I read this article by Menno Schilthuizen, a Dutch evolutionary biologist and ecologist, about the evolution of animal and plant species taking place in cities. In cities, evolution is propelled by two forces: the known laws of ecology AND the social dynamics of human society.
The city habitat, as a novel ecosystem, promises a towering stack of current and future questions that cross disciplines.
The article concludes that we are witnessing the emergence of a novel, hybrid type of ecosystem, one that is emerging at different locations all around the world at more or less the same time: the urban ecosystem. This made me question: why are more and more species calling the city home, and how do they adapt to survive in this new habitat?
Let’s start with my own home and habitat: Amsterdam. The Netherlands is one of the world’s most densely built up and populated countries. There are very few places in this country where you will find a horizon free of man-made structures, complete silence (even in the 650,000 ha appointed as silence area, where noise levels should not exceed 40 dB, there is no guarantee that the rules of silence will be complied with), or a night sky lit solely by the moon and stars (actually, we’ve got only two such spots). You will have to get yourself to the coastal outskirts to find these extraordinary places; in the rest of the country, ecology and society bump into each other constantly.
In order to guide this eco-societal contact, we have traditionally isolated one from the other by creating nature conservation areas and limiting urban sprawl by building compact cities. Zoning policies are valuable for protecting the functioning of different stakes that exist in a region: nature, food production, housing, industry, and so forth. The downside of prioritizing one function per area is the risk that the landscape becomes a collection of isolated or thinly connected islands. I will illustrate this using the “island” of intensive agriculture as an example of an isolated landscape, and the wildlife corridor as an example of a way to connect the “islands” of protected areas.
Large-scale intensive agriculture leads to impoverishment of the countryside’s natural character, chasing away birds and small animals that thrive on hedgerows and other linear elements that constitute the more traditional agricultural landscape in Europe. Removing grassy field margins and tree lines may obstruct water infiltration and increase erosion. At the same time, agricultural intensification and field enlargement lead to a decrease in the landscape’s attractiveness for tourism and outdoor recreation. People, just like other living creatures, enjoy variation in a landscape. So by prioritizing one function, in this case food production, there is a risk of losing other functions.
The second exemplary case is the wildlife crossing. The Dutch version of a wildlife crossing, the ecoduct, has become very popular over the past few years as an engineering solution for habitat fragmentation that connects natural areas with each other to enable safe animal crossings. And, as this video shows, wildlife crossings facilitate the movement of wildlife not only in Europe, but all over the world, including, for example, red crab migration in Australia. Yet since people are never far away, at least not in the Netherlands, the question has been raised whether to open wildlife crossings for recreational use. What would the deer, frogs, and hedgehogs think of sharing their crossing with hikers, bikers, and horseback riders?
Wildlife crossings are frequently built as a vegetated bridge over a highway—is there a place where ecology and society bump into each other more literally? Photo: Wageningen University & Research
Both cases illustrate a struggle between isolating versus mixing the diverse functions of the land. There is an ongoing debate about whether to propagate so-called nature-inclusive agriculture that offers opportunities for biodiversity increase through habitat creation—e.g., low-intensity management of drainage ditches that mimics natural processes. Farmers would receive financial compensation if they implement nature friendly measures. Then again, there is a strong argument against nature-inclusive agriculture: nature and large-scale agriculture have different demands on the land that are hard to satisfy simultaneously, such as in terms of the most preferred ground water level. So, in this case, ecology and society experience friction.
But the story is not just sad and gloomy. The bumping of ecology and society actually reveals very promising dynamics. And where do these dynamics reveal themselves most elegantly? In cities.
Because the city offers little space for isolation, functions need to be mixed. The city is a mix of buildings; infrastructure; flows of people, money and knowledge; but also home to an extremely diverse set of vegetation types and arrangements, water bodies, gardens, parks, and all things in between. The result is a unique ecosystem that operates on its own and that can only be expected to gain in importance, considering the increasing cover of urban land globally. Combined with the ongoing loss of natural habitat and the attraction of easily accessible food sources in the city, the emergence of the unique urban ecosystem has driven species formerly living in shaded forests and wild rivers to call this novel habitat home.
So, how do species adapt to urban living? Some are not so familiar yet with their new neighbors and remain on the lookout for spots with little human interference: the outskirts, industrial sites, and railway tracks. Amsterdam’s resident fox has built her hollow in a small patch of woodland right next to the train tracks and a large industrial area flanked by a busy road. Somehow, she manages to cross the road every day without getting hurt and with a meal for her family. On the menu: mostly rabbit (themselves once dumped here by their caretakers), alternated with the occasional rat or pigeon. A kingfisher has chosen to reside in one of the city’s port areas, a spot where the waters of river and sea collide to produce a large nutritional variety. From a sandy wall hidden by marshy bushes, the bird flies up and down while the ships go by. The grass snake has found a home in Amsterdam, too. It breeds in the urban forest, reproduces by the thousands, and the lucky few that are not turned into road kill or eaten by birds of prey can grow up to 100-110 cm long as adults. In March, these fellows like to go out in the sunshine, and you may very well find them sunbathing between the steamy stones of rail track levees—one of those urban fringes not crowded by people. If you’d like to see how the fox, kingfisher, and grass snake came to call the city home, the urban lives of these creatures have been beautifully captured in the 2015 documentary Amsterdam Wildlife, by city ecologist Martin Melchers.
Amsterdam’s resident fox jumping the water that divides its hollow from an industrial site. Photo: nrc (Dutch newspaper)
Other species, birds in particular, seem to mind the presence of human beings to a far lesser extent. Amsterdam is full of swallows building their nests underneath the tiles of sloping roofs; I witnessed a coot trying to build its nest on a deserted boat in the canal in front of my apartment; and people have found blackbirds nesting on inner-city balconies, even when that space is shared with the owner’s pet. People’s presence can even increase an individual’s chance of survival, as shown in a scene from the documentary Amsterdam Wildlife. In one of Amsterdam’s few high-rises, an office of ABN AMRO bank at the Zuidas business district, or “Financial Mile”, employees took over the care of a young Peregrine Falcon after it was deserted by its parents. The bank employees even came in on weekends to feed the bird. Peregrine Falcons are Amsterdam’s penthouse inhabitants; they like heights and started to inhabit the city when tall chimneys and office towers were constructed. From their lofts—often man-made nest boxes—they’re living an easy life, just waiting for a pigeon to fly by below before dinner is served.
A coot nesting on a heap of waste in the Amsterdam canals. Photo: belevenissenindenatuur.blogspot.nl
There are plenty more examples of animals adapting to city life. Madhusudan Katti recently described the growing population of endangered Kit Foxes in a California oil town in an article for TNOC. Matt Soniak has also provided entertaining stories about urban wildlife for Next City. In Chicago, for instance, coyotes have learned to navigate the city’s hectic traffic and can be found waiting patiently by the side of the road for traffic to stop, after which the coyotes start to make their way across. City coyotes in Chicago also appear to be healthier than their wild counterparts, as the city contains fewer of their predators and offers more food sources. Complex as they are, cities can turn out to be safer and steadier than many undeveloped areas. A severe drought in India that killed nearly half of the rural monkey population left Jodhpur’s city monkeys virtually unharmed. To other species, the urban heat island effect is what makes the city such an attractive place to live. Some insects just love the warmth, and this has resulted in more insects living inside than outside of cities. Meanwhile, people are purposely attracting biodiversity into the city. Residents actively plant flowers to attract pollinators and place bee hives on their green roofs, assisted and enthused by people and organizations trying to bring nature closer to the city.
So we know some of the reasons that animals come to the city, and have an idea of the ways in which they adapt their behavior to survive in their new homes. But does this adaptation also result in evolutionary changes? In his TNOC article, Madhusudan Katti mentions that Bakersfield’s Kit Foxes demonstrate novel traits. Also, some birds have adapted their singing to the urban environment. To deal with one of the largest urban burdens, low-frequency traffic noise, birds in San Francisco changed the tone of their melodies to a higher-pitched one. Or, they save their calls for the (relative) silence of the night. There are additional examples of typical urban bird behavior. Schilthuizen explains how, starting in 19th century Germany and extending from there to other European cities, blackbirds stopped migrating because cities offer plentiful food year round. In general, due to a lack of natural predators, urban birds are less sensitive to stress. This means that urban birds are evolving differently than birds of the same species that roam in non-urban areas. Research has shown that changes in urban bird behavior are taking place over decades, not millions and millions of years, and this process is labeled with the term HIREC: human-induced rapid evolutionary change.
Evolution-the-urban-way is happening all over the world. In a MOOC by Leiden University, Schilthuizen explains the effect on a species’ evolution if some reside in cities, facing strong selection pressure, and others of the same species don’t. Speciation may occur: the evolutionary splitting of a species into an urban and non-urban species. And if species evolve while in the city, how then do populations in different cities compare to each other? When the same evolutionary changes take place independently in different places or times, we arrive at what is called parallel evolution. These dynamics promise a towering stack of current and future questions for biologists and ecologists, but also for architects and planners (for a great example, see Mark Hostetler and colleagues’ new Building for Birds online tool), home owners and companies, food growers and traffic controllers. Most of all, these novel changes promise a chance to move from “nature despite people” and “nature for people” focuses all the way to a framework of “people and nature” that is underpinned by an interdisciplinary approach—just the right thing for our multi-function cities.
With the city habitat as a novel ecosystem, there is a whole new world to explore and discover for humans and, indeed, for many more animals.
And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a
mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a
million or two humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white-frost face of
that slim yellow mountain lion!
—D.H. Lawrence, Mountain Lion
Humans are an urban species. For the first time in our history, more than half the world’s 7.4 billion humans now live in urban settlements. We have become the single dominant species shaping the planet, from its surface lands and waters to its climate, and, by extension, to the future of all other species on earth. The Anthropocene age is upon us, and we are its defining creature. But what of the others—the other 2.5 million-so-far (by the most conservative estimate) known species on Earth? Who in the Anthropocene will speak for these creatures and their wild places? Where will be these wild things and, through their fading reflection, what will become of the wild within the human?
The old wilderness is now but fragments, and the wild (and its qualities) will be found in the refuges and connective tissue in-between.
In the last 20 years, landscape architecture has risen to prominence—and, in some cases, to dominance—within the applied professions of city building and urban place-making. In North America, the most urgent challenges posed by the environmental crises of the mid-twentieth century (some of which are referred to in the 1966 landmark Declaration of Landscape Architecture) have been, to a large extent recognized, managed, remediated, and in a rare few cases, solved. Indeed, the rise of 1970s and 1980s Third Wave Environmentalism was activated in large part through landscape architecture and supported by allied disciplines of ecology, environmental planning, environmental studies, and associated sciences. Together with landscape architects, these allies advocated, planned, and designed for environmentally responsible solutions, reducing and cleaning up toxic waste, controlling pollution, improving waste management, and initiating environmental conservation.
Central Park Island. Image: Sergei Semonov
These and other strategies were effective reactions as crisis management, but have now given way to more proactive strategies for longer-term, larger-scale, complex challenges related to climate change and sustainability. Landscape architecture has been at the centre of this shift, from new urbanism, to landscape urbanism, to ecological urbanism, landing squarely in the rhetoric of resilience and the practice of green infrastructure. Some might conclude that the landscape architect has arrived, centre stage, in the Anthropocene as urban saviour. But on this urbanising planet, what remains of the wild? More urgently, what will become of the wild things and their places, and of the quality of being that defines them and, by contrast, us?
On the relentless trajectory of global urbanisation, we continue to lose millions of acres each year of earth’s natural and agricultural cover through land conversion. The loss of natural habitats, whether by swift condemnation and conversion, or by the cumulative paper cuts of habitat fragmentation and degradation, ultimately leads to irretrievable loss of biodiversity. The Anthropocene is the planet’s sixth great extinction epoch: from almost daily extirpation to mass extinction, the wealth of the world’s biodiversity is bleeding away. While we may lament the loss of the wild, we also exacerbate it by failing to validate and value what it is to be wild. Honouring the condition of wild-ness is fundamental to valuing the wild things and caring for their places—central tenets in activating their protection.
Elk in Yellowstone National Park in 2016. Photo courtesy of Nina-Marie Lister.Wolf kill of elk in Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Nina-Marie Lister
The wild and its essence will not persist if we retreat passively. We cannot simply do nothing, for neglect is not benign. A different wild will inevitably emerge from the void left behind: from invasive species to barren fields and hostile environments, an evolving new nature—an unintended consequence of our own design—will simply select humans out, replacing us with plague and pest alike. Our role must be as active agents in reaffirming, re-establishing, and re-valuing the place and role of the wild. Policies and targets for wilderness protection vary widely, from the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity goal of 17 percent by 2020 to ecologist E.O. Wilson’s ambitious “Half-Nature” movement to protect from development 50 percent of the world’s natural landscapes. In the abstract, these targets are blunt instruments; they need design interventions to engage the imagination and empower action. From restoration sites to rewilding initiatives, from greenways to green infrastructure, we must engage in nothing less than a planetary strategy of landscape connectivity. Large wilderness is now rare, but its interstitial spaces will be the practice of the everyday. Designing and re-making connections between remnant wild fragments will be paramount, from the “mongrel places” [1] of the in-between, to novel and hybrid ecosystems, to agricultural working lands, to reserves for hunting and harvesting, and even derelict places of urban decay: together these landscapes will form a wild mosaic for the next wave of conservation. In the Anthropocene, there is no away to which we retreat, no pristine place unaffected by human hands. Rather, we need design tactics for the full spectrum of landscapes from urban to sub-urban to rural to wilderness. The old wilderness is now but fragments, and the wild (and its qualities) will be found in the refuges and connective tissue in-between. The local work of the landscape architect will be humble, to stitch together the fragments, but the cumulative design is planetary: we must (re)weave the tapestry of the wild back into the landscape of the future.
Grizzly and cub on a road in Montana. Photo: CLLC
To lose the wild is to lose that which makes us most human. The sad irony is that in wasting the wild, we lose a vital, visceral, and primal part of ourselves. Yet landscape architecture has the tools to integrate these stories through the medium of design, reflecting the relationship between wild places and the emotional responses they provoke—and the very human qualities they evoke. Reflected in art, anchored in master plans and policies, implemented in design, landscape architecture has the power and the authority to make legible the story of the wild, to re-centre its place within the landscapes we make, and by extension, to wake the wild within the human. So I urge us, as landscape architects and allies: reaffirm the primordial place of the wild, reactivate the vital role of wild things, and reconnect the landscapes that sustain us all. In so doing, we must design with awareness, humility, intention, direction, and conviction. To honour the voice of the wild, we must listen for it; to reveal the sublime of wild places, we must see them, and to assert the wild-ness that makes us human, we must value it. For without the wild, we are condemned to the endless monochrome, lost to a monoculture of our making.
Can environmental education in cities foster urban sustainability? Yes—according to 90 scholars from six continents who contributed to a forthcoming book called UrbanEnvironmentalEducationReview (Russ and Krasny, eds, 2017). Three themes—participation of urban residents in planning and environmental stewardship, exploring and reconstructing urban places, and forming partnerships among disciplines and organizations who care about the urban environment—emerged from the book chapters as critical to environmental education’s ability to promote sustainability, justice, livability, and resilience in cities.
Urban environmental education is driving progress in the wider field of environmental education by emphasizing participation, place, and partnership.
Although urban environmental education seems like a relatively new field, environmental education and related conservation education turned attention to cities a long time ago. For example, in 1942, Renner noted, “It is often assumed that the city is a much poorer place in which to teach conservation than in the country community. It is doubtful, however, whether the city actually is a less fertile field than the country” (p. 194). He argued that cities offer opportunities to connect with nature through learning about conservation in city parks and restoring urban riverbanks. In an earlier book about conservation education, Renner and Hartley (1940) suggested that children spend too much time in movies while only occasionally in parks and that children can participate in urban planning. Later, Swan (1969) provided one of the first definitions of urban environmental education, emphasizing its importance in students developing awareness of urban settings and improving their schoolyards. This early writing about environmental education in cities predated the formalization of the broader field of environmental education in the 1970s.
Fast forward to today: environmental education is not the only field that helps urban residents learn about sustainability. Urban planners, artists, celebrities, science educators, and community leaders, alongside government agencies and businesses, all help urban residents address urban sustainability issues. Further, urban environmental educational activities are no longer confined to classrooms, parks, or far-away residential camps—in fact, they take place in most urban settings, including community gardens, water-treatment plants, schoolyards, green buildings, and urban restoration sites. And instead of a narrow focus on individual pro-environmental behaviors, urban environmental educators seek to change social norms, foster environmental citizenship, and help people re-think how we should organize cities for sustainability outcomes. These recent developments justify and bring new meaning to the term “urban environmental education,” which emphasizes a diversity of pedagogical methods, settings, providers, audiences, and goals.
To bring these assorted goals, practices, and professionals together, and to provide a theoretical lens and empirical research to support their work, we decided to produce a textbook on urban environmental education. How has UrbanEnvironmentalEducationReview moved the field of environmental education forward? In addition to the myriad practices described by the authors, we discuss three principles of urban environmental education that emerged from the chapters in the book: participation, place, and partnership.
Cover of the upcoming book Urban Environmental Education Review edited by Russ and Krasny (Cornell University Press, 2017).
Participation
Danish scholars Jeppe Laessoe and O.K. Pedersen identified four types of participatory practices in environmental education: participation as encounters with nature, as action, as social learning, and as deliberative dialogue (Læssøe and Krasny, 2013). These practices are often combined in real life. Children in Boulder, Colorado, spend time observing insects in city parks (encounters with nature), and help redesign Boulder’s public spaces (action). Action approaches range from the political to urban planning, such as when impoverished youth in the highlands above La Paz advocated for an aerial tramway that would give them access to the city. In Australia, South Africa, and parts of Europe, where environmental educators assume a more deliberative and critical stance, social learning is intended to radically disrupt unsustainable routines and vested powers and interests.
However, participation is not without its challenges. For example, when rising sea levels immediately threaten a city, government regulations, social marketing, and other more government-directed approaches may be necessary. Participatory approaches can also be critiqued for their tokenism, and for claims that youth are the principal decision makers when in fact adult guidance is needed and prominent behind the scenes.
Children in La Paz, Bolivia participate in community planning workshop. Photo credit: Karen Malone
Place
Students who steward community gardens, plan for public transportation, or otherwise help address urban sustainability issues are reconstructing urban places. In so doing, they may be forming new place meanings, as we found among youth engaged in civic ecology practice in the Bronx, New York City (Kudryavtsev, Krasny and Stedman, 2013). For these youth, spending time creating a bioswale garden along the Bronx River or removing invasive species from an urban garden led to redefining their local place meanings. They no longer saw the Bronx as devoid of nature, but instead as a place where one could experience nature and wildlife. Whether changing place meanings through reconstructing places in turn helps address other sustainability remains to be seen.
In the Bronx, New York, students and other community members remove invasive plants and come to view the city as an ecological place that has parks and rivers and supports biodiversity. Photo credit: Alex Russ.
Partnerships
Partnerships in urban environmental education cross disciplines, ethnicandculturaldivides, and organizations or governance actors. All three types of partnerships are needed to address wicked problems.
At the Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee Wisconsin, a green building, a solar power station, public art, an urban wasteland being transformed into a park, riparian habitats, classrooms, and a climbing wall string together disciplines such as civil engineering, landscape architecture, and building design, alongside education. Restoration-based education in cities means heeding local values, traditions, and socioeconomic conditions alongside ecological considerations, as well being sensitive to diverse cultures and issues of power. If one fails to incorporate such diversity, misinterpretations, failure, and even environmental injustices can result. Organizational partnerships may start as more narrow efforts to bridge formal and non-formal educational institutions, but then expand to actors not directly engaged in education. One example comes from Singapore’s cross-sectoral 3-P (People, Public and Private) partnership, which focuses on recycling, energy, and water conservation in schools, and engages a network of advisors from government, NGOs, and the private sector. An author from South America sums up how critical partnerships are, saying: “Over the last two decades, Brazil has come to the realization that the current state of the environment is too dire for environmental education to be carried out as individual initiatives.”
Environmental education has often been seen as promoting environmental literacy, which encompasses knowledge, affect, and action that benefit the individual and the environment. In cities, this means partnering with organizations addressing public health, justice and equity, community and youth development, and urban planning, among others. In short, environmental education can be one actor among many in addressing sustainability issues.
In Favela Maré, Rio de Janeiro, university students, professors, local nongovernmental organizations, and residents collaborate to promote education about urban agriculture and hydroponics for children and families. Photo credit: Alex Russ.
Citiesasleadersinenvironmentaleducation
Just as cities serve as centers for sustainability and resilience innovations, environmental education in cities has the potential to push the field of environmental education toward innovative practices, including practices related to diversity. Whereas environmental educators often talk about ethnic and other types of diversity, our reasons—“why diversity?”—may not always be clear (e.g., diversity initiatives that seek to help marginalized peoples, to address past injustices, or to engage multiple perspectives in order to generate sustainability innovations).
Drawing on ideas from social networking and social innovation, authors included in our UrbanEnvironmentalEducationReview demonstrate how professionals trained in the environmental and education disciplines have as much to learn from those trained in community and youth development as practitioners in those fields have to learn about the environment. These two types of expertise come together in an after-school program at a Catholic charity in the Bronx, or a family empowerment initiative in public housing in Anacostia. Such urban programs engage youth and families in outdoor activities, but their primary goal is to foster youth communication and academic skills and strengthen family ties, rather than foster environmentally responsible behaviors. Although the urban, low-income audiences for these efforts suggest a diversity goal of helping marginalized people, the programs also reveal a change in perspective about diversity, from expanding existing outreach programs to simply being more inclusive of non-traditional audiences, to recognizing and honoring each professional actor’s assets—what each brings to the table—and how, by bringing different actors together, social innovations linking the environment, learning, and youth and community development can emerge.
Perhaps most importantly, by exploring the diverse practices and diverse forms of participation, place-making, and partnerships in cities, the authors help to move the broader field of environmental education forward. For years, our discipline has been defined—and sometimes constrained—by a definition generated at a UN convention in Tbilisi, USSR in 1977: “Environmental education is a learning process that increases people’s knowledge and awareness about the environment and its associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address the challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitments to make informed decisions and take responsible action.” Perhaps inadvertently, this definition implied that if we could teach people knowledge and increase their awareness, they would change their behaviors—an assumption that the years since Tbilisi have critically called into question.
Further, environmental education’s historical focus on individual behaviors has been challenged as the necessity for collective action becomes increasingly evident. Today, the North American Association of Environmental Education definition of environmental education incorporates civic engagement—perhaps reflecting research on social capital and collective efficacy that implies the importance of civic ties and local initiative in generating collective action. Urban environmental education—through forming partnerships with youth development and health and planning professionals, through incorporating notions of governance and social innovation, and through demonstrating how learning can be embedded in collective stewardship, restoration, and planning practice rather than as a precursor to environmental behaviors—is playing an important role in transforming the way we think about the relationships between environmental education, learning, and action.
To explore these ideas in-depth, we invite you to read the forthcoming 30-chapter edited book Urban Environmental Education Review. Also, watch 30 free videos recorded by chapter authors (see link below). Finally, the Cornell University Civic Ecology Lab plans to offer an Urban Environmental Education online courses in summer 2017.
Watch for announcements of the online course and book at www.civicecology.org
References
Kudryavtsev, A., Krasny, M. E., & Stedman, R. C. (2012). The impact of environmental education on sense of place among urban youth. Ecosphere, 3(4), 29. doi:10.1890/ES11-00318.1
Læssøe, J., and Krasny, M. E. (2013). Participation in environmental education: Crossing boundaries within the big tent. In M. E. Krasny and J. Dillon (Eds.), Trading zones in environmental education: Creating transdisciplinary dialogue (pp. 11–44). New York: Peter Lang.
Renner, G.T. (1942). Conservationofnaturalresources: Aneducationalapproachtotheproblem. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Russ, A., and Krasny, M.E. (Eds.) (2017). Urbanenvironmentaleducationreview. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Swan, J. (1969). The challenge of environmental education. Phi Delta Kappan, 51(1), 26-28.
Marianne Krasny is professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Director of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University, and leader of EPA’s national environmental education training program (“EECapacity”).
Many cities still have green areas in various forms, despite the fragmentation of their ecosystems. The call for integration of built form with nature is now more explicit and can be discerned from the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 as well as the New Urban Agenda of 2016.
Kampala, like many developing cities, has problems & opportunities. Its nature, if conserved, can enhance ecosystem services.
There is motivation both from global goals and local needs for cities in different ecologies to make progress in enhancing ecosystems within their territorial extents, as well as beyond. This impetus becomes even more compelling when a city comparatively exhibits more opportunities for ecosystem enhancement because of the existing building blocks it contains. As noted by Myers (2016), many cities in developing countries have been seen and described as sites of problems—poverty; deficiency in infrastructure; and places of high risk to climate-induced, as well as other types, of perils [1]. But not so much literature or practice views these cities as sites of opportunities for enhancing ecological processes that have local as well as regional and global benefits.
Kampala city fits this categorization as a site of perils characterized by inherent development problems. But Kampala city also exhibits opportunities which need to be harnessed. In this article, I present five reasons why Kampala’s nature, if conserved, can enhance ecosystem services—and why the city should conserve these resources.
A disjointed mosaic of green patches needs connectivity
Kampala city has recently become characterized by sporadic development, where plots of differing sizes are opened up for construction of housing, infrastructure, or industrial development. This development represents a transformation of natural areas with vegetative cover to grey-red impervious surfaces [2]. The reasons for these transformations notwithstanding, the form in which the seemingly unsystematic opening of land for development occurs is the concern here. The resulting pattern in some areas can be described as unconnected, with isolated patches of green having either been left intact or having regenerated with time as development slows down. These green patches may be viewed as problematic because open land areas are associated with flood risk and reduced water quality.
But, as Myers mentions, opportunity lies in spatially linking up the small patches of green along the wetland in Kampala, joining hilltops and valleys to create corridors for plant and animal life. This outcome of planning requires a move from micro-level planning to meso-scale and city-regional levels of planning, so that the spatial linkages of the patches can deliberately create a mosaic that enables nature to thrive in the city. As noted in myearlierarticles for TNOC, everything from primates and small- to medium-sized mammals, from aquatic animals and plants to trees, can thrive in a mosaic that is more spatially linked. Corridors would enable migration and temporal movement of wildlife.
In this way, Kampala can formulate a deliberate plan for conservation through planning for ecological mosaics. But more importantly, Kampala should actually create this green-patched mosaic because of its co-benefits to residents and commuters in the city. With industrialization increasing and energy originating mainly with fossil fuels in the city, coupled with the regional climatic influences of westerly air mass systems that blow sand from the Sahara desert, air quality in Kampala is likely to worsen [3]. For example, from August 2016 to December 2016, the daily average temperatures in Kampala have been above the average of 28 degrees C [4]. A mosaic of connected green patches would increase ecosystem services of moderated micro temperatures, improved air quality, and improved water quality for people in this cityscape. Thus, planning for local, specific ecosystem enhancement is a must for a city such as Kampala.
Current patches and possible green mosaic in Kampala. Photo courtesy of Shuaib Lwasa.
Nature on hilltops is critical for the city
Kampala is characterized by a geography and geology of rolling plateaus with wide valleys in which a lining of wetlands exists. This geological nature dictates that care must be given to the interlinkages between hilltops and valleys, which influence several ecosystem services, including drainage of the city. If vegetated, they play the vital role of protecting soil from erosion; if erosion proceeds, it can have various harmful consequences. The ecology of Kampala in this respect can be described as a remnant of a rainforest terrestrial system which, in its current form, is interspersed with built forms. The weaving in of built forms has greatly altered the ecosystem, and many hilltops are patched with built-up or bare land areas. Indeed, hilltops are preferred by high-income people for housing developments, so these areas are on the high end of the land value gradient. This valuation triggers a competition between nature and urban built forms on hilltops. Establishing a minimum vegetation threshold for these landscape elements would have benefits to the ecosystem and to the residents or users of the city.
Trees, in particular, are critical for many ecological reasons. First, patches with trees provide a service of wind breaks and regulated storm flow as excessive precipitation patterns increase. This will become important in the context of a changing climate pattern. Secondly, trees provide habitat for various animals that are needed in the city for continued ecosystem functioning. Thirdly, trees can reduce the effects of intense storms that detach soil particles which, when the land is cleared of trees, accumulates as runoff and erode soils. Such erosion, which drains silts (whether natural or channelized) can be costly for maintenance. For these reasons, hilltops should be conserved with tree vegetation cover, even if this means the City Council must buy off this land, which is prime on market, or through other means of incentivizing developers to keep the built surfaces on the developed plots to a minimum, and the rest of the land area planted with trees.
This is not to say that trees are not needed on lower slopes and valleys. Trees, as mentioned previously, are important in the ecosystem of the city and are needed everywhere that it is possible to have them. Still, Kampala should endeavor to protect the hilltops in particular, because the ecosystem services derived from green patches on hilltops is invaluable. By providing windbreaks, reducing the accumulation of runoff, reducing soil erosion, and providing habitat for animals to moderating microclimates and enhancing air quality, these hilltops are critical to the city and its people.
Hill top patches and forested neighborhoods in Kampala. Photo courtesy of Shuaib Lwasa.
Vegetation reduces heat
In the last year, temperatures have been at their highest on record both globally and locally in Kampala. These high temperatures have also been associated with below average rainfall recorded in the region around Kampala, which has been attributed to La Niña. One consequence of high temperatures and below average rainfall has been an increasing number of hot days and hot nights in the city. This has implications for health and livability in areas of high urban heat island intensity. Although there has not been a record of health challenges associated with the increasing number of hot days specifically in Kampala, there are indications that excessive heat stresses people, systems, and the availability of water in cities generally.
From a study on urban agriculture and forestry as a mediator of local climates, we know the rate at which different types of vegetation, and particularly trees, moderate the local ambient temperature [5]. Thus, one reason that nature should be conserved and increased in Kampala is the undoubted role vegetation plays in lowering temperatures. During months and nights of excessive heat, trees and plants critically reduce the temperature. This is a natural way of adapting to a warming climate compared to other possible ways. Thus, if future climatic scenarios involve an increasing number of hot days and hot nights, it is important that nature should be conserved in the city. That conservation should proceed because of its role in regulating microclimates that directly impact people at a local scale.
Vegetation is key for stormwater management
Rainfall in Kampala is characterized by intense storms, delivering a total average amount of rainfall ranging from 10 to 45 mm in short periods. This intensity of rainfall, coupled with inadequate systems of storm management, today results in flooding even in places that previously were not experiencing flooding in Kampala. In the long rains of March to May 2016, there were several storms that led to widespread flooding in the city and high runoff that affected middle slopes as well as high slopes in some locations of the plateaus.
These recent excessive storms are just one facet of the story. If the storms increase in the future, then Kampala must be prepared for the consequences of increased flooding. The important economic reason why intensive rainfall should be a reason for conservation of nature is that these storms affect businesses and livelihoods, as well as damaging infrastructure, which is costly to construct in the midst of Kampala’s very minimal maintenance culture. It is economically reasonable that investing in nature will directly reduce costs associated with flood-related damages and losses. Nature-based green infrastructure is one of the strategies that the city needs to consider as a move towards reducing grey infrastructure. This should be taken seriously because allowing intense storms to chronically produce this damage slows the economic progress of people and households in the city.
Recent flooding in Kampala. Photo courtesy of Shuaib Lwasa.
The space between buildings is an opportunity for embedding ecosystem restoration and enhancement
There is also a pattern of redeveloping areas and infilling some empty plots and tracts of land with developments at various scales in the city. Redevelopments and infilling offer an opportunity for the enhancement of ecosystem services if nature is weaved in with the redevelopments—an additional reason to pursue the conservation of nature in Kampala. Redevelopments and infilling allow plot-level restoration, while infrastructure to city-regional interventions such as retentions, green mosaics, and corridors, can integrate natural infrastructure into the city. These interventions would have to rely on revised planning and development procedures, with adjusted, appropriate standards and requirements. Many of these would be at no cost to the municipality, while several incentives could be incorporated for developers.
But there are contradictions related to redevelopment and infilling, which also need to be dealt with. For example, whereas the city council and government could offer exemplars for the recommended green infrastructure interventions, these institutions are also leading the destruction of the existing green infrastructure by allowing infrastructure projects in wetlands, as well as clearing hilltops, with the justification that they are being laid bare for development. This trend has to be stopped and more comprehensive processes put in place in order to check the destruction of natural assets of the city. In areas open for development and where possible, nature should take precedent. Where this is not possible, the strategies of plot-level greening can be applied to ensure a path of creating green mosaics that then become weaved into the built urban form.
Conclusion
There are many evidence-based reasons that nature should and can be conserved in cities, including Kampala. In this article, I have given five reasons that illustrate both the urgency and possibility for attaining “low-hanging fruit” in enhancing the ecosystem of the city. As already documented, technological solutions will not provide all the answers to many of the intertwined problems that we are experiencing now.
We need to move away from the trend of handling urban development as separate from disaster risk reduction and climate action. Although this is the pattern, experience shows that these problems, just like their solutions, are very much interrelated. A comprehensive framework that provides a suite of solutions is the starting point that builds on existing practices. These general solutions would be appropriate in many African cities, though they would have to be adapted to the different ecologies. Starting small and building big is a more proactive approach to enhancing cityscapes’ abilities to address the challenges they face. Good development is good for well-being, economy, risk reduction, and nature, and existing cities need to check their development patterns and adjust their planning systems to incorporate nature into their development.
[1] G. Myers, Urban environments in Africa: A critical analysis of environmental politics, Policy Press, 2016.
[2] K. Vermeiren, A. Van Rompaey, M. Loopmans, E. Serwajja, P. Mukwaya, Urban growth of Kampala, Uganda: Pattern analysis and scenario development, Landsc. Urban Plan. 106 (2012) 199–206. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2012.03.006.
[3] R. Timmermans, H.D. van der Gon, J. Kuenen, A. Segers, C. Honoré, O. Perrussel, P. Builtjes, M. Schaap, Quantification of the urban air pollution increment and its dependency on the use of down-scaled and bottom-up city emission inventories, Urban Clim. 6 (2013) 44–62.
[4] Seasonal Performance – UNMA – Uganda National Meteorological Authority, (n.d.). https://www.unma.go.ug/index.php/climate/seasonal-performance (accessed December 12, 2016).
[5] S. Lwasa, F. Mugagga, B. Wahab, D. Simon, J.P. Connors, C. Griffith, A meta-analysis of urban and peri-urban agriculture and forestry in mediating climate change, Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. 13 (2015) 68–73. doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2015.02.003.
Sweden, especially its capital, Stockholm, is a very famous “green” city. Indeed, Stockholm’s green infrastructure wedges system is one of the most recognized and cited around the world because of the significant ecosystem services that it provides and because it acts as a source of natural biodiversity for an urban environment. These wedges are remnants of old royal and nobility’s parks and forests. Stockholm was also an initiator of the world’s first Urban National Park (27km2 in size).
Changing people’s attitudes towards “real nature” requires understanding “designed nature’s” historic precedents.
However, “ordinary” urban landscapes in Stockholm and other Swedish cities were created during the era of the multifamily “People’s Home” (1940-1959) movement and the “Million Program” (1960s- mid-1970s) later in the end of the 20th century, and employed quite a simple model for urban green development. A global, modernistic, prefabricated design was based on intensively managed lawns (as a major “matrix” of neighborhood green “canvas”) with some scattered trees and decorative shrubs and perennials (see photos below). There is a sharp edge between ”real nature” and this “designed nature”. By “real nature”, we mean native ecosystems (for example forests or grasslands) that developed as the result of natural processes, with no or limited human intervention.
The domination of prefabricated design in Swedish multifamily houses: canvasses of lawn with some scattered trees and decorative shrubs and perennials. Million Programme Holma, Malmö and People’s Home area Tunabackar in Uppsala. Photos: Maria Ignatieva
The tidiness and clear visibility of management are the main pillars of today’s vision of urban green areas in the majority of Swedish cities. Why are the most artificial, expensive resources and energy-consuming elements, such as lawns (or groups of trimmed exotic decorative shrubs) understood as real, truly “green”, and, ultimately, a substitute for the real nature?
One of the solutions for returning real nature to our urban neighborhood is creating a new landscape architecture style—which I call biodiversinesque—which will employ biodiversity and natural processes as major design tools that will make nature-based solutions clearly visible for urban citizens. Since lawns cover the most significant parts of urban green areas, searching for an alternative lawn is very timely.
