As countries lose their topsoil, they eventually lose the capacity to feed themselves. When looking for solutions to address the loss of plant and animal species across the world, soil biodiversity is key in restoring the balance for all living beings on earth
Soil is a unique living ecosystem that provides a wide range of services to people. It is the foundation of life on the planet, home to biodiversity, it regulates the water cycle, stores and filters water, is the basis for producing food and fuel, it facilitates the natural recycling of waste, eliminates pollutants and stores CO2. One teaspoon of soil contains more living organisms than there are people in the world (United States Department of Agriculture). There would be no life without soil, we depend on it for our very existence. If planet earth is our mother, then soil must be our father.
As we have only one planet, soil is a finite resource, so we have to take good care of its health and wellbeing to ensure it can continue to deliver the many services it provides to humans.
Barefoot path, Belgium. Photo: Chantal van Ham
The secrets of soil
Soil is a living complex made up of roots, bacteria, fungi, rocks, sand and clay particles, and animals. Toby Query, ecologist with the City of Portland’s Watershed Revegetation Program, talks about the magic of earthworms in his essay “Earthworms can awaken us to ecological change”. He describes how their life in the soil interconnected with all living organisms, provides the many wonderful functions humans benefit from every day. He explains that earthworms are doing a lot of work in the city. They are decomposers and nutrient recyclers. They aerate and mix the soil by creating tunnels and move nutrients and organic matter up and down. They turn leaves and food scraps into soil. Amazingly, they also help process and degrade our toxins. Earthworms have been found to degrade petroleum products, extract heavy metals, and break down man-made organic chemicals, such as PCBs. Toby rightfully points out that soil can help us to learn about changes taking place in our cities and how well we take care of our natural environment.
Soil supports 98% of biodiversity, provides 99% of human food, filters 100% of rainfall for drinking water and stores more active carbon than the air, forests or seas combined; yet it is the most neglected biome (UN, 2018). To deliver all of these services, soil needs to be healthy. However, one third of our global soils are already degraded(UN, 2018)and we risk losing more due to soil pollution. With a growing world population, soil pollution is a worldwide problem as degrading the quality of our soil, means we are poisoning the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe along with it (UN, 2018).
Sonnentor Marc Boutavant
Human actions, such as deforestation, large scale industrial farming, climate change and urbanisation are destroying soil rapidly. A growing challenge is that fertile soil becomes scarcer as cities expand. According to a recent report entitled, Nature in the Urban Century, by 2050 humanity will urbanize an area larger than the country of Colombia—approximately 1.2 million km2. Many growing cities in the world face problems with hazardous waste from industry, polluting the soil and drinking water resources. Others face major issues with soil erosion resulting from large scale deforestation and the transformation of forested land for agriculture resulting in depleted and dried-out soil that is easily washed away by rain or floodwater.
The thin layer of topsoil that covers the earth’s land surface was formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil formation exceeded the natural rate of erosion. Soil that was formed on a geological time scale, is now being lost on a human time scale (Lester R. Brown, 2012). Sometime within the last century, soil erosion began to exceed new soil formation. In the last 150 years, half of the world’s top soil has been lost (WWF). As healthy and productive land erodes and the population grows, competition for land is intensifying.
As countries lose their topsoil, they eventually lose the capacity to feed themselves. When looking for solutions to address the loss of plant and animal species across the world, soil biodiversity is key in restoring the balance for all living beings on earth. There is clearly a need for immediate action, creating awareness of how we use soil, manage land and why it is so important for our life.
Botanic garden Vienna. Photo: Chantal van Ham
Soil, a natural ally in combatting climate change
As world leaders just gathered in Poland for UNFCCC’s 24thConference of the Parties (COP 24) to agree on measures for keeping global warming below the “safe” threshold of 1.5 degrees, it’s apparent now more than ever that nature is a critical part of the solution to avoiding the dangers of climate change. Not only civil society organisations, but also governments and business representatives are becoming more and more aware of the power of nature in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, maximising carbon sequestration and adapting to the effects of a changing climate. Even the actor Leonardo Di Caprio is raising awareness for this important matter. Often considered a “forgotten solution”, soil is the biggest terrestrial carbon sink, but land degradation is reducing its ability to mitigate climate change.
As soils degrade, they lose their ability to hold carbon, releasing enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, along with nitrous oxide, making land degradation one of the biggest contributors to climate change. An estimated two-thirds of all terrestrial carbon stores from soils and vegetation have been lost since the 19th century through land degradation. Agriculture, forest and other land-use sectors generate roughly a quarter of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (IUCN, 2015).
The world’s soils contain 1,500 billion tons of carbon in the form of organic matter – two to three times more carbon than is present in the atmosphere. This represents a significant contribution to man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing the quantity of carbon contained in soil, for example through agriculture and pasture management practices which increase soil organic matter, can reduce the annual increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is estimated that improved livestock rangeland management could potentially sequester a further 1,300-2,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030 (IUCN, 2015). Reversing land degradation and increasing soil organic carbon provides one of the surest and lowest-cost multiple-wins: climate change mitigation and adaptation, conservation of biodiversity, and increased food production (IUCN, 2015).
Agriculture and land management practices seem to be an issue distant from the priorities of cities, but considering the potential that soil regeneration has for reducing global carbon emissions, as well as the link with food production, drinking water provision and many other benefits to urban citizens, a strong case can be made for strengthening the connection between the city and the natural systems it depends on for creating a healthy and resilient living environment.
Valencia. Photo: Chantal van Ham
The business case for investment in soil health
It is promising that the World Business Council for Sustainable Development with a wide range of partners launched a new publication, “The Business Case for Investing in Soil Health, which recognises that soil health is the foundation of our food system. This is underlined by case studies from 10 companies across the agricultural value-chain on five continents which demonstrate that investment is already happening and returns are being made.
The publication explains that investing to improve soil health is an opportunity to increase crop productivity, secure supply chains and meet the growing food needs of our global population, to protect and improve our precious water and biodiversity resources, and enhance the livelihoods of the one in three people worldwide who work in agriculture.
One case study, from India, describes how Mahindra, a global federation of companies with an operational presence in over 100 countries, has been acting on soils to improve water availability in its operational regions and local communities. Improved land management practices, such as the establishment of sediment traps and ponds, have demonstrated they can help slow the flow of water, reducing soil erosion and resultant silting of water infrastructures downstream. As a result of the initiative, more than 4,000 farmers benefited from a two-meter rise in average groundwater levels, whilst allowing a doubling of land under irrigation and as a result, a doubling of per capita income.
If we bring this approach to an urban context, a valuable case for investing in soil can be made to slow water flow, control erosion and carefully select plant and tree species that will thrive in existing soil conditions. For example, degraded soils are a big concern in New York, where lead contamination levels can be high (NYT, July 2018). Soil is needed to fight flooding and to create new coastal wetlands that can help buffer the impact of future storms. The PUREsoil NYC program was launched, which in addition to pursuing environmental goals intends to focus on cleaning contaminated community gardens. It will make it possible to use native soils and reduce costs of transporting excavated materials elsewhere and bringing clean soil into the city from remote areas. Municipalities in other parts of the world are considering similar solutions.
Let the earth breathe
In light of the global discussions to determine concrete action for the protection of biodiversity, sustain life on earth and to strengthen the response to the threat of climate change, the work and cooperation to protect and restore soil represents a common denominator for cities as well as rural and agricultural landscapes. It means working with nature, not against it, by bringing the needs of people in balance with the needs of ecosystems.
The major challenge soil is facing is its invisibility. However, we benefit from a growing knowledge base among scientists, governments, business and the public that soil is the motor of life. We also have the technological capacity to identify very precisely the priority locations for stopping soil erosion, improving agricultural production, and restoring ecosystem, and mapping the benefits this brings.
The future of land and natural resources will depend on the extent to which we will be able to establish appropriate incentives and rewards for responsible land management practices that support the integration of biodiversity and ecosystems in decision making and investment at all levels. Restoring soil, should become a top priority for cities, national governments, businesses, and society at large to move from seeing soil as an object from which profit can be extracted, towards one that recognises the interdependence of people and nature.
We see the development of a wide range of inspiring local actions for sustainably growing food in cities and villages led by indigenous groups and communities in cities around the world. Examples are: “Incredible edible” in the UK, which creates connected communities through the power of sustainable local food growing, micro-gardening, aquaponics and urban farming in Africa, which enables soilless horticultural production in small urban spaces, such as flat roofs, balconies, yards and even in tyres or small recycled boxes, the “Slow Food” movement and the “Global Ecovillage Network” worldwide. It is these many unsung heroes who will increase the attention for the value of healthy soil and help shape the new future and encourage others to join in the action.
The private sector is an important partner in protecting and restoring soil through greening the supply chain, helping to prevent pollution and overexploitation. Activities, such as setting environmental standards that all suppliers must meet, creating performance goals for verification of the reduction of impacts on soil across the supply chain as well as partnerships to create new ways to improve environmental performance, can make a big difference. The Healthy Ecosystem Metric is a simple decision support tool designed to help companies understand their impacts on biodiversity, soil and water. It helps to identify high-risk locations where a company is most likely to experience biodiversity, soil and water risks or create negative impacts and informs strategies to safeguard natural capital and drive improved business performance.
Initiatives like these show how much we can benefit from having more champions to help in making the soil visible in boardrooms, landscape planning and design, the farming community, as well as among public and private land managers, in the media and in education at all levels.
“From here on, the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing human/Earth relationship”– Thomas Berry, author of The Dream of the Earth.
The vision for the Carbon Landscape? “It would have to be a thriving place, a green place, a place for people, for wildlife, for recreation, for health, all of those things.”
Less than an hour cycling out of central Manchester along the Bridgewater Canal takes you into a green and blue landscape. It only becomes clear that this is a post-industrial area when the infrastructure of a coalfield pithead rises up behind the trees. Further along the canal you encounter attractive lakes and could not guess by looking that these were created by subsidence due to coal mining. Other areas are characterized by peat bogs, which have been the object of extensive extraction, but now with restoration underway, are providing habitat for a range of species—and sequestering carbon and mitigating flooding.
Beyond the trees: a coalfield pithead. Photo: Joanne TippettPennington Flash. Photo: Joanne Tippett
Now thirteen partners spanning three different local authorities, local wildlife trusts, community groups, government agencies and universities are working together to give nature a helping hand, accelerating the restoration of habitats and creating connections not just between sites to create an ecological network, but between local people and the heritage of their landscape. The Carbon Landscape project is a five-year initiative funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
This initiative is taking an innovative approach to community engagement, drawing on the industrial heritage of the area to raise awareness about possible sustainable futures with the local community, organizations working in the area, and school children. This essay is a montage of many insights drawn from the decades of experience of the project partners that we interviewed in our research project. Many of them have been working and living in the region long enough to remember the coal mining and the vivid scars industrial exploitation left on the landscape.
Wigan Wetland and Woodland Custodians use Ketso (www.ketso.com) to explore what matters to them in their local landscape. Photo: Joanne Tippett
“I remember someone coming up with the idea that carbon is that unifying factor between the industry and the habitat,” said one of the originators of the Carbon Landscape project. The project emerged from several years of multi-stakeholder and community discussions about how to look after this special landscape. While some people were deeply engaged with the area’s wetlands and the species that inhabited them, many others saw little of value in this place on their doorsteps. Those involved in outreach activities frequently mention how “it’s surprising how people who live very, very nearby don’t know anything about it.” If they do have any thoughts on the area, they are often negative, describing it as: empty, inaccessible, inhospitable, frightening, polluted, scarred, and industrial.
The current landscape is now unrecognizable as the coal dust covered and smoke-besmirched place that fueled the industrial revolution and corresponding urban development in North West England. The industry and associated jobs have gone, but the towns remain and strive to recreate local economies and improve the health and wellbeing of their populations. The surrounding renaturalizing landscape is an important resource in this endeavor. It provides nearby nature for about one million people and interesting opportunities for social and economic development. Many, however, still regard the open space on their doorsteps as a wasteland or a reminder of what has been lost in terms of secure jobs, strong communities and pride. The Carbon Landscape project is trying to shift the narrative to one that incorporates both nature and industrial heritage and sees these as assets and inspiration for a bright future, rather than a story of loss.
Bridgewater Canal at Astley Green. Photo: Joanne Tippett
As another project partner describes, “I would say it was a landscape connected by carbon but carbon would mean different things for different parts of the landscape…it’s peat, and the carbon stored in that way, but as an ex-industrial landscape where carbon has been the driving force of that landscape for the last few hundred years, [there’s] a cultural heritage point of view from coalmining. So the carbon element ties current restoration work in the bogs and peatlands together with the historic aspects of coalmining in the region…But within that, a project that both tries to ensure that the landscape can adapt to future change, future climate change, and for nature conservation purposes, to facilitate species movement across the landscape, as species may need to move for climate change, in what is a quite fragmented landscape” in the only open area in this densely populated region lying between the urban conurbations of Manchester and Liverpool.
Visiting Little Woolden Moss with University of Manchester Students of Planning and Environmental Management, to explore what matters to them in their local landscape. Photo: Joanne Tippett
Even without climate change driven migration, this fragmented landscape needs reconnecting and this is an important aspect of the Carbon Landscape initiative. “We want to connect up islands of populations, we’ve got an island in one place, an island in another place and in between nothing at the moment. We want to try and fill the gaps in so that there’s ways the populations can mix,” says one project partner. Connecting up the different parts of the landscape in people’s perceptions is also an important part of the Carbon Landscape project.
The Carbon Landscape has three related but distinct landscape character areas: the Flashes (as the lakes formed by subsidence are known), the Mosslands with their peat soil, and the Mersey Wetlands Corridor bordering the Manchester Ship Canal which connected Manchester to the sea and facilitated its industrial growth—“and the factory is represented every time you go out, by the amount of strange alien weeds from America, that you find from the cotton industry, just growing in the pavement outside the building here.”
All of the areas provide habitat for internationally important species as well as significant recreational opportunities. The Mosslands are less accessible and considered less obviously attractive, as industrial scale peat extraction is only now drawing to a close, as a result of pressure from citizens and action on the part of local government. Peat extraction (for gardening use) along with drainage for agriculture has severely damaged and in many cases destroyed most of the lowland mosses in the UK, with only 3 percent of this habitat remaining, and not much of that in good condition. This has resulted in loss of habitat for a range of species, and other ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and flood mitigation. With interpretation and some access infrastructure, such as that available at Risley Moss, this 10,000-15,000 year old environment becomes an important and accessible recreational and educational resource. “It’s a fairly unique landscape I think, if we look at peatbogs, they tend to be very remote places in the middle of the countryside, in the middle of nowhere, it could be Scotland or the Peak District or the North Pennines. Whereas here, we’ve got that landscape but in a very densely populated area, …and actually, probably one of the most deprived areas in the country as well.”
With so many people living in and around the Carbon Landscape, its success depends on engagement of local communities and uptake of a different narrative about what the landscape means. Some people already have deep attachments to particular places and species, and have worked with others to protect these. There is a history of small groups of people being involved with looking after areas near where they live, often areas that may look quite ordinary to outsiders but where local people had noted the presence of particular species and characteristics. But for others it’s an unknown, and possibly frightening, place or a place with different meaning and uses.
“We sometimes forget in this industry that people don’t know about land biodiversity value, they don’t know about land ownership. If no one looks after it, it’s fair game, so they’ve adopted these landscape places as their own. Throughout generations they’ve gone up there, they’ve fished, they’ve used off road bikes, they’ve done shooting, they’ve just generally mucked around up there. That’s part of their individual story and heritage. For us to come in and take that away from them by putting up barriers without doing efficient community engagement gives a very damaging message in some cases. You have a love for the environment there, but it’s in the wrong perspective, it doesn’t align with our values. …My experience of doing community work is that kids…on nature reserves are seen as antisocial, so what everyone’s vision of what we’re trying to achieve is actually culturally not accepted anymore. If they’re mucking around on a nature reserve, it’s antisocial behavior (If they’re stuck on a computer, they’re ruining their future).”
Fear of antisocial behavior is a significant deterrent for many people in the area. They are wary of entering areas that appear uncontrolled or not looked after. Physical changes in the landscape may be needed to invite people in, as one project partner explained:
“At New Cut they put in this concrete tarmac path, and I was talking to some of the older people, they said, ‘we never used to come down here because we were scared, and now there’s a path and people are on their bikes and we don’t feel scared anymore, we can access this beautiful space’…it’s a change of cultural identity, I would say.”
While a perception of damaged communities in damaged landscapes brings with it many challenges, it also can be a motivator for engagement for some people.
“People get involved to do things if there’s a burning platform, if something’s broken, so one of the reasons we can be so successful with engagement right now is that people appreciate that this is broken, so there is a motivator for them to come out. Once we’re further down the line and things are starting to look good then you could argue that the motivation might drop, and I guess time will tell.”
Hopefully, as has been noted in other areas, seeing the positive results of their efforts will motivate engaged citizens to go further and hopefully attract others who needed to see that such work does make a difference.
Restoring pride is a key element in driving engagement with the landscape. As a project partner points out: “A lot of these communities have had a bad time in the past in terms of all sorts of issues. So it’s about pride in communities and there’s a lot of that going on in Manchester in different places, restoring pride in communities that have had a bad time. And the nature bits should be part of that as well, of restoring local pride.” Another says, “There are communities like ex-mining communities or agricultural communities in places like Irlam and Wigan where there’s real pride in that history and people maybe don’t still connect it with the landscape itself and that, that could be used to really benefit people in terms of having a sense of place of where they live and feeling proud about it.”
Linking this pride to the landscape can be an entry point for a better understanding of it. “I always say, do you know about these internationally important wetlands, we’ve got some species that are as rare as pandas, this is talking at a kids’ level, people connect to that, people like the thought of having super rare wildlife. It’s because it’s this post-industrial landscape that you won’t get these anywhere…this is unique round here and people like that story.”
People learn about what is special about this landscape through simple activities, as one project partner explains: “They didn’t appreciate how much was on those sites, and it was just a wasteland behind where they lived, and by going out and doing events like bioblitzes, walks, we slowly started to change some of those attitudes into there’s more here.” It is also important to start from people’s interests, which is facilitated by having multiple partners connected to different interests and groups of people (local communities, groups interested in cultural history, in protecting species and their habitats, in restoring waterways, etc.).
“You’ve got people who were already interested in recording wildlife and doing it that are now wanting to know more about what is the Carbon Landscape, why is that more important than somewhere else? What is the Greater Manchester Wetlands [of which the Carbon Landscape is part]? It spurs those kinds of conversations. And then the flip side of that, the community guys, they’re telling people the story and then they want to get involved. How can they get involved? There’s these opportunities to start recording, and that helps to write the story going forward.”
Coalfield pithead at the Lancashire Mining Museum at Astley Green. Photo: Joanne Tippett
“Starting to give that landscape scale picture [is important] as well. It’s not just this site, it’s how that links to the next site, and how that links to the next site.” Seeing the bigger picture helps people to understand that their efforts are part of something larger and impactful, which is an important source of motivation. But it can also be a challenge to get people beyond their local area. “We’ve had many attempts at getting the volunteers to be landscape scale volunteers, and it hasn’t worked yet, and I don’t know if it works elsewhere in the world, but the people from Woolston love Woolston, that’s why they’re volunteering, the people from Wigan Flashes love Wigan Flashes, that’s why they volunteer, et cetera, and the people from Wigan Flashes don’t want to go to Woolston any more than the people from Woolston want to go to Wigan Flashes, because if they’ve got some work to do [at their site], well it’s their volunteering time, they want to be there.”
It’s also difficult because people are often unfamiliar with the other areas of the Carbon Landscape. Greater access, connectivity and interpretation are needed to facilitate their engagement with it. The proposed Carbon Trail and Carbon Loops are seen as key vehicles for this. “One of the things I’m really looking forward to, to actually promote this as a landscape are the Carbon Trail and the Carbon Loops. I’m looking forward to those being in place so that I can advertise them as a Carbon Trail, and it’s the Carbon Landscape and this is the Carbon Landscape story. I know they’re still under development. I’m looking forward to cycling those myself so I can see how the different habitats and spaces blend as you move from the south up into the north.” This contact is expected to lead to engagement, “you’re opening it up and people are seeing things that they’ve not seen before, that makes people care about stuff.”
The Carbon Trail will connect gateway sites with the different areas of the Carbon Landscape. There will also be several interpretive walking trails, ‘Carbon Loops’ that will tell the stories of the different character areas, including a story of sustainability that illustrates what has occurred in this landscape in the past and how it can be transformed in a more sustainable future. These will be based on the RoundView, a way of navigating towards a sustainable future that is being used in community and school workshops in the Carbon Landscape to link our modern understanding of the environmental problems unleashed by the industrial revolution to an inspiring vision for the future, where human activities fit well within the landscape. The RoundView traces the long history of the landscape from the formation of peat and coal through the industrial revolution. It conveys that all of these events, and particularly the anthropogenic effects, are very recent chapters in the history of the planet. It describes how the process of change continues, and with it the opportunity for humans to do things differently in the future.
The Carbon Trail will bring people into the landscape so that they begin to know, use and care for it, and it will also establish connections among the surrounding towns by linking up and signposting active travel corridors. But some partners are concerned about conflicts between access and connectivity for people and for wildlife: “I would love to see proper links in the landscape being developed. Proper wildlife corridors, so that the landscape is working for wildlife. A by-product of that in my world, but equally valid, is that if it’s working for wildlife, it’s probably working for people. Because porosity is porosity. The only problem I have, is as soon as I mention the word, green corridor, somebody says, you can put a cycleway along that, and I instantly lose my green corridor. So, that’s why I separate the two to some extent, my green corridor is primarily the way that hedgehogs, newts, willow tits move through the landscape. Its secondary function in my world, is as an access for people.”
This discussion about the Carbon Trail and connectivity surface a dynamic tension in the Carbon Landscape project, that of balancing protection of nature and access for people. Some people argue that unless people get into this landscape and care about it, it won’t be protected for other species. A lot of the land is privately owned, demands for housing are very high, new economic opportunities are much needed. There is a tension between conservation and development to improve access and also to provide a funding mechanism to finance restoration work, through for example building new homes on the edges of the mosslands.
Discussing the intense pressure for development in the peri-urban landscape, one project partner said: “At the end of the day, if we want to achieve our goal, we have to engage local people, we have to engage people from further afield. We have to make these sites accessible. They are urban, so we have to create a relationship between people and biodiversity.”
“It’s about ensuring, from a sustainability point of view, that the landscape is treasured for its original assets, its natural assets and what that has provided for us, but it continues to evolve to meet the needs of future society, so that they then continue to value it.”
As the Carbon Landscape acts as an illustration of this history of change, including destructive changes, so can it act as a demonstration landscape for different practices that work for both people and nature. Opportunities for more sustainable livelihoods are emerging, including those related to heritage/eco-tourism and sustainable agriculture. The narrative of this region also includes innovation, and that element too can be called up in support of sustainable transitions. “This area used to be the most innovative region in the industrial revolution. We were frontline of technology and the way people were living their lives and thinking. It’s been overtaken now by modern life, but we have an opportunity again to grab that innovation and lead the way to create a green corridor and more sustainable way of living, a happier, healthier community…focusing on the innovation and wanting to change what connects people with their environment…I feel like a story of our site is about innovation into nature.”
Coal mining waste being restored at Bickershaw, Country Pary. Photo: Joanne TippettWetlands regenerating at former site of Bickershaw Colliery. Photo: Joanne Tippett
The vision for the Carbon Landscape? “It would have to be a place that was a thriving place, a green place, a place for people, for wildlife, for recreation, for health, all of those things.” Through innovative community engagement, active volunteering and working with partners and cities to improve our scientific knowledge of restoration of post-industrial landscapes, the Carbon Landscape project aims to inspire a step-change in the landscape and to bring hope for a sustainable future.
Many thanks to participants from Cheshire Wildlife Trust, City of Trees, Environment Agency, Greater Manchester Ecology Unit, Inspiring healthy lifestyles, Lancashire Mining Museum, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester Museum, Mersey Rivers Trust, Natural England, Peel Land and Property, Salford Council, The University of Manchester, Warrington Council, Wigan Council, Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester & North Merseyside and Woolston Eyes Conservation Group.
Rererences
Carbon Landscape Partnership (2016). The Carbon Landscape. Landscape conservation action plan part 1. Preston: The Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Greater Manchester & North Merseyside.
Great Manchester Wetland Partnership Technical Group (2014). The Carbon Landscape interpretation Report, 28 May 2014.
Tippett, J. & How, F. (2018). “The SHAPE of Effective Climate Change Communication: Taking a RoundView.” In W. Leal Filho et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Climate Change Communication: Vol. 2: Practice of Climate Change Communication, 357–72. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70066-3_23.
Tippett, J., Farnsworth, V., How, F., Le Roux, E., Mann, P. & Sherriff, G. (2010). Learning to embed sustainability skills and knowledge in the workplace. Manchester: Sustainable Consumption Institute. http://www.roundview.org/background/research/
Dr Joanne Tippett is a lecturer in Spatial Planning in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. Action research funded by the Sustainable Consumption Institute and 250 staff in Tesco led to the creation of the RoundView Tool for Sustainability [www.roundview.org].
Today’s post celebrates some of the highlights from TNOC writing in 2018. These contributions—originating around the world—were one or more of widely read, offering novel points of view, and/or somehow disruptive in a useful way. All 1000+ TNOC essays and roundtables are worthwhile reads, of course, but what follows will give you a taste of 2018’s key and diverse content.
The Nature of Cities advanced in a number of ways in 2018. The number of contributors has grown to over 700, and we published 150+ long-form essays, reviews, and global roundtables.
We founded a sister Charity registered in Ireland—The Nature of Cities-Europe—in order to collaborate more with our colleagues in the European Union.
The Stories of the Nature of Cities 2099 prize for Flash Fiction attracted 1200 entries from 116 countries. We awarded seven top prizes (all seven were women, from the U.S., Canada, and India), and in February 2019 we will publish a book of 57 stories from 21 countries. The top story, by the way, is called “Neither Above Nor Below”, by Claire Stanford of Los Angeles. We’ll run a second edition of the prize in 2019, with theme “Set in a City Park”.
We began serious planning for The Nature of Cities Summit, to be held in Paris in June 2019. Join us there for a really innovative meeting focused on transdisciplinarity and collaboration in green cities.
In essays, roundtables, and reviews we continue to seek the frontiers of thought found at the boundaries of urban ecology, community, design, planning, and art. Importantly, we’ve attracted more and more readers: in 2018 we had over a half million readers from 2,500+ cities in 150+ countries.
Thank you. We hope to see you again in 2019.
(Banner photo is by Georgina Avlonitis.)
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Roundtables
The High Line in New York City. Photo: David Maddox
In November 2017, Nature Ecology and Evolution published a major review of the field of ecology, titled “100 articles every ecologist should read” (behind a paywall, unfortunately)—a product of an extensive survey of ecologists. In addition to a lack of gender and racial diversity among authors, and its general lack of inclusivity, the list also includes nothing of how urban ecology has contributed to our understanding of our urban planet. So, we asked a diverse group to create a list of some of the most important contributions from urban ecology for advancing the field of ecology. (We asked them to suggest a reading also—a start on a reading list.)
…with contributions from: Pippin Anderson, Cape Town | Erik Andersson, Stockholm | Marc Barra, Paris Nathalie Blanc, Paris | Marcus Collier, Dublin | Paul Downton, Melbourne | Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires | Niki Frantzeskaki, Rotterdam | Dagmar Haase, Berlin | Steven Handel, New Brunswick | Nadja Kabisch, Berlin | Timon McPhearson, New York | Harini Nagendra, Bangalore | Steward Pickett, Poughkeepsie | Philip Silva, New York | Mike Wells, Bath | Weiqi Zhou, Beijing
Urban planning (and the city plans that express it) is typically focused on coherently organizing city systems, flows of people and resources, where things are and should be. While parks, green and open spaces are usually part of urban plans (but there are unfortunate exceptions), ecology and ecological processes are on the sidelines. Much of the writing at TNOC addresses the essential ecological and social values that flow from ecosystem services, green spaces, and biodiversity. So, should not a greater ecological sophistication be embedded within urban planning? Should there not be ecologists at the center of urban planning teams in cities? Of course, this requires that ecologists get involved, learn about planning and its methods, and invest in the tradeoffs that are inevitably involved in planning something as complicated as a city. Where are the examples ecology embedded in urban planning? How can it be done?
…with contributions from: Will Allen, Chapel Hill | Juan Azcárate, Bogota | Amy Chomowitz, Portland | Katie Coyne, Austin | Georgina Cullman, New York City | PK Das, Mumbai | David Goode, Bath | Mark Hostetler, Gainesville | Elsa Limasset, Orléans | Ragene Palma, Manila | Diane Pataki, Salt Lake City | Gil Penha-Lopez, Lisbon | Lauren Smalls-Mantey, New York City
Bonneville Power Administration 905 Building – Habitat Roof. Deswign & Photo: Jason King
The word biodiversity is one of those words that lives happily in metaphor. But in detail, it is all over the map. Ask 10 people, you’ll get 13 definitions. Even ecologists use diverse definitions, that sometimes make distinctions between native and non-native species, but sometimes not; that alternate between indicating species or ecosystems and their services; and sometimes in the same conversation. And then there is the subtle and not so subtle distinctions between definition, meaning, and action. 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 their 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?
…with contributions from: Gloria Aponte, Medellín | Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos Aires | Andrew Grant, Bath | Yun Hye Hwang, Singapore | Maria Ignatieva, Perth | Jason King, Portland | Victoria Marshall, Singapore | Daniel Phillips, Detroit | Mohan Rao, Bangalore | Sylvie Salles, Paris | Kevin Sloan, Dallas/Fort Worth | Diana Wiesner, Bogotá
For this, our second roundtable in the series “Artists in Conversatuion with…”, we invited eleven artists to present their conversation with water in cities. Coming from seven different countries—Czech Republic, France, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, and the United States—these artists inspire our own experiences with water in cities. They engage with water in the shape of fog, rain, ice, restored wetlands, urban rivers and creeks, city fountains, and reclaimed urban spaces. To them, water is an inclusive moving matter that when listened to, can serve as a conduit to larger understandings.
…with contributions from Antonio José García Cano, Murcia | Katrine Claassens, Montreal | Claudia Luna Fuentes, Saltillo | Nazlı Gürlek, Istanbul & Palo Alto | Basia Irland, Albuquerque | Robin Lasser, Oakland | Marguerite Perret, Topeka | Mary Mattingly, New York | Bonnie Ora Sherk, San Francisco | Nadia Vadori-Gauthier, Paris | Aloïs Yang, Prague
Engagement is the first step toward active acknowledgment, inclusion, and stewardship of the environment. Nature Atlas provides a rich tapestry of options for engaging with urban nature. The purpose of Nature Atlas is to invoke diverse ways of perceiving, understanding, and engaging nature by actively and consciously interacting with our environments through various practices across disciplines, inclinations, expertise, and capacities.
Jane Jacobs’ final chapter of Death and Life of Great American Cities, titled “The Kind of Problem a City Is”, remains its most misunderstood. The principal ideas of the book have become the mainstream of urban know-how and helped the triumphant turnarounds in the fortunes of American cities, most notably for New York City. But the last idea in the book—that the scientific foundation that is the basis of the planning profession is founded in error—has not had the same impact. The debate over the scientific basis of urban planning was set aside. The non-linearity of neural networks provides a useful illustration of how details can matter in complex systems, but also of the importance of iteration for adaptation. Is it possible for our cities to learn and adapt as neural networks do?
