As I was reading Musagetes’ Manifesto on Economic Dignity and getting all passionate about activism, the usual disturbing and stressful noise from the construction of a new ferry pier next to the construction site of another huge tower on the East River in New York City started up. The new pier will transport thousands of people back and forth, swarming between Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Manhattan since Hurricane Sandy damaged part of the L train tunnel normally servicing this route.
The noise of machines points to environmental destruction worldwide. Can we make enough counter-noise in a call to action?
I thought about the banging noise, its quality signifying the violent jamming of poles into the riverbed, and how our endless attempts at controlling our environment have led to such an unstable one. Four years ago, Hurricane Sandy upended part of the boardwalk close to the pier, and there is still a massive hole fenced off to the public. This river is fighting back, I thought; I’m not alone in sharing this idea.
“The Rivers Have Called Upon Us” is a beautiful Berta Caceres quote used by her indigenous activist organization Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) to protest a proposed dam supported by the Honduran Government, which was once backed by China, the U.S., and the Netherlands. When she was murdered by government thugs, those countries pulled out of the deal. Protests in Washington, DC put a stop to USAid funding to Honduras, and therefore, “inadvertently” funding a criminal government.
The banging noise continues through my reading of stories of environmental devastation by global corporations and the poor, disenfranchised and mostly indigenous people affected who are standing up to what seems like an unstoppable force, all over Tibet, all over Peru, and all over Honduras. That’s only three countries, but really all you have to do is point your finger at the map, pick a country and Google it for “environmental destruction,” and you’ll find lists of stories.
When traveling in Peru last year, I had a long conversation with an old man who runs tours of Lake Titicaca. He told me stories of the gold rush happening there, and that many Canadian miners go to the Amazon, pay off local government officials, and start mining illegally. I was surprised and disgusted with my country. I hadn’t heard of this story but Canadian mining companies are everywhere, including Peru and Tibet, and leaving devastation in their wake. It’s very easy to destroy someone else’s land when you are not the one that has to live there. We saw this in British Columbia, where I grew up, when U.S. mining companies could suddenly and easily cross the border because of the NAFTA Agreement and mine our mountains, leaving toxic waste running into our ocean. But how far will these corporations go? Will they continue to support a government regime that is killing its citizens just to get their gold? Yes, it seems so, unless this news gains international attention like the Berta Caceres case.
So there is only one thing to do. The noise of machines is worldwide. We must make noise worldwide to silence it and to protect what is our lives, our survival and our sanity!
I am from a family with Indigenous Latin American and German ancestry. I have been to many different countries and lived in different places. I believe this is partly because the Indigenous tradition my family comes from is nomadic. They see the earth as a living entity, and if they stay in one place they believe the land gets sick. They travel to where their ancestors send them, and this and other important messages are conveyed through their dreams. I married into a Cree and Blackfoot family where ceremonies are performed with the Blackfoot in Alberta. My son also married into a Maori whanau (family) in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
This inter-weaving of bloodlines gives me a perspective of many different Indigenous communities. I am no expert in any of them, and I do not speak for any of them. I also find it difficult to pinpoint only one place where I “come from.” In part, this is because I believe that the earth is alive and upset about fences and divisions. It is also because the tradition of being always on the road, crossing many different types of borders means one has to feel the pathway itself as a place too: one that enables you to see different patterns, different connections, as well as many similarities, and that offers a different kind of contribution to the whole. From this place, I would like to offer a story that speaks to the crossroads and the in-betweens.
I was coming out of a meeting at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where I work, and I found on the floor a dead hummingbird; it looked like it had died recently. At first I did not know what to do as I did not want people to step on the tiny bird. I could not leave it there, so I decided to wrap the dead body of the hummingbird in my scarf. I sang it a couple of songs, and put it in my bag because I was going to a lunch meeting and could not go straight home. I went to the meeting, had lunch, and really forgot about the hummingbird.
If we cannot see the hummingbird, it is because we are sleeping. People who were oblivious to the hummingbird, seemed to be so much in their heads, in their minds, that they could not really notice him: they were in torpor. I spend part of my life in torpor too.
As I was leaving the restaurant, I remembered the hummingbird and decided to show it to a friend. I took my scarf out of the bag and exposed the body of the hummingbird. As we were looking at it, to my greatest surprise, the hummingbird started to flex one of its legs. At this point the hummingbird’s heart began to race, and I thought that if I did not do the right thing, I would end up killing it. I decided to go straight to my office.
The hummingbird was slowly awakening and started flexing his wings, but his feet seemed to be entangled in my scarf. I took him outside in the scarf, but he would not fly. I thought: I’d better take him back to the tree where I found him, and then maybe he will know what to do. I started walking on campus; to get to the tree, I had to go counter-current through a lane full of people. It was a busy time when students had just finished their afternoon classes. I was carrying a scarf with a hummingbird flexing his wings, as if he was hovering on top of it. I had a miracle in my hands, going through that crowd. What really broke my heart is that nobody looked at the hummingbird. Nobody saw it. As I approached the tree the hummingbird flew away. And that was the end of my encounter with the hummingbird.
I went back to my office, and I started to research where those UBC hummingbirds come from. They come from Mexico. I also found information about the state that the hummingbird was in when I found it. When hummingbirds find an external threat, they go into a state of sleep where just eight percent of the bird’s metabolism keeps it going. This state is called torpor. In this state, they look dead. They take about an hour to “wake up” when the threat has been overcome. Maybe being in my bag protected by the scarf just gave him the warmth to come back to life again.
As I told the story to my Cree partner, he asked me to pay attention to what the hummingbird came to teach me. Reflecting on the hummingbird’s teachings took me back to the people walking without the ability to notice the hummingbird flexing his wings on top of my scarf. I believe the hummingbird was trying to teach me about torpor — the state of torpor of the people, who could not see him, as well as my own torpor. If we cannot see the hummingbird, it is because we are sleeping. People who were oblivious to the hummingbird, seemed to be so much in their heads, in their minds, that they could not really notice him: they were in torpor. I spend part of my life in torpor too.
From that point on, I started to think about an education that can awaken us all from torpor. I also started to think about this state of torpor in relation to what we are protecting ourselves against: what has created the state of torpor. If there is a threat that is prompting us to fall asleep, if we do not understand or face this threat, it is going to be extremely difficult to wake up from that state. And if we do not see the implications of being asleep, we might not want to be awakened, because we may be afraid of being awake. I imagined all these people coming to me with huge sleepy heads and very little bodies—heads that scale up our sense of importance, our sense of entitlement, our sense of control of everything, our sense that we are in a bubble that separates us from each other and protects us from the world. It is this sense of separation that presents the world as a threat, as something we need to be protected against and this creates a form of existential poverty.
Existential poverty is a denial of relationship (Donald, 2012), a denial of entanglement, a denial that our lives (both human and non-human) are all inter-woven. This denial leads to torpor and to the fear of awakening. Existential poverty also leads to material poverty because by trying to protect ourselves from each other, we start to accumulate stuff as walls between ourselves. We think that “stuff” is going to give us the affirmation of individuality and security that we believe we are entitled to.
I started to think about what has been scaled down so that the head could be scaled up. What has been scaled down for me is our sense of visceral connection with each other. We have been told that thinking is everything; that “we are” because “we think”; that reality is only what fits our enlarged bubble thinking heads. We have been taught to think about ourselves as much smaller and more limited than we actually are. I started to wonder about an education that could scale up what has been scaled down, that could un-numb the sense of visceral connection, and the responsibility that this entails. But also, the idea that we can scale up and connect the unique healing medicines located in our (different) bodies so this combination of medicines can contain and heal our collective pain, all the pain we have inflicted on each other.
We tend to think about hearts as limited, and to be afraid of the pain that we are going to face in the world because we may feel that our hearts are not strong enough to take it in. But as I was thinking about the teachings of the elders that have been in my path—and I have had the privilege of having elders in different traditions—I realized a common pattern. They have taught me through different stories and by example that we can scale up and connect our hearts. The same way that we can scale our hearing, so we can focus our hearing on something that is near or something that is far in our sight, we can make our hearts smaller, or bigger, enormous. Our sense of identity can also be perceived in the same way. We can be just this body, this ego, a defined identity, or we can be unbound spirit, we can be part of everything. Our sense of land could be just our home, our reserve, our country, or it can be the whole earth, or the whole universe.
Part of the problem with the kind of education we receive at university and schools is that we forget how to scale up the important things. And we scale down things like generosity, compassion, humility, in order to be able to participate in a system that has given us a few gifts, but that depends on violence to be maintained. So here I draw on Cash Ahenakew’s (2014) work to talk about this paradox that we face as Indigenous people all over the world. This paradox has two sides. On the one hand, there is the necessity to survive in a modern capitalist context that is inherently violent and completely unsustainable, a system that makes life outside of it almost impossible, unless we are “off the grid.” We have to fight for our lands, our rights, our languages and our cultures using the language of the nation state, if we want to be successful.
On the other hand, and at the same time, if we know that system is unsustainable, we have a responsibility to give our children an alternative mode of existence that might not be defined by that system. So how do we do the two things together, knowing that the first system tends to define our existence very quickly? Do we as Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, as people who are here to support young people, just support them to get through the system and then they become one of the people who came towards me and could not see the hummingbird? Or do we just socialize them in traditions where the hummingbird is one of the most important things to be seen? Can we train them to be successful in the existing system and to be awake, to be able to see the hummingbird? If they are awake and within the colonial system, will they be able to survive the pain without knowing how to connect and expand their medicines and hearts?
I believe these are discussions that we need to have. We have been thinking about an education for walking both worlds, but we have not yet really talked enough about the difficulties and the complexities of doing that, in the sense that young people feel torn, or sometimes fall through the cracks of both worlds (Battiste, 2000). Perhaps one way to think about it is through the concepts of material and existential poverty, and material and existential wealth. We need to think about the ways that material wealth, which has been associated with affluence, competition, and individualism, has caused a lot of existential poverty. So, how do we pass a notion of existential and material wealth to our children that upholds the dignity and wellbeing of every being, both human, more than human, and non-human, a notion of wealth that does not harm other people or the planet and that honors ancestors as people who have come before and of people who are yet to come?
This is the kind of education that I have been thinking about in terms of working at a university that, after this experience with the hummingbird, feels very much like an ivory slum, in terms of the existential poverty it promotes. Within this context, I also wonder about what reconciliation means and what it looks like. When I get really frustrated, part of me starts thinking about exiting: I just want to get out of institutions, return to community, forget about the university. Another part of me remembers that the process of reconciliation requires us to be where the problems are. I am not talking just about the reconciliation related to the effects of colonial violence, but about the (difficult) sense of wholeness and oneness that we have to have if we want to open the possibility for another form of existence in this planet. It is a reconciliation that starts in our guts and stretches out to recognize our inseparability. In many ways, being in the ivory slum is extremely important. And it is also really hard. And it is very difficult to face that existential poverty and not know what to do.
I find courage when I manage to de-center and to trust that there is an ancestral vision guiding where I go, a vision that knows why I was sent to this place, even if I do not know. That is what I try to say to myself in moments of extreme frustration. This helps me remember that the process of turning towards existential wealth involves dealing with the existential poverty that we see around us and within us. And that the “us and them” mentality works for certain things to a certain extent, but ultimately does not really speak to that yearning that we have inside of us, which is a yearning for wholeness, for wellbeing, for connection. This can only be achieved when we are together.
As an Indigenous scholar from Trinidad, Jacqui Alexander (2005) has pointed out that we confuse this yearning for wholeness with a yearning to belong, or a yearning for identity, for individuation, or for affirmation. And that, again, works in certain contexts and has saved many lives. I am not dismissing that. But maybe that yearning will only be addressed in the long term, not necessarily through more thinking or more dialogue, but through a renewal of our relationships, and our awakening to this visceral sense that we are individually insufficient and collectively indispensable. Regardless of what has happened in the past, if we use the same frames of being that create violence to resist violence, we will reproduce more violence. If focusing on thinking alone, on “making sense,” is not the answer, what else can we scale up so that we can remember to listen and relate to every being, not necessarily through conceptual language, but through our bodies and our spirits? How can we remember how to “sense sense,” to access other forms of reasoning, without dismissing the gifts of the rationality that we are over-socialized into?
I believe this is what the hummingbird came to teach me that day. I am glad that I did not kill it accidentally by forgetting it in my bag. I am really glad that we both came back alive. The ideas of torpor and of the university as an ivory slum have been very helpful, both in terms of understanding what my role is in that space, and in understanding how my own frustration reflects the same existential poverty that I am trying to address.
Seeing the frustration itself as a trickster teacher, showing me that my ego also reproduces and has been trained in that same kind of thinking, has been very useful. Being able to let go and allow this other vision to come in is very difficult, especially when you have to keep your webpage updated saying how great you are at competing with others: how much research you do, how much knowledge you have, how many articles you have written, how much money and how many awards you have received. I look at it and feel my stomach turn. But I trust there is something beyond myself that moves us where we need to be. It points to the life force within every single one of us, even when we do not want to listen. I believe it sings us a song that speaks of being awake, of breathing, of knowledge coming in dreams, of being undone, of healing and dancing precisely because of the scars we carry. It invites us to a natural state of vulnerability where obsessions with the meaning of an individual lifetime loses centrality as we see the same matter (or flesh), animated by a life-force that precedes it, as constantly morphing into different forms and different learning experiments. In this sense, awakening requires an interruption of our satisfaction with torpor and the false security we have with the illusions of individuality and of control that come with it. Once we let go of that arrogance, we can un-numb our senses and renew our relationships, by noticing that we are, simultaneously, one, many and the creative potential of ‘nothing’, as we inhabit bodies/flesh/form in linear time/reified space—and not—all at the same time.
On the other hand, I do recognize that I cannot be in that state all the time, and that there is anger, trauma and childishness within me. And these forms that I take, take me to enclosures of thinking and to a sense of entitlement absolutely grounded in the “us and them” separation, which depends on a denial of my entanglement with everything else. Maybe these entities are also part of entanglement. In this case, the question is how can I encounter these forms of my self productively without being overcome by their narcissistic tendencies? How can I identify and name the colonizers who appear as external to me (obviously I have to do that sometimes) without allowing that definition to determine my relationship with those people, and without seeing myself in them? When should we play the political game, in the pre-defined political context, and when should we breach those definitions and insist on other forms of relationality? Can we do both at the same time? When should we center ourselves for the benefit of our specific communities and when do we de- center to allow the land to imagine through us, for the benefit of all life forms (Longboat & Sheridan, 2006)? If this is not a matter of ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and more’, as my brother Hemi says, how can we mobilize both strategies without having the one least practiced subsumed by the other, which currently colonizes both our hopes and our imagination, giving us safety in a state of torpor?
I must acknowledge the elders who have taught me the most about this. These elders are Keith and Karen Chief Moon and Leroy English who are Blood elders from the Kainai reserve where I sundance. Above all, they show me that humility, generosity and compassion are not intellectual choices, not attitudes you decide to have, but waves that are radiated through you, when you tune to a different wavelength of being. Keith’s story is a beautiful story. For the past six years I have witnessed the process of him sustaining a Sun Dance created from a vision he had forty years ago: of people from the four directions dancing together to reconcile on the land’s terms. According to the vision he received, people would arrive at his Sun Dance, and he would not be able to send them away because it is not the bodies that would arrive—it would be people’s spirits asking to dance. I have witnessed people from other Sun Dances coming and telling him that what he is doing is wrong, because people in the dominant culture are used to appropriating Indigenous knowledge and using it in bad ways. I have heard people saying, “White people will come here, and in five minutes they are going to be bossing Indigenous people around thinking they already understand everything.” And it is true; they are trained to do that.
However, Keith’s response has been really interesting and has taught me something that I did not expect. His response is always that he agrees, on political grounds with the criticisms, but that the land is a sacred place, that his vision is also sacred and that this vision does not require consensus. What he has taught me is that spirituality trumps politics. Seeing him respond with generosity and with compassion to people who act arrogantly or stubbornly due to their torpor or training has helped me to identify and not be afraid to learn from my own arrogance. Keith has established a distinction between necessary political relations that require political agreements and frontiers, and existential relations grounded on visceral connections and wholeness that create a wavelength where frontiers do not exist, a wavelength where all our 99 senses point to the fact that we are each other.
At that Sun Dance I learned there are two groups of elders (who come in many ages): those who insist they know (which is a sign that they don’t), and those who insist they don’t know (who could be on to something). Both are important. Elders in the first group see education as the distribution of answers to be consumed or wrestled with. Elders in the second group see education as a recalibration of a search beyond meaning and the individuated self – a search driven by doubt that often gets stuck in distractions when certainties creep in. The first education gives us languages, concepts and ideas to play and experiment with. The second education demands that we loosen the grip when these things get confused for the path itself, when they become the cement of our ontological securities, getting us entrapped and immobilized precisely by giving us the impression that we are moving somewhere. Combining both types of education requires patience, humor, self-compassion, vulnerability, discernment, and, above all, a healthy skepticism towards one’s own and other knowledges and desires.
Perhaps torpor could be considered as a consequence of the overdoing of the first type of education. When knowledge becomes an instrument of existential arrest we get stuck in distractions. Awakening from torpor does not mean dismissing or banishing knowledge, rationality or identity, but recognizing unhealthy attachments and investments in these things that foreclose on our capacities for a multitude of other possibilities for sensing, reasoning, relating and being. In times of exhaustion or scarcity, hummingbirds shut down their metabolic system. Under conditions of perceived existential scarcity, we may likewise shutdown our capacities, and forget that they exist as we embrace the illusions of safety in our sleep. Perhaps the second education can help us to learn to let go of the strong faith we have on detractions. This may, in turn, loosen the grip that they exert over us, allowing the search to unfold otherwise, awakening our capacities to fly again.
senses
of resonance
of awe
of fusion
of possibility
of form
of being
-in-breathing
-in-beauty
-in-flux
-in-vulnerability
-in-time/space
of embracing
the miracle,
the privilege
the responsibility
of being alive:
both one, many
and nothing,
entangled
unfinished
and free
This text is an adapted transcript of a keynote presented at the Indigenous Scholars Conference: Indigenous Epistemologies: Re-Visioning Reconciliation on 26 March 2015, at the University of Alberta. It has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies. The article originally appeared in this form on ArtsEverywhere.
References
Ahenakew, C., Andreotti, V., Cooper, G., & Hireme, H. “Beyond Epistemic Provincialism: De-provincializing Indigenous resistance.” Alter-Natives: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 10, no. 3 (2014): 216-31.
Alexander, J. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Battiste, M. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2000.
Donald, D. Forts, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Aboriginal-Canadian Relations: Imagining Decolonizing Educational Philosophies in Canadian Contexts. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012.
Longboat, D., & Sheridan, J. (2006). The Haudenosaunee imagination and the ecology of the sacred. Space and Culture, 9, no. 4 (2006): 365-81.
A review of City Wilds: Essays and Stories about Urban Nature by Terrell F. Dixon. 2002. The University of Georgia Press. ISBN: 978-0820323398. 336 pages. Buy the book.
Writing this review came with a built-in challenge: Is an anthology, now almost 15 years old, worth a reader’s time and money? I assume that visitors to The Nature of Cities website have an interest—likely a deep professional one—in urban nature. So, we can clarify the question: What mix of qualities makes an older urban nature anthology worthwhile?
City Wilds is a retrospective and an inspiration for aspiring urban nature writers, disclosing the diverse ways the story of a city can be told.
First on our list of criteria should be the quality of the writing. City Wilds is certainly brimming with that. There is Michael Aaron Rockland’s “Big City Waters,” a tale about the author and his friend circumnavigating Manhattan by canoe, reminding readers that despite its monumental buildings, New York City “is a liquid place” of islands. There is Chet Raymo’s “The Silence,” which opens with a time-stopping near-death collision that unfolds into a series of ethereal reflections on the vacuum of space, the explosion of stars, and the transporting impacts of silence found in nearby nature. Two essays caused me to audibly exhale a wow after finishing the last sentence—Rebecca Johnson’s “New Moon over Roxbury,” a meditation on Black people’s relationships to land and the city as well as her own practice of astrological gardening (“If I worship at all, it is at the compost pile. It receives my most consistent offerings.”); and Helena Maria Viramontes’s “The Moths,” a beautifully disturbing story about a young girl’s final moments with her dying grandmother and the intercessory role of moths.
On the lighter side, Emily Hiestand’s “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah” is another stand out, full of wry observations about the goings-on of nesting blue jays—“the bird of the postmodern, of invention and recycling, of found art.” Among these and the many other excellent essays in the collection, Stephen Harrigan’s “The Soul of Treaty Oak” is masterful, a story that is equal parts murder mystery, mystical circus sideshow, and compassionate commentary about the human search for connection—in this case, with the venerable but beleaguered Treaty Oak in Austin, Texas, a being “older than almost any other living thing in Texas, and far older than the idea of Texas itself” that becomes a magnet for clashing values after the tree is intentionally poisoned.
Another signifier for a strong collection of urban nature essays would be the breadth of its geographical and cultural scope. Are diverse perspectives included that shed light on the many ways of being human in particular places? Again, City Wilds hits the mark—or many marks. Essays in the book are “clustered” by geography, as editor Terrell F. Dixon notes, beginning with major cities in the Northeast and then taking us on a circuitous road trip around and through the country before arriving on the Pacific coast. Reading across these diverse regions, one gains a sense of how distinctive places inform the experience of urban nature. The multiculturalism of the book is also impressive, with familial customs and dynamics intersecting with neighborhood landmarks and comforting aromas emanating from kitchens.
The essays do not shy from delving into the shadow side of difference. “Thank God It Snowed” by Ronald L. Fair packs an emotional wallop, as the author recalls the healing rains and snows of his childhood winters, weather that washed away “the gray grit-cloud that tried to remind us of our place in society,” providing relief and temporarily leveling the sins of neglect in a segregated Chicago. Many essays, in fact, return to vivid impressions of childhood, a time when local nature serves as the anchor of memory and transformation, from “the vacant lot that was the shortcut between worlds” (Denise Chávez, “Willow Game”) to large bodies of water “alternately tranquil and wild, changing colors like a mood ring” (Susan Power, “Chicago Waters”) to those secret spaces between buildings that are sites of comfort and life-changing points of reference “far away from where our mothers could find us” (Sandra Cisneros, “The Monkey Garden”).
A final strength of this collection, one I wasn’t expecting, is the wide mix of genres—a reminder that a good nature story comes in many packages, from straightforward travel narrative to magical realism. The inclusion of fictional short stories adds a surprising layer of depth, pushing against the boundaries of conventional nature writing. One of the more delightful of these is Richard Brautigan’s “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard”, in which the narrator visits a salvage shop for a piece of a “used” trout stream, sold by the foot and stacked in various lengths (waterfalls sold separately)—an effective satire of the commodification of nature and an affirmation of the unquantifiable value of a living river and its myriad ecological relationships.
Taken as a whole, City Wilds is simultaneously a retrospective and an inspiration for aspiring urban nature writers, disclosing the diverse ways the story of a city can be told. Dixon deserves recognition for his prescience in assembling one of the first, if not the first, multi-author collections of such writings. With the exception of a few outliers in the volume (Dubkin, 1947; Brantigan, 1968; Fair, 1972), most of the essays were written in the 1990s, a period of time still characterized, Dixon observes, by the idea “that real nature stops at the city limits sign.” City Wilds, without necessarily aiming for it, is thus part history lesson, representing a moment when the fuzzy outlines of a new category of writing were emerging and the city began to be regarded as a worthy site of investigation.
Good writing is good writing, and good writers are adept at transforming landscapes into breathing presences alongside their human characters. Yet Dixon points out some features that may distinguish urban nature writing from other types of nature-based stories. Urban nature writing tends to focus on accessible areas (“nearby nature”), nature at smaller scales (a single butterfly instead of the Grand Canyon), the humorous or comical rather than the death-defying (everyday experience), and themes of interdependent community rather than heroic self-reliance (how we relate rather than what we conquer or endure). Perhaps all nature writing reckons with being human among other creatures, but urban nature writing lingers on the small-scale dramas of inhabiting place.
Now let’s circle back to the question of age. Should you invest in a book that is a decade and half old? I would answer by saying that good writing, of any genre, tends to age well. City Wilds has aged well, in part because the essays are already a “best of” from various writers. With increasing numbers of people living in cities, it could be that City Wilds has become more relevant as time has passed. Robert Michael Pyle, in his contribution to the volume—a now-classic essay entitled “The Extinction of Experience”—provides City Wilds with what could be its thesis: “Many people take deep satisfaction in wilderness and wildlife they will never see. But direct, personal contact with other living things affects us in vital ways that vicarious experience can never replace.”
The essays underscore this point, showing just how formative those everyday experiences are to our sense of personal identity, community, and care for the more-than-human world. Plucked like pigeon feathers from city alleys, slugs from garden leaves, and caddis-fly nymphs from the shallows of recovering urban rivers, the stories in City Wilds reveal again and again the small revelations that await us in the spaces we may consider the most ordinary and homey.
Is this anthology worth your time? Yes. Emphatically. If you have any interest in urban nature writing whatsoever—in reading about cities, in writing about cities, in understanding the human capacity to interact and engage with other species—this book should be on your shelf, dog-eared and underlined. Take it on the subway. Bring it onto the balcony of your high-rise apartment. Cozy into a weathered bench in a pocket park, allowing the chatter of birds and squirrels to envelop you, and look up every once in a while, between essays, to see for yourself if the city doesn’t seem to sparkle more because of the book in your hands.
In this short essay my aim is modest and two-fold. First, I would like to share with you a story about an experiment in ecological-environmental-scientific-poetics that worked out beautifully. It worked so well that I believe it is worth sharing. Second, in the spirit of sharing, so that others can try out this recipe, I will make explicit the elements of that experiment, including certain autobiographical facts—the “choses et faits d’un agencement poétique-scientifique” that I believe were those which permitted une connexion profonde.
My initial concern was that I would experience isolation as an artist in a milieu strongly marked by a scientistic and empiricist frame. People “worked” while I was doing “something else.”
I am currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Canada, where I teach and do research on political philosophy and theoretical ethics. I teach a course in Philosophy of the Environment, which in North America is more focused on applied ethics and less on ecosophy; I also teach a course in literary theory. These are the bridges I use when thinking about “the environment” and “aesthetics.” While I have published books and articles on Foucault, Spinoza, Deleuze & Guattari, Irigaray, and Derrida, it’s important for me to say that I have a critical stance toward philosophy and academic philosophers, even though I am included in this demographic. I don’t identify as a philosopher with ease, and perhaps my background in science and my love of poetry is partly to blame.
My training and passions do not line up so nicely. They form something like an isosceles triangle: poetry-science-philosophy. What is important to me, philosophically, is to reflect on how these different métiers can be thought of as distinct forms of activity. They are distinct but not entirely opposed: somewhat complementary. They are three “forms of knowing,” as Michel Foucault might name them. I am much more interested in structures, forms and forces than in content because this perspective allows us to say that each form of knowing is a different form, not so much in what it is about—scientific facts, poems or metaphysical truths—but rather, each is a unique action, or set of actions.
Philosophy acts to find the fissures in large slabs of thought and push through them, like water into crevasses, and yet it flows wherever it flows, without fear. Science acts with a level of certainty and approbation. It cuts any piece of The Real into smaller pieces, and tries to name them to say how they fit together and at which scales these pieces belong. Each act of science, though, as Anselm Kiefer rightly notes, “points us further in the direction of the unknown,” and this smaller and smaller unknown serves as a source of both inspiration and dejection. Poetry is not the art of representation of The Real in words. I think of poetry as I think of ecosystems: commas, words, vowels, phrases, paragraphs . . . these are living arrangements within which all the various relations can come to pass such as predatory words, opportunistic phrasing, and invasive species of banalities. Poetry acts meaningfully, holding together what cannot be otherwise held together. It does this through the sound and shape of words. It enacts relations and allows them to vibrate and flourish at the level of language. Poetry lets the known and the unknown fit into the same place using the tricks of language. In this, it allows us to imagine a new Real, even if this new reality passes by the time the poem ends.
I want to suggest that this configuration—co-participations in three ways of knowing—is the key to the success of this experiment. In Foucault’s phrasing, each one is, or has, a different kind of power to act upon further actions; this means that coming together, an absolutely new power emerges. I also want to affirm that this configuration does not have to be poetry-biology-philosophy. Whether it be engineering + dance + theology OR primary education + music + gardening OR anthropology + sculpture + theoretical physics; a productive combination of three diverse approaches (either in one person or in a collaborative) is a very promising working-figure. This is especially so if there are some levers of distance and ambivalence in the mix such that there can be disavowals that shift the action and allow others to enter and leave these experimental spaces.
North House at rare Charitable Research Reserve in Cambridge, Ontario; photo by nik harron. Image courtesy of alternativesjournal.ca.
The situation
About three years ago, Musagetes (also the creator of ArtsEverywhere), a Guelph-based organization, formed a courageous and visionary partnership with rare Charitable Research Reserve, a land trust and environmental institute near Guelph in Cambridge, Ontario. One of the central aims of Musagetes is to create community through the arts, so it is extremely active throughout the region. Musagetes also works within the broader context of Ontario, creating programs and partnerships into working class corners of the province such as its now-concluded program in the city of Sudbury. In contrast, rare is a physical location where scientific research projects are carried out by university faculty, students, rare staff, and interns. Stephanie Sobek-Swant, Executive Director of rare also describes it as having “. . . a unique method of conservation that includes, among other things, the creation of communities of concern around sensitive lands, playing host to approximately 50,000 visitors annually from a broad sector of society.”