In our ongoing transdisciplinary project “Lawn as an ecological and cultural phenomenon: searching for sustainable lawns in Sweden” we found that 51.8 percent of total urban green areas in Swedish cities are covered by lawns. Lawns are both a source and a sink for greenhouse gases. Based on our research, we concluded that grass mowing was the main contributor to greenhouse gases from most lawns. Reduced mowing frequency and the use of electrified machinery can lessen the carbon footprint of lawns.
We found out that majority of people love lawns and see them as a “must have” trivial element of green areas. However, even with this attachment to conventional lawns, a high number of dwellers would like to see more biodiverse meadows in their neighborhoods.
Swedish municipalities are also quite cost-conscious; therefore, they are open to alternatives to traditional lawns.
In the spring-summer of 2016, we established several alternative, experimental types of lawns in Ultuna Campus, Uppsala (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) and in Sundbyberg public park at the request of Sundbyberg Municipality (see photo below). We found inspiration for Swedish alternative solutions in rethinking and re-evaluating the history of the Lawn within a Western vision of the relationship between Man and Nature. The answer to how we can change people’s attitude towards the acceptance of “real nature” can also be found within its historic precedents.
Alternative lawn in Sundbyberg Park, Stockholm, July 2016. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
In Ancient Greek culture, nature had a very rich inner life animated by the spirits of the mountains and valleys, lakes and streams. Nymphs of flowers—anthousai—and nymphs of trees—dryads—inhabited forests and meadows. Architectural monuments and houses were included in surrounding landscapes and there were not too many disturbances to nature. People admired flowers in natural grasslands and forests. There were no gardens as they exist today. Education and exercises took place in sacred groves and valleys.
Pragmatic Romans completely changed attitudes to nature. Now, the World of Nature and the World of Gods had become separate spheres. From this particular moment, the predominantly materialistic view of the natural world developed in Western society. It was the starting point of a growing detachment from nature and “Withdrawal of spirits from human awareness”. Nature was seen as something “out there” to be viewed and exploited by human technological power. Roman poet Publius Papinius Statius (45-96 AD) expressed a pretty clear departure from nature when he started to associate “wild” with “unlovely” (Naydler 2006). Since Roman times, the concept of beauty has been linked with the concept of the human “taming” (training) of nature and human aesthetic control. In this sense, topiary—the art of clipping plants—introduced by the Romans is the finest concept of human ownership of nature. Through the practice of topiary, plants were made “faceless” and, inevitably, lost their spiritual essence (see photo). Roman gardens became specially arranged places for human well-being and pleasure, and reinforced human power over the natural world. Such a turn mirrored Roman culture’s basis on slavery and the master-slave relationship, which also extended to human dealings with the natural world. Even if there is no direct evidence that lawns were used in Roman gardens, ideologically, lawns—artificially created elements which need a tremendous amount of maintenance—could fit into Roman culture extremely well.
Topiary art is the finest example of human ownership of nature. Parterre in Isola Bella, Italy. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Most researchers believe that the lawn, as a purely decorative, artificially-created plant community based on grass species (namely, a “velvet green carpet”), first appeared in medieval gardens. Green grass strips were used in small amounts (in turf benches and some pathways). Medieval enclosed formal gardens symbolized God’s soul triumphing over Nature (since gardens were created by humans, which are themselves created in God’s image). However, medieval people still felt that nature was an alive phenomenon full of spirits. Virgin Mary, the spiritual patron of every medieval garden, was interchangeable with Lady Natura. That is why flowery meadows were quite a common feature at that time. In this case, freely flowering meadows (which were also available in nearby nature) were not about control, but about the enhancement of natural beauty in a religious direction (each plant was symbolic and connected to the Bible). This particular period of medieval flowering meads came to be an inspiration for modern, grass-free (tapestry) lawns. This concept of lawns, comprising specific, mowing-tolerant, low-growing plants instead of grass, was introduced by Lionel Smith in the U.K. at the beginning of the 21st century.
Flowery meadows were quite a common feature in medieval gardens. “The Virgin Seated on a Low Wall Picking a Flower for the Christ Child, Saint Agnes, Saint Dorothea, and another female saint (possibly Saint Barbara) in an Enclosed Garden Beyond, an Extensive River Landscape with a City in the Distance,” by the Master of the Tiburtine Sibyl, oil on panel. Dated 1468.
The subsequent history of a Western vision of Nature continued the Roman’s concept of human ownership over nature. In the Renaissance, a garden displayed the classical culture of its owner and demonstrated human sovereignty over nature. In baroque formal gardens, lawns (decorative parterres), which departed from nature even further, started to be one of the essential features. Regularly cut green carpets emerged as perfect elements to serve human desire and express aesthetic ideals. From this particular point of view, green areas started to become the province of architects and were designed on drawing boards.
Interestingly enough, the modern vision of a global landscape is based on a Picturesque convention of using extended pastureland and lawns, which seemed so close to nature. However, this vision was mistaken for ecological quality, and this conception of an “ideal” landscape was accepted as a “real nature”, first in England and, later, in the rest of the world (e.g. Stowe Park). It is not surprising that modernistic urban landscapes follow this Western vision of Nature as something distant from people, and accept that it is a “right” attitude to create and design this “lovely” nature subservient to humans.
The results of the social studies of our LAWN Project in Swedish multifamily housing areas were not so different from U.K. or U.S. social studies’ findings in private gardens. People become attached to conventional lawns over generations, as they grow up amongst “designed” nature. Three alternative versions of lawns (grass-free lawn, a meadow-like lawn surrounded by mown strips (“cues to care”), and flowering annual pictorial meadows) received a range of opinions. For example, in some neighborhoods, grass-free lawns were considered very attractive. However, people stated that they were afraid of walking on such lawns because they worried about destroying nice flowers. Swedish stakeholders of multifamily housing areas advised placing meadow-like lawns in the periphery of housing areas. Meadows framed by mown lawns received quite a few positive responses.
Stowe Park: the English picturesque “ideal” landscape was accepted as “real nature”. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Our vision of alternative lawns for Sweden was inspired by old, traditional Lövangar—trees within the meadow. Even though Sweden still has a significant number of native ecosystems, the amount of grasslands (natural and semi-natural) has dramatically declined. Our vision of alternative lawns is to create biodiverse, aesthetically pleasing, and cost-effective plant communities based on the diverse native Swedish flora. Such biodiverse lawns can help to return real nature into the urban environment. We work closely with the Swedish firm Pratensis—a pioneer in the conservation of natural Swedish grasslands that is promoting the use of biodiverse alternative solutions for lawns. The firm collects seeds only from natural plant communities within different parts of Sweden. Pratensis is grounded in local plants that are extremely cost-efficient and suitable for our northern climate. Our suggestions for biodiverse meadow-alternatives to lawns correspond to the character of meager Nordic nature, with its modest color and texture (see photo below). Such meadows were used and seen as beautiful by many Swedish generations of peasants and also in the 1930s by dwellers of Stockholm’s functionalist landscape school, which used meadows instead of lawns.
Meadows from Swedish native plants created from Pratensis seed mixture in the municipal park in Växjö. Photo courtesy of Maria Ignatieva
Our vision of creating meadows with only native plants contrasts with modern British and U.S. approaches of promoting a more “pictorial” aesthetic for alternative plantings. The British and U.S. argument asserts that modern people will accept naturalistic plantings in urban environments only if they have more color and texture (for example, by planting exotic flowering plants from prairies or Asian grasslands). It is clear to me that this is very much a continuation fo the Western trend and vision of “taming” nature, of creating “improved” and “lovely” nature. Such a vision insists on the inability of modern man to love unvarnished nature, with its weeds and untidiness. Why not to try to find a solution wherein people appreciate nature as it is? In its “wild” originality?
The question which needs to be decided in the nearest future is: How can we design “wild” nature in urban environments? How can we teach urban dwellers without special knowledge to appreciate “wild” plant communities next to their houses, and not to be afraid of them—that they can experience grass-free lawns by stepping or sitting on them?
Grass-free lawn in SLU, Ultuna Campus Demonstration Trial. Photo courtesy of Maria Ignatieva
Results of our LAWN project social surveys have shown that people are tired of the monotonous lawns that surround them. Actually, people are ready for variety in green areas. We believe that our new types of alternative lawns, based on native plants and models of plant arrangements which mimic native plant communities, can be one of the types of “designed real nature” in urban environments. Why not suggest, at the level of neighborhood design, to arrange different solutions that include conventional lawns (recreational and sport field) and different ranges of “mixed nature”, such as “cues to care” (combinations of meadow-like lawns framed by regularly cut lawns), as well as “designed real nature”, such as grass-free lawns, and biodiverse meadows?
Suggestion for variety of alternative lawns in one of neighborhoods in Göteorg. Design: U. Bergbrant and S. Andersson
The most important part of this new paradigm’s development for designing urban “real nature” is experimentation and trying new solutions to ascertain what is suitable for each country and even for a particular neighborhood.
Grass free lawn (tapestry lawn) with 29 native plants at SLU Campus experimental site in Ultuna, Uppsala. Photo: Maria IgnatievaMeadow bench in SLU Campus, Ultuna Photo: Maria Ignatieva
It’s not unusual by any means in the contemporary art world, but as an edifice, the Power Station of Art is just about as apathetic to nature as most any building could be. Typifying the space is the view from the observation deck, proudly showcasing the ability of man to build a massive wall of housing towers.
The societal critiques present at the Power Station of Art point, in many ways, to a maturity and openness we don’t normally associate with China.
Given our position in Shanghai, it’s not a bad view.
To its credit, the building was once, as you might have guessed, a power station. It has since been transformed into a truly impressive space for showing art. The dedication of the Chinese government (and municipality of Shanghai) to building a world-class facility is evident here. Both in this exhibition and in previous shows, the space—where shimmering new walls of glass mingle with leftover industrial quirks and kinks—is used well by the curatorial team.
In many ways, the interplay between nature, industry, and technology is firmly planted in the commentary of the work.
The Power Station of Art building, and a view from the building’s terrace. Images: Patrick LydonA view of the main foyer at the Power Station of Art. Image: Suhee Kang
The show’s title, “Why Not Ask Again”, is, itself, telling of what viewers will find here: a deeper questioning of the questions to which we might think we already know the answers. In the West, this might seem a timid title, as this process of re-questioning our assumptions has been firmly installed as one of the key foundations of contemporary art as a practice for a long time. But here in Shanghai, it is gently pushing a boundary—and not so gently, in some cases, as one of the works was reportedly censored out of the show just before the opening. This means the exhibition’s curators are walking the tightrope between showcasing complacent, safe art, and getting booted out of the country. It’s a good sign.
Upon entering the building and being scolded for having a backpack, I am almost immediately drawn to a large circular installation of sand on the floor. Many more are, too: it’s surrounded by curious onlookers.
A view of “Lunar Station” by Marjolin Dijkman. Image: Patrick Lydon
Walking closer, I see that the work, titled Lunar Station, also comprises a large and heavy looking metal pendulum. It swings slowly and steadily, suspended over the sand by a cable running up the better part of three floors, straight through the guts of the power station. The movement of the pendulum and the marks it makes in the sand are mesmerizing, a massive yet simple cooperation between human-made objects and natural forces.
The energy of the universe and earth, brought into view in the middle of an old power station; it is a fitting way to talk about nature within the space.
The work also makes visible intersections between art, science, and nature. As the artist, Marjolin Dijkman, explains, the work “relates to a moment in time when the arts, science and philosophy made up a connected field, open to exploration by amateurs and professionals alike.”
Several minutes go by and my friend and guide, Gianpaolo, remarks “I could stand here all day.” I agreed with the notion. My partner Suhee, however, had already wandered away to a giant trio of woolly monster sculptures fashioned from snow, desert, and forest camouflage .
The sculptures, collectively titled The Water, The Soil, The Jungle, were created by Müge Yilmaz, an artist from Istanbul, the sculptures are at once human and inhuman. For me, they offer a moment to contemplate that difficult-to-tread line of viewing ourselves as both part of nature, yet distinct from it.
“The Water, The Soil, The Jungle” by Müge Yilmaz. Image: Patrick Lydon
On a lighter note, the sculptures honestly keep viewers guessing about whether they’re going to just start walking around. It’s ambiguous, whether they are animate or purely sculptural. Looking at passersby, the sculptures seem either to draw groups of selfie-snappers, or to be completely missed.
Well, they are camouflaged, after all.
Moving up to the second floor, we are greeted with an enormous, self-guided walkthrough installation called The Great Chain of Being—Planet Trilogy.
A sort of exhibition-within-an-exhibition, Planet Trilogy has the feeling of a film set on the surface of a desolate planet. Fittingly, it was envisioned by well-known theater director, Mou Sen. It’s eerie, dark, uncomfortable, and at the same time completely intriguing as we walk through multiple scenarios covering multiple floors, all of which are, at the very least, visually striking.
At best, the scenarios elicit some interesting questions about modern human culture, technology, and the complicated relationships that we hold with this technology. Rather than focusing on our past or current situations, the entire installation seems to elicit questions that hint at possible futures:
What does the future relationship of man, nature, and technology look like? Maybe it looks like a human body physically merged—and burdened with—our inventions, all of it being slowly reclaimed by moss.
What does it look like when humanity, devoid of ample resources on this earth, sets up camp on another planet? Perhaps it looks like an atrium dumped from space onto another planet’s surface, with plants inside struggling to come to terms with an alien atmosphere.
The futures considered here lean towards the dreary.
Two individual works in “The Great Chain of Being—Planet Trilogy” by MouSen and MSG. Images: Patrick Lydon
On the official program, this entire piece is credited to MouSen+MSG. As we exit the artwork back into the main gallery space, we find out that “MSG” is a program which Mou Sen established at the China Academy of Art and, furthermore, that the pieces within this giant theater set were produced by 40 artists, many of them students at the Academy. I am happily surprised by this. The number of thoughtful and well-executed pieces inside Planet Trilogy indicates a high level of thinking and skill mastery from the students.
Two other works to catch my eye in the category of natural scenarios are Event and A Straight Line Extended, both works of Liao Fei. The first of these interrogates our scientific understanding of the universe, recreating an orbit with a mechanical arm, lightbulb dangling from the end. All of this moves along slowly through one of the main thoroughfares, revolving around a steel plate and a large stone. The circumference of the orbit is so large, and the movement of the contraption so slow, that it’s easy to miss what is going on. Indeed, quiet yelps and laughs are heard as the “sun” (the lightbulb) occasionally strikes unaware visitors on its slow and steady orbit through the gallery space.
The second of the works from this artist, Straight Line Extended, creates a gentle balancing act that wouldn’t be terribly out of place next to an Andy Goldsworthy piece; a simple, elegant display of natural elements and forces. It might not be the blockbuster of the show, but the worlk necessarily fulfills the mind’s need for playful wonderment, balancing out some of the heavy darkness of other works here, which, for my taste, are a few too many.
I enjoy standing with this one for a while.
“Straight Line Extended” by Liao Fei. Image: Patrick Lydon
To return to heavy darkness, though, the film installation, Black Ocean, is tucked in the back corner of a 2nd floor hall, behind a giant curtain. Curiously, only two small benches adorn a space that could fit dozens, and though outside is bustling, few people sit down to see this one. I think to myself that perhaps the topic and geography it tackles—industrial resource extraction in the Gobi Desert—hits a bit too close to home for the institution, and perhaps for the audience as well.
The scenes that artist Liu Yujia presents in Black Ocean are of vast oil fields, open trenches, sandy, desolate, otherworldly looking settlements that are home to a vast resource extraction operation. She describes it as “a hallucinogenic phantom place.”
It’s certainly not easy to watch, especially because everyone sitting in the room likely knows what it means: these are the things that have to be done to this earth in order for us to be here at a giant art biennale, in a huge former power station, projectors running, bright lights shining away, climate control blasting, cars and taxis moving about outside.
A still from the “Black Ocean” film installation by Liu Yujia. Image: Patrick Lydon
The aforementioned “massive wall of concrete housing towers” flashes back into my mind.
Some leave the room immediately after coming in; very few others stay, glued to the screen, faces drab, gray, lifeless. Perhaps the reality check is too real for us; this is the cost of business—and art—as we know it today. I am pleasantly surprised, however, that the work, hidden as it is, made it into the bienniale at all, for it offers an abrupt and strong critique of an industrial world in which China, deservedly or not, is often painted in the worst light by international watchdogs.
Say what you will about censorship—it’s present here, as it is at some level in every corner of the art world—but the fact that such a critique is present in this kind of exhibition points, in many ways, to a maturity and openness we don’t normally associate with China.
If you manage to wander all three floors of the Power Station of Art in a day, you’ll be tired. Including artist teams and individual works not noted in the program, there are more than 140 artworks here from nearly as many artists—more visual and intellectual stimulation than a person can take in a single day. Unfortunately, I only have half of a day to see it all.
Although the jungle of works can be overwhelming, the curators of this exhibition, Raqs Media Collective, have certainly delivered a collection that pushes, and in some cases perhaps visibly moves, the boundaries of acceptable self-criticism in China.
They never push as hard as, say, Ai Weiwei’s Fuck Off exhibition, which famously ran in opposition to the 3rd Shanghai Biennale some 16 years ago. That exhibition was so controversial, it was eventually closed down by police.
But perhaps Why Not Ask Again pushes … just enough?
In a recent essay on TNOC regarding urban inequality, I spoke about the need to address inequality in exposure and vulnerability of urban populations to risk as a necessary condition to reducing urban inequality in general, including inequality in the access to basic services.
It is not sufficient to blame lack of progress on weak governance practices…the scrutiny, and guidelines, must extend to corporate and aid-agency practices.
I would like to expand on this idea by underlining the need for good governance in order to reduce urban inequality. When talking about good governance, attention is often directed, legitimately, at addressing governance deficits at the urban, local, and national levels. Notwithstanding the importance of the above, we also need to examine governance deficits at the corporate and international levels.
Relieving urban inequality in exposure and vulnerability to disasters requires good corporate governance
For example, in many cities in the “developing” world that suffer from weak national and urban governance, the United Nations and other international aid agencies often employ the help of international consulting companies to develop urban master plans for Disaster Risk Management (or DRM) and resilience. However, these master plans often end up not being implemented because the best practices and good governance principles reflected within them challenge vested interests at the local and national levels. This often puts pressure on consultancies and aid agencies to align the recommendations with local authorities’ interests, while keeping contradictions with best practices to a minimum. Although this compromise meets the immediate “shareholder interests” of consultancies and aid agencies, it does not necessarily reflect the “stakeholders’ interests”, where the latter actually means the urban populations living in the city under consideration.
In order to rationalize this compromise, and perhaps even trade-offs between shareholders’ and stakeholders’ interests, we need to develop good risk governance principles and guidelines for corporate risk governance. Indeed, it is not sufficient to blame lack of progress on weak governance practices at the local and national level. The scrutiny, and guidelines, must extend to corporate and aid-agency practices. The remainder of this essay provide examples of what these guidelines may contain.
Methodology for examining governance deficits
Before we develop guidelines and assessments for corporate good governance, we need to examine the existing tools that are available for analysing governance—and risk governance in particular—and apply these to the analysis of risk governance deficits at the urban level. Two available tools are the risk governance framework and associated risk governance deficits developed by the International Risk Governance Council.
In an earlier essay on urban risk, I identified risk governance gaps under relevant risk management guidelines, including: institutional, science-policy interface, risk pre-assessment, technical and societal risk appraisal, risk evaluation, risk reduction, data loss collation and analysis practices, recovery, etc. In this essay, the aim is to elaborate the above analysis and identify potential governance deficits and pitfalls at the corporate consultancy level, and then identify the required type of guidance and guidelines in order to avoid these pitfalls.
Case 1: Decision making process to upgrade poor urban neighborhoods against disaster risk
Description of Intervention: Often during urban DRM projects, a decision needs to be taken on whether to update poor neighborhoods with weak infrastructure and old housing. In some instances, this is dismissed as not being feasible or cost effective, without giving due consideration to international best practices and lessons learnt from various interventions.
Risk governance deficits:
(i) extensive risk (low intensity and high frequency), such as annual flash-floods and storms, are ignored and effort is directed at intensive risk (high intensity and low frequency), thereby automatically disadvantaging poorer neighborhoods, which disproportionately suffer from extensive risk;
(ii) the benefits of saving lives is not accounted for in cost-benefit analysis, thereby automatically favoring richer neighborhoods, which have a concentration of newer infrastructure, assets, and investments;
(iii) investments in the reduction of damages against extensive risk, usually in poorer neighborhoods with older infrastructure and housing stocks, is not considered, even though worldwide evidence shows this is cost-effective;
(iv) disaster losses due to extensive risk are not estimated, albeit qualitatively, to make a case for investments;
(v) financial needs and potential sources of funding from both the public and private sector are not assessed prior to dismissing the option of reducing existing risk in poorer neighborhoods; and
(vi) multi-year implementation programs are not developed based on financial needs and available sources of funding.
Proportion of infrastructure damage in extensive and intensive disasters in 56 countries and 2 Indian States, between 1970 and 2011. From Figure 5, Page 10. Source: http://www.preventionweb.net/english/hyogo/gar/2013/en/gar-pdf/GAR13_Pocket_EN.pdfProportion of fatalities from extensive and intensive risks in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Asia and USA, Figures 3 and 4, Background Paper to GAR 2011, Extensive and Intensive risk in the USA: a comparative with developing economies, J Serge, 2010. Source: http://www.preventionweb.net/english/hyogo/gar/2011/en/bgdocs/Serje_2010.pdf
Case 2: Upgrading of coastal urban neighborhoods against tsunami risk
Description of Intervention: Coastal neighborhoods facing tsunami threats have various options for improving their preparedness against tsunamis. These options, ranging from physical defenses to early warning systems and evacuation plans, can be adopted individually, or in combination. The eventual decision does not always ensure that the most vulnerable communities and households will benefit from the interventions.
Risk governance deficits:
(i) evacuation plans do not account for the needs and capacities of the population, and how they vary with age, sex, ability, health situation, and general socio-economic conditions;
(ii) early warning systems do not reach the most vulnerable communities;
(iii) evacuation and response plans are neither based on, nor informed by, multi-hazard risk assessments;
(iv) Investments in tsunami physical defenses are not compared against, or coupled with, early warning systems and response and evacuation plans; and
(v) investments in tsunami physical defenses are not compared against, or coupled with, a cost-benefit perspective against investments in reducing extensive risk.
Case 3: Urban master plans against disaster risk
Description of Intervention: Usually, large international consultancies develop master plans for local authorities for general resilience building and /or for mono-hazard management (e.g. earthquake master plans).
Risk governance deficits:
(i) consultants are not sufficiently informed by existing socio-economic constraints, challenges, and opportunities, as identified by various studies;
(ii) analysis is not sufficiently informed by disaster loss data;
(iii) method of analysis was originally developed for advanced countries and assumes the availability of accurate spatially and socio-economically dis-aggregated data. Effort is not sufficiently directed at tailoring the prospective plan to the current level of data;
(iv). the large degree of uncertainty in hazard frequency and intensity, and in its impact due to the lack of data, does not trigger a recommendation for a more participatory approach, specifically to address the large degree of uncertainty;
(v) the recommendations are not sufficiently informed by the current science policy interface, and as such will not lead to an improvement in this interface; and
(vi) financial, governance, and sustainability challenges in implementation are not sufficiently accounted for.
A way forward
DRM and resilience practitioners need to develop guidance for improving risk governance at each of the stages of the risk governance framework. The guidance will only be meaningful if its implementation by consultancies is adopted by independent bodies to safeguard the interests of the stakeholders. The guidelines can take the form of a checklist, which facilitates auditing by external civil society bodies and networks. An example is provided below on a typical checklist to be used during the Risk Pre-Assessment Stage; a concerted effort is required to produce checklists during all stages of the decision making process.
Checklist for auditing risk governance Stage 1: Risk Pre-Assessment
During the risk pre-assessment stage, the following decisions are usually made:
The scope of the risks that will be studied is determined.
The methodology to be used in the analysis will be determined.
The scope of interventions (ranging from risk prevention to risk mitigation to response and recovery).
The degree of participation in the risk management methodology and its relationship to the degree of uncertainty in hazard and risk data is determined.
The interaction between poverty and poverty reduction, and disaster risk and extensive disaster risk losses, in particular, is accounted for.
International best practices and guidelines that may be useful and should be considered are laid out.
The following checklist is useful to audit the decisions regarding the above points.
Has extensive risk been identified as part of the risks to be considered in the scope of risks? If not, has a justification been provided?
Has the science-policy interface been assessed and has the result of this assessment informed the methodology to be used?
Has risk reduction been considered as a possibility to be considered, subject to its feasibility?
Has participation been identified as a tool to be increasingly used as the degree of uncertainty increases?
Does the methodology aim to account for the interaction between disaster risk losses and poverty?
This concept paper was inspired by a series of round table discussions that were hosted by the Israel Urban Forum, together with the Bezalel Academy of Urban Design in Jerusalem.
In the urban biosphere, the city is at the center and becomes an active player in the integration of ecosystems and urban communities throughout the metropolitan region.
The participants at my round table, where the topic of discussion was “The City and its Surrounding Region”, are all effectively co-authors of this piece, and their names and titles appear at the end. The resulting paper constituted one of the chapters of the report submitted to HABITAT III by the Israel Urban Forum under the general title of “Other Urbanisms”.
The question we posed was:
“Can we evolve from the traditional urban-rural divide to regional management requiring cooperation among stakeholders throughout the ‘Bioshed’?”
* * *
By the end of this century of cities, the global process of urbanization, which started unsustainably with the Industrial Revolution, will reach unprecedented proportions. An anticipated 90 percent of the world’s population will, by the year 2100, be living in urban settings (mega-cities, cities, or small towns). In Israel, a small country with a steep population growth curve, we have already reached that point, and one of our major challenges is to contain further urban sprawl and to discourage the establishment of new urban communities.
Photo: Helene Roumani
In our need to strengthen existing cities and to ensure that they remain compact yet sustainable, we have to face an additional dilemma: urban-rural connectivity. Within any given urban metropolitan region, there are many and diverse governing entities, none of which is answerable to the others. Some of these entities are political bodies, and include all the different ranks and levels of local authorities, whereas some are professional, dealing with the many layers of infrastructure that are needed for modern urban living. However, in spite of the inherent disconnect among all the governing entities, people living in any one part of the metropolitan region will have need of services from other parts. For purposes of employment, education, health services, recreation, business and many additional functions, people will seek solutions within the metropolitan region.
In the case of some areas of activity, there is a regional authority of some kind in place. This can usually be said of infrastructure layers such as education, health, electricity, and transportation. However, what happens to the life-giving layers of infrastructure, water sources, and natural resources? It is only in the last few decades that these latter have begun to be treated as playing a significant urban role. Even as the concept of sustainable development in general, and sustainable urban development in particular, have evolved, nature in the city has mainly consisted of what was left over after development took place, and has rarely factored into the process of city-making.
In recent years this has changed, and there is a growing understanding and appreciation of the added value of nature in cities, and of the contribution of urban nature to the well-being of city-dwellers. That said, the city-region conversation takes this thinking one step further, tackling the enormous challenge arising from the reality that natural infrastructure and its ecosystems do not line up with either municipal or even geopolitical borders. They are not sufficiently respected within the diverse units of governance, let alone recognized as a layer of infrastructure throughout the region.
Connectivity between urban and peri-urban ecosystems
“Ecosystems” are not just natural habitats secured in “protected areas” such as national parks and nature reserves, but encompass processes and any land area in which live biomass is produced by plants that use solar light, soil minerals recycled by soil micro-organisms, and soil moisture. Cities are part of the natural world. Cities therefore comprise an interactive mosaic of such areas, including parks, gardens, and natural habitats, in which buildings and other human-made infrastructures are embedded, thus making the city in its entirety an “urban ecosystem”.
Urban ecosystems generate many benefits to city residents: they regulate the urban climate and its air and oxygen concentration and quality; they reduce flood intensities and the spread of vectors of soil and airborne diseases; and they conserve soil and habitat for all biodiversity components.
These benefits, which are essential for human health and well-being, have been referred to as “ecosystem services”. However, their rates of flow may not suffice for providing all the daily needs of the city’s dwellers. Food and water are often, if not always, imported from ecosystems outside the city. Thus, just as the built-up entities of the urban ecosystem are embedded in the city’s biodiversity habitats, the urban ecosystem itself is embedded in an often expansive mosaic of natural, planted, and agricultural ecosystems, not to mention smaller urban ecosystems within the region.
The cultural services provided by the intra- and inter-city, or by the city and the peripheral natural ecosystems and their biodiversity, include the options of healthy leisure, recreation, and inspiration available to the city dwellers and their communities. However, it is important to highlight the interaction between the city and the off-city ecosystems and their biodiversity, in a synergistic provision of ecosystem services for residents of the city and the urban periphery.
Photo: Helene Roumani
It is only in the last few decades that the urban role of natural systems has been addressed. The effective management of these systems is rendered harder simply because they don’t align with any existing boundaries, and are barely taken into account within each unit of governance in the region. A joint and interactive planning and management of the urban and regional ecosystems is therefore mandatory, since they are interdependent, and the protection of ecosystems at all scales is necessary for sustainable urban development.
Planning across scales must also extend to the larger national scale. Only in recent years has the need to integrate ecological corridors into the national planning grid been understood. What is quite new and in need of wider and deeper understanding is the potential role of cities and the metropolitan areas around them in supporting the continuity of these essential corridors. Even a small-scale neighborhood plan could wreak havoc with a national-scale ecological corridor. However, if understood and implemented properly, that same small-scale neighborhood plan could not only support the connectivity of the national ecological grid, but could also bring great benefit to the local residents, giving them a valuable cultural and recreational asset.
The urban biosphere
The urban biosphere provides a framework through which the vision presented above could be achieved. Its goal is the sustainable development of the large city at the heart of the metropolitan region, in collaboration and cooperation with the other smaller urban communities around it. This is not a structure of hierarchy, but of consensus and dialogue.
Formally, a biosphere of any kind has to earn its definition as such through a process under the supervision of UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere program. However, the actual process of designation is perhaps less important than the concept itself, especially in the case of the urban biosphere, as developed jointly by ICLEI, the sustainable cities’ network, and academic partners, including the IUCN. A Jerusalem team, together with the Jerusalem Municipality, took part in the initial development of this program between 2010–2013. This led to the establishment of the Jerusalem Bioregion Center for Ecosystem Management in 2014.
Although regional, cross-boundary management of natural resources is essential, none of the local authorities in the region have the statutory capacity to do so. This is the point at which civil society initiatives, such as the Jerusalem Bioregion Center, can potentially play a significant role by developing a non-hierarchical framework for cooperation among the many and diverse authorities and organizations in the region. Local government and academia are also essential partners.
In the urban biosphere, as opposed to the traditional biosphere reserve, the city is at the center, and becomes an active player both in the integration of ecosystems in urban development, and in encouraging the other urban communities in the metropolitan region to work together.
In the framework of the urban biosphere, not only are regional natural systems recognized as infrastructure in their own right, but they are understood as the natural resources that give us life. This understanding will influence planning, education, culture, recreation, and all of the other urban frameworks, not in a way that impedes development, but in a manner that strikes a balance between the needs of urban communities and the requirements of natural systems. This framework underscores the City’s obligation to deal with the quantities of garbage and waste that it traditionally dumped in sensitive areas beyond its boundaries. It would protect natural infrastructure during the development of transport and energy systems. Containing the city and keeping it compact remains a major goal, but no less important is the need for connectivity between urban and peri-urban nature. This transformation in perception of the urban context cannot be brought about by a “decision-making” process alone, but the greater part of the effort would be in educating hearts and minds among all the communities in the region.
Four “biosheds” or biomes
In Israel, dynamic urban challenges necessitate a new approach, especially in the current geo-political situation. The urbanization of the four metropolitan areas requires conceptual consolidation within the context of the country and region. This means that in tandem with this expansion of urbanization, the open spaces in all their manifestations need to be reviewed and considered in two distinct contexts. First, there is a need to identify open protected areas, and to ensure that stringent guidelines are in place for their protection. Second, it is important to emphasize four regional biomes and their ecological corridors, including the peri-urban areas. The linkage of the intensive urban areas with open protected forests and reserves, through recognized and protected ecological corridors, can generate the synoecism we need in order to preserve and benefit from the many cross-boundary ecosystems.
At the global level, this relates to the IUCN urban protected areas, the UNESCO urban biospheres, the 2011 Recommendation for Historic Urban Landscapes, and the World Heritage cultural landscapes. At the local level, a range of legal devices exist, but have yet to address, these issues in a comprehensive way. It should be noted that the Israeli Planning and Building Law specifically indicates objectives regarding the control of development and provisions for conservation and environmental conditions, while the Israel Lands Authority Law opens with the need to provide a balance between development and conservation on the one hand, and reserves for future generations on the other.
There are at least four potential biomes or “biosheds” (an organizing concept coined by Jennifer Rae Pierce of Central European University, 2014) in Israel, but to date Jerusalem is the only one where this process of ensuring connectivity has been attempted. It is the most complex bioshed of the four, and it is not surprising that the current initiatives of cross-boundary ecosystem management are products of the bottom-up, multi-stakeholder process led by the Bioregion Center, rather than mandatory processes dictated by the different levels of government.
One important way to counter unsustainable development pressures is to foster the inherent but often forgotten linkage between culture and nature, by adopting a policy for culture as an enabler of sustainable development. This should marginalize speculative development and short-sighted planning decisions, which will exchange the urban problems of today with new and more complex urban and national problems of tomorrow. Making our cities safe, inclusive, sustainable, resilient, and green requires an integrative approach in which global and local mechanisms are better connected through the application of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals in general, with special emphasis on Goal 11.
Resources must be provided for local governments through regional initiatives, together with education and awareness programs, that can better address the relationships between human and natural habitats. The role of academia in highlighting the research in these fields, alongside that of civil society in raising the consciousness of its importance to the well-being of society, will be critical in generating new approaches. “A successful sustainable development agenda requires inclusive partnerships … built upon principles and values, a shared vision, and shared goals that place people and the planet at the center.”
Ein Kerem, demonstrating forested terraces.
Urban agriculture and the local food cycle
The ecosystems layer of infrastructure throughout the city and its surrounding region connects with another very important infrastructure layer: the food grown, marketed, and consumed in and around the city. Significant bottom-up entrepreneurship has been impacting national policy throughout Israel, and it is a trend that should be encouraged. People grow food locally for many different reasons; in some cases, the focus is educational, whereas in others, it is a community initiative. There is an increasing number of commercial initiatives, whether on roofs or on the ground, inside the city or in peri-urban areas. In parts of Israel, notably in the Jerusalem region, part of the tourist’s cultural experience can be to participate in farming on ancient agricultural terraces that have been used since Biblical times.
The urban agriculture movement is playing an integral role in the growing Israeli urban movement. It brings together environmentalists, whose concern is to cut down the heavy ecological footprint of importing fresh food. It attracts health and nutrition experts, who realize the value of food growing as a personal experience that brings children and adults pride of ownership of the food they grow and encourages healthy eating. Resilience experts appreciate that a city with its own food production capacity is potentially more food secure in any kind of emergency. In economic terms, a local food system can provide livelihoods for an entire chain of food-growers, markets, and eateries, to mention only a few. Last but not least, biodiversity experts see urban agriculture as an opportunity to wean some of our food production away from the vast extra-urban areas of monocultural food growing, which many think constitute a greater threat to nature than our cities. In addition, when roofs and neglected open spaces in cities are used to grow food, there are many additional benefits. Food-bearing trees provide shade, and well-tended herb and vegetable plots provide new urban opportunities for butterflies, bees, and frogs, not to mention the half a billion birds migrating bi-annually over Israel, for whom a local community garden could make all the difference, offering valuable rest and sources of nutrition on their long north-south journey.
In conclusion, I wish I could give an unequivocally positive answer to the question we posed in our round table discussion. Jerusalem has established what I believe is an excellent framework, in the Bioregion Center for Ecosystem Management. However, in our special bioregion, which encompasses a wide spectrum of cultural and geopolitical human diversity, as well as its rich biodiversity, while many more stakeholders are at the table than we had at the beginning, and a lot of hands-on projects are happening, the way ahead is fraught with many challenges, not least the charge which is frequently leveled at us, that we are simply naïve and unrealistic as to the true problems of our region. As the Israel Urban Forum develops, we will try to have this model adopted in the other three potential bioregions, in the hope that our bottom-up approach will ultimately impact official national urban policy.