Mankind may have left the savannah some million years ago, but the savannah never quite left us. It makes sense that since we co-evolved with nature, our need for it is hardwired into our brains and our genes. Urban nature and public art can help to break down barriers both mental and physical, sparking imaginations, catalyzing placemaking, forging new connections, and bringing people together. In a GreenPop project, disused public corners in two African cities—Livingstone, Zambia and Johannesburg, South Africa—were transformed using public participation, mural art, public seating, sculpture, and indigenous plants into spaces of connection and of conversation around the incredible biodiversity that makes each city so unique and special.
In rapidly growing Indian cities, change seems like the only constant. Heritage buildings are torn down, roads widened, lakes and wetlands drained, and parks erased to make way for urban growth. Nature is often the first casualty in a constant drive towards development. Yet the street tree stubbornly survives across Indian cities—beleaguered by gasoline fumes, besieged by construction, but still tenaciously gripping the sidewalk. The lives of street trees are emblematic of the multiple entanglements that characterise the nature-society dialectic animating the ever expanding urban in the global south—entanglements that knit together the past and present, the secular and sacred, and the global and local.
Vancouver B.C. MetaFlow Diagrams for energy (left) and food (right). Credit: Dr. Philip Mansfield/Graphical Memes
Like the human body, cities are living, ever-evolving organisms. Just as diet, exercise, sleep, or laughter can be seen as indicators of our personal physical and emotional well being, the ways in which goods, water, commuters, or food move through the urban ecosystem determines a city’s health and sustainability within larger regional and global natural systems. With citizen-generated maps and diagrams based on real-life conditions and structured around a holistic framework, the patterns that emerge allow for both residents and planners to ask questions that can lead to both local and regional ecological improvements.
I am very much a practicing research scientist and not a humanist, but sometimes our traditional methods simply fall short of the questions that need to be answered. When it comes to the intersection between ecological processes, the built environment, and the experience of living in modern cities, this problem is both acute and urgent. If there is a chance that the arts, literature, philosophy, and other humanist disciplines have something to offer our understanding of what urban ecosystems are and can be, then I think we should explore that chance, and quickly.
Often described as Europe’s greenest city, Sheffield is reputed to have more trees per capita than any other, with over 100,000 trees spread across parks and open spaces, 10.4 percent woodland by area, and approximately 36,000 street trees. However, a public-private partnership is dramatically altering Sheffield’s urban forest. Sheffield exemplifies the worst-case scenario when private companies are contracted to finance and deliver public goods, and a noteworthy example of creative and resilient community activism.
“This is my drawing. I watch as the mountains come up close and then move back.”
What happens when we “freeze” the landscape on pieces of paper? To find the answer, for the past eight years our foundation, Fundación Cerros de Bogotá, has been inviting children from Bogota and the surrounding region to paper our walls with their landscape drawings. (Bogotá is a humid tropical city located at 8,700 feet above sea level, on a highland plateau in the eastern range of the Andes.) Last year alone, children from diverse backgrounds sent us more than 2,000 drawings of Bogotá’s mountains and their surroundings. In pondering all of these children’s drawings and listening to their stories about their interests, we began to realize that these children would be our greatest allies in bringing about the changes we have been dreaming about.
Re-wilding is a new area of interest in landscape architecture concerned with making landscapes that are as close to the original ecology of a place as possible. Not limited to only planting installations, re-wilded landscapes can also exist to attract, reconstitute and/or re-introduce wildlife to heighten biodiversity. Re-wilding beckons landscape architects to embrace a logical next step…to release artistic conceits altogether and replace them with the actual landscape type naturally intended, as much as is realistically possible.
What are the types of childhood experiences that instil a lifelong value for nature and promote stewardship behaviour later in life? It turns out that the sense of wonder that children experience in nature is a crucial factor. Over 60 percent of children around the globe live in cities where they face substantial barriers to regular and direct experience of nature. In addition to the numerous implications the absence of nature-based experiences has for the health and development of children, an increasing proportion of children are exhibiting a limited understanding of common plants and animals, as well as a biophobia (“fear” or ambivalence) towards the natural world.
Conventional wisdom tells us that deliberative democracy works best at local scales thanks to superior and immediate access to decision-makers, the tightness of feedback loops for citizens, deciders, and third parties (expressed by the notion that disgruntled citizens will “vote with their feet”), and the importance of local places to self-identity. But where it is presumably easiest to engage in deliberative democracy, it also seems most challenging. Even when full-blown deliberative democracy is not possible in complex societies, we can strive for a more modest goal: “civic coproduction”, which concerns the many grassroots initiatives that we now see in cities and landscapes. Even where the complex needs and desires of diverse publics must be conjugated with scarce resources, people and civil society are participating and making a difference.
For better or worse, 2017 was a historic year for both Mexico and Mexico City. This can be summed up in two numbers: 100 and 32. The first number celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of Mexico’s Constitution, approved on 5 February 1917, and renowned as the first Constitution in the world to incorporate social rights. The second number, 32, marks the remembrance of the deadly earthquake that killed more than 30,000 people and devastated Mexico City on 19 September 1985. Two very different anniversaries, of course. One, but distant and hardly provoking any popular emotion; the other one random and unforeseen, but still very present in the memories of at least three generations. Struggles for spatial justice, human rights, and democracy are interconnected and have a long history in Mexico City. As the previous official slogan claimed, this is a “City in Movement”. So let’s get inspired and keep going.
The stack of the water treatment plant is repurposed as a beacon to communicate rain events to the public. The stack and its vapor are blue if the weather is clear; red the night before rain to alert citizens to reduce their use of water and reduce pressure on the storm water system. Stacks become part of the city’s “green infrastructure”. Credit: Mary Miss Studio
As an artist, having the opportunity to develop a project at the scale of a city has been a remarkable experience. WaterMarks has grown out of a three-year engagement with the city of Milwaukee. City government, academic institutions, and many nonprofits have been essential contributors to the development of this urban-scaled project.
Focusing on water, the project has three important goals in mind: address environmental issues as a gateway to sustainable development; engage communities as active partners; help identify Milwaukee as a global water center.
Call and response as a means of dialogue: Physical interventions call out some aspect of the natural systems and infrastructure and, through community engagement activities, the people of Milwaukee respond to and activate the sites.
In her book Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (OUP, 2016), Harini Nagendra suggests we draw on the “cultural imagination and capacity for coexistence” demonstrated through the long history of the city of Bengaluru as we strive for sustainable and resilient modern cities. This call for considered and creative action is an appropriate directive in an age of rapid and dynamic urbanization. Her book is fascinating in that it simultaneously meets the directive of contemporary urban ecology in addressing the social and the biophysical, and also shares a personal lived experience of a city.
John Cary’s Design for Good comes at a time when it is so important to re-instill the hope that design brings to people—both designers as well as the people designed for. It sheds a ray of light into the design world by demonstrating how, through incorporating public dialogue and involvement, we can achieve end results that are hugely successful. If two young postgraduate aspirants from MIT have the drive and urge to explore beyond their comfort zones to eventually help communities in Rwanda—as did the MASS Design Group in the case of the Butaro Hospital project—then established professionals in the field can certainly take up the mantle and attempt to do the same.
New Integrated and Actionable Urban Knowledge for the Cities We Want and Need
Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm. Xuemei Bai, Canberra. Niki Frantzeskaki, Rotterdam. Corrie Griffith, Tempe. David Maddox, New York. Timon McPhearson, New York. Sue Parnell, Cape Town. Paty Romero-Lankao, Boulder. David Simon, Gothenburg. Mark Watkins, Phoenix.
Urban Planet draws from diverse intellectual and practice traditions to grapple with the conceptual and operational challenges of urban development for sustainable, resilient, livable, and just cities. The aim is to foster a community of global urban leaders through engaging the emerging science and practice of cities, including critiques of urbanism’s tropes. We hope that ideas about global urbanism that situate the city at the core of the planet’s future will provide pathways for evidence-based interventions to propel ambitious, positive change in policy and practice.
A new report from the Network for Landscape Conservation helps solidify the pathways forward for collaborative initiatives that protect natural and cultural resources in cities.
When I started my career in land and water conservation almost 25 years ago, cities and nature were usually seen as two separate things. Many strategic conservation planning efforts focused on finding the best places to protect nature from people. But as we have learned from The Nature of Cities and its contributors, cities should be thought of as ecosystems of people, nature, and infrastructure that have the potential to provide human inhabitants with a built environment that is resilient, sustainable, livable, and just.
As I have worked my entire career in the arena of metropolitan greenspace planning, I can safely say that now more than ever, people are working together across communities and regions to protect, enhance, and restore our natural and cultural landscapes within cities. For evidence of this groundswell of support, look no further than the National Forum on Landscape Conservation that took place at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, USA on 7-8 November 2017. The event, sponsored by the Network for Landscape Conservation (the Network), brought together 200 leading landscape conservation practitioners from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The Forumprovided an opportunity to share lessons learned, discuss ongoing challenges, and explore pathways forward to advance the practice of landscape conservation.
The Network has just released a report entitled Pathways Forward: Progress and Priorities in Landscape Conservation, which captures the insights of the Forum attendees, including the key finding that community-grounded, highly collaborative approaches to landscape conservation are on the rise. Perhaps when you see the term “landscape conservation”, you do not automatically think of the nature of cities. But now more than ever, I believe that landscape conservation is an essential framework for creating resilient, sustainable, livable, and just cities.
The Network report makes this compelling case:
“We know that healthy, connected natural landscapes are essential—for clean water, healthy ecosystems, cultural heritage, vibrant communities and economies, climate resilience, climate mitigation, flood and fire control, outdoor recreation, and local sense of place. And yet our approaches to these critical issues are too often piecemeal, scattered, isolated, and incomplete…Landscape conservation is about bridging divisions. It brings people together across geographies, jurisdictions, sectors, and cultures to re-weave fragmented landscapes and safeguard the ecological, cultural, and economic benefits they provide. This collaborative practice embraces the complexity of working across scales to connect and protect our irreplaceable landscapes—across public and private lands, and from cities to the wildest places.” (Network report page 6)
How do we know that this collaborative approach is on the rise? The report quotes a 2017 Network survey of 132 landscape conservation initiatives across the country that confirmed the dramatic increase in such efforts over the last two decades: “Nearly 90% of the initiatives surveyed have been founded since 1990, with 45 percent founded in the years since 2010…The [survey results] also suggest that we are seeing a fundamental shift in how we approach conservation…75 percent of the initiatives surveyed identified [themselves] as informal collaboratives.”
So what does landscape conservation mean in the context of collaborative approaches to protecting, enhancing, and restoring nature in cities? The report succinctly identifies three key evolutionary steps forward that are taking place:
A shift in geographic scale. Decades of scientific research have built a systems-level understanding of the natural world and have underscored the importance of habitat connectivity across scales. To sustain biodiversity, ecological function, climate resilience, climate mitigation, and other ecosystem services, conservation must transcend boundaries and move beyond a site-specific, parcel-by-parcel approach to the scale at which nature functions.
A shift in perspective. Wildlands, farmlands, rangelands, timberlands, tribal lands, places of cultural and historical significance, rural communities, urban areas, and other private and public lands are part of a whole system—a landscape. The landscape conservation perspective is that the entire landscape, private to public, developed to wild, should be considered together in a thoughtful and integrated manner when planning conservation action.
A shift in process. Landscape conservation crosses jurisdictional and topical boundaries, transcending traditional decision-making processes and organizational structures. The landscape conservation approach is generally characterized by a horizontal process and collaborative governance structure with long-term participation by a diversity of stakeholders.” (Network report page 6)
As Julie Regan, Co-Chair of the Network and Deputy Director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency in California/Nevada USA, accurately states: “We have entered an exciting era of epic collaboration.”
As a city and regional planner by training who always wants more nature in cities, my attention naturally turns to how to operationalize these ambitious and complex shifts to better protect natural and cultural resources. Although these shifts are challenging to implement, the Network report does an excellent job distilling down to the essence the key tasks for collaborative landscape conservation initiatives:
Define Landscape Boundary and Need or Opportunity
Identify Shared Vision and Goals
Undertake Spatial Design and Strategic Plan
Fund and Implement Strategies
Evaluate Progress, Update Plan, and Adapt Over Time
For the purposes of this discussion, I am focusing my attention on defining the landscape boundary and undertaking a spatial design. For cities, this boundary issue is a fascinating one, as large, interconnected networks of metropolitan centers increasingly serve as the focus of economic activity. Sometimes referred to as Megaregions, these areas have interlocking economic systems, shared natural resources and ecosystems, and regional transportation systems linking population centers together (see American 2050 graphic below). Megaregions currently account for about 25% of the USA’s land area, but include 80% of the population.
I think of Megaregions as areas that not only encompass a human footprint but also much of the ecological footprint required to maintain the existence of these dense human settlements. While the global marketplace provides many desired goods not readily available in most cities, many resources needed, and treasured, by communities come from nearby farmland, forestland, and natural areas. And increasingly, a small part of these needs are being met right next door to where you live (e.g. community gardens, urban forests, pocket parks).
People need resources—like clean water to drink, food from working farms, and fiber from working forests—from surrounding landscapes that remain free from intense urbanization and lie outside incorporated municipal boundaries. People also need (and want) nature (and agriculture) inside cities, and many new creative “local footprint” solutions are being implemented. Cities across the country are envisioning a world where humans, wildlife, and natural systems coexist in healthy, vibrant, resilient, urban communities.
In terms of undertaking a spatial design and strategic plan, Megaregions require mapping of a “green infrastructure vision” that integrates data across scales and landscape types. A detailed example of a strategic plan for the Chicago metropolitan region can be found here, while the spatial design associated with this green infrastructure network design methodology for Chicago can be found here. More and more metropolitan regions have developed green infrastructure visions, including Los Angeles, Nashville, and Portland, Oregon, and these visions tie well into the concept of the emerging trend of identifying a optimal amount of nature within cities and countries around the world.
With this combination of collaboration and available spatial analysis tools, we are entering what Emily Bateson, the Network’s Coordinator calls “a new transformative era” where “we increasingly embrace community-grounded and science-informed conservation at the landscape scale. This phenomenon is sweeping across the USA, continent, and globe, and represents our best chance to sustain the natural and cultural landscapes that in turn sustain us.”
Where once Henry Walter Bates saw a vibrant and lush paradise, the very water Bates once leisurely enjoyed in his favorite spot in Belém is now overrun with sewage and disease. But the fight for a better city is not over…not if grassroots mobilization has anything to say about it.
People have lived in and around the Una Hydrographic Basin for as long as the city of Belém itself. Belém is the largest urban center in the Amazon River Delta, with a population that exceeds 2 million people in its metropolitan region. Beginning at Guajará Bay, the Una Basin comprises about 60 percent of Belém’s urban space and 30 percent of its population. This territory includes twenty districts and over four hundred million people. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) deemed the Macro-drainage Project that took place between the 1980s and early 2000s in the Una Basin (Una Project), the “largest urban reform of its time in Latin America” (Costa 2013). This was happening at the same time that global consensus was broadening and beginning to see the Brazilian Amazon as more than just the host of the world’s largest tropical rainforest but also the site of major urban centers that have actually increased close to 300 percent in population size over the past 40 years. Yet a better understanding of Amazonian cities remains necessary, to which we contribute in this essay.
More than a century before this, though, Belém and the Una Basin were already world renowned for the region’s natural beauty. In the late 19th century, the famous English naturalist Henry Walter Bates used to walk through the várzea forests of the Una Basin and sail through the streams that connected the Guajará Bay to the vicinity of what was then downtown Belém. Bates described the Una Basin as his “favorite spot” and a “paradise for naturalists” (Bates 1944:83)—which is a good illustration of the historical perception of the Amazon region as “God’s Paradise” (Brondízio 2016). The contemporary urban imagery tells a distinct story, however. The status of paradise has changed as the Una Basin endured the impacts of what Belém’s policy-makers envisioned as modernization from the mid-20thcentury onward. In the mindset of the political leadership of this period, for macro-drainage projects to be considered modern when building basic sanitation and water treatment systems, the constructors used to rectify and concrete part of the streams connected to the Guajará Bay, which likely affected the permeable capacity of the soil. This standard was applied, for example, to the Docks region, a commercial hub at the time (see Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 1. View from 28 de Setembro Street at docks region in 1929-1930. Images: Federal University of Pará Architecture Department Virtual Laboratory blog, available here.Figure 2. Channelized stream at Visconde de Souza Franco Avenue, dock region in the 1970s. Scan from the newspaper “O Liberal” in 1972. Available here.
Although development programs change over time and across landscapes, parallels exist between the Una Project, blueprints designed for the Amazonian forest, and the construction pictured in Figure 1 almost a century earlier. In the name of progress, modernity, and ultimately development, both nationally and internationally funded urbanization projects attracted a massive influx of migrants to Belém. With this influx of migrants, the banks of the Una River and its tributaries became dotted with various factories producing paper, vegetable oil, screws, packaging, and soap. Industrialization unfolded in tandem with the growing population density, resulting in increasing environmental degradation of the Una Basin.
It didn’t help matters that the old myth that Amazonian waters can absorb pollution, which rather seemed to be an assurance for people and reinforced cultural assumptions that the waters were by nature regenerative despite growing mistreatment of the environment. This myth was a powerful one—and arguably it still affects the region today (Brondízio 2016). It is not uncommon to find old residents in the Una Basin who recall the catastrophic image of fish floating on the surface of the Una River and other streams. It was, however, only the beginning of dealing with issues caused by the water. The strategy of concreting and rectifying the channel system to drain water was replicated in the Una Basin, albeit with minimal success in managing waste and hydrological resources (see, for example, the confluence of two canals in Figure 3).
Figure 3: The confluence of the Galo and 3 de Maio Channels. Photo: Vitor M. Dias, 2017.
The environmental damage to the rivers and the marginalization of impoverished Amazonians are complementary aspects in terms of water and land use of urban space in Belém. Informal settlements have either replaced or surrounded the factories and large constructions that occupied the banks and tributaries of the Una Basin. Over fifty percent of the individuals living in Belém reside in these settlements officially named as “subnormal agglomerations”, which are mostly located around lowland areas and close to the water. The lack of basic sanitation that affects about 90% of Belém’s population, combined with even just one season of heavy rainfall, easily exposes these disadvantaged neighborhoods and over half million people to the risk of flooding and the hazards associated with it (Mansur et al. 2016). In the end, while the “clean” water may wash away part of the sanitary waste, the contaminated water may also invade people’s homes in recurrent and often unpredictable flooding events. This situation happens every year, for example, in the location depicted in Figure 3, which is a longstanding front of fight and resistance for the better management of the channel system of the Una Basin. (Compare Figures 4 and 5.)
Figure 4: Galo Canal overflowing in 2005. Photo: Archives of the Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin.
After years of mobilization, in 2013, local citizens managed to obtain a report from the Commission for the Defense of Human and Consumer Rights of the State House of Representatives (ALEPA—Assembléia Legislativa do Estado do Pará in Portuguese; see Comissão de Representação da Bacia do Una, 2013). The state legislators participating in this Commission investigated and confirmed that the Stations for Sewage Treatment (ETE, Estação de Tratamento de Esgoto in Portuguese) planned for the area had not been built (Pará 2006: 21).
Figure 5: Galo Canal overflowing in 2018. Photo: Archives of the Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin.
Consequently, the sanitary waste continued to be discharged, without any treatment, into the channels of the Una Basin and then released at Guajará Bay afterward. In a new context and era, we can confirm Eduardo Brondízio’s assessment, published at The Nature of Cities, that the myth of Amazonian waters being capable of absorbing and diluting all kinds of waste persists, insofar as it has been used to bolster governmental arguments for not dealing with the problem of sanitary sewage in cities like Belém (Brondízio, 2016).
Building and reshaping the “Gray Hell”: The mix of gray(ish) concrete, green but harmful vegetation, and brown-muddy water
The context outlined so far seems to describe a metropolis where public investment in basic sanitation has been absent. Unfortunately, this is not the case, especially when referring to the Una Basin. The Una Project cost, after all, over 300 million U.S. dollars. The IDB and the local government allocated these funds to improve roads, water, sewage, and drainage, transforming the urban landscape and the livelihood of its inhabitants.
On the books, the Una Project presents outstanding numbers regarding its accomplishments. A report by the Sewage Company of Pará (COSANPA, Companhia de Saneamento do Pará in Portuguese) lists that the Una Project built 25,731 individual septic tanks, 91 collective cesspits, 307 kilometers of sewerage network, 2,164 inspection wells, 3,887 cleaning terminals, and a drying bed of septic tanks (Pará 2006:11). In reality, however, the Una Project actually created a mosaic of gray, concreted canals, green weeds plaguing the spots without maintenance, and brown-muddy water that invades many houses in the region, shaping distinct experiences relating to sanitation and water among the residents.
Simply put, when asphalt arrived and floods ceased in some areas, many other areas remained without paved roads, sewage treatment, and still experienced flooding events. This meant that the population was forced to adapt to these mixed results accordingly.
Figure 6. Sanitation public works of the Una Project in the early 2000s. Photo: Personal archives of Dona Lourdes, Una Basin resident and former community leadership.Figure 7: Pipes close to the roof on a Una Basin residence in 2017. Photo: Vitor M. Dias.
For example, the two most significant shortcomings of the Una Project were that it excluded entire areas within the Una Basin from the construction. Also, the Una Project left several areas without micro-drainage structure that should have been built in parallel to the channel system. Controversy remains about the reasons for this exclusion.
This micro-drainage structure should include paving and surface drainage at the street level, as well as curbs, sluice gates, and manholes to handle the water coming from households and the rain. Vila Freitas, which is located on the banks of the Galo Channel, has long experienced flooding due to the absence of micro-drainage (see Figures 8 and 9).
Figure 8: Community Água Cristal, an excluded area from the Una Project in 2014. Photo: Pedro P. Soares.Figure 9. Vila Freitas in 2018. Photo: Archives of the Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin.
The adherence to the system of urban governance established to implement the Una Project has resulted in varying degrees of success. That is, some progress has been made, but at the expense of having excluded more than half of the more than 100,000 families residing in the Una Basin from reaping the benefits of these infrastructure developments. It further highlights how crucial it is to work from a planning perspective that understands the interconnectedness of social and spatial distribution of infrastructure, such as in the case of macro- and micro-drainage issues. This is what we have found to be the case in the Una Project of development, the limitations that stemmed from it, and the persistent segregation of Belém (Brondízio 2016).
Indeed, complications with this project continued even after it arguably came to an end. When the Una Project was officially closed and the disbursement contract with IDB was terminated, the Municipal Government of Belém received lots of different types of equipment—machinery, and vehicles from the State Government estimated at R$ 21,977,619.75 (Pará 2005)—which exceeded 52 million USD circa 2005, corresponding roughly to 66 million USD in 2018. The IDB facilitated the purchase of this proper apparatus for the maintenance of the Una Basin channel system to ensure the sustainability of a project of this magnitude. As an institutional innovation for the time, there was an interest of the financing organization in establishing a sustainable governance system of the Una Basin.
Linking global to local interests, representatives from the IDB and various governmental agencies cooperatively drafted and proposed the manual of operations for the maintenance plan of the Una Basin. Yet, it is not known for certain the whereabouts of some items of this equipment, compromising the already insufficient capacity to maintain the existing macro-drainage structure. Such factors ultimately motivated the resignation of then Secretary of Sanitation, Luiz Otávio Mota Pereira, amid a rupture with the mayor. Much later, in 2013, the City Council of Belém launched an official investigation to determine what happened to the equipment, machinery, and vehicles of the Una Basin maintenance plan. The results of this investigation remain inconclusive nonetheless (Belém 2015).
Toward the mobilization of legal actors by FMPBU: Urban problems as a matter of environmental and social justice
The abbreviation FMPBU stands for Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin (Frente dos Moradores Prejudicados da Bacia do Una in Portuguese). It was created in 2011, when aggrieved citizens circulated a communiqué denouncing the conditions of the Una Basin to the participants of a public demonstration carried out by the Brazilian Bar Association. Fearing retaliation from local authorities, members of FMPBU did not feel safe to list their names in that document, which highlighted the obstacles to mobilization in the young, still-fragile democracy in Brazil.
In 2013, FMPBU consolidated itself as an urban, grassroots movement during the demonstrations of what became known in Brazil as the “Journeys of June” (Jornadas de Junho in Portuguese). The protests occurred in several Brazilian cities and addressed several matters from both federal and local level political agendas. In Belém, urban infrastructure was a key point raised within this context. FMPBU members thus attempted to take advantage of the atmosphere of political and cultural effervescence by distributing that same communiqué document from 2011. Simply put, pamphleting was another way FMBU had devised to hold public officials accountable for the growing problems and raise awareness among Belém’s inhabitants of flooding being a public policy issue besides being an environmental phenomenon. After all, the media and political discourses often converge when using environmental rhetoric and blaming the population for clogging the canals with garbage as fundamental causes of flooding, overlooking infrastructural problems. Most importantly, the document called attention to the recent role taken by legal actors as mediators of the Una Basin case.
The aggrieved citizens, to be sure, were not satisfied with how political forces were managing the polluted waters flooding people’s homes. They continued to mobilize, concentrating their efforts on Belém’s legal arena next. After successive complaints, in 2008, the State Prosecutor’s Office finally filed an environmental class action suit—Brazil’s Ação Civil Pública. The defendants of this lawsuit were the State of Pará, the Municipality of Belém, and COSANPA, which are responsible for maintaining and finalizing the constructions of the Una Project.
Despite this step forward, the class action suit progressed slowly, with the presiding judge only beginning to take significant steps to move the case forward in 2013 after pressure from the National Council of Justice—nearly five years after the suit was filed. An additional setback was that when it came time to negotiate the contents of a legal agreement between the parties of the lawsuit. The state prosecutors, defendants, and the judge discussed the terms of and plans for this agreement without the inputs from grassroots movements’ leaders or any of the individual citizens affected by the floods within the Una Basin. Rather, while those players were meeting in the room where the judicial hearing was taking place, members of the movement and other citizens were awaiting their fate outside.
Figure 10: Members of social movements and individual residents of the Una Basin waiting outside the room where the judicial hearing was taking place on September 26 of 2013. “Em audiência”, in red, means “hearing taking place”. Photo: Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin blog. Available here.
After 2013, the steps needing to be taken in compliance with the agreement above were suspended. The municipality claims that it has negotiated resources with the IDB to comply with the terms agreed upon in court, but obtaining these resources raises uncertainty as to whether this is a matter of more money or better governance to ensure the maintenance of the Una channel system. Former managers of Project Una have already stated that this amount is not enough to do the necessary revitalization process, not to mention the pending issues that have yet to be built. Moreover, once the funding from IDB is disbursed, residents of the Una Basin are concerned that these resources might be allocated to finish other macro-drainage projects in the city, e.g., the Estrada Nova Basin, and not to improve the situation of the Una Basin.
Through the length of the legal battle, the social uprisings, and political clashes, the Una Basin continues to endure consecutive years of flooding after its so-called completion. The environmental degradation and loss of quality of life for residence, in turn, raise doubt about the capacity to implement and enforce new urban policies in the Brazilian Amazon. Additionally, the management of the water and sewage system in Belém, in general, and the Una Basin, in particular, remains precarious with the population facing unpredictable and frequent flooding events. Let us not forget the role the Inter-American Development Bank played in this. The results of the Una Project question whether such international forces by a multilateral bank are capable of spurring best management practices aimed at sustainability or if this model can ever really improve the path-dependent systems that run these cities and continue to perpetuate inequalities. Belém thus reveals a complex political ecology of flooding with an interconnected mosaic of players and institutions at various levels of governance from both global and local scales, all of which have been called into and have shown limited capacity of action.
Where once Henry Walter Bates saw and wrote of a vibrant and lush paradise (see Figure 11), the very water Bates once leisurely enjoyed in his favorite spot in the city is now overrun with sewage and disease. What remains today is a complex social-ecological landscape, where flooded and eroded urban landscapes strain the quality of life and livelihood of impoverished and increasingly stratified social classes. To conclude, we hasten to say that this does not mean that the fight for a better city is over; well, at least if it depends on grassroots mobilization. Ten years after Una’s class action suit was filed, the state prosecutors called for a public hearing to discuss the pending issues of the Una Project. This hearing is going to take place in December 2018, and yet again, it is a direct result of persistent mobilization by the members of FMPBU.
Figure 11. Una Basin delta region in the 19th century: Henry Walter Bates’ paradise. Photo: VASQUEZ, P. Mestres da fotografia no Brasil: Coleção Gilberto Ferrez. Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 1995.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Eduardo Brondízio for his comments on early drafts of this essay and the support of the Center for the Analysis of Social-Ecological Landscapes (CASEL) at Indiana University-Bloomington. We are also indebted to the members of FMPBU, the Assisting Program to Urban Reform and the Research Program on Urban Policy and Social Movements in the Globalized Amazon of the Graduate Program of the Faculty of Social Service at the Federal University of Pará (PARU and GPPUMA at UFPA). Special thanks to Andressa V. Mansur for her insights on this topic and her friendship that brought the authors of this essay together.
José Alexandre de Jesus Costa, Vitor Martins Dias, and Pedro Paulo de Miranda Araújo Soares Belém, Bloomington, and Belém
* The authors have been listed in alphabetical order based on last name. They have equally contributed to the essay.
Bates, Henry Walter. O naturalista no Rio Amazonas. São Paulo: Brasiliana, 1944.
Belém. Câmara Municipal. Relatório Final da Comissão Palramentar de Inquérito com o objetivo de investigar indícios de irregularidades na transferência, para empresas da iniciativa privada, de veículos e equipamentos doados pelo Governo do Estado do Pará ao Município de Belém. Diário Oficial da Câmara, Belém, 15, 16, 17, 18 e 19 dez. 2014
Comissão de Representação da Bacia do Una. Assembleia Legislativa do Pará. Relatório Final. Belém, 2013.
Costa, Marco Aurélio, Isadora Tami Lemos (Orgs.). 40 Anos de Regiões Metropolitanas no Brasil, IPEA, 2013.
FMPBU. O que é a Frente dos Moradores Prejudicados da Bacia do Una? Frente dos Moradores Prejudicados da Bacia do Una, 2013. Disponível em http://frentebaciadouna.blogspot.com/2013/. Accessed on 08/02/2018.
IBGE, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). 2011. Censo Demográfico 2010 – Aglomerados Subnormais: Informações Territoriais. Censo Demográfico Rio de Janeiro, available at: http://bit.ly/2mhWy4g.
Mansur, Andressa V., Eduardo S. Brondízio, Samapriya Roy, Scott Hetrick, Nathan D. Vogt, and Alice Newton. An Assessment of Urban Vulnerability in the Amazon Delta and Estuary: A Multi-Criterion Index of Flood Exposure, Socio-Economic Conditions and Infrastructure. Sustainability Science 11(4): 625-643, 2016.
Pará (Estado). Companhia de Saneamento do Estado do Pará. Ata de reunião para transferência de equipamentos para a Prefeitura Muncipal de Belém, conforme previsto na cláusula 6.05 dos contratos de empréstimo nº 649/OC-BR e nº 869/SF-BR firmados entre o Estado do Pará, mutuário final e o BID – Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento, órgão financiador,realizada em 02 de janeiro de 2005. p. 01-05.
dos Santos, Flávio Augusto Altieri, and Edson José Paulino da Rocha. Alagamento e Inundação em Áreas Urbanas. Estudo de Caso: Cidade de Belém. Revista GeoAmazônia 2(1): 33-55, 2014.