Scientists who do field work (e.g. botanists, entomologists, hydrologists, geneticists, soil scientists, ecologists) need places to complete their longitudinal studies. These places have to have the features that the scientists are interested in (e.g. a certain population of frogs or mites, patterns of erosion in the rocks, a system of streams and rivers, bird populations, etc.), and they have to be accessible. This land, which is the physical space of rare, is on the floodplain of one of the most politically and geographically important rivers in southwest Ontario—the Grand River just south of its confluence with the Speed River. In 1812, the US tried to invade Canada, which at the time was still a colony of Great Britain. Thousands of indigenous people fought against the Americans alongside the Loyalists, and in return for their fidelity, the British Crown granted them 6 miles of land on either side of this river, for the whole of its length, totalling nearly 400 km. This Haldimand Tract turned out to be a treaty that, of course, was never fully honored. In 2010, the University of Waterloo erected an award-winning, solar-powered, state-of-the-art architectural accomplishment called North House. It sits on rare property, where passerby mostly just gawk at it or attend the occasional guided tour. Mostly it goes unoccupied on the land where hundreds of scientists work. Musagetes and rare proposed that North House be used for an artist residency program starting in the fall of 2014 (called the “Eastern Comma Writer-in-Residence”).
There are many such opportunities for writers and artists around the world: Vatnasafn/The Library of Water in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, the Fogo Island Arts residency off the Coast of Newfoundland, the Centre for Coastal Waters Health on Vancouver Island, the Banff Centre for the Arts. I have been on two of these retreats, and even though I was able to produce a giant quantity of quality writing, I really only engaged with other writers in the workshop, but that engagement was often in order to be inspired by, and in turn, to gain something for my private (and pre-planned) writing project. The North House Eastern Comma residency was different for me, though, in ways that turned out to be very important for meshing the power of cultural capital with the power of data. It was a truly transformative experience rather than just acquisitive.
The residency had two stipulations. One was that the writer somehow “engaged the scientific community (formal and informal)” who made use of the terrain. The director had envisioned a vernissage or a reading at the end of my residency, to which the scientists would be invited along with the usual cultural suspects. The other condition of this residency was that the writing done there “be rooted in, and reflect, the place,” to engage with the land and the ecologies (i.e. people, birds, plants, rock formations, minerals, archeological artifacts) who inhered there.
The experiment
My initial concern was that I would experience isolation as an artist in a milieu strongly marked by a scientistic and empiricist frame. People “worked” while I was doing “something else.” In the past I have been invited to interdisciplinary events as the poet and often given a little demonstration of art at the end, mostly not integrated into the heart of the activities. I functioned like the dessert that could be foregone. I have also been the only philosopher (ethicist) on many social and natural science research teams, and again, experienced extreme disciplinary isolation that wasn’t just a matter of not sharing an idiom; it was as though there was an abyss between what I did and what they did. There was nothing for any of us to do but perform our roles at a distance from one another. At North House, I felt this immediately during the first week. Although I had suggested I would hold “Open House Fridays” where anyone working on the property could come and chat with me (the parking lot was always full whether of researchers, gardeners accessing the community garden, birders, hikers), nobody did. They went by the groovy glass house, and sometimes waved at me, but that made me feel like an animal in the zoo.
I was also concerned that my relationship to that land would be superficial. I feared that, as a poet with good eyes and ears, and a propensity for (as Virginia Woolf says) “making phrases,” I would walk the land and see only a surface bouquet like a tourist walking the streets of a city she is just passing through. I remember walking through the fields looking at the vegetation and the sky patterns feeling pressure to know it in a way that felt unavailable to me.
It was in the second week, when all that I had written was utterly trite and devoid of intensity, that I came up with The Idea: I would read the articles the scientists working at rare had published based on their data collection at the site. Initially I was thinking of it as a means to fast-track my tourist sensibility and use the number of hours that they had put into “looking” at the local phenomena so that I could see, at the level of detail they operated. For example, a scientist was studying a parasitic wasp that used a certain kind of hollow stem to nest. I would never have “seen” that happening had I not read the articles, but once I did my “nature walks,” those drab stems were transformed. Suddenly, I had high powered lenses to see down deeper into that world.
The author walking in the woods; photo by nik harron. Image courtesy of alternativesjournal.ca.
But it wasn’t quite enough. I didn’t want to be alone walking those trails, even with a better pair of glasses. I wanted to be accompanied by the ones who were passionate about it. I began to call and email the scientists, telling them who I am and asking if I could go with them to their sites the next time they were working on the grounds. Some never returned my calls. But others did, and we walked around. I asked a million questions, and they answered them all. Through their answers and in the act of going with them, I saw and heard something I am certain I would never have seen or heard, even with the best goggles lent to me: these were people who cared. They loved what they studied, even if they had no way to express that in their academic reporting of it.
As I was reading these articles week after week, something else began to happen. Often buried in the middle of these articles, which are nearly devoid of poetics and scoured of any expression of affect, I would encounter the most strange and beautiful words and phrases. Now because I am a poet, my reading of words is never just for their signification; it is also for their resonate capacity and their ability to metastasize into other meaningful relationships. But also, because I am a person who walked with others whose words I was reading, I could also feel that these were their own affects. I started to relate to these articles, then, as “found poetry,” cutting and dissembling what I took to be beautiful laden turns of phrase, and I set them aside as my own poetic material, knowing the “owners” of these excerpts (which is not usually the case for found poetry). It became a salvage operation like found poetry, but with a key difference: each of these “gleanings” has a footnote where I reference the article from which it was taken. I took my in-passing observations, borrowed insights, the scavenged phrasings and vocabulary, the subterranean axes of meaning, and the voices of the scientists and the way they spoke about what they made graphs of, and built poems. Among these very diverse standpoints, I found profound and coherent threads; deep thematic links that could be discerned, or forged, across the driest facts and stats. The themes included: loss and archival urgency, the inability to protect anything from the forces of change, insecurity and optimism, and trying to save things from getting lost or decaying or passing out of existence, whether a memory or a gene variation.
The author in her office at the University of Guelph; photo by Ilknur Ozalli.
The final movement of this experiment was something that again, I had not planned out or anticipated. It ran against my experiences of having made something (art) without putting the work into creating the best possible conditions for its reception. For the closing event of my residency, I personally invited all the scientists whose work I had used, and whose accompaniment I had enjoyed, qua scientists. I was asking them to come as patrons of the arts. I read some of those poems, first introducing them as having been inspired not only by a particular location, ecological niche or artifact at rare but also having been expedited via the work of the scientists. The poems were long and strange: hybrids of in-situ science and poetry. Although they read unlike anything I have ever read previously, they are filled with the sense of “nature.” After my reading most of the questions from the audience were directed to the scientists (!), whose answers transitioned to me, in turn, asking questions of them, creating an unscripted few hours of genuine curiosity and mutual admiration.
While I have not finished the manuscript from my time at North House, I hope to reproduce this kind of event at the book launch. My powerful hope is that the book and the launch of it into the world will carry with it some of that unique action-upon-and-action, serving as a signal to the scientists that my poetry, in turn, can be treated as material for their own learning & writing, whatever form of address that may take.
This essay is an abridged version of a keynote talk given October 2, 2015 in Paris at the “Formes Pour Vivre L’Environnment” conference, hosted by LADYSS (University of Paris 1, 7, 8, & 10) and CRAL (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). It originally appeared on ArtsEverywhere.
[*] Type in italics is excerpted from: Woodcock, T.S., Pekkola, L.J., Dawson, C., Gadallah, F.L., and Kevan, P.G. “Development of a Pollination Service Measurement (PSM) Method Using Potted Plant Phytometry.” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, April 2014. Accessed May 2016. doi:10.1007/s10661-014-3758-x.
Different schools of professional and academic thought have recently emerged to address the unprecedented problems of the sprawling megacity. One particular group believes that solutions will emerge from the cultivation of data and vast amounts of statistical research. This activity, which is sometimes referred to a “datascaping”, reduces the complex problems of megacities to verbal logic that has the capacity to inform other verbal systems, such as the regulatory statutes, zoning, by-laws, comprehensive plans, and public policy of a city.
The suburban megacity feathers through endless gradations, from city patterns and built systems to nature and bio-morphic systems, forming ONE LANDSCAPE.
Another group, comprising architects, landscape architects, and urban planners, see the megacity as a design problem. Born out of a long and time-honored history of urban design, this notion extends from a conviction that the spatial arrangements of a city and the uses they contain can be designed, altered, or permuted to foster the social and economic relationships of a society and its goals. In contrast to the datascapers, this group largely sees the city as visual and spatial logic—in other words, Architecture.
Datascape Diagram[s] from the Endless City. Image courtesy of Kevin SloanAnother group that is neither interested in datascaping or Architectural conventions passionately argues that megacities are unprecedented constructs that deserve, if not demand, new and unprecedented methods. The recent developments of Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism invent new verbal ideas and terminology that are in concert with the new and unfamiliar design solutions they produce.
Rather than debate the legitimacy of which one is right or better, that a unified theory and nomenclature of megacities do not yet to exist is perhaps a clue that they are not yet accurately understood or characterized. For example, to refer to Rome as a “city” and Los Angeles as a megacity implies that LA is simply a gigantic version of the Roman pattern, which, of course, it isn’t.
Perhaps a productive step would be to characterize the megacity more accurately by its attributes rather than by using nomenclature that is inaccurate or insufficient.
ONE LANDSCAPE
View of Park Cities from Downtown. Image courtesy Kevin Sloan
Pulitzer Prize winning architectural critic, Robert Campbell, offers a useful potential assessment of the megacity and its relationship with nature in “Still Steel” for Landscape Architecture Magazine.
“For the first time in human history, the entire world both built and un-built is being considered as one continuous landscape. It is a profound way of re-conceiving architecture (landscape) and cities.”
This article will explore and discuss the suburban megacity and/or mega-region as a landscape that feathers through endless gradations of city patterns and built systems on the one hand, to nature and bio-morphic systems on the other—i.e., ONE LANDSCAPE.
The article begins with a diagnostic of the suburban megacity that maps out a supportive framework for the notion of One Landscape. Density analyses of various cities and urban geographies will be used to reveal pattern characteristics.
Two potential techniques that can intervene in landscape-like patterns follow the diagnostic. The first is based on the notion of “reciprocity between buildings and landscape”, a conceptual device that was loosely utilized by planners and designers in the mid- to late- 20th century. The second is a particular kind of drawing technique that exploits the formal vagueness of megacities and the potential to introduce new qualities within them that unify urban design, landscape, and ecological impulses.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Sloan
WHICH DENSITY OFFERS HOPE?
Experts on urbanism extol “density”—the ratio of humans to an area of measurement—as an attribute that “offers hope for the future” as a potential strategy that can restructure a suburban pattern. However, simple questions quickly arise. For example, what is the density goal? At what density does urbanity ignite—i.e., what is a target density? And then, by logical extension, would the same density that produces a social and economic network also be sufficient to make energy consumption efficient and economical? Or are these different density thresholds?
And, conversely, at what concentration of building forms and density is the potential for nature and ecologies to exist within a city driven out and replaced by an entirely constructed environment? Simply put, does “density” mean Hong Kong, or is the density of Boulder, Colorado or Savannah, Georgia sufficient, and for what?
An inventory of the density of key world cities is revealing. The density comparisons that follow take into account only the residential population of a city or region and the area it encompasses. For purposes of this analysis, this limitation avoids potential density distortions that are created by surging commuter populations that originate from outside a geography, and which can heighten the urban performance of an area with pulse concentrations.
Density of San Francisco. Image courtesy of Kevin SloanDensity of Paris. Image courtesy of Kevin SloanDensity of New York. Image courtesy of Kevin Sloan
When considering only its residential population, San Francisco’s density is 27 people to an acre. Given that San Francisco is generally seen as a highly urbane world city, its surprisingly low resident-density, which stabilizes the urban performance of the city, is also evidence of the commuter surge delivered by BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) into the financial and governmental quarters of San Francisco.
The resident-density of Paris is 103 people per acre. At over four times the resident-density of San Francisco, what comes quickly into focus by comparing the two cities is that Paris is an extraordinarily efficient urban pattern, with an abundance of avenues and public spaces. We can infer that it isn’t as reliant on a commuter surge and/or that the weaving of residences with shops and small officing must be exceptionally integrated and fine-grained to sustain a resident-density of over 100 people per acre.
The resident-density of New York City is even higher than Paris at 111 people per acre. According to Professor Kenneth Frampton, the daily commuter surge into Manhattan can drive the resident-density even higher, with guesstimates falling somewhere between 500 and 1000 people per acre.
Comparing the density of these world cities—which originated around a historical core or a colonial center, or were hyper-densified by unusual geographical restrictions such as those posed by Manhattan island—with the 20th-century suburban megacities of the North American Sunbelt reveals a shocking if not an alarming, reality.
Density of Dallas. Image courtesy of Kevin SloanDensity of Atlanta. Image courtesy of Kevin SloanDensity of Phoenix. Image courtesy of Kevin Sloan
The average human density of Dallas-Fort Worth (or DFW) is 1 person per acre. Unaffected during its rapid expansion by any natural boundaries that might interfere and generate density, what has materialized in DFW instead is a pattern that undergoes a machine migration every day: residents abandon vast tracts of purely residential geographies to commute to purely “officing” or shopping geographies. Taken together with the public easements established for intercity highway and infrastructure, multiple airports (including the colossal DFW International Airport), and its system of water-harvesting reservoirs, every person living in DFW currently requires one acre of civilization to exist.
While the astonishment of such a land and resource consumption pattern settles in, keep in mind that Atlanta is virtually the same, with 0.97 persons per acre. Indeed, the same analysis applied to virtually all Sunbelt cities—Houston, Austin, Las Vegas, and others—yields a resident-density of approximately one person per acre.. Since all these cities were largely constructed with the same kind of engineered pattern—designed to the same parameters of traffic, safety, and turning radii—they essentially are one in the same place. Little wonder when critics and writers wax about the “lack of place” that typifies these kind “Generica” environments, they are stating facts that can be supported quantitatively. Whether it was offered as a critique or simply a statistical fact, architect Rem Koolhaas, during his 2008 lecture for the opening of the Wylie Multi-form Theater in the Dallas Arts District, called Dallas (DFW) the, “Epicenter of the generic.”
Only Phoenix, with 0.30 humans per acre—essentially one third the density of all the others—distinguishes itself from the monotonous hyper-pattern of the North American suburban megacity, which has produced one landscape built at an average resident-density of one person per acre.
ONE LANDSCAPE AT ONE PERSON PER ACRE
By comparison with hyper-dense cities, the strikingly thin density of the suburban megacity raises a broad spectrum of questions and potential speculations. It provides evidence for why attempts to create nodes of urban concentration and density struggle to succeed. Urban formations are inherently more complex and expensive to design and construct. Costs to achieve them are transferred into the lease and purchasing rates for officing, retail, condos, and apartments. The spike in price point is theoretically offset by the advantages offered by urbanism that include culture, convenience, walkability, safety, and a generally vibrant and satisfying urban environment.
What can be observed with almost documentary evidence is how the thinly densified suburban area around a dense node tends to exert a dissipating effect on the benefit of urbanization by diffusing the amenities of concentrated land uses: cheaper rents and real estate are supported by an endless array of alternative land uses that are equally accessible by motorcar.
Photo of a denser “attempt.” Image courtesy of Kevin SloanFour density ratios. Image courtesy of Kevin SloanCanadian population density math. Image courtesy of Kevin Sloan
The cause and effect relationship between density and urbanity may be more complicated than the simple notion that attaining higher and higher densities should always be the objective. For example, several U.S. cities, such as Portland, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; Boulder, Colorado; and Savannah Georgia frequently top rankings of urban places that are highly desirable to live in. The same density analysis approach in these cities reveals the following:
However, it is the counterintuitiveness of the analysis that brings into focus a more poignant revelation about the suburban megacity that may be its most urgent and irreversible characteristic.
Using North Texas as a typical case study region, we see that 11 separate counties comprise DFW and they incorporate approximately 7 million acres of civilization for approximately 7 million residents. As a simple thought experiment, consider what would happen if the entire DFW metropolis attempted to universally densify to equal the charming and town-like density of Madison, Wisconsin, with 4.7 people per acre. Simple arithmetic reveals that the entire population of Canada would have to move to DFW to inhabit the new and denser city of 36 million people.
Does this potentially mean that any attempt to urbanize the suburban megacity is fundamentally doomed, an exercise in futility or romance for a town-like history that cannot be achieved? Has the unbridled growth and horizontal expansion of the North American city made the suburban megacity statistically impossible to retro-densify? Obviously, nodes of concentration can exist within the pattern, but even the most modest density objectives of, say, a Savannah Georgia-like density project, quickly produce a statistical reality that cannot be achieved. Even if the denser formations were built, there simply wouldn’t be enough people to occupy the buildings.
This documentary evidence could lead us to conclude that 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. To meaningfully design new places, design strategies that interchangeably consider nature as architecture and buildings as site elements are needed. A strategy that considered such a hypothesis throughout the history of cities and gardens, as well as in the modern age, that could be useful to the contemporary problem of the suburban megacity, is known as “Reciprocity.”
RECIPROCITY IN HISTORY, LANDSCAPE, ARCHITECTURE & ECOLOGICAL DESIGN
Webster’s definition of reciprocity is “a situation or relationship in which ‘two people or groups’ agree to ‘do something similar’ for each other.” When reciprocity is applied as a design tool for architecture and planning, the phrase “something similar,” means the definition of spaces and places of most types and at most scales for human use. In extending the metaphor and application of reciprocity to urban planning and landscape design, the preceding phrase, “two groups,” that Webster mentions, can refer to architectural elements such as columns, walls, volumes and planes that can “reciprocate” by design with biomorphic and/or landscape elements such as trees, hedges, bosques, and orchards.
The key to reciprocity is that the mutual design of buildings and landscape elements should be a perceivable characteristic to individuals who inhabit environments or spaces that have been reciprocally conceived. Reciprocity is the result of deliberate and composed relationships that put buildings and landscapes into the “reciprocal” role of defining, mending, correcting, making a space or place that is a shared objective. The product of reciprocity is a continuous landscape where buildings and nature are spatially woven into a seamless fabric.
Image courtesy of Kevin SloanOne Landscape is formed in this exploratory project by applying the point grid of an orchard of trees to the interior column grid of houses. Image courtesy of Kevin Sloan
A simple and basic example of reciprocity between buildings and landscape, can be observed in how two repetitive lines of dots can signify the columns of a trellis or colonnade, or the trees of an alley or tree-lined path. If two such conditions were combined, the cadence of the trellis columns could continue into the cadence of the tree trunks and vice-versa.
The same thinking would apply to how a thickened line, drawn in plan view, can signify a building or landscape wall and/or a plant hedge. By further logical extension, a rectangle or volume in plan view, can signify a building footprint—a house—or it could signify a Bosque of trees, or even a biofilter that is planted and filled with dense underbrush.
These basic examples demonstrate how reciprocity can produce environments that are accomplished with the spatial integration of built and biomorphic materials of landscape. Creative extrapolations can rapidly multiply from the basic examples, into a playful and disciplined activity that is rich in possibilities, and thus “The game,” as Shakespeare wrote, “is afoot.”
Traces and built incidents of reciprocity occur throughout history as well as in contemporary buildings and landscapes. While reciprocity has existed as an infrequent occasion for making architecture, gardens, and cities, it could be used more often as a tool to make places and spaces in the diffuse pattern of the suburban megacity.
Two case studies follow that are intended to explain and highlight how reciprocity existed in the Renaissance garden of the Villa Gamberaia, as well as in The Nasher Sculpture Center, a 21st century accomplishment by architect Renzo Piano and landscape architect, Peter Walker FASLA.
Reciprocity in History: The Villa Gamberaia, Settignano Italy
Situated on a Tuscan ridge near Settignano, Italy, and in the hills above Florence, the Renaissance Villa Gamberaia is a textbook demonstration of how garden spaces can be reciprocally conceived with building and landscape elements. Along with the shifted formal relationships of buildings and plant materials, meanings and perceptions produced by the reciprocal operations also shift, adding richness that is an inspiration for how conceptual and perceptual intentions can co-exist in a place of unprecedented beauty and delight.
Villa Gamberaia. Image courtesy of Kevin Sloan
In the same way that the overture of an opera proclaims the essential themes of the musical production, the arrival sequence at the Villa Gamberaia announces to the observer that the entire garden will unfold as an interplay between landscape elements that are rendered as building elements, and building elements that are realized with landscape materials.
The foreshadowing role of the arrival sequence begins on the country road that extends a short distance from the town center in Settignano to the villa entrance, and proceeds through a concavely shaped gate and into a narrow garden corridor that is defined by two monumental bay laurel hedges that terminate on the door-less side of the main house. (Image One) The metaphorical meaning of the hall-like garden corridor is eventually revealed in the sequential presentation of the main space of the V. Gamberaia, which historians often refer to as the “bowling green.” (Image Two)
When examined in plan view, a long and axial bowling green is the dominant spatial figure of the space and the principal element that organizes the entire garden into subsets of other street-like spaces. The main building of the villa, two double arched arcades, a retaining wall that is articulated like a building façade, the edge of an equestrian stable, a banister railing and another bay laurel hedge, are arranged to reciprocally form and define the edges of the bowling green.
A freestanding grotto fountain caps one end and gives the alley-like space of the Bowling Green a kind of metaphorical beginning and origin point. (Image Three) The other end is left open as a belvedere overlook that propels a spectacular view into the Arno valley below.
A third clue is the interaction of the main house with the other dominant object of the garden, which is a monumental bay laurel hedge that was planted and trimmed to appear like a fragment of a Roman amphitheater. (Image Four) A plan view of the garden helps to reinforce the reciprocal reversal of meaning, because the hedge amphitheater looks more like an architecture element than the actual main house, which is a simple rectangular block. Returning for a moment to Webster’s definition of reciprocity, what the two different elements are “agreeing to do for each other,” is to frame and define a formal water garden between them. It is a space made in one part by a building that is simulating a hedge and on the other side by a hedge that is simulating a historical building fragment—an amphitheater. And this pattern of reciprocal operations and reversals in meaning repeats throughout the garden.
When all of these elements are taken together, one realizes that the Villa Gamberaia is a city fragment, where the narrow garden alleys and the bowling green are metaphorical streets and avenues with plants shaped into living facades and building facades that stand in for urban palaces.
Gamberaia. Photo courtesy of Kevin Sloan
Essentially, two places are produced in the same garden. One, in and of the city. The other, outside the city and in a pleasure garden. By traveling outside of Florence to enter a hillside garden, the observer discovers they have been conceptually re-inserted into a city. The concepts and ideals that shift the observer’s interpretation of the environment unfold within a garden that is also exquisitely beautiful and flawlessly integrated into the surrounding landscape.
Contemporary Reciprocity: The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas
Renzo Piano, architect for the Nasher Sculpture Center (Nasher), referred to the design as a contemporary “ruin” that nature has reclaimed as a garden. Where the Villa Gamberaia demonstrates reciprocity using a classical nomenclature of Roman Amphitheaters and axial alignments, the Nasher utilizes a modern and repeating system of parallel alignments of lines and dots that are reciprocally realized as walls, hedges, columns, and trees.
View of the Sculpture Garden. Photo courtesy of Kevin SloanPlan of the Nasher Sculpture Center. Image courtesy of Kevin Sloan
When viewed in a plan, the dominant quality of the overall arrangement is parallel lines that are the walls of the interior, the exterior perimeter walls of the sculpture garden, or freestanding hedges in the garden that act as spatial dividers and partitions within the overall garden room. Rows of live oak trees (Quercus virginiana) stand parallel with the walls and hedges. These point-lines reciprocally extend the building walls from inside the museum building into the sculpture garden, even as they are simultaneously transformed into landscape points that become the live oak rows and a cedar elm orchard.
To heighten interest, some of the line-points are shifted out of alignment with the building walls in order to adjust for pathways and also allow the imagination of the observer to become involved by correcting the misalignment with their minds-eye. Lines of street trees that lie outside the containment walls of the garden seem typical when viewed as a streetscape. However, when seen from within the garden and in comparison with other garden elements, they read like more rows of the parallels trees and hedges within the garden, that have been multiplied onto the street edges.
In addition to being a place that was exquisitely conceived and impeccably maintained, the Nasher is a textbook case illustrating that the elements of a building can be seen as reciprocally continuous with the elements of a garden landscape.
The net effect of reciprocal design is the work of the mind: inside can become outside, building turns into landscape, and a wall becomes hedge or a line of trees. Taken along with the splashing fountains, shadow patterns on the flawless turf, and the unparalleled quality of the sculpture collection, the reciprocal operations heighten curiosity and enlarge any visit to the center.
Reciprocity isn’t the only device that is available to mend and restructure the diffuse pattern of the suburban megacity. Urban applications of landscape and building reciprocity as an “architecture of trees” and potential mending fabric for the fragmentary and misshapen spaces of the contemporary city represent another tool that was advanced in late 20th– century writings of Colin Rowe.
“ARCHITECTURE OF TREES”
Colin Rowe (1920 -1999) was an architectural historian, theoretician, and professor of architecture at Cornell University, who exerted a significant intellectual influence on world architecture and urbanism in the second half of the twentieth century. His writings and influence revivified the urban design tactics and lessons of the great canonical cities of western civilization such as Rome, Florence, Paris and London.
As a graphic tool to convey and explore patterns of urban space and form, Rowe and his colleagues and followers frequently relied on a particular kind of drawing convention known as figure / ground, that was both a graphic device as well as an intellectual summary of an architectural worldview. The highly reductive, black and white abstractions were useful and consistent to their theoretical interests, considering how the black and white contrast intensified the edge and boundary condition between buildings and the voids that are formed between. The conclusion and summary effect of Rowe’s hypothesis is that cities are essentially building solids and the voids between them. In the same way that architectural space is the reality of a building, to paraphrase Frank Lloyd Wright, cities can also be reduced to the same essential condition. Cities are essentially voids that are deliberately shaped by buildings.
Wiesbaden figure / ground. Image courtesy of Kevin Sloan
While Rowe’s erudite speculations and the figure / ground drawings that represented them influenced world-renowned architects such as James Stirling, Michael Graves, Leon Krier, Rob Krier (Leon’s brother), Alan Chimacoff, Michael Dennis, Fred Koetter and others, as well as exerting a revolutionary influence on the curriculum of architecture, planning, and landscape programs at Cornell, Syracuse, the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland and individuals within the Harvard GSD, the drawing technique also carried with it the effect of editing out consideration of any role for nature, landscape, and/or the circumstantial interference of topography and/or geography to city form. All cities can be reduced to black and white diagrams of solids and voids. Cities that cannot be mapped by figure / ground, were edited in Rowe’s hypothesis as irrelevant or as anti-cities.
While an entire school of thought formed around the figure / ground-driven view of the “city of (architectural) space,” the same group of academics and practitioners may have overlooked another important lesson that also originated from Rowe’s writing—one that may be an even more provocative offering that could benefit the crisis of the suburban megacity.
While his interests were principally aligned with the European planning models, doubt about their relevance and/or applicability to the diffuse patterns of the suburban metropolis were already unfolding in the American city of the mid-twentieth century. Skepticism about the universal relevance of European cities may have been a by-product of his early teaching years at UT-Austin and the expansive Texas landscape he encountered. He offered the following speculation in an essay he wrote for “The Present Urban Predicament.”
“I would simply like to suggest that the garden may be regarded as both a model of the city; and that the architecture of trees either articulating as parterres as one of the these cases or, amplifying a particular condition as in the other, might well provide some kind of palliative for the contemporary predicament and even some kind of paradigm for the future.”
In the same way that Rowe revivified principles of the European city which are applicable for dense nodes, downtown centers, or dense American cities that have grown, densely, around the originating colonial center, the notion of an “architecture of trees,” and also the idea of the garden as a “palliative” and/or mending fabric for the sprawling and diffuse contemporary city, is an invitation for current generations to potentially extend Rowe’s line of design inquiry and research.
Two projects by Kevin Sloan Studio (of which I am principle and founder), one built and the other unrealized, are case studies that explored “Architecture of Trees” and the potential cohesion it could develop for a diffuse building and landscape formations.
A tree farm in Florida. Photos courtesy of Kevin SloanBefore and after of St. Cyril, Detroit Michigan. Images courtesy of Kevin Sloan
Case Study One: An Architecture of Trees at the Sprint World Headquarters Campus
The Sprint World Headquarters Campus in Overland Park (suburban) Kansas City is an essay on Colin Rowe’s hypothesis for “an architecture of trees.” Situated on 212-acres that were formerly agricultural land, the Kansas City-based Sprint telecommunications company co-located some 13,000 employees within a new campus formation of 21 buildings. While the building design favored a historicist notion of an academic campus in retro-brick, the planning idea for the mixed-use corporate center, produced seven garden quadrangles that were intended to be a spatial, social, and organizational armature for the entire project.
During the master planning process, the physical size of the quadrangles and the building arrangements that formed them was heavily influenced by an interior space-planning strategy that was driven by the area needed for a mid-level executive at Sprint to supervise their particular group on one continuous floor. Consequentially, the typical floor sizes for the office buildings at the Sprint Campus are unusually large—typically 50,000 square feet per floor, and up to 100,000 square feet for exceptionally large corporate divisions.
As a result, the spaces between the buildings were also unusually large and unwieldy for fostering the kind of social interaction between employees that was imagined by the co-location strategy and master plan. The idea to insert an architecture of trees into the seven voids of the quadrangles arose both as a theoretical exploration and one that would also be useful in re-scaling the quadrangles into multiple spaces that would individually be more humane in proportion.
Once within the network of quadrangles, the architecture of trees creates an enveloping effect that rescales the open areas of the quadrangles in some areas, and in others, completely removes the buildings from any perception. Much like the reciprocal metaphors at the Villa Gamberaia, after entering the quads and the highly densified building formations, one is suddenly presented with a landscape world that is without any visual perception of a building. In addition to abstracting notions from the V. Gamberaia, in other situations, we used modern notions of transforming arcade and column formations into tree groves and fountain structures.
In reversing the perceptual reality of the Sprint Campus from the buildings to the landscape in the seven quads, one is invited to imagine removing the buildings to leave only the trees, earth forms, and fountains as the architectural reality of the campus.