* * *
I hope the ideas presented here will lead us into a continuing discussion of the special relationship between big cities and their metropolitan regions, and I would like to thank the people (listed below) who contributed their ideas to this concept paper. The round table team gave me permission to use their comments and I have incorporated much of what was said, and later summarized, into this section of the report.
Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos AiresThe creation of sustainable projects can be achieved only by acting in coordination and direct relationship with professionals from many disciplines.
Jürgen Breuste, SalzburgBy taking an ecosystem service approach, urban ecology and landscape architecture can cooperate.
Mary Cadenasso, DavisThe studio training of a landscape architect offers a setting ripe for fostering meaningful interaction between the disciplines.
Danielle Dagenais, MontrealEcologists are calling upon landscape architects and planners to join their teams: as partners, or as wallflowers. Can genuine hybridization occur?
Susannah Drake, New YorkThe landscape architect can synthesize the work of many disciplines and integrate myriad voices into a clear unified vision. But design has sometimes been lost.
Vero Fabio, Buenos AiresThe creation of sustainable projects can be achieved only by acting in coordination and direct relationship with professionals from many disciplines.
Ana Faggi, Buenos AiresThe need to re-nature the urban matrix, making it more livable and sustainable, will not allow professionals to put design before ecological functionality anymore.
Andrew Grant, Bathit’s not really about the respective roles of ecologists and landscape architects that will make a difference. It is how we are engaged by the powers that be, either public or private, in the challenges of city planning and design.
Amy Hahs, VictoriaNow, the largest barriers to cooperation between the disciplines are the practicalities of trying to overcome current business as usual limitations and constraints.
Steven Handel, New BrunswickI know we haven’t grown up together or even gone to school together, you over there in the design school and me stuck with the scientists across campus. but invite me to the public works dance, please.
Marcus Hedblom, StockholmBuilding parks seems deeply rooted in planning, but there are major and important differences between parks and natural remnants.
Sarah Hinners, Salt Lake CityEcology ≠ “Good”: in treating ecology as “the right way”, people fail to recognize that the world—and the field of ecology—are in a state of constant change.
Mark Hostetler, GainesvilleCity landscapes can be both aesthetically beautiful, functional for people, AND ecologically functional, but we need to revisit aesthetics and what actually are norms in different situations.
Yun Hye HWANG, SingaporeWe must redefine the scopes of landscape architects and involve ecologists from the beginning of the design process.
Maria Ignatieva, UppsalaAt the site or neighborhood—at the actionable scale—we discover we don’t mean the same thing about the quality of “green”.
Jason King, SeattleWe need to better align the key strengths of each discipline—focusing scientific analysis to achieve accessible, applied solutions and integrating design synthesis that achieves cultural goals and rigorous, measurable ecological outcomes.
Nina-Marie Lister, TorontoIt is precisely within creative tension of multiple perspectives that we find the possibility and the promise of a more resilient, convivial future.
Ian MacGregor-Fors, VeracruzArchitects, engineers, urban managers, and planners all need to know the problem, raise awareness, and contribute to reducing the effects of bird-window collisions.
Jala Makhzoumi, BeirutSuccessful collaboration between ecologists and designers should accept that an ecological reading of a landscape, especially at the urban scale, cannot be “handed” to the designer as packaged information.
Diane Pataki, Salt Lake CityMore than just providing performance monitoring, scientists are hoping to work with landscape architects to test critical pieces of the urban ecosystem puzzle with every new project.
Kevin Sloan, Dallas“Facts and Ideas”: when landscape architecture is seen ONLY as art, problems arise.
Christine Thuring, SheffieldDear Landscape Architecture: working at plan view is such an abstract and technical exercise! I’m concerned that you are limiting yourself.
Anne Trumble, Los AngelesTry as we might to act on behalf of all living creatures and systems, a landscape architect’s work is anthropocentric.
Mike Wells, BathThere is a pressing need for us all to develop a much deeper knowledge and respect of each other’s disciplinary lineages and value sets.
Peter Werner, DarmstadtI think it is necessary that landscape architects grapple with scientific knowledge about urban biodiversity through education and collaboration with ecologists.
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 / Prompt
In the creation of better cities, urban ecologists and landscape architects have a lot in common: to create and/or facilitate natural environments that are good for both people and nature. Mostly. Some may tilt toward the built side, some to the wild. Some may gravitate to people, others to biodiversity, form or ecological function, or social function, or beauty.
There are a lot of shared values. And yet, they are still two distinct professions, ecology and design, and so there are ways in which we may say similar sounding things but mean something different. Steven Handel wrote in this space to analogize ecology and landscape architecture to a marriage: it takes work to make all that love and harmony happen.
Built into this roundtable prompt is certainly an issue of communication. That is, the possibility that, if we just talked to each other more, and more effectively, everything would be fine. But it is also possible that value sets do not exactly align. If you had to choose, what is the most important thing to consider? The responses in this roundtable include development of a unified vocabulary and suggestions of more integrated training, collaboration that functions throughout a project’s duration, start to finish, and ideas beyond.
So, get it off your chest. What is something your partner in environmental city building, the other profession, just doesn’t get about you? And what would it take it fix it? Or, if you don’t like the marriage metaphor, what are one or two key ideas from your profession’s beliefs and way of working that are not making it over to the other profession in a complete and true form? How can we get landscape architecture and ecology better integrated in the service of better cities?
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers expressed it quite well, singing the words of George Gershwin in Shall We Dance:
You say to-MAY-to, I say to-MAH-to
You eat po-TAY-to and I eat po-TOT-o
To-MAY-to, to-MAH-to, po-TAY-to, po-TOT-o
Let’s call the whole thing off
But oh, if we call the whole thing off then we must part
And oh, if we ever part then that might break my heart
—”Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” by George Gershwin (from Shall We Dance)
Here’s how Fred and Ginger said it, in a park, no less. And even if you don’t read another word of this roundtable, check out the dance number (including tap!) on skates.
We all have our points of view. Someone said about Rogers and Astaire: “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did…backwards and in high heels.”
Better call the calling off, off. Because, in the meantime, the stakes of getting city design right are high. And in diversity and collaboration, the spice of life creates new paths.
Gloria Aponte is a Colombian landscape architect who has been practicing for more than 30 years in design, planning and teaching. She lead her own firm, Ecotono Ltda., in Bogotá for 20 years. She led the Masters program in Landscape Design at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, in Medellín. She is a consultant and belongs to "Rastro Urbano" research group at Universidad de Ibagué, and also the Education Clúster at LALI (Latinamerican Landscape Initiative).
Gloria Aponte
Historically, a wide distance has existed between (1) disciplines that have nature as objects of study or which are based on biotic materials (such as ecology or biology), and (2) disciplines focused on anthropogenic creation and usually based on processed materials (such as architecture or civil engineering). That distance has evolved through the time since the west’s medieval epoch (it’s important to remark that history evolved very differently in Prehispanic America), when the realm of the second group was the small urban settlement, and the first realm was considered far outside the purview of the second group.
Landscape architecture is not one extreme—it is the bridge!
Such limitations have progressively vanished, mainly because the built world has invaded the “outside” world, and the natural one has suddenly demonstrated that it exists and underlays the built environment (through floods and landslides, for example). Nevertheless, the concepts and focus of both disciplinary lines haven´t been adjusted as they should be. Thoughts in public policy are mainly driven by physical proposals, and the “function” of the proposed design is planned under a utilitarian, western way of looking at life, ignoring the unavoidable eco-systemic base function. Meanwhile, natural sciences struggle, trying to convince others that nature matters and that our life on this planet depends on natural resources that we are spoiling.
Only when urban sprawl becomes worrying in scope and fundamental resources are increasingly scarce does society start to feel concern about certain urban-nature relationships.
It is at this time that the Landscape discipline comes to catalyse and sew these two halves of land management ideologies together. The landscape discipline is not at the other end of the spectrum as this Round Table question suggests; rather, the Landscape discipline is the bridge that deals with both mentioned branches, but additionally highlights experiential input in habitat complexity, the sensitive component that leads to establishing a sort of negotiation between human beings and the living and non-living world.
Historically, there has been a certain ambiguity in the title of the professionals dedicated to dealing with landscape matters or around the name of the profession itself. Brilliantly, the Spanish authors Busquets and Cortina suggest coining the term “paisalogía” that resumes in one word for landscape science, embodying: conceptualization, research, planning, design, materialization, and management of the whole spectrum—natural, built, and human—in a delicate balance and at multiple scales.
The word “architecture” in its name refers to spatial composition, but it does not necessarily mean artificially built. Not keeping this clearness in mind leads to the imprecision of locating this activity as an opposite to ecology, as it has been suggested by ecologists, while engineers identify it with environmentally guided activities. As someone said once, we are bats in the middle of a rats and birds confrontation. Consequently, the subject of landscape professionals is quite complex; as Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe states: Landscape design is the most complex of the arts. Among other attributes, it could be said that:Landscape is spatiality: “multi-dimensions” and physic spatial relationships (long, wide, high, time), as well as the proportions in which these combine. The landscape is observed, perceived, and lived space.
Landscape is perception: multisensory experience. Not only visual, but tactile, auditory, olfactory, and even gustative.
Landscape is identity: local par excellence, unrepeatable. A big difference with architecture, which can put the same building in different places or environments. For this reason landscape is an expression of identity, of a society, in a place in a certain time.
Landscape is expression: The expressions of the individuals or the conglomerate over spaces, are translated, spatially and compositely, and thus contribute to the strengthening or fading of the habitat character.
Therefore, to practice landscape professional activities, you have to:
Accept that nature is everywhere: living, functioning, and supporting
Inspire based on local resources and identity
Attend to local people’s traditions, interests, and concerns.
In opposition to other land ordering professions, landscape-responsible interventions propose:
Articulation instead of limits
Systems instead of polygons
Ecotones instead of frontiers
In the rich tropical strip of the world, and particularly in Colombia, landscape concern comes later than in many parts of the world—paradoxically, because of the native richness itself. We have all natural sources in abundance, mainly close to most cities’ locations. In addition, technology advances have been driven to bring those resources from places ever-farther away, so citizens are not aware of their imperative need or scarcity.
Interest in landscape is increasing because of the economical concern derived from tourism business. Only when it is considered as an income source does landscape seem
to deserve attention from policy makers, even insofar as regulation and law.
Landscape is SPACE,
Is not “object”
Is not “ornament”
Is not “tool”
Landscape is LIVING,
Not only scientific analysis (landscape ecology)
Not just planimetry or “render” (hard contructions)
Landscape should be INTENTIONAL,
No random result.
Not a sum of casual fragments.
The need to incorporate landscape considerations into decision-making is not new, but it grows in importance as interest in sustainable development grows (Swanwick). No small or large scale physical, urban, or infrastructural development project should be addressed without landscape considerations. And this does not mean remedial gardening, or “landscaping” after the fact, but honest, ethical, and systemic considerations of common convenience, above functional, economic, or formal whim decisions that guide many development projects.
In this way, landscape is the bridge between ecology and the built environment, for the satisfaction and happiness of the beneficiary of that bridge: us.
Ana Luisa Artesi is Head and Founder of the studio Ar&A – Arquitectura y Ambiente, an interdisciplinary office, whose focus is on highways, private and public landscapes, individual houses, multi-family buildings and housing developments
Ana Luisa Artesi and Vero Fabio
The Landscape, Connector
Cities are the setting and the resultant of the dynamic relations and tensions between nature and human culture, in constant transformation.
The creation of sustainable projects can be achieved only by acting in coordination and direct relationship with professionals from many disciplines.
Conceptually, Natural Landscape—no longer original but the result of evolution—is the integrator of life, a service provider, a connector of the various superimposed frames. The continuity of landscape is the nexus and support for the dynamics of Biodiversity.
On the one hand, Landscape Architects’ projects can generate substantial change (sometimes permanent) that may affect the environment, not only in immediately apparent ways, but also in underlying and subjective values.
On the other hand, the Urban Ecologists and Naturalists comprehend the site from a dimension of full nature, considering mostly the nature as it was in its origin.
Ecology’s principles and vision of the Natural Landscape refer to the ancient times, and all transformation is perceived as a threat.
We have heard many times concepts such as: manmade projects have a great impact against nature because they permanently alter biodiversity; biodiversity corridors must be only natural; projects should only use native species; nature must be respected as original; production of goods and food produces harm nature. In many ways, they are correct and true ideas, but they may fall in an extreme interpretation.
This, we believe, is the trigger of the opposite positions between ecologists and landscape architects.
So, today more than ever, it is imperative that we find an understanding.
The nature in cities is composed by tangible and intangible elements such as natural traces; its history, culture, rites, myths, monuments, and buildings; natured and artificial spaces; and its biodiversity. They are inherent to cities and their landscapes.
Soil, water, air, vegetation, life in all its forms and other protagonists of the natural systems coexist with the anthropic systems in the context of the three spatial dimensions plus the variable of “time”.
It is in cities where people live, devise, realize, and grow, forging their history and values in ways that are intertwined with the public space. In this way, the natural and the social are inseparable.
Our space, the one where our house lies, is the very planet earth.
Today, cities are more inhabited and densified. A recent study shows that these days 50 percent of the world population inhabits cities, and it is estimated that this proportion will grow dramatically.
It goes without saying that without proper planning, the clear division between the rural and the urban will become blurred, due to the proliferation of new developments.
Thus, Urban Landscape is a living organism in a delicate evolutionary (or disruptive) balance.
Over the years, nature awareness and knowledge applied to landscape architecture has been varying. Studying it from a new and different perspective has substantially modified the related design principles:
Projecting in a more sensible way, we must increase the use of approaches that relate nature to the built environment. This provides a different view of the construction of the landscape.
Sustainability principles are a priority when dealing with landscape projects. Side by side collaboration is required between the different disciplines.
It is our mission to make Landscape Architecture a discipline of integration. The creation of sustainable projects can be achieved only by acting in coordination and direct relationship with other professionals and specialists such as Landscape Ecologists, Naturalists, Biologists, Sociologists, Cartographers, Geologists, Surveyors, Planners, Architects, Engineers, and Artists.
The challenge is to consolidate and unite criteria among these disciplines, in order to generate new ideas, to enable the growth and continuity of nature systems in today’s cities and in the “cities to come”.
Verónica Fabio is the Director of the landscape studio Verónica Fabio and Associates since 1985, specializing in the design of public and private space, both small and large scales.
Dr. Jürgen Breuste is Head of the working group Urban and Landscape Ecology at the University of Salzburg, and founding President of the Society for Urban Ecology (SURE).
Jürgen Breuste
The subject “How can we get landscape architecture and ecology better integrated in the service of better cities?” is really important. It is important to bring all possible partners and activities for this target of “creating better cities” together. This aim requires even more partners than ecologists and landscape architects. But these two disciplines can be seen as core disciplines for reaching the target.
By taking an ecosystem service approach, urban ecology and landscape architecture can cooperate.
These disciplines are often labeled “basic” knowledge (ecology) and “applied” knowledge (landscape architecture). This is right, but things are not always so clear cut, because ecology has already developed in the direction of application, and landscape architecture in creating new knowledge needed for architectural applications.
What we need is knowledge about the urban ecosystem, its functionally, processes, and structure. Without knowledge, all design is based only on ideas, fashions, or individual perspectives. But knowledge alone is not enough. We can see that only a part of the existing and available knowledge is used in planning and design of new buildings, new open spaces, new districts, and new or renewed cities. The actual visual example is the fast ongoing urban development of Chinese cities; this development is mostly not based on ecological principles and does not apply urban ecological knowledge.
Urban ecological knowledge includes not only knowledge from the natural sciences’, but also knowledge about those who design, develop, and use the urban ecosystems: the urban dwellers. For this, we definitely must integrate social science knowledge.
To apply ecological knowledge, a perspective of what is necessary to create better cities is useful. Any general goal has to break down to clear targets, measurable by indicators; only then can we make better designs. This is perhaps the rarest profession in the chain, from knowledge-gathering to change-of-reality. A lack of policymakers causes even the best ecological designs not to be realized. All contemporary Chinese building projects have green roofs in the designs, but mostly none will be realized.
Flip sides of the same coin—one target
Ecology and landscape architecture seem simply to be flip sides of the same coin: both aim to make better cities. But this is not completely right. Ecology, as a university discipline, can successfully create new knowledge. Landscape architecture as a university discipline is forced to use knowledge for practical design solutions to problems. But both disciplines can work on both sides, the knowledge and the application sides.
Both urban ecologists and landscape architects aim to help develop natural environments that are “good for both people and nature”. But it is good to accept that the urban environment should be a natural environment, but one that is predominately designed for people! We should not aim to protect biodiversity or, more simply, rare species as assiduously in cities as we do with nature protection outside of cities for ethical reasons. We need a paradigm shift towards considering the whole range of urban ecosystems and towards the benefits we need from nature in cities for their inhabitants. Nature conservation may be challenged by the novelty of some urban ecosystems. But it is necessary to recognize the associated ecosystem services and social benefits of novel urban ecosystems, too. With this ecosystem service approach, urban ecology and landscape architecture can cooperate well and bridge the gap from understanding to making use of urban ecosystems.
Two key ideas of urban ecology
The most important critical idea that remains in urban ecology is to simply understand the ecosystems in a city or the complex urban ecosystem as a whole. With understanding, we follow the idea of modeling and balancing, which is ambiguous, especially when humans and human behavior are included. This is not an intellectual game, but a necessity for the next step, planning, and design of urban ecosystems. Landscape architects are typically better than urban ecologists at this kind of thinking. But we are best when we cooperate.
Mary L. Cadenasso is a landscape and urban ecologist interested in how the heterogeneity of a system influences ecological processes in that system. She is a professor of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis.
Mary Cadenasso
Urban ecologists and landscape architects are both interested in the structure or form of urban land. While an ecologist may investigate how the structure of the land influences, and is influenced by, ecological processes, landscape architects have a more direct hand in actually shaping that land. An idea from ecology crucial for understanding how cities work and for guiding efforts to create better cities is the reciprocal link between the spatial heterogeneity, or structure, of urban systems and the ecological functioning of that system.
The studio training of a landscape architect offers a setting ripe for fostering meaningful interaction between the disciplines.
Heterogeneity is fundamental to general ecological theory because of this hypothesized link between it and ecosystem functioning. In its most basic definition, heterogeneity is the spatial variation in at least one variable of interest, and urban heterogeneity consists of the spatial differentiation of biological, physical and social structures of urban areas. Specific descriptions of heterogeneity may include zones of different land use types, maps of socially bounded neighborhoods, or areas of greater or lesser vegetation diversity. These heterogeneities may influence the flow of nutrients and pollutants, the diversity of organisms, or the amount of carbon stored, for example. Because landscape architects can fundamentally alter the spatial heterogeneity of urban systems, recognizing the ecological functioning of that heterogeneity is crucial in order to incorporate heterogeneity into designs in a way that maximizes positive ecological outcomes and minimizes negative outcomes of the design.
Of course landscape architects incorporate heterogeneity into designs; heterogeneity in the physical or biological structure of the landscape can be aesthetically pleasing. Conveying the style or signature of the designer is important so that their work is recognized, but how can heterogeneity be used functionally and not just stylistically? Sometimes designed heterogeneity is constrained to the boundaries of the specific project and in other cases the design integrates the project with adjacent areas. Flows of people across boundaries are usually considered, but how about the flows of nutrients and pollutants, non-human organisms, information, etc.? How would the design differ if it explicitly considered both the ecological processes occurring in the specific project area and the ecological flows across the boundary between the project site and the adjacent landscape?
Because both disciplines share an interest in the structure of urban land, the potential for integrating the work of ecologists and landscape architects is enormous. The studio training of a landscape architect offers a setting ripe for fostering meaningful interaction between the disciplines. I, along with colleagues, have had the privilege of engaging with landscape architecture students in their studio courses as they work on design ideas throughout a term. We provided a broad overview of ecological concepts relevant to design in a seminar format but that was of limited utility. More productive was time spent together walking the project site and talking casually about what we each were seeing through our respective disciplinary lenses. In this casual setting, we could build trust and share the motivations and assumptions we each hold. We could also discuss design scenarios to achieve stated goals and the potential ecological implications of each scenario. After that “walk and talk”, we ecologists went away until the end of the term, when we attended the charrette, listened to the students’ presentations of their work, and provided feedback. Feedback at the end of the term is useful but, again, limited. The second time we contributed to a studio class, and every time following, we participated in “desk crits” at regular intervals. This process of literally dragging a chair from desk to desk to engage with students over their ideas and designs added an incredible richness to our conversations and allowed us to collaboratively make modifications to the design. For example, the use of a particular tree species in a design may be driven by the quality of shade it throws, and the tree’s size and shape. In conversation about resource needs of the tree, perhaps a different species that could provide those same characteristics but also be more appropriate for the climate could be substituted, or the number and arrangement of trees could be discussed relative to the flow of resources.
As an ecologist, learning the motivations, assumptions, processes, and constraints that a landscape architect experiences in the process of design was informative for how to communicate lessons from research and, excitingly, these collaborative conversations also sparked new research ideas for testing the link between urban heterogeneity and system function. Working collaboratively in a studio setting requires intellectual openness and a desire to learn from the other discipline. Participants have to be willing to be surprised, confused, and challenged respectfully in order to learn a different way of thinking. Obviously this takes a certain personality and combination of personalities, and sometimes it will fail. But when it works, it can be enormously valuable because of the ideas generated and the new ways of thinking developed and shared.
Associate Professor, School of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture, Université de Montreal B.Sc. Agriculture, M.Sc.A., Environmental Engineering, Ph.D., Environmental Design Research: Phytotechnology, Stormwater Management, Urban Biodiversity
Danielle Dagenais
In our part of Canada, ecologists have been leaving the “pristine” forests of the North for the cities, first invading their conservation areas and more recently their inner cores. Is this migration the result of an epiphany, a road to Damascus, or just an opportunistic change in habitat due to the gradual extinction of funding resources in the natural range of that species? One can only guess.
Ecologists are now, more or less reluctantly, calling upon landscape architects and planners to join their teams: as partners, or as wallflowers. Can genuine hybridization occur?
Anyway, the result is that the urban jungle now gets the attention of ecologists. They are slowly realizing that the key species in that strange built environment is man, and humans have strange views on nature. In fact, they don’t always appreciate it or recognize the true value of biodiversity. To contend with this challenging urban environment and win over urban communities, ecologists are now, more or less reluctantly, calling upon landscape architects and planners to join their teams: as partners, or as wallflowers.
For example, ecologists might deploy heavy modelling artillery to plan green infrastructure considering target species. Or they will go to great lengths to study the ecological dynamics of urban forests or wastelands. Or they’ll decide to conserve a piece of remnant nature. At first, the city and its inhabitants are not taken into account. After a while, landscape architects and urban planners are invited to join in, out of caution or to put a qualitative or aesthetic finish on the project. However, the question or the project is already framed within a very narrow ecological perspective. Important issues such as people’s perception, appreciation, valuation and uses of urban nature, not to mention social acceptability, are neglected. Co-design was never part of the plan. Had landscape architects participated in the definition of the project or the construction of the research object from the start, the collaboration would have had a better chance of success.
Are ecologists entirely to blame? Interdisciplinary research is hardly the norm, even today. Funding agencies and universities are partly responsible for the state of affairs. In Canada, at least, funding agencies are still divided between Health, Natural and Applied Science, and Social Sciences. And in this age of meagre funding, competition between disciplines is fierce. Any project on the margins, any hybrid that may possibly be funded by another granting organization, is viewed with suspicion. In universities, education in biology and ecology is still heavily, if not solely, focused on the natural environment, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. Students have very little chance to acquire basic social science or planning and design notions. Yet I often see ecology students who work on urban sites and are eager to integrate a social, design, or urban planning aspect into their graduate research. But the format of graduate studies in ecology and sciences in general and the productivity expected from universities precludes the students from taking the time to acquire the necessary knowledge to venture outside of their field or to work with a colleague from another discipline.
Studies suggest that encountering nature is important both for children’s development and their connectedness to nature. Isn’t time that ecologists encounter landscape architecture and planning earlier in their education if we want successful connections to occur and better cities to be built?
Susannah C. Drake FAIA FASLA is a Principal at Sasaki and founder of DLANDstudio. Susannah lectures globally about resilient urban design and has taught at Harvard, IIT, and the Cooper Union among others. Her award-winning work is consistently at the forefront of urban climate adaptation innovation. Most recently “From Redlining to Blue Zoning: Equity and Environmental Risk, Liberty City, Miami 2100,” was included in the 2023 Venice Biennale. Her first book “Gowanus Sponge Park,” was published by Park Books in 2024. Her work is in the permanent collection of MoMA.
Susannah Drake
Large, interdisciplinary consultant teams have become the norm in urban design over the last 20 years. The movement away from a purely formal, architect-driven vision of city making reflects a shift in understanding away from the primacy of a modernist position which uncoupled form and environmental process.
The landscape architect can synthesize the work of many disciplines and integrate myriad voices into a clear unified vision. But design has sometimes been lost.
In an essay titled “Regenerating Landscape Architecture” published in Topos 71 in 2010, I suggested that one of the reasons landscape architecture waned as a recognizable professional presence in the 60s and 70s was its merge with the discipline of ecology. Landscape architecture took on the mantle of environmental planning, a position that had a somewhat anti-urban focus. What resulted were large-scale planning efforts such as Ian McHarg’s layered analysis of Staten Island (see his book Design with Nature, 1969), which prefaced regional analysis over the urban human scale of design. The work, which ultimately led to the development of GIS mapping, remains a very important component of planning and mapping that should not be confused with design.
The formal backlash that occurred in the 80s and 90s is perhaps akin to the provocation hinted at in our prompt. While some designers remain purely aesthetically driven, others deny form, giving preferences to fish and mollusks over people. Happily these camps are more at the fringe of the profession as a whole, which is now more rooted in a nuanced and hybrid approach that blends functional urban design, civic beauty, and viable ecological planning.
Collaboration between ecologists and designers is not without a lot of give and take. My firm DLANDstudio is currently working on a project for daylighting a stream with an engineer as the lead, an ecologist as designer of the stream bed, and DLAND—the landscape architect—as community liaison. The problem with this arrangement is that the landscape architect is tasked with explaining to the community why they will lose their programmed recreational space. The design is functional and will likely be beautiful, and will work well as a daylit stream, but denies the complex program requirement of a public park located in a dense urban center. If the landscape architect were leading the team, elements of program, ecology, community engagement, and civil and structural engineering would be more synthetically managed and prioritized. It is not an issue of form over function. It is an issue of finding a balance of form and function. The landscape architect is better able to synthesize the work of many disciplines and integrate myriad voices into a clear unified vision. Civic beauty comes from maximizing the potential of both natural and formal systems.
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
Although ecologists and landscape architects have shared many values they have often not, until recently, succeeded in reconciling important aspects in their shared projects, and that’s what causes many projects to fail. I think that this difficulty is anchored in the roots of both professions and by the way they have been developed so far.
The need to re-nature the urban matrix, making it more livable and sustainable, will not allow professionals to put design before ecological functionality anymore.
Ecologists are aware, and often carry the burden, of the complexity of any ecosystems they intend to restore or rehabilitate, while designers, in their day-to-day work, plan and fashion the form and structure of objects. When the object to be planned is a landscape, designers frequently threaten nature by neglecting the fact that creating green infrastructure is about designing autogenic (or self-regenerative) systems.
An ecologist working on a restoration project, in contrast, moves in hesitation, knowing of the hopelessness of an ecological landscape created by a designer; only Nature itself can do this. Nevertheless, the act of creating is central to the designer’s work; thus, landscape architects often approach a project by giving more weight to aesthetic and human aspects at the expense of ecological responsiveness.
Placing a recycled frame for an upcoming descriptive poster in an agroecological orchard.
However, this divergence is changing, and I trust it will change radically in the future. The need to re-nature the urban matrix, making it more livable and sustainable, will not allow professionals to put design before ecological functionality anymore.
Beyond collaborative thinking processes that presently prevail in any given project, smart city planning should move away from merging approaches or struggling to balance ecologists and designers in their traditional domains. A smart city needs doers trained in transdisciplinary knowledge at early stages of their academic studies. Transdisciplinarity arises when participating experts interact in an open dialogue, giving equal weight to each perspective and relating them to each other.
To decrease the present divergence between ecologists and architects, higher education should engage in curricular transformations. Evidence shows that different academic subjects and forms of curricula organization produce different kinds of people because disciplines involve clear world views and values. Therefore, universities, as key institutions in processes of change and innovation, should reassess what gets taught and researched and the way they train skilled labor forces. Professors and students should be involved in transdisciplinary long-term projects exploring ways of engagement with their communities.
For six years and with these goals in mind, the architecture and environmental engineering faculties at the Flores University, Buenos Aires, have offered students of both disciplines the opportunity to enroll in Landscape Ecology and Alternative Energy courses, where they work together and take part in ecological restoration and rehabilitation of public space projects (see photos).
Ecological restoration of polluted riverbanks in Buenos Aires, which are shared projects between the Engineering and the Architecture Faculty at Flores University.
Andrew formed Grant Associates in 1997 to explore the emerging frontiers of landscape architecture within sustainable development. He has a fascination with creative ecology and the promotion of quality and innovation in landscape design. Each of his projects responds to the place, its inherent ecology and its people.
Andrew Grant
Of all the ecologists I have worked with in 30 years of professional life, I would like to promote Dr. Mike Wells as a great example of an ecologist who understands how to inform, enthuse and encourage landscape architects and, also, when needed, to challenge and question their ideas.
It’s not really about the respective roles of ecologists and landscape architects that will make a difference. It is how we are engaged by the powers that be, either public or private, in the challenges of city planning and design.
Mike has a particular ability to think outside the usual confines of ecology and science to find inspiring ecological options and I want more ecologists to be similarly creative in their thinking because we need a step change in the way we work on city planning and design issues. We are making headway in getting green and blue and health and food issues into the city planning debate, but are we really offering the ecological vision needed to push us out the other side of the global problems?
If ecologists need to get in touch with their imagination, then landscape architects need to learn more effective ways to process and apply ecological principles into urban schemes. We can only bring change if we act together to deliver the planning, design and management of more ecologically sound and inspiring, socially inclusive city environments.
This triple-layered objective to deliver Ecological, Inspirational, Purposeful urban landscapes should be our focus. Ecologists need to realize that arguments based on ecosystem services or species diversity are only half the answer, and landscape architects who are entirely obsessed with aesthetics, function, and experience are only offering the other half. We need both professions fused together in each and every urban project.
Of the above objectives, I believe ‘Inspirational’ is the least understood, but a crucial ingredient. If we are to change our behaviour and values to achieve a more sustainable urban future, we need to be inspired to do so. Much of the output of current ecology and landscape design derives from tired and traditional models and, whilst there are exceptions, I believe more than ever that we need radically new landscape interventions within cities that challenge our notions of the traditional patterns and components of urban landscapes. In addition to places for play, food, sport and leisure, I want to bring the awe and surprise you get when you see a natural wonder right in the heart of the densest urban areas. Magnificent waterfalls, dense forest, characterful rock outcrops—landscapes in scale with the new urban fabric that become the social media memories of the city.
While I see the role of landscape architects as communicating and implementing designs of the scale, purpose, and physical expression of such interventions, I would like to see more ecologists stretching their imagination to define new approaches to ecosystem design that allows the evolution of entirely new habitat types and systems that help bring these places to life and put nature at the doorstep of every urban resident and worker.
However, it’s not really about the respective roles of ecologists and landscape architects that will make a difference. It is how we are engaged by the powers that be, either public or private, in the challenges of city planning and design. We need a step change in perception of our joint value.
The television series “Thunderbirds” made a big impression on me as a kid. Palm trees that can be flipped over to make space for a runway. Amazing scenery, jets, cars, submarines and spaceships. A sense of saving the world and a global perspective in the guise of International Rescue. The best bit was always the choice of vehicle to tackle that episode’s challenge. Would it be the Mole or Thunderbird 1? Would it be Brains or Lady Penelope? In each case, the right person or device or combination of all was deployed to save the day. Teamwork was fundamental to every episode.
How great it would be if we could tackle the challenges of ecological city planning and design with such clarity. A wise client selecting the right professions and process to tackle each new challenge. An ecologist cracking a specific species conservation strategy or outlining the principles for a neighbourhood-specific ecosystem alongside a landscape architect shaping a space that lifts the spirits and creates another functioning piece of the city. Always a future-focused team, but with the right emphasis for each challenge. That would be almost perfect. We just need Tracy Island as our base.
Dr Amy Hahs is an urban ecologist who is interested in understanding how urban landscapes impact local ecology, and how we can use this information to create better cities and towns for biodiversity and people. She is Director of Urban Ecology in Action, a newly established business working towards the development of green, healthy cities and towns, and the conservation of resilient ecological systems in areas where people live and work.
Amy Hahs
Successful project delivery, post-collaboration
Over the past few years I have had the privilege of working with landscape architects on various projects that seek to integrate ecology with design. In every case, I have been lucky to collaborate with passionate and knowledgeable people who share my ambitions to develop more ecologically informed design. Our curiosity, respectful discourse, and willingness to listen to and explore the nuances of each other’s disciplines have been fundamental to the success of our projects, as well as making the experience an enjoyable one.
Now, the largest barriers to cooperation between the disciplines are the practicalities of trying to overcome current business as usual limitations and constraints.
Yet within our own professions there are also diverse approaches to practice. While the landscape architects I have worked with have had an impressive basic knowledge of ecological concepts and principles, they may not represent the majority of people within the profession. Similarly, within ecology there are a range of views and opinions, each with their own inherent biases. Open and frank discussions, such as this roundtable, are required within and between these two disciplines to ensure that we continue to make progress and push our fields further along the path to new discoveries. Encouraging and promoting knowledge-transfer and collaboration with other disciplines will also ensure that the ecologists and landscape architects of tomorrow have a broader vernacular at their disposal, and a firmer foundation for future collaborations.
There are a growing number of initiatives that demonstrate how the disciplines of ecology and landscape architecture can support each other. One example is the Society for Restoration Ecology, Australasia’s National Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration in Australia, which was developed in collaboration with the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (or AILA). These National Standards also form the foundation for the recently released International Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration, which was released at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 13th Conference of the Parties in Cancun, Mexico at the end of 2016. Another example is The Sustainable SITES Initiative, which includes the SITES Rating System and certification process. Indeed, there are a large and growing number of inspiring projects that have been delivered through collaborations between landscape architects, ecologists, and others who share the same vision for an alternative future; and these examples are expected to continue to grow into the future.
This leads me to believe that we are now at a point where the critical barriers are no longer related to how ecologists and landscape architects might work together, or even related to what we need to do and how to do it. Rather, the largest barriers are now the practicalities of trying to overcome current business as usual limitations and constraints. Adjusting management and maintenance practices may require contract adjustments, new machinery, or alterations to existing policies or guidelines. New approaches to construction are also being developed that need to be tested and refined. Therefore, finding the right clients, and sympathetic champions within government, industry and other organisations is one of the largest outstanding challenges we currently face. However, this is where the differences between ecology and landscape architecture become strengths, as there are a broader range of frameworks, understandings, terminologies, and networks that can be called upon than would be possible if either discipline had been working on their own. Ecologists can draw upon scientific methods to document and test the strength of the ecological outcomes, while landscape architects can create a design and scope of works that turns abstract research outcomes into physical, deliverable realities. Our individual vocabularies become just as important as our shared understandings, showing once again that diversity is a strength.
Steven Handel is a restoration ecologist and the director of the Center for Urban Restoration Ecology (CURE), an academic unit at Rutgers University.
Steven Handel
I’m shy, but I think we have a lot to offer each other. You designers know so much and have so much to offer to the public. Space maker’s designs satisfy so many programming needs for the public. I can complement your skills in new ways, and I think we’d be a really attractive couple.
I know we haven’t grown up together or even gone to school together, you over there in the design school and me stuck with the scientists across campus. but invite me to the public works dance, please.