Vasquez, Pedro. Mestres da fotografia no Brasil: Coleção Gilberto Ferrez. Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 1995.
Ph.D. Student in Sociology at Indiana University-Bloomington. Affiliated Researcher at the Center for the Analysis of Social-Ecological Landscapes (CASEL, Indiana University-Bloomington), and Research Fellow at the Milt and Judi Stewart Center on the Global Legal Profession (Indiana University Maurer School of Law
PNPD/CAPES Scholar and Visiting Professor at Federal University of Pará (UFPA, Brazil). Member of the Assisting Program to Urban Reform (PARU) and the Research Program on Urban Policy and Social Movements in the Globalized Amazon (GPPUMA) of the Graduate Program in Social Work at the Federal University of Pará (PPGSS-UFPA).
This context makes Malta an interesting case-study for the study of urban ecosystems and cultural landscapes. With greater competition for space between urban and industrial development, the need to assess the availability for green infrastructure has become more pressing. How does accessibility to green infrastructure, and the benefits it provides to people, vary in different spaces? What are the impacts on human well-being and do these affect one part of society more than another? These are some of the questions that researchers have been working on in Malta.
Valletta, the capital city of Malta and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is located in an urban agglomeration characterised with a high population density and strong tourism and commercial development. Photo: Mario Balzan
A recent study has looked at access to green infrastructure and how the use of these services has led to social, economic, and environmental benefits. This study found a strong gradient in terms of green infrastructure availability from rural to urban areas. And, as a consequence, the capacity of ecosystems to provide benefits to society is lower in urban centres. In contrast, research suggests various important contributions derived from urban green spaces. These include the reduction of ambient temperatures through shading and evapotranspiration, opportunities for recreation, reduction of flooding by limiting stormwater runoff, and the removal of air pollutants by vegetation. A recent study using the outdoor game Geocaching, described as the world’s largest treasure hunt, has shown the importance of these spaces for recreation. Results from Malta indicate that the highest number of caches were placed and searched for in urban areas, and that geocaching is strongly associated with the presence and accessibility of urban green infrastructure.
The Lower Barrakka Gardens in Valletta. A historical urban garden and a recreational and touristic site in the capital city. Photo: Mario BalzanHundreds of residents have recently gathered in Valletta in a demonstration in favour of the environment and the protection of trees and green spaces. Photo: Mario Balzan
The implication is that there is a strong need for land use planning to promote the use of nature-based solutions to develop a green infrastructure network in urban areas, and by doing so, significantly contribute to support biodiversity and ecosystem services flows leading to benefits to society.
The need for improved use of nature-based solutions also appears to be strongly felt by Maltese citizens, who were the most likely in the EU be in favour of the promotion and use of nature-based solutions with 95% of the Maltese participants in a recent Eurobarometer survey being favour of the EU promoting nature-based solutions throughout Europe. This was higher than the EU average of 83% of the respondents. In the same survey, Malta was also the EU member state with the highest fraction of citizens favouring urban greening measures. When asked whether there are enough natural features in the area where the respondent lives, and if they would like more or if they would not mind if there were less, 81% of the Maltese respondents wanted more natural features whilst only 18% said that there is enough of them (only 1% would not mind if there were less). This is higher than the EU average of 53% of the participants favouring more natural features in their residential areas. The Maltese respondents were also more likely (76%) to favour the use of nature-based solutions over technological solutions to improve the environment and the economy, and to address social issues, when compared with the EU average (60%).
Researchers at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology (MCAST) saw this as an opportunity to launch a research initiative—by working closely with policy-makers, businesses and stakeholders, they will develop a research strategy and build a research and innovation cluster to advance the development and uptake of nature-based solutions.
These are some of the goals of the recently funded project ReNature “Promoting research excellence in nature-based solutions for innovation, sustainable economic growth and human well-being in Malta”. ReNature is a Twinning project of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. This twinning collaboration aims at significantly strengthening nature-based solutions research at the MCAST as the coordinator of the project by linking it with internationally-leading research institutions in other EU Member States.
The ReNature project partners: ReNature brings together researchers from a total of five countries to establish twinning collaborations to stimulate knowledge exchange and nurture a new generation of scientists and practitioners around an emerging nature-based solutions cluster for Malta. Photo: Pensoft
During ReNature, Maltese researchers collaborate with partners from Ireland, Italy, the United Kingdom and Bulgaria. This collaboration is expected to offer an opportunity to increase the institution and national research capacity within this sector, link up with existing initiatives and projects, develop a national research community with strong international collaborations, and develop new practical solutions.
Through capacity-building and knowledge synthesis about nature’s benefits and nature-based solutions, and by developing a strong collaboration with policy and businesses, the ReNature researchers aim to foster a culture of evidence-based environmental decision-making and planning for human well-being.This ambitious project aims to make Malta a strong research and innovation player in the emerging field of nature-based solutions, thereby providing an opportunity to develop and test new technical and policy solutions in an urbanised island environment.
The Kick-Off meeting of the ReNature project was held on the 25 October 2018 at the Institute of Applied Sciences of the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology. During the meeting, the project was introduced to stakeholders through a number of thematic talks focusing on the need for research excellence for nature-based solutions, the integration of ecosystem services and knowledge synthesis in urban planning and environmental decision-making, and the steps to transform research outcomes into practice in policy and business. This was followed by an open discussion about the contributions of research to the development and application of nature-based solutions and actions required for the development of a network of researchers, practitioners and interested members of the public. The ReNature kick-off meeting also offered an opportunity for practitioners to exchange knowledge and discuss collaborations in less formal settings.
The ReNature Kick-Off meeting, held in October 2018, has offered the first opportunity for knowledge exchange between the project partners and Maltese stakeholders, researchers and students. Photo: MCAST
Given the complexity of the environmental systems, which increase the risk of inadequate or contested decisions or of not properly implementing policies, a stronger knowledge and evidence base is considered as being crucial for the design and implementation of decisions, credibility, and uptake by stakeholders and citizens. ReNature brings together individuals and organisations possessing relevant knowledge in various areas of expertise to participate in a research and innovation nature-based solutions cluster of interconnected companies and institutions linked by commonalities and complementarities. Clustering at a local and regional levels enables the contributing stakeholders to exploit their synergies and complementarity, leading to benefits such as knowledge transfer, preservation of community values and lifestyle improvement.
The creation of the research and innovation nature-based solutions cluster, which collaborates within a strong international network of stakeholders and adopts research-to-practice approaches, is a long-term goal of the ReNature partners and collaborators. This will be achieved through a series of meetings and workshops that identify knowledge needs whilst supporting collaborative research with stakeholders from the national and international scientific and practitioner communities. The development of strong collaborations with stakeholders from policy and business is therefore seen as being critical for the development of a research and innovation nature-based solutions cluster for knowledge co-creation and sharing, thus promoting the mainstreaming of nature-based solutions across all policy-relevant sectors.
The creation of a continuous and iterative cycle of innovation, based on the needs of society for new knowledge and applications, is critical for renaturing cities. Within this cycle, the importance of sharing of knowledge and scientific outcomes in open-source repositories and the role of young researchers to foster the long-term capacity for innovation and new ideas should not be underestimated. Essentially, ReNature wants to renature Malta through collaborations that promote the long-term use of nature-based solutions and thus to have an amplified impact on environmental decisions, landscape planning and the uptake of solutions in businesses.
Follow us on twitter @ReNature_H2020 for more details and updated information about the ReNature events. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 809988.
As our walk enters Europe, we see the small things that signal lackluster economic growth and a sense of helplessness and hopelessness in many small villages, towns and cities.
It has been raining all afternoon in Megali Sterna, a village in the north of Greece, and, from the empty and closed café we have been sitting in for hours, it looks like the rain will continue into the evening.
We scan the neighborhood for a dry place to pitch our tent, a daily part of our Asia-to-Europe walk.
No one is around to ask for help; it’s a summer afternoon, and people are resting in their homes. The rain encourages them to stay inside.
We find an old school, abandoned for years, it seems. The walls and roof are intact, but shattered glass from the long-forgotten windows is splayed all over the floor, classroom doors are missing, toilet bowls have been yanked out of bathrooms and dripping rain water falls into puddles pooled in the hallways. We use a few tree branches to sweep away the dust in a small corner that will be our home for the night, the only option we have today. We stare at the red graffiti scribbled on white walls and names of kids etched into the left-behind chalkboards.
Map of our walk so far: Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina
A short while later, a boy about 12-years-old sporting a hooded sweatshirt strolls through the school hallway. We hear the rap music from his phone before we see him. He glances into the classroom where we are camping. I wave. He nods.
A few minutes later, two teenage girls pass through the same hallway. We hear them chatting before they reach the classroom. We wave and say hello in Greek. They return the greeting, and keep strolling through the school. We hear them giggle as their footsteps fade on the dirty concrete floor.
Tent old school (white walls with red graffiti). We camped in this old school in Megali Sterna, Greece to escape the all-day rain storm. Local teenagers pass through its dilapidated halls and rooms because the few park benches were wet, and there was nowhere else to go.
It doesn’t take long before another group of pre-teens and teens finds us. There are few young people in this village, and word has spread that tourists are sleeping in the old school.
A group of five young women from 10 to 17 years old enter the classroom. The boy with the sweatshirt and his friend will join the group a bit later.
“Are you okay? Do you need anything?” asks one of the older teens in excellent English.
“Thank you for asking. Yes, we are fine. It’s been raining all day, and this was the only dry place we could find to sleep in tonight. Is it okay that we sleep here?” I say, half-asking and half-telling. Our tent is already up, and unless the police come and tell us to leave, we know we’re here until tomorrow’s first light.
“It’s okay that you stay here. It will rain during the night,” she says. “The rain has made all the park benches wet, so we hang out in the school.”
The school, which was used by their parents and grandparents, has been closed for years, her whole life, at least, she tells us. The village children are bused to schools in other towns, but the ruined building we are all gathered in still serves a purpose, a sad one at that.
“It’s better to hang out here than to stay inside our houses all day,” another young lady says, shrugging her shoulders at the normalcy of being in this run-down place. “There’s nowhere else for us to go.”
This “nowhere else to go and nothing else to do” concept follows us through our last stretch of Turkey, into Greece and deep into the Balkans. It shows up as abandoned buildings used by children and young people who have no parks to play in or when their parks are not well maintained. It also shows up in adult circles in the form of bars, cafes, and betting places where men stay for hours sipping their beverage of choice and hope lady luck puts a bit of extra cash in their pockets.
The “regular” tourist passing through these regions by car or bus may never notice these things. It seems like a normal thing that people sip coffee or rakija, ouzo, or other distilled liquors some part of the day. It is waved off as part of the country’s culture. And the falling apart facades fade into the wide landscape where wheat fields have been cut and rolls of hay are waiting for a tractor to haul them into a farmhouse.
To us, walkers who have traveled about 13,000 kilometers by foot over more than 2.5 years at a snail’s pace of three kilometers an hour, the increasingly noticeable presence of these overlooked village, town and city aspects take on a different meaning. They are signs of depressed economies, and resonate with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
Where the kids go
While many of the places we walk through have manicured gardens, playgrounds where kids can climb and jump, and nice parks and cafes to sit in, there are many other places that catch us off guard.
In the mid-size town of Burrell, Albania, for instance, we take a rest on the steps of what by all counts looks to be an abandoned apartment building, something built in the 1960s when square functionality was the design trend among architects. Its better days are far behind it, and the chipped paint, broken glass and gray lobby vestibule make us think the building has been out of use for years, maybe decades.
But, then we hear it. The sound of young people talking, and the echo of billiard balls colliding. They are confusing sounds in the context of decay.
Some of the children, most of them about 10-12 years old, find us and, with bright-eyed curiosity, quiz us about our walking journey. When they run out questions, they tell us they are going back inside to play.
We walk off as the crack of a new game of billiards begins.
A few weeks later, in Podhum, Bosnia and Herzegovina, memories of our night in the old Greek school return.
Dark picture with window of light caption: In Podhum, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the walls of the basement of a still-functioning school are riddled with bullet holes, which we believed may have been from the war in the early 1990s. Despite its eerie feel, young people seem to be comfortable here. The graffitied names of boys and girls scribbled on all the walls, the chip packages and energy drink cans strewn about and the pile of cigarettes butts give us the impression of teens who want to hide their smoking habit from their parents, and have few other hangout options.
Pouring rain forces us to stay in a dry but creepy auditorium, the small basement room of a school that seems to still be in use and where classes may start in the coming days. The gate door barely hangs on its hinges. Some of the heart symbol graffiti about who loves who dates back to the mid-1980s, and we speculate that the bullet shells lodged into the walls are reminders of the war that swept through the former Yugoslavian countries in the 1990s.
The room is littered with water bottles, soda and energy drink cans, and potato chip packages. The pile of cigarette butts in one corner make us think young people come here to hide their smoking habits from their parents, or, like the young people in the Greek village we met, they have nowhere else to go, especially on cold and rainy nights in this rural, hilly area. A distant thought clouds over: could this place be a stopover point for refugees and migrants escaping from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Africa? It’s a very real possibility as parts of our European walk parallels theirs.
The number of abandoned buildings we see during this leg of our journey these last several months raises bigger questions. What’s really going on here in this part of the world is one of the things we keep asking ourselves.
Where the men go
Sometimes the answer is right in front of us, sitting at one of the many bars and cafes we can’t help but run into.
Very frequently, the bars and cafes we have passed from Çanakkale, Turkey to Bihac, Bosnia and Herzegovina are filled with an intergenerational mix of men. The old men are usually farmers or pensioners living on a budget; the young men typically in their 20s are mostly unemployed. They all drink the same thing: Coffee, beer, and raki/rakija (the name and spelling of this hard liquor changes as we move through each country, but it’s always present).
“I lived in Germany for a while, and made a lot of money. But, I was sent back here, and now I have nothing. No savings, no job, nothing,” an Albanian 20-something-year-old tells us during another rainy afternoon when we are trapped inside a smoky bar where Latin American Spanish music is the choice beat from their YouTube TV connection. “What am I going to do? There’s no work in this country. I come here (to this bar) every day. I’m here all day. These guys are like my family.”
We glance around the room and have mixed feelings about these men. The resignation about their lot in life is evident on their faces. But, we are not ones who dole out pity.
“Why don’t you create work? There must be something that can create a better economic situation here,” I say, almost pleading.
The young man tells us what many others tell us in every country we walk through: The government doesn’t work; the politicians are corrupt, and people don’t have any chance to make money. He says the only job he may get is cutting trees deep in the forest, and that’s not appealing work. He wants to go back to Germany and get a job translating Albanian, German and English, but he needs certificates he can’t afford unless he takes the work as a lumberjack.
It is a cycle that feeds the helpless and hopelessness bubbling just below the surface, and shadows the easy-going conversations we have in places where hospitality to visitors is a underlining principle.
The increasing number of sport betting places, usually attached to the bar and cafes where men hang out, doesn’t help matters.
Sidewalk and signs of betting places caption: There are no shortages of places to bet throughout Turkey, Greece and most of the Balkan countries we have passed. They are often attached to the cafès where men go to drink Turkish-style coffee, beer and the local version of rakija, raki, ouzo or other distilled liquors; in many places, they are located a few doors down from money transfer shops, where family members living abroad send money to relatives back home.
“Ninety-nine percent of the men watching this match have money on the game,” observes our host in Bitola, one of Macedonia’s few cities, swirling his finger around 360 degrees pointing to the World Cup soccer match being broadcasted on every television in every café and restaurant along the main pedestrian street. “Everyone says they have no money. But there is always money for coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, and a bet on the game.”
Our host in Thessaloniki, a big Greek city off of our walking route that we visited for a few days, mentions something similar.
In Greece, a country that was hard hit in the last recession and whose people are struggling with European Union imposed economic austerity measures and high unemployment rates, betting places recently became legal, and they are popping up everywhere, our host explains. Often during our walk, we notice a handful of betting places just a few meters away from each other on the same street, and sometimes they are near money transfer shops where people receive cash from relatives living and working abroad.
“It’s another way to prey on the poor. People earn little money, and they think if they win a few Euros, that will help them out of their hole. But, they never win,” he says, shaking his head at the illogical behavior capitalism fuels.
This is the push and pull we feel as we walk.
When we have the good fortune to find people who speak enough English and are willing to have more thoughtful conversations with us about their lives and dreams, they tell us what they want. They want a bigger house, a car (or another better, higher-end car), another television, nicer clothes, and, yes, better education and life opportunities for their children, who they hope will make enough money to take care of them when they are old. The story is the same almost everywhere we go, from Asia to Europe.
But, who really has access and resources to turn this wishful thinking into reality? How viable is this line of thinking in the near-term? And further into the future.
Will the children who listen to rap music or play billiards in destroyed buildings be the ones to turn their local economies around? Will the young guy who hangs his hope on getting out of wherever he lives and earning paycheck in another country come back and build something the generations after him will benefit from? Will governments create initiatives to help their people living both in cities and rural areas do more than survive?
We walk on mulling over these questions and inventing philosophical possibilities for the people we meet along the way.
Signs of depressed urban and rural economies blur our vision. It’s a long road ahead for all of us, for the people we meet who want something more than they have and for us the walkers who have learned to live with less. One step at a time often feels too slow for such a big undertaking.
Regularly, 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.
Graciela Arosemena, Panama CityA fundamental strategy for empowering cities and guiding them towards a positive natural future is to develop a model of the city that contains the growth of the urban sprawl, through re-urbanization.
Marcus Collier, DublinWhile we desire a greening of our cities on various levels, and while we become more reliant on the services of nature for environmental change and innovation, the nature-based solution approach has a long way to go.
Marlies Craig, DurbanTrees in cities hold great potential for their cooling carbon sequestration, water absorption, biodiversity… In Durban, tree planting is also transforming the lives of marginalised and unemployed people.
Samarth Das, MumbaiWith scarcity of land becoming a go-to excuse for governments and the real estate industry to exploit “no development zone” lands for housing, mapping of natural areas will help establish what land is “developable” and what land is not.
Ana Faggi, Bueno AiresStop talking about nature in and near cities and think of the cities and their surroundings as multifunctional landscapes
Sumetee Gajjar, BangaloreA gap which needs special attention in the future, led by a specific set of actors, are city biodiversity reports which inform biodiversity planning or city greenprinting process of Asian, African and South American cities or city-regions, experiencing spatial concentration of biodiversity loss.
Gary Grant, LondonUnderstanding, embracing, and acting on the sponge city concept will be the most powerful and effective way that we can increase biodiversity in our cities, among many other benefits.
Eduardo Guerrero, BogotáWe need a multidisciplinary think tank oriented to the relationships between nature and business in cities, focused on concepts, principles, guidelines, and good practices that generate win-win initiatives for entrepreneurship and sustainability.
Fadi Hamdan, BeirutThe threat that urban growth poses on biodiversity and human wellbeing should also be seen as an opportunity to claim “our right to the city ”, to reinvent the city, based on our vision for the society we want, and our relation to nature.
Scott Kellogg, AlbanyPositive natural urban futures may be worked towards by focusing on decentralized educational-activist strategies that emphasize human-non human reciprocity, social inclusion, and the reconstruction of the urban commons.
Patrick Lydon, OsakaFor each place and person, the answers will differ greatly, but our neighborhoods and our cities must become unique representations of natural biodiversity, each one answering to the voice of nature when and where it exists.
Yvonne Lynch, MelbourneMeaningful citizen engagement for participation in decision making is the best way to empower cities to achieve their aspirations and goals for a positive natural future. Working together, city governments and communities can make rapid progress towards creating healthy, natural cities.
Emily Maxwell, New YorkJustice is about people and about places. If we invest in natural solutions in neighborhoods that need them most, we can ensure not only a natural future for cities that protects biodiversity, but an equitable, resilient, and sustainable future as well.
Colin Meurk, ChristchurchGet governing bodies to open their eyes to opening the door to not only “ecology” (everyone knows what that is, right?) but to ecologists. Afterall, we all know about health, but we do seek medical opinion when we have a broken leg!
Jean Palma, ManilaA call for consciousness in urban management and planning is a call for professionals—environmental planners, architects, landscape architects, designers, and other urban leaders—to pay respect to nature.
Jennifer Pierce, VancouverThe outcome of a bioshed party forms a directive for the city and its citizens to acknowledge their dependency on local and global landscapes, and to take responsibility for them.
Mary Rowe, TorontoEnlightened designers are making attempts to better mimic the natural patterns enabled by diversity in natural systems. We need more efforts like this, reminders of what true urbanism actually looks like: an ecosystem.
Luis Sandoval, San JoséWhat biodiversity was there before? We need this baseline to understand our local goals for biodiversity, and whether current conservation efforts are effective.
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. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
For many in The Nature of Cities community, a key objective or goal could be stated something like this: to empower cities to plan for a positive natural future. There is a lot of unpack in such a statement. Indeed, almost every word in the phrase “to empower cities to plan for a positive natural future” could benefit from some discovery.
“Empower”? What’s the action? Empower whom to do what? What knowledge would ground and justify such empowerment?
“City”? Where? How big? Is there one thing we might call a “city”? Or do we mean “community”?
“Natural”? What elements of “nature” do we emphasize and value? Wild nature? Built nature? Nativeness or functionality?
And so on…
This roundtable is a follow up to a new report called “Nature in the Urban Century”, in which TNOC was a modest partner. You can see the whole report here. The emphasis of the report is on biodiversity conservation, its goals and strategies, and its emergent benefits for people.
The partners of this roundtable—TNOC, The Nature Conservancy, and Future Earth—wanted to cast a wider net of responses to this topic, so we asked a diversity of people in the TNOC community to respond: architects, artists, activists, academics and practitioners, and people from the north and south. Their prompt: What is one specific action that should be taken (when? immediately?) to achieve a “positive natural future”? And who should do it? We asked them to feel free to define “natural” as it suited their argument.
No one would be surprised to hear that from such a diverse group there are a range of responses. Some threads exist, though, and three in particular. The first is “connection”, both of people to a consciousness about nature, and of connecting urban spaces to a wider geographic sense of the idea of “nature”, for example gradients spanning city centers to rural areas. Partly this is data and knowledge, but it also involves a broader awareness. There probably isn’t one “nature”, but we need to address the idea of this word directly and explicitly with a wide range of stakeholders.
A second thread is “diversity”, recognizing both its bio- and also human expressions. This emerges from recognizing cities as ecosystems of people, natural spaces (both wild and built), and infrastructure—all of these things. A key element in recognizing and honoring diversity is in truly engaging diverse stakeholders, from real participatory actions to finding new ideas from various sources, not just the usual collection of “experts”, such as professional ecologists, planners, and designers.
Third, there is a deep thread of “equity” and “justice” in these responses. That is, in our conversations about nature and cities we must always be demanding about spreading the wealth and benefits of nature so that everyone may benefit.
In other words, If there is going to be a positive natural future, we’ll only achieve it together.
Graciela Arosemena is a Researcher and Professor of Urban Open Spaces at University of Panama, Panama, and the author of “Urban Agriculture: Spaces of Cultivation for a Sustainable City”.
Graciela Arosemena
A fundamental strategy for empowering cities and guiding them towards a positive natural future is to develop a model of the city that contains the growth of the urban sprawl, through re-urbanization.
Re-urbanize to naturalize cities
In cities close to natural areas, the continuous growth and urban dispersion has generated great negative impacts on biodiversity, fragmenting habitats and causing spatial interruption, and the reduction of the quantity and diversity of species.
Deforestation of tropical rain forest for the construction of a residential area of the city of Colón, Republic of Panama. Photo: Graciela Arosemena, 2015The lack of an urban model based on the containment of the growth of the urban sprawl, is causing construction projects to deforest areas of tropical rain forest. Protected area Camino de Cruces National Park, near the City of Panama, Rep. Of Panama. Photo: Graciela Arosemena, 2016.
The need to achieve a balanced coexistence between urban environments and natural ecosystems is evident. Understanding as natural, a multisensory reality, synonym of greenery, and pure air, but also of respect and a high degree of commitment on the part of the cities to conserve.
A fundamental strategy for empowering cities and guiding them towards a positive natural future is to develop a model of the city that contains the growth of the urban sprawl, through re-urbanization, which must be assumed by policy makers and urban planners, of local governments; and although its execution is developed in the medium and long term, from now on, urban studies must be started to develop it.
This strategy constitutes the process of rearrangement of the existing urban fabric that may include the accumulation and new subdivision of lots, the demolition of buildings and changes in the infrastructure of services and population density. This process is based on demographic forecasts, and the promotion of the compaction of urban fabrics, prioritizing their recycling. Through the study of the existing urban sprawl, areas of renewal of the urban fabric can be defined, leaving the natural spaces and/or those with potential to be regenerated around and through the urban fabric.
Urban forest of the towns of the Panama Canal area, maintain their ecological connectivity. Photo: Graciela Arosemena, 2018.
In anticipation of the growth of the city, there is no commitment to extend the limits of it, the re-urbanization avoids the unnecessary occupation of new land, which in many cases is natural, for urban uses, so that an effort is made to a rational and efficient use of urban land. In addition, it contributes to ordering the globalization of undeveloped land, to maintain the ecological permeability of the territory, and to avoid the isolation of natural spaces.
Toucans inhabit the urban forests of the canal villages, in the Metropolitan Area of Panama. Photo: Graciela Arosemena, 2016.
Marcus is a sustainability scientist and his research covers a wide range of human-environment interconnectivity, environmental risk and resilience, transdisciplinary methodologies and novel ecosystems.
Marcus Collier
While we desire a greening of our cities on various levels, and while we become more reliant on the services of nature for environmental change and innovation, the nature-based solution approach has a long way to go.
Is there any hope for nature in the cities of the future?
There is a lot of concern that urban dwellers in the future, especially in very highly populated cities, will have considerably less “access” to nature, especially wild, unkempt nature. Indeed, there are similar concerns on whether people will have any access to nature, wild or otherwise. The negative effects of this on humans (socially, cognitively, and physiologically) are likely to be significant with respect to population health and well-being. Considering that the urban poor will be disproportionally impacted by this may also give rise to political and social issues. So, there is a demand for more diverse nature in cities, something that The Nature of Cities has been championing for many years now. There are many other champions for nature in cities, and one of the approaches of the European Union is to stimulate the scaling out of “nature-based solutions” partly as a response to this and partly to stimulate innovation in city-making. We know that urban green infrastructure such as parks can provide valuable ecosystem services, such as flood attenuation and improving air quality. The nature-based solution approach takes this further. It sees nature as a technology; one that can have multiple environmental, ecological, social and community gains. Typically, nature-based solutions manifest themselves as living roofs or living walls, rain gardens, nutrient interceptors, etc.; engineered (nature-based) technology that essentially exploits a few billion years of natural R&D to address the complex and the ever-accelerating impacts of environmental change in urban areas. Not that we needed another reason for bringing more nature in to cities, but what “nature” in nature-based solutions are we talking about?
Current technology sees it necessary to populate your typical living wall with evergreen plants that can provide the service of intercepting noise, dust and airborne chemicals; specialist plants that are tolerant of the disrespect and abuse that city living brings. The same goes for rain gardens which are often planted with species selected to tolerate drought and flooding, sometimes on a daily basis! However, will any animal find a living or a home in this new urban and urbanised nature? What of the desire for increasing urban biodiversity? A living wall or rain garden is constructed to do a job and provide at least one service. Therefore, like their counterparts in the rural landscape, for example food crops, will the management of these service providers be similarly anti-nature, as it has been with a myriad of complex chemicals for decades? To keep our living walls doing their jobs effectively, and to ensure no competition from the more common urban botanical urchins (or “weeds”), living walls and rain gardens may need some intensive management that is counter to the intention of providing a more diverse urban nature. Following the food crop analogy, it is logical to propose that we may seek to modify our new urban nature to do its “job” better—engineering our plants to be better nutrient interceptors, carbon absorbers, air filterers, and water attenuators. And with the importation of a new community of street-wise botanical service providers into our growing, densifying cities, there is also the possibility of some of them escaping” and the invasive species debate hots up once more.
Living roofs have taken a step in addressing this. No longer referred to as green roofs (a monocrop of sedums) they are now “living” and more biodiverse in species and structure. This is great for urban invertebrates and some birds, and at certain times of the year biodiversity is colourful and soul-lifting against the grey of the city. At other times of the year, however, this new “wild” can be ugly and depressing; such as when plants go dormant for the winter. So now your expensive living roof looks more like an abandoned and unkempt weed patch. Again, the “nature” of nature-based solutions can problematic. No doubt, social opinions may change as the technology of nature becomes more and more prevalent in cities, but whatever we decide, nature in cities may not necessarily be the nature we remember fondly from the past, if we remember it at all. It may be a sort of hybrid nature, botanically selected and modified, as it always has been in parks and gardens, for tolerance, aesthetics and functions. And just like parks and gardens, over time this hybrid nature may become the new normal in cities.
So, while we desire a greening of our cities on emotional and personal levels, and while we become more reliant on the services of nature to address environmental change and stimulate innovation, the nature-based solution approach has a long way to travel.
Marlies Craig, pictured in her own indigenous city-forest-garden, is the author of What Insect are You? Entomology for Everyone. Currently she works as a science officer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Marlies Craig
Trees in cities hold great potential for their cooling carbon sequestration, water absorption, biodiversity…In Durban, tree planting is also transforming the lives of marginalised and unemployed people.
Plant indigenous trees! Everywhere, always, more!
Trees in cities hold great potential for their cooling properties and carbon sequestration, for ground stabilization and water absorption, biodiversity and biophilia, food and fuel, etc. In Durban, South Africa, tree planting is also transforming the lives of marginalised and unemployed people from some of the most impoverished and vulnerable areas.
Incheon, North Korea. Photo: Marlies Craig
So-called “tree-preneurs” collect and grow the seeds of indigenous trees. The small saplings are then bartered for credit notes, which can be used to obtain food, basic goods and/or pay for school fees. The trees are used to afforest the buffer zone of a municipal landfill site, previously under intense sugar agriculture or overrun with invasive alien plants, with fantastic biodiversity outcomes.
The Buffelsdraai Community Reforestation Project is a model of effective collaboration between local government, environmental NGOs and civil society, resulting in multiple benefits for climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity, the environment, human communities and the local economy.
Left: Ricinus communis, an invasive alien, has immaculate leaves: nothing is eating it. Right: this powderpuff mangrove (Barringtonia racemose)is what plants should look like: nibble-marks are a sign that these plants fulfil their function in the food web. Photos: Marlies Craig
Through similar mechanisms the entire city could be “greened” by planting suitable indigenous trees, shrubs or grasses on unused land, company gardens and verges, so they line roads, dot car parks, blanket suburbs.
Unfortunately, urban greening is often achieved with exotic species. Even if, according to UBHub 94% of urban plant species are native, the bulk of biomass (if you could put the plants on a scale) may not be. Johannesburg for example is known as the largest exotic forest; on satellite images it registers as tropical rainforest. Cities can be turned into carbon-dense forest-equivalents with obvious multiple benefits, but non-indigenous “urban forests” are a wasted opportunity, as they do not suitably support local biodiversity.
The beautiful Common Striped Hawk moth (Hippotion eson) eats our local arum lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica), but refused a range of common, exotic garden plants of the same family (Araceae). Photos: Marlies Craig
In the food web the vast majority of consumers are invertebrates—insects mainly. Among the vertebrates, the vast majority eat invertebrates—again, insects mainly—at least sometimes or at some stage of their life: most birds, about two thirds of mammals, virtually all amphibians, reptiles and freshwater fishes.