View from the wetland at the Spring World Headquarters Campus. Photo courtesy of Kevin SloanThe quad. Photos courtesy of Kevin SloanRain fountain courtyard at Spring World Headquarters Campus. Images courtesy of Kevin SloanMosaic of landscape devices. Images courtesy of Kevin Sloan
Case Study Two: A Pecan Farm becomes a City of Trees
This project began as an assignment to lay out the orchards of a pecan farm and support buildings on four square miles of river bottomland along the Neosho River in southeast Kansas. In lieu of only an agriculturally established layout, the expansive fabric of trees was re-imagined as a “City of Trees,” to extend Rowe’s hypothesis for an ”Architecture of Trees.”
To originate the abstracted city form in pecan trees, the pattern of an ideal city that was conceived by 1st-century Roman architecture, we used Vitruvius and multiplied it into an array. The scale of the pattern was determined by two conditions: 1) the ideal spacing of pecan trees for agricultural production, which was 2) multiplied vis-à-vis the Vitruvian pattern across the area of the entire site.
The insertion of the pattern onto the site forced the ideal pattern and the circumstantial form of the river and its attendant cottonwoods to interfere and modify the design. The project remains unrealized as the landowner reconsidered the economical potential of hydraulic fracking over pecans.
Aerial photo of the pecan assignment. Photo courtesy of Kevin SloanVitruvius: City of Trees. Image courtesy of Kevin SloanThe pecan orchard as a City of Trees. Image courtesy of Kevin Sloan
Reciprocity in Drawing as a Design Tool
Michael Graves (1934 – 2015) was an American architect who revolutionized modern architecture by repositioning history into contemporary building designs. In addition to his prodigious architectural production and household product designs that included teapots, silverware, and other household items, Graves was an accomplished painter and artist. Drawing assumed an essential role in his architectural production and a particular kind of drawing he referred to as “referential” exploited ambiguities of drawn notations that could be reciprocally interpreted as either a building or a landscape element.
Each of the drawing examples shown above represents different themes, organizational ideas, sets of principles, or even conversations between pieces and fragments that suggest a possible completion or interpretation. The key to the drawing is that the ambiguities remain deliberate, allowing the broadest potential for interpreting what part of the drawing might be the building element and what part the landscape element.
Examples of Graves drawings. Images courtesy of Kevin Sloan
As a demonstration of applying reciprocity as an active part of a landscape or urban design process, Graves’ use of this particular kind of drawing convention may have no equal.
While Graves’ sketches are entirely from his hand, one can easily imagine extending the idea by taking the fragmentary characteristics of an existing site or suburban building arrangement and filling the spaces between with drawn notations that knit, organize, permute and/or transform. By making the drawing insertions similarly ambiguous, the endless speculation that the elements, which knit and transform a fragmentation into a composition, could be additional buildings or landscape devices, is possible.
While Graves may have been definitive in his use of this particular drawing convention for design, much more can be done with it, especially in application towards the vast problems and occasions of the suburban megacity.
SUMMARY
Photo courtesy of Kevin Sloan
In “Landscape & Memory,” author Simon Schama says, “landscape is the work of the mind.” This elegant and accurate remark clarifies that for landscape to be “landscape,” it must distinctly bear the imprint of the hand of man, distinct from nature. In returning to Robert Campbell’s statement that the entire surface of the earth is now being considered as “one continuous landscape”, by logical extension, we can move to viewing the entire surface of the earth as touched directly or indirectly by the actions of people.
At the poetic level, this notion is compelling and opens up exciting new possibilities for planning, design, and the nature of cities. And at a prosaic level, the statement is less poetry than potential fact, given the threats to the environment that are accumulating from the unmanaged actions of humans.
What is hopeful is not density, but rather how design as a productive and beneficial human could make incremental progress in reversing and transforming the malevolent nature of current building and planning paradigms into a synthesis of building with nature. Indeed, as Campbell concludes, it is potentially a profound new territory for landscape architecture to explore.
Our human-built ecology is today so far separated from the earth’s ecology that it is impossible for sustainability—let alone environmental and social well-being—to be achieved within it.
Producers working within an Ecology of One are building new vehicles for commerce, economics, social actions and interactions.
This is where we are as a society, but we don’t have to be stuck here.
In stark contrast to this human-built “ecology of separation,” the wider natural world operates in what might be called an “Ecology of One,” an ecology with parts so closely intertwined and interdependent that sustainability and environmental well-being are integral to its functioning.
Disgeotic: City infrastructure, Central Tokyo, Japan. Photo: Patrick Lydon
Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence & Ecologist, puts the distinction between these two ways of thinking this way:
“We can look at the world and see it whole and perceive it as a network of relationships, or we can perceive the world as a collection of fragmented and disconnected opposites fighting each other.”
It is clear that much of our social business and political world tends to follow the latter of these perceptions of reality; it chooses to live in an ecology of separation.
Yet, it is also clear that some of our culture’s most deep wisdom about ourselves and nature—both in the form of contemporary science and mathematics, as well as nearly every native or religious tradition—sees the world not as fragmented and disconnected opposites (an ecology of separation), but as a network of interrelationships (an Ecology of One). This kind of wisdom seeks to bring us together instead of pushing us apart. It seeks to unite and collaborate instead of to separate and compete.
“Despite humanity’s great diversity and historical differences, when the world’s wisdom traditions penetrate into the experiential depths of existence, a common understanding emerges that is in accord with insights from science … we live in a living universe that arises, moment by moment, as a unified whole.”
—Duane Elgin, The Living Universe
It is good to know that science and religion have such wisdom in their view.
Even so, an Ecology of One is not about science or religion any more than it’s about politics or economics; it is about knowing the connections between ourselves and nature by cultivating deeper, more empathic relationships in every corner of our lives and in every interaction—from the way we buy food to the way we operate our businesses—and allowing these relationships to inform how we go about living our lives.
An Ecology of One is based on relationships. From farmers to urban designers to politicians, the individuals who work with an Ecology of One mindset work to cultivate personal, empathic relationships with the environment and the people in their profession and life.
Natural Farmer Yoshikazu Kawaguchi at his Akame Farm in Nara, Japan. Image: Patrick Lydon
The case of Natural Farming gives perhaps one of the best examples of this mindset in practice. Originating in Japan in the early 1950s with plant biologist Masanobu Fukuoka, and spreading worldwide after the publication of his seminal book “One Straw Revolution” in English, this way of growing food is not about method, but about a way of thinking of ourselves and our relationship to nature. Natural Farming is based largely on a farmer’s personal knowledge of and relationship with the land, allowing most any given ecosystem to thrive on its own without the need for external inputs like fertilizers and pesticides. Today, a new generation of Natural Farmers in Japan and elsewhere not only understand that they live and grow food and sell food within a web of relationships, but also makes explicit efforts to bring empathy to each of these relationships—with the soil, the food, the weeds, and even with the bugs that we often call “pests”.
An Ecology of One mindset has guided many of these real world farmers to move everything to hand-and-human power, no oil power, no chemicals of any kind, no fertilizers, no tilling of the soil, and most strikingly, an embracing of weeds and bugs with empathy instead of as enemies.
As you can imagine, for such a mindset to work, both the farmers and their customers need to be flexible enough to restructure the systems within which they produce, sell, and consume. Yet once they have done so, the results are nothing short of astounding: beautiful fields thriving with life, enriched ecosystems, sustainable local economies, and surprisingly bountiful harvests.
Is that harvest bountiful enough to feed a future population of 10-11 billion people?
Not only are small-scale, biodiverse farming methods enough to feed our expected peak population, but leading sustainability research and practice conducted over the past three-plus decades indicates that it is likely the only way to feed the world while maintaining a sustainable environmental balance.
In painting a picture of the current industrial system, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization gives us 60 years before industrial farming renders most land un-farmable, and The United Nations agrees with the small-scale, biodiverse, non-chemical model as a way to remedy this. In America, decades of research by the Rodale Institute argues for small-scale, “regenerative,” organic methods as the a way to feed the world and cut our CO2 emissions to within recommended levels; and again, out in the field, millions of Regenerative Farmers, Natural Farmers, and Permaculturists are putting an Ecology of One mindset into real world practice, working today to feed much of the world in this way.
As Charles Eisenstein writes, the myth that we need industrial agriculture has been debunked, and the only ones who are holding firmly onto this myth are the industry giants who helped create it.
We also have the ability to bring this mindset to other industries.
In a sense, the producers who work within an Ecology of One are able to do what so many prominent academics and economists and social theorists have so far been incapable of doing. These people are building new vehicles for commerce, new vehicles for economics, for social actions and interactions, and, of course, a new way of working all of these into a connected ecology of well-being for people and the environment.
They are re-defining how to live harmoniously by looking at everything we engage with—economics or politics or plants or social structure—as a part of an Ecology of One, and approaching everything in this Ecology of One with empathy. And they are necessarily getting their customers and the general public on board with this mindset too.
On the food side of this equation, results of the Ecology of One mindset have produced everything from community supported agriculture (or “CSA”) networks; to local co-operatives and farmers markets; to small, one-person restaurant outfits; to direct buying by customers through farm visits. The end result is that the producers, consumers, and ecosystems surrounding them have all benefited in some way.
The know-how is already there, and there aren’t many technical hurdles we don’t already know how to jump in order to ensure well-being for 11 billion people while also securing sustainability. The need that we must address now is in changing how we as consumers think and act, just as we change how we go about producing food, housing, transportation, and the goods we consume.
For this, we need to learn how to apply an Ecology of One mindset to other systems of production, to economics, and to society in general.
What on earth does this look like?
A butterfly in the winter rye just before rice planting at a Natural Farm. Image: Patrick Lydon
“Even if you only care about humans, in order to care for humans, you need to take care of the system (the environment) that you live in…”
—Nathan Sheriff, Design Chair, California College of the Arts
Applying the lessons
To imagine what such a way of life might look like, and how we might start to build our social and economic systems around an Ecology of One, it is helpful to bring into view the recurrent outcomes of the people who are using this mindset.
How do our processes and aims change when we are working within an Ecology of One? There are many positive results, but for the sake of focus, there are three key outcomes that, in our studies and interactions, seem to be omnipresent in the pursuits of those with an Ecology of One mindset. They are 1) smallness of scale, 2) (bio)diversity, and 3) regeneration. These elements are functional foundations within the natural farming practice, yet they also happen to apply, likewise, as valuable aims for nearly any economic or social activity we might undertake.
Let’s take a look at a few brief examples to see firstly how each of these three concepts applies in natural farming, and then further expand this, to see how they apply within another industry.
Small scale
The natural farm should be small enough in scale that the farmer can have a relationship with the living things in the field. An entire economic view—known as Small is Beautiful—was built by the late economist E.F. Schumacher on this kind of concept, and for good reason. The mantras of “bigger is better” and “competition” tend to force an ecology of separation, setting the stage for exploitation of both people and environment.
On the other hand, keeping scale relatively small requires relationships to be built and nourished at every stage, from production to consumption. Having inherently nourishing relationships built into the act of producing and consuming gives us a fertile ground for growing well-being, both for people and the environments in which they live.
But how can we bring our economic world into a way of working that encourages small-scale, relationship-based transactions?
One way is to engage in a personal relationship with our resources: the farmer knowing the soil on an intimate level; the woodworker having a kinship with the trees he uses; the consumer knowing the land where their food comes from.
Then, there are the inter-personal relationships: a farmer engaging directly with their customers and vice versa.
Natural farmer Seonghyun Choi brings visitors on a tour of his rice farm in Hongcheon, South Korea. Image: Patrick Lydon
Ryoseok Hong, a Natural Farmer with whom we meet frequently in South Korea, takes the concept of relationship-making seriously. He never sells the vegetables or rice he grows to anyone who has not personally come to see his farm. Hong wants customers not only to meet him, but to meet his field, so they might better understand the beauty of what he does..Due to his naturally limited ability to produce—and his unwillingness to expand at the expense of breaking the careful relationships he has cultivated—there’s a long waiting list of customers who want to take part in this relationship.
In an urban context, friend and chef GaYoung gives us a good look at the concept of small scale and Ecology of One in the largest metropolitan area on earth—Seoul, South Korea.
Several years ago, GaYoung had just migrated back to Seoul, after studying culinary arts and working at upscale restaurants in New York City. She landed a job at a French restaurant perched on the side of a hill overlooking Seoul. By all means, the job was the dream of most of her colleagues. But she was troubled by many aspects of the way the restaurant—not this one in particular, but the industry as a whole—operated, including an intense misuse of the terms “natural,” “sustainable,” and “local” in the food that the restaurant acquired.
More troubling for GaYoung however, was the distance between her and her customers. She wanted to know the people she cooked for, to have some kind of direct feedback loop from them, and she also felt a need to know the people who grew the food she cooked.
After experiencing working with a Natural Farm in the area, GaYoung made a firm decision to quit working at a restaurant that she didn’t believe in fully. She started out blindly, and without the money to open a proper restaurant, she ended up selling rice balls from the back of her bicycle. Not the perfect situation, but it was an instant gratification for her; she tells us the she finally saw the faces of the people, and the effect the food she was making had on them. “People took the rice balls, went and ate them somewhere, and then came back the next day, and the next, and the next for more … I knew I was doing the right thing.” After saving her earnings from the popular bicycle shop, she opened a tiny twelve-seat restaurant in the Mangwon district of Seoul, swapping the rice balls in favor of cooking a single daily entree, and posting the day’s dish to her blog each morning. This way of working allowed her to use her creativity each day to make a new dish based on what was fresh and in season at the local market.
The restaurant became extremely popular, extremely quickly. On most days, GaYoung sold out very early, having to turn away dozens of customers. Yet, on principal of maintaining smallness in order to maintain quality and her own well-being, she never increased the size of the restaurant. Twelve seats remained twelve seats. She refused offers to expand, and also refused any kind of media attention or interviews, with the exception of an interview given to us at SocieCity, on account of our being very close with GaYoung during her transformation.
We see in GaYoung very clearly that the recipe for being successful at a small scale is not to do what will sell, but to do what you love, to do it well, and to engage in good relationships with those you do it for and with.
The act of maintaining smallness, and of physically inviting customers into the process of what you do, builds an Ecology of One by itself, allowing personal relationships to be established between consumer, farmer, chef, food, field. It’s also an act that is certainly not limited to the venue of growing, cooking, and consuming food.
What are your stories of how smallness is working in your city or neighborhood?
(Bio)diversity
Another theme of the natural farm is that many different life forms are encouraged to live together. As mentioned earlier, rather than seeing bugs and weeds as enemies, a natural farmer sees them as part of a balanced and diverse ecology. Diversity—not just of food plants, but of all living things in a field—builds a strong, resilient community of plant and animal life that can better withstand harsh conditions when they arise, and will thrive under normal conditions.
“Diversity is important … having many varieties of species in small amounts creates a stronger possibility for survival than having a large amount of only one specie. This is especially true in this changing environment.”
—Kenji Murakami, Natural Farmer, Itoshima, Japan
It goes against conventional farming wisdom, yet the idea of biodiverse agriculture has been creating thriving small farms around Japan, Korea, India, the United States, and other areas around the world for decades, having first been researched within western science by Richard Root, a Cornell University professor, in the 1960s. Even centuries beforehand, biodiversity was a key component in the agricultural undertakings of many native peoples, notably in North America, as explained in U.C. Davis Professor, M. Kat Anderson’s, recent book Tending the Wild, published by University of California Press.
“This collective storehouse of knowledge about the natural world is called traditional ecological knowledge and it has helped sustain tremendous biological diversity for more than a hundred centuries.”
—Kat Anderson, Lessons in Native American Plant Gathering
Through an economic and social lens, biodiversity is simply called diversity.
Diversity is often strangely interpreted by today’s economy, so it’s important not to dwell on the conventional definition; true diversity is not a matter of mechanically assigning categories and ticking boxes, but of truly knowing the inherent abilities of individual people, then appreciating those abilities in a way that allows them to flourish.
This kind of true diversity can be extended to our relationship with the environment, knowing the qualities of the environment and what it offers us, and appreciating these qualities similarly to how we would our own.
Natural Farmer Kristyn Leach shows a young girl around her field in San Francisco, USA. Image: Suhee Kang
The natural farmer Kenji Murakmai, who is quoted above, told us that he cherishes the act of knowing what the people around him are doing in their jobs—firstly because it builds community, opening up new possibilities for supporting each other, and secondly because, in his words, it “helps everyone work with a grateful heart.”
Kenji works in an area of Japan called Itoshima, and it is one of the great examples of diversity in an Ecology of One. In this town, there are many people working at multiple small and specialized jobs, yet they make efforts to understand, interact, and work across their disciplines as well. Socially and economically, they see themselves in an Ecology of One.
Kenji sells his vegetables to a part time chef who has a restaurant open “when people ask.” We asked, and it was delicious, intimate, supported local talent and ecological well-being, and was even less expensive than eating out at a normal chain restaurant. Across town, there is a small bakery that uses locally sourced ingredients built into one of the rooms of an old house. Kenji explained that they are only open a few times a week and only in the morning because the baker has other jobs around the town. This is just one of her passions. Again, knowing your abilities and passions, and letting these drive what you do—before economic considerations, because who on earth would open a bakery a few days a week explicitly for economic gain—inherently leads to diversity.
There are multiple levels of diversity at work here: one is to literally do multiple jobs at different times in different areas. This way of working is alive, well, and easy to see in small communities nearly everywhere in the world. In the best cases, one job flows into the next, as one season flows into another, or as one ingredient flows into another product. As this thinking goes, even if you aren’t physically involved in all parts of the flow, it is important to know and appreciate all parts of it so that you have a view of where your process fits and how it functions within the whole.
There are also slightly larger, full-time operations in Itoshima that operate on a similar passion. Yoshinori san, a local soy sauce maker nearby, recently took over the business from his father and transformed it, going back to a more traditional and slow process that is integrated with the ecology and social scene. Again, a theme here is that this man has a passion for the biological process of fermenting. I don’t know many people who have this passion, but Yoshinori does, and it came through as he was giving us a tour of his small factory. He makes the soy sauce starter by hand from ingredients that he personally chooses from small producers, at a time when most other small-scale makers are buying theirs in bulk from a national supplier. He truly wants to build relationships, to know the farmers, and to know the customers and how they use and enjoy his product. His work supports true diversity.
On a personal level, real diversity means knowing your own abilities and passions and employing them in ways that are useful and good for the people and places around you. If we can encourage the use of abilities in ourselves, and learn to see and appreciate the abilities of those around us, we can naturally create the same kind of strength and resilience that we see in naturally bio-diverse fields, forests, or farmland.
In this way, both economy and society can become an inter-woven fabric of mutually supportive threads that can withstand harsh conditions, and will absolutely thrive in normal conditions.
Regeneration
Natural farming, when practiced as described earlier, is an inherently regenerative practice: it builds the health and ecological capacity of the land, as well as the health and capacity of the people who come into contact with this land, whether farmer or consumer. The “regenerative” natural farm stands in extreme contrast to our conventional ways of growing food, most of which are decidedly exploitative of oil, mineral, soil, and all else, taking from the environment far more than they give back. The multiple long-term studies that were covered earlier in this writing show very clearly that in agriculture and, frankly speaking, in all areas of production, the need to shift our conventional industrial ways of production towards regenerative practices is deadly serious.
For agriculture to be regenerative, it needs to be based on the regenerative cycle of life and death on the earth, and importantly, on sunlight as a primary energy source. Our biosphere’s ability to capture and transfer this amazingly powerful “free” energy from sun to earth through plant life is a key to its ability for regeneration, and to why we have lush rainforests, thriving meadows, natural farms, and any other life on this planet. Natural farms follow such natural processes of regeneration, never attempting to pressure a given ecosystem to grow more than the it will naturally support by its own cycle of solar energy conversion and life and death in the field.
For society to be regenerative, we need to ask what the primary energy source for this regeneration is. What can society—like the sun—give to itself as a “free” source of energy to allow it to grow naturally, and to bolster its own well-being? Taking a page from some of the greatest social well-being activists, from Jesus and Buddha to Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King, Jr., it should be clear that only compassion and empathy can and do create an ecology of social well-being.
Compassion and empathy are the sunlight of our society, and when put into use by the humans within that society, they allow us to regenerate and grow an ever-more bountiful culture and planet.
Looking at this problem in the context of society and the Ecology of One idea, we can see another clear parallel; our economic system is very clearly not a regenerative one; it is based not on the power of compassion and empathy, but on competition and exploitation of natural resources, of labor, and of (trade) relationships, for starters. Both culturally and ecologically speaking, there is no way for this to continue; a truly resilient economic system must, again, be firmly the opposite of exploitative.
Working in an urban sense, we recently met a lawyer, Janelle Orsi, director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (or SELC) in California, who is fighting for such regenerative practices in the business and legal world.
From a law and regulation standpoint, Orsi sees a deep need to draw the distinction between “generative” entities—such as cooperatives—which are designed to “nourish and protect” communities and the environment, and “extractive” entities—and I will unabashedly call out most multinational corporations here—which are often designed to draw out wealth and resources from communities and the environment.
The SELC has already greatly influenced regulatory laws in California in ways that make regenerative business officially recognized and easier to facilitate, and which help legalize the cooperation of citizens to support and grow each other. Their efforts include helping to write and pass the California Cooperative Worker Act (AB 816), and a second bill that facilitates development of cooperative housing (AB 569).
The aim of these bills is regenerative. They are examples of efforts to recognize an Ecology of One in social, governmental, and economic senses, realizing the need for all of these areas to begin supporting the well-being of each other at their roots, and the need for compassion and empathy not just to re-enter our vocabulary, but to move themselves into the foundations of what we do.
Like Orsi, if we shift our actions towards a regenerative mindset, our business focus can also begin providing labor that regenerates, that increases the well-being of those who engage in it, that builds mutually beneficial trade relationships, and that generates economic well-being across all areas of a community.
The author, continuing his yearly tradition of rice planting at a friend’s natural farm in South Korea. Image: Suhee Kang
Effecting an Ecology of One
It might sound like a tall task to rebuild our entire economic and social reality to be small scale, diverse, and regenerative. This need not be the case. Like the farmer who creates relationships by bringing the community to his farm; like the chef who allows her creative skills to flourish on an explicitly small scale; like the baker and soy sauce maker who work with their passions and abilities and support a diverse network of others who are doing the same; like the lawyer who works within her community and state to help regeneration become a reality for citizens, we each have such roles, and they must be uncovered individually, revealed and engaged in despite the swift social or market forces that try to sway us otherwise.
You’ll see that even just taking the first few steps as an individual on this path towards an Ecology of One can provide us with infinite possibilities. When we start becoming partners again with the earth in all that we do, so can each of us, too, make a socially and ecologically just economic system a reality for ourselves and those around us. This can come from looking at our own actions each day and asking ourselves if these actions are fostering an Ecology of One, or an ecology of separation; are they bringing us into a closer relationship with this earth and those around us, or are they pushing us still further away, into this spiral of disconnection and dissonance?
“It is a man’s sympathy with all creatures that truly makes him a man. Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things, man himself will not find peace.”
—Albert Schweitzer, Philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient
It matters not what discipline we are functioning in; as professionals and as human beings, we can all be in the business of reconnecting into an Ecology of One, of planting our roots with empathy into the reality of this living earth and seeing our role within it. In this way, our work can and will naturally bring itself into the interrelated, living network of small, diverse, and regenerative beings who are working for the health and wellness of ourselves and the places we live.
We can make that choice today. We can accept and continue a life within an ecology of separation, or we can move, with each action we take, towards life in an Ecology of One.
Urban livestock has long been viewed as dirty, unsafe, and decidedly un-modern by both policymakers and members of the general public. Yet, for many people living in and near the cities of developing countries, animals are a key source of food, nutrition, and livelihood. In Kenya, peri-urban chicken production has become a potentially lucrative business—especially for women—due to rapid urbanization and a booming demand for meat and animal products. Moreover, recent scientific evidence suggests that rearing chickens has benefits that could help mitigate one of the greatest health threats to developing world populations.
As former herders are becoming more sedentary and urbanized, chicken rearing is increasingly becoming an attractive alternative.
To illustrate how poultry raising can change lives, Public Radio International’s The World program featured a story back in 2013 that showcased an urban livestock keeper named Regina Wangari. Ms. Wangari had a thriving enterprise in the Kahawa Soweto slum of Nairobi, Kenya, where she raised chickens in small pens neatly stacked one on top of the other. From the sale of her chicks, eggs, and chickens, she earned nearly $1,000 per month—a truly phenomenal sum. Having invested some of her initial earnings in an egg incubator, she was selling more than 700 chicks per month, mainly to neighbors eager to get into the chicken production business themselves [1].
New chicks are bringing new opportunities for urban and peri-urban producers. Photo courtesy of Valerie Gwinner.
Research from the International Livestock Research Institute and others suggests that poultry production has a key role to play in boosting food security and alleviating poverty across Africa and other developing regions [2]. The Kenya Economic Report 2016 also sees it as a key livestock enterprise for attaining the UN’s Millennium Development Goal 1 of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, as well as promoting productive employment for women and youth [3].
Small-scale chicken farming does not require huge investments in terms of space, labor, or initial inputs, which is ideal for people living in urban environments. For women, it serves as a primary, and often only, source of independent income, particularly in places where their money-generating options are limited [4]. While women are less likely then men to own land or large livestock, they typically own and manage the family chicken flock.
My own interviews with chicken producers in peri-urban areas of northern Kenya highlighted the potential benefits of poultry production, not just in Nairobi, but also in the poorer and more arid regions of the country, where urbanization is growing more rapidly. They include counties in the north and east of the country that were long ignored by government and international development investments because they were not seen as economically productive. Today, that view has changed, and the Kenyan drylands are seen as areas of significant potential growth and trade.
Kenya’s new Constitution of 2011 decentralized government budgets and decision-making authority. Known as devolution, the process has brought new money and urban growth to dryland counties such as Turkana, Isiolo, Marsabit, and Garissa.
Just outside the bustling northern town of Isiolo (population 80,000), I met with members of the Aten Women’s Group, who have recently taken up chicken production. They talked about life before the formation of their group—how they scraped out what existence they could mostly by making and selling charcoal from the scarce and scruffy trees that dot the arid landscape outside of town. Finding ways to feed their families or pay for school fees and clothing was a constant challenge, as was taking care of their own needs. “We gave birth outside, under the trees,” explained one member, “and sometimes that led to problems, such as too much bleeding.”
With support from USAID’s Resilience and Economic Growth in the Arid Lands – Improving Resilience in Kenya program, the women gained access to health, financial, and training services geared at improving their livelihoods. They learned basic business skills, along with multiple aspects of small-scale chicken production—from sourcing chicks, incubation, feed, and vaccination to sales and the building of suitable chicken pens from available materials. They were taught about managing a bank account and keeping financial records. The group received funding from small revolving loans, which were used to set up each member’s chicken production.
With proceeds from their production, the women pay into a group savings account that is used for emergency expenses. At the time of my visit, the account held the equivalent of about $1,000 and was a source of great pride to the group members. “We thought only employed people could have bank accounts,” said a member.
The proximity to Isiolo town, just a few kilometers away, has provided a ready market for the women’s eggs and chickens. Isiolo is rapidly expanding due to its role as the county capital, which has brought an influx of money, construction, development, and taste for poultry. The town is benefitting also from its position along the highway from Nairobi to Ethiopia, soon to be entirely tarmacked, which is a major trade route for livestock and other goods.
Asked how the chicken production was changing their lives, the Aten Women’s Group members were all smiles. They talked about having money for their children’s schooling, clothing, and food. They bragged about being able to put better roofs on their houses and using the local health services for births and other medical needs. They pointed to their new skills and to a newfound respect garnered within their families and communities.
Traditionally, most households in dryland regions have been engaged in pastoralism, herding cattle, sheep, goats, and even camels. But competing pressures for land and water, along with stresses from climate change, population growth, urbanization, and human conflicts have compromised this way of life. Most pastoralists no longer have big enough herds to live solely off their animals.
Nowadays, the real money is in commercial livestock rearing, where owners have the resources (e.g., large herds, ties to feed lots, water sources, market access) to weather prolonged droughts and exert influence over market prices. Meanwhile, smaller herders are more likely to have to sell off their animals in times of stress, often at unsustainably low prices. Individuals may also lose their stocks of ruminants to disease, drought, and livestock raids from enemy tribes.
As former herders are becoming more sedentary and urbanized, chicken rearing is increasingly becoming an attractive alternative.
“We thought only employed people had bank accounts,” says this member of the Aten Women’s Group in Isiolo. With their new chicken businesses and group savings account, their lives are more secure. Today, the women’s group members no longer give birth in the bush, can afford their children’s school fees, are improving their family’s housing and nutrition, and garner more respect from their husbands. Photo: Valerie Gwinner
“Chicken feed, chicken vaccines, and live chicks have rapidly become our fastest growing and highest selling products,” says Dr. Diba Dida Wako, a veterinarian and businessman, who manages Sidai Africa Ltd. in northern Kenya. Sidai is a social enterprise that provides animal health products, services, and advice through franchised and branded service centers. “We had expected that most of our business would center around cattle—the animals most associated with livestock production and pastoralism. The huge demand for poultry products was a surprise,” he notes with a laugh. “So we have had to adjust quickly to this major market shift.”
Of course, poultry raising is not a complete panacea for people in the cramped conditions of urban slums or peri-urban areas. Proper air quality, ventilation, space, temperatures, feed, and vaccines are essential for good chicken health and productivity. But these are challenges in informal and poor communities, where any one of those factors may be compromised or unachievable. The results greatly increase the risks of diseases and conditions that may not only decrease productivity but also wipe out an entire flock.
Living in close proximity with chickens can also increase human health risks. Diseases, such as avian influenza, can transfer from animals to people (a process called zoonosis). Waste from the chickens and their feeds are potential environmental and health hazards if not properly managed. Waste runoff can contaminate ground water with excess nitrogen and phosphorus, or with potential pathogens, such as salmonella. In addition, the organic nitrogen from chicken manure quickly converts into ammonia, which can then be emitted into the atmosphere as a pollutant.
