness, though, is not confined to landscape architects. This definition can be a shared, common definition of biodiversity, for use by all participants in a project, regardless of profession or discipline. It allows communication between project team members, with a shared understanding and common goals. What counts as biodiversity in each project, be it native or artificial, including novel ecosystems, can be identified in the project brief with specific management or monitoring objectives depending on the context and social values.
Perhaps the most important contribution that landscape architects make to enhancing biodiversity in their projects is their interpretation of biodiversity for the specific site context. In the roundtable, Mohan Rao stressed the importance of the geographical, social, ecological, and cultural aspects of that context and the role of landscape architects to provide a nuanced interpretation of biodiversity as they design places.
The role of the landscape architect is not as an ecologist but to create a place for the landscape’s inhabitants. In doing so, the landscape architect works across multiple disciplines, including the sciences and the arts, to develop a design solution. Depending on the project, different emphasis is given to different knowledge, but context is always critical. Thus, in the city, usually designed for humans as the primary inhabitants, flexibility must be accepted in the pursuit of biodiversity to create places that meet human needs. In a world of changing climate and an emphasis on sustainability and resilience, this might mean that artificial diversity is given priority in some instances over native diversity. A simple example in Australia, where most indigenous trees are evergreen, is the use of exotic deciduous trees in cities for summer shading, cooling, and winter solar access.
Biodiversity-positive design is a response by landscape architects to enhance biodiversity in their work in cities. How this is implemented is still being developed. One challenge is to assess the success of conserving or enhancing biodiversity in a design project. Landscape architects might not be able to quantify the impact of their work on biodiversity as metrics. An alternative is to adopt principles, such as criteria or targets, to inform their design. I am aware of two approaches, which overlap to an extent. One involves five principles for biodiversity-sensitive urban design:
maintain and introduce habitat,
facilitate dispersal,
minimise threats and anthropogenic disturbance,
facilitate natural ecological processes, and
improve potential for positive interactions between humans and nature.
construct diverse and complex habitats to attract or retain biodiversity,
ensure cycles that mimic natural flows,
facilitate interactions within and between ecosystem elements,
ensure benevolence of urban infrastructure to reduce negative impacts on biodiversity, and
support novel ecosystems and ecological communities.
One thing is certain, though: landscape architects care deeply about biodiversity in their work. A shared definition of biodiversity will help them with this.
It is interesting that we think of nature in cities only as fauna and flora. Mineral nature—the rocks and inert resources—is the stage on which living nature is set. In cities, this means that the embedded nature all around us, that has been extracted from the Earth like the processed aggregate that we use to make concrete, or the oil (decomposed plants) we lay down for our streets as asphalt, are excluded from the conversation about nature in the city, or city nature. What is it about mineral, inert nature that surrounds us in the city—and is used to create the infrastructure we depend on like buildings—that it gets no attention? We make pilgrimages to see Half Dome in Yosemite, or admire the Palisades along the Hudson River, but the transformation of this inert nature, the rocks, gypsum, iron ores and other metals and minerals, timber and asphalt, are never considered as part of the nature in cities. They are often seen as in the way of planting more trees, allowing water to infiltrate into the soil, and to creating more green open space.
What would happen to our view of city nature if we began to be aware of all the embedded inert nature in urban areas and consider the enormous resource value they contain?
Inert nature, the materials that make up the city and every object in our daily lives, is almost incomprehensibly ubiquitous, and valuable. It represents a sunk investment, sunken fossil energy, sunken human energy, sunken materials that can only be reused (if at all) by applying more energy, labor and ingenuity. Many of the materials are already highly energy intensive, like concrete, aluminum, steel. Energy that is often fossil energy, and to reuse them means more fossil energy expended. These mineral resources in cities are predicated on a vast exploitation of Earth ecosystems and resources. Should we begin to treat this embedded mineral nature with more awareness of what it represents relative to the exploitation of natural resources, ecosystems and people, it might lead to new ideas about how to make cities more sustainable.