I can bring so many ecological services to your side. These are recognized more and more as valuable to people and even save on budgets for public officials. I know you’re interested in stormwater management and the joy of cultural services, the aesthetic thrill of walking in a modern, designed landscape. I can add cleaner and cooler air, the sounds of nature, and the binding of soil to keep your waterways clear. My work can even add pollinators, enhancing the urban agriculture that so many folks are interested in these days. In this way, our partnership can make you seem more fiscally responsible and folks will really like that. I can help you on so many scales, giving you an ecological foundation for all your work. From a roadside planting to a green roof to a grand-scale public park. I know there are ecological perspectives that can be plugged in to make your work even better. So often, ecological features are really seen as engineering tools, cutting down on runoff or using green insulation keeping buildings cool. There is so much I can do, if you give me a chance.
I know you may have heard some bad things about me and I know some people are fearful of hanging out with ecologists. Sure, there’s rumors of ecological disservices, parts of my perspective that people fear: biting insects in public parks, funny odors, critters that might carry diseases; who needs them, some people say. I talk about thickets of native shrubs on the landscape, and people are nervous that muggers may hide there. But with communication and understanding, I can explain to people that these things are overblown and the value of having me around much outweighs these irrational fears. We know these communication gaps can be a real problem, but with time and honesty, we can overcome them.
I know we haven’t grown up together or even gone to school together, you over there in the design school and me stuck with the scientists across campus. Nevertheless, if we do meet, I think we can have a swell time together. I’d like to be with you from the very beginning of a project, when we lay out design features and the interplay of all the elements that are on your mind. If we meet later in the process, too much is set in stone, literally, and there is no room for me in your life. If we meet early, when the proposed project is young, we can grow it up together and be real partners. So many RFPs don’t even mention me. They see a public work as needing architects and engineers and traffic consultants and lighting specialists. People like me who think about food webs and biodiversity and natural heritage are rarely invited to the table of public work design. Let’s try some small projects together, talking about landscape on a coffee date or on a quiet walk through an industrial park that’s being redesigned. That’s not a big commitment, and I think it could lead to some really great times together. Then, people will start wanting us to attend a big public work events.
I’ve been hugging trees for a long time, but earning a general affection by the public will take a long-term courtship, I’m afraid. Give me a call and let’s see if we can get this relationship going.
Marcus Hedblom is a researcher and analysist at the Swedish University of Agricultural sciences.
Marcus Hedblom
Many cities globally still have rather large natural remnants within the cities. What I refer to as remnant nature in this text includes woodlands or urban forests. These remnants do sometimes have unique prerequisites for biodiversity. Meaning, these urban woodlands have additional values that forests outside cities do not have.
Building parks seems deeply rooted in planning, but there are major and important differences between parks and natural remnants.
These values are linked to the fact that forests in cities are not under timber production command and have different aged trees, shrubs, and dead wood—things that are removed in production forest, but which are important for biodiversity. Thus, urban woodlands can have as high biodiversity as other forests but also provide unique habitats for hole-nesting birds, for example, due to older trees and dead wood. Sweden has high coverage of forest, with 55 percent coverage, but out of these, 97 percent of the forests is for production. This means that most forests in Sweden are monocultures of one species, with equal ages in large areas and almost no dead wood. This also means that deciduous species are lacking in the landscape since coniferous species have higher production values.
In cities, however, woodlands are mostly left for future expansion or for recreational purposes and not for production. This allows trees to get old and also allows for a mixture of species. In Sweden, urban woodlands in the urban fringe have more dead wood than the forests outside cities, and deciduous bird species are in higher abundances in cities. However, these urban woodlands are threatened. The main threat is the densification trend of cities where forests are removed. Often, the previous forest are totally removed and replaced by a smaller park. It is very unusual that the already old and existing trees—nature remnants—are kept for the new area.
The second threat is what I refer to as “parkification”. This is when dead wood is removed for safety and aesthetic reasons; saplings are removed, and thus the understory of the woods is cleared (also for safety and aesthetical reasons) and some unwanted trees are removed, such as large coniferous trees. In the end, the forest looks more like a park than a natural remnant.
Here comes the interesting link between the ecologist (me) and landscape architects. Because when I worked at the municipality of Uppsala (4th biggest city Sweden), my landscape architecture colleagues said that parks where the same as nature. And my colleagues influenced the strategic planning map of the whole municipality. Thus, when a natural remnant was removed on the strategic municipal plan and replaced by a park, it was marked as green on the map—the same green colour as the nature parts in the city. At least, this was done on the bigger official maps. It then looks like nature has been kept in the city, although forests have been “changed” to parks. I had real trouble with this, since I believe that there are major and important differences between parks and natural remnants. This might be self-evident to most of you, and maybe my writing is one case of a problem in a small Swedish town, without similar perspectives elsewhere. But travelling around in cities on all continents, it is striking how parks dominate in the city and also how they all look the same, with lawns, some trees that are not indigenous, and some flower beds.
Thus, parks dominate cities, although new research shows that there are higher aesthetic perceptions in natural remnants than in parks. Also, biodiversity per se increases positive perceptions of urban settings, e.g., many native bird species that sing increase positive perceptions more than only a few species. These birds thrive in urban woodlands, but they don’t flourish in the same diversity in parks. Further, it is very common that parks to a large extent have lawns. Lawns are mostly monocultures, reducing the number of pollinators. Given these factors, biodiversity may be considered to be highest in natural areas. Interestingly, new research shows that many people, though not everyone, prefer meadows with large flowerbeds rather than lawns. Meadows have a much higher variety of flowers and allow a diversity of butterflies. It is possible to keep urban woodlands or meadows that are safe and provide high aesthetics.
Why do we then continue to build parks with lawns when natural areas provide biodiversity and well-being in higher extent than parks? Building parks seems deeply rooted in planning. It is also somewhat provoking, for me at least, that parks are considered to be nature. The urban green areas in cities, and especially in mega-cities, may be the only “nature” people experience. Experiencing nature in cities has been demonstrated to lead to a deeper understanding of nature elsewhere. So, with an ever increasing proportion of humanity living in cities, it is important to provide natural settings, not only for health and higher aesthetic experiences, but also for an understanding of the natural environment outside cities. In a majority of Sweden, you can easily still reach forests in the urban fringes that resemble virgin forests, but for how long?
Scientific references:
Ignatieva M, Eriksson F, Eriksson T, Berg P, Hedblom M. 2017. Lawn as a social and cultural phenomenon in Sweden. Urban Forest & Urban Greening. 21:213-223.
Nielsen AB, Hedblom M, Stahl Olafsson A, Wiström B. 2016. Spatial configurations of urban forest in Denmark and Sweden – patterns for green infrastructure planning. Urban Ecosystems. DOI 10.1007/s11252-016-0600-y
Ode-Sang Å, Gunnarsson B, Knez I, Hedblom M. 2016. The effects of naturalness, gender, and age on how urban green space is perceived and used. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. 18: 268–276.
Gunnarsson B, Knez I, Hedblom M, Ode Sang Å. 2016. Effects of biodiversity and environment-related attitude on perception of urban green space. Urban Ecosystems. DOI 10.1007/s11252-016-0581-x
Hedblom M and Söderström B. 2008. Woodlands across Swedish urban gradients: Status, structure and management implications. Landscape and Urban Planning. 84:62-73.
Sarah Hinners is a landscape and urban ecologist focused on bridging the gap between academic research and real-world planning and design applications. She is the Director of Research and Conservation at Red Butte Garden and Arboretum in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Sarah Hinners
Ecology ≠ “Good”
About 20 years ago, I was sitting in a group of students from various fields who were gathered in a month-long course to learn about ecological design. One young woman, a student of landscape architecture, was presenting with enthusiasm a project in which she and her mentor were working with the ecological concept of “edge”. Edges, they undersod from ecology, are places of very high biodiversity, because they are places in the landscape where different habitat or community types meet and there is a mingling of species from both ecological communities. Taking a normative leap, they then concluded that since biodiversity is “good”, then edges are desirable in landscapes and they were putting much creative effort into designing landscapes that maximized edge.
In treating ecology as “the right way”, people fail to recognize that the world—and the field of ecology—are in a state of constant change.
Indeed, the landscapes she showed us were beautiful—rendered in watercolor and full of curves and spirals. However, at about the same time, ecologists were publishing numerous studies showing that landscapes that are dominated by edge habitat are landscapes that do not support the vast biodiversity of “interior” species, species that cannot or will not live in edge habitats. Edges favor generalist, highly adaptable species, whereas much of the world’s biodiversity consists of specialized species that cannot tolerate edge conditions. As human influence spreads across a landscape, we tend to create more and more edge, and leave less and less interior, ultimately causing interior species to go locally extinct. Thus, the well-intentioned designs of these landscape architects may actually have promoted the opposite effect than they were trying to achieve. They “knew just enough to be dangerous”.
I fear this example to be illustrative of a broader (though surely not universal) phenomenon within the design fields. There is a desire to design ecologically, to be “green”, yet for landscape architects, ecology is only one of many subjects covered in their training, and they may draw bits and pieces from it without the deeper contextual understanding and questioning that comes from training and practice as an ecological scientist. A part of this is pedagogical: ecology is taught as a static field of knowledge and theory, with general principles and classic case studies. (I myself teach an ecology class like this to urban planning majors—mea culpa.) So if you are applying those principles, you must be designing “ecologically”.
There are two fundamental and related aspects of ecology (and science more generally) that, I believe, fail to be communicated to students of landscape architecture (and to the general public, for that matter). First, ecology is often attributed a normative function in terms of representing “the way things should be”. Actually, ecology is an objective science that seeks to understand how the world works, but it does not attribute value to one state of a system over another. As a result of holding up ecology as a normative frame of reference, some landscape architecture goes little further than using an ecological concept (such as edge) as creative inspiration for design, assuming that this is sufficient grounding to make it “ecological” and therefore “right” and “good”. The relevance, applicability, or consequences of this choice in context are not assessed. (A similar example would be the universal acceptance that “connectivity” is a good thing, whereas ecologists could certainly list examples of cases where connectivity promotes outcomes people probably don’t desire, such as the spread of disease or pests.)
In treating ecology as “the right way”, people fail to recognize the second critical aspect of ecology, which is the profound understanding that the world, and the field of ecology along with it, are in a state of constant change—some slow, some fast. It is a common misperception that ecologists “know” ecology. Scientists, in fact, are not trained to know, but to ask questions. This is one of the common frustrations of non-scientists with trying to get answers from scientists—they will never commit to certainty about anything! Through asking questions, and collecting data addressing those questions, scientists accumulate understanding, but to call it knowledge implies that it is static and fixed. In fact, ecological “knowledge” is a landscape of shifting sands in which our understanding of the world is constantly changing, sometimes in small ways where new phenomena are revealed, and sometimes in radical ways that force us to shift our entire paradigm. Ecology’s understanding of the world has shifted radically over the past several decades, but there is little opportunity or mechanism for landscape architects to keep up with the scientific literature in ecology. By perceiving ecology as a static pool of knowledge, rather than as a process for accumulating knowledge, designers end up with a piecemeal, value-laden interpretation that is out of date.
I am not arguing here for more or different ecological training for landscape architects—I don’t believe that many single individuals can be both good scientists and good designers in a single lifetime. Rather, I would like to see more direct and long-term collaboration between ecologists and landscape architects in the form of a mutual appreciation of the expertise that each has that the other lacks and a willingness to do their own thing, together. It means embracing humility (we don’t know the “right” thing to do), inquiry (what should we know and how could we find it out?), caution (we have the potential to do harm rather than good), investment (I am willing to have a relationship with this landscape and learn from what happens here), and turning to a friend to help navigate a path forward. On the ecologist’s side, I advocate for accepting that people manipulate the natural world and recognizing an opportunity to learn from this manipulation by working with landscape architects to build processes of inquiry into design projects, thereby co-producing both landscapes and knowledge.
In the realm of urban landscape design, ecologists (such as myself) frequently ask these conservation questions about a landscaping plan: Does it sequester/store carbon? Provide wildlife habitat? Filter water and improve water quality? Is it energy efficient and does it reduce C02 consumption? Provide opportunities for pollinators? Does it limit exotics and particularly invasive exotics? In summary, ecologists think in terms of ecological functionality or ecosystem services. Architects and landscape architects tend to think in terms of aesthetics and functional use by people: Is the landscape beautiful? Can people use and have a quality experience in the place?
Real ecological functionality needs to be, and can be, embedded in landscape design. And the public would be OK with that.
Can these two disciplines find “win-wins”? Sustainability has become more popular and the landscape urbanism movement (architects and landscape architects included) has begun to incorporate ecological principles into vertical and horizontal infrastructure, but I still see a disconnect, as aesthetics dominate most efforts. Below, I discuss two examples as an attempt to demonstrate how something is still missing.
First, a recent blog by Kevin Sloan on a concept called “One Landscape” explores an idea where buildings and other hardscapes match natural elements such as trees, hedges, and lawns. In the design of suburban megacities, Sloan states “. . . the future will, in fact, be One Landscape where nature, either cultivated or ‘wild,’ co-exists with diffuse patterns of civilization that feather across density and nature layers”. Initially this sounded good to me, but what does this design concept mean? Loosely translated, this means where landscapes and buildings “reciprocate.” As an example, evenly spaced trees replicate the columns and walls of buildings (see illustrations in blog).
To me, the One Landscape concept is an example of a landscape architecture idea that lacks discussion about ecological functionality or ecosystem services. Taking the example above, planting trees in an even spaced line, particularly if they are the same exotic/ornamental species, is a disservice to biodiversity. A monoculture of exotic/ornamental trees is not good habitat for a variety of wildlife and insect species. Biodiversity thrives at the edges of and in the thick of “chaos.” Symmetrical and even designs limit biodiversity, not to mention what these highly maintained landscapes mean for energy consumption and water consumption. A more natural landscape requires much less maintenance and is better for wildlife. Overall, I would argue designing with such symmetry would not conserve natural resources and any “win-win” scenarios are lost between aesthetics and ecological functionality.
Next, Joan Iverson Nassauer’s original study on homeowner preferences proposed a concept called “cues to care.”. She presented homeowners with photos of yards varying from highly manicured to more natural in appearance, asking them what they thought about these yards. The take home message from the study results were: “They [results] suggest that to be publicly acceptable, ecological practices must be designed to pay special attention to vernacular cues to care. Design that maintains aesthetic quality should include prominent mown areas in front of patches of indigenous plants. As a general guideline, mown areas should cover at least half the front yard.”
This is a study of a suburban community in Minneapolis-St. Paul—and it is supposed to represent the entire U.S. culture? I have heard this study, which is relatively old and can be found only as a technical report, used as a rationale for having a landscape that is highly manicured. I argue that this study has been widely misinterpreted, and is not a representation of landscaping preferences among people living in the United States. The study and the interpretations of it are fundamentally flawed on several levels. First, it is a non-random sample of a small residential community in only one city—hardly a representative sample of most Americans (or even of Minneapolis-St. Paul). Second, the residential participants for this study (about 167 in total) had come from neighborhoods with highly manicured landscapes. It is inherently a biased sample. These participants already were exposed to a neighborhood “norm” of mowed lawns with little indigenous vegetation, so of course they would select manicured lawns as desirable. I wager that if homeowners were interviewed from a much older residential neighborhood that had little or no lawn, their opinions would be much different because the neighborhood norm is quite different. In this hypothetical example, I suspect results would be skewed more towards yards with less lawns (and more native vegetation) as more desirable. In this case, the “cues to care” may actually mean a more ecologically-minded yard with less lawn.
I have worked with a community in Gainesville, Florida, (called Madera) where mowed lawns actually stick out like a sore thumb. Native vegetation and a lack of mowed areas are the “norm.” I bet if we were to do the exact same study on this neighborhood, the results would be quite different and lawns would be less preferred. Perhaps starting off with a neighborhood design that minimizes the amount of lawn would create an initial norm that would carry into homeowner awareness and preference.
In summary, I think city/residential landscapes can be both aesthetically beautiful, functional for people, AND ecologically functional, providing many ecosystem services. I do understand the position that peoples’ values play a significant role in landscape design, but I think we need to revisit aesthetics and what actually are norms in different situations. We just need more examples of ecologists and landscape architects working together, and creating properties where the highly manicured portion of a city landscape becomes the smallest part of the landscape. If this came to pass, I believe residents would be much more accepting of “messy” landscapes that are more sustainable.
Yun Hye Hwang is an accredited landscape architect in Singapore, an Associate Professor in MLA and currently serves as the Programme Director for BLA. Her research speculates on emerging demands of landscapes in the Asian equatorial urban context by exploring sustainable landscape management, the multifunctional role of urban landscapes, and ecological design strategies for high-density Asian cities.
Yun Hye HWANG
It’s a matter of redefining working scopes and creating a more open design process
Looking beyond traditional boundaries of landscape architecture as a single discipline, we know that an integrated approach is essential for successful landscape projects. This approach requires in-depth intellectual inputs from associated fields in the sciences and humanities such as soil science, geomorphology, climatology, biology, hydrology, geography, anthropology, environmental psychology, and social studies.
We must redefine the scopes of landscape architects and involve ecologists from the beginning of the design process.
There is no doubt that these “layers of landscape” have contributed to creating a more complete understanding of diverse environmental functions and human demands on the landscape. However, integrations with other fields are challenging in practice. In order for landscape architects to integrate the work of ecologists, we might, for example, need longer term studies and more opportunities for piloting experimental designs to account for unpredictability and complexity in dynamic human-natural ecosystems. This rarely works with the linear project development process and the limited understanding of ecology in the built industry.
Moving towards the practical implementation of an integrated design approach under given limitations, I would rather like to speculate on redefining scopes of landscape architects and involving ecologists in the design process. To what extent does the scope of landscape architecture design work need to be expanded in design projects in order to implement ecological knowledge effectively? When are the appropriate timings to invite ecological inputs from experts throughout the design processes? These questions have been explored to be answered through design studios, which I have conducted for the last couple of years in Singapore on the transformation of secondary forests into new residential towns. This is a common land development pattern that has far-reaching impacts, as these developments typically do not account for the ecological, biophysical, and socio-cultural values of these forests.
[Redefining working scopes]
Landscapearchitecture is generally regarded as a profession that focuses on tangible experiences of space where developers or clients ask them to design, but there are other notable issues when the necessary working scope extends beyond property boundaries. In the cases of the design studios, we regarded the assigned site as a “landing point” so that the boundary of site was more loosely redefined. When proposing a few-square meter backyard garden near forest edges or a few-hectare size nature park, for instance, we extended the range of working scope from fertility of soils, micro fauna, and the life cycle of single plant species up to mega fauna movement and ecological networks in a city island scale outside of the designing area and immediate surroundings. This approach is aligned with one of the fundamental urban ecological principles that urban landscapes are functioning ecosystems connected at nested scales.
[Creating a more open design process]
The core duties of ecologists for deforestation management projects are to identify areas that contain biodiversity conservation potentials and to highlight wild habitats to be saved. In many projects of Singapore, those environmental consultancies with environmental impact assessment reports are used as “AFTER” processes to seek formal support for developing on secondary forests, where planners and developers havealready determined to construct high-density housing estates. The inputs of ecologists should come at the initial stage, when beginning to review and prioritize the potential sites—“BEFORE” decision-making. The design studios I have conducted have highlighted multiple critical moments when ecologists’ timely involvement is needed in the design processes, including during the aforementioned stage of policy/ land use planning, contracting to determine the direction of site development, evaluation, design, construction, operation, and management in the post-occupancy period.
Maria is working on the investigation of different urban ecosystems and developing principles of ecological design. Her latest FORMAS project in Sweden was dedicated to the lawn as cultural and ecological phenomenon and symbol of globalization.
Maria Ignatieva
We all know that at the broadest scales, everything is a metaphor, and we can all agree that “green” is good. We all agree that Stockholm, Helsinki, and Copenhagen are green cities. It is at the narrow scales, at the site or neighborhood—at the action scale—that we discover we don’t mean the same thing about the quality of green.
How can we ensure that “green” spaces are truly green and sustainable?
The modernistic design of urban green areas, even in very “green” cities, primarily employs intensively managed lawns (as a major “matrix” of neighborhood green space), with some scattered trees and decorative shrubs and perennials. The tidiness and clear visibility of management are the main pillars of today’s vision of urban green areas in a majority of cities. The question of “quality” of green features and the place of biodiversity in this “green” space, as well as the design of sustainable ”green” space, is very complicated. The “quality of green” also incorporates different meanings for different people. For ecologists, truly “green” might be rich urban meadows and shrubs with berries which attract pollinators and birds, whereas for private garden owners, just a piece of grass is likely to be perfectly “green” and satisfactory. Likewise, for a landscape architect, tidy, prefabricated design will probably be in favor.
How can we make practicing ecological design and working with natural processes more popular, shifting this pattern from novelty and curiosity into the mainstream? How to convince your own colleagues—professional landscape architects, urban planners, or city gardeners—to be more open in using alternative, biodiverse, rich lawns-meadows or groundcovers instead of conventional lawns that need constant mowing? Why are the most artificial, expensive, resource and energy consuming elements, such as lawns (or groups of trimmed exotic decorative shrubs) seen as real and truly “green”? Is it possible to appreciate nature as it is in urban environments (without improving it by colorful and unusual flowering species which will please urban dwellers’ eyes)? Can we switch to a new paradigm of use and appreciation of local nature? What needs to be done in education and how can we work with neighborhood communities and local politicians to achieve these goals?
There are already quite a few theoretical and practical experiences and solutions of working with green spaces at finer scales, such as at the site level. These include enriching biodiversity in naturalistic herbaceous plantings and alternative meadow like lawns, low-impact design (green roofs, green walls, swales, and rain gardens), and integrating ecological planning and design in different countries. Nature-based solutions, especially those which are popularizing native plants, are even given priority in some countries due to deep environmental crisis and dramatic loss of native biodiversity. This tendency corresponds with a search for local identity and shifting from global to local contexts. However, the ecological merits of such pure “nativism” are also debatable, even among ecologists and landscape architects. Can the “golden mean” ever be achieved in this ongoing, native-exotic species debate? Should urban nature’s green space be of hybrid origin, reflecting ongoing urban ecological process and centuries of horticultural experiences and achievements?
We encourage you to share your visions, experiences and thoughts. Let’s discuss: what does the “quality” of green mean? Who questions the quality, and what does the word quality mean?
I took my first Ecology course 25 years ago when I was a fledgling undergraduate Landscape Architecture student. This was the first time I’d been exposed to many of the ecological principles, ideas that are woven into my work today. While the texts unlocked new secrets, it was hard to comprehend this new, foreign language and reconcile this to the visual and design work I was learning in studio. It wasn’t until my professor recommended that I read Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel “Ecotopia” that things finally clicked for me. Before you laugh at my nostalgia for what is admittedly a pretty bad book in terms of fiction, the underlying message to me was clear. This was not ecology as an abstract principle, but a coherent vision for an integration of humanity and nature. I’ve been hooked ever since.
We need to better align the key strengths of each discipline—focusing scientific analysis to achieve accessible, applied solutions and integrating design synthesis that achieves cultural goals and rigorous, measurable ecological outcomes.
The disciplines of Ecology and Landscape Architecture are linked together by their shared focus on the environment and the subsequent interactions that occur on these spaces. The challenge today is not one of shared values, but rather on our difficulty in how to apply these values towards a compelling vision of what ecologists and designers, together, can co-create.
To achieve these shared goals, we need to better align the key strengths of each discipline—focusing the scientific analysis to achieve accessible and applied solutions, while integrating design synthesis that achieves cultural goals and rigorous, measurable ecological outcomes. There are many good examples of collaborations that result in positive urban habitat for flora, fauna, and people, often emerging from interdisciplinary efforts. However, integrated design/science firms and even the inclusion of scientists on development teams is still relatively rare. The disciplinary boundary gaps continue to perpetuate this disconnection between science and design and, more, notably between academia and practice. The bulk of scientific research is often inaccessible or hard to apply beyond very specific conditions, offering little to designers. Many design solutions that privilege aesthetics goals and are not built on scientific research offer shallow, “ecologies” lacking function.
When thinking initially about this question, I was reminded of an essay by Davis and Oles “From Architecture to Landscape: The Case for a New Landscape Science” (Places, October 2014), where the authors pose the idea of a hybrid, Landscape Science, to redefine this mode of practice to better tackle the world’s big problems. The difficulty I have with their argument is the difference between inherently analytical operations (i.e. Ecology) that study systems using scientific methods, and generative operations (i.e. Landscape Architecture) that synthesize with a goal of creating an applied physical design. This is not to say that Ecology has no creative dimension, nor does it imply that Landscape Architecture has no analytical modes. However, ecologists are not designers and landscape architects are not scientists—nor do we want to remove the generative role of design.
To tackle these wicked problems, Landscape Architects don’t need to be become scientists, but need to better understand and speak the language of science. And we need scientists to help by making these principles more accessible. One great example of this on the shelves of many landscape architects is the slim volume Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-Use Planning (by Dramstad, Olson, and Forman), which uses a visual approach to core concepts like patches, edges and boundaries, corridors, and mosaics, which are presented in this format. This is a simplified summary and by no means complete, but offers enough information to inform practice, and, more importantly, begins to frames a shared language for future conversations. Another isPlacing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology (edited by Joan Nassauer), where I first discovered the approach of her seminal essay, “Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames” which has continually influenced my thinking on how to integrate the art and the science of landscape architecture. Together, we can better integrate this interdisciplinarity into all work, by polling designers as to research needs and possible collaborations, and by making ecology and design part of the standard operating procedure on all planning and design projects.
We must continue to redefine the role of landscape architecture to tackle climate change, resource depletion, and species extinction, and encourage science to value urban and human in their ecological research. I’m heartened by the continuing theoretical explorations of Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism to expand our potential in an interdisciplinary manner. And this is easier to apply to projects through more rigorous applied ecological principles that have permeated innovative certification systems, such as the Sustainable Sites Initiative and Salmon Safe. This strength means science that is connected to and generating research by ecologists that can be understood by designers and integrated with rigor in designs by landscape architects—with results that truly work for people and ecosystems.
Nina-Marie Lister is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor in the School of Urban + Regional Planning at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Nina-Marie Lister
Ecology + Design: From Marriage (Therapy) to Music (Metaphor)
Our work here in the big chorus of TNOC centres on the intersection of cities and nature; both big, messy joyful cacophonies of life, teeming and pulsing with energy. Ecologists (and other environmental scientists) and landscape architects (along with planners, architects, and urban designers) are all focused on making and shaping healthy habitats—homes—for all. So why do our professions continue to compete rather than collaborate, or repel more than we attract? I wonder why in my professional world that acknowledges complexity, values diversity and embraces uncertainty, do we continue to struggle with both the concepts and the practices of synergy, integration, hybridity?
It is precisely within creative tension of multiple perspectives that we find the possibility and the promise of a more resilient, convivial future.
Let’s consider a simplified set of traits we select (and train) in our respective professionals. Ecologists are trained first as observers of the natural world. We learn and practice the formulae for careful, systematic and empirical observation. We test these observations through repetition and replication. We value the accuracy of our observations that cumulatively and collectively build knowledge and establish facts about how the world works—facts based on evidence, tested through peer review. We are also skeptics, cautious advisors of policy—not in spite of, but because of—the urgent need for advocacy and action as the world’s natural habitats and biodiversity declines, and the climate changes (as the evidence tells us). Designers value creativity, emergence and intuition over objectivity and empiricism; we champion freedom and unfettered expression. We are trained in the arts and in technical modes of representation, and we often (in my experience) tend to be optimistic futurists. After all, if you have the power to shape the future, you may not feel so gloomy about it, despite evidence which suggests we have less control than we aspire to have.
However, designers do rely on carefully honed powers of observation, and that is arguably poorly understood, in part because the design community hasn’t cultivated methodological scholarship or invested in it to the same depth and extent of the sciences. In methodology, designers often appear as poor cousins of the sciences. If scholarship doesn’t show it, the evidence of practice does: designers are indeed trained to finely-tune their observation skills for detailed, meticulous and technical representation—from the patience of photographing or sketching a tree though the seasons, to the dynamism of human life drawing, or animation. A designer’s observation abilities are reflected in technical skills (either by hand or computer) which are needed for adept visual communication; these abilities are built through repetition and experience, and are not unlike the rigour of or investment in an ecologist’s empirical training for systematic experimentation. The designer’s repertoire of observation is ultimately deployed as the springboard for inspiration, as a companion to intuition, and the pollinator for imagination that is essential to envision a desired future. In short, whether ecologist or a designer, we all value observation and narrative—the power to tell a story.
But we rely on different ways and scales of knowing, and we look in different directions: ecologists see what is, and designers see what could be. Both these perspectives—the objective and the subjective, the normative and the conditional—are fundamental to creating a shared story, and from this, making legible the landscapes we live in. These are not binary skills in competition, or singular in isolation. Rather, they are improved in collaboration and enhanced in creative tension. The paradox is that neither approach is especially useful in the work we do without the other!
Ecology, nature, environment, cities, all rest on the central notion of oikos, home; not merely a house, but a home, which implies a certain kind of bond, whether communal, familial, or just familiar. And like a home, (or as Steven Handel cheekily reminded us here, like a marriage), we know it is not a constant place of peace, love and harmony—there are times of dischord and dissonance, and others of comfortable resonance. The point is that there are many melodies possible. So maybe there is power in a music metaphor as well as marriage therapy! The nature of cities—like life itself—is a symphony: complex, diverse, and much more than the sum of its parts. We need our diversity of perspectives, integration of voices, and scales of observation, both dissonant and resonant. It is precisely within this creative tension that we find the possibility and the promise of a more resilient, convivial future—one in which we collectively honour both the culture and the nature that sustains us.
Thames Riverfront (London, Ontario, Canada) is re-imagined as a public landscape designed for forest and flood, across the seasons (shown here in winter). Credit: Stoss with Dillon Consulting 2015. Website: http://www.stoss.net/projects/48/thames-riverfront/Orongo Station Conservation Master Plan, by NBWLA’s Conservation Agriculture Studio integrates biodiversity conservation research and agricultural restoration practice in a large landscape in New Zealand. Credit: Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBWLA) 2016. Website: http://www.nbwla.com/projects/farmCaption: Landcape Architect Forbes Lipschitz interprets catfish farming as an ecological and economic activity, integrating field study and agricultural methods. credit: Forbes Lipschitz and Justine Holzman 2016 via Landscape Architecture Magazine. Link: https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2016/10/11/catch-of-the-day/
Ian MacGregor-Fors is a researcher at INECOL (Mexico). His interests are broad, but he focuses on the responses of wildlife species to urbanization.
Ian MacGregor-Fors
As an ornithologist that has developed into an urban ecologist, I have worked with birds as models for studying urban ecological patterns (and starting to untangle some of the related processes) for over a decade now. Birds are a fantastic group to work with because they are diverse, melodious, and beautiful, but also because they are quite informative from an ecological perspective with (often) less field effort needed than many other wildlife groups.
Architects, engineers, urban managers, and planners all need to know the problem, raise awareness, and contribute to reducing the effects of bird-window collisions.
Birds form complex communities throughout cities (comprised by different species and in different numbers, both varying in relation to the nature of sites), and they have been one of the most studied wildlife groups in urban areas as bio-indicators (focal groups). As John T. Emlen stated in a pioneer urban ecology study back in 1974, “The new [urban] synthetic habitats lie open to invasion and colonization by any birds that can reach them, utilize their peculiar constellation of resources, and survive their special hazards” (The Condor 76, p.184). This idea has been highlighted in more recent publications: some of the most important drivers of urban avian diversity are related to cities’ resources and hazards.
Regarding an important urban hazard for birds that has passed largely unnoticed (or has been somehow ignored), are clear and reflective panes (both glass and plastic; referred to as “windows” hereafter). Bird-window collisions have been identified as one of the most important anthropogenic causes of avian mortality. Recent studies have suggested that they represent the most important anthropogenic mortality cause for birds after cat predation. In the U.S. and Canada alone, an estimate of 624 million—yes, million (624,000,000,)—birds are killed on a yearly basis through window collisions. Although these are estimates and real numbers are unknown, the magnitude of the evidence stresses the importance of the issue. These types of collisions occur basically because birds are incapable of recognizing windows as obstacles. They behave as if windows were invisible to them, attempting to reach “the other side” behind clear panes or striking the reflected image of vegetation and/or sky on mirrored panes. Diving a bit more into the tragic reality of the phenomenon, Prof. Daniel Klem Jr.—the leading worldwide expert in the topic—clearly states that “Casualties die from head trauma after leaving a perch from as little as one meter away in an attempt to reach habitat seen through, or reflected in, clear and tinted panes.” (p. 244). Besides birds being killed outright, avian window collisions can also result in debilitating injuries that make surviving victims highly vulnerable to predation or threaten their ability to recover, among other aspects that have not been considered in the shocking available estimates.
A handful of scientists, mainly from temperate-upland developed countries in North America and Western Europe, have explored this complex human disturbance; thus, little is known and much needs to be fundamentally discovered from tropical and subtropical cities, where urban growth, economic disparity, and biodiversity meet. Although people relate bird-window collisions with the height of tall buildings, they also occur in single-story residences. Birds are vulnerable to this threat regardless of their sex, age, or resident status; yet, scientists have identified some variables influencing the probability of collision, among which the size of the window, its height, and association with surrounding vegetation have shown to be the most important.
Well, this phenomenon is really worrisome, but what can be done to prevent such an amount of unintended causalities? Scientists have suggested some evidence-based solutions (as well as some educated guesses) to try to mitigate this involuntary massacre. Although it is believed that falcon silhouettes (or any other figures) are effective in preventing bird-window collisions, evidence shows they are not. Only if the elements/silhouettes/figures uniformly cover the entire window, separating the elements of a pattern by 5–10 cm., will collision prevention be effective, Given the complexity of the phenomenon, both short-term and long-term actions have been suggested to prevent collisions. Regarding short-term solutions, two head the list: (i) covering windows with nets/screens/decorations facing outdoors and (ii) setting bird feeders within 1 m of windows. In relation to long-term solutions, scientists are working with window-makers to apply coatings to windows, or to modify their outdoor finishing, to make them visible obstacles that birds will avoid. Although UV signals—which often alert birds to items in their environment in different ways—have been thought to prevent collisions, results of studies differ, and thus their effectiveness is still to be proved. One promising path is to modify window finishing using nanotechnology, as to alert birds with signals that are imperceptible for our eyes.
We, regular urbanites, do have options to join the cause! Architects, engineers, urban managers, and planners all need to know the problem, raise awareness, and contribute to reducing the effects of this unnecessary, unintended, and unwanted source of bird mortality though their creative talents. I am confident that a feasible long-term solution will be soon found through hand-in-hand collaborations between scientists, practitioners, and technologists.
Dr Jala Makhzoumi is an Iraqi architect and academic who specializes in landscape design, with expertise in postwar recovery, energy efficient site planning, and sustainable urban greening.
Jala Makhzoumi
Ecologists and landscape architects: Meeting the challenge
To get ecologists and designers working together efficiently in the service of better cities, the first step is to acknowledge the differences in the way the two approach cities. Ecologists are scientists; their approach is analytic, their logic guided by a step-by-step data gathering and analysis process organized to understand the structure and function of living systems. Design thinking is heuristic, seeking answers to a specific problem, learning through creative discovery, a process that is not in the least predetermined. The descriptive approach of ecologists elaborates complexities of the existing landscape, while the prescriptive skills of designers addresses the needs of people and their aspirations for quality living.
Successful collaboration between ecologists and designers should accept that an ecological reading of a landscape, especially at the urban scale, cannot be “handed” to the designer as packaged information.
These two approaches are complementary. Fruitful collaboration, however, necessitates bridging the communication gap that results from the different modus operandi of ecologists and designers. Just as important is the logistic of such collaboration: when does the work of one discipline stop and the other begin? Or is such clear allocation of roles unrealistic altogether? A parallel can be drawn with the collaboration of architects and landscape architects, the latter often being called at the last stages of the design to “beautify” the building site rather than contributing early on to help forge a holistic framing that embraces open and built, natural and manufactured elements. Nor is it acceptable for landscape architects to seek ecological assessment at the early stages of the design project to free them to get on with the business of “designing”. Ecological assessment is an ongoing process. The challenge, therefore, is the same as in other transdisciplinary collaborations, which necessitate breaching disciplinary boundaries to forge a new language and find a shared modus operandi, a middle ground for working together.