On the positive side, chicken manure is a good natural fertilizer. The litter and manure also can be converted into bioenergy, according to FAO, or even recycled as a component of livestock and poultry diets, when the pathogens are neutralized [5]. So, there is potential for further spin-off businesses associated with urban chicken production—not such a far-fetched concept in a country as entrepreneurial as Kenya.
Further promise comes from a report recently published in Malaria Journal, based on a study by Swedish and Ethiopian researchers. Working in Ethiopia, Rickard Ignell and his team discovered that the smell of chicken repels the Anopheles arabiensis mosquito, which is the main vector for the spread of malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa [6]. They found that certain compounds within the chicken feathers (isobutyl butyrate, naphthalene, hexadecane, and trans–limonene oxide) kept the mosquitoes at bay. As a result, suspending a chicken in a cage near where people were sleeping was enough to drive the insects away.
So, home-based chicken farming may be doubly advantageous for city dwellers in Kenya, Ethiopia, and other countries around the continent. Finding how best to reap the benefit of chicken proximity without encouraging the spread of disease seems entirely achievable. ILRI scientists have already suggested that keeping chickens in a wicker cage at a distance from the bed, instead of under it as is commonly done in cramped conditions, is a healthy alternative.
But making the most of these potential benefits requires government and program policies that support urban and peri-urban chicken production. Policies and programs that restrict small-scale urban livestock production only serve to promote evasive actions. Instead, they must spur the adoption of good practices through extension services, business training, farmer-to-farmer linkages, financing schemes, access to quality chicks, and other activities that will strengthen the potential of poultry production for reducing poverty and improving lives.
And focusing on women, who dominate small-scale poultry production, is key [7]. While men still dominate large-scale livestock production, it is clear from the stories of Ms. Wangari in Nairobi and the Aten Women’s Group in Isiolo that there is still plenty of room at the bottom of the pyramid for small-scale urban producers—and plenty of room for chickens in the city.
Sambo E, Bettridge J, Dessie T, Amare A, Habte T, Wigley P, Christleya RM. Participatory evaluation of chicken health and production constraints in Ethiopia. Prev Vet Med. 2015 Jan 1; 118(1): 117–127. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4300415/
Sambo E, Bettridge J, Dessie T, Amare A, Habte T, Wigley P, Christleya RM. Participatory evaluation of chicken health and production constraints in Ethiopia. Prev Vet Med. 2015 Jan 1; 118(1): 117–127. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4300415/
Ngeno V, Langat BK, Rop W, Kipsat M. J. Gender aspect in adoption of commercial poultry production among peri-urban farmers in Kericho Municipality, Kenya. Journal of Development and Agricultural Economics. 2011 July; Vol. 3(7), pp. 286-301. http://www.academicjournals.org/JDAE
A review of Good Urbanism: Six Steps to Creating Prosperous Places by Nan Ellin. 2012. Island Press. ISBN 13: 978-1-61091-374-4. 141 pages. Buy the book.
Many people have a desire to improve spaces in their cities and neighborhoods, but most don’t know where to begin or what steps to take to see a community project through to fruition. Most who have been successful at creating “livable and lovable spaces” succeed through tedious determination of trial and error.
Nan Ellin’s strong desire for environments that “inspire, uplift and sustain us” shines throughout Good Urbanism.
During the recovery stage after the Joplin, Missouri EF5 tornado of 2011, students at Drury University designed and built a 12,000 ft2 memorial garden, the Volunteer Tribute in honor of the over 170,000 registered volunteers that went to Joplin’s aid in their great time of need. As students with no prior experience in creating “prosperous places” they relied on the experience of their professors to guide them through the steps of designing and building this community space. In this case, as it was response to a traumatic disturbance, a trial and error approach to the steps of place making would have been too slow. There was immediate need of relief from the brownness in the city caused by the scrapping of the earth during the demolition and clean up. Greening this Red Zone (Tidball, Krasny 2013) through the construction of the Volunteer Tribute and other projects within the park, set the stage for the park to become a sacred place in Joplin.
In Good Urbanism, Nan Ellin offers her “positive call to arms to connect us to place” mapping out the process in a clear, cohesive manner that shows the reader how successful interventions have applied these steps through eleven easy-to-follow case studies. Ellin draws on and applies insights from organizational learning, psychology, and the philosophy of pragmatism-grounded theory and wisdom traditions, to create a straightforward, step-by-step approach to a “Path toward Prosperity” in urban spaces.
She quickly and succinctly defines six steps that become the road map for grassroots community members or students to follow toward successful acquisition of resources and execution of what she calls livable and lovable spaces. Icons representing each step reinforce the process and clearly tie the storyline of the case study with each step. The diverse projects and the variety locations of the case studies reinforce the idea that the proposed steps can be effective in any U.S. urban area.
Six steps to prosperous spaces, according to Ellin:
Present
Promote
Prototype
Propose
Polish
Prospect
Dissecting the case studies and clearly defining how each case used the steps she has identified makes the book a good resource for activists as well as professors and students. This short read has no self-indulgent filler. Instead, it is feels like the writer wants to uplift and inspire the reader to take action. A humble, collaborative approach to community action is suggested throughout, which is always good advice. As resources are the make or break of any project, Ellin guides the reader toward “cultivating good ideas” but makes clear the importance of “rallying the resources to realize them”.
In Good Urbanism, Ellin uses icons to illustrate the six steps to prosperous places.
Generating desire and enthusiasm to support improvement of places within a community is typically easy. Identifying and acquiring funding to make projects happen is almost always the harder task. Though she calls for a “rally for resources”, a deeper description of successful funding acquisitions or a step-by-step guide for successfully finding funding would be of great assistance to the reader.
While this book could be a reference for urban designers, universities with a strong and engaged learning culture could turn to Good Urbanism as the go-to guide for any civic engagement project, regardless of the discipline the project is housed within.
The book’s optimistic approach is undeniable and refreshing—Ellin’s strong desire for environments that “inspire, uplift and sustain us” shines throughout the read. As to its merits as a guide book to community action, Ellin’s straightforward approach to telling the story and organization of case studies, combined with the overlay of six step icon, makes it a friendly resource for first-time grassroots activists and students.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Pippin Anderson, Cape TownWe should be training young urban ecologists in the Global South to recognize that their voices belong in the conversation.
Olga Barbosa, ValdiviaWe need to take the best of the existing knowledge from the Global North and incorporate (and value) the singularities of the Global South.
Tim Bonebrake, Hong KongResearch gaps in urban ecology likely hinder adequate management of nature in cities of the Global South… but everyone likes butterflies.
Sabina Caula, Ibarra, EcuadorThe homogenization of urban greening leaves sensitive birds outside urban borders both in cities North and South.
Bharat Dahiya, BangkokThe diversity of “Southern” perspectives draws on the cultural diversity of the “South”, which is rooted in the ecological diversity of this geographical collective.
Ana Faggi, Buenos AiresThe homogenization of urban greening leaves sensitive birds outside urban borders both in cities North and South.
Shuaib Lwasa, KampalaFoundational differences unify urban ecologies within the Global South more than between the Global North and Global South.
Fadi Hamdan, BeirutIn the age of globalisation, urban governance is the main factor affecting urban ecology and urbanites’ ability to build just, resilient, and sustainable cities.
Yvonne Lynch, MelbourneResponding to rapid growth trajectories whilst protecting our ecosystems will provide a new paradigm for urban ecology in the South.
Colin Meurk, LincolnDramatic differences between continental and oceanic ecosystems, such as in New Zealand, lead to a need for very different management approaches than in the North.
Susan Parnell, Cape TownOne characteristic of the southern city is that built and natural systems have not been entirely severed and that nature works for the city dweller.
Steward Pickett, PoughkeepsieUrban ecology works well in the Global North and South, but only when the assumptions of its empirical and conceptual models are exposed.
Luis Sandoval, San JoséThe dichotomy between the development of natural areas and urban areas is one of the unifying elements of urban ecology in the Global South.
Seth Shindler, SheffieldFormal infrastructure systems in Southern cities are incomplete and exclusive compared to those of Northern cities.
Tan Puay Yok, SingaporeUrban ecological principles should be the key means to unifying our understanding of the urban ecology of and in the Global South.
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
A key theme at The Nature of Cities is the fundamental connection between urban nature and the challenges of creating better cities, particularly cities that are more resilient, sustainable, livable, and just. Cities around the world experience similar challenges related to this theme, and they also may pursue many shared or convergently evolved approaches to them.
Yet, cities are also different, every one. One pattern that emerges in such difference is along a North-South gradient. By this we mean not only geographic north and south (e.g., relative to the equator), but also—and perhaps more importantly—differences in cities currently perched at different stages along a developmental trajectory: that is, as we now say, cities in the Global South versus the Global North. Cities in the Global South, or “developing countries”, may struggle with insufficient resources to address their challenges; they also may have different approaches to planning and environmental management; or maybe not enough study has been applied there; or maybe…and so on. In any case, much of the ecological work and urban thought—and climate-changing economic activity—applied globally emerges from the Global North, and is applied to the South. Or, at least, such a bias is commonly cited. Is this true? Is it a problem?
This roundtable is convened to discuss urban ecology from a southern perspective. Is urban ecology somehow different in the south? Are there cultural or governance nuances that mean that common ecological principles are best modified when applied to urban planning in the south? How might we propel a Global South urban ecology for the design of better cities in these regions? Perhaps the models of the North are not the only, or best, options.
These questions are key for our global future, for it is in the Global South that the majority of rapid urbanization is taking place. Here we convene 15 scientists and thought leaders, mostly from the South, to discuss the ways forward.
Pippin Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, is an African urban ecologist who enjoys the untidiness of cities where society and nature must thrive together.
FULL BIO
Pippin Anderson
Growing global-contributing urban ecologists in the Global South, or: Who lines the walls of fame in urban ecology? Interrogating community and belonging
I was interviewed for my current job in the University of Cape Town’s Science Faculty boardroom. This boardroom, probably like many others around the world, has something of a “hall of fame” line up of framed photographs of past Deans of the Faculty. It’s a classic collection of black and white photographs of somewhat austere looking, heavy-eye-browed men. It is an honourable group of hardworking men who have built up an excellent intuition over the last 100 years. Looking at them, as I sat there, sweaty-palmed, made me feel terribly out of place. I wondered, was this the place for a young female scientist, and could I legitimately make a contribution here?
How can we train young urban ecologists in the Global South to recognize that their voices belong in the conversation?
Of course, my point in telling this anecdote is a straightforward one—one we are all acutely aware of—about representation and belonging. Who has the right to speak? Whose voice is heard? Whose story is valid?
There are enough brilliant minds in this roundtable to put forward clever arguments on how urban ecology in the Global South differs from that of the Global North, and to that end I will focus my energy on a smaller and more delicate issue within this broader debate. What I wonder is: How should we be training young urban ecologists in the Global South? What worries me is that my own students look around at the urban ecology literature and ask themselves a similar question to the one I asked when I looked up at those portraits in my job interview: they wonder if they belong. We constantly tell our students to chime in on the conversations taking place in the published literature, to be active participants in the debates and discussion taking place among the authors publishing in their field. We expect them to draw on ideas and present these in relation to other ideas, and to pit them against their own ideas and findings. But what if, from the very get-go, they do not feel part of the community, or that their experiences and understandings exclude them in some way from these conversations?
University of Cape Town urban ecology students chatting to local conservator Ismail Wambi while on a field trip to the Kenilworth Racecourse Conservation Area in Cape Town. Photo: Pippin Anderson
There is lots of excellent urban ecology literature emerging from our Global South cities, and I firmly believe there is a lot of excellent literature that is relevant but not always readily flagged as urban ecology literature in the Global South. Sometimes, one has to dig a little deeper to find it. That said, there is no escaping that the bulk of the voices in the urban ecology conversations are from the Global North. I think any seasoned urban ecologist from the Global South can readily engage in healthy and productive debate with these voices and views and can critically engage with them around the numerous points of departure and agreement between the South and North with respect to the urban ecology of our cities. I do, however, worry about growing young students in this space, where the heavy tidal flow of cases and opinions are skewed to the Global North, leaving them feeling that this is not their territory or that their contribution is not legitimate.
Indeed, a student of mine pointed out to me last week that while the case study she had chosen to present in my class was from South America, the authors were from Florida, in the United States. Sometimes, even where the material is Global South in content, the voices retain a Global North tone. These voices are often very confident, from institutions that are globally known, relatively well-funded, and infused with a culture of older cities, cities with different development trajectories, which have no sense of urban informality or devastating inequality, and possibly have a closer proximity to global publishing houses, etc. etc. I think the only way to get around this is to flag these issues, talk about how they have come about, encourage students to critically engage with those circumstance, using such questions as: How might this case have been presented differently if the author was from Bogotá? Did the authors own their positionality? How would you engage with your positionality when writing about your own city?
It is vital to encourage students to publish their own work and to offer whatever support one can to grow the groundswell of literature that reports on and reflects on urban ecology in the cities of the Global South. I think another important bolstering opportunity is engaging with communities of local urban ecologists to grow a sense of belonging and to allow students to find their “voices” in local spaces. To this end, I find fieldtrips and engagement with local practitioners extremely useful. I suppose that just as I got my job, and went on to be part of a Department that is actually dominated by women (the Dean who interviewed me at the time was the first woman Dean of our Faculty, whose picture now also adorns the boardroom wall), so too will this tide turn. It is a question of acknowledging, engaging, and encouraging one’s students (and self) to be part of the movement that sees the growth of urban ecology literature from the Global South.
Dr. Olga Barbosa is an ecologist interested in the relationship between humans and the environment from an ecosystem ecology perspective. She is an Associate Professor at the Universidad Austral de Chile.
Olga Barbosa
There are several unifying elements of urban ecology, no matter in which part of the world you live. As humans, we all have similar needs and the differences are tuned by the degree to which we (and cities) have been able to satisfy those basic needs. I think this discrepancy—the lesser degree to which cities have been able to satisfy basic needs in the Global South—is one of biggest differences we can find between the Global North and South, which of course influences the study of ecology in cities and for cities in both sides of the world.
In Latin America, we should make the best use of knowledge from the Global North while incorporating (and valuing) the singularities of the Global South.
For example, Latin America—one of the most urbanized regions of the world—is beginning to show a “stabilization” of urban demographic growth, in which most cities have covered basic human needs associated with rapid urban growth (e.g., housing, sanitation). Therefore, we should have the capacity to rethink the way Latin American cities are growing and advance to a more sustainable trajectory based on available models. However, how informative are the available (Global North) models for the Global South?
We know urbanization growth patterns have huge implications on nature. Thirteen years ago, Liu and collaborators published a paper in Nature showing a general growth of household numbers globally. The research highlighted the potential consequences this household dynamic would have on biodiversity due to increased rates of consumption of wood for fuel, habitat fragmentation, greenhouse emissions, etc. As shown in their study, which remains valid, household growth was significantly higher in countries with biodiversity hotspots (regions with high diversity and endemism and priority for conservation), which are usually developing countries. How can urban ecology inform what we know and how we address the consequences of losing nature—and the benefits it provides to urban dwellers?
Urban ecology research has been extremely scarce in Global South, not to say inexistent in our region (Latin America). For example, in Chile (which is not very different from other Latina American countries), we face challenges associated with a lack of systematized basic information, such as spatially explicit demographics on household dynamics, not to mention urban biodiversity inventories. Although urban ecology studies are growing fast, our research must invest a lot of effort in gathering basic data to answer even elementary urban ecology questions, let alone our more complex sustainability questions. We are ready to focus on the complexities of urban dynamics, even while we are still learning the basics.
What are the consequences of the Global North guiding urban growth and the field of urban ecology in the Global South? Real problems come when decisions are made based on general models without the complexities of particular (local) realities. Problems are likely to arise when we follow the growth patterns of the Global North, knowing they have failed under certain circumstances. Climate change has demonstrated a huge challenge for existing grey infrastructure in developed countries. Nowadays, these countries are moving toward the integration of green and hybrid infrastructure that is expected to provide multiple functions and to be “safer to fail”. Still, our Southern cities yearn to follow the Global North patterns and build monumental infrastructure, neglecting undeveloped land that harbors nature—our unintended green infrastructure—that provides multi-functional ecosystem services.
Rather than relying solely on the urban ecology models from the Global North, we in Latin America should highlight the opportunities we have, in which we can make the best use of existing knowledge while incorporating (and valuing) the singularities and particularities of the Global South.
To achieve this, urban ecologists not only need to generate more research, but also to develop stronger links with society to move our scientific knowledge into action, and ultimately into policymaking.
Dr. Timothy C. Bonebrake is an Assistant Professor at The University of Hong Kong studying global change, urban ecology, and tropical conservation.
Tim Bonebrake
As an ecologist doing research in a number of countries located in the Global South, my main experiences of major urban centers usually takes place as I transit from the airport, maybe make a few supplies/permit stops, and then head to the forest to catch butterflies. I’m not alone. In a 2012 survey, Martin et al. (2012) found that over 60 percent of ecological research is conducted in protected areas.
Research gaps in urban ecology likely hinder adequate management of nature in cities of the Global South… but everyone likes butterflies.
In fact, most ecological research is conducted in countries with high incomes in the first place; 90 percent of surveyed studies came from high-income countries in the 70-100th percentiles (Martin et al. 2012). The situation is even worse for the field of “urban ecology”, as approximately 70 percent of published studies have taken place in Anglo-Saxon countries, even though over 90 percent of projected future growth in urban areas will take place in Latin America, Asia, and Africa (Shwartz et al. 2014). As a consequence of this pattern, ecologists spend a comparatively small proportion of their time in the cities of the Global South.
A young research assistant helps the author conduct butterfly transects in urban El Salvador in January 2007. Photo: Tim Bonebrake
According to recent statistics (March 2016), San Salvador has the third highest homicide rate in the world. In this environment, you might not expect a population that would care much for their urban butterfly biodiversity. I ended up in El Salvador myself, largely on a whim, to do PhD research. A friend of mine from high school, Celia, invited me to join her on a visit to see her family and I wound up spending a couple of weeks in a municipality not far (about 30km) from San Salvador. We had running water (usually in the mornings) only about half of the time I was there. Gang violence was a frequent topic of discussion. A variety of other challenges I was not accustomed to as a product of my middle class American experience were readily apparent during my stay there.
In the absence of good urban ecology data from the Global South, one can only speculate as to the similarities and differences regarding urban nature priorities and challenges across the North-South (development) divide. But I suspect it would be fair to say that people in the South have bigger problems on their minds than urban nature, in most cases.
Having said that, I can’t help but think back to my eye-opening first two weeks in El Salvador living with Celia’s family on the outskirts of San Salvador. I brought my butterfly net and decided to run some transects in the small backyard where I was staying. The backyard was on the corner of a somewhat busy street, and it had no fences. I felt strange (and more than a little uncomfortable) at first, swinging at passing butterflies while being watched by confused neighbors. But after a while, I got pretty good at explaining with gestures and (very) broken Spanish that I was hunting mariposas. Pretty soon rumors of my bizarre behavior had made their way through town and I accumulated a following (see photo above). Lots of folks had suggestions on where I should go if I wanted to see some cool butterflies (usually close to where they lived). And on one memorable occasion, a young girl, maybe six or seven years old, came to our house and handed me a very large and very dead sphingid moth as a gift. After a couple of weeks, I had only found about 10 species in the backyard, but I had made a lot of friends.
I went on to spend part of the next three summers/falls of my PhD program working in El Salvador. But like most ecologists, I usually stopped in San Salvador only briefly, to pick up permits or supplies (and to visit my friends/familia) before heading off to the forest to study climate change and butterflies. So, unfortunately, I’ve not been able to do much personally regarding the data gap in urban ecological research in the Global South. The North-South divide is clearly worthy of further investigation and surely our research biases are contributing to inadequate management of nature in urban areas in the South. But I’m also convinced that there are some similarities that unite cities all over the world, based on my personal experience. That is, if you wander a city with a tall butterfly net in hand, as I have, be it in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Yaounde, or San Salvador, you’re likely to get many inquisitive looks…and even a handful of smiles.
Martin, L. J., Blossey, B., & Ellis, E. (2012). Mapping where ecologists work: biases in the global distribution of terrestrial ecological observations. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 10, 195-201.
Shwartz, A., Turbé, A., Julliard, R., Simon, L., & Prévot, A. C. (2014). Outstanding challenges for urban conservation research and action. Global Environmental Change, 28, 39-49.
An award-winning Urbanist, Bharat combines research, policy analysis, and development practice aimed at examining and tackling socio-economic, environmental and governance issues in the global urban context.
Bharat Dahiya
The difference isn’t ecological, it’s cultural
It is seemingly a strange notion that there should be different perspectives on urban ecology, especially when urban areas worldwide exhibit similar characteristics in the broader era that we now commonly call the anthropocene.
The diversity of “Southern” perspectives draws on the cultural diversity of the “South”, which is rooted in the ecological diversity of this geographical collective.
These perspectives should be similar—if not outrightly the same—everywhere, as the problems related to urban environments (see the four urban environmental goals identified by Bigio and Dahiya, 2004) and urban ecology are rather similar, even though they manifest themselves differently. Further, based on the “urban environment stage model” (Bai and Imura, 2000), we can with great confidence say that urban environments around the world are going through a similar, if not really the same, transition in the so-called “South” in today’s anthropocene.
It follows, therefore, that if the “Southern” perspective is different from the ‘Northern’ perspective, this distinction must be based on or rooted in something equally fundamental, and that is culture. From this standpoint, the relevance of the “Southern” perspective, or perspectives more correctly, becomes highly significant. The diversity of “Southern” perspectives must then draw on the cultural diversity of the “South”, which in turn is rooted in the natural and/or ecological diversity of this geographical collective.
As Carl O. Sauer elaborated, the cultural landscape of a particular place is a cumulative result of the interactions between the nature and culture of that place. In his words, “The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result.” From this perspective, the thoughts that developed in the “South” on urban ecology, or a broader nature-culture relationship, form an extraordinary subject of study.
From the geographically vast and culturally diverse Asian region, a few of these “Southern” perspectives are worth mentioning to illustrate the point.
First is an ancient thought borne out of the culturally rich and fertile soil of India. In Indian thought and tradition, a human being is considered as a part of a larger and nested structure. The individual human being is nested within the wider human society. The dialectic between the human individual and society defines their mutual complementarity. The society (including all individuals) is then nested within nature, and the relationship between the two gives rise to the culture of a specific place. Further, the individual, the society, and nature are nested within the cosmos. These four seemingly are different concepts and identifiable realities. However, they are part of each other, or better to say, identifiable with regard to each other. This underlines each entity’s interdependence and, therefore, interconnectedness. In practical terms, this idea gets translated into the philosophy of “oneness” (Sanskrit: Ekatmata) or “non-duality” (Sanskrit: Advaita) in the entire cosmos, “the world is one family” (Sanskrit: Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam), and “non-violence” (Sanskrit: Ahimsa). Using this concept, the Indus Valley cities in ancient India, such as Dholavira, had developed elaborate systems of water harvesting and management that helped their citizens to survive in some of the harshest arid environments that nature presented. It is this concept and its understanding in the wider society that leads to the worship of nature and her representations, such as rivers, mountains, trees, and so on.
Second, the idea of “Pratītyasamutpāda” (Sanskrit; Pali: Paticcasamuppāda) or “dependent origination”, which is commonly known as “interconnectedness”, finds a philosophical place and practical application in the Buddhist tradition. According to the principle of “dependent origination”, all things arise with dependence on one another. It follows that, since we, as human beings, are interconnected with nature, it becomes our duty to be compassionate to Mother Nature and all living beings. Therefore, Emperor Ashoka, who adopted Buddhism as the state religion in his reign (from c. 268 to 232 BCE) in India, prohibited the killing of animals and birds. With Buddhism, the principle of “interconnectedness” spread far and wide in Asia. For example, in Thailand, rivers are revered as “mae nam” or “mother river” to the present date. With such rich endowments of thought, tradition, and culture, one would expect that the relationship between Mother Nature on the one hand, and cities and human settlements on the other, would be truly harmonious in current times in these places as well. That is, however, not a widespread practice in urban Asia.
Still, some of these ideas and thoughts are being tested for their practical application in today’s urban Asia. For example, public authorities in Lumphini Park—Bangkok’s oldest green space, have allowed the growth of Bodhi plants that had germinated from seeds contained in bird-droppings (Lai, 2016); Lord Buddha had attained enlightenment under a Bodhi tree. In India, the National Ganga River Basin Authority has started the Mission Clean Ganga with a comprehensive approach to champion the challenges posed to Ganga (commonly known as Ganges) River through four different sectors: wastewater management, solid waste management, industrial pollution, and river front development.
But an obvious question arises: Why are these efforts not widespread? A set of interrelated factors causes the present situation to persist, or even worsen in some places.
First is the meaning associated with “development” in the international arena. “Development” is commonly understood as an increase in income and an improvement in the quality of life, which are the derivatives of national economic growth. This is based on the example set by the Global North, which, for historical, geo-political, and economic reasons, “developed” before the South did. Once economic growth became the marker of development in the North, the South started to follow this paradigm, facilitated by international development agencies. And until the late 1980s, the idea of “development” did not include sufficient attention to nature.
Second is the integration of the world economy through the process of economic globalization, which finds spatio-economic manifestation in the cities of the “South” (as well as the “North”). This often allows little space for the inclusion of caring for Mother Nature as a “mother” or “giver of all life”. The concomitant occurrence of urban environmental problems related to poverty, production, and consumption (following Bai and Imura, 2000) in the South confirms this.
Third, the South generally follows the path laid by the North: grow first, clean up later. This has worked for the North as it has had a long gestation period with regard to its economic “development” process. However, this will not necessarily work for the South, where cities are experiencing explosive economic, demographic, and spatial growth, particularly in Asia (see Dahiya, 2014).
Lastly, the neo-liberal economic model crowds out caring for nature even though nature is deemed culturally important. This is because the culture of caring for nature is increasingly being replaced by the culture of accumulation and consumption. Money, after all, matters a lot!
Looking forward, the culture of respect and care for nature will have to be brought back if the cities of the South, as well as those of the North—and, for that matter, humanity and all forms of life—have a chance of survival on planet Earth.
References
Bai, Xuemei and Hidefumi Imura (2000) A Comparative Study of Urban Environment in East Asia: Stage Model of Urban Environmental Evolution, International Review for Environmental Strategies, 1(1), pp. 135-158.
Bigio, Anthony G. and Bharat Dahiya (2004) Urban Environment and Infrastructure: Toward Livable Cities, Directions in Development Series, The World Bank, Washington DC.
Dahiya, Bharat (2014) Southeast Asia and Sustainable Urbanization, Global Asia – journal of the East Asia Foundation, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 84-91.
Lai, Chieh-Ming (2016) Public Green Spaces in Bangkok: A Case Study of Lumphini Park, M.A. Thesis, Southeast Asian Studies Program, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok.
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 and Sabina Caula
Why should southern and northern cities be ecologically different in this globalizing world? In the end, a city is a complex mosaic of interrelated patches of green, blue, grey, and brown infrastructures that influences the composition and abundance of urban biodiversity. As in the north, southern cities show biotic homogenization trends that have significant ecological, evolutionary, and social consequences.
To birds’ eyes, urban greenery in the South and North is highly similar—a quality that’s good for generalists, but not for specialists.
Much knowledge of urban ecology has been based on avian community studies. Birds are charismatic components of the urban landscape that can find habitability, connectivity, and resilience in the varied structural typologies in the city. For this reason, we want to answer the question posed in this roundtable by using South American birds as indicators.
Studies around the world have shown that in cities, metrics that help us measure ecological health, such as bird species richness and the number of food guilds (organizations of species based on their diets), decrease; meanwhile, the number of exotic species and the rate of nest predation increases with urbanization. In South America, the assemblage of birds is simplifying with increasing urbanization both at the species and guild levels, so that generalist omnivores and seedeaters dominate. Omnivorous birds are common along the urban gradient and seedeaters are also tolerant to urban development. As in the north, specialized insectivores and frugivores are the most negatively affected groups.
Image 1. Rock doves and sparrows in Stanberg railway station, Germany. Photo: Anna Faggi
In South America, there are two foreign species, native to the Global North, that are nonetheless recorded as common and abundant in most cities: Columba livia (Rock Dove) and Passer domesticus (Sparrow), but they are mainly found in the areas with a higher density of buildings and sealed surfaces (Images 1 and 2).
As in other parts of the world, evidence shows that most of the birds observed in “green” areas are native. From México to Chile, common native urban bird species recorded are: Rufous-collared Sparrow (Zonotrichia capensis), House Wren (Troglodytes aedon), Eared Dove (Zenaida auriculata), Shiny Cowbird (Molothrus bonariensis), Tropical Kingbird (Tyrannus melancholicus), Blue-black Grassquit (Volatinia jacarina), American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), Vermilion Flycatcher (Pirocephalus rubinus), and Great Kiskadee (Pitangus sulfuratus). From north to south, most of these birds are just generalists adapted to new manmade urban habitats, while sensitive ones disappear.
Image 2. Rock doves as dominating species in Costanera Sur, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photo: Ana Faggi
In cities all over the world, vegetation is the most attractive cover for bird communities. In urban parks, the mixed native and exotic trees and shrubs facilitate generalist birds to make use of the greater plant diversity by offering a higher quantity of food and refuges, especially during ecologically challenging seasons. Because native vegetation and local bird species have co-evolved together, in the breeding season, green remnants rich in native vegetation offer a comparatively large number of habitats available for specialist birds.. Unlike “natural” habitats, the parks in South America often have similar structures in all cities, because they have been designed and planted following European styles. In our globalized world, new fashions imposed by designers, architects, and urban planners have given rise to urban green spaces that suit a particular aesthetic, but which have nothing to do with the local identity and, in many cases, have excluded the native flora and fauna.