The ubiquitous way in which sunken infrastructure is invisible can be seen in the way modern ecology has turned its back on the interactions between natural and modern industrial systems, just like much of neoclassical economics has ignored the physical and biotic underpinnings of economic production. Economic production is treated as sui generis, subject to its own rules and not to natural scarcities or pollution impacts on future biotic or physical resources. Ecologists have little to say about modern industrial systems, despite those systems being derived from, and built upon, physical principles and elements (Hall, Cleveland and Kaufmann 1992). Sustainable city literature seems to have done so as well. Ecological footprint analysis, that measures embedded energy in the city, still does not seem to make us appreciate the actual mineral materiality in our every day urban lives. To realize how much Earth resources our existing cities contain, and to begin to consider those transformed resources as part of city nature, could transform our relationship to the city’s infrastructure.
One of the myths supporting the invisibility of nature in infrastructure is that technological advances and human ingenuity make the issue of resource availability and resource quality irrelevant (Hall, Cleveland and Kaufman 1992). Though modern technology has made the link between natural resources and human existence less apparent, we are still as dependent as ever on the extraction of natural resources to make material goods, and to build infrastructure. The lack of awareness of the processes and impacts of resource exploitation and the often profound disruptions in the ecosystem where that deposit is located, regardless of its scarcity, enable a kind of cavalier approach to the built environment, where not only do we build carelessly as to the local impacts on natural systems, but we are wasteful of Earth resources, building cheaply knowing that things will be torn down and rebuilt in the next economic cycle, or by the next property owner, or that with enough heating and cooling energy expended, the quality of the construction does not matter.
Half Dome, Yosemite National Park. Photo: USGS.
Yet, true resources are expended in rebuilding, resources from nature that come from somewhere. Just like cutting down mature street trees is wasteful, so is our churning of the urban fabric to maximize the next real estate cycle. So, to better take this situation into account, we need to comprehend that the mineral hard surfaces of the city are city nature too. This calls for consciousness in what we use to build, how we build, and ensuring the longevity of that investment.
Over time, as resources become rare, or dissipated, the more energy will be needed to extract them. Geological factors ultimately determine the amount of energy needed to exploit a resource deposit and humans can apply greater and greater fossil energy to extracting resources—to a point. Ultimately there are diminishing returns and the resource is too dissipated to be exploited in any reasonable manner. There are changes in quality of the resource with increased rates of exploitation. All this is important to keep in mind when thinking about the nature in cities and sustainability.
What has already been extracted and transformed into usable materials must be valued for what it is: largely unrenewable. For example, copper deposits, once exploited, do not regenerate. Copper in infrastructure provides important services, it has to be conserved, reused, well managed. Plastics, such as for pipes, may be more abundant since we still have fossil energy, but once disposed of are unrecoverable, and pose disposal challenges.
Chino open pit copper mine., New Mexico USA. Credit: Wikipedia.
Understanding that cities are nature—including an inert nature that is harvested, extracted, mined, reprocessed and made into our roads, buildings, pipes, roofs, wiring, doors, windows, mechanical systems, and more—is sobering. It means we need to be thoughtful when we advocate for new LEED buildings, or Zero Net Energy buildings. It means that any new infrastructure, including public transportation infrastructure, means more capturing of mineral nature and the application of fossil energy, to make it and to place it in existing infrastructure, ripping out the existing infrastructure that will then need to be disposed of. All that rubble originally came from somewhere, whose extraction damaged ecosystems.
One approach to better determine how to retrofit the existing built environment is to begin to employ new tools like life cycle analysis more systematically, to reveal the already invested materials and energy in what we have built. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is a cradle to grave energy and materials accounting method that reveals the existing sunk costs. Conducting LCAs to better evaluate choices in approaching the already built environment could lead to better use of existing cities, densifying them, repurposing existing buildings, reworking existing transportation corridors, and appreciating the degree to which the cities we live in are expressions of nature in and of themselves rather than disregarding the resources already mustered in what we have built already.
In Los Angeles we have a research project attempting to quantify the city’s urban metabolism—the energy flows in and the waste flows out—in greater granularity and specificity. Concerned with understand the energy and materials already existing in the built environment, we are using county tax assessor parcel data that includes building age, size, type, and material make up. Based on this information we are creating a life cycle assessment of the embedded energy in 27 different building types to begin to account for the nature that we have already used and are living in.