Implicit to the breaching of this disciplinary divide is the questioning of scope and method. Ecology has evolved to embrace schools that range from the reductionist focus on ecosystem energetics and trophic-dynamic analysis to the holistic, integrative approach of landscape ecology, a younger branch of the science. Design thinking since McHarg’s Design with Nature is similarly expanding beyond the analysis-synthesis paradigm, broadening the way designers conceptualize nature beyond what is visible to embrace invisible processes that regulate the world we inhabit and underlie our very existence. Ecological design is one example of such shifting paradigms, where design thinking is shaped by the holistic and dynamic understanding that is rooted in ecology (diagram). Landscape ecology influenced my practice in landscape architecture, informed my design approach, and liberated my professional intellect and creativity. Above all, landscape ecology tempered my inclination to bound landscape in time and space, prompting me to search for continuities and contiguities.
Designers set boundaries so they can focus on the problem at hand and come up with answers/ solutions. Patterns and processes however are shaped at different levels of the spatial hierarchy (from ecotope, the smallest to the ecosphere, the largestand) just as they flow across the temporal scale. Although I still set spatial limits in research and practice, however, I do so knowing for a fact that long-term, enduring solutions can only come from a hierarchical, evolutionary knowing of the landscape.
Diane Pataki is a Professor of Biological Sciences, an Adjunct Professor of City & Metropolitan Planning, and Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Utah. She studies the role of urban landscaping and forestry in the socioecology of cities.]
Diane Pataki
Scientists today are worriers. These days, when we look into the future, more often than not, we wonder, “what will go wrong”? It wasn’t always like this; there was a time when, like designers, scientists wondered, “what if” and saw a magnificent world of possibilities for technology, for cities, and for the way that people might live in the coming decades.
More than just providing performance monitoring, scientists are hoping to work with landscape architects to test critical pieces of the urban ecosystem puzzle with every new project.
But things have changed after the many mistakes that have been made. Science and society have failed to anticipate the worst consequences of technological advances such as combustion engines, mass production, the widespread use of impervious surfaces, and modern highway systems. The result has been ever-increasing concentrations of pollutants, degraded water systems, cities clogged with traffic, and divided communities. We are seeing political and social ramifications of the dawn of the Internet age and social media, not all of which are positive. Our cities are dependent on massive imports of energy and materials, leading to waste products that have nowhere to go except into landfills and the local air and water supply.
Scientists worry so much, but design can help
There’s much hope that nature in cities can rectify some of these mistakes. If paving over large areas of land caused many of the environmental problems of the 20th century, won’t restoring nature reverse the trends? And yet, scientists worry about this solution, since we have miscalculated before. History has shown that the places we created are complex and dynamic. Cities are ecosystems and the great lesson of ecology is that most ecosystems are unpredictable: try to push them in one direction and they may take off in another. When we tried to fix the problem of urban infectious disease we created “sanitary” water conveyance systems that concentrated pollution; when we revitalized neighborhoods with new parks and amenities we displaced poorer residents through gentrification. In fact, the list of unanticipated consequences of large-scale programs to “fix” cities is perhaps rather longer than the list of anticipated consequences.
So we worry. Many people ask: what could go wrong in large-scale efforts to bring nature back to cities? Here are some of the issues that give us pause:
1) Scale: The simplest concern is that small scale greening projects are not up to the task of absorbing and mitigating the dramatic emissions of pollutants and other transformations of the urban environment. It’s likely that most green solutions to urban problems must be implemented on a very large spatial scale to really make an impact. But honestly, in most cases we don’t really know the scale that’s necessary to achieve the desired impact—that’s a fundamental knowledge gap. This shouldn’t prevent us from engaging in small-scale projects. However, to really solve critical urban problems, we must get a handle on scale and advocate for the right scale in the right place.
2) Altering systems that we don’t really understand: Large scale change comes with the possibility of making large scale mistakes. Neither science nor society has a great track record of reliably predicting the outcome of dramatic land transformations. I live in a desert city, and worry in particular about water resource and climatic consequences of efforts to shift vegetation and greenspace in one direction or another. Desert cities in the U.S. tend to use quite a lot of water to manage urban greenspace. It’s a worthy goal to reduce this water consumption, but many other ecosystem components are tied to water including local climate, human thermal comfort, energy use, and downstream water supplies such as groundwater. When we consider changing one part of the system, we must carefully consider possible cascading effects.
3) The right project for the right place: This is an old axiom, and yet, the devil is in the details. I have found that ecologists and landscape architects have much to discuss about why and how particular projects are suitable for a particular city, landscape, and site. In my city, located in a unique high desert region, there is much discussion about what a climate appropriate landscape looks like, and how it might provide needed shade and aesthetic properties while minimizing water and maintenance requirements. Which imported design types work here? Which plant types balance resource use, aesthetic, and functional criteria? Why or why not? There is still much discussion, a few points of agreement, and many uncertainties.
The scientific tendency to focus on uncertainty can be frustrating for people who need to act now. As scientists, we don’t want action to grind to a halt just because we don’t know all the answers yet—far from it. But as a compromise, we propose to build uncertainty into action. This can be done with projects that are “safe to fail” and by providing mechanisms to plug knowledge gaps with each new design project. More than just providing performance monitoring, scientists are hoping for opportunities to work with landscape architects to test critical pieces of the urban ecosystem puzzle with every new project. In many cases, we know what we don’t know, or at least can take a good guess. Can we build projects together that fill the many holes in our understanding of how cities work? This might make the future of cities much more predictable, with fewer mistakes and consequences that we can more fully anticipate. We might worry a lot less, and together start imagining again a great future full of new possibilities.
Kevin Sloan, ASLA, RLA is a landscape architect, writer and professor. The work of his professional practice, Kevin Sloan Studio in Dallas, Texas, has been nationally and internationally recognized.
Kevin Sloan
Urban Reserve. Photo: Kevin Sloan Studio
Facts and Ideas
Well, it may surprise the panel, but my private practice in landscape architecture and planning, Kevin Sloan Studio, consistently enjoys energetic and positive collaborations with ecologists, environmental engineers, and, on occasion, scientists. The reason our design work “reaches across the aisle”, I suspect, originates from a particular design view that was taught to me by two great mentors.
“Facts and Ideas”: when landscape architecture is seen ONLY as art, problems arise.
Werner Seligman was a young European architect in the mid-1950s who was hired and implanted into the School of Architecture at the University of Texas-Austin, along with a group of other European educators, to pioneer a new architectural curriculum for the 20th century. While Edward M. Baum wasn’t one of the “Texas Rangers” (a nickname given later to the UT-Austin Europeans), he was an academic colleague of Seligman’s and the Dean at the UT-Arlington School of Architecture. When I relocated from New York to North Texas, Werner told me to “look up Ed Baum”. What they both gave me was a “new set of eyes,” especially about how to see and understand the task of design and how it interacts with many other hands.
Urban Reserve. Photo: Russell Buchanan
Architects and landscape architects bring facts and ideas together to direct the production of places and spaces. The “facts” of a project can include the specific needs of a location, a finite budget in money and time and/or the facts of horticulture and the climate of a particular region. Other facts might include lessons drawn from the great reservoir of history to imbue a contemporary assignment with content and depth. Then there are ideas, such as organizing principles, conceptual frameworks, patterns, theories, and metaphors that guide a landscape architect to artfully imagine possibilities that reconcile the facts and their problems.
When landscape architecture is seen ONLY as art, problems arise, potentially when they are working in collaboration with other fact-driven disciplines, such as ecology.
Noguchis California Scenery. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
The work of an artist is treasured because it offers a personal and singular view of the world. Since ecology, and other related disciplines, such as horticulture and botany, are based on science and repeatable phenomena, the priorities of an artist can, on occasion, be exclusive and intolerable to the pragmatism of those who speak for nature, ecology and science.
In addition to facts and ideas, the design work of Kevin Sloan Studio aspires towards the standards set by great design precedents. One in particular, the round barn at Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts, is a unique and appropriate example for the roundtable because it demonstrates a perfect synthesis of landscape architecture, architecture, ecology, farming, and agriculture. When the round barn is fully understood, it’s difficult to assert whether it is a metaphor, a machine, an instrument, or something even more profound.
Round Barn Exterior.
The Shakers clearly knew archetypes and architectural history, since the round form of the barn is not only temple-like, but is prominently located in the village as if it was in fact a place of worship. At the time, a round building was also the ideal form for feeding an entire herd of cattle using only a single farmhand. This was the functional objective.
When the farmhand would appear, the cattle would instinctively begin moving towards the barn where a round building was, again, a perfect form to face and gather the herd from all directions. Once they entered through a set of equidistantly spaced doors, the interior layout queued all the animals to vertical wood slats that lined an interior circular hallway.
The farmhand would then take a pitchfork of hay from the center mass and place it in front of the animal who was on the other side of the corridor—take three steps—then, repeat the process, around and around. Each animal left the queue when they were full. When the last animal walked out of the building, the herd was fed.
But the more profound aspect of the design is how it ultimately became a “time machine.” As political and religious separatists, the Shakers were a society devoted to energetic celebration. A barn that allowed them to feed the village herd with one brother would give the rest of the congregation a maximum amount of time for “shaking.”
Our office hopes that someday we will produce a design that is as effortless, brilliant, indestructible, and profound as the round barn at Hancock Shaker Village.
Christine Thuring is a plant ecologist who integrates her love of life into creative collaborations and educational dialogues. While her expertise is expressed particularly in the built environment (green roofs, living walls, habitat gardens), she is passionately practical and enjoys restoring peatlands, mentoring students, leading interpretive walks, and advocating sustainable and healthy lifestyles.
Christine Thuring
Yin and Yang: Urban Ecology and Landscape Architecture
Dear Landscape Architecture, We’ve been together for several years now, and they’ve been the most exciting, fruitful and creative years of my existence. As a team united by shared values and interests, we have combined our skills, perspectives and knowledge towards projects that are beautiful and functional, both ecologically and culturally.
One of my weaknesses, as an ecologist, is to get bogged down by the everything I don’t know. I could take a lesson in confidence from a landscape architect. Who, in turn, needs to get out from behind the computer screen.
For creating healthy and beautiful cities, we both love nature and adore using planting design as a medium. Your expertise is on people and design, while I seek opportunities for natural processes and biodiversity. Both approaches are essential, and perhaps our relationship in this context can be seen as a reflection of yin and yang. If unified feminine and masculine energies have positive effects, does the same apply to the balance of wild and managed landscapes, soft and hard?
Sadly, we are not in a balanced place at the moment. Our therapist, David Maddox, has suggested that we communicate our discontent and seek reconciliation by identifying the gaps between us. Specifically, he suggests we reflect on the following: How can we get landscape architecture and ecology better integrated in the service of better cities? After some venting, I will reflect on the inadequacies of my profession in this light and will conclude by outlining some approaches that, if we both adopted, could help create better cities and landscapes.
When we first got together, we used to go for vivid walks that elevated our powers of observation to child-like ecstasy. Do you remember? Whether in the natural environment, sculpture parks or beautiful cities, the outdoors is definitely where we fell in love, because we love the same things. Our poetry sang the praises of natural shapes and forms, admired the intricacies of blossoms, and mused upon dramatic contrasts. We were constantly learning from each other, and took turns exchanging field guides and sketch books. Or at least this is how I remember it.
Nowadays, you’re only ever behind your screen or at the drawing board and rarely come outside. It seems that you trust your notes and photographs to the extent that you don’t need to visit the site again. Working at plan view is such an abstract and technical exercise! I don’t want to challenge your practice, but I am concerned that you are limiting yourself (and your gifts of creativity and sensitivity) to a 1-dimensional plane. Is it time pressure/ time management? Or have you lost touch with your inspiration?
If there wasn’t so much at stake, I wouldn’t mind. But your studio-/ screen-based process also seems to have shifted your priorities away from “life” and increasingly towards “living”. You take such delight in geometry, sculpture, and clean surfaces that little time remains to consider other forms of life. What about birds and bats, who need homes, food and water? Given so little thought, designed features like lollipop trees will offer little benefit to particular species who need our help. Your colours and patterns are beautiful, but will the species lists actually benefit insects, pollinators, or birds? How will they affect local and regional food webs?
On the other hand, I really admire your ability to move forward on a project in spite of incomplete knowledge or understanding, as I realise this is a hindrance of mine. As a plant ecologist who dabbles in landscape design, I am hindered by my ideal to thoroughly know a site and to predict how an installation will establish and develop. One of my weaknesses, personally and professionally, is to get bogged down by the knowledge of the knowledge I lack. I could take lessons in confidence from you, since my holding back does not serve the world.
I have faith in our connection, and believe that we can accomplish much more together than we could alone. Following are a few points that I think could help create better cities and landscapes. These may resonate with you, but perhaps with other professions, too. At the very least, I hope they help us better understand each other and our relationship to making the world a better place.
The urban ecologists approach to landscape design:
Observation: prioritise observing the site (or other sites with similar qualities) at various times (day/ month/ year);
Consequential yields: plant selections will impact food webs and trophic structures, so choose your plants wisely;
Bird’s-eye view: consider the role of the site/ project to regional corridors, networks, populations, communities, etc.
Think global, act local: identify local qualities and features that are relevant to the site and its context (e.g., cultural heritage, green space networks)
80-20: aim to spend 80% of your time/ energy on the survey, analysis and design, and 20% on the implementation and maintenance;
Ethics: regenerative and sustainable designs can be achieved when they take into account the needs of local communities and people, the potential of local ecosystems, and create conditions for abundance;
Patterns: design from patterns to details;
Collaborate: there is always more to learn (and it’s fun!);
Stay informed: science and practice continue to churn out valuable information and knowledge;
Down-to-earth: if you start feeling overly conceptual, get outside and refresh.
Anne Trumble is a landscape and urban designer based in Los Angeles, where she is currently working with the Arid Lands Institute.
Anne Trumble
I suspect most ecologists are well aware of the things I’d like to share about landscape architecture. Because you, ecologists, interact with the impacts of our work long after we’ve fulfilled a construction contract. How does the large plaza and pier on a new riverfront impact the river ecosystem ten years after the ribbon cutting ceremony? Ask an ecologist. How does a designed “forest” in a local park impact bird populations over time? Ask an ecologist.
Try as we might to act on behalf of all living creatures and systems, a landscape architect’s work is anthropocentric. It is shaped by human constructs: ownership of land, commodification of space, and human timescale.
Ownership of Land: Landscape architects most commonly work for clients who own land. While natural systems and non-humans disregard these legal definitions of who owns what, we are bound by and to them. Water flows, soil is porous, and birds, animals, insects, and plants move fluidly across property boundaries, while we create islands according to them.
Try as we might to act on behalf of all living creatures and systems, a landscape architect’s work is anthropocentric.
Commodification of Space: Landscape architects are often asked to quantify how a project will increase capital, in order for it to happen. Metrics tell us that landscape architecture can raise surrounding property values, increase human health and productivity, reduce crime, and attract people who then support nearby businesses. Other less commodifiable value propositions, such as ecosystem health, are acceptable so long as they don’t decrease the commodification of a space; what keeps landscape architects employed.
Human Timescale: Landscape architects plan and design with the goal of implementation. To implement a plan, we construct it, and to construct it, we have contracts to manage liability. Contracts operate on human time, which is usually about maximizing profits and often at odds with ecological time which is about maximizing change and resilience. The images we create to communicate with clients and the public represent contract time because they illustrate what a landscape will look like as a result of construction. Sometimes built landscapes get frozen in contract, or human, time because maintenance keeps them looking like the static images that convinced people to build them. As we’re learning from erratic and increased weather events, human time landscapes are less resilient than those with the ability to change with and adapt to a changing planet.
Ecologists, can you see how much we need you? You know how the islands of our work within property boundaries impact natural systems beyond. You know what is the highest ecological value we could embed into our commodified spaces. Now that we are in the Anthropocene, whereby humans are the greatest geologic force on the planet and nothing remains untouched by us, we need your feedback loops. Since we work on human time, and you on ecological time, we must put our heads together to bridge the two for more resilient communities, and planet.
Dr Mike Wells FCIEEM is a published ecological consultant ecologist, ecourbanist and green infrastructure specialist with a global outlook and portfolio of projects.
Mike Wells
Disciplinary myopia and professional tribalism
The question is a vital one, but just one example of a wider phenomenon and problem related to design in its entirety, that of “disciplinary myopia”.
In vocational education in landscape architecture and ecology, as in many other disciplines, what those in other disciplines care about and why has been given too little attention. In depth investigations of the historic canons of knowledge and thought underpinning spheres of endeavour other than one’s own have been given little emphasis. The sheer burgeoning of knowledge and expectation in each profession has compounded the problem by focussing energies for study too myopically.
There is a pressing need for us all to develop a much deeper knowledge and respect of each other’s disciplinary lineages and value sets.
This phenomenon of not caring to find out what others care about—and why—leads to a second phenomenon of professional tribalism: when trained professionals engage together to undertake real projects. Pressures of budgets, timetables, and project team structures, themselves, often strongly militate against the provision of interdisciplinary explorative space. Far from a constructive collaboration, there is often inter-disciplinary competition based on different starting premises and “professional territory” (and feeding different egos). Small wonder that so many design teams founder on the jagged rocks of mediocrity when delivering what is supposed to be a multidisciplinary creative endeavour! Of course there are great exceptions, but it is sadly so often true.
Professionals with different lenses on the world
One might think that the professions of landscape architecture and ecology would be the exceptions—that the divide between them would be less marked than between other professions given their “common currency” of nature. But the fact is that landscape and ecological professionals often care differently about the same things and also care about different things. They have been taught different languages, and different philosophies (whether explicit or implied) based on different starting premises. They use different lenses on the world.
Ecologists that I know, by and large, appear to have entered the ecological profession driven not only by their love of nature but by their deep moral indignation at the damage done by man to nature in all of its innocence and incapacity to fight back. The theory and practice of nature conservation evaluation elevates to importance those features in the world that are rarest, take the longest time to develop naturally, and display the least influence of Homo sapiens. Ecologists frequently focus on our being at one with nature by somehow “going back” to it; they often jibe that when we, like the Oozlum Bird or the Easter Islander, disappear from the globe on a wave of our own greed and ignorance, “we will not be missed”.
This focus, however, underrates the many achievements and values of civilization and culture, and can cause disengagement from the pressing challenges posed by our ever-increasingly urban existence—challenges for which ecological thinking is vitally required if we are to find proper resolutions, not only for us but for all nature within and beyond the urban realm.
Landscape architects instead generally focus notably more on the merits of Jacob Bronowskian Ascent and Kenneth Clarkian Civilisation in our relationship with nature. They reason that as the only know civilised and self-reflective being, we are clearly here to take a different path to the rest of nature. So, exerting control upon it, simplifying it, abstracting from it, recombining it, and improving on it—all hold significant allure for the landscape architect, both emotionally and intellectually; indeed, these actions might even be considered to encapsulate our very purpose on Earth for landscape architects.
Such a focus, however, can create a blind eye to (or much reduced focus on): the concepts of natural limits on resources, the different responses and capacities of different parts of ecosystems to absorb anthropogenic environmental change, and our whims of intervention and on the intrinsic value of non-human life.
Seeking synergy
Many who read this will be, like me, passionate believers in the merits of humankind and the “ascent of man”. We will revel in the achievements of culture, the arts, fine landscapes, fine music, fine food and drink, fine buildings and astonishing technologies—in short, appreciating all the best in human creative endeavour. We will wish for this “ascent” to continue.
Many of the same readers will have hearts that bleed at the pollution of the seas, the felling of the forests, and the mindless eradication of natural wonders and genetic libraries by human action and will want to reverse these depredations.
To achieve both goals, true synergy is needed between ecologists and landscape architects—and all other professions involved in both protecting and embellishing our world as a place of wonder and delight.
And for that to happen there is a pressing need for us all to develop a much deeper knowledge and respect of each other’s disciplinary lineages and value sets.
Peter Werner
Give urban biodiversity a chance!
Private and public green spaces and structures planned and designed by landscape architects have a main impact on the biological diversity of cities. Many landscape architects do a good job and plan and realize good, attractive, and ambitious urban green. But, from my view, I miss some essentials with respect to maintaining and improving urban biodiversity.
It is necessary that landscape architects grapple with scientific knowledge about urban biodiversity through education and collaboration with ecologists.
What is it that I miss? The landscape architects construct green areas, which show richly structured vegetation; the vegetation is aesthetic and it considers the needs of the people. Many of these landscape architects believe that they make a contribution to species richness and diversity, both quantitative and qualitative. As a rule, however, they use a superficial understanding of the meaning and mechanisms of what constitutes urban biodiversity, aligning it with visual perception. Those planning and designing do not realize that such an approach can realize the potential of a location for the protection and development of diversity and for the perception and experience of nature by the dwellers but, possibly, can counteract biological diversity. Some examples for the latter: if the construction material stone is used excessively in green places, even when stone is present in abundance in cities; if the extensive offer of flowers attracts pollinators, but the blossoms are modified or infertile, that pollination is not possible; if the landscape architects share the sentiment, without analysis, that wild places, like wastelands, are ugly and have no value.
I think it is necessary that landscape architects grapple with scientific knowledge about urban biodiversity. The responsibility for the protection and improvement of biological diversity should be become an integral part of the education and training of landscape architects and, in this context, they should be taught which processes influence biodiversity in urban areas.
Who of the landscape architects knows the essential components of the local and regional species pools? What are the biogeographically typical species, which can be part of the urban biodiversity in order to mirror the regional biogeography? How well do landscape architects know the impact of their planning and designs on the diversity of animals and plants? Which landscape architect is aware that each planned and designed green space influences the structure of the metapopulations in the city? Or, is aware of the contributions of the green space to the local food chain? Etc. etc. Experts in the local and regional species pools are not always able to present sufficient answers for the specific plan, but they can give an orientation.
And, another point. Do not forget common species. They contribute to regional identity, because the common species of the surrounding landscape are often species that are able to enter and survive in urban areas, too. They are also fundamental for the occurrence of rare species in urban areas, because they support the nutrition cycle, are essential parts of food webs, act as shelter for other species, and ensure a great extension of the ecosystem services. Last but not least, they provide the biggest potential for nature experience in urban areas.
Landscape architects make important contributions to the valuation of urban green. Therefore, they should visualize that apparently ugly places, such as wild, unpleasant waste areas settled by a variety of plants and animals, are of value. Good planning concepts and the placing of remarkable symbols, but also the use of interesting information, can produce a shift in thinking, such that the former ugly place becomes a new beauty.
What would be helpful?
First: The topic of urban biodiversity and the scientific background and knowledge of that topic should become an essential part of education and advanced training of landscape architects
Second: Local and regional knowledge by experts and laymen (citizen science) about the occurrence—in past and present—and diversity of species and their habitats should be considered in planning and design of urban green.
Third: Landscape architects are important stakeholders conveying awareness about values of green spaces and structures. Landscape architects, ecologists, and environmental economists should come together to discuss and work out the valuation and improvement of urban biodiversity.
Winter is here in the north—not the slightest allusion here to any famous TV series or any recent election, of course. And in the wintertime, life goes underground in a literal sense: tubers and roots reign while most of the aboveground parts of plants are dormant; animals hibernate or at least seek shelter in holes and caves. But in the annual cycle, above- and underground are tightly linked; without underground reserves to provide for the winter and start the active cycle again in spring, you die. If there is no active life aboveground in summer and fall to make reserves underground for the next winter, you also perish.
Is it possible to live underground? Is it reasonable? Is it desirable? Is it feasible? Yes. But it needs thoughtful design. The key issues are water, sound, vegetation, and light.
The same goes for cities, although in different terms—above-the-ground and under-the-ground systems are also tightly linked. It is virtually impossible for any city to exist without buried power and information networks; underground water transmission, sewerage pipes, malls, basements, pedestrian tunnels, and motorways; sometimes a subway system, etc. Helsinki is even planning its expansion straight down with a strategic “Underground City Plan” that considers the underground as a part of the city itself, which the local authorities refer to as the “shadow city”. Helsinkians already enjoy access to a subterranean swimming complex, shopping area, and hockey rink. A data center has been built beneath a cathedral and uses cold seawater to cool its machines, drastically cutting energy consumption. The plan establishes the construction of a further 200 underground structures in forthcoming years, including apartments and public spaces.
Underground swimming complex in Helsinki. Photo: HKP
Thus, since it is winter (in the north), why not turn our eyes to the subterranean world and ask: is it possible to live underground? Is it reasonable? Is it desirable? Is it feasible?
Cities were once built with materials extracted from beneath the space they would eventually occupy, which left quarries of huge dimensions beneath urban feet; such abandoned galleries sometimes collapsed, causing disasters. The urban underground is also full of deserted shelters and bunkers—remnants of past wars, cold or warm—catacombs, and so on. Most of these networks are now empty, but they still exist. There is plenty of room down there. Why not use it?
I can almost hear you grumbling—yes, you who are reading this post: living underground like rats! Why the hell would we do that?
Well, to begin with, let’s recall that caverns and hollows are intrinsically linked to human history: they have been used as dwellings and for food storage since the Paleolithic, millions of years ago. More recently, what can be described as underground cities existed in China (Banpo), Turkey (Cappadocia), and Israel (Maresha) between two and three thousand years ago. Underground passages for emergency evacuation were an inherent part of many medieval cities. Nowadays, there are troglodyte villages in France (nearby Poitiers), Spain (Granada), and others, where thousands of people seem to live a good life.
More pragmatically, nearly 70 percent of the world population lives in urban areas, and according to the United Nations two billion more people will move into cities in the next 20 years. It is probable that the size of the city itself will grow still faster than its demographic growth rate: 276 percent vs. 66 percent, according to Shlomo Angel and Stephen Sheppard, 20 years from now. Such a decoupling is driven by a trend: urban population growth tends to go hand in hand with rising living standards, which requires more room (larger dwellings or offices, considerable infrastructure provision, etc.). From this perspective, cities are potentially going to be jam-packed with construction, especially considering that future city developments are supposed to be—and designed to be—sustainable. Better standards of living means that we are likely to encourage urban densification and to promote urban agriculture, for example, so that buildable areas are going to become scarce and, thus, more expensive.
There are but two ways to deal with this Gordian knot. The first one consists of untying the knot: allowing the mushrooming of high-rise buildings as an adaptation to the scarcity of available space—which may seem “sustainable” at first sight, but is not. This option doesn’t work: high-rise buildings are usually met with distaste by the people living nearby and, besides, high densities also generate environmental nuisances. The second method works: it doesn’t try to untie the knot, but cuts it altogether. Why not build downwards instead of upwards? This way, we could meet the demand for more urbanization without erecting skyscrapers everywhere.
Let there be no mistake here: living underground is also a huge environmental and economic issue. As I mentioned before, there are masses of unused underground infrastructure (ancient quarries, tunnels, shelters etc.). Their maintenance costs a lot of money and is essential, since derelict structures may cause building collapses at the surface. The point here is turning a problem into an opportunity. Or, to put it another way, turning an environmental bad into an environmental good, which is rather rare. We are speaking of significant available surfaces, plus the possibility to dig deeper and create new underground areas.
Building and living below the surface is an interesting and disruptive alternative, and a more sustainable one. As Nikolai Bobylev states in his seminal article, “Underground spaces are less susceptible to external influences, and their impact on the external environment is less than aboveground facilities.” Further, “Deep underground structures suffer significantly less damage during earthquakes than aboveground structures.”
Many cities in the world are beginning to take renewed interest in underground space. It is not only Helsinki, or the well-known underground city of Montréal—which, by the way, is not really a city but a gigantic mall—or subterranean Moscow. In Japan, China, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy, and France, people are undertaking underground development initiatives. In China, for example, a recent regulation act provides a legal basis for the development of urban underground spaces. The National Planning Agency of the Netherlands devotes special attention to the good use of underground capacity. And Singapore, which faces severe land constraints, has embarked on a comprehensive master plan for underground development.
For all of these reasons, investors and private operators’ interests, as well as mayors’ interests, converge to develop underground cities. Whether we like it or not, underground cities will boom in the coming decades. Thus, we’d better get ready to influence the making of these underground cities, in the sense of real sustainability. Otherwise, they may very well turn into a social and environmental nightmare, as in Fritz Lang’s cult film Metropolis, where class divides determine who lives at the surface (the rich) and who lives below ground (the workers). Have you ever been to Montréal’s Ville Souterraine—which (and as I mentioned above), despite what its name suggests, is actually a huge shopping mall, with constant harsh lighting and noise, with no place to halt and nothing to do if you’re not a consumer or a commuter—and felt the dizziness and discomfort this kind of place provokes?
Metropolis? No, just the undergrounds of La Défense, Paris. Photo: Sylvie Salles, 2015.Montréal (Ville souterraine), the lower floors of the Eaton Center—a not so nice confined environment. Photo: Wikimedia commons
Now is time to propose something different from these dystopic futures backed by hidden financial agendas. How to practically design desirable, livable, and sustainable underground cities—places people can take ownership of and can transform to fit their needs and their desires? To do so, collective perception and imagination will have to be stimulated. But, how do we do that?
What features exist at the surface and in natural underground spaces, such as caverns, that do not exist in the manmade underground structures mentioned above? Natural daylight, water, bedrock. Natural earth—ironic when we consider that we’re speaking of underground spaces—vegetation, and familiar forms of life are missing, and their absence generates an oppressive atmosphere. Couldn’t we say that, in the manmade structures, nature is missing?
Yes, I know “fake natures” are widespread in malls, subway stations, and underground plazas: basins, palm trees, tropical flowers and ferns, and sometimes moss. But these are nothing more than cheap exoticisms that eventually gather dust, decline, and wither due to their high maintenance costs and technical difficulties in the long run. Does anyone consider these stagings as expressions of Nature? A double mistake is made with such artificial installations. First, they are “artificial” in the sense of being incongruous: usually, there has never been a tropical forest where these malls, stations, and plazas are located—rather, there have been prairies, temperate woods, snow, and sometimes deserts. Second, the implicit intention of the designer is to create a replica of what is above the ground, to make people forget they are actually under the ground. And it doesn’t work: people are not fooled. Worse still, the disastrous subliminal message communicated by such installations is that life underground is “bad”, since everything is done to make any signs of being underground disappear.
Thus, if we want desirable, livable, and sustainable underground cities, we have to design undergrounds that look like what they really are, and that highlight the specific features of subterranean life. Contrary to what the Emerald Tablet states, we must embrace a philosophy of “as above, not so below”. This was the intent of a research project I ran, which ended in a conference last October: “Underground Cities — Living Below the Surface: Supporting Urban Transition to Sustainability.” To succeed, four key issues have to be addressed:
(1) Our first action must concern water. Let’s discard the traditional approach, which holds that water is a threat underground (flooding, molds, etc.). Make it a friend instead. Freshwater may very well become a golden thread that gives consistency to underground areas. Water can play a crucial part in well-being underground: while circulating, it can considerably enhance the sound landscape, and it facilitates orientation. To foster life and natural vegetation underground, it goes without saying that freshwater is needed. To do so, mapping the seepage and water pathways, then channeling them into small rivers and creeks, and finally orienting them and concentrating the flow in ponds and pools in a configuration as close as possible to the natural water circulation system, would make sense.
(2) As mentioned above, sound is crucial to comfort and orientation. Sound helps overcome the opaque and partitioned feelings that can be characteristic of underground areas. Sound makes it possible to imagine what exists on the other side of a wall or at the end of a hallway. A good “sound landscape” should include shades and fluctuations between intense and calm areas.
(3) Returning to the vegetation and water issue, common sense favors the introduction of plants involving minimal human intervention: namely, plants that already exist in cave ecosystems. Naturally, two specific conditions must be met to match with human activity: brighter lighting than in natural caves, and lower levels of moisture to remain in human beings’ comfort zone. Cave ecosystems from dry and warm lands with karstic subsoil should prove to be quite adaptable models for built underground spaces, as they are perfectly adjusted to significant variations in temperature and lighting, and have rather low humidity rates.
(4) Vegetation brings up the related issue of lighting, which I have already mentioned briefly. Intense intrusion of daylight is common in manmade undergrounds: subway entrances, patios, glass canopies. This is not good, since it results in a blinding contrast between deep shadow and harsh light on large surfaces, which causes discomfort. Functional indoor artificial lighting is also inappropriate; it causes people to lose their sense of time, as there is no difference between day and night, or between the daylight hours according to the seasons. Orientation is impacted, too—moving around in invariable lighting environments distorts human understanding of distances.
One solution could be to combine artificial lighting—the intensity of which would vary with the season and the time of the day, and in accordance with the characteristics of different places (pedestrian passageways, quiet areas, etc.)—and small-sized light shafts and light wells dotted across an underground space’s ceiling, which would unobtrusively connect the underground to the surface. These vertical “light pillars” would act as landmarks and make orientation easier.
Are there places in the world were these four principles are actually applied? Yes there are—and these undergrounds also host kitchen gardens. But that’s another story, which I will talk to you about in my next post. Meanwhile, wintertime is a wonderful moment to pause for a nice root and tuber soup. Want some? It comes from my own garden.
In a previous contribution to The Nature of Cities (Faggi & Vidal 2016), we wrote about linear parks (LPs) as an interesting green space typology and discussed some strengths and threats of these multifunctional areas in Latin America. Other contributions (Tsur 2014, Das 2015, Maddox 2016) explained that LPs are good answers to create more access to green and open space in cities that don’t have much space to spare.
In planning the layout of a linear park using a successful integrative design process, it is paramount to consider users’ perceptions and attitudes.
Linear parks include greenways, waterfronts, and transportation infrastructure, frequently in re-used sites linking major urban nodes. Unlike other types of green areas, people use LPs for moderate and vigorous physical activities. In the last decade, linear parks received a great deal of attention among city planners as an opportunity to revitalize interstitial edge-spaces in the post-industrial era. In many cities, they are being planned as drivers for the regeneration of deprived areas and for residents to be physically active.
People relate to linear parks not as a uniform space, but rather as a hierarchy of different supplies which provide a range of benefits that enable active and passive recreational experiences. Each linear park may be seen as having more or fewer cultural, ecological, developmental, agricultural, and recreational values. Each linear park type has its own appeal, and each park is filled with an array of elements to shape its character, creating individual feelings along with the experiences people have when they use the park.
One of the first questions designers should ask themselves about their projects is for whom and for what are these linear parks being designed? In addition, they should explore what the target community most values about linear parks?
For example: which park’s features are residents particularly interested in?:
Is an identifiable location of the park within the urban matrix, easy access, and secure connections across the LP and with other places in the city most important? Surely these variables will be appreciated by most of the visitors, and will have a decisive impact on public attendance.
Are users more interested in the environmental quality of the LP? These traits will be prioritized for those with environmental feeling—a sector of the population that already knows how important urban green space is for environmental benefits such as biodiversity, cleaning and cooling the air, or slowing down runoff.
Or, will the visitors prefer nature-based recreational areas ideal for fishing, boating, hiking, biking, birding, or scenic views, and access to the sky and to the horizon line?
When linear parks are designed, conflicts frequently arise. Sometimes, there is a lack of articulation between environmental function, social use, city regulations, and institutionalism. Other factors that play against linear parks are perceptions of insecurity, the community’s unconcern, lack of planning, and lack of cross disciplinary work. For example, the LP of Palmira city (Colombia) draws substantial apathy from the city’s residents. Lack of a sense of belonging and of environmental sensitivity, coupled with the perception of insecurity in the park, compound the lack of interest of the local authorities. This lack of synergy between community and government is what prevents the park from reaching the splendor it deserves and from which all would benefit.
In planning the layout of a linear park in a successful integrative design process (below), it is paramount to consider users’ perceptions and attitudes by examining the interplay between public life and public space.
Last year, we studied a set of six linear parks in Argentina and Colombia. In our analysis of them, we delineated three different types classified as: Connector, Aerobic, and Waterfront linear park.
Balance between meaning, benefits, uses, and needs of a linear park.
We found that that these three different types differed in the quantity and quality of the services they provided and on the way these parks were perceived by the public. We made our categorizations according to accessibility, neighboring land-use (urban complexity), connectivity, vegetation cover, paved surfaces, infrastructure, and how people use the areas by performing active and passive recreation.
For the active physical activities, we considered percentages of walking, crossing, running, cycling, rollerskating, skateboarding, playing ball, soccer, other games, riding, aerobics, fishing, and boating.
Passive recreation included: social interaction, walking the dog, eating/drinking, sitting, lying, sunbathing, and reading.
Our results showed that the proportion of active recreation and of crossing were the features that discriminate between types (Fig. 2). Other interesting differences we recorded among parks were the perceived benefits mentioned by users (Fig. 3). The waterfront LP was the one that reached the highest value of well-being (physical and psychological benefits).