Most of these spaces have been developed from French, Spanish, and Italian prototypes, using similar non-native species arranged in a savannah type display, with large grass areas, always neatly cut, as well as granite and asphalt. These parks can be found anywhere in the world, from Sydney to Santiago, and from the historic centers of the city to the periphery. In Latin American cities, seasonally ornamental flowers and exotic trees from different continents prevail: Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus sp.), cypress (Cupressus sp.), acacia (Acacia retinodes), poplar (Populus sp.), willow (Salix babylonica), linden (Tilia cordata), maple (Acer sp.), chinaberry tree (Melia azedarach), sycamore (Acer pseudoplanatus), London plane (P. occidentalis x P. orientalis=Platanus x acerifolia) and Jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia) are common in temperate and mountain cities, whereas Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus sp.), pine (Araucaria heterophylla), tree orchid (Bauhinia sp.), yellow flame tree (Peltophorum pterocarpum), Mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni), Neem (Azadirachta indica), Ficus sp., Flamboyant or acacia (Delonix regia) and Mango (Mangifera indica) are common in neotropical cities.
For birds, these tree assemblages become an environmental filter that excludes many differentiating sensitive species. To birds’ eyes, urban greenery in the South and North is highly similar. As such, plans to create green spaces in the Global South should be adopted by any city to promote local biodiversity and to conserve and restore native vegetation, rather than planting exotics from the North.
Sabina Caula is a biologist with graduate degrees in ecology from the Central University of Venezuela and the University of Montpellier II in France. Her work focuses on the ecology of bird communities, urban ecology, environmental and socioeconomic assessments, and environmental education.
Shuaib Lwasa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Makerere University. Shuaib has over 15 years of experience in university teaching and research working on interdisciplinary projects related to urban sustainability.
Shuaib Lwasa
The laws of nature are universal, but our understanding of how they can be applied in the Global North and South is constrained by tools and approaches developed in the Global North. Unifying laws that determine how elements of nature operate and relate have been a central consideration in making cities better for human populations and, more recently, in how people can relate with urban nature. Most of the tools and approaches to understanding urban ecology have been developed in the Global North. This no surprise because, again, urban development principles promoting the notion of universality emerged from the Global North. Does the Northern perspective of this framework matter?
Foundational differences unify urban ecologies within the Global South more than between the Global North and Global South.
The application of science developed in the Global North
Whereas the approaches and tools of the Global North are evident in many cities of the global South, there is also divergence in the form of patterns and processes. Urban development trajectories of the South present differing patterns and processes. In some literature, this has been referred to as “insurgent urbanism”, while in more recent literature, the urban development trajectories represented in the Global South are referred to as “alternative urbanism” with its own theory. We use “insurgent urbanism” to give a perspective on how urban ecology of the South can be described, characterised, and compared. “Insurgent Urbanism” here is understood as alternative urban development trajectories to the Global North experiences. Although the Global South’s Insurgent Urbanism has been perceived as not decent, not up to standards, there is recognition of many good elements of this urbanism.
Based on this Insurgent Urbanism, urban ecology of the Global South differs greatly from that of the Global North. Taking the broader definition of urban ecology as comprising built elements, population and its culture, as well as nature, the configuration of these helps us understand the differences that perhaps unify urban ecologies of Africa and South America more than between Africa and Europe. The foundation of the different urban ecologies in the Global South lies in the terrestrial ecologies on which the urban areas were superimposed. As with many cities in North America and Europe, cities in the Global South were strategically built on river transport ways, strategic inland points (for economic reasons), coastal zones, mountainous areas, and in desert environments (for economic resource extraction). These defined the inherent elements of the urban ecologies on which were weaved built components that determine the green patches; waterways; wetlands; road islands with various forms of configuration as linear objects; circular, discrete patches; and/or corridors of nature that serve various purposes.
The foundation also determines how urban populations and the various cultures relate with natural elements. There are patches that are tethered through urban planning or infrastructure development, but many are remnants of natural areas that form a unique mosaic of urban ecology, including public green spaces, water canals, valued environmental components (such as wetlands, hilltops and urban forests). The tethered patches also include plot-level landscaping and manicuring. An interesting feature of urban ecology is the definition of “public spaces”, which differs between Global North and Global South. Public areas in a state-led tethering of space are often planned, protected, and maintained by the municipal authority. Though these spaces have generated more contestations lately, with expression of civil rights’ views as in the case of Nairobi, for example, and the Wangari Maathai greenbelt movement. On the other hand, “public” in a largely “informal” city is not limited to publically defined spaces, but to all space, including private spaces that dwellers can make use of in any way, even if, by law, such use infringes on the protected rights of the territorial owner, as is largely the case in Kampala. There seem to be various informal rules of utilization of such spaces that differ from in Global North.
Patterns of change
Another difference is in relation to peri-urban areas that, across the Global South, have undergone tremendous spatial, social, and environmental change. As is the case in Kampala, these areas have the characteristics of spontaneous developments, with a mix of distinct agricultural patches. This change is converting large areas to urban uses, but in a fragmented matter. Peri-urban areas are presenting more theoretical and definitional challenges, with a character that makes it useless to distinguish between “urban” and “rural’ characteristics” in these areas.
The maze of land use activities seems to display configurations of ecological patches of different forms. Thus, urban ecological fragmentation is one feature that both unifies the Global North and South, while simultaneously distinguishing between them. For example, in Kampala, the fragmentation of urban nature is a significant feature of urban development, just as in other cities. The reason for this continued fragmentation is that most urban areas are founded on earlier urban development principles and structures, among which is the separation of “incompatible” land uses. But this process is broken by spontaneous developments that disregard separated “urban uses”, such as industry, residential, and commercial zones aiming to create a mosaic of uses at various scales of development.
To generate solutions, contemporary planning of cities is slowly embracing the “planning with nature” principle, which is motivated by recent discourse on global environmental change. For this reason, any attempt to compare urban ecology of the Global North with the Global South leads to more questions than answers. From a practical point of view, it is important that the differences between the two are recognized and enhancement of urban ecology builds on the nature of urban imprints in the South. Urban ecological planning is one possible approach to enhancing the Southern cities’ ecosystems services and the relations between nature and people. This approach takes the situation, resources, and conditions into consideration while developing contextual solutions, as opposed to superimposing solutions from elsewhere.
References
S. Lwasa, Planning innovation for better urban communities in sub-Saharan Africa: The education challenge and potential responses, Town Reg. Plan. 60 (2013) 38–48.
H. Ernstson, S.E. Leeuw, C.L. Redman, D.J. Meffert, G. Davis, C. Alfsen, et al., Urban Transitions: On Urban Resilience and Human-Dominated Ecosystems, AMBIO. 39 (2010) 531–545.
Habitat, UN 2009 Planning Sustainable cities—Global Report on Human Settlements 2009. Earthscan, London.
Lwasa, Shuaib, Frank Mugagga, Bolanle Wahab, et al. 2014 Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture and Forestry: Transcending Poverty Alleviation to Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Urban Climate 7: 92–106.
Fadi has more than 25 years of international experience in analysing the interaction between development, urbanism, disaster risk, climate change, conflict, and state fragility. Fadi cooperates with various companies, cities, and countries to protect people, assets, and the environment
Fadi Hamdan
Human beings living both in the Global South and the Global North aspire to live in sustainable, livable, resilient, and just cities. Guiding principles for achieving this include recognizing and studying how cities are both drivers of, and driven by, ecological processes within and beyond their boundaries.
Weak governance within and between cities acts as a barrier against developing and implementing a unified vision and strategy to achieve just cities.
Before trying to identify convergent and divergent challenges, opportunities, and methodologies in urban ecology between the Global North and the Global South, it is first necessary to select an indicator which can act as a measure of on which side of the gap the country is located. One such indicator is the Human Development Index (or HDI), used to develop the Human Development Report, and put forward by the UNDP (http://report.hdr.undp.org/). In this report’s definition, HDI is calculated based on three main variables, namely: 1) the health dimension, which is assessed by life expectancy at birth; 2) the education dimension, which is measured by mean number of years of schooling for adults aged 25 years and more, and expected years of schooling for children of the age to enter school; and 3) the standard of living dimension, which is measured by gross national income per capita.
However, the HDI simplifies and captures only part of what human development entails; in particular, it does not reflect on inequalities, poverty, human security, empowerment, access to the decision-making process, and governance in general. Even the Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index (or IHDI), addresses inequalities in the health, education and income dimensions, while falling short of scrutinising governance arrangements. In this sense, the HDI can be viewed as a measure of human development outcome. Notwithstanding the importance of the above, for the purposes of this debate, what is needed is a measure of inputs (e.g. governance arrangements that lead to certain policies) that can produce countries with the same Gross National Income per capita, while nevertheless having very different human development and urban ecology outcomes. The remainder of this short contribution will therefore focus on the effect of urban governance on urban ecology.
Human activity within city boundaries is related to the use, production, and distribution of natural resources including water, land, air, and minerals. This human activity leads to a particular distribution of benefits; exposure to risks; vulnerabilities; and risks and losses due to disasters, climate change, and interaction with the environment in general. Different political systems lead to differences in the 1) mechanisms for decision-making (regarding the human activities above), 2) gate keepers guarding access to new ideas in the decision-making forum, and 3) legal and illegal forms of formal and informal lobbying, amongst others. In weak governance countries, limited debate takes place in the decision-making forum regarding what constitutes a “just” use and distribution of benefits and vulnerabilities. Furthermore, there are few checks and balances in place to prevent one sector (e.g. the banking and real estate sector) to become a dominant sector, driving policies and activities at the detriment of other “pro-poor, job-rich” sectors such as the industrial and agricultural sectors. Hence, in order to understand internal mechanisms affecting the driving forces of interaction between human society and urban ecology, it is necessary to closely examine and scrutinize urban governance.
Another related issue is the effect of globalisation on urban governance, in both weak and good governance countries. While globalisation (in the form of the free movement of goods, services, and capital) exerts pressures on urban governance, countries and cities with good urban governance arrangements are better equipped to resist these pressures, and to ensure transparent and participatory debates in the decision-making forum. Conversely, weak governance arrangements within cities (usually in the Global South) render them ill-equipped to deal with the pressures of globalisation on urban governance arrangements and on urban ecology. Hence, urban ecology methodologies and urban indicators must try to address these differences.
More recently, various international and regional aid agencies are carrying out initiatives for improving the resilience in cities, where Terms of Reference (or ToR) are drafted and international consultancies are selected based on a competitive bid process. While these initiatives are devised based on ToRs that aim to protect the stakeholders’ interests (i.e., the inhabitants of the city under consideration), more often than not, in the context of weak urban governance, the recommendations shift towards representing shareholders’ interests (of both local and international consultancies) leading to a shift in focus to capital-intensive investments in security and major infrastructure in rich urban areas, with limited benefits to the most vulnerable.
Along the same lines, the use, production and distribution of resources beyond city boundaries, at the global level, leads to a particular distribution of benefits, risks, and losses within the city. Due to inter-city, and inter-country governance arrangements, cities in the Global South have very little say in, and limited access to, the decision-making process in the Global North, but are often detrimentally affected by this process (e.g. the issue of climate change on Small Island Developing States, or the role of a particular city in global supply chain economics).
Urban ecology poses challenges to the whole of humanity, which is an opportunity for human societies to unite along good urban ecology principles. However, weak governance intra- and inter- cities and countries acts as a barrier against developing, and/or implementing a unified vision and strategy. The way forward is to develop and refine contextualized good urban governance principles and indicators within and between cities, and then to monitor and lobby for their implementation.
Yvonne is an Urban Greening & Climate Resilience Strategist who works with Royal Commission for Riyadh City.
Yvonne Lynch
Knowledge of the ecology of urbanization has been missing until recently. Over the past decade, our understanding of the ecology of and in cities has evolved. We’ve never known more than we do now, so how we create resilient and sustainable cities for the future will largely depend on the application and further development of this knowledge.
In the Global South and geographic south, our common challenge is responding to rapid growth trajectories whilst protecting our ecosystems
Urbanization is an uneven development process, both temporally and geographically, with differences in patterns of growth and change across the globe. However, we can make some generalizations; the future development trajectory for cities is markedly different in the North versus South. In the Global South and geographic south, our cities are expanding at an unprecedented rate and will accommodate most of the planet’s growing population. In fact, 37 percent of predicted urban growth is expected to take place in three countries by 2050: China, India, and Nigeria.
The North is predominantly, but not exclusively, experiencing a process of de-densification. Shrinking cities are located primarily in Europe, the U.S., and Japan. Whilst population decline is not limited to the North, this is an issue that mainly Northern cities will have to grapple with, particularly in terms of its implications for urban ecology.
If one was to posit a core unifying element of an urban ecology of the Global South and the geographic south, it is that our common challenge of responding to rapid growth trajectories whilst protecting our ecosystems will provide a new paradigm for urban ecology beyond what we have known to date.
We need to understand how we curb the negative effects of aggressive urban sprawl on ecosystems. Australia is home to some of the fastest growing cities in the developed world, but over 40 percent of nationally threatened ecological communities and more than 50 percent of threatened species occur in urban fringe areas, which means many of our threatened ecosystems are verging on the brink of extinction. Recent investments in integrated research programs and partnerships will shape and inform Australian urban policy for how we manage this challenge. Our researchers are also working to understand how over 40,000 years of Aboriginal knowledge can inform our approach to urban ecology. How we embrace the cultural and social diversity implicit in the fabric of our cities, particularly indigenous knowledge, to shape a modern urban ecology has the potential to be a defining opportunity for many cities in the Global South and geographic south.
We also need to understand how we can avoid green gentrification of our cities and ensure ecosystem service provision is equally distributed for all urban residents. Ultimately, the urban poor will remain located in the Global South. Minimizing social inequalities will define the resilient city of the future. In South America, we can find some great examples of addressing inequality. Curitiba has approximately 52 m² of green space per capita—the highest urban green space ratio in world. The city was transformed into a global model of sustainability through strong leadership and the revision of land use planning in tandem with a suite of supporting environmental initiatives. Bogotá Humana is Bogota’s local government urban development plan, outlining policies to address climate change and growth in a manner that prioritizes ecosystem services.
As we build the cities for the future, we will spend an estimated US$5 trillion per annum in the coming decades to provide basic levels of infrastructure. The question is, what kind of infrastructures will we provide? Singapore provides a leading example for urban ecology, where green infrastructure is very much on par with grey infrastructure and shows how a city can increase its vegetation cover and minimize biodiversity impacts whilst doubling its population. In 2012, Beijing made a bold investment in green infrastructure, committing over US$4.7 billion to construct 67,000 hectares of trees around the city to minimize air pollution.
Ultimately, city collaboration will provide a unifying framework for urban ecology because, in a time of unprecedented global change, learning from contemporaries will be the key to success. Climatic similarities may take precedence over other similarities as cities adapt to and grow with climate change. Therefore, we may see increased collaboration for urban ecology between cities facing similar climate change impacts.
For now, the lack of common datasets in cities, which would allow for comparative analysis of urban ecologies, remains an issue. This lack of data is even problematic for how we define cities. As digital transformation sweeps our cities, now is the time to unlock the opportunity technology holds for enhancing our understanding of urban ecology.
Dr Colin Meurk, ONZM, is an Associate at Manaaki Whenua, a NZ government research institute specialising in characterisation, understanding and sustainable use of terrestrial resources. He holds adjunct positions at Canterbury and Lincoln Universities. His interests are applied biogeography, ecological restoration and design, landscape dynamics, urban ecology, conservation biology, and citizen science.
Colin Meurk
There is another kind of “south”; biologically special in one way, but disadvantaged in another. This is the “islands versus continents” divide. The vast majority of the world’s ecological literature, as well as conservation philosophy, methodology, and investment is generated from the (affluent) population centres of the northern hemisphere continents and tropics—or continental islands such as the British Isles—with long histories of mammalian and human occupation.
The north-south question is one of the world’s “wicked problems”.
New Zealand is a south Pacific mini-continent that has been isolated, as a sliver of ancient Gondwana, for the past 65 million years—missing out on the land mammal thing. Accordingly, primeval New Zealand was a bird/lizard/macro-invertebrate driven ecosystem. There are pollinator bats, sea mammals, and there were once large colonies of land-nesting sea birds that transported nutrients to the mainland, compensating for the oceanic leaching climate. No part of NZ is more than 150 km from the coast. When people arrived a mere millennium ago, and brought the first of a host of introduced predators, natural systems were decimated, especially the ground-dwelling wildlife.
The historic absence of land mammals had a profound evolutionary influence on the vegetation and bird life and, in particular, resulted in a high proportion of flightless creatures. Compared to continentally-honed ecosystems, the NZ native biota is relatively sluggish and some might say drab (we would say endearing). Organisms evolving in NZ had no need for “rapid response” physiology or a competitive edge, adapted as they were to defoliation by herd herbivores, and having poor fight/flight strategies and reproduction rates for dealing with voracious predators.
This dramatic difference between continental and oceanic ecosystems leads to a need for very different management approaches, but NZ is as much colonised by ideas of nature and landscape from the European homeland as it is by thousands of exotic organisms. This is no more so than in cities, where extinction of experience (Miller) is a significant cultural impediment to recognising that there is a problem to be addressed. And in the hinterland, hunters strongly lobby for wild (exotic) game. They are not “seeing” the exponential destruction caused by introduced organisms. Even the recent fashion of “reconciliation ecology” is a continentally derived philosophic construct. It sounds nice, but in New Zealand’s oceanic, evolutionary context, the end point of ecosystems, left to their own devices (without active management), would almost certainly be one indistinguishable from a globalised northern temperate biome dominated in its early stages by pines, willows, Douglas fir, European sycamore, holly, ivy, gorse, broom, prunus, and blackberry, and European passerines, mustelids, rodents, and cats.
In such circumstances, strategic management, and a culture shift among urban arborists, park managers, and landscape architects, will be essential to maintaining an indigenous/natural character through NZ’s city-scapes. Similar circumstances apply to other, old islands, such as Hawaii, Fiji, Noumea, Madagascar, Galapagos, and Sri Lanka. There are a range of indigenous species that can be used in NZ urban settings, but hitherto the palette has been limited due to lack of experience, a dearth of knowledge, and what has become habitual. It’s simply easier to use the conventional, the tried and true! Although NZ doesn’t have a lot of lawn grasses, nor large flowery herbs for borders or deciduous woodlands, we do have flat herbs with fragrant flowers suitable for mowing; divaricating shrubs that make great hedges and lizard forage; ferns, mosses, and forbs with colourful berries for our evergreen broadleaved canopies with emergent native conifers; and species for stormwater treatment trains including green roofs. There needs to be an aware, “horses for courses” approach to urban biodiversity in New Zealand.
The bigger north-south question is one of the world’s “wicked problems”. This is about the West (the Global North) sharing its wealth and power more equitably (within countries and internationally), but also about being more efficient with a smaller footprint. This is going to depend on learning to live and work with nature and being more connected to it. A greater presence of trees, green space, and functioning ecosystems (eco-parks) is critical to produce the well-known calming influences of “green”, but also for providing “living lessons” for how nature works, how we are a part of it and dependent on it—not separate and in control. In the end, we have to obey natural laws.
So, to address the questions posed—yes, there are differences between the Global North and South, in many senses: inequity and competition for land in poorer or developing countries, a biogeographic difference between the land and water hemispheres, and a broader distinction between continental and oceanic land masses and their biota. NZ is a bit of an outlier. It is one of the affluent first world countries, but has been colonised both by creatures and a culture that are not conducive to protection of our natural heritage. All three issues need to be addressed and managed according to their historic and material circumstances; urban environments are both the battle and learning grounds.
Professor Sue Parnell is an urban geographer in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town and is a founding member of the African Centre for Cities there.
Susan Parnell
Harrowing and destructive experiences of nature in cities of the south undoubtedly emerge from the pervasive poverty and elevated exposure to disease and climate change—this cannot be denied and should be urgently addressed. But, nature-based urban “risk” is a simplistic and overly negative entry point for understanding the distinctive ecology of African cities and towns. Whether as a scholar, policymaker, resident, or traveller between African cities, it is striking how dominant and inspiring nature is and how much it defines the lived experience of the city in positive ways.
In African cities, the greatest threat to the resilience of urban nature is the lack of adequate local government power to curtail the unsustainable lifestyles of the elite.
The rich biodiversity of Africa almost always encroaches on the porous urban edge. Even in big cities such as Kampala, Kinshasa, or Kigali, a nature-based “sense of place” prevails. Because so many African capital cities were first established as colonial ports from which to extract primary goods to the metropolis, river mouths and coastlines dominate the urban form and function—presenting challenges, but also defining local culture and enriching the interface of social, economic, and ecological urban processes.
If you live in an African city that is located in the tropics or south of the Capricorn, your active and direct engagement with nature is rarely entirely mediated by infrastructure designed to insulate people from the vicissitudes of nature, as it is in wealthier northern cities. Unless you are super rich, there won’t be any central heating or air conditioning, but you can open the window and the night stars will be visible in the absence of streetlights. It is possible to clamber down riverbanks to play, wash clothes, or even defecate. Irregular pavements make your shoes dusty and the rainstorms leave puddles and potholes on un-tarred roads—even while they invigorate your senses. Under-spec cheap concrete makes for bumpy surfaces that are tricky for prams or wheelchairs to navigate, but the weakness of the material also allows plants, insects, and small animals to reclaim territory that was once all theirs.
Nature and people do not always compete in the city. The symbiosis that urban greening has reintroduced in northern cities through the post-destruction restoration of nature is often still intact in African cities, leaving the less arduous task of protection and enhancement. Especially in the smaller African towns, embraced by birdsong, it is common to find informal traders or the unemployed sitting under a tree. While far from all produce is locally produced, it is impossible not to notice food being grown along roadsides and in gardens. It is normal for settlement to extend unchecked into a peri-urban fringe where subsistence agriculture provides a precarious livelihood, at least for a few and for some seasons. One characteristic of the southern city, then, is that built and natural systems have not been entirely severed and that nature works for the city dweller.
Nature, despite its power and resilience, cannot escape the realities of weak southern urban governance, which undermine its integrity and may ultimately destroy it. Cocooned in lush, well-tended compound gardens (probably inappropriately planted with water-greedy or invasive alien plants), it is easy to miss the destructive impact of weak government on the apparently nature-loving African urban elite. Excessive consumption (especially of water and power), unchecked sprawl, and pollution are the obvious eco-crimes of the rich across the world, including in the Global South where government is unable or unwilling to curtail excess. In African cities, moreover, there is little effort to mitigate natural damage. Elite resistance to paying city taxes that could improve overall urban ecosystem management, either though basic water and air quality or through more specialized eco measures, such as greening of public spaces or land protection for parks and biodiversity corridors, is widespread across the continent. Possibly the greatest threat to the resilience of urban nature in Africa is the lack of adequate local government power to reign in aspirations of the rich or curtail the unsustainable lifestyles of the elite.
While the disregard of the public good by the rich may be the biggest threat to the integrity of urban ecosystems, nowhere is the impact of the absence of a strong state on natural assets more immediately obvious than in low-income neighborhoods. In the so-called slums or informal areas, such as Phillipi in Cape Town or the infamous Kibera in Nairobi, landlord greed, state neglect, and householder efforts at rodent and insect control have created dystopian urban landscapes that are effectively ecological deserts. Beyond the home, lack of public security and widespread gender-based violence detracts residents from valuing the open spaces on which citywide natural systems depend. Second only to lack of capacity, the southern city lacks public education about the value of nature in the city.
Steward Pickett is a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. His research focuses on the ecological structure of urban areas and the temporal dynamics of vegetation.
Steward Pickett
The ecological science of cities and urban regions is still young. As a science, it seeks to both generalize and to apply to specific places and times. This bifurcated aspiration can lead to problems, since much of the urban ecological insight so far has been generated by accumulating empirical examples. Many of the empirical examples come from the Global North, and there is no guarantee that they will hold outside of the situations that produced them.
Thoughtlessly transporting empirical generalizations or even specific ecological models from North to South won’t help either the science or design.
In fact, the very nature of “the urban” may be tacitly shaped by the history, economies, cultures, and parochiality of experience in the Global North. For example, the very idea that industries and cities develop is a framing that originated in the Global North, but which has been transported across the world. Does it fit? Is it a useful or a constraining background for urban ecology?
To the extent that this framing hides assumptions about the link of industrial and urban development, and that it suggests a deterministic succession of cities, it almost certainly fails. The empirical generalizations of urban ecology must rest on more fundamental understanding of the nature of urban processes and structures. When urban ecological science rises to this goal, it will find its roots to be as deep in the Global South as in its Global North birthplace. The science of urban ecology as an approach, as a theoretical structure whose assumptions must be stated and evaluated, and as a body of generalization that is anchored in the diversity of urban processes, should be as much a Southern as a Northern thing.
“Modifying principles” is a tricky phrase. The most general principles we would hope would be invariant. But the models that explain structure and dynamics in particular regions, or even in different parts of a single urban megaregion, will likely differ. Here’s an example. The concept of the urban heat island is one of the most familiar general principles of urban ecology. It posits that urban cores will be warmer than their surroundings due to the thermal mass of such areas, and to additional effects such as atmospheric boundary layers and reduced evapotranspiration. But when this idea was investigated in Phoenix, AZ, a desert metropolis, researchers found that the city was actually cooler than expected relative to the desert. This was because of the massive subsidy of irrigation water in town, which was available for evapotranspiration during the daylight hours when plants were active. At night, when the plants ceased their photosynthesis and transpiration, the city became much hotter than its surroundings, as the empirical generalization of heat island suggests. So the explanation—the locally relevant model—used the same ideas (or equation) that apply to all urban energy budgets, but recognized that the magnitudes of the different processes differed based on the irrigation subsidy and the associated planted vegetation. The deep principle is universal, while the model is particularized.
If ecologists and practitioners don’t separate the principle from the specific model, we are in danger of transferring empirical generalizations from a place where they work to places where they don’t work. So it is crucial to recognize the deep, process-based differences among cities and urban regions—whether in or between the Global North or South. Science can illuminate how urban social-ecological systems operate and change under any circumstances. But the diversity of circumstances must be better and more consciously incorporated in our models and into our framing of urban taxonomies and trajectories. With such increased subtlety, I would expect urban ecological science to become a trustworthy partner to urban design in the Global South. Thoughtlessly transporting empirical generalizations or even specific ecological models from North to South won’t help either the science or design.
Luis Sandoval is a researcher and professor at Escuela de Biología, Universidad de Costa Rica. His research focuses on urban ecology, animal communication, and behavior and natural history of birds.
Luis Sandoval
When I was invited to join in this roundtable, I start thinking about the possible causes that make countries in the Global North and South different in terms of urban ecology. First, as a tropical investigator, I remembered that the diversity in our region is higher than in the North, that the majority of Southern countries are developing countries and were colonies in the past, and that work and study opportunities are limited in the majority of Southern countries.
Countries in the Global South need to generate information about the importance of urban green areas and distribute that information between city residents and governments.
Then, I started to think about how Costa Rica, despite its recognition as a “green” country (because more than 25 percent of natural habitats are preserved under several protection categories, including national parks, wildlife reserves, or private reserves), has cities that are not growing in-keeping with the pattern that makes the country famous for being ecologically friendly.
The dichotomy between the development of natural areas and urban areas is probably one of the common unifying elements of urban ecology in the majority of countries in the Global South. This may be driven by the land use change that all the developing countries previously experienced, when the natural forest was changed into agricultural lands (plantations and grasslands) next to or in between the main towns. Several generations of city dwellers’ lack of contact with large tracts of forest has made people more open to changing the agricultural lands and the remains of natural habitats into urban developments, especially if the changes contribute to increasing their quality of life. For example, inhabiting a part of the city with limited streetlight and a lot of vegetation makes me insecure and is synonymous with poor development for the majority of people that live in the cities. Consequently, in cities, the lack of green areas (natural or artificial) is not perceived either as a problem or a benefit because people have lost appreciation for those land uses.
Recently, however, the wave of incorporating nature inside cities, with more friendly developments to increase people’s wellness, which started in Northern countries, has permeated Southern countries. This permeability changes country to country and city to city, in relationship to government laws and government interests. Therefore, it is vital that urban ecologists in Southern countries start to generate information on how the lack of green areas (and native species) in cities affects people’s wellness and begin to publicize their findings in a language style that non-scientists understand. This step is essential because if studies show that animal and plant species may be used as indicators of urban ecosystem health, and people know this, they are likely to want to contribute (e.g., change small things) to protect the area. If studies demonstrate that green spaces have cooler temperatures and this saves money in temperature control for houses and buildings, they will plant more trees or avoid cutting the trees that are present in the first place. Additionally, it is key for studies to incorporate citizen science; in this way, people feel more related to habitat and start to create and increase awareness about the importance of one species or remnant habitats.
Countries in the Global South need to start to generate information about the importance of natural and green areas around cities and distribute that information between city residents and governments. Additionally, we must educate the younger generation, as they will influence how countries and cities change to be “greener” in the future.
Seth Schindler is an urban geographer interested in the transformation of cities in the so-called "Global South."
Seth Schindler
Discontinuous metabolic configurations and ungovernable ecologies
Cities are complex metabolic systems sustained by energy and materials that come from elsewhere and whose consumption generates waste. The configuration of cities’ metabolisms is contingent on local politics, resources, technology, and know-how. The configuration of metabolic systems determines what materials and energy are used (e.g. coal, renewable energy, nuclear power), who has access to services and resources, and who is exposed to waste.
Formal infrastructure systems in Southern cities are incomplete and exclusive compared to those of Northern cities.
Furthermore, a city’s metabolic configuration structures its relationship with its hinterland and shapes the localized ecology within the city. For example, a city that runs on coal and cars is less able to relocate environmental hazards (i.e. air pollution) beyond its borders than a city that uses nuclear energy to power public transportation. The former is likely to exhibit poorer ambient air quality with higher levels of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, with concomitant impacts on the city’s ecology.
Cities in the South tend to have metabolisms that differ in quantitative and qualitative ways from cities in the North. Gray infrastructure tends to extend throughout Northern cities and most residents enjoy access. In addition to being inclusive, there is typically a singular way in which urban residents are connected to urban systems. This does not necessarily mean that every Northern city offers universal access to high-quality resources and services, but access does tend to be uniform (although people of color are disproportionately exposed to waste). For example, residents of Flint, Michigan, were uniformly exposed to lead-contaminated water from an inclusive and extensive public water system.