Biodiversity (in terms of species) is underpinned by a diverse indigenous flora sustaining a myriad of harmless insect specialists, which in turn keep the food chain going. Exotic plants benefit only a small number of generalists.
In cities, where ground space is precious, indigenous trees provide the above-ground biomass required to sustain local insect populations large enough to feed sustainable bird populations. The birds, while keeping insect pests in check, also bring in their droppings the seeds of more plants (trees, bushes, flowers) which then attract more harmless insect species, fueling a wonderful upward-spiral of biodiversity.
An area of lush coastal forest near Durban is overrun by invasive aliens (Eucalyptus spp., Melia azedarach, Ricinus communis, Canna indica, Cardiospermum grandiflorum, Solanum mauritianum, etc., right, coloured red). There is not much for local insects to eat in this “green desert” and consequently little food for many other animals. The fact that birds eat bugweed (Solanum mauritianum) seeds, or that the eucalypts provide forage for local bee keepers does not mean these plants are providing a valuable service. It only means some animals are able to eat the only food available. The same bee- and bird-food service would be provided better and more reliably by indigenous trees—if there were any. Photos: Marlies Craig
Samarth Das is an Urban Designer and Architect based in Mumbai. Having practiced professionally in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and subsequently in New York City, his work focuses on engaging actively in both public as well as private sectors—to design articulate shared spaces within cities that promote participation and interaction amongst people.
Samarth Das
With scarcity of land becoming a go-to excuse for governments and the real estate industry to exploit “no development zone” lands for housing, mapping of natural areas will help establish what land is “developable” and what land is not.
Mapping as a means of empowering Nature in a rapidly urbanizing built environment
Taking national level projects as precedents, nature—in all its forms—is severely compromised in most Indian cities. The issue is compounded several fold in the case of the urban metropolis of Mumbai. Essentially an estuary, the city has grown over the years by way of constant land filling and consolidation. This makes the city highly vulnerable to sea level rise and flooding. Mumbai city has a rich and vast extent of natural assets, measuring approximately 140 km2 including rivers, creeks, nullahs (natural storm water channels), mud flats, salt pans, wetlands, mangroves, lakes, hills and forests. We all know how important a role these natural features play in maintaining the environmental balance in and around the city—the most direct advantage of features such as mangroves and wetlands being that they help mitigate the ill effects of storm surges and high tides in extreme weather events.
Unfortunately over the years, the city’s development plan has not taken these natural features into account, which has led to the lack of their integration and consequent degradation.
Sadly, the city has turned its back and considered them as a dumping ground—both physically and metaphorically—leading to their rampant destruction and degradation. Unplanned commercialization has destroyed the natural environment considerably. The absence of a master plan for development of the waterfronts and other natural edges has encouraged the rich and the powerful to manipulate and grab land along these assets.
Map, Map, Map!
The need of the hour in Mumbai is to engage in an intense mapping process of all natural assets and areas in the city. Mapping today, goes beyond its orthodox use where it was deployed for purposes of physical surveying of land. It has become a powerful tool for analysis of current conditions, as well as in predicting future trends across various fields in which they are used. Mapping of the natural areas in Mumbai will serve a larger purpose at this point—it will establish the relationship of these resources in context to our urban environment while lending credibility and authenticity to the claims of those advocating and fighting for their protection. With scarcity of land becoming a go-to excuse for governments and the real estate industry to exploit NDZ (no development zone) lands for housing, mapping of natural areas will help establish what land is “developable” and what land is not. With the city’s new Development Plan for the next 20 years currently in the works, we are at a crucial juncture to ensure the protection and safeguarding of the city’s lungs against ill intentions of the real estate sector. Once mapped, these development plans become a basis for legal standing to challenge abuse and misuse of our natural assets which is missing presently.
This has to happen now.
To be truly effective, the mapping process will require active participation from local administrative bodies as well as from citizens in individual neighbourhoods/areas. Including the various stakeholders in the process of producing and reviewing the maps will increase the sense of ownership and responsibility towards these natural assets right from the ground up. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai will need to take the lead in this process. National and State level bodies such as the National River Conservative Directorate (NRCD), the Mangrove Cell and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF)—who govern various environmental and natural features will need to prescribe the specifics of the mapping endeavor and oversee the process to ensure that basic standards are met. This effort will ultimately need the backing of the State’s Urban Development Department which is tasked with approving and publishing the final Development Plans for the city. We can set a precedent for future administrations, and begin re-gaining lost ground in the race to protect the environment and ensure a sustainable future.
Empowering our cities to plan for a truly positive natural future will require the empowerment of the very natural assets and features that will ensure a sustainable balance between the built and unbuilt environment. Mapping is a socio-political act we must engage in to empower Nature within our cities.
Ana Faggi graduated in agricultural engineering, and has a Ph.D. in Forest Science, she is currently Dean of the Engineer Faculty (Flores University, Argentina). Her main research interests are in Urban Ecology and Ecological Restoration.
Ana Faggi
Stop talking about nature in and near cities and think of the cities and their surroundings as multifunctional landscapes.
I believe that to empower cities to plan for a positive natural future we should stop talking about nature in and near cities and think of the cities and their surroundings as multifunctional landscapes.
In order for these landscapes to function and be resilient in the face of recurrent and surprising changes (which characterize the Anthropocene), it is necessary that the whole community understand that the green and blue infrastructures are not options but essential elements that cannot be negotiated to continue building the city.
For this, the diverse media should address them from the ecosystem services point of view that they provide.
Green is formed by parks, squares, urban forestry, reserves, gardens, green roofs, corridors, vegetation remnants; the blue: all watercourses.
The choice of the green type will depend on the need to make attractive places to live, work or recreate, to meliorate climate and or to improve local natural habitats and biodiversity. Nevertheless, faced with these decisions of what green to create, maintain or conserve, it is fundamental to use native plants, which are found naturally in an area. This will guarantee the balance.
To mitigate the loss of biodiversity due to changes in land use, an action to be implemented would be the obligation of the municipal government to cultivate native and very especially endemic plants, which should be donated to the neighbors. This would reverse gradually, the harmful trends caused by a globalized landscape architecture which are evident in almost all cities.
Sumetee Pahwa Gajjar, PhD, is a Cape-Town based climate change professional who has contributed to scientific knowledge on transformative adaptation, climate justice, urban EbA and nature-based solutions. I currently work at the science-policy-research interface of climate change, biodiversity and vulnerability reduction, in the Global South.
My research interests continue to be focused on urban sustainability transitions, through collaborative governance, just innovations and climate technologies.
Sumetee Gajjar
A gap which needs special attention in the future, led by a specific set of actors, are city biodiversity reports which inform biodiversity planning or city greenprinting process of Asian, African and South American cities or city-regions, experiencing spatial concentration of biodiversity loss.
The assessment titled “Nature in the Urban Century” makes a compelling case for aligning urban growth with biodiversity conservation, not only to address habitat loss and promote human connect with nature, but also for providing ecosystem services including flood regulation, climate adaptation and mitigation, and reducing disaster risks.
A suite of solutions is suggested that can help integrate nature into cities. The foremost step offered is biodiversity planning, or greenprinting, to facilitate a combination of efforts including education and communications campaigns about nature, increased direct access to nature, conservation planning and establishment of green and blue infrastructure. Critically, these require the incorporation of biodiversity and ecosystem information into urban planning, busting of institutional silos at local level, which impede integrated planning for future urban growth, and importantly, the alignment of development agendas across different levels of government. Biodiversity planning or greenprinting is presented as the first step towards the next two sets of solutions—integrating nature into the city; and managing protected areas. Nature-based solutions include green infrastructure (including human-designed parks, planted street trees, green roofs) and blue or water management infrastructure (such as bioswales, rain gardens and artificial wetlands). However, land protection is proposed as the most permanent and effective way to safeguard biodiversity.
A city greenprint would speak to urban transport considerations, zoning and affordable housing construction, water management, economic development plans and energy infrastructure. Alongside, it should strengthen disaster management and investment planning within urban areas. The authors suggest inclusion of key stakeholders who are representative of a range of decision-making processes and parallel drivers of urban expansion—both through physical development of the built environment, and population growth—as crucial for a city greenprint, as is with any type of urban planning exercise. Nature-based solutions have clear linkages with eco-sensitive building and urban design and render discernible benefits towards well-being of city residents. Moreover, implementation of particular solutions can be located in brownfield and vacant or unutilised urban plots. However, long-term locking in of land on urban fringes strictly for biodiversity conservation, with controlled human presence, primarily for education, or restricted recreation, would be a harder outcome to negotiate, even with support from higher levels of government, and despite strong evidence proving it as the most effective strategy.
The report finds that while there are several examples of current biodiversity activities by municipal governments such as urban biodiversity reports and plans, these are primarily from the UK, North America and Japan. At the same time, the assessment shows that significant impacts from urban growth on biodiversity in the period under study (2000-2030) have occurred and continue to occur in Asia, Africa and South America. Studies have also shown that biodiversity loss is spatially concentrated, and that targeting key biodiversity hotspots through local planning, could help focusing worldwide efforts on lowering the impact of global urban growth on biodiversity
Therefore, a gap which needs special attention going into the future, led by a specific set of actors, are city biodiversity reports which inform biodiversity planning or city greenprinting process of Asian, African and South American cities or city-regions, experiencing spatial concentration of biodiversity loss. It would include an assessment of current ecosystem health, mandated and approved by government, necessitating collaboration between scientists across a range of natural sciences, and urban planners and practitioners. It can also help align the efforts of citizen groups who demand protection of nature in their cities, by engaging them in the assessment process through citizen science tools, and empowering them to align their efforts, based on scientific evidence.
Authors of the assessment cite governance and capacity gaps, as reasons for why biodiversity reporting and planning lags in regions and cities, which will see the most significant impacts of urban growth on biodiversity planning. To meet capacity constraints, local governments can draw upon and join any number of existing frameworks and programs specific to urban biodiversity. They can then access and apply tools for assessing their biodiversity status, learn how to implement pilot projects and contribute to knowledge networks and platforms, such as those developed and supported by ICLEI, IUCN, and The Nature Conservancy.
Gary Grant is a Chartered Environmentalist, Fellow of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, Fellow of the Leeds Sustainability Institute, and Thesis Supervisor at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London. He is Director of the Green Infrastructure Consultancy (http://greeninfrastructureconsultancy.com/).
Gary Grant
Understanding, embracing, and acting on the sponge city concept, launched in China in 2014, will be the most powerful and effective way that we can increase biodiversity in our cities.
The lack of soil and vegetation and absence of wildlife is largely the result of the replacement of natural features with sealed surfaces. Most people are not concerned with the loss of biodiversity and they are not usually concerned with the problem of sealed surfaces, however there will be an increasing realisation, as climate change brings more frequent and more intense downpours and heatwaves, that the great efforts that were made to pave and seal our cities, for our convenience, have left people vulnerable to flood and the consequences of extreme heat and desiccation. Even those with no appreciation or understanding of nature and wildlife have an interest in adapting to climate change.
Understanding, embracing, and acting on the sponge city concept will be the most powerful and effective way that we can increase biodiversity in our cities, among many other benefits.
Although the reasons to adopt it may take some explanation, the sponge city concept is soon grasped. It is not a technical term, it is a simple idea and can be interpreted in many ways which are largely beneficial. Just as the complete sealing of cities occurred incrementally, the reversal of that process, de-paving and the restoration of soil can also be undertaken as a series of relatively easy steps. This means that individuals can have an impact, as volunteers assisting with the restoration of ponds, wetlands or streams in public lands or as property owners making rain gardens, harvesting rainwater or fitting green roofs. A huge amount can be achieved by individuals in this effort. We can take inspiration from the efforts of individuals working in cities all over the world. I am particularly impressed with what has already been achieved in Philadelphia.
Politicians, officials and experts can do their part. Simple guidance, like the Biotope Area Factor, which came of Berlin in the 1990s and is now been adopted in various forms, for example as the Green Area Ratio in Washington DC, or the proposed Urban Greening Factor in London, can ensure that development proposals contribute towards the establishment of the sponge city. These simple ideas are not too prescriptive and encourage innovation. Where people wish to become more sophisticated about the testing of plans and designs for climate resilience through the use of nature-based solutions, they can turn to new software like the GREENPASS, from Austria, which can used climate data and 3D plans to identify problems with schemes and cost-effective solutions.
Although not all efforts to create the sponge city necessarily increase biodiversity or necessarily create the most appropriate habitats or species, a permanent increase in the volumes of soil and water, both on the ground and on buildings, create more potential for ecological restoration, better informed planting and the provision of more and improved natural services, like cleaner water, cleaner air and pollination. The sponge city will bring together a wide spectrum of people to ensure that more soil, water and vegetation is present. Specialists and enthusiasts can fine-tune the methods of planning, design, installation and maintenance.
In Littlehampton (UK), rain gardens have been installed using local schoolchildren to undertake the planting. Photo: Gary Grant
One of my own experiences with introducing the sponge city concept to a small community was in the small town of Littlehampton, West Sussex on England’s south coast. A public meeting to propose rain gardens was met with some scepticism from some older people who like piped drainage. There were concerns about a lack of funds and the authorities were lukewarm about the idea to begin with. A couple of years later, mainly through the hard work of a few champions, rain gardens have been installed using local schoolchildren to undertake the planting, an award has been won and the authorities are now actively promoting the idea in other towns.
These patterns of bottom-up activism and top-down regulation and guidance can bring about the sponge cities we need and nature needs.
Eduardo Guerrero is a biologist with over 20 years of experience in projects and initiatives involving environmental and sustainable development issues in Colombia and other South American countries.
Eduardo Guerrero
We need a multidisciplinary think tank oriented to the relationships between nature and business in cities, focused on concepts, principles, guidelines, and good practices that generate win-win initiatives for entrepreneurship and sustainability.
A think tank network on urban nature and competitiveness
Are cities part of nature? Is the budget devoted to cities environment a cost or an investment? Does the urban green matters in terms of the economic performance of the cities? Which kind of cities are more competitive: those actively integrating green areas and peri-urban ecosystems to the urban design or those where green and biodiversity are secondary issues? How can we integrate urban green and environmental concepts to entrepreneurship from the beginning in the business cycle?
In fact, cities are built in the middle of ecosystems and biomes, so they are part of regions and territories whose natural attributes should be integrated into urban design and urban economic plans.
In general, in their narratives urban planners and business stakeholders accept the need to reach minimal standards of green and environment quality in their cities, but in practice entrepreneurs do not receive clear policy signals and market incentives to stimulate nature-based and green businesses.
The point is that nature and ecosystems services are drivers of competitiveness in cities. And there is much evidence, pilot projects, and good practices waiting to be systematized, adapted to local contexts, and scaled up.
In rankings of competitivity, environment use to be considered as a minor factor, mostly dealing with the ability to manage hazards and the environmental governance.
Of course, ability to implement environmentally sustainable policies and mitigate the impact of natural hazards is key to cities, but it is just part of the nature-cities equation.
We propose a most constructive approach, oriented to promote synergies among nature and urban economies. When you invest in green infrastructure, sustainable building, a circular economy, urban nature tourism, urban agriculture, biogastronomy, and so on, you are both investing in sustainability and competitiveness.
We propose to arrange a think tank network on urban nature and competitiveness. The objective: to contribute to a plural, multidisciplinary dialogue on green businesses in cities by connecting university-based research capacity to business stakeholders, policy and decision makers and civil society.
There are many good examples of synergies among biodiversity and economy in cities. A lot of good practices in urban and peri-urban contexts showing that business and environmental sustainability could be mutually reinforced. Limitations and restrictions use to be just the result of rigid cultural visions, biased mentalities and poor dissemination of good practices.
Among other factors, Bogotá is a competitive city thanks to the joint work of the national agency for natural parks and the water supply company taking care of the paramo (high sierra) ecosystems that regulate water supply to the city.
If we look around the world, there are other many excellent examples of city economies increasingly based on nature and ecosystems services. In Rio de Janeiro, income from tourism mostly depends on the beauty of its natural landscape, so conservation and sustainable management of natural landmarks as Guanabara Bay, Tijuca Forest, and the magnificent Botanical Garden represent key investments.
Lima is gaining a reputation as a gastronomic destination, because of an enchanting cuisine based on a fusion of cultural and biodiversity ingredients. Nairobi with its safaris to a National Park located around the city is a suggestive destination. London’s inspirational project to be the world’s first National Park City connects very well with its well-earned reputation as a financial center. Bangkok’s ancient culture and spectacular palaces have an intimate relationship with Chao Phraya River, as Cape Town’s traditional architecture establishes a unified relationship with its coastline ecosystems.
Worldwide there is a growing trend towards responsible businesses based on the environment and biodiversity. So green business entrepreneurs need incentives and useful information, the same as authorities and planners need relevant knowledge and data.
So, my proposal is to develop a plural and multidisciplinary think tank network oriented to the relationships between nature and business in cities. Focus would be on concepts, principles, guidelines, and good practices that generate win-win initiatives and entrepreneurship in terms of both urban sustainability and urban competitiveness and productivity.
Of course, many think tanks on urban development matters already exist, but not many connecting urban nature to urban businesses and competitivity
Urban performance and sustainability indexes offer a general image about situation and trends regarding cities development. They invite us to advance from theory to practice in terms of better integrating nature to urban economies.
Who should do it? A think tank network on urban nature and competitiveness should be a synergic and multi-partner action. Maybe The Nature of Citiescould open a thematic line on these matters in coordination with regional, national and local partners and focal points, taking into account nature particular context of each city. We in Colombia would be interested in such an initiative.
Fadi has more than 25 years of international experience in analysing the interaction between development, urbanism, disaster risk, climate change, conflict, and state fragility. Fadi cooperates with various companies, cities, and countries to protect people, assets, and the environment
Fadi Hamdan
The threat that urban growth poses on biodiversity and human wellbeing should also be seen as an opportunity to claim “our right to the city ”, to reinvent the city, based on our vision for the society we want, and our relation to nature.
The great advantage of conserving nature for biodiversity and human wellbeing
In view of the recent publication on urban growth and conserving nature for biodiversity and human wellbeing1, it is important to put such efforts in a wider context.
Human rights-based concepts have occupied the centre stage both politically and ethically, in many cities. However, in many instances these are individualistic and do not necessarily take a collective turn2. On the other hand, thinking of what negative impact of urban growth on biodiversity we are willing to tolerate, is an opportunity to come together collectively, to decide what kind of relations to nature we want to protect and promote. In addition, thinking of how to manage the impact of urban growth on human wellbeing, and how much negative impact on vulnerable people, communities and countries we are willing to tolerate due to the loss of vital ecosystem services, is also an opportunity to decide what kind of societies we want to build, and what kind of urban social relations we strive for.
Therefore the threat that urban growth poses on biodiversity and human wellbeing should also be seen as an opportunity to claim “our right to the city”3, to reinvent the city, based on our vision for the society we want, and our relation to nature. Raising the awareness to recognise this broader opportunity, and the potential of coming together as a result of this recognition, is in my view the single most important action to plan for a positive natural future. This should be done immediately, by all rights-based advocacy and pressure groups, to pressure local and national representatives to allow for a more transparent and participatory decision making process related to the management of urban growth and its impacts on biodiversity and human wellbeing.
In addition to the above, few additional points can be made regarding the recent publication4 on conserving nature for biodiversity and human wellbeing:
In weak governance and weak environmental governance countries, empowering local governments should extend beyond providing a scientific evidence based tool for local urban planning, together with the institutional and legislative arrangements necessary for the successful implementation of such planning. It should also include an equally important aspect of freeing local governments from narrow vested interests that put the interests of the few above the needs of the many. In other words, the issue of local governance in the broadest sense of participation in the decision making process, needs to be given more attention.
The advantages of ecosystem services in climate change adaptation and reducing the impact of natural hazards, extend beyond the hydro-meteorological hazards (floods and storms) referred to in the publication, and include other hazards such as earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis. For example, green cover can reduce the impact of tsunamis on vulnerable coastal communities. Furthermore, it can reduce the occurrence of landslides and soil failure after earthquakes.
The disproportionate concentration of the negative effects of unchecked urban growth on vulnerable and poorer households and communities needs further elaboration. This is particularly important as it can help raise awareness on the opportunity to reclaim our right to the city.
Notes
[1] Nature in the Urban Century, A Global Assessment of where and how to conserve nature for biodiversity and human wellbeing, The Nature Conservancy, 2018.
[2] Rebel Cities, From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, David Harvey, Verso, 2012.
[3] The Right to the City, Henry Lefebvre, 1968.
[4]Nature in the Urban Century, A Global Assessment of where and how to conserve nature for biodiversity and human wellbeing, The Nature Conservancy, 2018.
Scott Kellogg is the educational director of the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center, an urban environmental education non-profit based in the South End of Albany, New York.
Scott Kellogg
Positive natural urban futures may be worked towards by focusing on decentralized educational-activist strategies that emphasize human-non human reciprocity, social inclusion, and the reconstruction of the urban commons.
Ecological justice education for regeneration of the urban commons
Actualizing healthy, just, equitable, and ecologically regenerative urban transformations will require strategic diversity and polycentricism. While it is common in planning circles to favor concentrated, policy-based, and expert driven approaches, equally important and frequently disregarded is the potential of citizen-driven, grassroots, and decentralized initiatives. Although the impact of any individual vacant lot garden, rain water barrel, chicken coop, or compost pile may be small, when multiplied and scaled to a city-wide level their effect is synergistic. Together they significantly build a city’s resilience and adaptive capacity, resulting in a locale where control of resources is distributed equitably among an eco-literate population. Moreover, when sustainability tactics are simple, affordable, and culturally relevant, they are easily transferrable to other locations (Smith, 2014).
Community Composting with E-Bike and Trailer. Photo: Scott Kellogg
To those invested primarily in top-down, command and control approaches to urban sustainability governance, such ideas may be seen as trivial, unworthy of consideration, or even threatening. Their operationalization, however, is an essential first step towards cultivating positive natural futures and the resurgence of the collective urban commons (Nagendra, 2014).
Achieving this goal requires challenging the profound ecological alienation experienced by many city dwellers and the exclusion of the social dimensions of justice, access, and equity from mainstream sustainability discourse. These may both be addressed in part through education.
Studying Biocultural Diversity with Bees. Photo: Scott Kellogg
Environmental education, as conventionally taught in urban schools, frames nature as an abstract concept: something “out there” beyond the city limits that needs to be protected from ourselves. Challenging this nature-culture dualism requires reframing urban ecosystems as complex and dynamic co-evolutionary hybrids of human and non-human processes (Alberti, 2008)—not the hopelessly degraded and un-natural spaces they are commonly conceived as. Furthermore, environmental education must examine how equity, access, class, and race apply to urban ecosystems: what are the historical forces that have led to the exclusion and contamination of urban ecosystems for marginalized populations?
Issues of relevancy and justice may be addressed through an urban sustainability education paradigm named Urban Ecosystem Justice: a framework that aims to cultivate familiarity, care, respect and reciprocal symbioses between urban residents and the soils, waters, atmospheres and non-human life in the urban ecosystem (Kellogg, 2018). It provides whole-systems conceptual lens as an alternative to our educational system’s current obsession with reductionist STEM disciplines.
A few specific examples include:
Community composting initiatives—regenerating soil health with food waste
Grassroots soil bioremediation technologies—spent mushroom substrate and compost tea
Artificial Floating Islands—cleaning rivers with DIY wetlands
Urban biocultural diversity assessments—valuing ruderal and novel ecosystems
Citizen-centered air quality monitoring
Preparing a floating island. Photo: Scott Kellogg
The work of teaching socially relevant urban ecological education must be carried out in both formal, informal, and non-formal educational settings and be thought of as a form of grassroots activism. With the threats of climate change, energy depletion, pervasive toxicity and increasing inequality rapidly converging, we cannot rely solely on legislative action to bring about needed transformations.
Integral to the urban ecosystem justice approach is a critique of the neoliberal logic that is endemic in many urban planning circles. The practice of viewing cities as “growth-machine” (Molotch, 1976) real-estate investment engines rather than living communities has led to the degradation of the urban commons. Key to their restoration is the extension of the “cities for people, not for profit” (Marcuse, 2012) ethic to the soils, atmospheres, water, and biodiversity of cities.
Opportunity for urban ecosystem justice and commons restoration exists in “shrinking cities” with plateaued or negative population growth (Herrmann, 2016). On account of their reduced real-estate pressures, it is possible to advocate for both urban green space and affordable housing simultaneously—two essential components of urban ecojustice that are often mutually exclusive in hyper-capitalist cities.
In conclusion, positive natural urban futures may be worked towards by focusing on decentralized educational-activist strategies that emphasize human-non human reciprocity, social inclusion, and the reconstruction of the urban commons.
References:
Alberti, Marina. Advances in Urban Ecology Integrating Humans and Ecological Processes in Urban Ecosystems. New York, Springer Science+Business Media, 2008.
Herrmann, Dustin L., et al. “Ecology for the Shrinking City.” BioScience, 2016, p. biw062.
Kellogg, Scott. “Urban Ecosystem Justice: The Field Guide to a Socio-Ecological Systems Science of Cities for the People”. Ph.D. Dissertation. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2018. ProQuest.
Marcuse, Peter. “Whose Right (s) to What City?.” Cities for People, not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, New York, Routledge, 2012, pp. 24-41.
Molotch, Harvey. “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 82, no. 2, 1976, pp. 309-332.
Nagendra, Harini, and Elinor Ostrom. “Applying the Social-Ecological System Framework to the Diagnosis of Urban Lake Commons in Bangalore, India.” Ecology and Society, vol. 19, no. 2, 2014, p.67.
Smith, Adrian, Mariano Fressoli, and Hernan Thomas. “Grassroots innovation movements: challenges and contributions.” Journal of Cleaner Production 63 (2014): 114-124.
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 is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
Patrick Lydon
For each place and person, the answers will differ greatly, but our neighborhoods and our cities must become unique representations of natural biodiversity, each one answering to the voice of nature when and where it exists.
Cultivating relationships between people, cities, and nature
Though they may be bad actors at present, streets, housing blocks, and the economy are all inclusive of biodiversity, and of the troupe that we call nature. For this troupe to function properly however, requires a fundamental shift in how we see and experience our cities—and ourselves—in relation to the ecosystems in which we live.
This shift can be plainly put as two (interrelated) points:
in cities, we need to accept that urban spaces areinextricably intertwined with the rest of nature, and build them in light of this awareness
The second of these points necessarily gives birth to answers for the first.
“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” — Frank Lloyd Wright
Ask our most brilliant scientists, artists, architects, and designers throughout history and you’ll find that a close relationship with “nature” is not only the common fertile ground for creativity and innovation, it is also a critical foundation for growing the kind of nature-connected solutions needed for truly regenerative* cities.
Listening to nature: it’s not just for artists and esoteric philosophers
Having personally spent much of the past decade using an artist’s lens to peer into the mindsets of ecological farmers—both in urban and rural contexts—a comparison of two different approaches to agriculture might help us understand what listening to nature actually means, and why it is important.
Consider that, in Western industrial agriculture, biodiversity most often means creating good conditions for a variety of food plants, while ensuring harmful conditions for weeds, bugs, and most other living things in, around, or downstream of the places where food is grown. At best, this view of biodiversity represents an immature relationship with the natural world. It continues to be accepted today however, even though thousands of years of history—and contemporary biological science—show clearly how harmful it is to our future.
By comparison, on natural farms throughout East Asia—refer to the recent documentary Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happinessif you are unfamiliar with the term—biodiversity has come to mean something far more comprehensive; not only does it mean growing a diversity of foodplants, it also means encouraging a diversity of all other living things in and around the farm, from weeds to bugs.
In the West we tend to question, often harshly, how one could successfully grow enough food to feed humanity without drawing battle lines and waging wars against the parts of nature that seem bothersome to us. However, the truth is that small natural farms throughout the world are growing food more productively, more sustainably, and at less cost to humans and the environment than even the most technologically advanced farms in the United States.
This way of growing food is the result of listening to nature, and of establishing an equitable relationship based on respect, trust, empathy, and acceptance—even for the things we don’t necessarily like. It is also the way to build truly inclusive biodiversity.
If city-building followed a similar prescription, the results would mean positive growth for cities, for people, and for the rest of this nature in which we dwell.
In every neighborhood, a unique representation of biodiversity
What does this mean for cities?
For each individual, each community, each microclimate, the answers will differ greatly. Yet perhaps in this is the answer we are seeking, that our neighborhoods and our cities must become unique representations of natural biodiversity, each one answering to the voice of nature when and where it exists.
Just like a natural farm, or a masterful painting, or a thriving forest.
If we wish for cities to exist harmoniously, sustainably, regeneratively within nature, there is no foundation on which to grow them other than the cultivation of equitable relationships between ourselves, our cities, and the rest of this nature.
Ultimately, it is from these relationships that our best answers will come.
* Regenerative cities go beyond the ‘less pollution, less consumption’ mantra, instead seeing the city and surrounding environment as an organism, and seeking to continually regenerate the health of the whole – people, city, and nature.
Yvonne is an Urban Greening & Climate Resilience Strategist who works with Royal Commission for Riyadh City.
Yvonne Lynch
Meaningful citizen engagement for participation in decision making is the best way to empower cities to achieve their aspirations and goals for a positive natural future. Working together, city governments and communities can make rapid progress towards creating healthy, natural cities.
There is no silver bullet for developing healthy, natural cities but there certainly are some approaches that will travel further than others. Each city needs to develop its own unique approach that caters to its conditions and circumstances. Whilst city governments can learn from other cities, it is the people who reside within a city who can provide the answers, the solutions and the ideas that are appropriate for that particular place. Harnessing people’s love and passion for their place can return deep dividends for city governments.
I believe that meaningful citizen engagement for participation in decision making is the best way to empower cities to achieve their aspirations and goals for a positive natural future. Citizen participation transcends what we broadly understand to be community engagement. Oftentimes our governments deploy public relations strategies masquerading as community engagement activities. They make their own decisions and then summon the community to a town hall meeting, or similar, to discuss their plans. The problem is that there is rarely an opportunity for people to influence or shape those plans. Information provision is not true engagement.
Inviting citizens to co-create from the outset can unearth local knowledge, foster and strengthen community bonds, develop innovative ideas and build widescale community trust in government. If people have an opportunity to invest their time in planning with their governments, they develop a sense of stewardship for their cities and urban landscapes. This sense of community ownership and involvement has the power to overcome the short-term political cycles and related issues that sometimes stifle progress. Community involvement in decisions also provides government with a social licence for the bold moves that need to be made to secure positive natural futures for our cities.
Planning is perhaps the most controversial portfolio for cities. There are generally many vested interests in this arena and the big dollars are always at play. Planning regulations to both enforce increases in urban greening and to protect natural assets are critical for all cities—no exception. There are some wonderful examples of successful planning regulations which have improved development outcomes such as; the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Nature Conservation Ordinance which has resulted at least 6,739 buildings adding 220.2 hectares (2,202,099 m2) of green roofs to the city skyline since 2001; and Melbourne’s tree protection policy, which protects trees from removal and charges developers significant sums if they are removed. There’s also Berlin’s Landscape Programme and Biotope Area Factor (Biotop Flächenfaktor) which require new developments to integrate green space. Developed in the late 1980s, Berlin’s regulations have influenced several cities, including Malmo and Seattle.