Connector linear parks: What we have called “connector linear parks” are mainly used as commuting axes—cool and quiet routes through which to pass on the way to other destinations, such as shops, services, and bus stops. It is known that natural settings with good access and amenities encourage people to walk for transport (Gehl 2010). Both in Buenos Aires and in Palmira, these LPs connected services and commercial areas, as well as parks and squares. Respondents gave them the highest values of environmental benefits and the lowest of social interaction.
Aerobic linear parks: These play a dominant role in daily recreation because they provide the greatest overall physical benefit, as indicated by active recreation (running, cycling, rollerskating, skateboarding) scoring highest in this type of park. This type does more than pretty up a district; it has an improvement effect on residents` health and well-being.
Waterfront linear parks: These are somewhat similar to the connector park type in the amount of active recreation that they support, but waterfront linear parks are used less for commuting and more for contemplating the landscape. They also have great potential as meeting points for social events. Other significant activities in this park type are actions linked with water, such as fishing, boating, and reflection. There is substantive evidence, for instance, that water gives a landscape a special appeal. Architects, designers, planners, psychologists, and researchers interested in environmental behavior have consistently reported the presence of water as one of the most important and attractive visual elements of a natural or built landscape.
Perceived benefits mentioned by users.
As these types of parks are used in different ways and have their own distinctive character, they require specific infrastructure to sustain their individuality. Such contrasting features should be taken into account in the early phases of their design process. In terms of management, this early incorporation can make a project more successful.
If a park already exists and shows dysfunctional instrumental effects, a redevelopment is necessary. The application of corrective measures seeking solutions should be based on the different functionality of different types of parks.
In our study case, the lack of adequate infrastructure revealed that, in the design, the park features previously mentioned were underestimated. This experience enables us to develop recommendations for future interventions that should be used to reinforce the park’s identity (below).
Connector linear park in Buenos Aires city: painting the pavement can create a better division between new bicycle lanes and pedestrian areas. The presence of guards is advisable to help maintain the security of the corridor.Waterfront linear park in Formosa (Northern Argentina): a tropical climate requires that the park has shade to reduce heat. Outdoor furniture creates space for lunching and relaxing (top left). Currently, the lack of large trees means that the park is used more at night than it is during the day, necessitating artificial lighting (bottom right).Aerobic linear park in Bella Vista, Buenos Aires. In this park, a better separation of activities and a good provision of devices for sport practices are advisable.
We have shown that design and location are keystones to what makes a successful linear park. Approaches to design must vary to suit the scope of the park, as its design influences how the place will be managed and used, not to mention that a green and pleasant area that is well-planned and well-managed is generally a well-used space! To achieve these goals, cross-disciplinary good practices will ensure that existing LPs settings can be better promoted or modified.
Ana Faggi, Claudia Zuleyka Vidal, Florencia Gusteler, and Romina Lopez
Buenos Aires and Cali
Claudia Zuleyka Vidal is an architect with many years’ experience in a wide range of urban renewal design projects. At present, she is working on a variety of architecture projects in the city of Cali.
A review of Can a City Be Sustainable?By Gary Gardner, Tom Prugh, and Michael Renner. 2016. Island Press. Buy the book.
This compact volume is an ambitious portmanteau of information on sustainable urbanism that covers an impressive range of issues and amply demonstrates how many of the essential initiatives needed to make sustainable cities are demonstrably achievable, with actions that can proceed immediately. Although the meaning of “sustainable” is assumed, rather than defined, by page 45 Gary Gardner, one of its key authors, answers the question posed in the book’s title with a one sentence encapsulation of the sustainable city vision:
A sustainable city is a vibrant human settlement that provides ample opportunities, in harmony with the natural environment, to create dignified lives for all citizens.
It’s hard to argue with that, although it doesn’t really pin down what “sustainable” means.
For the authors, a sustainable city “treats squirrels and robins, streams and trees, as neighbours rather than artifacts”.
The book begins with big picture descriptions of the city and is followed by numerous chapters dealing with the specifics of making cities work and their potential for sustainability, interspersed with vignettes from individual cities that provide positive examples of trying to deliver on that potential. The project directors of this Worldwatch publication acknowledge the “variability” of approaches to sustainability and, sensibly, do not attempt to prescribe a single path to the sustainable city.
Chapter one in this book is “imagining a sustainable city”, but it curiously fails to mention that much of the early and current literature on the topic describes “ecological” cities. If I came to this book without much of a background in the topic, I could read it from cover to cover (and gain a lot of useful information) but remain unaware of the breadth and depth of the international ecocity movement and the various manifestations of ecocity ideas that have contributed to shaping and informing sustainable city initiatives for over three decades. Ecocities is a term that has been used to describe municipal programs that aim to make a city sustainable, to make claims of urban ascendancy based on sustainability, and as a label for visionary ideas about what the ultimate sustainable city might be like.
A brief exposition of the similarities or differences between eco and sustainable cities might have helped introduce newcomers to the range of literature that exists on this rapidly evolving and sometimes contentious topic. Likewise, “green cities” aren’t mentioned, although there is mention of a “Green City Index”. Yet every green city program or idea I’ve ever come across would readily, if not rather obviously, fit into any comprehensive discourse about sustainable cities.
The book covers many strategies for sustainable city making that aren’t always covered in the literature, such as remunicipalization (return to public ownership at a local level) of power utilities (notably in Germany). Gardner’s chapter on “Cities in the Arc of Human History: A Materials Perspective” is an excellent exposition of the inter-relationship between energy flows, materials and socio-economic change. Although not mentioned in the book, some of the pioneering work on energy use in cities (Newman and Kenworthy) comes from Australia. Australian researcher Stephen Boyden was responsible for the first published study (in 1981) of a city (Hong Kong) as an ecosystem. He has written compellingly on the biological history of civilisation and developed theory about the metabolic stages of civlisation. His “4 ecological phases of human existence” correlate strongly with the fourth socio-metabolic regime identified in the “Cities in the Arc of Human History” chapter and, although Boyden isn’t cited in this book, I’d recommend his work (here, here, and here) for those wanting to read more about the relationship between society, human development, cities and metabolism
The reality of making cities is prosaic and managerial. One part inspiration, nine parts perspiration. The book’s structure reflects this with the one part inspiration of the vision followed by the nine parts of perspiration chapters that describe the nuts and bolts of managing ideas on the ground. Given the variety of material covered in this compact volume the editors have done well to maintain the book’s overall character and focus.
This is not a book by or for designers (TNOC writer Tim Beatley’s concept of biophilic cities is described, for instance, but biophilia and biophilic design are not). It is pitched much more at municipalities, planners and people with a general interest in cities and sustainability. It is very much a book about existing cities and how they’re tackling, most of all, climate change. It’s a prosaic approach, but curiously inspiring. It will take you to the well of the vision but only provides an occasional sip—to slake your thirst you’ll need other tomes, sources that bubble out from the cracks in the homogeneity of modern culture. People like Soleri, Register, and Magnaghi (also here).
It is understandable that more recent and relatively untried concepts such as regenerative design aren’t dealt with in the text, but resilience is an increasingly influential concept that is strongly embraced by many advocates of urban sustainability. As a newly arrived denizen of the Melburnian metropolitan region, I was pleased to see Melbourne as one of the ten City View chapters, and mention of its participation in the 100 Resilient Cities Challenge, with “Australia’s first Chief Resilience Officer appointed to lead the development of a resilience strategy on behalf of the 31 local government areas that comprise metropolitan Melbourne”. The cautionary note here is that I didn’t know this until I read this book, which is a small measure of the communication gap that exists between the informed, considered actions of urban systems managers and the rest of the population! There are some problematic issues in relating resilience to sustainability (something explored in depth by Brenda Vale and Emilio Garcia in their new book Unravelling Sustainability and Resilience in the Built Environment) but it deserves wider consideration and, again, it would have been good to see some references and links to make it easier for readers to follow up and further explore key information.
Many times whilst reading this fascinating book, a fact would jump out at me. For example: “If food waste were a country, it would rank third in carbon emissions after the United States and China”.
In China, thanks to decades of advocacy by people like the late Professor Rusong Wang (National People’s Congress of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences), the idea of the ecocity became a meme for transforming the nation’s approach to development so that hundreds of municipalities were encouraged, by policy and fiscal incentive, to adopt ecocity characteristics in new development as a priority. It is not always easy to see the ‘eco’ in the explosion of urbanism that included these initiatives (Tianjin Ecocity is a notable exception) but the very idea has generated new strands of ideological DNA in the Chinese urban planning systems, which will likely have systemic impacts for decades to come. This is alluded to in the City View chapter on Shanghai, where the Dongtan Eco-city project gets a mention as a “notable failure”. One is left with a sense that urban environmental concerns get short shrift in China, but a more generous analysis suggests that, although China does often take a step backwards, it takes many more steps forward. Without gross inequities you can’t get to “sustainable” without passing through a certain level of development and the unprecedented urbanisation that has been taking place across China has delivered sewage treatment, reticulated water supply and electricity to millions of people who had no such amenities before. Anyone who has seen the state of villages and waterways in China prior to the recent urbanisation push is likely to share my opinion that there has been real environmental progress over the last decade or so. Interestingly, much of Peter Calthorpe’s chapter on “Urbanism and Global Sprawl” reads as an indictment of China’s explosive urban development and its inherent failings thanks to high-density urban sprawl.
Towards the end of the book, chapters on the “The Inclusive City” and “Urbanization, Inclusion and Social Justice” make the point strongly that social justice has to be integral to the concept of sustainable city. The challenge of achieving anything remotely like sustainability in modern cities is hugely dependent on having healthy, happy citizens and a reasonably equitable society, but as the conclusion of the chapter on “The Inclusive City” tells us: “Socioeconomic polarization and spatial segregation have become prevailing trends in cities worldwide”. In a world where the combined wealth of just eight individuals is equal to that of the 3.6 billion people who are the poorest half of the entire planet’s population, the chances of political will overcoming the problem of systemic inequality and exploitation (of both people and nature) appear slim. Whilst the general failure of national and state governments to address the core problems of climate change, ecological destruction and gross inequality suggests that city governments are now our last hope, the chapter on “Urbanization, Inclusion and Social Justice” cautions that “local governments rarely have self-sufficient power and knowledge to create or adequately manage city planning frameworks that safeguard citizens and assets for the long term”.
Curitiba, in Brazil, is one of those cities that has had that kind of self-sufficiency. It is, famously, the first city to have the hubris to call itself an ecocity, and is in many ways the poster child of the sustainable cities movement. Amongst other things it pioneered BRT (Bus Rapid Transit), kicked the car out of major inner-city streets, and introduced innovative garbage-for-credits tied to educational programs to reduce waste and help the urban poor—all achieved during the quarter century of mayoral leadership provided by Jaime Lerner. Given that the book acknowledges the importance of mayors worldwide in shaping and acting on the sustainability agenda, it is surprising that Lerner doesn’t rate a mention. Lerner recently produced a great little handbook on Urban Acupuncture (reviewed for TNOC) that has become a go-to reference for urbanists around the world. The inclusion of references and links to such material would have added to the usefulness of Can a City Be Sustainable?
In the chapter “Towards a Vision of Sustainable Cities”, Gardner identifies seven key principles that summarise “the broad spectrum of areas relevant to sustainability”:
Reduced, Circulating, and Clean Flows of Materials
A Prominent Place for Nature
Compact and Connected Patterns of Development
Creative Placemaking
Centers of Well-being
People-centred Development
Participatory Governance
The essential ethos of an ecological city places cities firmly in the frame of needing to fit natural processes. That relationship with nature has to be central to achieving any kind of genuine sustainability, so I find Gardner’s principle 2—“A prominent Place for Nature”—falls short of what is needed. Cities are anthropocentric by necessity, but their long-term future is a chimera unless there is a powerful shift to a biocentric view of human settlement. This demands more than just “a prominent place”. Likewise, his “concise vision of urban sustainability” is a soft vision that seems calculated to avoid offending rather than inspire the conceptual and cultural shifts of the kind that are needed to get us beyond making cities merely less bad and begin addressing the real challenge of repairing the damage created by consumption, industrialisation, environmental mayhem and fossil-fuelled growth. When Gardner writes “In a sustainable city, nature is no longer an urban afterthought”, I couldn’t agree more, and in the chapter “The Vital Role of Biodiversity in Urban Sustainability” authors Juncà, Zaragoza and Guelar suggest that, used as one of the central measures of urban sustainability, biodiversity makes it possible “to promote and assess urban biodiversity, the ecosystem services that it provides, and broader ecological functions in cities”. But I think that many TNOC readers would appreciate seeing a much stronger call for nature to be central to any strategy for sustainable urbanism.
The book is full of useful and informative graphs, diagrams, tables and snippets of information—the chapter on “Supporting Sustainable Transportation” being noteworthy in this regard, and there are plenty of raw, hard-to-digest facts in this book. In the chapter on “Source reduction and Recycling of Waste”, for instance, we read that “Global waste flows show no sign of abating” whilst “waste-to-energy initiatives are predicated on an unabated continuation of waste flows”. 2.3 billion people—40% of the planet’s population—don’t have access to a toilet and there are nearly as many people without access to electricity and clean water as there were people on the entire planet when I was a child, so the prospect of achieving global sustainability seems as likely as keeping global warming to 1.5˚C. In that light, the proposition that the world’s cities can be made sustainable before the end of the century is even more preposterous, but what else can we do but try?
While I want to shout this stuff across the rooftops, the authors of this very well put together book might prefer a quiet and reasonable conversation. Both are necessary. Whether one chooses to shout about it or mention it in quiet asides to your local councillor, Can a City Be Sustainable? provides facts, figures and examples that help carry the argument for radical change in our urban environment.
In such a comprehensive and wide-ranging volume it is churlish to point out what is missing, so perhaps the best thing to say is that virtually every aspect of what it takes to get serious about sustainable cities is covered in this modest volume. With its numerous authors and viewpoints, this book is best read for its parts rather than as a whole, and would have benefited from a concluding chapter to bookend the content and tie the parts together. Overall, for all my own impatience (and tendency to nit-pick), and despite my reservations about the limited range of references and failure to make links to the rich history of knowledge and ideas in the ecocity movement, I have to say that Can a City Be Sustainable? is an excellent book that raises—and points toward the answers to—most of the many questions that are coiled up inside the disarmingly simple question posed in its title.
And, notwithstanding its northern hemisphere bias, my favourite sentence in Gardner’s chapter “Toward a Vision of Sustainable Cities” provides a lovely one-liner that I think I’ll be quoting for years. He writes that a sustainable city:
…treats squirrels and robins, streams and trees, as neighbours rather than artifacts.
In November 2016 there was a celebration in London: it had been 40 years since the idea of creating an Ecology Park in central London was first suggested. The event provided opportunities to share memories of those early days and to see how the concept has taken root and proliferated. We met near Tower Bridge on the site of the original park and walked from there along the south bank of the Thames to the redeveloped docklands of Rotherhithe, ending up at Russia Dock Wood and Stave Hill Ecology Park. There was much for us all to learn.
We need to learn from our great successes and ensure that their legacy survives.
The Walk had been suggested by a team who are currently investigating the historical development of ecology parks in this part of London, and I was struck by the fact that most of the people who attended were too young to have known how it all started. It seemed that knowledge of the first ecology park and its achievements had already been lost in the mists of time. It certainly wasn’t history to me, as I had been closely involved, but it made me realise how quickly a body of knowledge can be lost between two generations.
Early days at William Curtis Ecological Park. Spreading the subsoil in January 1977 before the planting started. The Tower of London, built in1078, lies across the river. Photo courtesy of David Goode.
I told the story: how Max Nicholson, who was one of the most influential conservationists in the U.K., persuaded the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Committee that they should create an Ecology Park as part of the celebrations to be held in 1977. His idea was to convert an unsightly patch of derelict land on the south bank of the Thames next to Tower Bridge into a mixture of natural habitats that could be used for environmental education by local schools. I suspect that few of the committee members had the slightest notion of what he had in mind. It was completely novel. But it fitted their aims, which were to improve the landscape along the proposed route of the Silver Jubilee Walkway being planned along South Bank from Westminster to Tower Bridge. Not only would the project remove an eyesore, but it was argued that an ecology park could be created quickly and at a fraction of the cost of conventional landscaping. Given the constraints of timescale and available funding, the committee quickly agreed. The result was that two acres of derelict land were made available on a short-term lease, on the understanding that the park would eventually close when planned development went ahead. The committee also provided the modest sum of £4,000 towards the cost of creating new ecological habitats.
A dramatic success: William Curtis Ecological Park in 1983, with Tower Bridge behind. Photo courtesy of David Goode.
Where did the idea for an ecology park come from? I think it likely that Max Nicholson’s proposal was influenced by the work of Lyndis Cole, one of his staff at Land Use Consultants. She had just written an article in Landscape Design describing Dutch techniques for the creation of naturalistic plant communities in urban areas. She was a real pioneer and it was no surprise when she was given the job of creating the new ecology park at Tower Bridge. Her plan, drawn up in November 1976, indicated the range of habitats to be created, including a small meadow, mixed woodland, willow carr, and a shallow pool. These habitats were inspired by the natural parks known as Heemparks, which had become well established in towns and cities in the Netherlands, where they provided opportunities for inner-city children to have contact with nature.
The new park at Tower Bridge opened in time for the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations in May 1977. It was called the William Curtis Ecological Park, named after the eighteenth century botanist who produced the first flora of London–possibly the first publication to be devoted to urban nature. William Curtis Park was to become another pioneer. Its success took everyone by surprise. Commentators in the media could not believe that such an apparently natural environment could be created so quickly on the rubble of derelict warehouses.
A school group collecting “mini-beasts” from the pond. Image courtesy of David Goode.
The park was also an immediate success with local schools. It was booked solidly for classes through every term. Two teachers were appointed, one for younger children and the other for teenagers. They were learning fast on the job, developing teaching aids that were related specifically to the urban environment. The rate of colonisation by plants and “mini-beasts” exceeded all expectations, and this provided a wealth of material for detailed studies of urban ecology. The increasing diversity of butterfly species from six to 21 over seven years was particularly dramatic. It demonstrated very clearly what is possible in the middle of a large city.
The William Curtis Ecological Park closed in 1985 to make way for new developments. During its short life, it had over 100,000 visits from local schoolchildren. It provided a link with the natural world that was a new experience for these inner-city children. For some, it was a place they will remember all their lives. But the park left another legacy that persists. It paved the way for other, more permanent ecology parks in the new development zones along the Thames and in the redundant docklands. In the mid-1980s, the charitable trust that ran William Curtis Park rebranded itself as the Trust for Urban Ecology to promote these and a host of wider initiatives. Some of the ecology parks created at that time still exist today. One of these is Stave Hill in the old docklands of Rotherhithe.
So we return to our celebration, for it is 30 years since Stave Hill was constructed, and we wanted to see how it has fared. We walked through the new residential district, along canals and waterways with bridges and bollards dating from the time when this was a hive of maritime activity. Russia Dock, where the ships brought timber from Siberia, is no more. It was filled in and planted with native trees in the 1980s to form Russia Dock Wood, part of the ecological landscape that has become so characteristic of Rotherhithe. We arrived at Stave Hill to find the Trust for Urban Ecology (now part of Conservation Volunteers) still going strong. The trees have grown and matured since I was last there in the 80s, but the vision is the same.
Aerial view of the park in 1983. The Thames embankment is in the foreground. Photo courtesy of David Goode.Map of the various mini habitats in 1984. Image courtesy of David Goode.
There has been great continuity at Stave Hill. Rebeka Clark has been working there since 1989 and still runs things today. She points out that everyone has gained from the far-sighted vision established in the early years at William Curtis Park. I am glad to hear that those words are not forgotten. As well as all the structured educational visits to Stave Hill, there is a more informal monthly children’s club, Kids@StaveHill, and a program of volunteer days for local people on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The park also provides opportunities for corporate teams from banks and investment companies to gain experience in environmental projects. These volunteers find themselves building bat boxes or constructing bee walls, as well as doing their fair share of habitat management in the wetlands and woodland. Their contribution amounts to over 700 days of work every year.
The park also benefits from people undertaking community service. Others use the park to complete their John Muir awards. Every year, in May, local residents are invited to join a dawn chorus walk. This year, they were treated to a great surprise: the song of a grasshopper warbler coming from the reed bed at Lavender Pond nature area. A wetland warbler in the middle of a housing scheme!
The ecology park still seems to get by on a shoestring budget, but what impressed me was the way it is supported by the community. People here know what ecology means. They have lived next to an ecology park for 30 years. Their children have come here from school and many residents have volunteered to help. The park is part of the community. For many of these people, knowledge of kingfishers, cormorants, hedgehogs, and herons is part of life.
From those small beginnings near Tower Bridge, a new philosophy has taken root. Stave Hill is not alone. Camley Street Natural Park, created in the 1980s on a disused coal yard at King’s Cross, has become one of the most successful nature parks in the U.K. and is a showcase for the London Wildlife Trust. Another is the Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park, a four-acre wetland along the banks of the Thames constructed in the late 1990s as part of a major housing scheme and managed by Conservation Volunteers (which has now absorbed the Trust for Urban Ecology). The project officer, Tony Day, tells me that the vision created by the William Curtis Park is still firmly with them at Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park. Last year, the park had 12,000 visitors and a host of activities, including 48 school visits involving 1,200 schoolchildren. They also had six work experience placements and provided material for 27 higher education projects in Environmental Management, Product Design, and Landscape Architecture.
Four acres of wetland habitat at Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park, together with 600m of board walks, two bird hides, and a visitor centre. Overlooked by high-rise residential development. Photo: David Goode
These are places created specifically for nature to thrive in the city. They are places where local people, and particularly children, can relate to the natural world. We need more of them.
But we also need to retain the knowledge and experience gained in these endeavours.
The legacy of the early days of ecological parks in London still exists in written records, especially in the annual reports of the William Curtis Ecological Park and the Ecological Parks Trust, together with its successor, the Trust for Urban Ecology. They contain much information about the projects carried out as part of the educational programmes, together with detailed accounts of the monitoring of ecological changes. This is valuable material that needs to be more readily available. I am glad to hear that the team investigating the history is intending to digitise these archives. But there are other records, too, in the form of published papers and books by some of the people involved. We need to ensure that practitioners today do not lose sight of these sources.
Here are just a few of the key items that tell the story in more detail:
Cole, L. & Keen, C. (1976) Dutch techniques for the establishment of natural plant communities in urban areas. Landscape Design 116, 31-34.
Lyndis Cole. 1986. Urban opportunities for a more natural approach. In: Ecology and Design in Landscape. Bradshaw et.al. Eds. Blackwell Oxford.
Jeremy Cotton. 1982. The field teaching of ecology in central London – The William Curtis Ecological Park 1977-80. In Bornkamm et. al. Eds. Urban Ecology Blackwell Oxford.
Malcolm Emery. 1986. Promoting Nature in Cities and Towns: a practical guide. Croom Helm and Ecological Parks Trust.
David Goode. 1986. Wild in London. Michael Joseph (see pages 179-181).
David Goode. 1989. Urban Nature Conservation in Britain. Journal of Applied Ecology 26, 859-873.
David Goode. 2014. Nature in Towns and Cities. Collins. (see pages 318-9).
David Nicholson-Lord. 1987. The Greening of the Cities. Routledge (see pages 120-122).
Often, city forest fragments and tree canopies are overlooked by city planners and developers as important bird habitat. More often than not, people only regard large patches as beneficial. The message from conservationists is that we want to avoid fragmentation and to conserve large forested areas. While this goal is important, the message tends to negate any thoughts by developers and city planners towards conserving individual mature trees and small forest fragments.
“Building for Birds”, a design tool, allows decision-makers to manipulate amounts of forest fragments and tree canopy to determine the best designs for conserving bird habitat.
To design around individual trees and small forest fragments, it takes a good deal of planning and, in some cases, extra costs. Roads have to be realigned, homes on lots have to be sited to protect trees, and a considerable amount of construction management has to be implemented to prevent earthwork machines from damaging conserved trees and forest areas. From an engineering/construction perspective, it is sometimes easier to wipe out all vegetation and start from scratch. The tool described in this essay helps city decision-makers evaluate how different development designs benefit or do not benefit different bird species.
Empirical studies have demonstrated that small forest fragments and trees in residential areas can provide good breeding, stopover, and wintering habitat for a variety of birds. There is value in these small forest fragments and individual trees for many different species of forest birds. But how to evaluate which conservation designs impact which species of birds?
New York City’s Central Park—a city habitat patch that is used by birds. Photo credit: Sergey Semenov
The goal of the “Building for Birds” online tool is to provide decision-makers with a way to evaluate different development scenarios and how they affect habitat for different species of forest birds that use fragmented areas. This tool allows decision-makers to manipulate amounts of forest fragments and tree canopy (in built areas) and determine the best designs for conserving bird habitat. This evaluation tool is most useful for developments in already fragmented landscapes, where decision-makers are trying to decide which tree patches or tree canopies to conserve.
The online tool calculates scores for three separate habitat categories: 1) breeding/wintering habitat, 2) stopover habitat during migration, and 3) as breeding or stopover habitat in residential areas with trees. Scoring is based on the amount of conserved forest fragments and tree canopy cover kept intact for a particular development design. For example, each acre of intact forest gets one point in some situations. However, these points increase or decrease (for each acre) depending on the season. To determine bird habitat scores that result from different development designs, one simply enters the amount of conserved forest fragments and conserved tree canopy cover in residential areas. Using these inputs, the tool generates a report for a particular scenario, containing a score for each of the bird habitat categories and a list of birds that could be found in each of these habitats. These scores help to evaluate a design’s potential for bird habitat. The tool can be found at http://wec.ifas.ufl.edu/buildingforbirds/web/home.html. Below, we explain each of the three habitat score categories.
Habitat score 1: forest birds breeding and wintering in urban forest fragments
Figure 1. Forest- and tree-dwelling birds, such as the red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus, left photo) and the tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor, right photo), can often be found in forest fragments during the summer and winter. Photo credits: Audubon, www.audubon.org
A variety of forest birds will use fragmented forests as breeding sites during the summer and as foraging/shelter sites during the winter (Figure 1). This is the first bird habitat score that the tool calculates: breeding/wintering in forest fragments habitat score. For the purposes of evaluating different development scenarios, we restrict the analysis to forest birds in the order Passeriformes (i.e., perching birds) and woodpeckers in order Piciformes. Woodpeckers are primary cavity nesters, often creating their own nesting cavities in trees. Secondary cavity nesters, such as the tufted titmouse, use natural holes in trees or cavities made by woodpeckers. Other species, such as the northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), make open-cup nests in the branches of trees and bushes. Fragmented forests provide food for many species of birds, which consume vast amounts of insects, fruits, tree sap, nectar, and seeds. Forest bird species prefer woodlots and forests to open rangeland and open bodies of water. Trees are important habitat for forest birds year-round during both the breeding and non-breeding seasons.
However, some birds, such as several species of Neotropical migrants (e.g., Cerulean Warbler, Setophaga cerulea), are sensitive to forest fragmentation and typically only breed successfully in large patches of forest (e.g., greater than 125 acres). Birds that primarily breed in large forest patches are called interior forest specialists. These species are thought to be vulnerable in fragmented landscapes because they are area sensitive, typically build open-cup nests on or near the ground, lay relatively few eggs, and often do not nest again if a nest fails. In fragmented landscapes containing agriculture and urban areas, a variety of nest predators and brood parasites are more abundant along the edges of forests. Nest predators include mammals and birds, such as raccoons, cats, skunks, blue jays, and crows. The main brood parasite is the brown-headed cowbird. This species lays eggs in a Neotropical migrant’s nest, tricking the migrant bird parents into feeding and raising the cowbird chick instead of their own. Cowbirds and nest predators thrive in fragmented forest landscapes containing agriculture fields, pastures, and residential development.
Some interior forest specialists (e.g., Canada Warbler, Cardellina canadensis) breed in dense understory growth in the openings of large forests and use regenerating vegetation (caused by windfalls, fires, and clearcutting). Although they technically breed along edges, they do so in large forest patches, and they are thought to be vulnerable to the increased predation and cowbird parasitism common in forest edges found in fragmented landscapes where urban and agricultural areas are nearby. Overall, interior forest specialists are vulnerable to forest fragmentation; many populations of these species are declining and are in danger of extinction due to human modifications of the landscape. Thus, this habitat category targets species that only use smaller forest fragments for breeding.
Scoring: For breeding scores, we elected to award more points to conserved late successional forest fragments (1.5 points) and fewer points to conserved early successional forest fragments (1 point). Early successional forest fragments (Figure 2) are defined here as 1) shrublands composed primarily of shrubs with some scattering of trees and grassland patches, and 2) very young forests primarily composed of planted pine saplings and/or pioneer species such as black cherry (Prunus sp.), with trees that are 0–15 years old, and where tree height is typically less than 30 ft. In late successional forest fragments (Figure 3), most of the trees that form the canopy are over 30 ft tall, including both relatively young forests with trees 15–50 years old and mature forests with trees 50 years old or older. To be considered a forest fragment, the minimum size is 1 acre of forest. Any groupings of trees less than 1 acre do not count as forest fragments.
The rationale for the scoring difference between late and early successional forests is that in early successional forest, very few large trees would be available for nesting cavities to support primary and secondary cavity nesters (e.g., woodpeckers). More mature forest fragments have both early successional habitat (along the edge) and mature trees, which together support a greater diversity of birds. However, in certain regions of the United States, large fragments of shrublands may be relatively desired and highly valued; in these cases, early successional forest fragments may warrant a score that is equal to or greater than the score of late successional forest fragments.
Figure 2. Shrubland/early successional forest example from Vermont. Note that there are very few large trees and there is very little tree canopy. Photo credit: http://lindenlandgroup.com Figure 3. Late successional forest example. This is a Florida hammock. Note the dominance of large trees and a closed tree canopy. Photo credit: http://floridahikes.com
Habitat score 2: migrant birds that use urban forest fragments as stopover sites
Figure 4. Neotropical migrants, such as the Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia, right photo) and Yellow-throated Vireo (Vireo flavifrons, left photo), migrate during the spring and fall. Forest fragments could be used as stopover sites during migration. Photo credits: Audubon, www.audubon.org
In and around urban areas, forest fragments could be used by an important group of long-distance migrants called Neotropical birds (Figure 4). This is the second bird habitat score that the tool calculates: a habitat score for migrating birds that use forest fragments as stopover sites. Migrating birds typically breed during the summer in the U.S. and Canada and migrate south to spend the winter months in Mexico, the Caribbean islands, Central America, and South America. Migrating species make the return trip in the spring back to their breeding grounds. Along the migration route, forest fragments in urban areas can serve as stopover sites where migrants rest and forage for food. These stopover sites are critical, as the birds need to rest and forage in these sites in order to make their long journeys.
Scoring: From our literature review of stopover habitat, we found that many migrating birds—both migrants that breed in the interior of large forests and migrants that breed in small forest patches and open woodlands—use small forest fragments as stopover sites. Thus, small forest fragments may not be appropriate as breeding habitat for many interior forest Neotropical migrant species, but could serve as stopover habitat. Short/medium-distance migrants also use forest fragments as stopover sites. Some studies have indicated that Neotropical and short-distance migrants were found in early and late successional forest fragments. Therefore, we count both early and late successional forest patches as stopover habitat. To be considered a forest fragment, the minimum size is 1 acre. Any groupings of trees less than 1 acre do not count as a forest fragment. Based on studies, larger forest fragments received more points because larger patches tended to have more migrating species and more individuals.
Habitat score 3: birds that use trees in residential areas as breeding/wintering and stopover habitat
Figure 5. Birds that use bushes and trees in built areas, such as the Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, left photo) and the Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis, right photo) can often be found in residential areas throughout the year. Photo credits: Audubon, www.audubon.org
A variety of forest birds will use trees and shrubs in built areas (i.e., urban residential and commercial areas) as breeding sites (during the summer) and as foraging/shelter sites during the winter and spring/fall migration seasons (Figure 5). This is the third bird habitat score that the tool calculates: breeding and/or stopover sites in built areas habitat score. This habitat score should primarily be used to evaluate the relative worth of a built area for more urban-adapted species. There is value for many different species of forest birds. Built areas with extensive tree canopy cover can serve as breeding, wintering, and stopover habitat for a variety of species.
Scoring: From our review of bird studies in residential areas, we gave points when trees (and their tree canopy) were conserved during the construction process. Built areas with trees and associated vegetation provide important habitat during breeding, migrating, and winter seasons. In fact, during the migration season, interior forest specialists can use trees in built areas as stopover sites. Essentially, one looks within areas that are to be built and estimates the amount of tree canopy cover (in acres) that will remain after construction. Each acre of tree canopy conserved received 1 point.
Species list and scoring example
The tool is based on a thorough, systematic review of the literature and it is limited to studies conducted in the United States and Canada. One useful summary of our findings is a bird species list that indicates whether a particular species can breed or stopover (during migration) in city forest fragments and in residential areas with trees. It can be found here (http://wec.ifas.ufl.edu/buildingforbirds/web/birdlists/masterlist.pdf). Below, we briefly describe a scoring result for a hypothetical 100 acre site (for more detail, see Fact Sheets at http://wec.ifas.ufl.edu/buildingforbirds/web/home.html).
Figure 6. Hypothetical habitat scores for a 100-acre development project based on conserved acres of forest fragments and tree canopy (in residential areas). The overall habitat scores (70, 70, and 10) are indications of how much habitat has been conserved, but they are only relevant when you compare one development design to the next for the same site.
The graphical display (Figure 6) is useful when you compare one development scenario versus another for the same site. The evaluation tool allows you to manipulate the amount of forest fragments conserved; the scores will change depending on the design. The inputs all exist online and using the tool is a 5 step process (see http://wec.ifas.ufl.edu/buildingforbirds/web/tools.html ). With this tool, a developer can manipulate different designs and determine how they could maximize breeding and stopover habitat for birds.
Summary
This is the first design tool (that we know of) where decision-makers can manipulate amounts of forest fragments and tree canopy (in built areas) and determine the best designs for conserving bird habitat. In particular, the master bird list we have compiled has translated data from many scientific studies into a format that allows people to see which birds are most likely to use urban areas. The take home message for people using this tool is that small forest fragments—and even individual trees—are important for a whole variety of forest birds.
“Why isn’t every city doing this?” Dave Vella asks as he intently massages a handful of succulent compost from the towering pile freshly deposited onto his vineyard’s gravel thoroughfare. Dressed in jeans and denim shirt, the veteran Grape Manager of Chateau Montelena is about as casual as can be for someone whose vineyard shocked the wine world in 1973 when Parisian judges scored its Chardonnay above all French wines and put Napa Valley on the global map for good.
San Francisco and its surrounding farms are reconnecting the natural cycle, reducing waste, restoring soils, and reversing climate change one food scrap at a time.
A native of California’s agricultural Central Valley who says he has watched farmers screw up a lot of land using synthetic fertilizers, Vella isn’t afraid to get down in the dirt. It doesn’t take much prodding by Robert Reed, San Francisco waste management company Recology’s spokesman and the person responsible for bringing a truckload of ”The Mix” that afternoon—along with a French television film crew to document the groundbreaking effects of urban composting on organic farming—to get Vella to spill the beans on the secret ingredient for his award-winning soil.
“The soil microbes flourish on humus,” Vella explains. “If you have soils low in organic matter and humus, you can tell just by the weeds that aren’t growing out there for whatever crop it might be on. Humus is an extremely important part of your soil makeup, and recycling urban food scraps instead of burying them in a landfill is such a non-brainer, as it makes such great compost.” Like a professor trying to make sure his students will at least remember the main thesis of his research, he kicks up the fluffy topsoil with his leather boot. “It’s the black stuff, right under these leaves. If it’s wet you can actually see it.”
Chateau Montelena’s Dave Vella digging the San Francisco Mix. Photo: Sven Eberlein
Growing up with a gardening mother, I’ve always had an affinity for compost piles in the backyard. As a metropolitan denizen sensitive to human consumption, I have also had a longstanding fascination with material flows in and out of the urban organism, resulting in field trips to transfer stations and recycling facilities. But it wasn’t until I wrote an article about San Francisco’s efforts to achieve zero waste a few years ago when I realized that my adopted hometown was on to something beyond just reducing waste: by making the collection and composting of every disposed scrap of organic matter the linchpin of its garbage policy, it had tapped into a deeper reservoir of transformation through which a city could not only reduce its harmfulness to nature but instead have its urban metabolism mimic the life-supporting ecosystems on which all life on Earth depends, thus restoring—rather than depleting—nature’s innate biocapacity. In other words, San Francisco was becoming more ecocity-like in the way it was treating its resources.