In contrast, formal infrastructure systems in Southern cities tend to be incomplete and limited to central business districts and historically privileged neighborhoods. These limited systems exclude a significant number of city residents, and people are forced to access resources and dispose of waste in a range of creative ways. For example, people living beyond the limited reach of piped water systems must dig borewells, purchase water from formal- or informal-sector entrepreneurs, harvest rainwater, or fetch it from nearby bodies of water. Similarly, many municipal governments in the South have a poor track record when it comes to solid waste management. While only a fraction of solid waste is collected, the remainder is dumped illegally, recycled informally, or burned openly. My point here is not that there is an ideal-type metabolic configuration of Southern cities—on the contrary, there is tremendous diversity with regard to the ways in which material and energy course through Southern cities.
The diversity exhibited by the metabolic configurations of Southern cities inhibits interventions favored by technocrats and city planners in Northern cities (e.g. initiatives that make cities “smart”). Given the limited reach of formal infrastructure, the technological fixes meant to make metabolic systems more efficient or reduce the throughput of energy or resources can only affect a small fraction of a city’s metabolism. Energy and materials that do not move through formal channels escape regulation, and the diversity of ways in which people obtain resources and dispose of waste produce a kaleidoscopic patchwork of localized ecologies.
This cityscape of localized ecologies is not a mirror image of the socio-spatial inequality that characterizes most Southern cities because ecologies will not respond to the disciplinary repertoire used by states to produce populations and maintain their separation (e.g. Apartheid). In spite of efforts to produce particular ecologies, diverse localized ecologies will affect and “contaminate” one another in unpredictable ways. Take, for example, Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay, which happens to be the site of a number of events in the 2016 Olympics as well as the destination of immeasurable amounts of pollutants. A number of rivers traverse neighborhoods that lack sewerage infrastructure, picking up excrement and waste along the way, which ultimately flows into the bay. The point is that while authorities focus on policing and the “pacification” of favelas, they have yet to devise an effective strategy to govern the city’s ecologies. Indeed, the dream of controlling “nature” is nowhere as inconceivable as in the cities that are representative of our urban future.
Dr. Tan Puay Yok is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture in the School of Design and Environment of the National University of Singapore. His research, teaching, and professional activities focus on the policies, science, and practices of urban greening and ecology of the built environment.
Tan Puay Yok
My immediate reaction to this question is that urban ecological principles about how cities function in relation to sustainability, resilience, and liveability, and how cities respond to socio-ecological drivers, should be the key means to unifying our understanding of the urban ecology of and in the Global South and geographic south, and, for that matter, of the north.
Science cannot fully tell us what we ought to do; governance decisions need to also be guided by values such as ethics, equity, and respect.
But though principles can guide urban development, actual outcomes are tempered by complementary or conflicting socio-cultural, socio-political, and socio-economic factors within a framework of city governance. As we seek to apply urban ecological science to the betterment of urban conditions, it is also useful to remember that there is a limit to the application of science. Science cannot fully tell us what we ought to do; governance decisions need to also be guided by values such as ethics, equity, and a respect for the rights of other living things to co-exist with humans.
When I pulled up in my friend’s truck to the tunnel entrance to the Marin Headlands, part of San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, I entered what appeared to be a fine mist of white plant fluff. I turned off the motor and observed. Incidentally, the white plant fluff had wings, and was tumbling frantically in the early afternoon sun. “Less vegetable than animal”, I thought, trying to figure out what I was witnessing.
As a technique for sustainable development, citizen science is a powerful tool that touches on each of the three pillars of sustainability.
When the answer clicked, I smiled to myself. This was the termite flight, a swarm cued by weather. It was to be expected, so I had been told, after the gentle rain that had fallen the previous night—the first “storm” to drop at least a quarter inch of rain (as the termites require) since I had arrived in the Bay Area in July of 2015.
I learned about the termite flight from the formidable Tim Behr, one of the volunteer citizen scientists at my internship with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, a non-profit that monitors the migration of birds of prey as they pass through the Bay Area. As a community science project, the GGRO fosters the transfer of natural history information—about the migration of birds of prey and beyond—between scientists and community members through a long-term migration monitoring effort.
The Marin Headlands, as viewed from Hawk Hill. Photo: Laura Booth
Sharing natural history is just one of the ways that citizen science can facilitate the process of sustainable development as understood within the framework of the three pillars outlined in 1987’s Bruntland Report: economics, society, and the environment.
Citizen science is generally described as the participation of non-scientists in scientific projects. Like many of our other decades-long volunteers at the GGRO, Tim represents the GGRO’s model of citizen science: investing heavily in a group of committed volunteers. But citizen science initiatives are remarkably diverse, ranging in scope from ecological monitoring via bioblitzes (check out those held in Melbourne, London, New York, and San Francisco) to crowd-sourced, online data acquisition about the shape of galaxies.
GGRO volunteers at work. Photo: Ruth Cantwell
Economically, citizen science promotes the expansion of research efforts whose worth is not captured by our current capital-based valuation paradigm. From a financial perspective, understanding bird of prey movements, or constellation shapes, for example, lacks intuitive, direct impact justifying the employment of highly trained scientists. By engaging citizen scientists, these research efforts—which provide community benefits in addition to low-cost data acquisition for managing scientists—can still take place, despite challenging funding landscapes.
The GGRO is a prime example: the cost of staffing our hawk watch and banding programs with professionals each migration season could easily exceed our non-profit budget. By keeping a smaller staff and training a labor base of 300 volunteers, the GGRO has been able to maintain a 30-year research effort on hawks that is unparalleled on the West Coast. This data is vital for the evidence-based management and conservation of North American raptors, who perform an important role as ecological indicators and predators high in the food web. In addition, the process of collecting this data is valuable for maintaining a cultural ecosystem service: citizens obtain satisfaction merely from knowing that birds of prey (particularly such charismatic species as the Bald Eagle, our national symbol, and the Peregrine Falcon, an emblem of ferocity and wildness) persist in their natural habitats. In this sense, citizen science circumvents the problem of our undervaluing of conservation biology by ensuring that essential research goes on—funding be damned.
Future citizen scientists: students from the Marin Horizon School visit Hawk Hill. Photo: Laura Booth
Likewise, citizen science can be an economically efficient way to collect massive amounts of data over time. Take eBird, Cornell’s app for birders, which harnesses the information collected by countless amateur and professional bird watchers to investigate the distribution and abundance of bird species all over the world. eBird-ers submitted more than nine million bird observations in May 2015 alone. No team of biologists could collect data at that scale.
Shorter-term citizen science projects can also have long-term economic implications. For example, bioblitzes—rapid efforts that use volunteers and professionals to catalogue as much of the biodiversity in a designated space, such as a park or neighborhood, as possible—have been employed all over the world to provide baseline estimates of biodiversity in locations where none previously existed, as several TNOC writers have discussed. The data collected by citizen scientists in bioblitzes can be used as preliminary data to justify research proposals to funding agencies, can help inform location-based land management decisions at minimum cost to governmental and non-profit entities, and can alert communities to the imminent loss of species that provide financially valuable ecosystem services.
Publicity for the 2014 Melbourne BioBlitz. Image: www.melbourne.vic.gov.au
Of course, all of these citizen science initiatives support sustainability through the benefits they provide to the environment.
In the case of the GGRO, citizen scientists are collecting information on the health of ecological indicator species. By virtue of their high trophic position, birds of prey tend to be affected by environmental contaminants before the damage of those contaminants manifests in other species; in this sense, problems for raptor populations can act as an early warning for problems afflicting entire ecosystems. This was exactly what happened in the 1960s, when the widespread use of the pesticide DDT caused eggshell thinning and population crashes in several species of raptors—a phenomenon famously elucidated by Rachel Carson in her book, Silent Spring. Today, our volunteers are assisting in the research of a different environmental contaminant: rodenticides, the active chemicals in rat poison, which bio-accumulate in predators and which may be impacting species at all levels of the food web.
Generally speaking, online applications—such as eBird and iNaturalist—and bioblitzes make use of citizen scientists for ecological and biodiversity monitoring. Both of these activities are essential for rapidly increasing our knowledge of ecosystem function and community ecology, as well as for assessing conservation threats.
In addition to biological applications, citizen science can provide data and labor support for land-use and planning. One such example is TreesCount2015!, a citizen-science based initiative that Phil Silva has described at TNOC, and which aims to map every single street tree in New York City.
Citizen scientists measure trees as part of TreesCount2015. Photo: @healthforyouths on Twitter.
You’re probably still wondering where, exactly, the termites factor into my citizen science story.
My personal fascination with citizen science stems from its ability to unite the environmental and social facets of the sustainable development challenge.
Through much of this post, I have used my current internship with the GGRO as a case study in the relationship between a citizen science-based initiative and sustainability. And when I encountered the termite flight on my drive home, the linkage of the social and environmental benefits of citizen science became clear in my mind.
As a recent transplant to California, I knew almost nothing about its natural history, let alone its entomological history. The only reason I could correctly identify the termite flight was because of my friendship with one of GGRO’s volunteers. Were the GGRO a strictly professional organization, employing only avian biologists, I may never have had that delightful nugget of natural history passed on to me.
GGRO volunteers in conversation on the Hill. Photo: Nelia White.
Although no formalized assessments of the social impact of the GGRO on the local community, or even within its community of volunteers, have been published, the impact of such work is qualitatively obvious. It builds a community that coheres around experience in and stewardship of the environment.
In each of the examples I’ve given, scientists—biological, social, and astrophysical, among others—have joined with laypersons to gather a little bit more information about the world we share. Such initiatives have the power to rally various kinds of previously disengaged communities around science and the natural world, and to spread the creativity and wonder of science both to groups that traditionally have not had access to science and to future generations.
And although citizen science is far from a panacea for the disillusionment of the public from environmental issues, I believe it has substantial power to reconnect individuals to their environment—and to engage them in fighting back against the many dangers humans pose to it.
Story Notes: House sparrows, rock pigeons, and red-tailed hawks are three bird species that have successfully—and very visibly—adapted to life in cities. Yet as the number and the size of cities across the globe continues to grow, more birds find themselves dealing with the challenges and the opportunities of urban life. While some species find ways to take advantage of living near humans, up to a billion birds die each year after flying into glass buildings, according to the American Bird Conservancy. Architects, engineers, and planners in some cities are working to make the built environment more bird friendly, adapting to the needs of our feathered neighbors.
White Crowned Sparrow.
This podcast episode, produced by Philip Silva, checks in with Kim Todd, a science journalist and the author of Sparrow, a book that explores the social and natural history of a tiny bird with an oversized representation in poetry, song, and theater from the past two thousand years.
We hear from Dr. Christine Sheppard, a scientist with the American Bird Conservancy and co-author of the organization’s Bird-Friendly Building Design guidelines. While Todd’s writing investigates the ways different bird species are adjusting to human habitats, Sheppard’s book—co-written with TNOC contributor Glenn Phillips—collects insightful examples of buildings purposefully designed to make urban life easier for birds.
Finally, we hear from Jennifer Sánchez Acosta, an environmental educator at Parque La Liberated in San José, Costa Rica, where the first annual Urban Bird Festival recently introduced city dwellers to more than fifty bird species found within city limits. Educators at Parque La Liberated hope that residents of San José can grow to appreciate the diversity of birds living alongside them—and, perhaps, take steps to help make the city more bird friendly over time.
The Orange Cube, in Lyon, France, was created by Jakob+ MacFarlane, Architecture and is a bird-friendly design.
I recently spent a month in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and have been reflecting on my experience ever since. Chiang Mai is a beautiful and vibrant city, rich in culture and history. The Buddhist religion permeates every aspect of the city and surrounding countryside, with temples and symbols of Buddhism everywhere.
Does Chiang Mai’s portrayal of elephants as domesticated beasts of burden influence how tourists and Thai citizens perceive elephants today?
Elephants are closely associated with Thai Buddhism, and nowhere is the symbol of the elephant on more prominent display than in Chiang Mai—the country’s cultural heart of Buddhism. Images of elephants surround you, and it is easy to understand the prominent place that the elephant plays in the lives of Thai people. The Asian elephant is also the national animal of Thailand and its popular portrayal in stone, ceramic, murals, fashion, jewelry, and art is inescapable.
Elephants guarding a Buddhist shrine at Buak Haad Park in the Old City of Chiang Mai. Photo: Lynn WilsonElephant mural on laneway in Old City of Chiang Mai. Photo: Lynn Wilson
What is the essence of the Thai elephant, and what is its meaning in a modern global society? This is an especially germane subject for the largely urban tourists who flock to Chiang Mai from around the world—most of whom, it might be fair to say, have had few, if any, experiences with real elephants. Arguably, opinions and feelings about this mysterious “other” may largely be based on pop culture imagery, where portrayals of elephants run the gamut from wise beast to circus clown.
In Chiang Mai, the center of Thai elephant tourism, the chance exists to see real, live elephants in the nearby countryside (they are no longer allowed in the city). The range of tourist offerings is wide—from highly structured captive elephant shows to revelatory one-on-one experiences with rescued elephants in natural forest settings.
How or whether a tourist to Chiang Mai selects a live elephant experience—and what type of experience they choose—could depend in part on the images of elephants encountered in Chiang Mai city. The city has had a close association with elephants since its inception more than 720 years ago, so it is not hard to find eye-catching depictions of elephants around almost every corner. What is striking about these portrayals, though, is that the elephants are almost never shown as wild animals, unencumbered by the trappings of human culture. Instead, they are portrayed as ornate, decorated, subservient beasts obligated to serve human needs.
Elephant at Doi Suthep Temple near Chiang Mai. Photo: Lynn Wilson
Does this constant portrayal of elephants as domesticated beasts of burden subtly influence how modern tourists, and indeed Thai citizens, think of elephants today, and what they might consider as “normal” treatment of elephants, particularly as vehicles for human entertainment? In this capacity, captive elephants are made to paint pictures, make music, kick balls, stand on their heads, roll over, reenact ancient battles, and carry tourists on their backs. Of course, no wild elephant would perform like this, so captive elephants must be taught, normally through harsh methods, to obey commands. This is the dark side of elephant entertainment, and it is fueling a growing demand to experience elephants on their own terms, free from human domination.
The typical portrayal of elephants as beasts of burden in popular culture, and as frequently experienced in the art of Chiang Mai city, likely does have meaning and resonance. With populations of wild elephants rapidly declining in Thailand, and an unending demand for captive elephants to fuel the growing tourism industry, the knowledgeable Chiang Mai traveler can certainly appreciate the historic representation of elephants in Thai culture while choosing not to buy into its current exploitative forms.
A chained elephant replica with a broken tusk. Photo: Lynn WilsonAn elephant float made of flowers at the annual Chiang Mai flower festival in February 2016 celebrating the city’s 720th birthday. Photo: Lynn Wilson
A very brief history of Thai elephants
The Thai people have a long history with the elephant, which can be traced back at least to the Sukhothai period about 700 years ago. The first recorded use of elephants in Thailand, formerly known as Siam, was during the war between King Jhunsri Inthradhit of Sukhothai and King Samchon of Chod, when elephants were used in battle. The Thai people were allowed to capture wild elephants during that time, but the number of domesticated or wild elephants was not recorded. It was known that people had the knowledge and experience to keep and use elephants in the Sukhothai period.
Elephants guard Wat Chedi Luang, a Buddhist temple founded in 1401 and partially destroyed by an earthquake in the 16th century. Photo: Lynn WilsonStone elephant at an orchid show at Buak Haad Park in the Old City of Chiang Mai. Photo: Lynn WilsonA white elephant standing guard at Doi Suthep temple in Chiang Mai. Photo: Lynn Wilson
During King Narai’s reign between 1633 and 1688, King Louis XIV’s envoy to Siam wrote that there were approximately 20,000 domesticated elephants in the Kingdom, and that these animals were used in warfare and were honored with noble titles after a victory of the King’s forces. It was noted that the outcome of ancient wars was in part determined by the number of elephants in its service, with the winning side usually having the most and the largest elephants. Elephants were also used for transportation of people and goods along well-worn routes. It was estimated that during King Narai’s reign, there were approximately 200,000 elephants living in the jungles of Siam (Pimmanrojnagool et al, 2002).
Pimmanrojnagool et al. also note that in the ancient past, people used elephants for everyday life, and the lives of people and elephants were inseparable. However, with colonization by Western powers and the introduction of long-range weapons, the use of elephants in war decreased until they were no longer used in the front lines of battle. The role of captive elephants shifted from war to logging, where they were noted for their ability to pull half of their weight, or about 1,000–2,000 kg. According to Pimmanrojnagool, in Chiang Mai alone, 20,000 elephants were recorded working in the logging industry during the reign of King Rama V the Great (1868-1910), while the demand for additional wild elephants was endless.
Some of the elephants that were captured were “white elephants,” notable for the pale color of their skin. These white elephants legally belonged to the King and were housed in the palace. During the reign of King Rama V, there were 19 white elephants in his palace. Thai Buddhists believe that white elephants generally symbolize the power of the King. Because white elephants symbolized the King’s power, people were encouraged to capture elephants in the hope that white ones would be discovered. A person who hurt or wounded a white elephant would receive the death penalty, as would his family (Pimmanrojnagool et al, 2002). The current King of Thailand, HM King Bhumibol, keeps ten white elephants at the Royal Elephant Stables near Chiang Mai.
Elephants in general have been historically revered by the Thai people, and ancient cultural and artistic representations of them abound in and around Chiang Mai. For instance, the famous Wat Phra Doi Suthep Temple on the outskirts of Chiang Mai was founded in the 14th century at the spot where a legendary white elephant, said to be carrying a holy relic of the Lord Buddha, climbed Doi Oy Chang, or Sugar Elephant Mountain as it was then known, when he stopped near the peak, trumpeted three times, then laid down and passed away. The king ordered the temple to be built at that exact spot, and today a shrine to the sacred white elephant greets visitors to Doi Suthep temple, and every Thai student knows its founding legend. Inside the temple is a series of beautiful mural paintings depicting the life of Buddha, many of which feature domesticated elephants in various scenes along the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment.
At the turn of the 20th century, it was estimated that there were over 100,000 Asian elephants in Thailand, but by the turn of the 21st century, those numbers had precipitously plummeted to less than 5,000. And, of those, only about 1,000 are thought to be left in the wild, almost exclusively in the Khao Yai National Park and the Thungyai-Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuaries in central Thailand. The remaining are domesticated elephants, used predominantly in the tourism industry.
The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as endangered on its Red List of Threatened Animals. Since the 1970s, no license has been issued for capturing wild elephants in Thailand, although habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, and poaching continue to cause elephant numbers to decline in every part of the country. Only 1 percent of the elephant population that existed in King Narai’s reign remains today.
Thai elephant celebrated in a mural at Doi Inthanon National Park, the highest spot in Thailand. Photo: Lynn WilsonElephants in regal repose in a Chiang Mai courtyard. Photo: Lynn WilsonElephants stand guard at the entrance of the Chiang Mai Zoo. Photo: Lynn WilsonA Buddhist shrine at Doi Inthanon National Park with elephants. Photo: Lynn Wilson
In 1989, the Thai Government suspended all logging operations in the country due to severe flooding caused by extensive deforestation. This effectively put domesticated elephants and their mahouts out of work. Unlike wild elephants, which are managed by the Ministry of Forestry, captive or domesticated elephants are considered by law to be the equivalent of draught animals and are treated as private property. As such, they have little protection against being worked by their owners.
With the loss of their traditional role in war and logging, elephants seem to have also lost the noble and revered status they once enjoyed. The cost of maintaining an elephant is high, and Thai society generally considers that a domesticated elephant must earn its keep. With over 2,000 captive elephants in need of food and maintenance, it is not surprising that the Thai government has increasingly turned to the growing tourism industry as a way to manage and maintain the large captive elephant population. Thus, by the vagaries of time and circumstance, the fortunes of captive elephants are now firmly tied to tourism.
Leading up to modern times, images of the elephant have largely continued to reflect back their traditional role as either highly decorated (somewhat mythical) beasts or as domesticated working animals. These images may well suit the artistic sensibilities of their creators, but an inevitable consequence may be a subliminal understanding of the elephant as a service animal. Certainly, artistic representations of decorated, domesticated elephants seem popular with tourists, who face an unending variety of elephant-themed jewelry, clothing, handbags, prints, carvings, cards, statues, and various other portrayals to pick from.
Although many tourists may not question the insertion of captive elephants and their artistic representations into the tourism schema, the relationship has not generally been a happy one for the elephants, with many abuses occurring as elephants are forced to work long hours performing unnatural activities, often under considerably less than optimal conditions. But, with government support for tourism firmly entrenched, and the need to find a new role for elephants to support themselves, one might think elephants’ fates are sealed.
However, new ways of thinking about elephants are beginning to emerge as urban populations the world over start to question the moral and ethical dimensions of this unique human-animal relationship. This change in thinking is increasingly being reflected in the way elephants are portrayed in popular art and culture.
The changing face of elephant tourism in Chiang Mai
Thailand is a prime international tourist destination; it attracted almost 30 million visitors in 2015, many of whom come to northern Thailand to experience authentic Thai and Buddhist culture, the heart of which is in Chiang Mai city and province. As noted, Chiang Mai is also the heart of elephant tourism, offering a range of experiences for tourists.
International tourism has been Thailand’s single biggest foreign exchange earner since the early 2000s, and the need to develop tourism products to suit foreign visitors has included many animal-related offerings. In the Chiang Mai vicinity, there are numerous tiger, monkey, and elephant venues, each offering pre-packaged shows and activities to expectant tourists. Most often these shows involve trained animals performing tricks and stunts in highly controlled settings.
To promote the transition of elephants from logging into tourism, the Thai Government established the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre (TECC) which began as a “Young Elephant Training Centre” for elephants and mahouts, but soon began offering tourist rides and short shows for elephants to display the skills they had learned at the Centre, including skidding and pulling logs, playing musical instruments, and painting pictures. This type of offering has caught on with the private sector and a number of elephant camps have opened up in the Chiang Mai area aimed at the international tourism market.
Because of the fickle nature of international tourism, the TECC has started to explore other avenues to demonstrate the importance of conserving wild and domesticated elephants in Thailand, arguing that tourist rides and tricks “might not be the basis for funding elephant conservation in the longer term” (Duffy, et al, 2010).
A large male elephant at the Chiang Mai Zoo waiting to be fed. Photo: Lynn WilsonAn elephant camp near Chiang Mai offering elephant riding. Photo: Lynn WilsonSeeing eye to eye with an elephant at Elephant Nature Park, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photo: Lynn WilsonEmploying local villagers to care for the elephants at Elephant Nature Park. Photo: Lynn Wilson
Indeed, the TECC has begun to see that the long-term survival of elephants in Thailand might depend more on demonstrating their wider importance to the people of Thailand and to the world, rather than just considering their market value.
Still, as Rosaleen Duffy and Lorraine Moore state (2010, p. 753), very few people in Thailand believe that “culture alone can save the elephant”. Instead, they believe that, due to the high number of captive elephants and the amount of money required to keep a captive elephant, the survival of domesticated elephants will depend on their ability to pay their way, either in the tourism industry or by providing services to people.
As Kontogeorgopoulos argues (2009, p. 443), “Thailand has failed to conserve elephants based on their intrinsic worth as living creatures, and so their future depends on demonstrating their economic importance and utility to human beings.”
That being said, people are trying new and innovative ways to help elephants sustain themselves through tourism. These approaches don’t rely on forced performances and restrictive living conditions. For instance, the approach taken by Sangduen “Lek” Chailert at the world-famous Elephant Nature Park, a 2,000-acre sanctuary outside of Chiang Mai, introduces a concept of promoting elephant conservation through responsible ecotourism which utilizes a nature-based learning experience to help save and sustain more than 40 formerly abused elephants that worked in the logging, entertainment, and tourism industries. This approach provides “learning journeys” for visitors, while also improving the well-being of local villagers (Lin, T., 2012).
This successful model is attracting growing numbers of tourists worldwide, with annual visitor increases of 10-15 percent (Lin, T., 2012). Visits can be booked online or from Chiang Mai. The basic experience at the park is to spend a day or longer with elephants in a natural setting, interacting with the animals on their own terms, without them being forced to perform or to provide rides.
The experience of standing or walking next to a free elephant is overwhelming in its simple power. It teaches respect, empathy, and compassion for these gentle giants who have endured so much in their lifetimes. This non-traditional use of elephants was resisted at first by local Thai people, who were accustomed to more mainstream tourist offerings. However, the idea is slowly catching on as it proves to be an economically viable model (Lin, T., 2012). It offers an alternative path forward for humans and elephants, whose lives and fates are inextricably woven together in this region.
Art and life
Does art imitate life or life imitate art? In the case of elephant portrayals in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand, both are true. The depictions of elephants to be found in every corner of the city certainly reflect the historic role of elephants as beasts of burden.
One of the ancient murals depicting Buddha and an elephant at Wat Doi Suthep near Chiang Mai. Photo: Lynn WilsonModern elephant art at the night market in Chiang Mai city. Photo: Lynn Wilson
As we have seen, in the ancient past, wild elephants were captured for the King and achieved noble status for their bravery in war. They were revered by Buddhists as symbols of the King’s power, and elephants were portrayed carrying Buddha himself in exquisite murals found at the revered Wat Phra Doi Suthep temple outside of Chiang Mai. Elephants were important in building the Thai economy through their role in logging and transportation, and, more recently, in international tourism. The art of elephants in Chiang Mai certainly reflects this utilitarian view of elephants, while also managing to imbue them with majestic power and inward grace.
A happy and free elephant at Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai. Photo: Lynn Wilson
More recently, different conceptualizations of elephants have started to come to the fore, with more considered and nuanced ideas of elephants and their relationship to humans. The newest art in Chiang Mai portrays elephants in more natural—albeit colorful—unadorned poses, with no trace of material culture attached to their bodies. Is life starting to imitate this type of art? And, how might these new artistic renderings of elephants in the city influence the way people choose to experience the real thing?
From Chiang Mai’s vibrant street markets, where large, colorful paintings of unencumbered elephants dominate, to the epiphanies to be found by interacting with freed elephants at the Elephant Nature Park, the tide may be turning for the captive elephants of Chiang Mai. Let’s hope so—there is not a moment to waste in transforming our relationship to these magnificent creatures into one of dignity.
Through its evolving artistic and cultural depictions, images of elephants continue to imbue Chiang Mai with a magical realism that is hard to resist. Let’s now transfer this into meaningful action on behalf of the real elephants of Chiang Mai.
For a state surrounded by fresh water, Michigan, in the northern United States, certainly has had its share of water woes lately. Michigan’s water has always been our crowning glory; from our geography to our automobile license plates, the Great Lakes define us. As we hit the height of summer, you can hear the State’s “Pure Michigan” advertising campaign everywhere as it beckons visitors to the mitten-shaped state surrounded by five immense, freshwater lakes.
Michigan and its neighbors should return to the idea of Great Lakes water as a Commons to protect fresh water in the region.
Unfortunately, on most days, you can also find news about lead-poisoned water in Flint, Detroit’s water shut-offs, beach closings caused by contaminated water, or the threat of water exports. Add to this the decades-old issues of industrial and agricultural pollutants in the watershed, combined sewer overflows, and the emerging issues of stormwater assessments and water access for agriculture and landscape maintenance, and it becomes abundantly clear that water is a major issue in the Great Lakes State.
Lake Huron at Sunset. Photo: Rebecca Salminen Witt
The Great Lakes that surround Michigan’s peninsulas contain 20 percent of the fresh water surface on the planet. The lakes rest on the border of the United States and Canada, and the Great Lakes basin is home to about 34 million people who depend on these waters for drinking. The five Great Lakes were formed 10,000 years ago as the glacier that covered the northern U.S. receded and melted, leaving water-filled depressions in its wake. Given that these lakes hold six quadrillion gallons of water, it is easy to see how generations of people have viewed the great lakes as a resource that could never be compromised or exhausted. In fact, in the early part of the 20th century, the lakes were intentionally used to dispose of all kinds of waste. Lake Erie was probably the most seriously impacted by this practice. Shallower and smaller than the other lakes, Lake Erie became so polluted that one of its tributaries (the Cuyahoga River) famously caught fire in 1969. Rivers in Chicago, Buffalo, and Detroit burned as well, a situation chronicled by John Hartig in his book, Burning Rivers – Revival of the Four Urban-Industrial Rivers that Caught on Fire. In recent decades, a concerted effort has been made to clean up the Great Lakes, as well as the watersheds within the Great Lakes basin after the Clean Water Act of 1972 set the stage for continuous progress toward making sure that our fresh water resources are protected.
Conservation is essential, but questions of access have been grabbing the spotlight recently. Waukesha, Wisconsin was recently granted permission to siphon water from Lake Michigan for its residents, re-igniting a controversy that has been simmering since 1999, when the Canadian government revoked a permit that would have allowed millions of gallons of water from Lake Superior to be shipped to China. That protest still echoes in the voices of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, which is calling attention to a Nestle water-bottling plant in Stanwood, MI.
Another kind of access issue has risen in Detroit, Michigan where decades of inconsistent enforcement and unpaid bills led the water department to act on thousands of shut off-notices sent to residents during the summer of 2014. Water and sewerage costs in that city are also threatening the future of urban agriculture, long held up as one of the mechanisms of Detroit’s burgeoning comeback. In Flint, Michigan, residents discovered in late 2015 that their drinking water had been infused with lead after a series of governmental interventions. Since then, water testing across the country has revealed that the presence of lead in urban drinking water is a widespread problem, leading to questions of safety and environmental justice in access to water.
In June 2016, council members of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact (“the Great Lake Compact”) voted to allow the city of Waukesha, Wisconsin (a city lying outside of the Great Lakes watershed), to purchase 8.2 million gallons of water per day from Oak Creek Wisconsin (a city located inside the Great Lakes watershed), which draws its water from Lake Michigan. Waukesha applied for the diversion because its water is currently drawn from a deep-water aquifer with unsafe levels of radium. Radium is a naturally occurring element common in ground water pumped from sandstone aquifers. As an aquifer is drained over time, water is pumped from deeper in the aquifer, increasing the amount of radium dissolved in the water. Lifetime exposure to elevated radium levels can result in an increased risk for cancer.