However, improving urban nature in a city is not so simple as finding a good example and following the recipe. If a city government decides it wants to implement the measures Tokyo, Melbourne or Berlin have put in place, it may encounter staunch opposition. The media might convey such plans as anti-development or unnecessary. Indeed, certain stakeholders will rally against the new planning requirements before they are even made public. However, if a city government invests time to work with its community and stakeholders to tackle problems together, ideas like this may be well supported and they may even be proposed by citizens themselves.
Working together, city governments and communities can make rapid progress towards creating healthy, natural cities. Leveraging networks and partnerships with the private sector is considered important for governments. We need to value community partnerships with the same gravitas. Working together, we can achieve more than any individual effort for our cities. The timing of securing a natural future for our cities has never been more critical than now.
Emily Nobel Maxwell is dedicated to environmental justice and urban greening. She is Director of The Nature Conservancy’s NYC Program and Advisor to TNC’s North America Cities Network.
Emily Maxwell
Justice is about people and about places. If we invest in natural solutions in neighborhoods that need them most, we can ensure not only a natural future for cities that protects biodiversity, but an equitable, resilient, and sustainable future as well.
Nature in cities should be treated as a matter of justice, because it is a matter of justice. By whom? By all of us.
In the United States, your life expectancy can be predicted by the zip code in which you live. While there are many factors at play, study after study shows that healthy people need healthy environments. To achieve an urban century in which all people, flora, and fauna survive and thrive, we must work in all cities and across all zip codes. We must treat nature in cities as a matter of justice—a basic human right of all people. And we must invest deeply in those communities that have been marginalized to help them protect their natural assets where they still exist.
The forces that denude landscapes and threaten biodiversity challenge all life, including and especially people. As climate change increases both the duration and intensity of heat waves, water supplies are being stressed, plants and trees are removed, and soils are compressed and paved over, exacerbating the impacts. More Americans die from heat waves than all other natural disasters combined, yet they receive relatively little public attention. In July of 1995, Chicago experienced a heat wave where 473 deaths were attributed to excessive heat. This summer (2018), heat waves killed 96 people in Tokyo, which recorded an all-time high of 106. Dozens of people were killed across the U.S. and in Canada—including 54 people in Montreal. As reported in the Guardian, “the majority were aged over 50, lived alone, and had underlying physical or mental health problems. None had air conditioning.”
Heat waves are projected to increase in length, frequency and intensity over the coming decades, and urban landscapes intensify their effects. The good news is that nature can help. Shade from tree canopies can lower surfaces’ peak temperature by 20–45°F (11–25°C), and increasing trees and vegetation can alsoimprove air quality, lower greenhouse gas emissions and enhance stormwater management and water quality.
But how do we ensure all people can access these benefits?
First, we must seek intersections between conservation, public health, and environmental justice— between those who advocate for the rights and dignity of nature and those who fight for the rights and dignity of people. And we must organize at those intersections for collective impact. We must look at the whole landscape, both physical and social. And we must reject the mythology that only certain people care about the environment.
After all, evidence shows that people who face the greatest environmental ills care deeply about the environment. To plan for a positive natural future, we must cultivate relationships with these natural allies, making clear and meaningful connections between social and ecological struggles. We need to recognize, listen to, understand, elevate, and amplify the voices and solutions of those who are on the front lines of ecological and social degradation. Ultimately, we have a duty to invite people to the table who we see are missing, then build bigger tables and join others’ tables.
Who is “we”? Of course, everyone has a role and responsibility in this but I’m focusing my recommendations first on big green organizations, like the one I work for. And as a U.S. resident, I’m writing from a U.S. perspective, though I’m keen to learn what my colleagues from other countries recommend.
Justice is about people and about places. If we invest in natural solutions in those neighborhoods that need them most, we can ensure not only a natural future for cities that protects and even restores biodiversity, but an equitable, resilient, and sustainable future as well.
Dr Colin Meurk, ONZM, is an Associate at Manaaki Whenua, a NZ government research institute specialising in characterisation, understanding and sustainable use of terrestrial resources. He holds adjunct positions at Canterbury and Lincoln Universities. His interests are applied biogeography, ecological restoration and design, landscape dynamics, urban ecology, conservation biology, and citizen science.
Colin Meurk
Get governing bodies to open their eyes to opening the door to not only “ecology” (everyone knows what that is, right?) but to ecologists. Afterall, we all know about health, but we do seek medical opinion when we have a broken leg!
Need both bottom up and top down (leadership)
I pondered the “one critical action” and know the forum will come up with many relevant things to do to make cities biodiverse and legible while supporting ecological integrity and natural character. I think many of us who were sentient beings through the 1980s and before, believed that there was a dawning if reluctant recognition of the fact that governing structures were fixated on single bottom lines. And Triple Bottom Line (TBL) was born and seen as the way forward. It was on corporate and governors’ lips but, by and large, no actual change in structure and representation took place.
Instead we have often well-meaning, intelligent, and experienced business minds still running the show—gate keepers who “don’t know that they don’t know” the ecological risks and opportunities they are continually overlooking. Somehow ecology is cast as special pleading whereas commerce, engineering, and a nod to culture are not? We recently had a visit from an inspirational Canadian speaker—Dr Enette Pauzé who coached us on mastery of leadership, partnership and stewardship, http://www.valuebasedpartnerships.com/about. The question of how governing bodies can be more inclusive (more TBL), understanding, and remedying inherent bias, was neatly unpacked and answered, but my question is how does one, from outside the tent, convince conventional governing structures in the first place to share their power with ecology, sociology, and cultural diversity? We have previously discussed the relative success of Landscape Architecture in gaining traction for urban design; and one can see how beautifully and innovatively crafted, animated depictions of some imagined landscape will appeal to governing bodies who don’t have the deep ecological insight to drill down to the functionality, sustainability, biogeography or sustainability of such designs.
So my action is to get governing bodies to open their eyes to opening the door to not only “ecology” (everyone knows what that is, right?) but to ecologists. Afterall, we all know about health, but we do seek medical opinion when we have a broken leg!
The irony is that (holistic and projective) ecology is surely the key discipline required to save the planet and yet is seldom if ever represented in decision-making except as nice to have, green fluff (or wash) sprinkled like fairy dust after the “real decisions” have been made. The professional status of ecology needs urgently to be raised as capable of rational thought and often more acutely aware of inherent biases than many other professions. The consequence of this is that design and landscaping should always be informed by professional, experienced ecologists—not just by what people think they know about this complex topic.
An example of necessary joined-up thinking is the importance of “urban wild” in bringing nature and people together even in constructed environments where the conventional tendency is to control and sanitise. A little-known fact is that Berlin (of all places) allows “weeds” to grow in footpath cracks. Like “forest bathing”, this should lead to a more relaxed and forgiving attitude, not just towards nature but to all such interdependencies—one might call it ecological literacy! And for control freaks there is always Joan Nassauer’s “messy ecosystems – tidy frames”.
To summarise: there have been decades of grass roots actions on the environment and there are many initiatives and quasi-polices spawned from this movement. But show me a Board or executive with an actual ecologist on it. We need more ecologically literate/informed governance, not just a vague notion that when “we” think we have an environmental problem we will know to come and ask.
No, we need the canaries in the mine before the disaster!
Ragene Palma is a Filipino urbanist currently studying International Planning at the University of Westminster, London, as a Chevening scholar. Follow her work at littlemissurbanite.com.
Jean Palma
A call for consciousness in urban management and planning is a call for professionals—environmental planners, architects, landscape architects, designers, and other urban leaders—to pay respect to nature.
Inclusive urbanism in congested, developing cities
If there was one specific action to push cities for a positive natural future, it would be undertaking conscious urban planning and management that truly integrated development with the natural landscape and ecological systems—not compliance-based, not politically lopsided; just conscious.
While this is not a new approach, and while many cities around the world have made outstanding achievements towards truly sustainable planning (the Netherlands could boast of this), there would always be a different point of view from a developing country.
Cities in the Philippines have very varied levels of development, and it’s due to many reasons: island locations against landlocked areas, unequal distribution of national resources, metropolitan centrism, among many other factors. But one thing is common to our cities: we keep creating plans, yet we leave our resources unchecked, despite the knowledge that the natural environment is finite.
Captive in its own habitat. The Binturong, or the Palawan Bearcat, is safe and protected within the Palawan Wildlife Rescue and Conservation Center. Ironically, it is held in captivity within a protected frontier because of its declining population. Sanctuary spaces in developing countries are cleaned regularly, but barely resemble the real natural habitats of wildlife.
Take Metro Manila, for example. Sixteen cities and one municipality are growing with a 4.4 percent urbanization rate per year, congesting the already concrete-laden capital region, and further increasing the push-and-pull dynamic with provinces. Despite decades of using comprehensive planning to supposedly manage and sustain its growth, the poor implementation has even pushed the boundaries of the metro to create Mega Manila, intoxicating the agricultural fields and fishing grounds of its neighboring regions with sprawl, resettlement, and unmanaged development. While efforts such as designed cities and climate guidelines have entered the planning arena as attempts to make sense of the confused urban fabric and increasing climate impacts, the metro remains to be mismanaged as ever.
The Philippine Eagle is one of the rarest and most powerful eagles in the world, but it is also critically endangered. This eagle named Girlie, who was blinded because of a slingshot injury, now resides in the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center in Metro Manila, and has spent years living inside a cage.
This manifests in everyday experiences in the cities. Metro Manila can hardly be called walkable or comfortable—it just shows how disoriented it is towards human-centered design; so what more for wildlife and the natural environment? If a common commuter can’t even bike across a few hundred meters without fearing for his or her life, and if going through the central business districts call for a face mask as protection against emissions, then how can we even create cities that are welcoming towards fauna? The Philippines is home to “two-thirds of the Earth’s biodiversity and 70% of the world’s plants and animal species due to its geographical isolation, diverse habitats, and high rates of endemism.”[1] And yet, we hardly drive cities to become inclusive towards nature.
The segregation of living things, which is apparent in how many of our cities are built, shows that there is a lack of consciousness and concern for the life around us. Our development is associated to a growing economy and more and more cars—malls pop up almost as fast as Starbucks and 7-11’s, and yet, our wildlife is shunned to cages, and we push back our forests and coastlines in exchange for “progress”.
How do we coexist with and plan with nature? A white feline sits beside a worker on the edge of a creek wall in Makati City, Metro Manila. In developing countries, being inclusive towards biodiversity is a long way to go, given how being people-centric in cities is not yet established.
A call for consciousness in urban management and planning is a call for professionals—environmental planners, architects, landscape architects, designers, and other urban leaders—to pay respect to nature. The how-to all of this of takes a variety of solutions, including conservation of green spaces, making open spaces permanent and multi-use and geared towards ecosystem services, and planners encouraging governments for more buy-backs in terms of property that could be transformed back for natural causes.
This also applies to already congested cities, even in the developmental setting. Some key actions that may be taken include re-integrating flora (and eventually fauna) into the pocket spaces of heavily cemented networks, re-establishing walking trails in the city that extend to rivers and metropolitan borders, and designs that integrate the built-up with the natural environments.
Jennifer Rae Pierce heads the Urban Biodiversity Hub’s Partnerships and Engagement team and is a steering committee member. She is a political ecologist and urban biodiversity planner. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on the topic of engagement in urban biodiversity planning.
Jennifer Rae Pierce
The outcome of a bioshed party forms a directive for the city and its citizens to acknowledge their dependency on local and global landscapes, and to take responsibility for them.
Host a bioshed party! A bioshed party is a fun and interactive way to link the functions of your city and the day-to-day decisions of you and your neighbors with the natural systems that you depend on, connecting you and your city with the landscape. It will help you see where shifts need to occur to contribute to a positive relationship with nature.
What is a bioshed? The bioshed is all of those parts of nature that your city depends on, impacts, and stewards. It includes your city’s watershed, food sources, all the “away” places that waste goes, all the places where resources come from to the city, and all the landscapes that the city is in charge of, like parks, abandoned lots, playgrounds, private land, and development sites.
A diagram that illustrates many parts of the bioshed from The 2050 Nagoya Strategy for Biodiversity, chapter 1. Produced by the City of Nagoya, (2012, p. 3)
What is a bioshed party? It’s a fun and select gathering of people with diverse perspectives who come together to understand your city’s bioshed. The outcome of a bioshed party is a diagram of your city’s bioshed in the past, today, and in a happy future. It forms a directive for the city and its citizens to acknowledge its dependency on local and global landscapes, and to take responsibility for them.
Ingredients:
A big, welcoming space
Food and drinks
Lots of huge sheets of paper and quality markers or other artistic elements
Illustrators and facilitators
Youth and elders
Indigenous and traditional cultural leaders
Community leaders of vulnerable or oppressed groups
Technical experts in food, waste, industry, transportation, energy, construction
Ecologists and natural resource experts (fishermen, forestry experts, etc.)
Local government decision-makers and planners
An example drawing for past conditions from The 2050 Nagoya Strategy for Biodiversity, Popular Edition. Produced by the City of Nagoya, (2012, p. 3)
Create visual outputs at each step:
For each step below, create an oversize poster together.
Draw the bioshed of the past. Choose any time frame, but one suggestion is to start with the time period representing the childhood of the eldest person in the room. Include important natural elements from that time (animals, rivers, etc.)
Draw the bioshed of today.
Compare the two diagrams and list how we got from the past situation to today. What happened and how?
Draw the bioshed of a happy future
List the assets of your city today and celebrate what you have already done to move in the right direction
List what you still need to do to get to the happy future scenario
An example drawing for a connecting historical conditions to current day conditions from The 2050 Nagoya Strategy for Biodiversity, chapter 2. Produced by the City of Nagoya, (2012, p. 37)
Close with reflection and action: Set aside time for silent reflection on what participants can contribute. Call for volunteers to form a committee who will transform the resulting drawings into a pledge, which the city can host on its “Bioshed Party” web page where people can discuss and commit publicly to the pledge.
An example drawing for a future vision from The 2050 Nagoya Strategy for Biodiversity, Popular Edition. Produced by the City of Nagoya, (2012, p. 7)
What is the impact? A bioshed party encourages participants to think differently about the role of cities in conserving nature. It illustrates a vision for your city in harmony with nature. In this way, it addresses the perceived lack of connection between our urban lives and nature. Through the three drawings, participants connect the experiences of generations of the past, today, and the future. The bioshed party demonstrates how all members of the community are part of a positive solution.
Mary W. Rowe is an urbanist and civic entrepreneur. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada, the traditional territories of the Anishinabewaki, Huron-Wendat and Haudenosauneega Confederacy, and works with government, business and civil society organizations to strengthen the economic, social, cultural and environmental resilience of the city and its neighborhoods.
Mary Rowe
Enlightened designers are making attempts to better mimic the natural patterns enabled by diversity in natural systems. We need more efforts like this, reminders of what true urbanism actually looks like: an ecosystem.
Building the Natural City, one home at a time
Diversity is the underpinning of every healthy ecosystem—natural and human. It ensures cross- pollination, adaptation, course correction, efficiency, productivity, and, often, unexpected beauty. This is as true of human-centred ones as it is of ones where human habitation does not dominate. The worlds’ most resilient citiesthe ones that have endured centuries—have an elegant connectivity that enables movement, exchange, solo and communal activities. Before the industrial revolution, the urban neighborhoods that formed up were dense and idiosyncratic, adapted to the landscape, and a range of amenities seemingly emerged “organically”, close at hand. These urban forms have evolved over time, mirroring the natural ecological world in which they reside, each teeming with endeavor.
Sadly, over the decades urban development patterns in North America predominantly followed an industrial path, preferring uniformity over uniqueness in pursuit of “economies of scale” and rapid production. The more organic, human-scale development created by craft and a local labour supply sourced within a few hours walk, was replaced by mechanized, mass production dependent on automobile travel. Contemporary metropolitan regions are left with huge swaths of monotony: tall towers surrounded by half empty parking lots and 4 lane roadways, or single family “estate” residences, with multi-car garages, adjacent to private golf courses.
“Sprawlation” is the daily context for millions of urban dwellers. These artificial forms no longer mirror the intricate interactions found in the natural ecosystems from which they sprang. Units are isolated, there are no corridors or patches even of biodiversity, and a generation of urban dwellers has been deprived of those tactile reminders of the natural roots of place.
Enlightened designers are making attempts to better mimic the natural patterns enabled by diversity in natural systems to guide their plans for parks, neighborhoods, transit systems. We need more efforts like this, reminders of what true urbanism actually looks like: an ecosystem. Connected, porous, rich with feedback loops and redundancies. But faux versions: where designs are artificially imposed, lacking in connections to the vernacular elements of neighborhoods and local people, instead “dropped into place”, defeat the purpose.
This can be more than depressing for ecological urbanists, because the bad patterns of development are locked in our economy, regulatory regimes, and cultural expectations of the middle class. And as with any significant phase transition, the system needs many more disruptors than a cadre of progressive planners, urban designers and architects can catalyze.
To have any real impact on re-surfacing the natural into all aspects of our shared urban life, action must start at the most basic unit: the household. Here is my suggestion for one simple, elegant action that households should undertake, to symbolize, and concretize, a collective commitment for a positive natural future
Municipal governments should strictly limit the zoning approvals for new single-family homes to designated intensification areas, and make easy the approval of multi-unit residential development in existing built-up areas (“infill”) where services exist (and may need to be upgraded).
In addition, provincial (state) governments should levy a modest “heritage occupancy tax” on all dwellings: residential and commercial, to seed a revolving restoration fund to invest in ecological restoration and new forms of green infrastructure. (For instance, in Toronto where I currently reside, a meagre1% percent of assessed property tax would generate about $40 million dollars annually). To create more incentives for recognition and behavior change, households could be offered various ways to exempt themselves from the levy (e.g. installing alternate energy sources, use meters etc.). And the levy could be graduated to favour denser neighborhoods over sprawling ones.
This levy would acknowledge our fundamental, inherent connection to the resources, topography and history of where we live, and be a constant reminder of the natural assets upon which we depend, and their need for replenishment. Together with courageous zoning leadership from municipalities, it will curtail sprawlation.
I have only recently returned to live in Toronto, having spent a decade working in the US. Here, it is common practice to begin every public event with a land acknowledgement of whose territorial lands we occupy. It has become for me a powerful signal of our temporariness. Taking steps to more explicitly monetize the true costs of our occupancy would empower our cities to better plan for a positive, natural future.
Luis Sandoval is a researcher and professor at Escuela de Biología, Universidad de Costa Rica. His research focuses on urban ecology, animal communication, and behavior and natural history of birds.
Luis Sandoval
What biodiversity was there before? We need this baseline to understand our local goals for biodiversity, and whether current conservation efforts are effective.
The main goal to empower cities to plan for a positive natural future is to know what they had inside natural areas before urban development and what they have now. This information is the baseline to improve the recovery of disappeared species and survival of the remaining species. It will tell the city managers and city people, which was the impact they caused to the natural areas and species that remain inside cities.
Also it will provide knowledge to help decrease the impact of cities on natural habitats and guidance to recover some of the species that are not present now, but which were present before. It will facilitate an evaluation of whether the effort in the protection, conservation, and restoration of the natural habitats, due to management or connection between remain patches of natural vegetation, has a positive effect on species conservation.
(This is a recasting of an essay of the same title recently published in the limited circulation Ecocity World newsletter)
“You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it’s evolution Well, you know We all want to change the world” —Lennon & McCartney 1968
When evolutionary processes arrive at solutions which survive they are, one way or another, effective and place specific. They are fit for purpose. As our ideas evolve, so must our cities, and given the perilous state of the biosphere it needs to happen with urgent rapidity.
Can we talk of evolution and cities in the same breath when “cities” is a term that applies to human settlements that range in population size from a handful of thousands to multi-millions and when “Evolution” is in danger of going the way of “sustainability”, a term diminished and distorted by mis-use, mal-appropriation, and cynical expediency. There is, after all, a car called “Evolution”…
We can, but we need to pay attention to where ideas come from and how they have been understood in different ways. For example, Charles Darwin’s work was co-opted to serve the ideological spirit of capitalism when Thomas Huxley focused on the competitive “red in tooth and claw” aspects of his theory.
But as, neatly summarised by Nigel Barber, the dominant feature of evolutionary behaviour is actually cooperation. Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer of Evolution, wrote that. . .”the popular idea of the struggle for existence entailing misery and pain in the animal world is the very reverse of the truth. What it really brings about is the maximum of life and of enjoyment of life with the minimum of suffering.” Forty-two years after The Origin of Speciesthe great Russian anarchist geographer Prince Petr Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid (1902) in response to Huxley’s brutally competitive take on evolution to demonstrate through a series of case studies and reasoned arguments that cooperation is normal in nature.
Our cities, for all their faults, rely on cooperation and shared endeavour to exist at all. The converse truth of the fact that occasional murders and obscene events are headline news is that they are sufficiently rare to make the headlines on a planet of over 7.6 billion people.
In 1915, over a century ago, Patrick Geddes published Cities in Evolution. Fifty years later, the flawed visionary Paolo Soleri presented his “arcology” (architecture + ecology) conception of cities as a tool of evolutionary progress. My first exposure to his marvellously outrageous ideas was as a student at the Welsh School of Architecture in the early 1970s; I had a “Soleri phase”, as I rather gracelessly told him when I was able to interview him during my sabbatical in Phoenix in 1990. For a little more background on Soleri and his influence by the radical evolutionary theology of Teilhard de Chardin see my previous TNOC article “Half Earth Cities”.
Soleri
Soleri’s concept of cities as evolutionary tools was predicated on the idea that human mind and spirit could be developed and perfected by creating an appropriate physical environment. Observing a correlation between density and complexity and noting that greater levels of intellectual and spiritual endeavour arose from denser congregations of people in cities, his proposition was that the denser the city, the greater the number of interactions there would be to amplify the collective mind power and spiritual awareness of the congregation. At the same time, with less physical space required by urban systems they would be more efficient, and the ecosystems of the natural world could be released from the consumption and denaturing of the landscape by sprawling suburbs.
His was an extreme vision, but it favoured the growth of consciousness and the health of living systems over profit and the perverse ideas of what constitute “development” that we’ve all become used to. Although Soleri’s efforts to physically manifest his vision are restricted to a handful of buildings in the Arizona desert, he has been responsible for one of the great thought experiments linking urbanism with evolution and has produced important insights, like the now largely accepted view that urban sprawl is antithetical to healthy landscapes.
Register
Despite these ideas being around for some time, they are not at the heart of modern discourse about what cities are and what they can do for the natural world. Richard Register’s proposition that ecocities should be places where the great human invention of urbanism should be set in balance with nature shifted the ecocity idea from the spiritual vagaries of Soleri to a more concrete goal of working with nature to enable people to meet all their needs and be healthy, happy and fulfilled at the same time as maintaining the functions of natural systems that are crucial to the continuation of life.
There is nothing intrinsically “smart” or technologically advanced about this line of thinking – which is one of its great strengths (I am reminded of Lloyd Kahn’s “Smart but Not Wise’” essay from the early 1970s here he makes the distinction between smart and wise, it’s an observation that has stuck in my mind ever since). The human settlement that is established and maintained within the limitations of its immediate environment achieves almost complete ecocity status and fits the definition of wise, rather than smart. It is worth recalling that amidst all the rhetoric and advocacy about the wonders of a smart new digital world, that technology can help or hinder and smart can be nurturing or lethal. One thinks of smart bombs and weaponised drones.
Ecopolis
As I’ve pondered these ecocity concepts over the years I’ve become fascinated and increasingly disturbed by the realisation that cities are epicentres for the destruction of the natural world.
Drawing on everything I’d read, seen and believed about cities I have long since come to the conclusion that there is something crucially important about the idea that cities, evolution, human development, and protection of the biosphere are intrinsically linked and that it deserved a great deal more attention and focus intellectually, philosophically—and in practice. I explored this in some detail in my book Ecopolis: architecture and cities for a changing climate (2009). What does it mean to say that a city is an evolutionary tool? How do these concepts interact?
In an attempt to link these strands of sometimes divergent thought, looking for the points of connection in what Gregory Bateson might have called “the pattern that connects”,I put together a set of propositions.The propositions describe cities and their relationship to both the biosphere and human culture and lead to a tolerably concise definition of the purpose of cities—which is to create and manage complex living systems that are the primary habitats for human survival. It seems to me axiomatic that human survival depends on the integrity of the natural world. Much of the following is taken directly from my 2009 book Ecopolis.
The term Ecopolis is drawn from “eco” (strictly, from the Greek oikos, or house, but conventionally understood to mean ecological) and “polis” (which Lewis Mumford describes as a self-governing city “where people come together, not just by birth and habit, but consciously, in pursuit of a better life”). Thus eco refers to ecological purpose and polis to the ideas and ideals of governance that encompass community and self-determination. I adopted the term in 1989, constructing the word from first principles. It has been independently discovered or constructed around the world: in late 1970s Russia (according to Ignatieva 2002), in Finland (according to Koskiaho 1994), in Italy (Magnaghi 2000), adopted by others (Girardet 2004), and it has been used to name conferences in Russia (1992), China (2004) and New Zealand (2004).
Although Ecopolis is about creating human environments specific to their time and place, the concept is timeless and universal. To make places for everyone, in every land, for all time, cities need to be different, reflecting the characteristics of people, place and processes unique to their place and time. This “universal regionalism” can only come about through the consistent and persistent application of principles embedded in an explicit culture of city-making. The challenge is to embed processes in the life of a city that are as natural to it as bones are natural to our bodies. Fully realised, Ecopolis is a manifestation of a developed ecological culture, standing in contrast to the expressions of exploitative culture that are our present-day cities.
Municipalism
At the beginning of the Twenty First Century Alberto Magnaghi and the Italian “Territorialists” proposed a “New Municipalism” which is very close to the Ecopolitan idea and bears strong influences from Murray Bookchin and his Municipal Libertarianism. It deals with what Anitra Nelson might call “the grainy level of community-inspired action” (Nelson 2007) and has more to say about citizenship and the purpose of cities than New Urbanism. It offers much more than prescriptions for civic pleasantries and transit-oriented commuting. Partly, this reflects the birthing environment of the ideas. The New Urbanists are largely from (and a much-needed reaction to) the New Worlds which spawned mindless sprawl, soul-less shopping centres and big boxes of possessions masquerading as homes. The European Territorialists are from the Old World, where enough remains of pre-consumerist, fine-grained, functional, equitable humanist urbanism and its relationship to the productive landscape that the recent dominance of industrialism and the motor vehicle can be placed in the perspective of a deeper historical context. When it comes to interpreting the patterns and purposes of the urban and the rural, the New Urbanists are, at heart, traditional modernists. The Territorialists are radical traditionalists.
The purpose of cities
The making of architecture and cities is not something we choose to do, as if there was something else we might do instead, it is fundamental to our nature and as essential to our capacity to procreate and thrive as nest-making is to birds. Until the development of modern human civilisation, there had never before been a situation in which a single species so dominated the planet’s biota, taken up so much of its productive potential or affected so many of its ecological processes. We have achieved this dominance and its associated impacts by city-making and its associated processes. As we learn how to deal with managing the consequences of climate change and come to terms with our role as the planet’s dominant species, we must understand how this phenomenon of building cities is central to our survival.
The purpose of the city must be to create an environment that generates health and enhances sustainability. This is a major historical shift, but the city has the power and reach to achieve it, for as Ian Douglas observed 35 years ago, in 1983: “The urban eco-system is the most elaborate geographical control-system or integrated resource-management system in human experience.”
A city is more than the sum of its buildings; it includes services and infrastructure, hinterland and agriculture that its inhabitants use to consume energy, resources and land. The making and maintenance of cities creates the greatest human impact on the biosphere and it is vital that we understand their processes and purpose. Because cities are the drivers of environmental degradation the challenge is to turn them into agents of ecological restoration, supporting massive human populations and simultaneously repairing the damage to the world that humans have already done. The survival of our species’ civilisation depends on how we make our cities work.
What are cities?
Cities are what we have been making for nearly 10 millennia without regard to environmental consequences; an Ecopolis or, if you will, a fully developed ecocity, creates an environment that generates health and dynamic ecological stability. I propose that successful city-making is about the construction of living systems and that a truly “ecological” city is exemplified in an urban system through which biophysical environmental processes of a region are sustained through conscious intervention, active engagement and collective management by its human population. In other words, the citizens of the urban ecosystem seek to fit human activity within the constraints of the biosphere whilst building environments that sustain human culture. Defined by the need to minimise ecological footprints (biophysical) and maximise human potential (human ecology) to repair, replenish and support the processes that maintain life, Ecopolis is about process; about the cultural patterning of the way we organize knowledge and how we see ourselves.
A city is primarily a place of culture and for the sake of our own survival we must rapidly evolve a culture capable of constructing cities as urban ecosystems that make a nett positive contribution to the ecological health of the biosphere. Even more than this, on a planet so thoroughly urbanised, with every function of the biosphere in some way mediated by its engagement with urban systems, the capacity of the biosphere to sustain civilised humans depends upon the nature of our civilisation. Cities need to be consciously designed and understood as living systems embedded in the processes of the biosphere as key regulators of the global ecology and, I would now add, sentinels for achieving the goal of E. O. Wilson’s Half-Earth project, which is a call to conserve half the Earth’s land and sea in order to provide sufficient habitat to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity, including ourselves.
I’m not a Marxist, but Karl Marx was a first-class analyst and in true Marxian (or is it Hegelian?) fashion it seems to me that there might be some logic in the idea that if cities were the centres of destruction they could and must become the tools for reconstructing and healing the biosphere. From this it is arguable that the ecocity is an evolutionary tool—remembering that evolution can go in any direction. In EcopolisI set out a number of propositions built around that idea.
The Ecopolis Propositions
The ability to transmit in symbolic forms and human patterns a representative portion of a culture is the great mark of the city: this is the condition for encouraging the fullest expression of human capacities and potentialities… —Mumford 1961
Fitting Cities
We need cities that fit their purpose as global pattern makers and provide fitting places for the realisation of the best of human aspirations. We need cities that generate and are generated by appropriate cultural patterning for achieving this, including the way we organize knowledge and manage human affairs. The over-arching proposition and underlying theme for the following set of Ecopolis conditions is simply that cities are the means by which civilised societies achieve a physiological fit with the biosphere.
I propose that these are the 4 conditions that form the basis of ecopolis.
Proposition 1: CITY-REGION: City-regions determine the ecological parameters of civilisation
Cities must be regarded as habitats for human survival and evolution.
Cities are places for procuring, managing and distributing resources for the mutual benefit of their inhabitants and are inseparable from their hinterlands.
Human impacts on the processes of the biosphere are mediated by land-use patterns that achieve their quintessential expression in city-region morphologies and processes.
Cities, through their immediate and associated impacts (especially via its coevolved cousin agriculture) are the primary means by which humans act on the biosphere.
An Ecopolis is an urban system consciously integrated by its community into the processes of the biosphere in order to optimise the functioning of the biosphere for human purposes and for the health of all other organisms.
Proposition 2: INTEGRATED KNOWLEDGE: Ecocity concepts generate an imperative to integrate extant knowledge
The concepts, principles and techniques that are required to create human settlements that fit within the ecological systems of the biosphere whilst sustaining their biogeochemical functionality already exist.
Concepts, principles and techniques already exist which are capable of creating urban systems consciously integrated into the processes of the biosphere in order to optimise the functioning of the biosphere for human purposes and the health of other organism, but they are not yet embedded in a cultural framework (arts, sciences, humanities, vernacular and popular culture) that integrates and facilitates their application in the design, development and maintenance of such systems.
Architecture and urban design are major components of culture and must be conceptually expanded as part of a life sciences approach to recognising the central place of human settlement as an evolving agent of change in the biosphere.