Soil is the solution
My curiosity about how the treatment of municipal organic waste could address a whole range of hot-button issues facing humanity on a global scale had been piqued further when I received an email from Robert Reed in response to my article, with the subject line “Soil is the Solution.” In it, Reed touted the obvious benefits of a robust green bin program, such as the reduction of landfill and the creation of a marketable product: organic fertilizer. But what stopped me in my tracks was his plea to look at the treasure chest of big picture benefits inherent in urban composting, ranging from its potential to conserve water, restore soils, and—the big enchilada—sequester climate change-causing carbon out of the atmosphere.
Citing one of the findings from Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial (or FST)—America’s longest running, side-by-side comparison of organic and chemical agriculture—that the application of food scrap compost to one acre of land might add as much as 12,000 pounds of carbon to the soil in one year (while conventional farming releases 3,700 pounds of it into the atmosphere!), Recology’s Food Rebel explained how the world could offset more than 20 percent of carbon emissions if all cities instituted urban compost collection programs and the organic fertilizer were applied to local farms, especially through the addition of cover crops. “These crops deliver two charges of carbon 14 inches into the soil. The first charge is carbon we preserve in the finished compost. The second charge is carbon the plants pull out of the atmosphere.”
Reed ended his note with the kind of impassioned, bare-knuckled challenge I would come to love and expect from him. “Sven, ‘Soil is the Solution’ might be the most important environmental story you’ll ever write. It is part of the solution to our environmental challenges. The story belongs on the front of the New York Times and on 60 Minutes.” No pressure there, Robert.
Robert Reed zooming in on a row of cover crops powered by urban compost. Photo: Sven Eberlein
Since that first email exchange with Reed, trips like the one to Chateau Montelena to document the various stages of the city’s organic waste on its way back to residents’ dinner tables have become regular events on my travel calendar. In the past two years alone, I’ve witnessed what used to be dirty napkins, banana peels, and greasy take-out boxes discarded from my own kitchen resurface as precious compost on farms and vineyards in the surrounding hinterlands of the San Francisco Bay Area.
I’ve walked 10 acres of diversified salad mix fertilized by SF compost with Paul Wirtz, production manager for Oak Hill Farm in Glen Ellen, CA. I’ve stood in the field next to Nigel Walker, founder and owner of Eatwell Farm, a 105-acre certified organic farm with a thriving CSA program in the Sacramento Valley, as he explained how he had to scale back on “The Mix” because “the fertility was getting too big.” I’ve gotten lost in a sea of shining mustard, stringy bean, and hairy vetch with Ross Cannard of Enterprise Vineyard Management in Sonoma, learning about the extraordinary capacity of cover crops in fixing nitrogen and storing carbon.
Ross Cannard showing off the purple flowered hairy vetch. Used as a winter cover crop, it has been known to add 60-70 lbs. nitrogen to the soil. Photo: Sven Eberlein
A lot of these visits have been arranged by Bob Shaffer, a Hawaii-based agronomist whom Reed connected me with. Shaffer works as a composting consultant for farms and vineyards across the Western United States and has become a pivotal liaison between Recology and the rising number of growers in search of just the right kind of urban compost mix for their respective soils, micro-climates, and crop rotations. During our initial phone conversation, this living, breathing encyclopedia of soil recapped for me how the high density of protein, oils, complex carbohydrates, and minerals inherent in recycled food provides soil microbes with the nutrition essential for creating Dave Vella and his fellow carbon farmers’ beloved humus. He also pointed out the heavy price humanity is paying for the temporary convenience of the chemical fertilizers used in conventional farming.
“Letting all the carbon that’s supposed to be in our soils go up into the air is causing us not only environmental pollution and the threat of atmospheric warming, but it’s devastating our ability to produce healthy crops. If we keep wasting our nutrients like we have for the past fifty plus years, not only are we filling up our landfills, which we don’t have any room for, and poisoning ourselves with methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, but we’re not getting the most precious thing that we raise—high mineral value food—back into the soil where it belongs. Now that’s a full-blown crisis.”
Bob Shaffer doing soil quality control at Sonoma Valley Worm Farm. Photo: Sven Eberlein
The good news, according to Shaffer, is that there is a simple, inexpensive, and effective way to revive the broken cycle, rooted in three basic areas of carbon-based, biological farming. “If we want to feed our soils again, we need to manage organic matter, we need to manage minerals, and we need to manage tillage. By recognizing the incredible synergism at work between compost, cover crops, and mulch, we can grow large volumes of organic matter and return it to the soil.”
Nothing but a bug’s life.
Just how simple and effective this is in practice would come into focus for me a few weeks later, when I was invited to tour some of the farms Shaffer had been working with outside the small town of Sonoma, 50 miles north of San Francisco. We met at Fowler Creek, where Ross Cannard and his partners are experimenting with cover crops as nutrient producers as well as pest control. After a quick introduction to a gaggle of chattering hens (that have made a name for themselves by laying a variety of beautifully colored eggs for such illustrious restaurants as Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Boulette’s Larder in San Francisco), we quickly found ourselves in the middle of a field of twirling greenery.
Bob Shaffer looking for resident bugs at Fowler Creek Farm. Photo: Sven Eberlein
“Check out the buckwheat over there, nestled between the bell beans and oats,” Shaffer pointed at the shimmering curtain of white dotting across the lush field of tall grass between two rolling hills. “That’s what you get when you put the compost on the cover crop. If you feed the roots of these plants you allow the microscopic bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa to accelerate their full food web below ground. Those plants are not only stronger nutrition-wise, but they have built-in disease prevention.”
He bent down to pull up one of the buckwheat blossoms. “See these dark spots clustered around the bud and stem? These aphids have now piled up right here to take advantage of nectar and other pasture juices. By having them over here we’re keeping their more mobile ladybug predators all over the field in large enough numbers to help take care of the crop plants. I know, the fearful mind is thinking, ‘Oh my god, kill all the aphids.’ But no, that would be like killing off all of the mice. You need to have a few mice. Either that, or you have to buy cat food.”
Aphids are good fits. Photo: Sven Eberlein
It’s this kind of economic calculus that gives Shaffer his biggest opening for selling a radically different way of farming to a trade he knows and understands to be on the cautious side. “There’s a couple thousand pounds or more of insects that come and die here simply because of this plant,” he reckons. “Now let’s convert that to dollars. That’s 35 percent protein and 12 percent nitrogen in the insect’s body, plus other services that are going on. If you go down to the store right now and buy 2,000 pounds of protein, you’re not gonna like it, it’s gonna cost big money. And you have to haul it and apply it.”
Pulling out his magnifying glass, he motioned for me to take a closer look at the tiny critters. “These guys are doing it on their own, they may as well be Bob’s Bug Manure,” he mused about his de facto business partners. “The bottom line is, you raise cover crops with your high nutrient food scraps, you’re gonna get lots of bugs. And they’re gonna end up as part of the fertility in our soil.”
Talking on eggshells
Still buzzing (pun!) from my “bug’s life” exploration with Shaffer, I returned home to a call from a producer at The PBS News Hour, the nightly newscast on American public television. They were doing a story on San Francisco’s progress in becoming a zero waste city and, after finding my article online, figured I might know a person who could show them first-hand how this whole composting thing works at the beginning of the cycle—in a residence. Seeing that my wife and I had been meticulous separators of all living things in our outbound material flow since SF became the first city in the U.S. to make composting mandatory in 2009, the logical outcome of that conversation was a camera crew in our kitchen a week later.
PBS’ Spencer Michels talking trash in my kitchen. Photo: Sven Eberlein
After whipping up a scrambled egg breakfast and tossing a bunch of egg shells, onion scraps and tea bags in our compost bin for the cameraman, we got to share our personal experience of recycling food scraps with PBS reporter Spencer Michels. We went from the technical (kitchen bin is lined with either bio produce bags from our local food coop or just compostable paper bags and wraps from delis and bakeries) to the educational (composting at home is not yucky at all—the exact opposite, by keeping food out of your trash you are keeping your source of potential odor easily identified and separated) to the political (we don’t care whether we’re 70 percent or 80 percent of the way toward our zero waste goal as long as we are getting closer) to the philosophical (composting is fun, engages us as citizens with a stake in our city’s future, and connects a daily routine with the Earth’s ecosystems we depend and thrive on), before finishing with a dramatic live action shot of me depositing the precious scraps in the green bin that serves our multi-unit building.
Me taking out the compost while the world watches. Photos: Debra Baida
Speaking of getting closer, now that I had seen with my own eyes the economic and environmental value of urban compost and shared with a major news network how eminently achievable it is to set up a city-wide green bin program, I was curious as to why it hadn’t yet become more commonly instituted in municipalities across the country, and the globe. While San Francisco is now collecting 600 tons of compostables every day (219,000 tons per year), the EPA’s latest Sustainable Materials Management Report shows only a slight overall increase of food composting in the United States, from a total of 1.84 million tons in 2013 (5.0 percent) to 1.94 million tons in 2014 (5.1 percent). This means not only that 95 percent of uneaten American food is still being thrown away, but that San Francisco alone is responsible for almost one out of every ten tons of what small percentage does get composted.
The bottleneck, I thought, must surely be in the one link of the organics recycling chain I had not yet inspected more thoroughly: the composting facility. I remembered my mom’s warnings of yore to refrain from tossing anything besides fruit and veggie peels or coffee grounds on her compost pile, and it occurred to me that perhaps the pizza cartons and chicken bones Recology was encouraging us to add to our green bins were responsible for making the composting process too complex and prohibitively expensive for most other municipalities to replicate.
There was only one way to find out, so the next time I was riding my bike past Recology’s headquarters near San Francisco Bay, I stopped in to ask Robert Reed about their flagship composting operation, Jepson Prairie Organics. “Funny you should ask,” he said as I was peeling the tangerine he handed me as a welcome-to-his-office gift. “I’ve got thirteen visitors from agricultural cooperatives and food companies in France coming to see Jepson Prairie. What are you doing next Tuesday?”
Bringing the Coquille back to the farm
We got to the town of Vacaville about half way between San Francisco and Sacramento at around 9:15 am. Reed, who had picked me up in his Prius an hour earlier bearing coffee and apples for breakfast en route, turned onto a straight country road before pulling into what looked like an empty construction lot a few miles ahead. “This is it.” He pointed at a basin of about 50 acres that looked a bit like a quarry, with some trucks, equipment, and a bunch of piles of dirt. “The French aren’t here yet, so go ahead and check out some of the finished compost piles by the office.” I wandered behind the unassuming single story building and discovered my first big piles of virgin San Francisco Mix.
Genuine San Francisco Blend. Photo: Sven Eberlein
“That’s our premium compost blend of food scraps and yard trimmings. Took just about 30 days to cure and has another 15 to 30 days to go until it’s a mature, finished product.” Reed had sneaked up behind me, joined in neon-yellow Recology safety vests by a middle-aged gentleman with a robust frame and a healthy farmer’s tan. “Sven, I want you to meet Greg Pryor. Greg oversees all eight of our compost facilities and has unique insights into the art of making fine urban compost and its benefits for topsoil. Lucky for us, he will lead our tour today.” Pryor was about to launch into a story about how he was first tasked in 1994 by Recology’s previous incarnation to set up an experimental compost collection program when we heard two vans pull up. “That must be our French delegation,” Reed interjected. “Let’s say bonjours.”
Greg Pryor giving “the compost talk” to the French delegation, with Robert Reed looking on. Photo: Sven Eberlein
With everyone gathered, Pryor gave us a quick rundown of how the operation had evolved since its early days, adapting to an ever-increasing volume of compost while complying with California’s steadily tightening air quality regulations. “We had to meet specific criteria that quantified emissions from when we received the material, while it’s being processed, while it’s actively composting, to the finished product.” Finding the right technology that would drastically reduce Volatile Organic Compounds (also called VOC) while also keeping things competitive with the (too) low cost of dumping everything in landfill led Jepson Prairie from giant Ag Bags to Aerated Static Piles (or ASP) to their current state-of-the-art negative ASP. “Rather than forcing air up through the compost and blowing all the emissions into the atmosphere the way we used to do it with the positive ASP, we’re now drawing air down where it’s collected in a series of ducts and pipes and then exhausted out through a biofilter. The negative ASP is giving us a 97 percent destruction of VOC.”
Lots of hot air going through the ducts and pipes of a Negative ASP. Photo: Sven Eberlein
Filled with some good technical nutrients, everyone was ready to smell the dirt (though mostly in the metaphorical sense of the word, as the early morning arrival of the compost trucks coupled with the rapid breakdown of materials through the teamwork of bacteria, fungi, and lots of air renders the place largely odorless during the day). We walked the facility in sort of a “reverse rot” direction, from the pristine finished piles near the office, to the in-progress aerated static piles transected by a geometrically sculpted system of aluminum piping, to the beginning of the chain where the grinder, trommel, and conveyor belt were rattling along, doing the busy work of cutting yard trimmings to size and picking unwanted objects from the coveted organics nectar.
Grinding up yard trimmings. Photo: Sven Eberlein
Pryor tells us that they process about 375 tons of finished product every day, sold to over 350 farms, vineyards, orchards, and landscapers in the region. “We have four standard blends, but a lot of our customers prefer their compost made to order with custom nutrients and minerals. Everyone has different crops and conditions, so the personalized aspect is really what makes our mixes so popular.” The biggest challenge, other than removing non-compostable items (and educating citizens to separate at the source), is that the demand for good compost is growing so fast, while most facilities like Jepson Prairie are already at capacity. According to Pryor, getting the land and permits to run a composting operation in California is prohibitively expensive, with little incentive by the powerful chemical fertilizer industry to lobby the state government to streamline and speed up the costly regulatory red tape.
How hard can it be to get a few more of these? Photo: Sven Eberlein
So there’s one of our bottlenecks in the quest to get more of our food scraps composted. The good news that I gleaned from both Pryor and in my conversations with Bob Shaffer is that a growing number of the bigger players in the agriculture business are currently experimenting with compost, which, ironically, is contributing to the supply shortage. This, of course, makes perfect sense, as depleted soils aren’t only bad for the planet, but—as with everything else when previously externalized ecological bills come due—their ever-diminishing returns will ultimately impact the bottom line. Synthetic fertilizers worked great for a while to squeeze everything out of existing soils, but at some point you have to replenish them with nutrients if you want to keep growing and selling food that actually feeds. As more industrial farms realize the value of this product and how technologically advanced the composting process has become, the hope is that the labyrinth of archaic regulations can be disentangled more quickly.
Selling like steaming hotcakes. Photo: Sven Eberlein
“You want to know a secret?” Robert Reed interrupts our silent sniffing and caressing of the various piles of compost with a one word epiphany that remind me of Mr. McGuire in The Graduate.
“Shellfish.”
I could tell by the ensuing murmur that the French visitors did not want to miss what was obviously going to be a teachable moment that day.
“You know all the crabs and mussels that get fished and eaten at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco?” he asks rhetorically. “The shells contain chitin, a great source of nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium, and magnesium. It’s a superb cleansing agent and exactly the kind of ingredient that makes our compost so rich. So when people throw these shells in the trash after their crab feast, it’s like they’re throwing away gold without even knowing it. That’s why education is such an important component of composting. ”
Reed turns to one of the bilingual members of the group. “What’s ‘shell’ in French?” Someone yells “Coquille” and Recology’s intrepid resource recognition slam poet improvises the most memorable line of the day.
“We have to bring the Coquille to the farm!”
Coquille freshly delivered to the farm. Photo: Sven Eberlein
Since returning home from that afternoon, I’ve been feeling pretty optimistic about the prospects of looping our cities into the natural systems that have sustained us since the beginning of the agricultural age. If we can reactivate some of the wisdom and practices that worked for us before the industrial revolution while recalibrating the many insights and advances we’ve gained since then to align with the Earth’s naturally self-sustaining processes, the vision of cities becoming part of the solution, instead of being major problems, is not that far-fetched.
It’s true, there’s a long way to go. But I’m encouraged that there are now over 150 communities (and growing!) across the United States with source separated organics programs, spreading across a total of 16 states. I’m thrilled that over 100,000 New Yorkers are now composting their coffee cups and bagel wrappers. I’m heartened that communities from British Columbia to Vermont are getting serious about keeping their organic assets invested in the natural loop. And fresh off the presses, I am ecstatic that Paris, which—like most of France—had thought until recently that it was prudent to just burn all its resources—just announced its new compost collection program for the 2nd and 12th arrondissements, with the intention to service the whole city soon.
Now that’s what I call bringing the Coquille back to the farm.
If I were to ask you where I could find a healthy population of the endangered San Joaquin Kit Fox, you might be forgiven for not immediately saying, “Why, Bakersfield, of course!” Bakersfield? The Oil Capital of California? Yes, the very same!
As it turns out, the big city is not such a bad place for an endangered San Joaquin Kit Fox to raise a family, or several.
Unlikely as it seems, this oil-town-turned-city sprawling at the southern end of the Central Valley—butt of bad jokes and dark fiction in Hollywood, and home to nearly half a million people—has also become a refuge for a growing population of San Joaquin Kit Foxes.
This subspecies of the Kit Fox, found throughout the deserts of the American Southwest, is named after its native San Joaquin Valley home, which it has mostly lost to farming and urban development over the last century. Its population declined so drastically that it became one of the first species to be officially listed as Endangered by the federal government in 1967. Its cousin, the Southern California Kit Fox went extinct in 1903, and the San Joaquin Kit Fox has been pushed to the outer margins as humans have transformed the Central Valley into the agricultural engine of California. This little canid has seemed like a permanent member of the endangered species list through nearly half a century.
Bakersfield Kit Fox. Photo: Tory Westall
In addition to losing habitat, the subspecies also suffered from changes in populations of other carnivores in California: the big bad Wolf was extirpated from the region, allowing the smaller Coyote and Bobcat populations to grow; this has been bad news for the Kit Fox, as both these mid-sized predators prey on the smaller Kit Fox; the introduction of non-native Red Foxes has also meant greater competition for already diminishing habitat. The case of the San Joaquin Kit Fox has seemed like a classic case of a species being sucked into an extinction vortex by the forces of direct and indirect human impacts. But surely, the most visibly extreme way humans destroy native habitats is by building cities. So, how does a little kit fox manage to live and, indeed, thrive in the middle of this urban sprawl?
By the late 1990s, wildlife biologist Brian Cypher of the Endangered Species Recovery Program at California State University, Stanislaus, knew there were a few foxes in Bakersfield, stragglers he thought, that had somehow managed not to die amid development. Watching them more closely, he started noticing that the same individuals (with visible markers identifying them) were apparently holding down home ranges for long periods. He started noticing pups, which meant these individuals were also reproducing. Were they establishing themselves in the city? Thus began Cypher’s long-term research on these urban foxes, which continues to surprise the veteran conservationist.
Just like the humans who build cities, the kit foxes, it turns out, find urban habitats to be safer and more nourishing than the surrounding countryside. The lack of large urban forest patches or wooded areas means that unlike their Chicago cousins, Bakersfield coyotes avoid the city; so do bobcats. The city also provides an endless smorgasbord for a small omnivorous predator, ranging from junk food in garbage that people toss out to more nutritious dog and cat food intentionally supplied by those who like having kit foxes around in their neighborhoods.
An adult Kit Fox in Bakersfield. Photo: Tory Westall
As it turns out, the big city is not such a bad place for an endangered kit fox to raise a family, or several. And they do just that, in abundance. Cypher’s research indicates that while only one in ten of the pups born in the countryside survive past the first year of life, over half of the urban pups survive in Bakersfield. This drop in first-year mortality is one reason why the kit foxes are thriving in the city, with population densities much higher than outside it. While a single pair may occupy two square miles of countryside, in Bakersfield, Cypher and his team have identified (using camera traps) more than 30 individuals living on the local California State University campus alone. Across the city, he estimates there is a population of 400-500 kit foxes that is growing, making Bakersfield home to their 3rd largest remaining population.
Carnivores generally don’t fare well at high densities. Island Foxes stuck in high densities on the Channel Islands, Cypher tells me, “look always torn up, like they are always fighting all the time”. Mainland foxes prefer to keep their distance from each other, maintaining territories through scent marking, and avoiding direct confrontation whenever possible. One might, therefore, “expect more aggression” among Bakersfield’s kit foxes. “But that is not the case here”, says Cypher. The urban kit foxes turn out to be “quite docile, and not as fiercely territorial or aggressive” toward each other. Instead, surprisingly, they seem to be engaged in more cooperative behaviors, especially when it comes to raising pups.
Kit Foxes born in the countryside tend to disperse from their parents to find their own territories within a year or two. While an older pup may linger past the first year and help raise next year’s brood, helpers at the den are rare. In the city, however, Cypher finds a lot more helpers, possibly because there is a steady supply of food in a saturated real estate market with few open territories for young foxes to take over. Why not stick around at home, then, and help raise younger siblings? However, urban kit foxes seem to be going beyond this increase in sociality, which is predicted by mathematical models of social behavior. Cypher and his students have documented at least two cases where two females shared a single den, seemingly became pregnant at the same time, and successfully raised their respective litters together in the same den. This level of cooperation is unprecedented in our knowledge of the natural history of Kit Foxes.
A Bakersfield Kit Fox in 2015. Photo: Christine Van Horn
In collaboration with geneticists from the Smithsonian Institution, Cypher’s team has discovered that the urban population of kit foxes shows high genetic variation, at levels that may surprise conservation biologists. There is some connectivity of habitat near the eastern edge of town, closer to the foothills. Bakersfield kit foxes, however, prefer to remain in town, and even exhibit some unique alleles, i.e., genetic mutations not found elsewhere, which may play some role in explaining the novel traits seen in this urban population.
There is a different downside to the higher density of foxes: the growing incidence of mange over the past three years. Caused by parasitic mites, this skin disease can, if untreated, eventually kill kit foxes through secondary infection, hypothermia from loss of fur, dehydration, and starvation. Cypher is not sure where the kit foxes are getting infected but suspects the mites may be coming from contact with domestic dogs. “It is unlikely to be coyotes infecting foxes,” he says, because “if a coyote encounters a kit fox, the fox ends up dead!” Domestic dogs are often protected from mange through monthly application of tick and flea prevention medication. Researchers from UC Davis are collaborating with Cypher to determine if the mites on mangy kit foxes are genetically similar to ones found in dogs; if so, the infection may be treatable using similar medication. They plan to test whether over-the-counter mange-preventive collars may also work to protect the kit foxes.
Another potential threat is exposure to anticoagulant rodenticides in the city: accidental consumption has been associated with mange in Bobcats in California. Cypher and colleagues have documented worrisome levels of these chemicals in urban kit foxes, with the anticoagulant rodenticides implicated in at least several known deaths. Whether they also make kit foxes more vulnerable to mange remains to be seen. The recent ban on second generation anticoagulant rodenticides may go some way in reducing this risk of urban life for the kit fox.
On the whole, though, the kit foxes continue to thrive in the urban matrix, even serving as vanguards for new urban development. The threat of coyotes and bobcats keeps kit foxes away from farmland, according to Cypher, “except when the land is allowed to go fallow” resulting in growth of shrubs that provide some cover. Such fallow land at the edge of the city is often a precursor to urbanization, but the kit foxes “don’t seem to get pushed out by development, except in really high-density residential areas. School campuses, golf courses, even commercial areas—anything not residential seems to have foxes in them”, says Cypher. They manage to find nooks and crannies within the sprawl to settle in, so that, counterintuitively, “as development grows, so does the fox population!”
Bakersfield’s kit foxes also thrive because people have grown from merely tolerating them to appreciating their presence in the city. Cypher is applying his team’s research to reconcile urban development with the conservation of this endangered native species by advocating for more thoughtful design of urban landscapes. It is possible to develop the city for humans in ways that also provide the necessities of life for an urban kit fox family, and indeed other wildlife. If the domestic dog is our oldest friend, the San Joaquin Kit Fox may yet be our newest friend, giving us hope of surviving the current extinction crisis with at least some of the native wildlife and wild landscapes folded into our brave new, human-built world.
A review of Civic Ecology, Adaptation and Transformation from the Ground Up, by Marianne E. Krasny and Keith G. Tidball. 2015. ISBN: 9780262028653. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 328 pages. Buy the book.
Krasny and Tidball’s Civic Ecology is a book that promises something different—and then actually delivers. The book sets out a clear mandate to demonstrate the notion of “civic ecology” and, to this end, presents an array of case studies showcasing people and their practices towards “transforming broken places” through their engagement with community and nature.
Krasny and Tidball’s book is peppered with the active voices of civic ecology stewards. Their stories are nothing short of inspirational.
At the outset, the authors present their “two pillars”, drawing on the work of two historic figures pertinent to American history. They look to Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote about civic engagement in his travels across America in the 1830s, for their notion of “civic”, and to Aldo Leopold, one of America’s earliest ecologists, for a definition of “ecology”. They make no apologies for their singular selections and come up with clear and interesting definitions and principles that in turn can be readily applied to the case studies in the book.
Ten principles are set out to guide the reader; while none of these is in-and-of itself spectacular, I have yet to see these values presented together in this manner, in a way that is clear and uncluttered by more traditionally academic writing. What follows is a rich collection of stories from “stewards” and reflection pieces ordered to illustrate each of the 10 civic ecology principles. Through this arrangement, the varied (both geographically and in character) content speaks to the emergence of civic ecology in broken places, the exceptional nature of stewards in their pursuit of civic ecology, and how civic ecology builds community, draws on socio-ecological memory, produces ecosystem services, fosters well-being, and provides opportunities for learning.
The authors demonstrate the role of systems in civic ecology, including notions of scale, partnerships, and cycles of chaos and renewal. In concluding, the authors bring the text back to what is possibly a more comfortable and conforming space in positioning civic ecology within the realm of policy makers. The content is well written and the voices of the stewards are evident, making the work feel fresh and relevant. I was, of course, delighted to see the inclusion of cases from both the Global South and Global North. For a glimpse of just a few—we meet Helga Garduhn and Marian Przybilla from Germany, who share their story of seeking a united environmental community following the fall of the Berlin Wall; Mandla Mentoor, who grew up in a township in South Africa and seeks to draw communities together through engagement with art and nature; and Nam-Sun Park from South Korea, who carries out restoration projects under the banner of United Nations’ action plan on sustainable development, Agenda 21.
The book is peppered with the active voices of these civic ecology stewards, and their stories are nothing short of inspirational. These stories are carefully woven together with chapters that reflect on the emerging narratives in relation to the authors’ guiding principles. In all respects, the book manages a balance between its clear direction, as set out in the guiding principles, and a clear purpose emphasized by the more understated narrative and reflection. The reader is never left feeling cramped or stifled.
As someone who teaches urban ecology, I think this is a most refreshing addition to the otherwise predictable, traditional academic texts in this field. The combination of diverse case studies with normative directives provides excellent material for postgraduate teaching, where students can be both exposed to a diversity of experiences and provoked to consider their own civic duty, and—more broadly—what constitutes civic duty. I thoroughly look forward to introducing the book to my class this year and imagine I will draw on it for teaching and personal inspiration for years to come. Pippin Anderson
Cape Town
We attended the 22nd session of the United Nations Climate Conference (also called COP22) as “Observers” in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. 2016 presidential election. Since 1995, the COP has served as the annual UN climate conference, providing an opportunity to assess progress, negotiate agreements, and disseminate information regarding global climate change action. This year’s COP was simultaneously exhilarating and uplifting, a message that we are determined to bring home to a country still reeling from an election that has elevated someone who called climate change a hoax to our nation’s highest office.
At COP22, even the recent election of Donald Trump could not quash the sense of momentum building around widespread action on climate change.
Thanks to its official Observer status, our employer, Drexel University, was one of hundreds of civil society institutions from around the world permitted to send a delegation to the two-week meeting in Marrakech, Morocco (7-18 November 2016). Our Office of International Programs and our Institute for Energy and the Environment sent an envoy of 10 faculty and students to this meeting, five each week. Our role as “observers” was none other than to attend the various summits, official meetings, and side events and to report on the actions that nation-states, indigenous peoples, businesses, mayors, and individuals are taking to address the challenges posed by climate change. We networked with other civil-service institutions, conducted an informal survey, listened to talks, and were interviewed by National Public Radio (11/21/16, State Impact NPR, “Pennsylvania Academics Find Inspiration at Climate Conference”).
A scene from COP22, held in Marrakech, Morocco. Photo: Franco Montalto
The ongoing actions being discussed in Morocco would not have been possible if not for the historic agreement reached last year in Paris at COP21. The so-called “Paris Agreement” represented the first time that world leaders achieved global consensus regarding the need to work collaboratively to hold future global temperature increases to under 2 degrees Celsius. Over the last year, national governments had to formally ratify the agreement. Only 55 countries, accounting for 55 percent of global greenhouse gas (or GHG) emissions, needed to formally ratify the historic agreement for it to go into force; however, according to U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, speaking at the meeting in Marrakech, more than 109 countries—collectively responsible for 75 percent of global GHGs—had already signed prior to COP22, a much faster pace of ratification than anyone expected. Clearly, the need for global climate action has become a widely-held international value, shared not just by scientists and environmentalists, but also by governmental leaders, their rank and file governing bodies and agencies, and the private sector, whose interests underlie many political decisions.
With the signed agreement in force, conversations in the restricted Blue Zone of this year’s COP, focused on implementation strategies, identifying knowledge gaps, networking, and financing. The various meetings highlighted the efforts that individual countries have undertaken to identify the sources of their existing emissions, and gave them a platform to articulate their specific strategies for achieving their nationally determined contributions (or NDCs) to global GHG emission reductions. Discussions also addressed how specific countries, cities, and other sub-national actors are planning to nurture, manage, or shape forecasted economic and population growth, peacekeeping, and advances in human rights while keeping their emissions under control. Again according to Secretary Kerry, each nation is now in the process of developing its own plan, tailored to its own circumstances, and according to its own abilities. It is an example of common but “differentiated responsibilities”, with the most vulnerable nations being helped along by those most equipped to address this challenge.
In the publicly-accessible Green Zone of the meeting, attendees were largely focused on the role that the private sector and civil society can and must play. In small and large booths, vivid displays highlighted everything from the voluntary emission reduction goals of large multi-national corporations to small-scale entrepreneurial efforts to innovate new ways of deriving fuel from waste, or to create new market opportunities for existing technologies such as the “Nigerian Refrigerator,” which can cool a pot of fruit from 40°C to 4°C relying solely on evaporative processes. The Green Zone included interactive meetings where individuals could spontaneously join group discussions focusing on climate justice, racism, and other struggles intimately related to climate change. It also featured an international, socially-engaged art exhibit.
Photo: Franco Montalto
Marrakech, a beautiful city situated at the foot of the Atlas Mountains and at the edge of the Sahara Desert, was the perfect backdrop for this kind of multi-faceted exchange of ideas. Each day, as our group walked through its central square, the Jemaa el-Fna, a dynamic urban space packed with storytellers and snake charmers, musicians and dancers, traders and merchants, street food vendors, and children, we thought, what better setting to host the growing cross-cultural, global dialogue regarding the planet’s future? The square’s air is full of smoke, smells, sounds, and slang; its perimeter is lined with shops, rooftop restaurants, and street-level cafés. A vibrant, multi-actor, pulsating center of contrasts between old and new, of negotiation and of barter, it represents, in miniature, what is now happening on the world stage between global leaders, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and other vested individuals.
But what was most exhilarating to witness was how integrated the global response to climate change has become inside other contemporary efforts to improve the human condition. COP22 is just the most recent of a historic string of new pacts and agreements that will collectively guide the next phase of global human development. It began in 2015, when the United Nations officially replaced its Millennium Development Goals (or MDGs) with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs), and 169 carefully articulated and intimately-related targets. The SDGs point the way to the next wave of progress on poverty alleviation, environmental protection, and the spreading of economic prosperity. A few months later, in March 2015, and at the request of the UN General Assembly, the Sendai Agreement for Disaster Risk Reduction—another global pact focusing on resilience and reducing the impacts of disasters on lives, livelihoods, health, and economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental assets—was adopted. The Paris Agreement was signed on December 12, 2015, and went into effect less than one year later on 5 October 2016. On October 15, 2016, after the conclusion of all-night negotiations in Kigali, Rwanda, an agreement was reached to limit the use of hydrofluorocarbons (or HFCs) resulting in the largest potential temperature reduction ever achieved by a single agreement, as much as 0.5 C. Later in October of 2016, in Quito, Ecuador, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (called Habitat III) concluded with the adoption of the New Urban Agenda, a document that establishes new global standards for sustainable urban development, focusing on the collaborations necessary to more sustainably build, manage, and live in cities.
The “conversation” in Marrakech focused on how policymakers, planners, designers, business leaders, and individuals from all corners of the globe can integrate all of these different goals and aspirations into actionable initiatives at local, regional, national, and international scales. How can we design safe, accessible cities, with low-carbon transport systems, stable governing bodies, and equitable access to resources? How can we re-imagine our coastlines as multifunctional living landscapes, equipped to adapt to rising sea levels, but also supportive of critical fisheries, emergent habitats, and other forms of biodiversity? Where and how, in geographical and economic terms, will we feed ourselves, live, earn a living, and play, as both the global and urban populations of the world reach historical proportions? What successful models have been piloted, and what can we learn from them? These and other related, intellectually stimulating, and fundamentally important questions were on the lips of just about everyone we bumped shoulders with on the sprawling conference grounds.
Personally, we were reassured to witness this important conversation elaborated in so many different ways, by so many different people, in so many different languages, at COP22, even as the U.S. prepares for a new president. President-elect Donald Trump’s dismissive rhetoric during the campaign, and the expressed views of many individuals he appears poised to appoint as part of his Cabinet, suggest that this administration may not instinctively understand the urgency of global collaboration on any of these issues. Where the Obama administration has lead, the incoming administration seems, at least initially, to want to close the door. Like many other Americans attending the meeting, we used phrases like “angrily charged” and “disillusioned, but determined” to describe our post-election feelings at a workshop organized at the conference by Mediators Without Borders (or MWB) as an outlet for attendees to express our emotional reactions to the election results, and to convert these into a constructive reorientation of our professional activities.
To elicit global perspectives on the election, our Week Two delegation designed an informal survey to conduct after the MWB workshop, as we circulated among the tens of thousands of conference attendees. It featured two core questions: “What was your reaction when you heard the results of the U.S. election?” and, “Do you have a message for the incoming U.S. Administration regarding climate change?” Though we would be remiss not to mention that among the conference attendees were certainly a small group individuals who were unsurprised, or even satisfied, by Mr. Trump’s victory, responses to the first question overwhelmingly reflected many of the same feelings of shock, horror, and devastation articulated in the MWB workshop. But regardless of their feelings about Mr. Trump, and without exception, respondents to the second survey question urged the President Elect to follow his predecessor’s example by collaborating with the international community on efforts to battle climate change and to also lead in related struggles for sustainable development.
Leaders from all levels of government have expressed the same sentiment, tinged with optimism that significant backpeddling may no longer be tenable. UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon said he counts “on the U.S.’s continued engagement and leadership to make this world better for all…” Brian Deese, Senior Climate Advisor to President Obama, reported in Marrakech that for the first time in human history, carbon emissions are now completely decoupled from economic growth. And Jonathan Pershing, the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change, stated confidently that, “The transition to clean energy is now inevitable.” While we still have many profound challenges, “the momentum is insurmountable: there is no stopping,” he said. Indeed, the recent open letters from more than 300 companies and from 37 red band blue state mayors asking President-Elect Trump not to abandon the Paris Agreement is further evidence of the deep roots that this movement now has.
Franco Montalto (far left) and Hugh Johnson (far right) with representatives from Drexel University at COP22. Photo: Franco Montalto
For all these reasons, we returned Stateside full of renewed excitement, resolve, and hope. We are not naïve to the struggles we may have to face domestically, but we feel more energized, focused, and determined than ever before about the importance of the work we are all doing. The time to perfect our analyses, demonstrate our ideas, publish our work, talk to our neighbors, and to let our values drive our personal and professional activities is now. We must be the change and action that we want to see in the world.