This type of accounting may help in determining the true cost of new building, especially on green fields, and urban retrofitting. We are still in the process of developing the calculations on the LCA of the building types, but according to new studies, there is evidence that retrofitting existing infrastructure for energy conservation has lower life cycle impacts than building new energy efficient buildings – except for warehouses. This adds to the argument that building on green fields is generally less efficient than infill. Additionally, as there is plenty of land already annexed in most American cities new population growth should be accommodated where there is already infrastructure. So, if already existing infrastructure is retrofitted and urban space better utilized, the pressure on virgin resources, and on ecosystems will be lessened. While ecological footprinting has already shown the Earth impacts of cities, it has not really been used to examine the amount of nature captured in city systems; life cycle tools are useful in this regard.
In the end, our immersion in nature is inescapable, even in what we perceive of as the most non-natural of environments—cities. Once this realization starts to change we can really begin to appreciate the nature of cities and treat the mineral resources of cities as lovingly as fauna and flora.
While we have been focused on the nature of cities in cities and its sublime paradoxes, one could perhaps also enlarge the city nature question to reflect on the gradual urbanization of planet Earth. Whether it is global appropriation of Earth resources by humans — human activities now appropriate nearly one-third to one-half of global ecosystem production (Foley et al, 2005) — or the concentration of Earth’s resources and energy in cities, cities and thus their dwellers have enormous footprints and thus embedded nature from afar in city-infrastructure (see a previous Pincetl blog here).
This, I would argue, should now also includes how nature outside city limits gets dramatically altered with exurban development. Exurban development is not suburban development. It is the house on 5 to 20 acres, surrounded by either public land, or large ownership parcels that are relatively undisturbed. Land use rules and the availability of cheap (relatively) fossil fuel have enabled people to live in far-flung places and commute long distances into urban centers for employment. Not all of these exurban dwellers are affluent, but living outside of the city and the suburbs is a clear choice. And they bring with them a “city nature” spreading it along a city to exurban gradient — manicured lawns, non native ornamentals, and most of all, defensive spaces as I describe below.
Here in Southern California where I live, I see the ravaging impacts of exurbanization on nature all around when I travel outside of the city itself. Unless the land is protected, like in National Forests, land continues to be developed and urbanized even in far-flung places. There are still many pockets of private land in the National Forests, and inholdings in large parcels. Alluvial fans, some of the best land for ground water recharge and urban–non urban buffers, continue to be developed due to their beautiful views. Because of our region’s fire-prone and fire-dependent ecosystems, when humans build dwellings in the exurban countryside it sets of a vicious circle of nature destruction. To build, there must be vegetation clearance around the home (unless it’s a suburb), and that now must be 300 feet around the dwelling. This is required by county fire departments, and fire insurance is predicated on complying with clearance requirements.
Vegetation clearance is just that: tabula raza, dirt. Increasingly rare chaparral and coastal sage scrub vegetation is removed for “fire safety”, creating disturbance conditions that favor Mediterranean grasses. Mediterranean grasses, in turn, burn more frequently and more easily than chaparral, and increased fire frequency in chaparral — a fire dependent ecosystem — stresses its ability to recuperate and engenders system change.
And the cycle reinforces itself. More fire (due to human intrusion and fire clearance that enables more fire prone grasses to grow) undermines the ability of indigenous vegetation to come back, which leads to more fire and more clearance.
Chaparral and coastal sage scrub vegetation in the exurban hills outside Los Angeles. Photo: Stephanie Pincetl
Expectations of a safe, fire-free environment, brought to the fire-prone countryside by city folk, means the destruction of the very nature one would think they have escaped the city to enjoy. Many millions of dollars are spent protecting these homes, despite their bulldozed perimeters, because the truth of the matter is that fires in this part of the world are wind driven. They can easily jump 300 feet, and embers have been known to travel much, much farther. Often these same homes have trees all around them — there is a 300 foot buffer to the chaparral, but the houses themselves are closely surrounded by vegetation — perhaps to buffer the views from the scarred landscapes all around. Trees are, of course, akin to Tiki torches once the embers touch them, and the house is next. There is a great deal of discussion currently about revising building codes to make dwellings less fire prone — no open eaves, no wood shake roofs and so forth. But forbidding building in fire prone landscapes is not part of this discourse.