Proposition 3: CULTURAL CHANGE: Creation of an ecological civilisation requires conscious, systemic cultural change
The collective consciousness and unconsciousness of human inter-relationships with the biosphere is embedded in culture.
An Ecopolis cannot exist except as the consequence of the creation and maintenance of a society capable of sustaining the responsiveness necessary for managing such a settlement.
The inter-dependent nature of elements in urban ecosystems requires communication and decision-making structures based on mutual aid—which recognises inter-dependency, and direct democracy—which shortens channels of communication, improves information flow, and more closely relates decision-making to place.
The foundations of society are cultural and lasting social change depends on deep levels of cultural change.
To create ecological cities in the form of Ecopolis it is necessary to effect cultural change.
Proposition 4: URBAN FRACTALS: Demonstration projects provide a means to catalyse cultural change
Changes in city making can be catalysed by demonstration projects of ecocity fractals.
A living system of human relationships that displays the essential characteristics of the larger culture of which it is a part can be thought of as a ‘cultural fractal’.
Cultural change can be catalysed by the creation of cultural fractals that display essential characteristics of the preferred cultural condition.
An ‘urban fractal’ is a network that contains the essential characteristics of the larger network of the city. Each fractal will possess nodes, or centres, and patterns of connectivity that define its structure and organisation, and it will exhibit characteristics of community associated with living processes. It is a particular type of cultural fractal.
Ecopolis demonstration projects must be urban fractals, containing sufficient characteristics, in process and form, to represent a whole in microcosm (see my 2012 essay for TNOC).
These catalysing urban fractals can only be brought about with a high level of participation from the community in their design, development and maintenance.
That participation represents the conscious engagement of the human community with the urban ecosystem of which it is a part.
Register found that the urban fractal idea “describes very well” his own “integral neighborhoods” and “ecological demonstration projects” (Register 2006), and supports the idea that an urban fractal as “a fraction of the whole city with all essential components present and arranged for good interrelationship with one another and with the natural world and its biology and resources for human activity” and because such fractals are only a small fraction of the size of a whole town or city they are much more achievable than whole new cities, particularly in developed countries.
Fractal Trim Tabs make differences
Looked at from the point of view of information theory, Gregory Bateson might have said that an urban fractal is a physical manifestation of a cultural pattern that is sufficiently different from the norm to change the deeper pattern of the city. It is, systemically, sufficiently different to make a difference. It is also a device that fits the definition of Buckminster Fuller’s “trim tab factor”.
An urban fractal acts as a trim tab to the larger society and its patterns of urbanism, turning the direction of development of a part of the city so that the direction of development of the whole city is affected, with the whole city, in turn, redirecting the evolutionary arc of the larger civilisation of which it is part.
Architecture and graphics by Paul Downton.
It was in 1983 that a singular experience brought home to me the capacity of urban civilisation to consume its hinterland. I was working in Jordan as a lecturer in architecture at Yarmouk University, which was an unforgettable and, overall, positive experience that taught me a great deal about any number of things but especially the nuances of different cultures. Chérie (later to be the key organiser of the EcoCity 2 conference in Adelaide) and our young family of three kids had joined me there and we typically spent weekends exploring the countryside, meeting local people and getting to know the ancient and pivotal history of this place—one of the world’s most fascinating countries. A friend who was in the Royal Jordanian Airforce was one of our informal guides and on one occasion he took us to the old stone building of Qasr Amra sitting out on the gibber plains of north-east Jordan. The sun was setting by the time we got there but there was enough light to go inside the building, which hadn’t been dressed up for tourists at all and we were able to make out the hunting scenes painted on its walls. It had been built as a hunting lodge and it used to be surrounded by the forest and its animals that were the subjects for the paintings that, although faded, still decorated its interior. Stepping back outside of that building we were in the middle of one of the most barren landscapes I’d ever seen.
What had happened?
When the Ottoman empire was pushing its way across the region a century before it had constructed a railway line southwards from Turkey and in making the line, timber was hewn from the forest (that used to be there) for railway sleepers and to feed the furnaces to fire the boilers of the steam engines that took the timber to build their cities. We could see that there was now barely any sign of the railway, and no sign of the forest and its denizens. Civilised consumption had struck it all down and all that remained was the evidence of an empty stone hunting lodge and its fading murals.
A few years later, after we had emigrated to Australia and after I had spoken at the First International Ecocity Conference in Berkeley in April 1990 (where I met Richard and our friendship began), I was a delegate and speaker at the 1990 International Conference and Exhibition on Architecture of Cities in Calcutta, India (which came about through my acquaintance with Professor Santosh Ghosh that began during my two years in Jordan). By then I had done some considerable research into the impact of cities and urbanisation and concocted a summary statement for the conference declaration that became The Charter of Calcutta.
The 1990 Charter remains my most succinct summary of how I view the impact of cities, both their capacity for damage, and their potential for hope and regeneration.
Twenty-three years earlier in my fourteenth year on this planet, I drew a tongue-in-cheek image of a “green” building that was a prescient commentary on what I now think about much so-called ‘sustainable’ architecture. Given that the fundamental shift in thinking needed to get beyond image-mongering to real consideration of ecological and social function in architecture and urbanism has barely begun, the concept of evolutionary cities is nothing if not ambitious.
Image by Paul Downton
Evolution appears to be purposeful because it produces results that are fit for purpose but there is no evidence that there is anything at all conscious about the way it proceeds. Which is where we come in (see the Ecopolis Propositions, above). The more we understand about how evolution works, the better the chances are that we can augment, anticipate, facilitate or mimic evolutionary processes and work towards a state of conscious evolution. But we must be aware of what we are conscious of. Evolution is not equivalent to progress. We humans are constantly presented with choices that are pertinent to the future of our species. Do we choose war or peace, murder or life? Etc… These are evolutionary questions where choice can be the agent of destiny. Do we want to be a war-like species or peace loving? Chimp or Bonobo? And how do we build to accommodate that decision?
When evolutionary processes arrive at solutions which survive they are, one way or another, highly effective and place specific. They result in designs that are fit for purpose. If they weren’t they wouldn’t survive. That will always be the measure of anything that lays claim, as I believe we must, to the idea of consciously evolving ecological cities. As our ideas evolve, so must our cities, and given the perilous state of the biosphere it needs to happen with extraordinary and urgent rapidity.
We need more young leaders all round the world, and parents who encourage and support their exploratory curiosity. The more they learn about their world, the more they will love it.
From early on as a family, we considered ourselves to be fairly knowledgeable about environmental issues, such as plastic pollution, deforestation, and global warming from all we’d learnt through the media. We recycled. We bought fair-trade items like chocolate and bananas. We also participated in environmental initiatives like a national beach clean-up in Southampton. But even with all this, it wasn’t until much later that we truly understood the impact of marine plastics and global warming.
Three years ago we had been living in England on a farm surrounded by daisy and poppy fields and small woods of oak, beech and coppiced hazel. The children, Leah and Peta, had built a den of fallen branches and moss, and watched snowdrops and daffodils take their seasonal turns. In late Spring we would hunt for wild orchids and watch tadpoles grow up. But it was not all bucolic harmony all the time. We also experienced nature red in tooth and claw. In the woods we sometimes stumbled upon carcasses of fowl picked clean by a buzzard or hen harrier, and every year we tried to save mallard ducklings from the talons and beaks of grey herons and red kites.
Wild orchid growing in farmland, Hampshire, UK. Photo: Olivia TayWe often came across animal carcasses and skulls. Photo: Olivia Tay
Tropical diversity
When we moved to Singapore we thought we would be severely deprived of natural sights in this city-state. Even though there are nature reserves and parks in what is proclaimed as a “garden city”, we were not initially convinced that their charms could replace those of rural Hampshire.
Then one Saturday, to get fresh air but also out of curiosity, we joined a guided tour of the MacRitchie Nature Reserve organised by the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Toddycats—a group of local university students who care about the environment. It turned out to be a pivotal experience for us. Not many steps into a trail we were electrified when a snake raced across the path between our feet. Our guide was delighted and remarked that it was the first time that a snake had surprised her like that, adding that it was most likely a Common Malayan Racer, Coelognathus flavolineatus. The incident jolted us from our complacency and we began then to really pay attention to what our guide had to say.
She helped us put names to many unusual local and non-native trees and plants in the forest reserve. There was the cluster of nibong palm, Oncosperma tigillarium(nibungis thorn in Indonesian) with sharp thorns that could be used as blow darts. And fruit much like the horse chestnut conkers of Europe, but which come from a native species of chestnut, the Kertak Tangga, Castanopsis schefferiana. We saw the beautifully wrinkled trunks of the Tembusu, Cyrtophyllum fragrans(the old scientific name used to be Fagraea fragrans) and learnt about the chewing gum tree, the Jelutong, Dyera costulata. There was the vivid Wild Ixora, Ixora congesta, which prefers being in the forest shade. The rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, once a highly valuable crop and originally from South America, we could now distinguish from other trees by its three-leaved saplings and three-lobed fruit.
It was through the Toddycats that we learned about the government’s plans to tunnel an MRT (Singapore’s subway) line under part of the forest anid how this could harm MacRitchie’s ecosystem and along with it the wildlife of the Central Catchment’s forests, of which MacRitchie is a part. Having been jolted from our complacency, we now started to really understand the significance of conservation, and of reserving natural spaces for wild flora and fauna, as we stood to lose a place, we’d come to cherish
After MacRitchie we went on another guided walk, this time among the diverse habitats of Pulau Ubin’s Chek Jawa district. Pulau Ubin (Ubin Island) is only a 10-minute boat ride from the eastern end of Singapore, but it is a time capsule of a Singapore from a not-too distant past. Village houses roofed in corrugated iron partly line a single road that almost circumnavigates the entire island. Chek Jawa, on Ubin’s eastern flank, had been earmarked for resort development but virtually at the last minute was given a 10-year reprieve. The National Parks Board (NParks) seized its chance and restored and created new boardwalks that the public could use, enabling greater ease and safety for the public to learn about the unusual richness of Chek Jawa’s ecosystem – it has six habitats: rocky shore, sandy beach, mangroves, coastal hill forest, seagrass lagoon and coral rubble.
Green spotted puffer at Chek Jawa, Pulau Ubi. Photo: Olivia Tay
It was on the mangrove boardwalk that we spied a pufferfish, the adorable Green Spotted Puffer, Dichotomyctere nigroviridis (syn. Tetraodon nigroviridis). It ignited Leah’s interest in mangrove and marine creatures. Her keenness led us to volunteer with NParks’ Intertidal Watch, a citizen science group that records marine life biodiversity in the intertidal zone of Singapore’s coasts. Both Leah and Peta enjoy mucking about in the sand, sifting through seaweed or seagrass to peer at snails and crabs, delighting in discoveringnew animals like sea hares.
A Geographic Sea Hare (Syphonota geographica) found just off a popular beach in Singapore. Photo: Olivia TayThis is not uncommonly seen at low tide: a Sea Pen (Pteroides sp.) and its tenant, a little Painted Porcelain Crab (Porcellanella picta). Photo: Olivia Tay
It was from these intertidal surveys that our experience of Singapore’s natural bounty broadened. Our coastal waters are so rich in invertebrates and fish, nurtured by the seagrasses and off-shore coral reefs. On our own intertidal walks, we have come across varied sea cucumbers, crabs and sea stars. Once we rescued a baby moon crab, Ashtoret lunaris, which had been hidden in seaweed trapped in a large plastic bag. Luckily we had emptied the bag of seaweed before binning as the tiny creamy-yellow crab plopped onto the sand before scuttling away. And this lead us to more fully understand the urgent issue of pollution and littering. While it is amazing to record all the fauna on each intertidal survey, we also saw first-hand how human trash, especially plastic products, impede and outright harm marine life.
The juvenile Spotted Moon Crab liberated from a plastic bag filled with seaweed. Photo: Olivia TayMarine plastic litter is a ubiquitous blight. Here a Pink Warty Sea Cucumber (Cercodemas anceps) rests on a plastic cup. Photo: Olivia Tay
It is now not just about terrestrial habitats which need conserving, but the protection of Singapore’s diverse marine life.
From participating in various nature surveys (for birds, butterflies, and intertidal flora and fauna), we began to help with the NUS-NParks Marine Debris Sampling project, bagging fine sand for the researchers to examine for microplastics, and engaging in more beach clean-ups.
Recycling our knowledge
Eventually we tried our hand at being guides ourselves when we returned to Pulau Ubin for this year’s “Balik Chek Jawa” (Chek Jawa Homecoming) event with the nature group, Naked Hermit Crabs. It was our turn to infect other members of the public with an appreciation for Singapore’s biodiversity. If we can share our ideas and knowledge with members of the public, perhaps they too will want to protect the amazing things we can see in and around Singapore.
Mangrove forests are rare now on mainland Singapore, but this stand on Pulau Ubin’s Chek Jawa, is an important fish nursery, a crucial store of carbon and is a barrier to storm surges. Photo: Olivia Tay
At home, Peta is now running a biodiversity survey in our neighbourhood park, using NParks’ app, SGBioAtlas. The data will go into NParks’ database, BIOME, and will show them what species there are, and what is common or uncommon. Only a week ago Peta and Leah spotted a Tiger Shrike, Lanius tigrinus,in a Tanjung tree, Mimusops elengi, as it is now the autumn migration season and we should be seeing more bird visitors. NParks would be able to use this data to help the animals, which could mean choosing different plant species to attract them.
Leah is organising a regular beach clean-up to monitor the amount of rubbish collected at the same location over time. Although her Scout pack does a yearly beach clean-up for the International Coastal Clean-up event, Leah felt that once a year would not be as effective, especially to reinforce the idea that preserving a pristine natural environment is every person’s responsibility and not just the job of a contract cleaner.
Looking back over the past few years, our feelings towards Singapore’s natural biodiversity have certainly evolved, from ignorance to curiosity and now determination to conserve as much as we can.
The younger generation taking the lead
It is heartening to know that young people like Leah12 and Peta 9, are exploring the natural ecosystems in a densely populated city-state like Singapore. They are discovering that the diversity of species can co-exist with humans in a wide range of habitats. More importantly, they are documenting the rich flora and fauna in urban and natural ecosystems, building up a growing population of citizen scientists, sharing their biodiversity data and proactively conserving our rich biodiversity. If more young people monitor and record the biodiversity in their neighbourhood, we will be able to accumulate a rich database of the plants and animals living around us. With that invaluable information, we can proactively encourage people to plant suitable species that will function efficiently as ecological corridors.
We need more of these young leaders all round the world, and parents who encourage and support their exploratory curiosity. The more they learn about their world, the more they will love it. After all, it is their planet and their future that they are saving for themselves and their descendants.
Leah Thorpe, Peta Thorpe, Olivia Tay and Lena Chan Singapore
While Zagreb’s circumstances and regimes changed, planners often remained, pulling the values of the previous period and linking them with values of the next period. Most of the time positive aspects remained while the undesirable ones were replaced.
When we consider planning for green infrastructure, we typically think forward to what kind of city we might imagine for the future. Far less frequently do we consider the history of the city and how past generations have shaped the green spaces and the activities and meanings related to them. In Croatia, a country known for its majestic landscapes and beautiful coastlines, the city of Zagreb is a unique example of how past generations have shaped the city’s green legacy.
Zagreb indeed has a rich and complex history. It entered the 19th century as a small town in the Austrian Empire only to become the largest city and the capital of Croatia in the mid-19th century. The change in the balance of power between Austrians and Hungarians resulted in subjugating Croatia to the Hungarian Kingdom which governed it as a colony, suppressing its social and economic development. The First World War marked the end of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and Croatia united with other south Slavic nations in the Yugoslav kingdom where Zagreb was the second largest city and economic centre. The short fascist phase during the Second World War was followed by almost half a century-long socialist period in which Zagreb was again the economic centre of Tito’s Yugoslavia. The independent era finally began in the 1990s with Zagreb becoming a modern European metropolis. So, over the last 200 years, Zagreb lived through changes in government forms, ideologies, planning ideas and practices, and, all of this impacted how greenspace was perceived, planned, and maintained.
Zagreb: Circa 19th century
Before the 19th century, Zagreb was a small town with two separate cores: religious (Kaptol) and secular (Gradec). Both were built densely within the fortification walls for protection from Ottoman conquests. In such a compact area, there was not much space for parks, so the city’s rural surrounding provided most opportunities to enjoy nature. Where green spaces did exist in the city, they were primarily designed around religious buildings, as is the case in Kaptol, where the churches’ green spaces were almost exclusively reserved for the clergy. It wasn’t until the end of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century when urban parks around the two settlements really started to take root (Barešić and Sirovec, 2011). Yet, it remained the case that the creators of these parks were most often the bishops of Zagreb, as they owned most of the land around the town. In the same way, today’s largest park in Zagreb—Maksimir—was created. Its initial development was influenced by the baroque landscape design ideas penetrating from central Europe. Although imagined as a regular-structured French garden, construction took many years. It was finished in the mid-19th century in the style of an English landscape garden with many romantic elements.
Maksimir Park in the mid-20thcentury. Source: The Zagreb City Museum
The golden age of urban greenspace
A new era of urban greening began when the two cores, Kaptol and Gradec, began to merge together in the city of Zagreb. At this time, Zagreb was industrialising. Railway construction accelerated population growth and economic development, and as the population moved into the city Zagreb expanded rapidly, creating new quarters and “absorbing” surrounding villages (Slukan Altić, 2012). The separation between church and state led to the civil government overpowering the clergy, and landscape design became a civil activity. Zagreb got an official architect and urban planner whose task was planning the construction of new parts of the city, which also included the greenspace. City planners in Zagreb were usually schooled in other large cities of the Austrian Empire, and design and style in these cities greatly impacted planning ideas in Croatia.
Notably, the utilitarian aesthetic of German planners, Ernst Bruch and Reinhard Baumeister—for whom beauty was almost synonymous with practical—guided aesthetic in the city of Zagreb. This can be seen in the construction of a green belt around the new city centre. Modelled on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, a chain of seven parks was designed as a visual barrier around the new city centre as well as a kind of buffer zone protecting it from air and noise pollution originating along the railway (Slukan Altić, 2012). Due to its U-shape, the park chain came to be known as the Green Horseshoe. Another change characteristic for this period was the redevelopment of many medieval graveyards around churches into parks as the civil authorities started considering them as non-aesthetic and non-hygienic (Barešić and Sirovec, 2011). As industrialisation increased the city’s income, greater investments were made to further city expansion.
The aerial view of the Green Horseshoe in the centre of Zagreb. Source: geoportal.dgu.hr
Socialism and urban planning in Zagreb
As the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918 with the end of the First World War, Croatia became a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In united Yugoslavia, Zagreb became an economic centre. Under these conditions, the development of new working class quarters did not follow the urban plans set in place earlier but progressed uncontrollably and informally. This caused overpopulation and led to a lack of focus on preserving greenspace (Bašić, 1989). The authorities, therefore, planned a green zone with recreational facilities along the river, which the city reached in that period, but due to a lack of money, only the green lawns were realised (Matković and Obad Šćitaroci, 2012).
Sava Riverside Park in the plan from 1936. Source: Matković and Obad-Šćitaroci (2012)
During the Second World War, the socialist party took over the government, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). The change in political values and government structures was blended with the urbanistic tradition. Socialist urbanists seemed to be aware of the benefits for workers population provided by urban greenery, including the effect on physical and mental health (Kiš, 1976). The care for urban greenery was demonstrated already in the early post-war years. Since the country did not have the financial means, the new regime implemented a decree in which the citizenry was organised to repair the damage in the city caused by the war and re-build the city. In this wave of public works all the existing parks were renewed and, according to the socialist ideology, the fences around them were removed so that access to parks were open to all. The socialist regime also nationalised all the land in urban areas, with the exception of the privately owned buildings on these properties (Simmie, 1989) to ensure planning went unimpeded, and smoothly according to socialist ideological principles.
Socialism also widened participation in urban greenspace planning processes. The general public could engage in greenspace planning by proposing ideas and implementing projects together with official service workers in charge of greenspace. One of such initiatives was the creation of the Newlyweds Park, based on the idea that newlyweds select and pay for a tree which would then be planted in the Newlyweds Park (Blažević, 1976). However, this widening of participation int he planning process also had its setbacks and ultimately led to a lack of planning control that great impacted urban green space. For example, in the 1970swhen the number of cars in the city started increasing, there was not enough parking space. Through legal means, but more often than not illegal recourse, parking lots and garages were constructed on the edges of urban parks, which impacted their size and quality. Authorities were generally aware of the problem, but not having a solution, they usually turned a blind eye on such developments. Today, the impact of this is still visible in Zagreb.
The examples of garages and parking lots intrusion in Vjekoslav Majer Park (above) and Newlyweds Park (below). Photos taken on 11/04/2018. Photo: Neven Tandarić
Contemporary Zagreb
The disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early1990s lead to yet another war that greatly impacted the development of the city of Zagreb. A political, economic and social transition introduced democracy in government and liberal market economy and various nationalised services and departments were transferred to the private sector. The lack of money in city treasury meant that some public projects could not be done exclusively by the city and needed the involvement of private investors. That often included granting some rights to private investors over the public space at the expense of public rights. Moreover, the new system allowed the private-sector-led transformation of public space, like urban parks, into commercial or residential functions. This sparked discontent among the citizenry and lead to people self-organising against these public-private initiatives to redevelop greenspace. For example, one recent initiative rallied around the preserving the only park in the Savica quarter from joint city authority, and private sector plans to build a church in it (Kramarić and Lisac, 2017).
A church was supposed to be built in the only park in the Savica quarter. Source: Inicijativa Čuvajmo naš park, 2018
Today, there are hundreds of various green spaces in Zagreb. While the most famous and central ones are well-maintained, the other ones, especially those further from the centre, are not cared for as well. Moreover, in distant districts green spaces are frequently of poor quality, they often lack landscaping, biodiversity and are mostly just plain grass lawns, and are used mostly by dog owners. Contemporary greening ideas appear to focus mainly on accommodating tourists while incorporating incorporate the longstanding mayor’s passion for fountains. There are many examples of newly introduced fountains in Zagreb squares and parks. Perhaps the largest and most expensive such project was the redevelopment of the University Meadow close to the city centre. While beautifying the image of the city, little attention is paid to the inhabitants’ opinion and the functional design of quarters. The light at the end of the tunnel is the strengthening of the civil sector in Croatia which fights its way to influence the planning of public space at the local level and publicly re-examines decisions made by city fathers.
The new design of the University Meadow. Photo taken on 29/08/2018. Photo: Neven Tandarić
Look at the history to envision the future
Over the last 200 years, greening ideas in Zagreb changed substantially. Urbanisation, influential planning practices such as utilitarian aesthetics (in the 19th century), regime ideology (socialist period), privatisation and personal agendas (post-socialist period) were all factors that greatly influenced the design and development of greenspace in the city. Parks in Zagreb are the result of original ideas and contemporary drivers of each period. While historical circumstances and regimes changed, planners often remained, pulling the values of the previous period and linking it with values of the next period. Most of the time positive aspects remained while the undesirable ones were replaced. By knowing some socio-political history, we can read Zagreb’s parks as a history of ideas of living, recreation, design and values. Moreover, the parks can help us to evaluate new ideas and re-evaluate the old ones in order to come up with functional public spaces. Even past mistakes can help us to learn and improve the planning practices.
Barešić, D. and Sirovec, J. (2011) ‘Rokov perivoj u Zagrebu’, Prostor, 19(1), pp. 184–199. Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=63030750.
Bašić, K. (1989) ‘Unutargradski prerazmještaj stanovništva kao pokazatelj funkcionalno-prostorne transformacije Zagreba’, Acta Geographica Croatica, 24, pp. 69–84.
Blažević, M. (1976) ‘Uvod’, in Uloga i značaj zelenila za stanovništvo Zagreba i njegove regije. 1st edn. Zagreb: Stablo mladosti, pp. 8–10.
Kiš, D. (1976) ‘Drvo u gradu – faktor zaštite čovjekove okoline’, in Uloga i značaj zelenila za stanovništvo Zagreba i njegove regije. 1st edn. Zagreb: Stablo mladosti, pp. 35–44.
Kramarić, I. and Lisac, R. (2017) Slučaj Savica – i struka protiv betonizacije parka. Zagreb: Savica ZA park. Available at: http://www.kulturpunkt.hr/sites/default/files/DAZ_SLUCAJ_SAVICA-podrska_struke.pdf.
Matković, I. and Obad Šćitaroci, M. (2012) ‘Rijeka Sava s priobaljem u Zagrebu; Prijedlozi za uređivanje obala Save 1899.-2010.’, Prostor, 20(1), pp. 46–59.
Simmie, J. M. (1989) ‘Self-management and town planning in Yugoslavia’, The Town Planning Review, 60(3), pp. 271–286.
Slukan Altić, M. (2012) ‘Town planning of Zagreb 1862-1923 as a part of European cultural circle’, Ekonomska i ekohistorija, 8(8), pp. 100–107.
Chris Ives takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying sustainability and environmental management challenges. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham.
UBHub arose as a response to gaps and bottlenecks in urban biodiversity planning and management. Developed with practitioners in mind, its goals are increasing capacity of local governments and their partners to develop knowledge-driven biodiversity strategies
Cities that plan for biodiversity recognize the potential of healthy ecosystems to mitigate urban problems and enhance quality of life but, due to limited capacity, can struggle with developing and managing their biodiversity strategies. Our team at the Urban Biodiversity Hub (UBHub) has compiled thousands of examples of biodiversity work from local governments and environmental NGOs around the world that can help. After two years of development, we have now publicly launched the largest public database of urban biodiversity activities worldwide. Our database is a one-stop shop that makes it easier for people to explore urban biodiversity practices and select from helpful resources.
In defining the scope of the database, we use a broad definition of urban biodiversity that encompasses all activities and information related to urban nature and the influence of cities on conservation, including individual species plans, green and blue infrastructure, impact on regional landscapes and global conservation goals, environmental education, and more. Together, these data consolidate information previously scattered across hundreds of sites into one searchable location.
The UBHub database has two parts, now available and free to explore at www.ubhub.org: (1) an interactive map of biodiversity in practice, consisting of plans, reports and activities, and (2) a resource guide that organizes and compares tools for urban biodiversity.
Screenshot showing the largest database of urban biodiversity activities worldwide, by the Urban Biodiversity Hub. Image from www.ubhub.org/map.
About the map
The UBHub map visualizes global and regional patterns of what cities and other actors are doing to improve local biodiversity. Each of the map’s 1,200+ markers (as of October 2018) contains a list of urban biodiversity activities, documents, programs, and awards related to that location, along with links to the original sources. The data can also be filtered by city parameters to locate comparable biodiversity efforts. Markers on the map can be searched by keyword and can be highlighted by program or filtered according to several variables, including scale, population, density, biome, and conservation status. The map database is also available in a summary or in table form.
The data available via the map are already proving useful for practitioners and researchers. Staff at the City of Los Angeles, in preparation for creating their own biodiversity strategy, used the UBHub map to locate other municipalities that have instituted specific programs and activities of interest. Researchers have used the database to quickly locate government documents and summarize current practices in urban biodiversity. Our team also harnessed the database to put together a summary report of current practice as contributors to The Nature Conservancy’s Nature in the Urban Centuryassessment (McDonald et al. 2018).
Of the variety of document types (reports, plans, declarations, maps, etc.) in our database, the most comprehensive data so far are on municipal biodiversity reports and plans. We have identified at least 123 cities from 31 countries that have produced a biodiversity report and/or a biodiversity plan; 108 of these have published biodiversity plans, 46 have published biodiversity reports, and 31 have published both. Cities around the world have taken part, although the majority of documents were produced by cities in Europe, followed by North America and then Asia. Cities of all sizes are planning for biodiversity, from towns with populations of less than 100,000, such as Curridabat, Costa Rica, to megacities such as Shanghai, China.
Graph of the number of cities (by continent) that have published urban biodiversity plans and/or reports. A biodiversity plan is an official government document that indicates the intended strategy for biodiversity conservation. A biodiversity report is a document that summarizes the current conditions of biodiversity within a particular area. Data are based on the public database at www.ubhub.org/map and originally produced for McDonald et al. (2018).
Another comprehensive data set is a compilation of municipal participants in biodiversity programs. Programs help cities manage or plan for biodiversity by offering a standardized index or series of steps that sometimes comes with institutional support. Examples of such programs include the Singapore Index (also known as the City Biodiversity Index or Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity), the Ecological Footprint, the Biophilic Cities Networkand other international programs. We mapped municipal participants in 26 frameworks and programs that are specific to urban biodiversity and are in use in more than one country.
Graph of municipalities participating in various international urban biodiversity programs. Note that these data do not include city-states, such as Singapore. Data from www.ubhub.org/map, produced for McDonald et al. (2018).
About the guide
In addition to the map, the UBHub website also includes a guide, which is a collection of resources that are useful for urban biodiversity practitioners. The resources are organized by category and linked back to the original source. Categories include public engagement, regulations, data repositories, conferences, measurement tools, blogs, and more.
One feature of the guide is a program comparison to help practitioners make an informed decision about their biodiversity approach by comparing nine systems at once. The comparison includes a basic description of each program, the program steps, participation requirements, and the pros and cons of each. This comparison can help a city more efficiently select a program that is right for them. Practitioners often have little time to research comparable efforts in other cities or compare approaches, and may end up either developing a system on their own or adopting a pre-existing framework without having the opportunity to analyze or even find out about alternatives. With the many numerous urban biodiversity strategies and programs being applied around the globe, it is difficult to discover and select an appropriate program. We hope that this comparison will help practitioners identify the most suitableprogram for their city or community.
Forum
We recognize that capacity and needs vary from region to region and city to city, and that knowledge of urban biodiversity and related topics is spread around the world. We therefore believe that an international exchange of knowledge and resources can bring important insights and offer opportunities for future collaboration. To that end, the UBHub website also includes a dedicated discussion forum accessible to logged-in users. On the forum, users can post or respond to questions and vote up or down on content to ensure quality. Positive votes on a user’s contributions add to the user’s reputation points in recognition of their contribution to the dialogue.
Future plans
We are now developing the myIndicators web platform for cities and their partner organizations to select and manage biodiversity indicators. City representatives will be able to log in, connect to the dashboard for their city, invite collaborators to join their dashboard, select their indicators, and start managing their biodiversity strategy. They may choose from several pre-existing index programs or create their own custom set of indicators. Indicators can include quantitative trends such as the amount of tree canopy cover or number of participants in education programs, or qualitative steps such as approval of a biodiversity plan by city council. The myIndicators dashboard will provide practitioners with a summary of their city’s progress and downloadable reports to use and share. It will also link to the forum, where practitioners can connect with researchers and one another to compare approaches and share techniques.
We are working with several cities and NGOs in our beta testing program to refine the myIndicators platform over the upcoming years. These beta testers are leaders in the field of urban biodiversity and pioneers in the measurement and management of urban biodiversity indicators. Ultimately, the myIndicators platform will help cities and communities manage their indicators, track their data, generate reports, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their biodiversity planning and management.
Collectively, UBHub’s components—the map, guide, forum, and myIndicators—arose as a response to the gaps and bottlenecks in urban biodiversity planning and management. While developing UBHub, we spoke with many researchers and practitioners who told us that urban biodiversity is generally championed by one or a few passionate staff members who take on the city’s biodiversity or conservation-related efforts on top of other responsibilities. We developed UBHub’s components with these practitioners in mind, with the goals ofincreasing the capacity of local governments and their partners to develop biodiversity strategies and of making urban biodiversity resources more widely available.