The Great Lakes Compact was formed in 2008 by the eight states and two Canadian provinces that border the Great lakes. The Compact regulates water conservation and uses in the Great Lakes Basin and provides that any diversion must be approved by a unanimous vote of the council members. The council is comprised of the governors of all eight member-states. Never before had the council voted to allow a diversion of water to a community outside of the Great Lakes Basin. The use was allowed in this case because the city of Waukesha is located in a county that includes property within the watershed, and the Council determined that Waukesha had exhausted its alternatives. Additionally, the city promised that 100 percent of the water it used would be treated and returned to the lake, convincing the Council that diversion was an acceptable option.
Opponents to Waukesha’s petition were not convinced that Waukesha had exhausted its options, noting that water can be treated to neutralize radium. They cited concerns that the treated water, which will be returned to Lake Huron via the Root River, could be contaminated by the chemicals used to treat it after use, harming both the Root River and Lake Michigan. They also argued that the diversion creates a dangerous precedent in a time when fresh water is becoming increasingly coveted around the world.
As the world’s population grows, fresh water will continue to grow in value. Great Lakes water has already had decades of diversion pressure. In fact, the Great Lakes Compact was created to regulate use of Great Lakes water after several American and Canadian companies sought to export lake water for sale as drinking water. In one instance, a Canadian company planned to sell 160 million gallons of Lake Superior water to a client in China. In another instance, a partnership between a Canadian and a U.S. company was formed to siphon five billion gallons of fresh water a year from a glacier-fed lake in Sitka, Alaska. This water would also have been shipped in bulk to China for drinking. In 1999, the Canadian government revoked both permits before the planned diversion. This narrow miss alerted the states and provinces surrounding the Great Lakes to a gap in regulatory strategies, leading to a discussion of whether Great Lakes water should be considered a Commons protected by law as a Public Trust that is the property of the public, which cannot be denied access to it. As proposed by Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, in her paper “Our Great Lakes Commons: A People’s Plan to Protect the Great Lakes Forever”:
“A Great Lakes Basin Commons would reject the view that the primary function of the Great Lakes is to promote the interests of industry and the powerful and give them preferential access to the Lakes’ bounties. It would embrace the belief that the Great Lakes form an integrated ecosystem with resources that are to be equitably shared and carefully managed for the good of the whole community.”
The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2008, but like most policy initiatives, it includes a variety of exceptions and loopholes that prevent it from creating a Great Lakes Commons as Barlow proposes. One of these loopholes permits water from the Great Lakes from being labeled a “product,” allowing it to be bottled and then sold outside of the Great Lakes basin. This loophole makes it possible for Nestle Corporation to operate a bottling plant in Stanwood, MI, which bottles water from Lake Michigan aquifers in Western Michigan for sale as Ice Mountain drinking water.
Noting environmental issues that this practice was generating in the watershed, the conservation group, Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, brought suit against the corporation in 2000 to stop a planned expansion of Nestle’s operations. This suit resulted in a 2009 settlement that permanently limits the amounts and rate of extraction of water by Nestle’s operation. However, questions about the public policy implication of allowing a private company to bottle and profit from the sale of a public resource have continued even after the settlement. The discussion reached a boiling point once again in late 2015 as the citizens of Flint, Michigan found themselves turning to the bottled water for sale in their local stores as an alternative to the lead-infused water that was flowing from their taps.
Flint residents have had a particularly painful 24-month lesson in the value of clean, safe drinking water. For years, Flint had received its water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, sourced from Lake Huron. In April, 2014, Flint’s water source was switched to the Flint River in a cost-saving maneuver orchestrated by an Emergency Manager appointed by Michigan’s governor. Within two weeks, residents were complaining about water quality, noting skin rashes, as well as discoloration and poor taste of the water. For months thereafter, governmental officials—ranging from the Mayor’s office, to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to the federal Environmental Protection Agency—assured Flint’s citizens that their water was safe. (Check out the timeline for the Flint Water Crisis here.) Health concerns escalated, including an outbreak of Legionnaires Disease, skin rashes, and finally findings of escalated lead levels in blood tests of Flint children.
All of these problems were eventually traced to the switch to Flint River water and the subsequent decisions about how to prepare the water for public consumption. Like many inland rivers in northern urban areas, Flint River water is highly corrosive as a result of a high concentration of chloride ions present in water that has filtered through soil saturated with salt from winter road de-icing practices. Ignoring the chemistry of the water, the City of Flint made a cost-saving decision not to add a common anti-corrosive agent to it. As a result, the water corroded pipes containing lead or lead solder, which were a component of Flint’s water infrastructure. Lead leached from those pipes into drinking water, causing elevated blood lead levels and a variety of other illnesses. Meanwhile, Flint residents were still being charged for the lead-infused tap water, and they were also purchasing bottled water for use in their homes. When news of Flint’s poisoned water hit the media, the country rose to support Flint, donating millions of bottles of water for distribution. Many corporate citizens, including Nestle Corporation, joined the effort to provide safe drinking water to the citizens of Flint.
Photos of Flint water aid inevitably showed cases upon cases of bottled water. This led to more questions: Why was Nestle allowed to pump clean public water for free in order to bottle and sell it when residents were forced to pay for poisoned water? Why were Flint residents forced to keep paying for water they couldn’t use? How could this happen in a city located only 70 miles from Lake Huron, one of the largest sources of fresh water on the planet? Shouldn’t residents have the same right as Nestle to pump clean, safe drinking water for free?
In April 2014, residents of Detroit, Michigan found themselves asking that very same question as they experienced another kind of water crisis. At that time, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department announced its intent to turn off water service to 140,000 Detroit residents for non-payment of water bills. News of the shut-offs spread worldwide and the conversation quickly turned to whether water was a service or a human right. Protests were organized, and the United Nations declared Detroit the site of an international humanitarian emergency. Eventually, the City of Detroit issued a moratorium on shut-offs and created new programs to aid customers with delinquent water bills. Still, for some residents, there simply is not enough aid and each spring more shut-offs are announced; 50,000 homes have been disconnected so far, and the question of whether water is a human right continues to be debated.
In an ironic twist of fate, many of these same Detroit residents are dealing with another kind of water problem: flood waters that invade their homes during heavy rains. Detroit has a combined sewer system, meaning that its sanitary sewers and its storm sewers combine on the way to Detroit’s water treatment facilities. This system is aging, and in many areas it is inadequate. The result is that in heavy rains, stormwater overwhelms the system, causing it to overflow. This sends water from the street, and water from residents’ sinks, showers, and toilets flooding into the streets, basements, and rivers of the city. Detroit has been ordered to eliminate these so-called combined sewer overflows (or CSOs) and it has begun to implement solutions. Still, many of the same residents who are getting their drinking water shut off are also forced to deal with unwanted stormwater whenever it storms.
Nature, in the form of green infrastructure, offers one solution to this problem. The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department has begun to install a variety of storm water reclamation treatments on vacant property in areas where CSOs are common. The Department is working with communities and non-profit groups like The Greening of Detroit to plant trees, build roadside bioswales, and create vacant lot plantings designed to work like giant sponges, all with the objective of absorbing or diverting stormwater before it reaches street-side storm sewers.
These treatments are useful as models for urban property owners who want to implement similar treatments on their own property. The desire for such beneficial landscaping, especially in commercial and industrial settings, is growing and should continue to escalate as a result of a stormwater surcharge that will soon be imposed on all property owners. The surcharge will be based on the ratio of impervious to pervious surface on a single piece of property. Where properties are covered by large buildings and acres of asphalt or concrete parking lots, these fees will be astronomical. Property owners will be induced to reduce the amount of runoff from the impervious surfaces on their property, and solutions such as parking lot bioswales, green roofs, and pervious pavers are all cost-saving opportunities just waiting to be planted.
A Detroit farm, situated in an underutilized park. Photo credit: The Greening of Detroit.
In fact, much of Detroit is in the process of being planted. Detroiters have realized that with abandonment comes space, and with space comes opportunity. By planting their vacant spaces with forests, prairies, bioswales, and farms, Detroiters are making their property more valuable and their lives better. But they are also realizing that all of these solutions require water, and in Detroit, the water they need to keep their plantings alive is safe and clean and available, but it isn’t free. In fact, it’s pretty expensive. Water bills for landscaping and agriculture can run to thousands of dollars a month, and even in the off-season, the charge for sewerage is substantial. At one of The Greening of Detroit’s farms, pictured above, a $20 monthly water usage fee garnered a $596 sewerage fee. For a community organization or a small-scale farmer, an expense like this can quickly put an opportunity out of reach. In a city where there are plenty of social issues to concern residents, one local farmer recently listed his water bill as his biggest worry.
This is a particularly poignant problem because urban agriculture has been hailed as a solution to so many urban ailments. In Detroit, urban farming has been lauded as the answer to a well-publicized food security problem, as well as a mechanism to connect community residents and engage them in the civic revitalization of their city. It has also been recognized as a contributor to Detroit’s economic revitalization, acting as a beacon that has attracted young chefs and visionary restaurateurs to make Detroit one of the country’s hottest food scenes. In Flint, the role of urban agriculture is even more important. In a city that is as distressed as Detroit ever was, where food security is still an issue, and where a generation of children will suffer from the effects of lead poisoning, urban agriculture has the potential to both feed and heal the population.
Students tend a Salsa Garden in Detroit. Photo credit: The Greening of Detroit
A healthy diet rich in vegetables and leafy greens provides iron, calcium, and vitamin C that can keep lead from absorbing into the body. Increasing the amount of vegetables and herbs such as garlic, cilantro, tomatoes, onions, and green peppers after lead poisoning can create a chelating effect, helping to remove lead that has already been absorbed. These same vegetables can help prevent lead from absorbing into the blood. In poor and food insecure cities, urban agriculture is often the best way to help the population heal itself with food. In Detroit, where home-based lead poisoning is common as a result of lead paint in older structures, so-called “Salsa Gardens” containing all of these vegetables are a staple in Detroit school gardens.
Fortunately, Flint, like Detroit, has a rich tradition of urban gardening and a wonderful group of gardening elders who can bring this knowledge to a new generation of people who need it more than ever before. Flint’s water is improving but its community has much healing to do. Urban agriculture can help this process—but water will continue to be a central issue. Gardens cannot be watered with lead-infused water, and, like Detroit’s farmers, Flint gardeners will have to find a way to water that does not cost too much.
Watering newly planted trees in Detroit. Photo credit: Rebecca Salminen Witt.
Even well established programs find themselves threatened by the escalating cost of water. The Greening of Detroit has planted nearly 100,000 trees in Detroit since 1989 and boasts a 92 percent survival rate. The long-range success of Detroit’s planting efforts, in large part, is due to an innovative watering protocol which puts Detroit students to work watering trees each summer. Without the extra water provided by Green Corps members, newly planted trees would suffer and likely die over time. Students who join the Green Corps travel the city filling buckets from neighborhood hydrants and watering thousands of trees each year by hand. This work is made possible by a broad partnership led by The Greening of Detroit, which includes funders, the Detroit Public Schools Office of School Nutrition, and the City of Detroit, which traditionally has allowed the Green Corps to tap the hydrants for water without charge. In 2016, a new regional water authority took effect and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department was placed under new leadership. The watering arrangement that The Green Corps had operated under for 17 years was cancelled.
A new agreement is in the works, but it seems clear that the water that has been keeping Detroit’s trees alive will no longer be free. In the best case scenario, this new arrangement will add expense to the program, diverting funds which had been available for youth wages to pay the City for the water needed to water its trees. In the worst case scenario, this new expense will put the cost of the program, and therefore the ability to maintain the Detroit’s trees, out of reach, leading to the demise of both The Greening of Detroit’s youth employment and its tree planting programs.
Water is a critical component of nature in cities. Its role is complex, and increasingly expensive. Water is by turns absolutely necessary, an inalienable right as some argue, and also incredibly destructive when mismanaged either in preparation or in flow. As the planet grows hotter and more crowded, fresh water in cities is likely to be one of the issues that will determine our success as a species. Michigan’s struggles, surrounded as it is by fresh water, are a cautionary tale for the world. To bring this tale to a satisfactory conclusion, Michigan and its neighbors in the Great Lakes Basin should return to the idea of Great Lakes water as a Commons, owned by no one and available to all in the region who depend on it for survival. This is the only way to ensure that this essential resource remains available to us and to the generations to come.
A review of The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. 2013. ISBN: 978-0316178525. Little, Brown and Company. 338 pages. Buy the book.
Bestiaries—elaborate and fantastical combinations of medieval scientific knowledge and folklore—were meant to describe the animal life of the Earth. These large volumes depict all kinds of different animals using intricate illustrations, and almost never distinguish between fact and fiction.
The Urban Bestiary is a beautiful marriage of writing meant for the soul and for the mind, with information about interacting closely with wildlife.
The most famous of these kinds of catalogs, the Aberdeen Bestiary, was created in the 12th century, and now resides in the Aberdeen University Library. Its entry for the beaver states that, when pursued, a beaver “bites off its own testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes.” Beaver testicles were, in those days, highly valued for their medicinal purposes. The Aberdeen Bestiary is full of fantastical descriptions like this. It has been digitized by the University of Aberdeen, and can be accessed online here.
Lyanda Lynn Haupt has created a modern version of a bestiary, set in the urban wild of Seattle, Washington, USA. Devoting a chapter to each creature, Haupt describes the habits of her urban cohabitants. She sticks to the tradition of mixing facts and lore; The Urban Bestiary is a combination of Haupt’s personal experiences with these creatures and scientific tidbits. She gives advice on topics from tracking animals to urban deer control to human-wildlife conflict. Not only does this book tell stories, it also provides information about real ways to interact more closely with your own local wildlife.
Haupt dedicates each section of The Urban Bestiary to a different type of urban fauna or flora. One part for the mammals (“The Furred”), one for the birds (“The Feathered”), and one for the rest (“The Branching and the Rooted”), which includes one chapter each for trees and humans, the engineers of the urban ecosystem. Disappointingly missing are the reptiles, amphibians, and insects, some of the most maligned of urban critters. In her introduction, Haupt states: “My intent was not to be all-inclusive, but rather to treat species that are common in most urban places and those that have a particular lesson for co-existing with wildlife”. Surely, Haupt missed a chance here to defend an unappreciated toad, a slandered snake, or a seemingly insignificant grasshopper.
That said, The Urban Bestiary does provide some worthwhile lessons. From opossums, we learn not to judge another being strictly by its (in the opossum’s case, shocking) appearance. From mountain lions and bears, we learn humility in the face of nature’s power. From the oft-overlooked city birds (pigeons, starlings, house sparrows), we learn to appreciate the wildlife we do have in cities, instead of lamenting an absence of “nature”. From crows, we learn about non-human intelligence. From opossums, we learn not to judge by appearances. And from trees, we learn a sense of time deeper than that usually available to humans. The book is full of lessons such as these that we can learn from the everyday nature we experience even in the most urban of cities.
The Urban Bestiary is a beautiful marriage of writing meant for the soul and for the mind. By observing closely the habits of our non-human neighbors, we can learn about animals, plants, our neighborhood, our planet, and ourselves. Haupt of describes in detail the habits of, and lessons to be learned from, each organism she presents. For any urban dweller looking to connect with nature, The Urban Bestiary is a superb first step. Even skilled naturalists may find some useful tips on urban tracking or animal behavior. Haupt’s goal “is that this is just the start of a huge, earthen bestiary, an invitation to wild intimacy, written daily by all of us, through attention to the creatures in our midst.”
Understanding the nature of the place in which a city exists must be a priority, and involves sensible use of the local context, building in a manner consistent with the particularities of topography—an imperative highlighted in the Colombian Andes—and appropriate integration with hydrology and water flow systems, biodiversity, and other ecosystem characteristics.
Although it is less conspicuous than vegetation in dense urbanized areas, water, the source of all life, is just as vital.
Medellín is the second Colombian city, located in the center of the Aburrá Valley. It is also the main settlement of the 10 municipalities that comprise the denominated Metropolitan Area of the same valley. Medellín has not been an exception to the modality of enforced, rigid, uncontrolled urban occupation over the wrinkled topography of wild or rural areas in Colombia. The colonial introduction of the damero pattern over topological and hydrological conditions, which suggests and even demands other responses, has been repeated across the whole nation’s urban setting. Many disastrous events, such as landslides and annually repeated floods, have demonstrated that we need a harmonious dialog of design and nature.
Despite Medellín’s successes (e.g., in transportation and social urbanism), we haven’t done so well in our relations with nature. Public authorities and people in general feel that the duty towards nature is fulfilled by projecting numbers of trees to be planted, when possible.
Although it is less conspicuous than vegetation in dense urbanized areas, water, the source of all life, is just as vital. Discreet most of the time, but forceful when it occurs in a large body or when it appears suddenly (especially in respondse to climate variations, which have lately become unpredictable), water reacts by following clear hydrological laws and according to the way urbanization, unaware of its effects, has modified the relief and corresponding bed, surfaces, and spaces for free and natural flow.
In particular, cases such as Stuttgart, Boston, St. Petersburg, Zurich, Delft, and Woodlands, Texas, are quite illustrative of a sound dialogue with their water bodies. These cities have become well known for their understanding and harmonious coordination with the aquatic realities of their specific locations. In Colombia, one of the water-richest countries in the world, there is a long way to go in the realms of knowledge and acceptance of the behavior of water in urban settings. In urban planning processes in Colombia, people’s primary concern has tended to be determining the quickest way to get rid of water as soon as it reaches urbanized surfaces. The conviction that we have an abundance of water is counterproductive and reduces our impulse to care for and retain sensible interactions with the hydrological cycle.
The mistreatment of watercourses has been increasing since the first half of the 20th century, when urban planners with narrow, purely utilitarian aims sought to “sanitize”, urbanize, industrialize, and transport. At that time, the administrative authorities decided to “rectify” and channelize the river Aburrá, axis of the valley and source of life in many senses.
Upstream, this “rectification”, channeling, and continuous urban growth mounted along the valley slopes at the fringe of each and every one of the tributary streams, until, today, no brook crossing through urban areas in Medellín leads its waters naturally towards the river. Most of the streams across the city have at least part of their routes channeled in concrete, when they are not fully encased. Images of channels, walls, pipes, and concrete beds have become so familiar that people do not remember the original names of the watercourses, and indistinctly refer to all of them as “the channeling”.
Medellín watercourses are channelized. Photo credit: Gloria Aponte
The rapid and little-controlled urban advance towards the mountains’ edges led planning authorities to an idea: draw a thick line to stop the city’s sprawling tendencies. This is the origin of the so-called Metropolitan Green Belt (from the metropolitan administration) and Encircle Garden of Medellín (from the municipal administration). Though the main—and quite optimistic—purpose of that line was to stop urbanization, the names suggest a concern for nature that has not materialized. Although these works, already accomplished, include a certain amount of vegetation, they are dominated by cement or brick tiles, hardening the bed of small runoffs instead of transforming it, as a true green belt would. Certainly, effort has been invested in good quality works, which have been well received by the community. Directors of these projects have involved the suburban communities, and the results have stimulated the recognition of previously inaccessible places and the need to work on increasing biomass. But the water has definitely been the forgotten main actor of the story.
Local projects to improve water management. Photo credit: Gloria Aponte
A similar situation occurs again halfway between the mountain ridge and the mouths of creeks in the river, through the scarce green open spaces within the urbanized areas. Even when spaces are converted into parks, in these green patches, water is mistreated. This is the case in the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Channel Park, where a nice recent opportunity to interact with running water in a respectful way or contemplate it, as a constituent part of the landscape, has been wasted. On a plot that used to be the municipal nursery, the sport television offices established themselves, accompanied by a park. Although some of the works respect the natural spirit of the place, in affluent areas, the existing water and vegetation were displaced by rigidly disposed water channels and plants.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Channel Park. Photo credit: Gloria AponteGabriel Garcia Marquez Channel Park. Photo credit: Gloria AponteExisting water and vegetation displaced by rigidly disposed water channels and plants. Photo credit: Gloria Aponte
We urgently need to attend to water in all its manifestations. All levels of society have responsibility in this task; it must be faced via a joining of wills from several society groups: authorities, administration, the academy, communities, developers, schools, etc.
As it has progressed, studies and guidelines to improve the quality of urban development have been published. The most recent for the Area Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá is 2015’s Política Pública de Construcción Sostenible (Sustainable construction Public Policy). This policy, which integrates natural resources and building construction, is addressed to builders and developers and articulates the inextricability of principles of biodiversity and environment with gray infrastructure and engineered solutions. The work consists of eight books and, although its overarching title could be interpreted as being focused on buildings, it involves elements from wider scales. If we accept, as the above policy states, that “a collection of sustainable buildings does not produce a sustainable city”, the traditional scope of sustainable building must widen to encompass the open space in between buildings.
The policy´s first book, called “Base line,” orients the reader to a detailed analysis of the place before intervening in it. The book covers all aspects of the landscape, such as ecosystems, biodiversity, natural landscapes, water, and green spaces. In this sense, the document suggests that the recognition of any water flow is important for understanding it and using it in a sound way. Such recognition also raises awareness of the threats from flooding and torrential overflows.
The purpose of this book is to stimulate a responsible attitude towards natural water functioning and avoiding interference caused by unconscious works in open space. Although there are examples and references in many countries, this is the first time that these principles are clearly and explicitly “translated” to our own environment, to be adopted by normative force, for a much more stimulating habitat.
The first step would be to spread the existence of these tools, followed by studying and digesting them, before applying the experiences that emerge from them in every new urban intervention by demanding responsible agents to implement them.
As Gary Grant says in his recent article, “Towards the Water-Sensitive City” (TNOC June 2016): ”When city authorities begin to consider the fabric of the city itself as a rainwater collection facility, this changes the way people design and operate the urban landscape.”
We won’t be able to complain after flooding disasters occur in the lower parts of our cities if, together, we all do not drive attention and efforts to understanding nature’s flows or articulate development interventions to these problems through overly simple adaptation strategies.
Nevertheless, Medellín has recently received international recognition because of its strong and continuous work to reemerge from a pronounced social decline that the city experienced at the end of the last century. Due to its persistent efforts in terms of coexistence, civic culture, equity in public services, and transport systems, Medellín can now share certain important achievements. The unwavering work of various bodies and successive administrations earned Medellín the following awards:
Medellín won the title of most innovativecity in 2013, competing with the cities of New York and Tel Aviv for the “City of the Year”, organized by the Wall Street Journal and the Urban Land Institute -ULI-
Medellín won TheMobiPrice 2015 prize for its model Metro System and EnCicla program, each of which is unique in Colombia
Medellín won The Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize for their sustainable and innovative urban approach in March 2016
Medellín has thus become a national and international example of social inclusion and the organization of urban operations. However, this does not mean that the city has solved all problems related to everyday urban life. A great debt is still latent: attention to the city’s relationships with its natural ecosystem, particularly water, and equilibrium between urban activity and the city’s “metabolic capacity”— goals of actual “sustainability” that must go beyond semantics.
Our debt is mainly to the abundant water that runs towards the valley axis, which urban development works strive to hide. We all have to remember that water is also nature!
The skin of the city shifts. Waves of residents come and go; meanings vanish. The longer I live here, the more I feel like I am a creature of many phantom limbs. Hungry, I walk to Jimmy’s hoping for fish and a chair to eat it in, but it is gone. In its place, a bodega expanded into a head shop and a pharmacy. It’s not the worst offense, these changing storefronts. But the churn at the whim of capital is a storm that rages and threatens the living parts of the City, the small human bits.
Rapacious development is churning and devouring neighborhoods. Gathering places are first on the chopping block.
A century of disinvestment and municipal neglect add up to slow motion carpet-bombing. Buildings deteriorate until their removal seems inevitable, and whole communities are replaced with a “new” urbanism. Profit-driven construction, in the wake of orchestrated disinvestment and a legacy of public and private neglect, transforms New York City; neighborhoods once full of social clubs, artists’ spaces, churches, and dances halls become rows of shells for private luxury living. These “investments” leave an eerie emptiness in their wake; there are simply fewer people in the new neighborhoods.
Mural Memorial + Completed Spire alteration, July 2016. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalSilent Barn 2016. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalCumbia Postcard, 2013. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal, 2016
In January 2013, the organization I run, 596 Acres, became one of the first “stewdio” tenants at the then-newly-reopened Silent Barn in Bushwick, Brooklyn, an artist-created-and-run cooperative space. 596 Acres took over a portion of a former car mechanic’s garage, broom-swept, oil stains still on the floor. The Silent Barn had signed a 10-year lease on a live-work space that suggested some kind of permanence, or at least some kind of duration. 2022 seemed an awfully long time away.
Around the corner from our new “office” stood a majestic church with a 190-foot copper steeple, St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, opened in 1892. The building had hosted a congregation for over a century, and a community garden for several decades, and in the more recent past had become the site of parties, artist studios, and, briefly, an indoor velodrome for bicycle races.
The steeple was how everyone told direction in that corner of Brooklyn; it reached dozens of feet above the elevated subway tracks and winked its ever-greener green. A few blocks in each direction, three distinct street grids turn away from each other, relics of the independence of the six towns that became Kings County in New York State and then the City of Brooklyn, which later became one of the five boroughs of New York City. A compass marker here has helped orient residents for over a century.
But the church and its spire have never been formally designated a “landmark,” despite numerous requests for the NYC Landmarks Commission to evaluate the building for a designation under the NYC Landmarks law. These include one made to the local City Council Member and a team of Architecture History students from Columbia University in 2010, but all were ignored by the agency or cast aside with the simple response that the building itself was in too precarious a condition to designate.
Silent Barn. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal, 2016
Rapacious development was already churning and devouring New York City’s outer borough neighborhoods. Gathering places are first on the chopping block.
The week we moved to the Silent Barn, the sale of the former church building across the street to Cayuga Capital Management, a private for-profit developer planning a market-rate condo conversion, had just been completed. Architects seeking approval of their plans showed drawings that left the pointy spire intact and described apartments with stained glass windows in its upper reaches. The developers, in their marketing materials, wrote:
The whole thing was becoming 99 expensive rental apartments.
The Church was designed by Cooper Union-educated architect Theobald Engelhardt a generation after the village of Bushwick was incorporated into the new City (!) of Brooklyn. Mr. Engelhardt located his own architecture office around the corner from the Church site on Broadway while the spire went up. It was in a building he also designed on what was then Brooklyn’s Wall Street, across the street from a German singing society hall the construction of which was paid for by its members, and which he also designed.
One hundred years later, the intricate architecture—created to foster social inclusion, artistic production, and a life of collective endeavor—is rapidly transforming into private residences rented and sold for ever-higher prices on the unregulated market. The singing hall is now the Opera House Lofts and many private developers are buying up churches and converting them to residences for those who can afford their lofty ceilings and bespoke window frames.
Bushwick. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal, 2016Engelhardt office, July 2016, Broadway side. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal
Formal NYC Landmark designation is primarily reserved for architectural artifacts, disconnected from their cultural context or their social import. A landmark designation for a piece of the built environment, with its mercurial meanings bestowed by changing local demographics over many decades, is extremely unlikely, though in 2015, in an unprecedented move, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.
That Commission report begins, “The Stonewall Inn, the starting point of the Stonewall Rebellion, is one of the most important sites associated with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender history in New York City and the nation.” It continues for many pages, describing how the Stonewall Inn operated (“the owners made regular payoffs to the Greenwich Village’s Sixth Police Precinct”) and contextualizing the role of this meeting place in its historic moment (“New York police could arrest anyone wearing less than three items of clothing that were deemed ‘appropriate’ to their sex, and the State Liquor Authority made it illegal for a bar to serve someone who was known to be gay.”). As the New York Timesreported, several speakers at the designation hearing pointed out that the buildings that house Stonewall are not architecturally distinguished and “would not earn landmark status on aesthetic grounds.” Yet the designation will protect the physical buildings that house the Inn from future alterations.
This may be a new path to protecting places that matter to our communities for their mattering, but it’s coming late, after one hundred years of redlining, the cut-backs in municipal services of the 1970s and 1980s, “urban renewal,” blight designations and bulldozers. The economic history of our city’s neighborhoods has ripened many for replacement, has forced families and communities to move away from places they loved because the disinvestment turned septic, turned into danger and reduced life expectancies. People who could took their children away to live in more orderly and invested places, stopped attending church, stopped paying fees to the singing club, eventually stopped coming back when their neighbors did the same.
Cumbia front view, 2013. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalCorner of Bushwick Avenue and Melrose: 2016, 2013, as memorialized. Photo credit Paula Z. Segal.
In 2013, I knew that the architects’ promotional materials were just advertising and nothing in their renderings was enforceable.
Predicting then that the church would not survive its conversion in any cognizable form, Daniel Eizirik, an artist in residence at 596 Acres, and I conceived of a mural: If You Love the Music, Spare the Drummer (a cumbia for Stanwix Street). In it, Daniel captured the world we saw that upside down winter, a tiny corner of a larger world that we knew was vanishing, a tattoo on brick inked to mark a moment.
In it are the fish place, a Spanish-speaking fashion boutique, chain link fences surrounding city-owned land, a flat fix/auto glass joint attached to the gas station. The map is not the territory, and the portrait is not the person, but in some places, under seismic shifts in demographics and geographics, the map and the portrait are our last fixed points.
I won’t call it graffiti, this practice of making memory by inscribing place onto itself. Our memorial, like the Landmarks Commission’s designation of Stonewall, is not based on architectural distinction, though the building was certainly distinguished; it is the only landmark designation that Mr. Engelhardt’s majestic spire will ever get. The painted version has already outlasted the 190-foot cooper one, which was placed into a dumpster and sold for scrap over the winter. The apartments are nearly ready, and the spire itself has been capped, an echo of itself and of Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, another nineteenth-century German church with its steeple now lopped off, a memorial to forces of this century and their transformation of urban centers.