So what is driving this madness? A number of factors, including old subdivisions plotted at the turn of the 21st century and vestigial parcels claimed under the Homestead Act still exist and are seen today as great opportunities to develop for pastoral living. Weak land use regulations are another reason, and a remaining belief that developing beyond city limits is cost free. Thus, private property rights trump common sense and county budgets, and the landscape is the sacrifice zone for continued individualistic preferences for country living and long commutes (Pincetl et al. 2008).
A house surrounded by trees in the middle of chaparral vegetation outside Los Angeles. Photo: Stephanie Pincetl
And there are other impacts. Roads are built to provide access to the dwellings, creating further habitat fragmentation and fire hazards. Roads disseminate more non-native invasive and weedy species, accelerating the flammability of the landscape and thus the transformation of native habitat. Above ground power lines (much less expensive) also increase fire risk, and there is more pressure on water resources either due to well-drilling or water system expansion. With irrigation of yards for these exurban houses, there is run-off, often contaminated with fertilizers and pesticides. If the homes are on septic systems, they can contaminate soils and water. Exurban living must have the same amenities of any urban living, and more: privacy, space and the investment of many more resources to make it possible to live so far out. This includes infrastructure — made from petroleum products, plastics, minerals, timber — extracted from nature to begin with.
Not only is indigenous nature impaired and changed, but the resource intensity is high of such development. These exurban dwellers expect city-like services like fire, medical, sanitation and trash disposal, maintained roads and reliable access to where they need to go though rarely are those costs internalized to the individual home builder or purchaser. Rather, they are borne by society as a whole, and by, most especially, nature.
Roads, houses, and supporting infrastructure in the ExUrban hills outside Los Angeles. Photo: Stephanie Pincetl
Exurban development continues, eroding habitat and landscapes. It makes for a continuum of “city nature” from the downtown core outward. In Southern California fire clearance is perhaps the most visible impact of that continuum, but habitat fragmentation, pollution and dramatic landscape transformation can be found across the U.S. Often exurban development takes place in vernacular and unprotected landscapes, carrying with it the characteristics of suburban living — the lawns, shrubs and trees, full blown energy and water use of more urban dwelling — but having an outsized impact and cost.
The curious thing about this phenomenon is that many of the dwellers of these far-flung places seek quiet and nature. They do not wish to live in the hustle and bustle of the city, the noisy, dangerous, populated city. Yet the transformation of nature they bring with them means they have urbanized the countryside. Such alienation from the city engenders changes far beyond the individuals themselves and raises questions about how to build better cities, more livable, humane and beautiful places such that there is less desire to transform our ever fragile and disappearing landscapes.
Want to explore diverse and connecting threads in urban ecological arts? In the LEAF, three FRIEC Urban Arts Collective members share something from their ideas and work for 10 minutes each, followed by Q&A.
Presenters: Olive Bieringa, Oslo Matthew Jensen, New York Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, Paris
21 October, 11am EDT
Olive Bieringa, Oslo: “Resisting Extinction” is a performance work that will offer embodied practices for grieving and resisting extinction amidst our spiraling ecological devastation. This performance work will offer participatory practices for building relationship and agency through weather walks, grieving practices and hauntings in urban landscape with the land meets the water.
Matthew Jensen, New York: I will share a few recent projects that help unpack what I mean when I say I have a “walking-based practice”. I will touch on Tree Love: Street Trees and Stewardship in NYC and show a few iterations of the project. And I will quickly explain the first and only “virtual walk” I created for City as Living Laboratory during the pandemic. The piece takes a walk and spreads it out on StoryMap, an interactive map with video and text.
Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, Paris: I will present about an ongoing body of research on what I’ve coined “the permacircular museum”. It revolves around gestures of object maintenance, looking at expanding the field of museum care practices to ecosystems and non-human collectives. There are currently two field experiments: in Karlsruhe, with ZKM museum of art and media – we are regenerating an abandoned fruit orchard, in the framework of the exhibition Critical Zones; in Taipei, with Taipei Fine Arts Museum – an urban reforestation action in partnership with Taipei Forestry Technologist Association and Geotechnical Engineering Office. I’m keen to explore the question recently asked by curator Chus Martinez on the possibility for cultural institutions to “produce shelter”, in a time characterized by the disappearance of refuges (Haraway, Tsing).