As we move forward in partnership with our beta test cities in developing myIndicators and other tools, we invite interested parties to join us in promoting the value of urban biodiversity and facilitating better urban biodiversity management by adding and using data, as a volunteer, or as an organizational partner.
Melissa Barton, Jennifer Rae Pierce, Mika Mei Jia Tan & Juan de Dios Morales Portland, Vancouver, Los Baños & Guayaquil
McDonald RI, Colbert M, Hamann M, Simkin R, Walsh B, Ascensão F, Barton M, Crossman K, Edgecomb M, Elmqvist T, Gonzalez A, Guneralp B, Haase D, Hillel O, Huang K, Maddox D, Mansur A, Paque J, Pereira HM, Pierce JR, Weller R, Seto K, Tan MMJ, Ziter C. 2018. Nature in the Urban Century: A global assessment of important areas for safeguarding biodiversity and human well-being. The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA. http://www.nature.org/urban100
About the UBHub Team:
Our team at UBHub originally came together in December of 2016 at the 13th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity, out of mutual interest in promoting measurable biodiversity actions in cities around the world. We have members in 18 countries who all volunteer their time to create a one-stop shop for current practices in urban biodiversity.
Jennifer Rae Pierce heads the Urban Biodiversity Hub’s Partnerships and Engagement team and is a steering committee member. She is a political ecologist and urban biodiversity planner. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on the topic of engagement in urban biodiversity planning.
By night, Mika Mei Jia Tan leads the Urban Biodiversity Hub’s Steering Committee. In the day, she is Coordinator of the ASEAN Youth Biodiversity Programme at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Biodiversity Centre. An interdisciplinary thinker, she holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies (Conservation Biology) from Middlebury College, USA.
Juan de Dios Morales is the founder of the Wild GYE Initiative, which promotes Guayaquil’s biodiversity through photography. He has worked on different aspects of environmental management, communication, and education and is knowledgeable on ecological research, environmental policy and planning strategies, and project management. He has dedicated more than 8 years to nature photography and become an environmental communication leader.
Planting trees to achieve an arbitrary Tree Canopy Cover obscures the real challenges before us. It is time to go beyond trees and green infrastructure to a decoupling from the hydrocarbon economy.
Urban trees and tree planting is like a contemporary urban planner’s holy grail—more trees means a better city, and better city assumedly means a better quality of life for city residents. But why is this the case? I’ve set out here to reflect on this. Why the focus on urban trees today and what are the historical origins of urban greening. Should plans to build better cities for residents rely on strategies that involve greening and tree planting?
I see a growing need to explore the ideological origins of this approach, including in the U.S., where the presiding idea that nature should provide services in cities to remediate modernist infrastructure, may actually skirt a more fundamental question: the need to reinvent urbanization.
With this, I also think the notion of planting trees carries with it a whiff of colonial ideology wherein “planting trees substitutes cosmetic physical changes that are morally satisfying, for the radical reorganization of society and culture that would address the underlying attitudes and actions that have led to widespread degradation of the natural and human world” (Cohen 2004: 21). Further, hegemonic agreement that tree planting should be done in all cities to achieve certain tree canopy cover overrides local ecologies, climates, history, traditions, and practices. It evacuates difference and possible autochthonous emergence of solutions that might be more structural and transformative. While I personally find city trees beautiful and attractive, not everyone, or all neighborhoods welcome trees, nor are they appropriate for all places. It is time to discuss what kinds of cities we want, and where trees or green infrastructure fit in.
The rise of the city
The rise of industrial cities, enabled by the harnessing of hydrocarbon fuels, has fundamentally changed relations between “the city and the countryside”, to use older vocabulary. As cities grew, the countryside and the connection that many village dwellers had to nature and its cycles, changed. Not only was human labor less involved with nature through agriculture, animal tending, and primary harvesting manufacturing with locally sourced materials, but cities themselves expanded at an unprecedented pace. These new cities, using the dense power of hydrocarbon fuels, pioneered multi-story buildings, skyscrapers, paved roads and surfaces, sanitary systems for water provision and treatment, industrial manufacturing and more. In short, the large scale, engineered sanitary city emerged in western nations riding on hydrocarbon-based economic development. This new approach was enormously successful in many ways, including the reduction of disease, the increase in efficiency and transportation access, democratic access to water and power, and waste management.
Industrial cities utilized engineered systems to provide infrastructures that supported urban activities, but at the same time, these systems, propelled by the ideology of modernization and deftness of engineering science, overshadowed, and often overpowered and destroyed, local ecologies, hydrologies, fauna and flora, and more. Engineered systems utilized hydrocarbons to heat and cool buildings, ignoring cooling breezes, the orientation of the sun, obliterating slopes and valleys. Engineered systems paved over the soil’s ability to infiltrate storm water, and bulldozed existing vegetation, casting much of the fauna out of the urbanized area.
The evacuation of nature and building of dense and insalubrious cities, in the late 19thcentury, in Western Europe and the U.S. was countered with an influential park movement whose mission was, in part, to provide healthy spaces of recreation and repose to residents in tenements, to immigrants in need of acculturation and disciplining into “citizenship”, and to foster greater beauty (Rozenzweig 1983). They were also about display, prestige, and growing cosmopolitanism (Lawrence 2006). These parks were predominantly well-landscaped, unstructured green spaces that provided access to a picturesque nature in the city. As this vision evolved an additional aspect included a means to pursue social reform, and therefore parks were an important aspect of rationalizing city planning.
Rationalizing city planning
Connections between the US, UK and other European countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were strong. Park planning, and concepts originating from the City Beautiful movement including greenways and access to nature in the city were traded across the ocean. Such luminaries as Frederick Law Olmstead, his partner Henry Vaux, and others strongly advocated for urban parks and beautification, and spent time in England and France, learning of efforts there. The result was impressive. The Emerald Necklace plan in Boston, Central Park in New York, much later the Olmstead Plan prepared by Olmsted’s sons in Los Angeles are among the most prominent examples. Major cities followed suit and undertook to plan and build parks. The idea that tree planting in urban areas could cool the atmosphere and provide health benefits was advocated as early as 1889 by Arbor Day organizers (Cohen 2004). Planting trees was promoted as a selfless act of good citizenship, and later advocated by American Forests and supported by the U.S. Forest Service (Cohen 2004).
Ideas of urban parks and beautification necessarily reflected their places of origin: a climate and vegetation predominant in northern Europe, predominantly “green”. Green and greening became to be an antidote to the urban—green parks in dense urban settlements offered relief from the surrounding asphalt jungle (Doherty 2017). Thus, as humans have come to increasingly live in urbanized settings surrounded by hardscapes, there has been increased concern and interest in building parks and providing green open spaces for urban residents.
Urban greening, ecosystem services and tree planting
In the contemporary period, there has been wide acceptance that modernist city infrastructure is insufficient if cities are to become more sustainable. Introducing natural processes into the urban fabric, trees, permeability, green roofs, bioswales and more, are now common strategies, though often opportunistically implemented, poorly funded with little maintenance money. The concept of urban ecosystem services comes out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), and has been translated into urban programs, often implemented by volunteers and non-profit organizations, to be maintained by residents. Such efforts translate into a kind of ground up implementation of urban ecosystem services to remediate lack of shade, the urban heat island, increase water infiltration into groundwater basins and more.
The common vocabulary is greening the city. But is this appropriate? Is greening going to bring about the kinds of urban morphology transformations that on the one hand create more equitable, generous and welcoming cities, and on the other, decrease the Earth systems change cities require and engender for maintenance and growth today? Indeed, beyond the issue that the template for the greening ideal emerges from a mesic northern Atlantic environment, and that anything else is seen as lacking, there is an additional paradox: these greening efforts often become environmental gentrification. They are a convergence of urban redevelopment, ecologically-minded initiatives and environmental justice activism in an era of advanced capitalism. Greening operates under a seemingly a-political rubric of sustainability and appropriates any successes to serve high-end redevelopment (Checker 2011). Urban greening does little to substantively mitigate urban environmental and social impacts. And the volunteer mode of governance shies away from politics; it is cast as a kind of (soft) science universal consensus about what is good for the city, good for the residents, and good for the planet.
However, in order for cities to reduce their environmental and climate impacts in a just and equitable manner that does not refer to a Euro—North American view of a green nature frosting over existing material and urban conditions, much more radical and transformative actions to change cities will need to occur that reflect local climates, ecosystems, hydrology, residents, culture, history and politics.
Radically rethinking cities
Good and wholesome neighborhoods that are green seem desirable and necessary to improve the quality of life of residents. The arguments rely on an emerging science termed “biophilia” and on belief that trees in cities perform the same functions as trees in forests, such as carbon sequestration and stormwater mitigation. Some even believe that trees mitigate air pollution. Such concepts may be true, in part, but assert a view of what cities ought to be that is rarely broadly consultative, usually based on insufficient scientific studies of those places, and more importantly import and generalize an approach that may be implementable in mesic landscapes, but not in other regions. Finally, as stated above, this approach avoids dealing with the systemic hydrocarbon dependence of cities that is generating GHG emissions, creating voracious patterns of urbanization and Earth systems change for needed resources, and deludes people into thinking that urban ecosystem services can substantially affect these aforementioned problems.
No contemporary city is close to being sustainable in our high-energy modernity. Some say that modern society will crumble without fossil fuels (Lang 2018). And yet,, as I explained above, modern cities arose due to the power of hydrocarbon energy, whose use is changing the global climate, poisons water resources, soils and living beings, and is fundamentally altering hydrology in many parts of the globe. Hydrocarbon fuels enable mining, processing and manufacturing. They are ubiquitous. And thus, any urban sustainability quest must address the fundamental drivers of unsustainability and how hydrocarbon energy structures urban form, urban infrastructure and, ultimately, social and economic relations of power and influence.
Urban greening, while a well-intentioned strategy, brings with it assumptions about appropriate vegetation, aesthetics, benefits, and public commitment. I suggest it might be time to go beyond urban greening to revisit how we build our cities, where, and for whom. U.S. style suburban living, replete with lawns, trees and single-family dwellings prolong climate change, and urban impacts, including inequality. Understanding that our cities today must decouple from hydrocarbon dependencies will entail vast changes in our ability to continue to despoil local and distant environments, and urban morphology. It is time to go beyond trees and green infrastructure to decoupling from the hydrocarbon economy. This will mean that cities will evolve differently according to climate, water availability, culture, history and place. Planting trees to achieve an arbitrary Tree Canopy Cover obscures the real challenges before us.
At this juncture, it would be useful to rethink many of the codes and regulations that prevent cities from addressing a number of issues such as the urban heat island, density, mixed uses, and greatly reducing the need for automobiles and the amount of heating and cooling necessary to make poorly constructed buildings habitable. Reducing street widths, eliminating on street parking, requiring all urban surfaces to reflect the sun in warm climates, zoning for common wall buildings that due to their common walls, reduce heating and cooling needs, making sure people’s housing and jobs are close to transit. While none of these are revolutionary, they are also rarely implemented. Many of the codes for transportation infrastructure drive wider and wider streets and intersections. The dominance of single family dwellings continues to generate urban expansion and dependence on the automobile and Earth system change: habitat fragmentation, hydrological modification, materials intensive construction.
Urban greening alone will not help our cities become more suited to the places they are built in, including building orientation, typologies, building materials, heating and cooling fuels. It is a piece of the city, but an artifact of urban morphology and the rules, codes and conventions that supports the current high energy intensity of daily life.
Banner image: Bernard Rudofsky, 1967, Photographies de Cacères.
References:
Checker M. 2011. Wiped out by the “Greenwave”: environmental gentrification and the paradoxical politics of urban sustainability. City and Society. 23: 210-229.
Cohen S., 2004. Planting Nature. Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Doherty G., 2017. Paradoxes of Green; Landscapes of a City-State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Land G., Urban energy futures: a comparative analysis. European Journal of Futures Research https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-018-0146-8
Lawrence H.W. 2006. City Trees. A Historical Geography from the Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Rosenzweig R. 1983. Eight Hours for What we Will, Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1970 –1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The problems facing urban waterways are genuinely wicked and often expensive. But there are some simple, affordable, and decentralized techniques that can result in mutual and reciprocal benefit to both people and their waterways.
While the urban sustainability movement has had many successes over the past decades, the benefits have been disproportionately befitted affluent residents. This is partly on account of the fact that sustainability discourse over recent years has placed a stronger emphasis on the “environmental” and “economic” aspects of sustainability, largely ignoring or underemphasizing sustainability’s social dimension.
Albany, NY, Summer 2018. The news cameras closely followed the group of youth as they carried the floating island down to the banks of the Hudson River near the edge of the heavily industrialized Port of Albany. Resembling a mass of plastic tubing intertwined with swamp plants, the island was placed in the water and dragged out with kayaks and canoes to be strategically placed near a massive sewage discharge pipe. Already in the river was a solar panel-equipped barrel-raft, tied to several other smaller floating islands. Once all the pieces were coupled together, makeshift anchors created from concrete blocks were dropped on either side, holding the island in a southward-facing orientation. Now fully powered, a solar powered pump hummed away, blowing beautiful tiny bubbles into the roots of the plants from the murky depths below. The artful-yet-functional techno-ecological hybrid assemblage known as the “artificial floating island” was now complete. As the crowd of onlookers applauded and cheered, I could feel the sense of satisfaction and pride that the youth took in their accomplishment.
Launching the Island. Credit: albanyweblog.com
With hope, this creation would help to degrade sewage and storm water pollutants that impaired the health of the river. At minimum, it was a participatory project that fostered a sense of care, love, and responsibility between local youth and the well-being of the river. By shining a light on persistent infrastructural problems such as combined sewage overflows, I sought to illustrate the connections between urban ecosystem health and concerns of social justice, access, and equity, weaving in broader conversations about issues of exclusion and alienation in the urban ecosystem. This one small floating island was an encapsulation of the much larger idea of “urban ecosystem justice”.
On the Shores of the Hudson. Credit: albanyweblog.com
Urban ecosystem justice
Cities and societies are not sustainable unless there is justice. Urban Ecosystem Justice (Kellogg, 2018) is a framework that views cities as complex adaptive socio-ecological systems and looks at how questions of equity, access, fairness, race and class apply to the biophysical dimensions of urban ecosystems (soil, water, waste, air, biodiversity). By doing so, it makes explicit and moves social sustainability to the forefront of sustainability discourse, while simultaneously challenging ecological alienation by making the urban ecosystem a legitimate, and relevant, topic of study. Both of these issues of social sustainability and ecological alienation are deserving of closer analysis:
Social sustainability
While the urban sustainability movement has had many successes over the past decades, the benefits have been disproportionately befitted affluent residents. This is partly on account of the fact that sustainability discourse over recent years has placed a stronger emphasis on the “environmental” and “economic” aspects of sustainability, largely ignoring or underemphasizing sustainability’s social dimension. This trend has produced a form of “techno-managerial sustainability” that is attractive to business owners, policy makers, and the ruling classes as it promotes a “green” agenda that is at once friendly to capital and conducive to crafting the illusion of community consensus. By relegating the social component, inconvenient questions regarding equity, access, fairness, race and class are glossed over, and fundamental structural socio-economic inequalities are never addressed. As such, the status-quo remains unchallenged and environmental initiatives privilege only affluent communities. Little to no attempt is made to ensure that there is equitable distribution of environmental harms and goods, and in cases when environmental amenities are provided to low-income communities, it often results in the unintentional (or intentional?) consequence of their displacement/cultural alienation (i.e. gentrification). The most extreme form of this manifests in the phenomenon of “urban ecological securitization” (Hodson, 2009), where premium environmental services are provided to the wealthy and the poor are displaced to the urban periphery where they are subject to the brunt of ecological risk, exposure, and vulnerability.
Ecological alienation
Ecological alienation, or ecological rift, is a present-day manifestation of the nature/society dualism professed through modernist ideals and philosophy. Through it, urban residents are profoundly separated from and ignorant of the natural processes and systems that make life on earth possible (i.e. food production, water, composting/decomposition, energy, atmospheric/climatic processes, non-human life). The separation of town and country has relegated these processes and systems to the urban periphery or hinterlands, making them invisible and inaccessible to urban residents. In instances where “remnant” ecologies remain in cities, they are commonly made inaccessible through enclosure, poisoned, degraded, or otherwise de-valued. Where environmental education does exist in cities, it teaches about the environment and nature as external to the city, with urban environments being considered unworthy of study. Likewise, definitions of “the environment” seldom are extended to include social and human processes. The combined influence of these conditions produces in both children and adults what is referred to as “ecophobia” (Sobel, 1996), or fear of ecological systems and processes. When a citizenry has no sense of inter-relation, love, concern, or responsibility for ecological systems, they cannot be expected to act in their defense.
Urban ecosystem justice importantly situates itself within a citizen-center, grassroots context. In this regard, it focuses on exploring and creating mutually reciprocal symbioses between ordinary citizens and urban ecologies from the ground up, an angle typically not explored from top-down planning and policy perspectives. By applying a DIY ethic to the “ecology of cities” paradigm developed in the discipline of urban ecology, humans are seen as central and integral to urban environmental processes. In this regard, urban ecosystem justice can be thought of a “science of cities for the people”. Urban water issues are good starting place for seeing how an urban ecosystem justice response may be operationalized.
Water in cities
Water is essential for life: for drinking, irrigation, fishing, washing, transportation, trade, and industry. It’s no wonder that most cities are built on the edge of a river, lake, or ocean, providing the lifeblood to urban activity. Over time, however, on account of the growth of cities, industrialism, and auto infrastructure, waterways have become increasingly abused and neglected, treated like open sewers to carry away all manner of urban waste products. Correspondingly, the health of urban waterways has suffered, causing them to become unsuitable for either swimming or fishing.
Take New York’s aforementioned Hudson River as an example. Once a thriving tidal estuary with abundant aquatic life that sustained people over thousands of years, in Albany there are now advisories against eating most fish species out of the river, a consequence of PCBs (Poly Chlorinated Biphenyls) leaching from industrial sites and building up in the food chain. To make matters worse, the construction of Interstate Highway 787 in the mid-twentieth century has all but cut off resident’s access to the riverside, a tragic decision made to facilitate suburban commuting at the expense of people’s connection to the river. The inaccessibility and poisoning of waterways has had a disproportionate impact on lower-income urban residents, who frequently rely on fish caught from them for sustenance and survival.
The health of urban waterways is further impaired by polluted storm water runoff. On account of the tremendous amount of impervious cover (asphalt, concrete, and rubber and tar roofs) in cities, very little rainwater is absorbed into soils. The majority of it rushes off streets roofs and flows rapidly into storm drains, carrying a toxic mixture of gas spills, fertilizers, pesticides, and dog droppings. In older cities, storm drain pipes are often combined with sewers. During heavy rain events, these will spill over into local waterways, resulting in what’s known as a CSO (Combined Sewage Overflow). This noxious mixture of storm water runoff and sewage contributes to significant water quality issues in urban water ways including eutrophication (excess of nutrients) and the spread of disease.
The problem of storm water runoff and sewage overflows can seem enormous and daunting. Small actions such as building floating islands can give people the feeling that they have the ability to make an impact, even if it is just a first step.
Warning Sign. Photo: Adam Kaszas
Return to the island
Such was the impetus for the design and creation of the Artificial Floating Island, or AFI (Yeh, 2015). The AFI was a project of the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center, an urban environmental education non-profit based in the South End of Albany. It was carried out in conjunction with Radix’s “Ecojustice Summer” program, a five-week summer youth employment immersion that combines community gardening with sustainability justice education and outdoor adventure. The AFI’s construction was made possible through a $5,000 award from the Albany Water Board, who opted to fund an environmental benefit project in lieu of paying fines to the Department of Environmental Conservation for failing to report a sewage discharge the previous summer. While Radix had built many AFIs previously, it had always been done on a shoestring budget. Consisting of bundles of recycled plastic bottles, they had been jokingly referred to as “floating trash islands”. Now with some financial backing, we could construct the Cadillac of floating islands complete with a component of active aeration.
Here’s how it worked: “islands” kept afloat by rolls of irrigation tubing would support native wetland plants affixed by zip-ties. While floating in a contaminated water body, the plant roots would grow down into the water column and be colonized by beneficial bacteria. A solar panel mounted on a floating dock powered an air pump that would oxygenate the water and support the microbial community. Sewage and other pollutants flowing through the roots of the plants would be consumed by bacteria while the plants themselves would uptake nutrients from the water, transforming them into a harvestable biomass. Inspired by “natural” floating islands that help to purify lakes and ponds, its design is simple, elegant, and effective. AFI technology had advanced considerably, with a substantial body of published studies proving their effectiveness.
The islands, built cooperatively by the Ecojustice youth, were “incubated” in stock tank ponds at Radix for several weeks before being deployed. This not only gave the chance for both plants and their attached microbes to mature, but also allowed to youth to develop an intimate and daily familiarity with the system, seeing it grow and develop over time. Not only did the island function as a tangible model of participatory, problem-based, and experiential learning, it also spurred interest in the history and ecology of the river itself, an effective means for challenging ecological alienation among the youth who for many, despite having grown up in Albany, had never actually stood on the banks of the Hudson, let alone gone out into it on a boat.
Close-up of Island Roots. Photo: Scott KelloggIncubating at Radix. Photo: Adam KaszasA baby island. Photo: Scott Kellogg
Conclusion
The problems facing urban waterways are genuinely wicked, some of which can only be solved through multi-million dollar infrastructural upgrades performed by municipalities. How then, is it possible for the average urban resident to have any impact on this problem? The good news is that there are a number of simple, affordable, and decentralized techniques that can be carried out that will result in mutual and reciprocal benefit to both people and the health of their waterways.
In addition to floating islands, these include rainwater collection, de-paving, and rain gardens. While the impact that any of these might have by themselves is small, collectively and synergistically they can produce significant results. It is critical to point out that these decentralized approaches must be done in coordination with broader political action aimed at “turning off the tap” of storm water and sewage pollution—residents cannot bear the burden of “mopping up the mess”. More importantly, citizens taking any kind of initiative towards improving their relationships with local waterways has profound symbolic and educational value. Just thinking of impaired waters as anything other than hopelessly polluted and deserving of care creates a powerful counter narrative to the idea of urban waters as being dead, toxic, and beyond salvation—an essential first step towards building urban ecosystem justice.
Hodson, Mike, and Simon Marvin. “‘Urban ecological security’: a new urban paradigm?.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33.1 (2009): 193-215.
Kellogg, Scott. “Urban Ecosystem Justice: The Field Guide to a Socio-Ecological Systems Science of Cities for the People”. Ph.D. Dissertation. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2018. ProQuest.
Sobel MEd, David. Beyond ecophobia: Reclaiming the heart in nature education. Orion Society, 1996.
Yeh, Naichia, Pulin Yeh, and Yuan-Hsiou Chang. “Artificial floating islands for environmental improvement.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 47 (2015): 616-622.
Both the meso and macro benefits of green walls shine light on the role of cities in addressing the growing global problem of extreme heat, excessive precipitation and loss of nature-based barriers for environmental pollution.
Walls that talk are not found in haunted houses or buildings but rather symbolic to the phenomenon of greening residential fences using organic plant species, in ways that non-verbally speak to the broader goal of re-naturing cities. This is happening in Kampala city, where vertical structures with walls that have elements of green cover are being erected around residential dwellings in high-income Neigbourhoods.
Although the green fences may not be the overarching solution to Kampala’s loss of vegetative cover, wetland resources and green corridors, which are increasingly being cleared to open up plots for high-rise apartments, business complexes, and infrastructure expansion projects, their importance lies in the incremental benefits of providing a micro climate for human health and re-naturing the look of Neigbourhood environments.
Plot opened up for high-rise apartment along kiwafu Road in Kampla. Photo: Kareem BuyanaFlowery wall for aromatherapy. Photo: Kareem Buyana
Whereas green infrastructure—riparian zones along urban drainage lines, urban agricultural spaces, wetlands, urban forests, wildscapes and extensive patches of green areas—holds the promise of confronting the challenge of urban resilience, institutional arrangements and planning processes in most southern cities are devoid of perspectives that go beyond a single institution’s mandate and a systems-oriented lens on preserving, restoring and protecting nature in the city.
As such, green infrastructure has been treated uni-dimensionally—that is, something nice to have as a green area around a building or house instead of providing critical ecological and social benefits, such as absorbing or living with shocks such as floods and epidemics. Social-economic issues such as poverty, industrialization, and youth unemployment that dominate current planning regimes in southern cities are for the most part overlooking the broader socio-economic opportunities associated with ecosystem restoration and enhancement[i][ii].
Tree garden with traditional medicine adjacent to a paved compound in Muyenga surburb. Photo: Kareem BuyanaWall safeguarding aganist dust clouds. Photo: Kareem BuyanaReciprocity of grey and green infrastructure. Photo: Kareem Buyana
But not all hope is lost.
Over the last five years, I have been jogging around the city suburbs and picked up an interest in the green fences and their meso and macro benefits. I have not spoken to the proprietors of the premises, but from the look of things, using my intuition and random picturing with a mobile phone, I have come to some conclusions on the scalable benefits of urban green fencing in Kampala.
fFont yard banana graden in Muyenga surburb. Photo: Kareem Buyana
The benefits of green fences
Broadly, the meso benefits include edible fruits and vegetables from walls, growing traditional and herbal medicines on walls,
recreational walls, green paved compounds for percolation of surface run-off, aesthetics and aromatherapy from flowery walls, front and backyard pasture for livestock, thorny tendril for safety, green barriers for dust storms, heat stress, air pollution, noise and flush floods, as well as hydroponic substrate in which the plants grow.
The macro benefit, on the other hand, is that urban green fences as nodes of re-naturing the city, providing green cover for climate resilience, maintain ecosystems for food and heritage conservation, biodiversity conservation, reciprocal integration of grey and green infrastructures[iii].
Paved green compound. Photo: Kareem Buyana
They also unlock dependency on actors in government to provide opportunity of engagement with formal institutions, to co-design strategies that re-connect people and infrastructure development with nature as an intervention for resilience building in the city.
Take-away message
Both the meso and macro benefits shine light on the role of cities in addressing the growing global problem of extreme heat, excessive precipitation and loss of nature-based barriers for environmental pollution[iv][v]. Considering the need to upscale solutions to heat health and other risk management strategies across timescales, re-naturing cities through urban green fencing is an intervention to reckon with.
[i]Schäffler, A., & Swilling, M. (2013). Valuing green infrastructure in an urban environment under pressure – The Johannesburg case. Ecological Economics, 86, 246–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.05.008
[ii]Lwasa, S., Buyana, K., Kasaija, P., & Mutyaba, J. (2018). Scenarios for adaptation and mitigation in urban Africa under 1.5 °C global warming. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. Elsevier B.V. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2018.02.012
[iii]Bowler, D. E., Buyung-Ali, L., Knight, T. M., & Pullin, A. S. (2010, September). Urban greening to cool towns and cities: A systematic review of the empirical evidence. Landscape and Urban Planning. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2010.05.006
Most people love some aspect of a city’s nature, but if we can all take some time and observe how everything is interconnected, then there is hope for a just and green world.
The soil is alive and there is a whole ecosystem waiting to be explored, right below our feet. Anywhere in the city, where there are leaves and some cracks in the sidewalk, there is life underneath us! The soil is a living complex of roots, bacteria, fungi, substrate (rocks, sand and clay particles), and animals. Many soil animals are microscopic such as springtails and mites, but there is a whole array of soil megafauna that is waiting to be discovered in urban soil. Of these, earthworms are the most ubiquitous and peculiar to learn about in my rainy city of Portland, Oregon.
Earthworms can be found in many urban settings from gardens, to football fields, to cracks in the sidewalk where there is some moisture and nutrients. They can be enlisted to bring us closer to the life around us and teach us lessons about survival, nutrient cycles, and reproduction. Any wild animal that thrives the harsh conditions of the city should be praised and studied. Children as well as ecologists can gain insights about their importance in food webs with simple techniques.
Worm midden with castings in grandpa’s driveway. The worm has brought in pine needles and rose petals. Photo: Toby Query
Don’t worry. Earthworms don’t have teeth, nor do they transmit disease, so they are entirely safe to handle, if a bit slimy. They are extremely sensitive, able to recognize light, breath through their skin, and feel vibrations. Some earthworms are parthenogenic, meaning they can reproduce without having sex. Others like the nightcrawler (Lumbricus terrestris) are hermaphroditic (have both sexes), and mate by attaching themselves to another worm, impregnate each other, and then have their fertilized egg sacs (the clitellum) migrate from their mid-body over their head where they place it in a good spot for their babes to hatch. One rainy day in the forest I found newly hatched earthworms crawl up to the tip of ferns and watched as they hitched a ride on my pants.
Thank an earthworm
Earthworms are doing a lot of work in the city. They are decomposers and nutrient recyclers. They aerate and mix the soil by creating tunnels and move nutrients and organic matter up and down. They turn leaves and food scraps into soil! Amazingly, they also help process and degrade our toxins. Earthworms have been found to degrade petroleum products, extract heavy metals, and break down PCBs.
Here in Portland once the autumn rains begin and leaves start to drop, worms get to work. The nightcrawler builds small pyramids, called middens, which are a mix of twigs and leaves pulled near their entrance of their underground lair. Their castings (or poop) are easily found nearby between clumps of plants throughout parks and gardens. I sometimes drop leaves around middens in the evening, and in the morning the worms have pulled them closer to their tunnel entrance and often under the surface for a meal.
Grass clippings have been pulled toward the center of the middle. Red circles are the edge of a midden and the green arrow points to the entrance of one. Photo: Toby Query
Children and earthworms
Because earthworms live close by, are creepy, and quite resilient, they are perfect animals for children to learn from. My daughter’s school yard is prime night crawler habitat, as is grandpa’s driveway. Crows know about worms too, as do robins. The crows move in groups slowly and methodically to pull out worms. Other times they turn over leaves on my street harvesting worms. I’ve seen them stash worms on my neighbor’s roof. Robins do a quick short run to find worms in fields.
At school, students can have a pet worm in the classroom by putting one in a jar with soil and leaves, and the kids can watch the worms eat, move, and launder the soil. The mustard extraction method is a crowd pleaser, whereby you mix water with ground mustard seed (found in the spice section) and pour the mixture over the soil. Watch for the next 5 to 10 minutes as worms bubble up out of the ground. It’s like a mild chili bath for the worms, so I usually have some extra water to help wash it off them. This is a great ecology lab or just a fun learning activity.
Night crawler added to a jar with soil, a fern and some florescent coated seeds. Photo: Toby Query
Earthworms are change agents
Along with the first European cargo to Portland arrived the first European earthworms. Early ships used soil for ballast and would unload it at the port and fill it up with goods. Worms crawled out of the ballast and into our forest, including Portland’s Forest Park, which is adjacent to one of the earliest ports in Portland. Forests in the Midwest and east coast of the US and Canada have well documented shifts of plant and animal communities due to the introduction of earthworms. The soil changes from a fungal dominated, slowly decomposing, layered substrate, to soil that is bacteria dominated with an accelerated nutrient cycle. These changes affect tree composition, habitat quality for birds and amphibians, and have been found to increase drought stress in sugar maples.