Auto Glass/ Flat Fix, 2013 & as memorialized. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal.Auto Glass, 2016. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalFence, 2013 & as memorialized. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal626 Bushwick, 2016. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalPhoto credit: Paula Z. Segal
Paula Segal and Daniel Eizirik
Brooklyn and Porto Allegre, Brasil
Now that urban greening is increasingly seen as a climate adaptation strategy, the question is how to best provide the necessary green space. Where, at which scale, and what type of greenery? Which design is preferred? And how can municipalities increase public support for green adaptation measures?
Municipalities should use green space strategies that assess needs, create designs, and evaluate outcomes on a neighborhood level
To find answers to these questions, we need to investigate local needs. This story illustrates residents’ needs in two different neighborhoods in the Dutch architectural and cultural capital, Rotterdam.
Heat waves today, flooding tomorrow
In two typical residential neighborhoods (see boxed text for a description), the one “greener” than the other, we interviewed 200 residents about their experiences with urban heat and local flooding. The underlying study can be found here.
Photo: Marthe Derkzen
We found that residents are more aware of present-day heat waves, but more alarmed by future flooding. The prospect of increasingly frequent and extreme rain events that cause traffic jams, block streets, and flood basements is apparently considered a greater risk than a rise in heat waves that pose serious health risks to vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly, even though, at present, Rotterdam residents indicate that they suffer more from heat than flooding. Shuaib Lwasa found a similar difference in risk perception between heat and flooding in Kampala. This apparent contradiction may be explained by the difference between individual and societal problems, and the related ability of controlling these: whereas heat can largely be dealt with on an individual level (e.g. regulate indoor temperature), the consequences of flooding are much more difficult to regulate by oneself and therefore set off more alarm bells.
One thing that heat and flooding have in common is that both are typically observed at stony, impervious locations: streets, parking lots, city centers. The city’s sealed and built-up surfaces are clearly most prone to climate impacts. Talking to residents, it becomes clear that the impacts are not limited to those spaces that are under public control (streets, sewage system) but are also felt at the smallest urban scale level: people’s homes. During the interviews, residents told how their basements would flood during heavy rains, leading to financial damage. In several streets, slight differences make houses on one side of the road vulnerable while houses on the other side are not. The measures that people take to protect their homes mostly serve to block the water from seeping in through roofs and walls, or to redirect the water before it reaches the house by constructing, for example, a drainage pipe 30cm below street level in front of the house. Up to now, few residents have implemented green measures, such as a green roof or rain garden, to increase local infiltration capacity.
Green space for recreation and clean air
People are aware of urban heat and flooding and consider these serious future challenges, but do not always realize how greenery may support climate adaptation. We asked residents to name the two most and two least important benefits related to six different green space types (see figure). Green space benefits with a more direct effect on people’s health and well-being, such as recreation and air purification, are better understood than less direct benefits, such as temperature regulation. Traffic noise reduction was considered the least important benefit of each green space type.
Most (top) and least (bottom) important benefits provided by green space types, according to residents. Image: Marthe Derkzen
We also enquired about residents’ preferences for different green space types. Overall, people prefer large-scale greenery such as city parks, especially those with a woody character. Parks with large water bodies are also favored, followed at some distance by street trees and then by gardens. Green roofs and grass strips are not very popular, although green roofs grew in popularity for people living in areas with a larger share of vegetation cover. This does not happen for grass; even in areas with limited grass cover, people preferred trees or green roofs. The reason why people do not seem to like grass is because it is easily littered and attracts dogs.
Adaptation measures
In collaboration with Rotterdam municipality, we compiled a set of green climate adaptation measures from which residents could select their preferred options. For each scale level (home, street, neighborhood square, main road, city park) residents had three alternatives to choose from, e.g., for “home”, residents could choose between a green roof, green wall, and front garden. For “main road”, participants could choose between trees, a canal, and a grass strip (see image). Half of the 200 interviewed residents were shown symbols that conveyed information about climate regulation benefits: thermometers indicating cooling capacity and water drops indicating flood protection capacity. This way, we could assess whether residents’ preferences for adaptation measures are influenced by additional information about their effectiveness.
Interview forms to gauge preferences for green adaptation measures. Thermometers indicate cooling capacity and water drops indicate flood protection capacity; the more blue thermometers and water drops, the greater the climate adaptation capacity of that measure. Image: Marthe Derkzen
Comparing the two neighborhoods, it becomes clear that they have quite different demands, illustrating that green adaptation measures need to be tailored to preferences on the neighborhood level. Whereas the first neighborhood prefers accessible greenery that can be used for leisure, sports, and play, such as gardens, playgrounds, grass strips, and recreational parks, the second neighborhood chooses trees, streams, wooded parks, and green walls and roofs. Such differences are related to demographic factors but also to the locally available greenery. Generally, diverse, aesthetically attractive, and familiar greenery is preferred over green space that is rather simple or unfamiliar, like some of the suggested adaptation measures may be.
The water plaza, for example, is a relatively new element in Rotterdam’s streets, designed to store peak flow during heavy rains and serve as a sports court when dry. Likewise, green walls and roofs are not so common yet, and we noticed that residents can have doubts about such greenery, often related to their maintenance. We found that the use of informational symbols influenced residents’ preferences: when citizens are informed about the climate adaptation capacity of different measures, their preferences shift towards the most effective options. Thus, providing information about the reason why investments are made for certain green space designs can increase public support for adaptation measures.
City planners: communicate benefits and tailor to local needs
From the stories and opinions expressed by local residents, some important lessons can be learned and applied in urban green space planning.
First, green measures need to be tailored to local needs. The case of Tarwewijk neighborhood illustrates this. Residents of this grey and stony neighbourhood encountered more heat and flood prone locations, experienced more personal problems (often health-related—see Chris Garvin’s piece for a discussion on climate related health risks) with climate impacts, and more often acknowledged climate benefits of green space. This may lead to the conclusion that Tarwewijk residents would easily accept the most effective adaptation measures. However, when asked for their opinion, residents prioritized functional green space that can be used for leisure, sports, and play much more than in Kralingen-West neighbourhood, where residents expressed a preference for natural greenery. City planners need such nuanced information to design adaptation measures that are effective but also fit the local context.
Second, we learned that talking and listening to residents is key to designing green space strategies that fulfill needs from both user and climate adaptation perspectives. Knowing that residents worry most about flooding and air pollution, urban planners can prioritize these issues and in their communication, stress how new greenery helps to mitigate these problems. Designing productively also works the other way around: by informing residents about the climate adaptation effectiveness of different green measures, municipalities can influence the way people think about and increase support for the most effective designs. Increased green cover and accessibility stimulates residents’ contact with nature and its processes, subsequently facilitating environmental learning and private (e.g. green roof installation) or communal (e.g. neighborhood garden) action.
Third, residents prefer large-scale greenery over small-scale greenery. New greenery is often small-scale out of necessity, since it needs to fit into the existing urban fabric: green roofs and facades are ideal solutions from this point of view. Given that, in newly built neighborhoods, the plans mostly include smaller structures such as grassy road verges, canals, and street trees, such small-scale measures are absolutely needed to fulfill local demand. But planners should keep in mind that cities also need iconic parks that shape city identity and act as pillars of ecological and cultural structures.
Fourth, residents need to be better informed about the risks related to flooding and, especially, heat waves. Although residents are well aware of temperature differences within the city, they do not consider heat waves a major risk for the future city. They do worry about future flooding. On the one hand, residents trust that the authorities will take care of dealing with climate impacts; on the other hand, they are not sure how this will happen. Both parties would benefit from an awareness campaign, especially if it is targeted at vulnerable groups.
Taken together, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for using green infrastructure to mitigate the impacts of climate change in cities. But municipalities would benefit from a green space strategy that assesses needs, creates designs, and evaluates outcomes on a neighborhood level. Where green space is sparse, a first priority may be to provide greenery designed for recreational purposes. Where green space is already in place, new greenery can have a more natural character. This does not mean that green-poor neighborhoods should be equipped with the least effective adaptation measures (playgrounds, sports fields) and green-rich neighborhoods with the most effective measures (woodlands), but that designers keep an eye on the degree of usability. By nature, this includes communicating with residents.
It’s a sunny morning and I leave the house, walking towards the gate of our subdivision. It’s just a few meters, downhill, around that pechay plantation, then uphill, typical of the sloping contour of Marikina Valley.
The street may be the most important public space because of the way it should be shared.
In the two minutes and few meters, I see almost no one. Perhaps just Mr. Pechay, or so I call him, who’s busy tilling the soil or slaving over his watering cans and new seeds to keep the largest greenspace we have, green. He rarely talks, but will drop by the house during Christmas to sell his overly large upo and ask for a fifty-peso bill. Past his tree, I see closed, locked gates and wide walls.
Treading up the path, I see cars, parked on either side of the street or taking up my space on the sidewalk, so I have to tiptoe around whatever shadow I can to avoid the glaring heat of the sun. A child screams, then laughs somewhere inside the cream-colored house, and a dog barks from the white gate across. Even with all these voices, it’s sad because there’s no one to say hello to.
The gated community, where mostly cars enter and exit. Photo: Ragene PalmaThe vegetable stall on Panorama. Photo: Ragene Palma
A few seconds more and I exit our subdivision gate. But before I do, I anticipate a different sight compared to the bland, boring, unfriendly walls and quiet, lonely road. I enter what is called a thriving street. It is aptly called Panorama.
I first wave to Mr. Bananas, whose meter-long stall is just outside the gate. He smiles and waves back, and as always, says, “Ang sipag magtrabaho a! (You work so hard!)” I nod and take note that I have to buy some saba on the way home tonight. Almost simultaneously, Mr. Foochow grins from across the street, perhaps wondering if I’d be too lazy to cook dinner later and order his Chinese fried chicken and classic bihon. Starting downhill again, I look to my right. Mrs. Rice nods at me, but as always, is busy asking how many kilos of Malagkit or Sinandomeng Mrs. Three-Blocks-Away would need. I pass the first FX terminal, and ask old Mr. Yosi if the driver would make the long route or take the short route. As always, he replies with the long route. I know that all too well; I just ask the question to stir conversation into the old man’s life. I avoid the gaping, hazardous hole on the pavement, making yet another mental note to call City Engineering, then walk some more to avoid Mr./Ms. Fantastically Fabulous, who keeps telling me he’s/she’s just more beautiful than I am. I continue a little bit faster (because the slope gets steeper) and ask Mr. Fruitstand how sales have been this morning. “Laging maganda, (always beautiful)” he replies with a wink. I turn right and make eye contact with Mr. Barker. He raises his pointing finger, and I make the same gesture to reserve a passenger seat. I leave Panorama and embark on a silent journey with a heading towards Cubao. Or, as silent as the FX FM radio allows it, anyway.
The many trikes of Panorama. The tricycle is a two- to three-seater mode of transport that operates in neighborhoods. Photo: Ragene Palma
Panorama Street is an example of what urbanists like to call a thriving street or a vibrant part of the community. It isn’t perfect because it still has zooming jeepneys and too many trikes, like any other Philippine street, but it has familiar faces, each with a role to play. As opposed to mere space, it becomes a place which has meaning to the people who use it, who take part in it, who take center stage in its story. It is vibrant not just because of this chitchat, but because of the many small businesses it has and the way people have relationships. I take comfort in knowing that I can trust these not-really-strangers, who anticipate the people who pass by and look out for everyone’s well-being. I love that even if the smallest conversations with some of the vendors repetitively adhere to a template, they establish a connection between real people. Most importantly for me, and I guess everyone else who lives in the southeastern outskirts of this highly urbanized city, Panorama is known to be a final stop on the commute from other places in the metro area. It’s what Filipinos call dulo when we use public transport. For me, Panorama is home.
A thriving place or a busy street is something urban planners stand for. It’s something that we champion in design and in planning for better communities. The street is meant to be used by everyone. That’s why it is called a public space. The street is, perhaps, the most important public space, because of the way it should be shared. It embodies equity among the people. It’s simply saying that while I take one point of view in this story, it’s not just mine that matters. We could take Mr. Pechay’s or Mrs. Rice’s story, or perhaps that of an unnamed supporting character who was passing in the background of what I saw. It wasn’t just my route or my character that meant something here; it’s everybody else’s. It’s all of ours.
Four young girls looking at a toddler being carried along Panorama. Photo: Ragene Palma
I would never have known what Panorama was like before. I would never have been able to tell this story, because I wouldn’t have known anyone from it, or whatever it is that they did. Even if I had already lived for a decade in our current home, the majority of those years were spent inside the bubble of a car. And all the while, I believed that vehicle-bound experience to be normal. Mostly because of convenience and partly because of ignorance, I traveled through mere spaces, not places, and I saw more traffic lights than people’s faces.
Then I came to realize that cars fit perfectly in gated communities. The solitude is built exactly for someone who prefers to ride alone in the car, where there are no people, just roads; no connections, no relationships, just yourself and the wheel, shut out from the cool breeze and in sight of tinted greeneries.
I’ve stopped using a private car (or limited it the most I can) because I prefer to be at one with my community. While I consider the tremendous smoke-belching in this country as a curse to my lungs, there is still the privilege of knowing that I’ve played a part in lessening traffic congestion, reducing car emissions, and contributing to the income—no matter how small—of the local drivers. Most importantly, I’ve learned to replicate Panorama wherever I go. I now see familiar faces in the security guards or streetsweepers in other places, and it’s not a sea of blank stares anymore. Places mean more to me now than they did before. Memories are made with every step taken, and memories come flooding back with a few steps more.
At the corner of Panorama: an old lady asking for spare change (see the recycled cup?) so she can eat lunch, and a young boy who was amused because I wanted to take his picture. Photo: Ragene PalmaInside the gated community – no one in plain sight. Just high walls and locked gates. Photo: Ragene Palma
You know when I miss riding in a private car? It’s when I leave Panorama, in the few meters that lead back to my house, because there’s no other way to go home. I miss the car because it makes me feel safe from the dark, and all the high walls that surround me. The juxtaposition of a lively street and a gated community suddenly becomes so striking.
Come to think of it, I only walk those meters when daylight can provide me safety. There have been a few times I’ve been forced to sprint home, strongly wishing the house with a chihuahua would open a night barbecue or that Inday from the bougainvillea canopy house would suddenly take a nighttime stroll. It would brighten the way home. But they don’t, and I don’t think they ever will. This leaves me with the option of riding the trike. The drivers at our terminal are very friendly, thank God for them, and sometimes they even say, “Good night.”
A review of The High Line. By James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofido + Renfro. 2015. ISBN: 9780714871004. Phaidon Press. 452 pages. Buy the book.
New York City’s High Line Park, once a rusting relic of abandoned freight rail transportation infrastructure, has become arguably one of the world’s best-known urban parks, and possibly the single most visited park in the United States—and perhaps the world—on a visitor-per-acre basis.
The High Lineis, in the end, a sensual experience reflecting its creation, design, and current reality.
As I travel across the United States, speaking with audiences of planners, landscape architects, park aficionados, and interested lay people, informal polls reveal that more than half have visited the High Line. It has become both a major tourist destination and an economic development magnet of unprecedented proportions, attracting at least 40 new residential and office buildings and spurring a reported $4 billion economic impact. It has also spurred at least 60 similar projects in cities around the globe, and it has been lionized (and occasionally reviled) as an apotheosis of urban design and placemaking.
How the High Line became the singular phenomenon it is, and, in particular, how it evolved from condemned ruin to celebrated masterpiece through finely honed design, is documented in this recent book by the project’s principal designers, landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations and architecture firm Diller Scoffidio Renfro. This handsome, massive “doorstop of a book,” as landscape architect and co-author James Corner referred to it, is beautiful to look at and to feel (its cover is embossed and textured like the precast planks that make up the High Line’s flooring). As with many books about architecture, whether monographs of an architect’s or firm’s work, it is replete with delicious color photographs and renderings, sections and, axonometrics. But this book, in some ways like the work it describes, resembles high-end erotica—like the “art” books of the 1960s that arrived in “plain brown wrappings”: architectural glamour of the highest order.
As someone closely involved with the preservation, planning, design, construction, and management of the High Line, I recognized early on that this was a park of a completely different order than any New York City park of the last century or more. I served as New York Parks Commissioner during most of the life of the project to nearly the completion of its second phase, and worked closely with Robert Hammond and Joshua David and the Friends of the High Line, who conceived of and fought for the project, and City government colleagues, including City Planning Chair Amanda Burden and the Economic Development Corporation, under the direction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a major supporter of the project.
From the project’s inception, I had a sense of its subtle sexuality. That sexuality is cited often in this book, both overtly and by implication, and it could be argued that the High Line is the first “Out” public park landscape. Further, the sexuality of the concept and its environment were evoked in the sensuality of the design of its landscape.
The sexual aspects of the High Line (and this book) are apparent in the book’s design. Like old issues of “Playboy” magazine, it has foldouts—not one, but scores, sumptuous photos and renderings laid out in graphic detail for landscape architecture and architecture aficionados to pore over. And both in photos of the High Line neighborhood’s recent “seedy “ past and in conversations between the project’s designers transcribed in the book, the sexual aura of both the High Line itself and its neighboring buildings is laid bare. One photo shows a group of apparently trans individuals, one with bare breasts protruding from a shirt. Another suggests a prostitute, conversing with a potential customer in a car. The Meatpacking district surrounding the abandoned High Line was well known for prostitutes of various sexual persuasions and identities, for sex clubs catering to a variety of clients and preferences, and for the abandoned piers that were locales for mostly gay sexual assignations, at a time when homosexuality was still vilified by many and openly gay people were at risk for harassment and much worse.
Also thoroughly documented in the book is the design competition sponsored by the Design Trust for Public Space, a non-profit group that was an early supporter of the High Line; one imaginative concept turned the elevated rail line’s “basin” into a linear swimming pool, and a rendering shows a naked, muscular man climbing out of the pool. Later, after the High Line opened, so did a sexy new hotel designed by Polshek Partners, situated directly over the High Line, with its legs towering over and astride the park. Almost immediately after it opened, there were reports and salacious tabloid news items about people having sex or parading nude behind the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows (and the book contains several pictures of both).
The park’s designers, in conversations transcribed in the book, discuss the sexual aspects of the High Line, as well as the hotel and the other buildings so close that you can almost touch them (and certainly engage in casual or studied voyeurism of the “Rear Window” variety with them). In the opening conversation, “Forethoughts”, Elizabeth Diller describes the “illicit quality of the place”, when it was still a post-industrial ruin, and Matthew Johnson discusses the sociological conditions as the neighborhood evolved from industry to “queer subcultures…sex workers and cross-dressing kids sharing the streets with meatpacking workers and longtime tenement residents.”
Later in their accounts, after the High Line has been built, the sexuality of the new park becomes more pronounced as the designers see it: “We never imagined the High Line would become a place of romantic intimacy…” says Diller. “It’s considered the make-out park in New York City. I took a walk on a nice night recently and counted twenty-three couples passionately kissing.”
The designers understand that they created a new form of public stage for seeing and being seen. “On the High Line, the close proximity of others attracts a strange sort of public intimacy,” says Diller. “The voyeur and the exhibitionist have a consensual relationship. The pleasure of watching people is matched and perhaps exceeded by the pleasure of being watched.” Johnson confirms: “Encouraged by the many extra eyes on the High Line exhibitionism seems more publicly embraced than ever.”
But I would argue that the ultimate product, both the design and the completed work, is actually more sensual than sexual, and the details of that sensuality are gloriously covered in the book. For starters, everything in the park was unique—no off-the-shelf park furniture for this new form of park. The chapter headed “Design” may be the most explicit for lovers of architectural detail. It contains numerous foldouts with renderings of different areas—the pinups you are tempted to pull out and put on your wall. The foldouts include typical sections and details galore, including the more than 50 different types of precast concrete aggregate planks that make up not just the High Line’s “floor” but also the stunning “peel-up” benches that seem to grow out of the deck like wind-stunted pine trees growing from rocky crevices.
In addition to the three sections of interviews, the book contains seven chapters. “Found” documents what the design team, also including gifted planting designer Piet Oudolf, discovered in the summer of 2004 when they first hopped off a concrete deck of an abandoned warehouse into chest-high mugwort and wildflowers, like explorers debarking into an abandoned ruin, with both large-scale photos in the foldouts and small scale snapshots at measured distances. The large photos include walls with huge, faded graffiti murals, and found objects—a bucket of spray paint cans, a mannequin torso, a package of strawberry-flavored sexual lubricant, a robin’s egg in a nest.
The “Archives” chapter is rich with historical artifacts—documents, plans, and working drawings for the original High Line, including sections, details, and isometric drawings of constructions joints. It is apparent that Master Builder Robert Moses was constructing for the ages in this ambitious project to lift freight trains above 11th Avenue and onto a massive, functional steel structure capable of holding two fully loaded freight trains simultaneously. “Archives” also includes photos and other documents of the neighborhood’s transformation from industrial, to post-industrial, to chic, and brings the project up to the point of the Design Trust for Public Space report.
The “Concept” chapter explores the design completion, focusing on the eventual winning team’s entry, and the initial design development. One concept sadly missing from the final design and realization was a combination pond/pool and elevated beach; the pool would have turned into a skating rink in winter!
The “Design” chapter lovingly details the entire design, with plans, sections, and renderings for each of many segments, and you can see the eventual High Line really taking shape. This is the phase I most remember from my days working with the team—many long design meetings, including one where we examined and debated for several hours the different possible subtle configurations for the pre-cast planks. Among the delectable details of the “Design” are those of all the furnishing and fences, as well as the more than 50 types of pre-cast planters. Also here are Oudolf’s planting plans, and color photos of more than 400 plant species actually growing on the High Line—200 perennials, 36 grasses, 12 vines, 50 bulbs, and 100 varieties of trees and shrubs.
“Construction” documents in burly, large-format color photos the transformation of ruin to glorious completion, and “Walk” is just that, a walk through the newly complete High Line, compressing 5 years of opening three separate segments between 2009 and 2014. “Walk” is bookend to “Found,” with both large-scale photos of the completed park in full use in all seasons, along with smaller snapshots at almost the same measured distance as the initial chapter, so one can do almost perfect “Before and After” comparisons.
The final chapter, “Unforeseen”, documents the unanticipated uses and phenomena of the High Line. There is artist Patty Heffley doing performances on her fire escape, drawing attention to the fact that she has now completely lost her privacy to millions of annual visitors. There are the myriad events—official and spontaneous; the arts installations and musical performances organized by the Friends of the High Line—who, by then were completely managing the park, and funding its operations; weddings, stargazing, the topless reading group, and, of course, the exhibitionists in the Standard Hotel, parading their nudity or having sex in the windows. “Unforeseen” also documents the perhaps not completely unforeseen mushrooming of development with at least 40 new buildings, many by world-renowned architects, along with the 60 similar adaptive reuse projects around the world, many apparently inspired by the High Line.
Reading—really, “looking at”—The High Line is, in the end, a sensual experience reflecting its creation, design, and current reality. Its 452 pages and scores of foldouts offer great delights, and encourage many repeat visits—as with the High Line itself.
The urban heat island is a well-known phenomenon that affects all cities around the world. It is the difference in temperature between a city and the surrounding suburban area. In countries such as Greece, the peak summertime temperature difference between a city such as Athens and its periphery can be as much as 10 degrees Centigrade. The causes of this difference are multiple. In general, two of the main causes are the lack of natural green space in a city centre and the use of air conditioning for cooling.
Green roofs can cool a city such as Athens by a substantial amount—if we can install a sufficient number of them.
Natural green spaces that surround Greek cities lower the ambient temperature in those areas substantially. Over the last three decades, the use of air conditioning has grown and its implementation has accelerated. Air conditioning works by removing heat from inside a building and pumping it outside. This creates a vicious cycle. The air conditioning effectively heats the city while cooling the buildings internally. As the city gets hotter, more air conditioning is used to cool the buildings, making the city even hotter and increasing the requirement for cooling. Hotter cities mean more air conditioning, which means even hotter cities.
The Greek Treasury, Constitution Square, Athens. Photo: Andrew Clements
Studies conducted in Athens over the last thirty years have confirmed that the city is getting hotter over time and that air conditioning use is a major contributor to this heating. Other studies have shown that urban greening mitigates the urban heat island.
Cities in hot countries tend to have flat roofs and Athens is no exception. Currently, the rooftops typical of Athens, and of many other cities around the world, are a barren concrete wasteland of unused urban space. They represent a huge potential for greening.
A green roof is a perfect way to cool a building and also the surrounding space. A green roof cools a building in two ways. First of all, it shades the roof surface, protecting it from heat load and thereby reducing the temperature of the building. The second way a green roof cools a building is even more interesting in terms of city cooling. The plants on a green roof evapotranspire water through their leaves. This uses heat energy in the building. So the plants effectively remove heat from the building and, by extension, the city. Therefore, these two effects of green roofs lower both the temperature of the building and the temperature of the city. Consequently, less air conditioning is required and a “virtuous” cycle is established. Less air conditioning leads to less heat in the city, which, in turn, leads to a lowered requirement for air conditioning and on and on. How virtuous this cycle is depends on the amount of green roofs installed. The more green roofs the greater the cooling effect, the less air conditioning used and, consequently, the less heat produced and the more heat used.
Villas in Antiparos. Photo: Andrew Clements
If this is all true, and research suggests it is, one must ask: when we will start to green the roofs of cities on a massive scale?
A one square metre green roof plot. Photo: Andrew Clements
I am a believer in the power of the consumer. If we can get a critical mass of adopters, this could work. One idea would be for every resident of the city to fund and/or install one square metre of green roof on their building. Many of the apartment buildings in Athens have flat roofs of about 150 square metres and house 40 or more residents. So, under such a plan, each roof would have a total of 40 or more square metres of green roof. The total number of residents of Athens is five million. So that would be five million square metres of green space. This represents a green area bigger than the size of Central Park in New York (which is about 3.4 million square metres in area). This amount of cooling should lower the peak ambient temperature of the city to an extent that warrants much less use of air conditioning, yielding lower peak temperatures and less of a requirement for air conditioning; the aforementioned virtuous cycle kicks in. The point at which the virtuous cycle would start is not known empirically and is difficult to calculate because we are dealing with subjective human behaviour. A pilot study is required to prove the concept and, once proven, the concept would need effective communication to achieve a critical mass of adopters.
This is a simple way to cool a city appreciably. Once the model has been proven, it could be implemented worldwide. The one important consideration with this model is to not exchange the urban heat island problem for the bigger problem of water consumption. Appropriate green roofs should be installed and that means natural ecosystem green roofs which require much less irrigation, less other inputs, and less maintenance than inappropriate grass or sedum blanket roofs. Also, methods of winter rainwater harvesting for irrigation in the summer should be adopted.
Commercial building, southern Athens. Photo: Andrew ClementsResidential building, northern Athens. Photo: Andrew Clements
The opportunities that such a greening effort would provide are myriad, and include a wide range of business, employment, and recreational potentials not to mention the more important restoration of habitats for wildlife. In terms of business and employment opportunities, researchers of many varieties would be required to make the initiative a success, along with a list of green roof professionals, gardeners, installers, maintenance people, and so on. Communications and advertising professionals, as well as media people, would be required. Getting the public to support this idea is a matter of effective communication, in my opinion.
We could transform life in a city using this model with relatively little effort and with relatively little use of finite natural resources.
On the lighter side, Emily Hiestand’s “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah” is another stand out, full of wry observations about the goings-on of nesting blue jays—“the bird of the postmodern, of invention and recycling, of found art.” Among these and the many other excellent essays in the collection, Stephen Harrigan’s “The Soul of Treaty Oak” is masterful, a story that is equal parts murder mystery, mystical circus sideshow, and compassionate commentary about the human search for connection—in this case, with the venerable but beleaguered Treaty Oak in Austin, Texas, a being “older than almost any other living thing in Texas, and far older than the idea of Texas itself” that becomes a magnet for clashing values after the tree is intentionally poisoned.
That said, The Urban Bestiary does provide some worthwhile lessons. From opossums, we learn not to judge another being strictly by its (in the opossum’s case, shocking) appearance. From mountain lions and bears, we learn humility in the face of nature’s power. From the oft-overlooked city birds (pigeons, starlings, house sparrows), we learn to appreciate the wildlife we do have in cities, instead of lamenting an absence of “nature”. From crows, we learn about non-human intelligence. From opossums, we learn not to judge by appearances. And from trees, we learn a sense of time deeper than that usually available to humans. The book is full of lessons such as these that we can learn from the everyday nature we experience even in the most urban of cities.
People are aware of urban heat and flooding and consider these serious future challenges, but do not always realize how greenery may support climate adaptation. We asked residents to name the two most and two least important benefits related to six different green space types (see figure). Green space benefits with a more direct effect on people’s health and well-being, such as recreation and air purification, are better understood than less direct benefits, such as temperature regulation. Traffic noise reduction was considered the least important benefit of each green space type.
How the High Line became the singular phenomenon it is, and, in particular, how it evolved from condemned ruin to celebrated masterpiece through finely honed design, is documented in this recent book by the project’s principal designers, landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations and architecture firm Diller Scoffidio Renfro. This handsome, massive “doorstop of a book,” as landscape architect and co-author James Corner referred to it, is beautiful to look at and to feel (its cover is embossed and textured like the precast planks that make up the High Line’s flooring). As with many books about architecture, whether monographs of an architect’s or firm’s work, it is replete with delicious color photographs and renderings, sections and, axonometrics. But this book, in some ways like the work it describes, resembles high-end erotica—like the “art” books of the 1960s that arrived in “plain brown wrappings”: architectural glamour of the highest order.
As someone closely involved with the preservation, planning, design, construction, and management of the High Line, I recognized early on that this was a park of a completely different order than any New York City park of the last century or more. I served as New York Parks Commissioner during most of the life of the project to nearly the completion of its second phase, and worked closely with Robert Hammond and Joshua David and the Friends of the High Line, who conceived of and fought for the project, and City government colleagues, including City Planning Chair Amanda Burden and the Economic Development Corporation, under the direction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a major supporter of the project.
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