This month, Drexel became the North American Hub of the Urban Climate Change Research Network. We have listed two preliminary goals to guide our activities: we will continue to generate and to disseminate scientific knowledge where it can inform sound decisions and policy, and to support our practitioner colleagues in their efforts to implement change. But in other contexts—ones where change must be catalyzed through other means—we are prepared to apply other forms of pressure, drawing from the enormous fountain of energy, creativity, and connections available to us through the growing international demand for climate action, social justice and sustainability. We invite you to join us as we transition from debates to determined action at all levels of our global community.
Hugh has consulted on various aspects of renewable energy and energy efficiency for private, municipal, and federal clients. At Drexel, he contributes technical expertise and manages special projects.
Today’s post celebrates highlights from TNOC writing in 2016. These contributions, originating around the world, were widely read, offer novel points of view, are somehow disruptive in a useful way, or combine these characteristics. Certainly, all 550+ TNOC essays and roundtables are great and worthwhile reads, but what follows will give you a taste of this year’s key and diverse content.
2016 has been an important year at The Nature of Cities. The number of contributors has grown to almost 600, and we published 150+ long-form essays, reviews, and global roundtables. We launched the The Nature of Graffiti, a crowd-sourced gallery of street art from around the world that includes themes from nature and the environment. We partnered with Jenn Baljko as she walks from Bangkok to Barcelona over three years, reporting on the cities and communities she encounters. We published a pre-publication of 10 chapters from an urban environmental education book that will appear in its full form in 2017. In essays, roundtables, and reviews we continued to seek the frontiers of thought found at the boundaries of urban ecology, community, design, and art. Importantly, we’ve attracted more and more readers: in 2016 we had over a half million readers from 2,500+ cities in 150+ countries. Thank you.
A collaboration with Ray Cha, funded by the Transit Center, to produce education modules for better utilization of open data produced by cities;
A new book addressing the justice and equitable access imperatives of the benefits of ecosystem services;
As an outgrowth of our Nature of Graffiti project, we will embark on the beginning stages of an interactive, creative exhibit of art on social-environmental themes in urban “vacant” lots, generously funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts;
And of course, over 150 new essays, reviews and roundtables.
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Roundtables
Can cities save bees? How can urban habitats be made to serve pollinator conservation? How can that story be better told? bit.ly/2h7F1uP
Bees and pollinators have always been a part of the city landscape, but increasing interest in urban conservation, agriculture, and gardens, has made their presence more noticeable—and more important. Bee and pollinator conservation is a key concern outside of cities too, with habitat loss, indiscriminant insecticide use, and other issues threatening bee species and pollinators generally. What role can cities play in bee and conservation? How can this role be supported, by both public and private actors? And how can the story of urban pollinators be better told to propel the conversation about urban pollinator conservation and their critical services?
…with contributions from: Katherine Baldock, Bristol; Alison Benjamin, London; Sarah Bergmann, Seattle; Mark Goddard, Newcastle; Damon Hall, St. Louis; Tina Harrison, New Brunswick; Scott MacIvor, Toronto; Denise Mouga, Joinville; Matt Shardlow, Peterborough; and Caragh Threlfall; Melbourne.
Visions of resilience: Eighteen artists say or show something in response to the word “resilience” bit.ly/1WbnLV1
“Resilience” is the word of the decade, as “sustainability” was before it. A challenge with both words is that while they exist so well in the realm of metaphor, they are more difficult in reality. The same can be said for “livability” and “justice”. In this roundtable, we aimed to strike out in possibly new metaphorical directions. We invited 18 artists and designers of various types to respond—in words, images, or other works—to the word “Resilience”.
This Roundtable was a co-production with Arts Everywhere, where these responses are also published.
…with contributions from Juan Carlos Arroyo, Bogotá, Katrine Claassens, Cape Town; David Brooks, New York City; Rebecca Chesney, Preston; Emilio Fantin, Bologna; Ganzeer, Los Angeles; Lloyd Godman, Melbourne; Fran Illich, New York City; Todd Lanier Lester, São Paulo; Frida Larios, Washington; Patrick Lydon, San Jose & Seoul; Mary Mattingly, New York; E. J. McAdams, New York City; Mary Miss, New York; Edna Peres, Johannesburg; Caroline Robinson, Auckland; Finzi Saidi, Pretoria; Keijiro Suzuki, Yamaguchi & Nagoya
Common threads: connections among the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom, and their relevance to urban socio-ecology bit.ly/2hZm2Uv
Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom were both giants in their impact on how we think about communities, cities, and common resources such as space and nature. But we don’t often put them together to recognize the common threads in their ideas. Yet, their streams of ideas clearly resonate together in how they bind people, economies, places, and nature into a single, ecosystem-driven framework of thought and planning—themes that deeply motivate The Nature of Cities. In this roundtable, we asked 16 people to talk about some key ideas that motivate their work, and how these ideas have roots in the ideas of either Jacobs or Ostrom, or both.
…with contributions from Paul Downton, Melbourne; Johan Enqvist, Stockholm; Sheila Foster, New York City; Lisa Gansky, San Francisco; Mathieu Hélie, Montreal; Mark Hostetler, Gainesville; Michelle Johnson, New York; Marianne Krasny, Ithaca; Alex Russ, Ithaca; Harini Nagendra, Bangalore; Raul Pacheco-Vega, Aguascaliente; Michael Mehaffy, Portland; Mary Rowe, New York City; Laura Shillington, Montreal & Managua; Anne Trumble, Los Angeles; Arjen Wals, Wageningen; and Abigail York, Tempe
What, how, and where are examples of graffiti as a positive force in communities? bit.ly/2hbr5Qz
Graffiti and street art can be controversial. But they can also be a medium for voices of social change, protest, or expressions of community desire. In many cities, graffiti is associated with decay, with communities out of control, and so it is outlawed. In some cities, it is legal, within limits, and valued as a form of social expression. “Street art”, graffiti’s more formal cousin, which is often commissioned and sanctioned, has a firmer place in communities, but can still be an important form of “outsider” expression. Interest in these art forms as social expression is broad, and the work itself takes many shapes—from simple tags of identity, to scrawled expressions of protest and politics, to complex and beautiful scenes that virtually everyone would say are “art”, despite their sometimes rough locations. What, how, and where are examples of graffiti as a positive force in communities?
This roundtable was a co-production of The Nature of Cities and Arts Everywhere, where these responses are also published. Also check out The Nature of Graffiti, a gallery launched in 2016 that illustrates some of these ideas from an environmental perspective.
…with contributions from: Pauline Bullen, Harare; Paul Downton, Adelaide; Emilio Fantin, Milan; Ganzeer, Los Angeles; Germán Eliecer Gómez, Bogotá; Sidd Joag, New York City; Patrick Lydon, San Jose & Seoul; Patrice Milillo, Los Angeles; Laura Shillington, Managua & Montreal
Urban agriculture has many benefits. Is one of them a contribution to urban sustainability? bit.ly/2ifOwKk
Sustainability is key to our future, and, as urbanization steadily grows, keys to increased global sustainability must be found in cities and how they use and are provided with resources. In this topic, there has been much excitement about urban agriculture—the production of food in and near cities at scales larger than home or community gardens. Does urban agriculture have the potential to contribute significantly to urban sustainability by reducing cities’ dependence on food grown at great distance from the city? Can it produce enough to address food insecurity? In this roundtable, we asked respondents to address the potential for urban agricultural production to make cities more sustainable, and how such potential could be realized.
…with contributions from Jane Battersby, Cape Town; Katrin Bohn, Brighton; Christopher Bryant, Montreal; Easther Chigumira, Harare; Evan Fraser, Guelph; Kelly Hodgins, Guelph; Patrick Hurley, Collegeville; François Mancebo, Paris; Idah Mbengo, Harare; Innisfree McKinnon, Menomonie; Leslie McLees, Eugene; Geneviève Metson, Vancouver; Navin Ramankutty, Vancouver; Kristin Reynolds, New York City; Esther Sanyé-Mengual, Bologna; Shaleen Singhal, New Delhi; Kathrin Specht, Müncheberg; Naomi Thur, Jerusalem; Andre Vijoen, Brighton; and Claudia Visoni, São Paulo
Read this! 90 recommendations for the one book about (or relevant to) cities that everyone should read bit.ly/2ig2Zpu
In this roundtable, we assembled a list of 90 must-reads on cities from a diverse group of TNOC contributors—a nature of cities reader’s digest. The recommendations were as wide-ranging as the TNOC community, from many points of view and from around the world. They are a reflection of the breadth of thought that cities need. The list could serve as a wonderful primer for courses or other gatherings. You can download the entire list as a PDF.
…with contributions from 90 of TNOC’s authors, who also happen to be artists, urban planners, conservation biologists, architects, and much more.
Essays
Confronting the Dark Side of Urban Agriculture
François Mancebo, Paris bit.ly/22jcKio
Some people praise urban agriculture as a kind of panacea that could help reconfigure more sustainable cities by bringing people together and, eventually, reshaping the whole urban fabric. But it is misleading to greenwash, without caveats, conventional or high-tech agriculture in the city as sustainable. All urban agricultures are not sustainable, and some may even produce deleterious effects on city inhabitants, as well as on the city itself. In this essay, François Mancebo sets out to distinguish between the types of urban agriculture and to denounce those which, under the disguise of promoting agriculture in the city, promote practices that are absolutely unsustainable.
Market-Based Solutions Cannot Forge Transformative and Inclusive Urban Futures
Richard Friend, Bangkok bit.ly/2hh2RpM
Richard Friend uses an analysis of a Dhaka advertisement to assess what a classic neoliberal response to environmental degradation could mean for Asia’s city dwellers as the effects of climate change worsen and the New Urban Agenda remains absent from the discussion. “It seems that even while the combined effects of climate change, environmental degradation, and social injustice are more in evidence now than ever,” he writes, “the overall direction of responses is a toxic combination of individualist, market-based solutions, alongside growing, heavy-handed political oppression. The calls for solutions to the challenges of climate change uncertainty and risk to embrace participation, innovation, and informed dialogue amid polycentric, multi-scalar governance mechanisms seem all the more distant”.
Why Conserve Small Forest Fragments and Individual Trees in Urban Areas?
Mark Hostetler, Gainesville bit.ly/1TX6IEq
For many developers and city planners, it takes time and money to plan around trees and small forest fragments. Often, the message from conservationists is that we want to avoid fragmentation and to conserve large forested areas. While this goal is important, the message tends to negate any thoughts by developers towards conserving individual mature trees and small forest fragments. Mark Hostetler demonstrates how fragmented landscapes have value for a variety of species—and why stating that fragmentation is unequivocally bad can only lead to lost conservation opportunities.
Viola Has an Acorn in Her Pocket
Stephan Barthel, Stockholm bit.ly/2evX4JP
Stephan Barthel’s daughter, Viola, age 4, is curious about the nature that surrounds them on their father-daughter walks in Stockholm. Her questions prompt her father to muse on a wide ranging of subjects, from the importance of ecological memory, to the possible impact of the Smart City paradigm on future development and education, to the gentle wisdom of singer-songwriter Nick Drake.
They are Not “Informal Settlements”—They are Habitats Made by People
Lorena Zárate, Mexico City bit.ly/1YRQpaY
According to the UN, at least one third of the global urban population suffers from inadequate living conditions. Lack of access to basic services, low structural quality of shelters, overcrowding, dangerous locations, and insecure tenure are the main characteristics normally included in the definitions of so-called informal settlements. In this essay, Lorena Zárate argues that words matter: changing the words means changing the concepts; changing the concepts means changing the way we understand (or not) complex phenomena and are able (or not) to transform them in a positive way. These “informal settlements” are neither informal nor irregular— they are, above all, human settlements.
Climate Adaptation Plans Can Worsen Unequal Urban Vulnerability
Linda Shi, Boston; and Isabelle Anguelovski, Barcelona bit.ly/2hjAeqm
To date, few studies have asked: who actually benefits from urban adaptation plans and projects? Do projects prioritize the vulnerability of the most disadvantaged and marginalized groups? Do projects succeed in reducing vulnerability and, if so, for whom? In this essay, Linda Shi and Isabelle Anguelovski argue that there is an urgent need to find examples where climate adaptation and resilience projects have moved towards more equitable outcomes and to identify specific normative principles, design strategies, and evaluative outcome metrics for alternative adaptation strategies that highlight equity and justice.
Sense of Place
Jennifer Adams, David A. Greenwood, Mitchell Thomashow, and Alex Russ; New York, Thunder Bay, Seattle, and Ithaca bit.ly/2i3LiH5
Different people perceive the same city or neighborhood in different ways. While one person may appreciate ecological and social aspects of a neighborhood, another may experience environmental and racialized injustice. Jennifer Adams, David A. Greenwood, Mitchell Thomashow, and Alex Russ explain how sense of place—including place attachment and place meanings—can help people appreciate ecological aspects of cities. This is a chapter from the book Urban Environmental Education Review, which will appear in 2017. TNOC published ten chapters as a pre-publication.
Closing the Gap Between Girls’ Education and Women in the Workforce
Jenn Baljko, Barcelona bit.ly/2dR5LiL
While traveling through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, Jenn Baljko meets young women who are “compassionate, generous, enthusiastic, observant, smart, funny”—but who have limited opportunities to continue their educations or to remain unmarried. What does this mean for the future of cities? “It’s the kind of conversation that raises more questions than answers.” This essay appeared as part of TNOC’s featured series with Jenn Baljko, who is journeying from Bangkok to Barcelona on foot. For more about the project, click here.
Small Rain Gardens for Stormwater and Biodiversity in the City: Learning from Traditional Ways
Keitaro Ito, Fukutsu City bit.ly/22Hsrpo
“These days, especially in summertime, we have heavy rain in Japan,” writes Keitaro Ito. In response to the increasing frequency of flooding, he has turned to Sado, a traditional tea ceremony, to inform the biocultural design of small rain gardens that can provide an important ecosystem service: stormwater management.
From Reactive to Proactive Resilience: Designing the New Sustainability
Nina-Marie Lister, Toronto bit.ly/22gbWQF
Long-term sustainability necessitates an inherent and essential capacity for resilience—the ability to recover from disturbance, to accommodate change, and to function in a state of health. In this sense, sustainability typically means the dynamic balance between social-cultural, economic, and ecological domains of human behavior necessary for humankind’s long-term surviving and thriving. As such, long-term sustainability sits squarely in the domain of human intention and activity—and, thus, design. This should not be confused with managing “the environment” as an object separate from human action, which is ultimately impossible. Instead, the challenge of sustainability, says Nina-Marie Lister, is very much one for design, and specifically one of design for resilience.
Urban Nature that Reduces Risk in Kampala
Shuaib Lwasa, Kampala bit.ly/2hncXUp
Kampala’s urban landscape has been largely fragmented, just like the landscapes of many other cities. In fact, this is the common character of urban development. But it isn’t the only way. In this article, Shuaib Lwasa illustrates the urban risks that Kampala faces—especially those related to natural hazards, such as flooding—and demonstrates how these risks can greatly be reduced through greening and restoration of nature in lowland and hilltop forests.
Wouldn’t it be Better if Ecologists and Planners Talked to Each Other More?
Diane Pataki, Sarah Hinners, and Robin Rothfeder; Salt Lake City bit.ly/2iwFt3Y
At first glance, one might think that the fields of ecology and planning communicate regularly with one another. But they don’t—at least, not enough. The contact between these disciplines rarely occurs as a direct collaboration between practicing ecologists— whose job is to generate new scientific understanding—and practicing planners, whose job is to envision and plan better cities. If planners and ecologists found more ways to work together, would cities look different? Would they be better? Yes, they would, say Diane Pataki, Sarah Hinners, and Robin Rothfeder as respond to this question with a case study from Salt Lake City.
The Forgotten Rurality: The Case for Participatory Management in Bogotá and its Surrounding Countryside
Diana Wiesner, Bogotá bit.ly/2hHS842
We often think of the city and the country as separate, and that development planning and urban sustainability ends at the city boundary. But this isn’t true—in a planning and sustainability sense, the city and the surrounding rural areas are deeply linked. With this in mind, Diana Wiesner discusses a plan for the sustainable coexistence of a section of forgotten rurality near the megacity of Bogotá, Colombia, and how a civic response is being molded to draw attention to the issues involved.
Designing Ecologically Sensitive Green Infrastructure that Serves People and Nature
Christine Thuring, Sheffield bit.ly/2hrFgmg
Green infrastructure is expanding and gradually softening a proportion of our planet’s increasingly urban surface. Yet, from her perspective as a plant ecologist, Christine Thuring argues that many green infrastructure installations miss their full ecological potential. While monoculture is better than concrete, diversity is generally better than monoculture. The ideal of green infrastructure, she says, is two-fold: it must be multi-functional and it must express ecological sensitivity.
Photo Essay: Life and Water at Rachenahalli Lake
Sumetee Gajjar, Bangalore bit.ly/2invheE
Rachenahalli, one of the few living lakes of Bangalore, India, is an example of a thriving social ecological system. As documented in Sumetee Gajjar’s photographs, it provides natural resources to people living around it, acting as a sink for fisher folk cleaning fish or for women doing Sunday laundry and receiving treated sludge from new residences around the lake, as well as from an upstream sewage treatment plant. In these ways, the lake continues to live and to support life.
Justice and Geometry in the Form of Linear Parks
David Maddox, New York City bit.ly/1Tib32u
Here at The Nature of Cities, we write a great deal about the benefits of “green” cities, widely construed. Green infrastructure is good for human health and quality of life, it reduces the carbon footprint of cities, it increases resilience by insulating us from storms, it helps create foci of community building, and so on. Furthermore, green cities are good for nature in the form of conservation. But in cities around the world, everyone does not currently enjoy these benefits. If we ask how to increase access to ecosystem services via parks, then linear parks are a good answer, writes David Maddox.
Reviews & Podcasts
Knowing vs. Doing: Propelling Design with Ecology
Anne Trumble, Los Angeles A review ofProjective Ecologies, edited by Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister bit.ly/2ho8TmR
If we cannot get our most innovative and challenging ideas out of books and into real landscapes, we will squander an opportunity to determine a proud future. Projective Ecologies turns to ecology for new ways to think beyond the old nature/culture split. Offering up the insight that we may not be making the most of a diverse and complex concept of ecology, is, perhaps, the greatest success of Projective Ecologies.
What Should We Make of Jane Jacobs’ Critique of Parks in The Death and Life of Great American Cities?
Podcast produced by Philip Silva, New York bit.ly/2hhZ9Y2
While it’s true that Jane Jacobs changed the way we think about cities, relatively little is ever said about her views on urban parks. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Jacobs’ birth, we took a moment to revisit her views on “the uses of neighborhood parks” as she laid them out in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
The idea that material and thread can communicate so much about our human relationships with our urban and natural environments isn’t so wild. If we’re working to save anything, whether it’s a forest or a culture, one can’t help but think how much easier it is to save that something when one has a personal relationship with it. In this way, much of what Earth Stories accomplishes is in bringing enough familiarity to the gallery wall that we might more easily re-establish these relationships.
The Cheonggyecheon restoration. Photo: David Maddox
How Did Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon River Restoration Get Its Start?
Podcast produced by Philip Silva, New York http://bit.ly/2ifowMw
A casual chat on a bus nearly thirty years ago led to the improbable removal of a major elevated highway and the restoration of a beloved river in the old city center of Seoul in South Korea. Dr. Soo Hong Noh, a professor of environmental engineering at Yonsei University, became a champion for bringing back the Cheonggyecheon River in his home city after listening to a colleague fancifully muse about the river’s restoration while they sat together on their evening commute.
The High Line. Foreseen. Unforeseen.
Adrian Benepe A review of The High Line. By James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofido + Renfro bit.ly/2ix0wqT
New York City’s High Line Park, once a rusting relic of abandoned freight rail transportation infrastructure, has become arguably one of the world’s best-known urban parks, and possibly the single most visited park in the United States—and perhaps the world—on a visitor-per-acre basis. The High Line—the book recording the process of bringing the park to fruition—is, in the end, a sensual experience reflecting the High Line’s creation, design, and current reality.
Poetry Produces the Novel Language of Future Cities
Laura Booth A review of Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City bit.ly/1Ttzt7q
How can poems advance our understanding of nature in cities? Poetry, with its capacity to invert the lexicons of “nature” and “culture” so that they are not artificially divided per our current paradigms, is uniquely positioned to play a role in visioning future cities.
Nature in Chicago: Surprisingly Wild, Surprisingly Human
Chris Hensley A review of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, edited by Gavin Van Horn and Dave Aftandilian bit.ly/2ho9S6L
A collection of stories, poems, drawings, and photographs contributed by numerous Chicago artists, scientists, and residents, City Creatures whisks the reader through the streets, parks, and history of the Chicago region, giving a perspective on the city’s relationship with nature that is at once complete, nuanced, detailed, entertaining, and surprisingly intimate.
Out of sight, out of mind. That is how most of us want to think about the trash we generate. But as our cities become increasingly overwhelmed with the burden of refuse collection and disposal, we must refocus the way we view our discards and devote greater attention to the value and importance of waste management. Only by seeing waste as a resource, and understanding its potential, can we help accelerate the building of better systems for disposing and reusing the things we throw out.
Trash talk (n): discourse relating to sustainable waste management, from job and energy creation to art.
Garbage is a natural product of development and urbanization. The world’s cities produced 1.3 billion metric tonnes (286.6 trillion pounds) of trash in 2012, according to a World Bank report on global solid waste management. By 2025, that figure is expected to reach 2.2 billion tonnes (485 trillion pounds) per year. Municipal solid waste already overwhelms city budgets, especially in the developing world, and it is expected to grow even faster than the rate of urbanization.
Trash carries many names in English. Garbage, rubbish, refuse, waste, detritus, debris, discard, litter, junk, and scraps are some examples. Whatever we call it, we tend to have a single prevailing attitude towards trash: get rid of it, preferably with minimal muss, fuss, or stink. And while we may be willing to sort recyclables and deposit them in special bins, we generally give little thought to where our discards go or what happens to them. Just consider: how often have you visited a municipal waste site or recycling center?
For the health of our people and planet, however, we do need to devote more thought to garbage—how to reduce it and where it ends up. We need to move beyond the “yuck” factor and stop expecting others to take care of our rubbish for us. We must re-think what trash is, and get behind the solutions that tap its potential uses and benefits to push for better waste management across both the developed and developing worlds.
Let’s start by considering the multiple facets of city garbage.
Piles of refuse litter city streets during the Paris garbage strike of 2016. Photo: V. Gwinner
What the stink is about
Yes, common garbage is not attractive. Thrown in with other trash, most discarded objects quickly become slimy, grimy, and smelly. If you live in a city with good trash collection and recycling, the stink and ugliness are minimized and quickly whisked from view.
But sometimes, even that falls apart. I was in Paris in the spring of 2016, when the city’s public garbage collectors went on strike for nearly two weeks—in a city where residential garbage is normally collected daily. The result was a mess. Despite considerable progress in getting people to sort refuse from recyclables, collection bins were overflowing and oozing with sludge. The usually welcoming sidewalks of areas such as the Latin Quarter were blocked with heaping garbage piles, greatly frustrating locals and visitors alike. [Note: half the city’s districts are serviced by private trash collection companies. Those neighborhoods remained clear of garbage, and the city ultimately paid the private companies to pick up the refuse left by the public sector collectors until the strike was resolved.]
I live in Nairobi, Kenya, where municipal garbage collection is largely nonexistent. In our compound, we pay a monthly fee to a private company that collects our rubbish (one bag maximum, twice a week) and presumably disposes of it properly.
But not everyone can afford or is willing to pay for private trash collection. Less than half of households in Nairobi subscribe to such a service. Instead, many people burn their rubbish, filling the air with smoke and fumes. Others simply toss their trash on the ground, as evidenced by the large amounts of litter across the city.
Smoke from burning garbage is a daily sight in Nairobi. Photo: V. Gwinner
Poor neighborhoods suffer the most from waste management neglect and are filled with piles of rubbish, including so-called “flying toilets” (plastic bags of human waste tossed in with the rest).
What garbage is picked up is supposed to go to collection centers and ultimately end up in the city’s Dandora dumpsite. But factors such as graft, political turf wars, and scrabbles over lucrative waste disposal contracts mean that trash is often dumped in unauthorized locations or left to rot in place along city streets and alleys. Those trucks that do make it to Dandora face an access road that gets washed out during heavy rains and gangs that demand small bribes to offload the garbage.
Dandora covers 30 acres and was designed to hold 500,000 metric tonnes of trash, though it is said to contain some 1.8 million tonnes. The refuse is not properly contained and ends up leaching into the land and water that flows into the Nairobi River.
Plans to open a new 1,500-acre dumpsite on the outskirts of Nairobi have been discussed for years, but they are stalled because the land is situated directly beneath the flight path of Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Dumps attract birds, which could pose a serious aviation safety risk. After all, it was engine failures due to bird collisions that forced Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger to land U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on New York’s Hudson River.
Formal waste management is nonexistent in Nairobi’s slums. Photo: V. Gwinner
Open dumps are used all over the world. They present major health and environmental risks, especially in heavily populated areas. Hazards include microbial pathogens, toxic chemicals, noxious fumes, and heavy metals that can contaminate soil, air, and groundwater.
When garbage smells…like money and jobs
For all the stink and risks, garbage also has its positive sides.
Waste management is a huge business worldwide. In the U.S. alone, the collection and disposal of non-hazardous solid waste is a $52 billion industry. From curbside pickup through specialized trucks and sorting, all the way to landfills and incinerators, there is money to be made along the garbage collection and disposal continuum. Large companies such as Waste Management, Republic Services, and Veolia dominate, but there are many smaller companies taking care of waste collection, treatment, and disposal, too. In the U.S., they number more than 25,000.
Garbage also creates jobs, both formally and informally. Millions are employed in formal garbage management, and recycling has been adding jobs at a rate of 7 percent per year in the European Union and is expected to create 1.1 million new positions by 2030 in the U.S., according to the EcoCycle website. The numbers of informal waste-pickers—people who live off what they find and sell from garbage bins and piles—is estimated to be 15-20 million globally. Their work is often dirty and dangerous, as it exposes them to hazards, pathogens, contaminants, and crime related to turf wars over trash sources. But, informal waste-picking offers a source of cash and employment to people who are often desperately poor. In Kenya, 43.4 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25/day. Scavengers picking through the garbage mounds of Dandora might make up to $2.50/day collecting metals, rubber, plastics, electronics, and even meat bones—a pittance, yes, but an important form of income generation nonetheless.
Examples abound of cases in which the informal sector has organized to create safer and more sustainable ways of participating in waste management, thereby allowing people in this sector to play a considerable role in garbage collection and the recovery/reuse of recyclable materials, according to the United National Environment Programme (or UNEP). In Lusaka, Zambia, for example, the informal sector accounts for 30 percent of waste collection, and UN Habitat estimates that as much as 60 percent of urban jobs there are associated with trash collection, sorting, recovery, and disposal.
In the slums of Nairobi, community-based organizations are spearheading efforts to make trash collection and the recovery of usable materials into businesses that serve as a source of employment and empowerment for local residents. For example, the Matare Environmental Youth Group (or MEYG) employs young community members to collect garbage near their homes in one of city’s largest slums. They pick up household waste once a week for a monthly fee of 150 Kenya Shillings (U.S. $1.50) and take it to a designated site to be collected by municipal services. [Note: though the city services often fail to do their part, the effort removes trash from where people live, and has improved community cleanliness and security, according to locals.]
MEYG also has reclaimed formerly trash-ridden spots in the neighborhood to create public spaces for sports and other social activities. It has developed a recycling program that pays youth to collect plastics, which they then process for industrial use. Members note that MEYG has changed how local residents handle garbage, has reduced litter, and has created a forum to engage youth and foment community leaders.
While making such programs financially sustainable is a challenge, there are strong arguments for using public or donor subsidies to keep them alive. The costs and benefits are hard to monetize, but the contributions of these programs include such key public goods as improved health, cleaner environments, job creation, leadership development, and reduced crime; these need to be weighed against the price that comes with a lack of action. As noted by UNEP:
“The economic costs of not addressing waste management problems in developing countries are difficult to quantify, but the available evidence suggests that they greatly exceed the financial costs of environmentally sound waste management. So action on waste management is an urgent political priority—waiting for better evidence is no excuse.”
—The Global Waste Management Outlook, UNEP, 2015
Informal groups and micro-enterprises have formed agreements with municipal authorities to deliver waste management services in places as diverse as Uganda, Colombia, Brazil, the Balkans, and southern Asia. They demonstrate that “decentralized and community-based, small-scale facilities can provide a viable and affordable alternative to municipal services,” according to UNEP. Here is an example from Bangladesh:
Waste Concern, an NGO in Bangladesh, has developed a model for such facilities, which are called Integrated Resource Recovery Centers (IRRCs). Waste Concern’s model uses simple technology based on source separation of organic waste. It is low cost, and it recovers value from waste by converting organic waste into compost and valorizing recyclable materials, while providing livelihood opportunities to the urban poor. With assistance from the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), the model has been replicated across secondary cities and towns in several countries. In Matale, Sri Lanka, for example, three neighborhood-based plants have been installed with a combined capacity of 9 tonnes of organic waste and 3 tonnes of recyclables a day, thus treating a major portion of waste generated by the town and creating employment for 20 urban poor.”
—The Global Waste Management Outlook, UNEP, 2015
When trash is power
When garbage decomposes, it releases gases like methane, which is flammable, explosive, and a potent greenhouse gas. However, if properly captured, the gas can be converted into energy for powering vehicles, businesses, and homes. Likewise, incineration of garbage can be used to create energy, and organic waste can be converted to biofuel.
Indeed, all over the world, companies have set up operations to capture the waste-to-energy potential of modern landfills. For example, Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power fuel the City of Industry hotel and convention center complex using processed landfill gas. The Isséane Recycling Centre and Energy from Waste plant near Paris, France converts more than 460,000 tons of household trash per year into enough electricity and heat to serve 79,000 houses and apartments. With 32 waste-to-energy plants around the country, Sweden is so successful at converting its trash to power that it actually imports garbage from other countries. The plants generate enough power to heat 950,000 homes and provide electricity for 260,000 households. China has some 50 plants converting trash to energy, and Japan converts 30 million tons of municipal solid waste into power annually. Other examples of countries with waste-to-energy facilities include Austria, the U.K., Canada, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India.
T-Park is turning waste treatment on its head—not just to create energy but also to change public attitudes. Photo: www.info.gov.hk
Similar efforts are converting sewage waste into energy. Hong Kong has a plant called T-Park that treats 1,200 tonnes of sludge each day, using the steam generated from the incineration process to create enough energy to power both the facility and an additional 4,000 households. Previously, all the city’s sludge was disposed of in landfills, but now, the plant’s modern incineration system has reduced that volume by 90 percent.
A further effort to relieve Hong Kong’s municipal waste load involves the construction of the city’s first electronics recycling facility, which is meant to process some 30,000 tonnes of discarded computers, TVs, air conditioners, and refrigerators each year. The plant will be built with government funding, but will operate under a “polluters pay” scheme that charges disposal fees to electronics importers and distributers.
Why trash talk and trashy thoughts can be a good thing
Hong Kong’s T-Park is doing far more than converting waste to power. It is also introducing a novel approach to public outreach aimed at turning common perceptions of waste on their heads. Instead of being the type of place people want to avoid, T-Park has deliberately developed educational and recreational facilities designed to lure people to its waste treatment site. It is housed in a modern glass building with beautiful spaces and views of the harbor. It features a spa with three pools (hot, warm, cold), a roof garden, a second garden on the ground, and a wetland habitat that attracts a wide range of birds, insects, and amphibians.
T-Park also offers guided tours, an education center, a theater, and a gallery, all of which teach people about the plant’s processes. Exhibits focus on sewage treatment and waste reduction, encouraging visitors to deepen their efforts to conserve energy, to produce less waste, and to promote recycling. To further support the facility’s green theme, the education areas and café are equipped with environmentally-friendly furniture and utensils.
While T-Park is turning the sewage treatment process into a major urban green space, a highly innovative artistic production used the medium of dance to convey the hidden beauty and grace of municipal trash collection. The show, called Trash Dance, was the brainchild of choreographer Allison Orr. Orr spent nearly a year following municipal sanitation workers around Austin, Texas on their daily rounds, talking about their work and their lives. When she first proposed to involve them in an artistic production, they were skeptical. But over time she convinced them that the cadence and movements that they saw as a routine part of their work could be construed as dance, if they were just looked at from a different perspective.
The show was only performed once, on an abandoned airstrip outside of Austin. It received great accolades from the hundreds of people who came out in the rain to watch. Fortunately, the show’s preparation and performance were captured in a film by Andrew Garisson. Also called Trash Dance, the movie garnered numerous awards, including a special jury recognition at the 2012 South By Southwest (SXSW) festival.
Orr’s show is transformative, and it captures the kind of change that will be needed in public attitudes towards the garbage we generate.
Indeed, trash talk is going to have to adopt a new definition—one that includes widespread conversations about the value to be derived from our daily discards. Trash talk needs to become part of our development discourse, and to serve as a basis for new attitudes and behaviors around trash management. The shift may not be easy. But it’s the alternative—inaction—that will really stink, both for our cities and our futures.
Kasozi A, von Blottnitz H. Solid Waste Management in Nairobi: A Situation Analysis – Technical Document accompanying the Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan. Environmental & Process Systems Engineering Group, University of Cape Town. 2010.
Chapter one in this book is “imagining a sustainable city”, but it curiously fails to mention that much of the early and current literature on the topic describes “ecological” cities. If I came to this book without much of a background in the topic, I could read it from cover to cover (and gain a lot of useful information) but remain unaware of the breadth and depth of the international ecocity movement and the various manifestations of ecocity ideas that have contributed to shaping and informing sustainable city initiatives for over three decades. Ecocities is a term that has been used to describe municipal programs that aim to make a city sustainable, to make claims of urban ascendancy based on sustainability, and as a label for visionary ideas about what the ultimate sustainable city might be like.
The authors demonstrate the role of systems in civic ecology, including notions of scale, partnerships, and cycles of chaos and renewal. In concluding, the authors bring the text back to what is possibly a more comfortable and conforming space in positioning civic ecology within the realm of policy makers. The content is well written and the voices of the stewards are evident, making the work feel fresh and relevant. I was, of course, delighted to see the inclusion of cases from both the Global South and Global North. For a glimpse of just a few—we meet Helga Garduhn and Marian Przybilla from Germany, who share their story of seeking a united environmental community following the fall of the Berlin Wall; Mandla Mentoor, who grew up in a township in South Africa and seeks to draw communities together through engagement with art and nature; and Nam-Sun Park from South Korea, who carries out restoration projects under the banner of United Nations’ action plan on sustainable development, 
Can cities save bees? How can urban habitats be made to serve pollinator conservation? How can that story be better told?
Visions of resilience: Eighteen artists say or show something in response to the word “resilience”
Common threads: connections among the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom, and their relevance to urban socio-ecology
What, how, and where are examples of graffiti as a positive force in communities?
Urban agriculture has many benefits. Is one of them a contribution to urban sustainability?
Read this! 90 recommendations for the one book about (or relevant to) cities that everyone should read
Confronting the Dark Side of Urban Agriculture
Why Conserve Small Forest Fragments and Individual Trees in Urban Areas?
Viola Has an Acorn in Her Pocket
They are Not “Informal Settlements”—They are Habitats Made by People
Climate Adaptation Plans Can Worsen Unequal Urban Vulnerability
Sense of Place
Closing the Gap Between Girls’ Education and Women in the Workforce
Small Rain Gardens for Stormwater and Biodiversity in the City: Learning from Traditional Ways
From Reactive to Proactive Resilience: Designing the New Sustainability
Urban Nature that Reduces Risk in Kampala
Wouldn’t it be Better if Ecologists and Planners Talked to Each Other More?
The Forgotten Rurality: The Case for Participatory Management in Bogotá and its Surrounding Countryside
Designing Ecologically Sensitive Green Infrastructure that Serves People and Nature
Photo Essay: Life and Water at Rachenahalli Lake
Justice and Geometry in the Form of Linear Parks
Knowing vs. Doing: Propelling Design with Ecology 
What Should We Make of Jane Jacobs’ Critique of Parks in The Death and Life of Great American Cities?
Intertwining People, Nature, and Place with Quilts and Thread
The High Line. Foreseen. Unforeseen.
Poetry Produces the Novel Language of Future Cities
Nature in Chicago: Surprisingly Wild, Surprisingly Human 
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