Since earthworms are master nutrient recyclers, they also release nutrients that can cause nutrient problems (eutrophication) in waterbodies. This presents a challenge for waterways managers that work to control aquatic algae and macrophytes. Besides all the fertilizer and nutrients humans put into our waterways, what part of eutrophication can be accounted for by earthworms? Oregon does have native worms, unlike the recently glaciated northern latitudes of North America. The lily-scented Oregon Giant Earthworm is the most charismatic. It can grow to over a meter long and burrow up to 4.6 meters but is exceedingly rare. One published earthworm survey in forests just outside of Portland in 2002 had a hope of documenting its presence in sites where it had been previously seen. The authors didn’t find the Giant Earthworm, but they did find on average 1,136 kilograms of earthworms per hectare, over 97% of which are of European origin. That’s the weight equivalent of 2 cows per hectare, that are underground and hungry.
That was the only study I could find from my area, but I wanted to know for myself if this is the case in the sites I manage in Portland. I surveyed using the mustard extraction method and repeated plots in my backyard, and in wetlands and forests. I found them in assorted abundances in different areas the city. A few isolated conifer forests remain earthworm-free, but the highest plots translated to over 800,000 worms per hectare. What conditions do earthworms prefer and how do they shape conditions for plants and animals? We did find a clear correlation between an absent duff layer and abundant earthworms. The duff layer (or the humus layer or Organic horizon) acts like a sponge for water and nutrients. It’s also an important habitat for native seedlings, ground fauna (like salamanders), and a hotbed for mycorrhizae. The worms, which can hasten its disappearance, create a driving force that shifts plant and animal communities. Plants that thrive on soil disturbance (you know, weeds), do well with earthworms, and plants that need stable soils with a deep duff layer often disappear. We’ve seen this shift in Portland, much like elsewhere, whereby graminoids (grasses and sedges) and certain weeds (garlic mustard and herb Robert) are favored by earthworm presence. Other understory plants found in nearby old growth forests can’t handle the conditions that worms create. Like other newly arrived species that have a large biomass, earthworms form new connections with resident wildlife. Beyond the birds I mentioned, moles, voles, frogs, salamanders, and even raccoons and turtles eat earthworms.
Urban natural areas have lots of stressors: climate change, urbanization, the urban heat island effect, fragmentation, pollution, and hydrological changes. These stressors, however, are often impalpable. Worms are a living stressor that can be counted and held. You can witness their effects once you train your eyes and hands to them.
The more I study earthworms (and read earthworm studies), the more I realize their silent and continuous labor has deep imprints in the ecology around us. There currently is no field guide or even technical manual to identify earthworms of the west coast of North America. But with this absence of the basic taxonomy of earthworms, there is an opportunity for us to learn about them and observe and document their effects on the world around us. Their ability to thrive in adverse urban conditions generates the need for humans to collaborate with them to create sustainable landscapes. Their ability to degrade human pathogens has been investigated for use in composting facilities and sewage treatment plants.
In this conceptual diagram, the addition of earthworms pushes the system (the ball) to a new location where conditions and processes have transformed and operate under different rules. Credit: Toby Query
Earthworms are just outside your door waiting to be discovered (if you live in a temperate wet climate). If you can’t find worms, there are ants and spiders and millipedes and flies and beetles that can be observed nearby. A few might even be new to science. Children should get in on the discoveries: document creatures on iNaturalist or a nature journal, set up experiments and surveys, and get their hands dirty. Worms have shifted my perspective about the complex nature of cities, underground. With their introduction, our forests here are playing by new rules. Earthworms are a major driving force behind shifts in the plant, animal, fungal, and bacterial communities.
The nightcrawler, anchoring in the crack in the street, accompanied by a small millipede near its head. Photo: Toby Query
How do we learn about changes taking place in our cities? Kneeling and examining the soil and its creatures is a good start. We can learn about the life around us, and how resilient it can be. Worms can be a conduit to noticing the myriad of ways of how other creatures (as strange as they might be) are connected to how we treat our cities. Most people love some aspect of a city’s nature, but if we can all take some time and observe how everything is interconnected, then there is hope for a just and green world.
While resilience has become a central feature of urban research and policy discourse, it remains a fuzzy and contested concept. We need to understand the different ways that cities interpret and apply resilience into plans and policies, and how this will help them grapple with future challenges.
Record-breaking disaster losses, unprecedented storms and heat waves, and stark warnings in the most recent IPCC report all point to an urgent need for local governments around the world to prepare for climate change impacts. Consequently, many cities have developed climate change adaptation plans that outline projected climate change impacts and response actions (Woodruff & Stults, 2016). In the last few years, a growing number of cities have shifted the framing of their planning efforts from adaptation to resilience. This may be driven, in part, by high profile funding initiatives, like the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, which support cities explicitly in resilience planning. This trend is mirrored in the academic literature, where work on urban resilience has proliferated in recent years (Meerow et al. 2016), as well as in discussions at The Nature of Cities.
While adaptation plans focus specifically on climate impacts, the scope of resilience planning is often broader. This makes city resilience plans in some ways more like comprehensive or sustainability plans. Nevertheless, more cities are now opting for resilience plans instead of stand-alone adaptation plans. This begs the question: What are the implications of this shift for local climate change preparedness?
In a recent study published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, my colleagues Sierra Woodruff, Missy Stults, Chandler Wilkins, and I examine whether resilience plans in the United States appear to be substantively different than adaptation plans. In doing so, we contribute to a broader debate about whether resilience is simply the latest buzzword or a truly more integrated and flexible approach for preparing for future challenges (Davoudi et al., 2012;Coaffee et al., 2018).
To address this question, we use established plan evaluation methods to analyze the first ten US city resilience plans released through the 100 Resilient Cities program and compare them to a sample of 44 climate change adaptation plans. (See map below). We score each of the plans based on 124 criteria that relate to seven plan quality principles: (1) goals; (2) fact base; (3) strategies; (4) public participation; (5) inter-organizational coordination; (6) implementation and monitoring; and (7) uncertainty. We supplement this quantitative plan analysis with semi-structured interviews of officials in seven of the cities that are part of the 100 Resilient Cities program.
Figure 1: Map of the United States showing cities whose resilience or adaptation plans we evaluated, Credit: Woodruff et al., 2018
Our plan analysis shows that when the seven principle scores are combined, the average quality of the adaptation and resilience plans are similarly low (scoring less than half the possible points). This suggests that there is considerable room for cities to improve how they are planning for climate change impacts. Moreover, when we break down the average scores for resilience and adaptation plans by the seven principles (see the graph below, in Figure 2), there are some important differences.
Resilience plans do a better job of clearly articulating goals, engaging a broader set of organizations, agencies, and the public in the planning process, and acknowledging the linkages between different threats and systems. Our interviews support the idea that resilience planning encourages cities to prepare not just for climate change, but a variety of interconnected shocks and stressors. But we find that the resilience plans score worse than the adaptation plans on the Fact Base principle, meaning that fewer resilience plans include data on baseline climate conditions, future projections, or risks. It seems that there may be a tradeoff between added breadth (in terms of threats) and the depth of analysis. This supports earlier work by Lyles and colleagues (2017) that suggests that narrow-scope adaptation plans are more integrated and do a better job directing development away from hazardous areas than broader-scope ones.
The fact that resilience plans tend to score better on Public Participation and Coordination principles seems to support the idea that resilience encourages collaboration and breaks down silos, but in this study we cannot determine whether this stems from something unique about resilience planning per se or the 100 Resilient Cities program. I recently launched a research project — in collaboration with Sierra Woodruff and another researcher at Texas A&M, Bryce Hannibal — to examine this question by analyzing flood resilience planning networks in four U.S. coastal cities.
We find that adaptation plans, on the other hand, have a stronger fact base. For example, they are more specific about climate impacts and more likely to reference IPCC and other models. Adaptation plans also score significantly higher than resilience plans in how they acknowledge and address future uncertainties (e.g. through robust or no-regret strategies), although this is the lowest scoring principle for both types of plans. We found this surprising, given the focus in the literature on adaptive management and flexibility as characteristics of resilience (Meerow & Stults, 2016). There was no significant difference in the Implementation and Monitoring principle scores, but both plan types scored quite low.
Figure 2: Comparison of adaptation and resilience plan principle scores and aggregate plan quality. Error bars indicate standard error. Credit: Woodruff et al., 2018
We recognize that some of these results may be specific to the plans produced through the 100 Resilient Cities program and may not be generalizable to all resilience planning efforts. Cities were selected for the program because they were already doing innovative work and then they were given additional guidance and support that likely influenced how they conceptualized and planned for resilience. Other cities might not have the same level of capacity. Nevertheless, the 100 Resilient Cities initiative has been so instrumental in shaping the broader urban resilience agenda that we think it is worth examining these plans.
Our findings suggest that resilience and climate change adaptation planning have different strengths and weaknesses. Across the board, plans need to focus more on identifying robust strategies that work under a wide range of future scenarios and provide more details on how these strategies will be implemented and monitored.
Because the meaning of resilience is itself contested, we also look at how the different plans define resilience. Unsurprisingly, climate change adaptation plans generally define it more narrowly in terms of withstanding climate impacts. The resilience plans generally conceptualize resilience in broader terms, considering a wide array of shocks and stressors. Even though the 100 Resilient Cities program has its own definition of resilience, cities often modify it. For example, some cities make equity or justice an explicit part of their definition. Boston’s plan, for example, states: “Achieving citywide resilience means addressing racial equity along with the physical, environmental, and economic threats facing our city.” Other cities focus less on equity. Some plans define resilience as an outcome, others a process. These differences show that resilience is still a malleable concept.
In short, while resilience has clearly become a central feature of urban research and policy discourse, it remains a fuzzy and contested concept. As one of the first studies to systematically analyze multiple city resilience plans, I think our paper can help us begin to understand the different ways that cities interpret and apply resilience into plans and policies, and how this will help them grapple with future challenges, but we still have much to learn.
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.
This emphasis on killing introduced species to protect native ones makes me wonder how much people involved in these activities think about why they are willing to kill some to protect others. Why do they value native species above others?
The image of a child triumphantly brandishing a dead rat on national TV news in New Zealand, trapped in her backyard as part of a community’s bid to try to bring native birds and lizards back into her neighbourhood, reminded me of the extent to which local people in New Zealand’s urban areas have committed to protecting and enhancing urban native biodiversity. TV1 News had delicately pixelated the rat’s head, to spare the queasy members of their audience the sight of a crushed skull. Predation by ship rats, also known as black rats, has been linked to local extinctions of many forest birds, reptiles and large invertebrates in New Zealand, and their habit of chewing on seeds has adverse impacts on forest regeneration.
But rats are only one of a suite of introduced mammals that have decimated New Zealand’s flora and fauna. Becoming “predator-free” to protect native wildlife through wide-scale and intensive eradication of predators has become a major national preoccupation in New Zealand, especially since the launch by the previous government of “Predator-Free 2050”, a nation-wide initiative that has the ambitious goal of eradicating three introduced predators (rats, possums, stoats) from across New Zealand, by 2050. While some debate over how and whether this goal can be achieved, large sections of the public of all ages are enthusiastically behind it, particularly in some neighbourhoods in some urban areas, where backyard trapping of rats and possums has become the norm.
Some may ask, is it right to support community initiatives that have the goal of killing as many animals as possible? After all, these species didn’t ask to be brought to New Zealand and in following their own natural instincts, don’t deserve to be demonised. Does this community offensive against introduced predators reflect a lack of compassion for animals that are merely victims of historic human decisions, and are they being used as scapegoats for the consequences of wider environmental degradation? As an urban ecologist and conservation biologist I see the involvement of people in towns and cities in trapping predators as a very positive force, and completely necessary if we are to restore populations of native species in urban areas and foster a sense of stewardship among urban human residents. Although the battle to reverse declines in populations of our native species occurs across all habitats, the urban one is noteworthy in the level of community participation. In fact the community is the biggest resource in this battle, with urban human populations enabling a level of predator control that is difficult to achieve in rural areas without the application of aerial toxins.
From the Department of Conservation’s blog which provides step-by-step instructions on how to trap in your backyard: https://blog.doc.govt.nz/2017/10/15/how-to-trap-in-your-backyard/
The willingness of New Zealand’s urban public to trap rats and brushtail possums is likely to be at least partly explained by New Zealand’s relatively recent history of colonisation and loss. Unlike the UK, Europe or the USA, NZ’s history of settlement by humans is relatively recent, perhaps only about 800 years, and we are still witnessing the ongoing loss of our natural heritage. While wide-scale habitat loss, degradation and modification are undoubtedly important causal factors in the decline of many ancient endemics, mammalian predators introduced for various reasons — to establish a fur trade (brushtail possums), by accident (ship rats and Norway rats), and to control introduced rabbit populations that were out of control in the nineteenth century (stoats) — have wreaked devastation on our native species. This, in combination with large-scale introductions of species, mainly from the UK, mean that only about half of bird species encountered in urban areas are native to New Zealand, and numerically they are very much in the minority: in areas of higher density housing only 10% of the birds seen are likely to be native, but even in well-vegetated suburbs that proportion increases to only 35% (van Heezik et al. 2008). Both rats and possums can be abundant across urban landscapes, and of course there are cats and hedgehogs too. Social support to control cats and hedgehogs is still contentious, but most communities have no problem supporting and participating in the control of rats and possums. People from countries that don’t have the same history of colonisation and level of endemism as New Zealand might not understand our national obsession with trapping predators.
Endemic faunas and floras make a country unique, and it is that uniqueness that engenders among its human inhabitants a sense of place or identity. Those species with populations that respond best to predator control are the most deeply endemic ones; in New Zealand they are species that have evolved for millions of years in an environment with no mammalian predators. The only terrestrial mammalian species native to New Zealand are a couple of species of rather small, insectivorous bats. When urban residents band together to trap rats or possums, it is to protect these vulnerable, endemic, native species — they want to be able to share their living spaces with them and encounter them as part of their day-to-day lives, rather than having to travel to special predator-free areas such as offshore islands to see them. NZ’s Department of Conservation’s Threatened Species Ambassador, Nicola Toki, argues that native species and introduced predators in New Zealand cannot co-exist, and that it is the indigenous subset of our biodiversity that fundamentally defines us as a nation.
Some cities also contain or are situated adjacent to eco-sanctuaries, which are areas fenced with predator-proof fencing — no mean achievement — and from which almost all predators have been removed: mice are always the hardest to eradicate entirely. For example, Wellington, our capital city, has in its core the Zealandia Ecosanctuary, which has been the site of several translocations of species that used to be resident in the area, but which had disappeared with the ongoing process of urbanisation. If these populations of birds thrive in the eco-sanctuary in the absence of predators they inevitably reach their carrying capacity and spill out into the city. One of New Zealand’s native parrot species which was translocated into Zealandia, the kaka, is very mobile and now roams widely across the city. The saddleback, or tieke, a species that has been rescued from extinction through translocations from its one remaining island population to predator-free islands and eco-sanctuaries, was also translocated into Zealandia, and has attempted to nest in suburbs surrounding the sanctuary. It was this event that prompted a group of locals to band together to protect these individuals, by reducing predators as much as they could. Since then a groundswell of support for the predator-free initiative has built in Wellington, with groups working towards entire suburbs being possum and rat-free, and a trap in every 5th resident’s backyard. It is an exciting concept for people living in cities; to now be able to see species that have previously been restricted to ‘safe’ islands inaccessible to most people.
This emphasis on killing introduced species to protect native ones makes me wonder how much people involved in these activities actually think about why they are willing to kill some to protect others, i.e., why they value native species above others? There has been long-standing, ongoing debate in the scientific literature on how introduced species should be managed, with some scientists arguing that the paradigm of native/non-native is no longer relevant in highly modified environments, such as urban landscapes (Davis 2011). Instead, proponents of this school of thought assert that environmental management should involve acceptance of alien species and novel ecosystems. Conciliation ecology is thought by some to be the morally acceptable course of action (references in Russell & Blackburn 2017), but is soundly rejected by others.
While there is no doubt in New Zealand that the introduction of predatory mammals into a fauna that evolved without any mammalian predator has had a disastrous impact on many of NZ’s native species, not everyone in NZ agrees with Nicola Toki’s sentiments or the concept of valuing native species above others. For example, one opponent to the “predator-free” concept asserts that “we can’t keep erasing the fact that the species that we introduced, whether managed or not, are ‘ours’ too — even the ones we later decided were a mistake. They’re our responsibility as well. And a future where people learn to accept the presence of our introduced species is not so horrifying.”
This view is being echoed more frequently in the media; in a recent opinion piece in The Press, columnist Joe Bennett writes:
“We like our birds here. They’re our signature fauna. No-one else has got them and we haven’t got much else. But among birds we practise apartheid. We distinguish between birds that are — and here’s an adjective that chinks like a gold coin — native, and those that are not. Native birds are first-class citizens who can do no wrong. The rest are the rest and the magpie is among them. It’s an Australian import, loud, boorish, a bird to deride.”
In his article defending the magpie, which was introduced from Australia, he goes on to say:
“Reproducing annually they’ve now been here for 150 generations, which in evolutionary terms is more than twice as long as human beings. What do they have to do to become native? How do they get to be tangata whenua (‘people of the land’)? And how fair is it to trap, shoot, bludgeon or poison a bird because its 150-times-great grandfather drank Foster’s, pronounced school skewl and had a penchant for cheating at cricket? We are all of us mongrels from somewhere or other and none of us responsible for our forebears.”
Those who support this view believe that nature connection in people will ensue from our contact with all species, native and introduced, that they see day-to-day outside their windows. Indeed, it is a fact that there is no evidence that the well-being benefits associated with exposure to nature are greater if that nature is native; although this question hasn’t yet been tested explicitly.
Annie Potts (2009) expands on the concept of responsibility for all species, irrespective of their origin. She presents the brushtail possum as a species that was forcibly transported from their native Australia to New Zealand to establish a fur industry, but which in the last 80 years or so has become “blamed and despised” for their unanticipated negative impact on the native environment and wildlife, becoming the subject of “revenge and punishment”, and unworthy of compassion. She neglects to mention that possums also transmit bovine tuberculosis to cattle and by doing so threaten a sector of our economy as well. She argues that the “demonization of possums in New Zealand is overdetermined, extreme, and unhelpfully entangled in notions of patriotism and nationalism”.
At a more general level, in other countries, criticism has been leveled by social scientists at those advocating for native species, labelling it as a form of anti-immigrant nativism. They claim that the removal of non-natives reflects an anti-immigrant, racist, political discourse (Mastnak et al. 2014). They draw our attention to the Nazi policy of removing non-native plants, and by doing so implicitly associate the protection of native species with Nazism. An alternative perspective is that many current ecological problems are a legacy of colonialism, a process of settlement of plants, animals and people that resulted in the uprooting of native plants and indigenous peoples (Mastnak et al. 2014). This was certainly the case in New Zealand, where we even had an “Acclimatization Society” whose role was to introduce many species from the UK, where most settlers originated from, and create landscapes populated by familiar species. After early waves of extinctions this process was thought to be a means of restoring biodiversity to a depleted environment. Advocating for native plantings then becomes a process of decolonisation, which is ethically appropriate.
Others advocate for the middle-ground; they both question the dichotomy between native and non-native, but at the same time acknowledge that low-impact, non-native species should be tolerated, and that control methods to remove alien pest species can also be contentious if they involve the use of toxins (Shackelford et al. 2011). Some critics have raised the issue of involving children in the process of systematically killing predators, but also the militaristic dimensions of the entire exercise, which uses terminology such as “war on predators”, or “under siege”, and what some consider to be xenophobic expressions (Schlaepfer et al. 2010 ). Simberloff (2003) discusses the claims and suggests that it is impossible to prove that aesthetic preferences for native species are infected by nativism or xenophobia. He points out that those who criticise efforts to control non-native pest species often ignore their ecological and economic impacts, which alone comprise a valid, ethical rationale for managing introduced species.
Do the families involved in trapping introduced predators in their gardens ever realise the political dimensions of their actions? I suspect not. Given the large body of evidence pointing to the damaging impacts both brushtail possums and rats have on New Zealand’s native fauna and flora, I believe urban community groups are well justified in going into battle to remove these pest species from their neighbourhoods. In doing so they not only provide safe refuges for native species, but they also foster a sense of national identity, and through united community effort, enjoy the social benefits of being engaged in a community undertaking.
Recently our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, explained her feelings about Te Reo Maori, i.e., the Maori language: she said she felt proud to hear Te Reo being spoken when outside New Zealand, knowing that it was something that was unique and special to New Zealand. The same sentiments apply to our natural heritage. While the conciliation ecologists are willing to accept novel ecosystems, in cities in particular, the process of biotic homogenisation means that these novel ecosystems will hardly differ from one city in one country to the next. In this case novel, or new, isn’t better: let the citizens unite and fight to save the unique identity of their cities and country!
Davis, M. 2011. Do native birds care whether their berries are native or exotic? No. Bioscience 61(7): 501-502.
Mastnak, T., Elyachar, J., Boellstorff, T. 2014. Botanical decolonisation: rethinking native plants. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32:363 – 380.
Potts, A. (2009). Kiwis Against Possums: A Critical Analysis of Anti-Possum Rhetoric in Aotearoa New Zealand. Society and Animals 17: 1-20.
Russell, J.C., Blackburn, T.M. 2017. The rise of invasive species denialism. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 32(1): 3-5.
Schlaepfer, M.A., Dax, D.F., Olden, J.D. 2010. The potential conservation value of non-native species. Conservation Biology 25(3): 428-437.
Simberloff, D. 2003. Confronting introduced species: a form of xenophobia? Biological invasions 5: 179-192.
van Heezik, Y., Smyth, A., Mathieu, R. 2008. Diversity of native and exotic birds across an urban gradient in a New Zealand city. Landscape and Urban Planning 87: 223-232.
Despite the geopolitical currents that have surrounded Jerusalem for centuries, it is first and foremost a city, with the same urban needs and aspirations as any community in the world. In this urban context, making Jerusalem a cleaner, greener, and healthier city for all its residents has proved to be a shared goal.
Jerusalem has been described as “golden” by many poets and writers, inspired not only by the golden domes of holy buildings in the city, but also by the special quality of illumination created when the evening sun is reflected from the famous Jerusalem stone which characterizes most buildings in the city, whether new or old. Jerusalem stone has indeed been a major feature of the cityscape from the time of the First Temple.
The largest stones we know of are those in the Western Wall, whose lowest layers date back to the First Temple period. Yet these stones are basically the same local Jerusalem material used today in urban development. The little bird in the picture is of course the swift, mentioned in the Old Testament by the prophet Jeremiah. The Western Wall swifts, as they are called, were noted by the Prophet Jeremiah, who claimed that they are more faithful to their routine than the straying Children of Israel to their faith:
Yeah, the stork in the sky knows her appointed time, as the turtle dove and the swift observe their time of coming….
—Jeremiah, Chap. 8, vii
A swift circles before returning to its nest in the Western Wall. Photo: Amnon Hahn
There is something truly remarkable in the migration habits of the swifts. They are just a few of the half billion birds that fly over Jerusalem twice a year, on the busiest bird migration route in the world, following the famous Rift Valley, from Africa in the south to Anatolia in the North. Understanding the significance of Jerusalem in the global birding context led to the establishment of the Jerusalem Bird Observatory, a small but important natural area just behind the Knesset. Here birds are checked and banded before going on with their journey. For them, Jerusalem offers a green oasis, with food and water to compensate for their depletion of strength while flying over the desert south of the city. Many of us have come to realize that when we support a community garden or a green area in Jerusalem, we are effectively supporting this borderless global food chain. Fortunately, migrating birds are not required to hold visas for all the borders they cross…..On the other hand, a famous Israeli ecologist, Prof. Uriel Safriel, noted that the swifts seem to be no less worthy of the title “pilgrim” than the Jews, Christians, and Muslims that visit the Holy City at their appointed times.
Recently a stone in the Western Wall, that had become loose for some reason, dropped and landed at the feet of a woman who was praying by the wall. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the incident triggered a lot of speculation, and being a holy site in Jerusalem, reached the global news networks. These latter speculated as to whether this might have been an act of terrorism, but missed entirely what I believe was the important part of the story. In 2002, in the course of “repairing” the Western Wall and the walls of the Old City, the 88 nesting crevices used by the swifts for the last 2,500 years had been saved from being cemented over due to the watchful diligence of the Swift Lovers Society. After the recent incident, it was feared that in an attempt to secure the safety of pilgrims at the Western Wall, there would again be a move to cement over crevices, many of which serve as nests for the swifts during their annual visit and mating season. These gallant protectors of swifts’ rights joined forces with the Jerusalem Green Fund, the Antiquities’ Authority and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, dreading a renewed assault on the swifts’ nesting places, which might be blocked in in the name of protecting the safety of worshippers by the wall. We submitted a special request to the Rabbi of the Western Wall, and hopefully we have succeeded in ensuring the right of the Swifts to continue their annual pilgrimage to the Western Wall.
Indeed the concept of Jerusalem conjures up an infinite array of images, from the deeply spiritual, to the purely physical. The spiritual spectrum of Jerusalem primarily embraces the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and has throughout history provided a platform for conflict. Who will “control” the holy sites of Jerusalem? Who will be able to visit them? At this time, members of the three faith communities all have access to their places of worship, and the densely populated square kilometer of the Old City, with its Jewish, Christian, and Muslim quarters, conducts itself for the most part with mutual respect. This was not always so.
It is important to note that in spite of the geopolitical currents that have surrounded Jerusalem for centuries, and show no sign of abating, it is first and foremost a city, with the same urban needs and aspirations as any community in the world. In this urban context, making Jerusalem a cleaner, greener and healthier city for all its residents has proved to be a goal shared by all the communities in the city. That is why I have found great satisfaction to have been able to contribute to the greening of Urban Jerusalem and its bioregion for the last twenty-five years, in a succession of challenging roles.
First, I served as head of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (S.P.N.I) in the Jerusalem region, between 1996 and 2008. During these years I was able to develop a metropolitan coalition of organizations and neighborhood groups, known as “Sustainable Jerusalem”, and indeed major environmental goals were achieved by this cross-sectoral, non-political coalition. There is no doubt that the public impact of the many member organizations in the Sustainable Jerusalem Coalition working together, contributed greatly in the ultimately successful struggle to secure the Gazelle Valley as Israel’s first urban nature park.
In the pictures below we see a gazelle, surprised to be having his photo taken, and our friend the swift enjoying clean water in the park.
Meet a permanent resident of the Gazelle Valley Urban Nature Park. Photo: Amir Balaban
The Gazelle Valley is a triangular basin in the heart of West Jerusalem, part of the Soreq river basin, which runs out eventually to the Mediterranean. It is some sixty acres, and the land was used for fruit orchards in the 1940’s and 50’s. These were tended by two Kibbutzim, Ma’aleh Hachamisha and Kiryat Anavim. When the Israel Land Reserve Authority attempted to turn the valley into real estate, the surrounding neighborhoods, together with the S.P.N.I, fought to preserve the valley and in a historic move the residents themselves became the developers. This time, however, they developed Israel’s first urban nature park, now a sanctuary for a small but thriving herd of gazelles. In addition, as a result of designing the park around the natural drainage basin of the Soreq River, instead of the usual winter flooding, the winter rainfall is now collected in a series of three small lakes, whose water is supplemented in the summer with fully treated sewage water. This has resulted in attracting thousands of birds to the valley, and in the pictures above we can see not only a gazelle, but our friend the swift from the Western Wall enjoying his lunch break in the Gazelle Valley.
A swift stops for a midday drink at the Gazelle Valley Park. Photo: Amir Balaban
Another opportunity arose when the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem train was brought back into use (it had stopped running in 1993 because of frequent derailing, due to the sharp bends in the route). A new Jerusalem train station was built in the south-western neighborhood of Malha, instead of bringing the train to its original station in the German Colony. This left eight kilometers of abandoned railway track, which since 1993 had turned into a back yard dump for all the neighborhoods along the route. This stretch of abandoned track was to become Jerusalem’s Railway Park, a resounding success, that links an assortment of culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, such as Bet Safafa, German Colony, Bakaa, and Gonenim, through a clean, green linear park, safe for pedestrians and cyclists. The Railway Park has completely changed the ambience of South Jerusalem, providing a wonderful green corridor that runs from the business hub that thrives on the site of the old train station, to the Metropolitan Park serving Jerusalem in the South. Completed in 2015, it has exceeded expectations, and continues to surprise us again and again, with the many community initiatives that have sprung up along the route.
Green Pilgrimage and the Green Pilgrim’s Ladder. Diagram courtesy of Architect Osnat Post
Green Pilgrimage and the Green Pilgrim’s Ladder
Every year more than a quarter of a billion people choose to undertake a journey that has deep spiritual significance for them. These pilgrims do not merely seek a restful vacation or spectacular views, but a transformative experience that feeds their souls—a journey that taps into their cultural, spiritual and religious beliefs.
Most human beings share a sense of connection with the natural world. For people of faith this is linked to the belief that they have a responsibility to protect the divine work of creation, while for nonbelievers the mystery of the cycle of life on earth is often no less potent.
Throughout the world, more and more tourists are looking for alternative experiences and new meaning in their travels: tourism that caters for the individual, nature and ecotourism, incorporating a cultural, ethnic, and spiritual dimension.
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land is quite different from pilgrimage in other parts of the world, in diverse ways. Because Jerusalem is a spiritual destination for the three monotheistic faiths, members of all three communities strive to visit the Holy Land at least once during their lifetime.
In the neighborhood of Ein Karem, we have worked hard to implement the philosophy of Green Pilgrimage. To illustrate the way we see pilgrims and visitors to Jerusalem making their experience greener, we invite them to become familiar with our “Green Pilgrim Ladder”. We hope that by following the rungs of the ladder illustrated above, visitors to Jerusalem will not only benefit from the spiritual impact of their pilgrimage, but will go back home more responsible citizens of the world, having left a “Positive Footprint”. I owe special thanks to my colleagues in the Green Pilgrimage team, Architect Osnat Post and Avner Haramati
In Ein Karem, visitors can help to prune and care for ancient olive trees, and help restore the agricultural techniques used to feed the pilgrims coming to the Temple in Biblical times. When they visit Mary’s Spring, they can see how by local Christian communities joining forces with Ein Karem residents in a long and wearying campaign, the water from the holy spring has been redirected to flow as it should into the orchards in the Wadi down below.
Pilgrim Volunteers help to restore Biblical agricultural terraces in Ein Karem. Photo: Stephanie LeeThe Golden Domes of the Ein Karem Russian Church viewed from the Road to the Hadassah Hospital. Photo: Ron Havilio
In conclusion, I don’t believe it is possible to separate urban Jerusalem and green Jerusalem, which together constitute “Earthly Jerusalem”, from the city’s spiritual aura. This is supported by the fact that the flora and fauna of Jerusalem today are barely different from those of the time of the First and Second Temple and Jesus’ times. That is why we are convinced that the more our pilgrims become familiar with the nature and life-style of Biblical times, the better will they assimilate the true essence of Jerusalem, and the more they will wish to continue to “Leave a Positive Footprint” when they get back home.
As I submit this contribution to TNOC, winds of unsustainable change are blowing once again in Jerusalem, now on the eve of municipal elections. Civil society organizations are rallying once again in the Sustainable Jerusalem Lobby, desperately campaigning to protect the Jerusalem Hills to the West of the city, threatened for a second time by unsustainable urban sprawl. We are working both reactively and proactively. The damaging development is being fought in the planning committees, of course. However, parallel to that, we are trying to bring together neighborhood councils on the west side of Jerusalem, together with the small towns and villages to the west of the municipal boundary, to create a bioregional partnership of care and responsibility for the very natural resources that give us life.
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