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The FRIEC (Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures) Urban Ecological Arts Collective is a global group of almost 100 artists and creatives interested in the connection between nature and people in cities. The LEAF is a monthly webinar in which three Collective members spend 10 minutes describing an ideas or motivation central to their work, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. The idea to get to know the work of the Collective members, and to explore creativity and imagination in urban ecology.
Interested in being part of the FRIEC Collective? Write is at [email protected].
Banner image: A photographic series by Matthew Jensen celebrating the myriad of ways city residents care for street trees and the spaces surrounding them.
Matthew Jensen is an interdisciplinary artist whose rigorous explorations of landscape combine walking, collecting, photography, mapping and extensive research. His projects investigate the relationships between people and local landscapes.
Stéphane Verlet Bottéro (b. 1987) is an artist working at the intersection of social practice, installation, education, writing, gardening, and cooking. He is interested in the entanglements of community, materiality, body, and place. Based on site-specific research and durational interventions, his practice seeks to open spaces to unlearn and unsettle ways of inhabiting the world.
Want to explore diverse and connecting threads in urban ecological arts? In the LEAF, three FRIEC Urban Arts Collective members share something from their ideas and work for 10 minutes each, followed by Q&A.
Presenters: Christina Freeman, New York Lucie Lederhendler, Montreal Paula Nishijima, Amsterdam
Christina Freeman, New York. I will share work from my cooperative and participatory practice. As an artist and curator, my projects challenge pre-existing cultural value systems such as definitions of waste, and the normalization of competition as inherent. Most recently, I worked with the USDA Forest Service’s New York City Urban Field Station (NYC UFS) and Pratt Institute’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI), to organize Who Takes Care of New York? Presented at Queens Museum in September 2019, this exhibition highlights the wide range of environmental stewardship throughout New York City. An online version of the exhibition will be presented by TNOC very soon!
Lucie Lederhendler, Montreal. Within the framework established by Roland Barthes that “myth is a type of speech chosen by history” (1970/1991 trans), I’m going to review a few past projects that tried to unearth neglected but extant mythologies by highlighting the traces of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal’s industrial past. Building on that approach, I will introduce my current, nascent research trajectory, which deals with the incontrovertible existence of sea monsters, ghosts, and the complexity of void spaces.
Paula Nishijima, Dieman. I’ll share my ongoing artistic research and series of works “Game of Swarms.” The project draws on theories about self-organisation and swarm intelligence—common in the collective behavior of decentralized systems in nature, e.g. social insects and slime molds—and materializes into an audio-visual piece and a cooperative game. I propose the swarm as a framework to discuss how the world is tackling global issues, such as the environmental crisis, while claiming the self-organised and auto-poetic forces of living matter. GoS seeks to stress a non-hierarchical relationship among living organisms that work together through local interactions to achieve a global harmony. It is an initiative to spark new ways of thinking inspired by the behavior of swarms in nature.
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The FRIEC (Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures) Urban Ecological Arts Collective is a global group of almost 100 artists and creatives interested in the connection between nature and people in cities. The LEAF is a monthly webinar in which three Collective members spend 10 minutes describing an ideas or motivation central to their work, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. The idea to get to know the work of the Collective members, and to explore creativity and imagination in urban ecology.
Interested in being part of the FRIEC Collective? Write us at [email protected].
Banner image: A drawing of my empty street corner during COVID, by Lucie Lederhendler.
Lucie Lederhendler has been the curator of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, a community-engaged, contemporary public art gallery, since 2021. Her research is concerned with the ecosystems of mythologies and the mythologies of ecology. She is a lecturer in art history at Brandon University.
Paula Nishijima is a Brazilian visual artist whose research-based practice unfolds on the crossroads of life science, technology and participatory social practice. Exploring individual and collective motivations, either through happenings or longer processes of interaction, her production materialises into different digital media, such as video, web applications and photography.
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