Thanks to a bunch of canny coyotes doing what coyotes do, we have recently been reminded of the increasing presence of nature in cities and the human interaction with nature, both in New York City and other cities. And these lessons are applicable not just to the many cities where humans and nature interact, but also to how people relate in a social way with nature.
New Yorkers are a funny group, at once impatient with any reminders that natural elements (such as the snow and cold of our recent winter) might impact their lives, but endlessly fascinated by nature in the form of wildlife and plants, appearing and surviving against all odds in one of the world’s mostly densely populated and built up cities.
For followers of nature in cities, few can forget the saga of Pale Male and Lola, two red tailed hawks whose nest on a tony Fifth Ave. co-op was evicted, later to be replaced following a high-level diplomatic negotiation (that I was part of along with officials from the Audubon Society). The story of Pale Male transcended the small world of birders and entered the popular culture mainstream through several books for adults and children (Red Tails in Love, Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City, The Tale of Pale Male, etc.) and movies.
Pale Male and Lola. Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Over the last few months, coyotes have been appearing on an almost daily basis in New York City—one on top of a bar in Queens, another wandering through Manhattan’s Riverside Park, a third (or was it the second) trapped outside a restaurant in Lower Manhattan. Each of those sightings, and the attendant police chases replete with tranquilizer-dart armed sharpshooters of the NYPD’s elite Emergency Services Unit, becomes fodder for the nightly news and daily newspapers (with the word “wily” used almost every time). In fact, coyotes have been in parts of NYC for decades, and now are common in cities across the country.
Hal the coyote being tracked by NYPD and Park Rangers. Photo: NY Times/ Paul Kreft.
But the fact that those stories are still prominent on the news reflects New Yorkers’ fascination with nature. Kind of like the song “New York, New York”—if they can make it here, they’ll make it anywhere—city residents seem to identify with the survivor instincts of hawks, falcons, herons, and now coyotes. They also tend to love stories of “survivor” trees, such as the non-native Ailanthus altissima—the tree made famous in the novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—which grows from almost any surface. (I have even seen one growing out of a subterranean pit and up through a steel grate.) Threaten to cut down a tree, even if it is old and decrepit and likely to fall, and the neighbors will get up in arms (except for those who don’t like trees and the messy leaves they drop.) It may be no accident that nature has taken an ascendant role in New York City, where the City has pursued a deliberate policy of protecting and enhancing natural areas for more than 30 years, from starting a special unit concerned with natural areas in 1984 to the recent creation of the Natural Areas Conservancy.
And while it might seem to people who have never visited New York, or only visited Manhattan, that New York is the last place for nature and humans to interact, in fact more than 50 percent of the parklands in NYC (City, State and Federal) are “natural,” according to the Trust for Public Land’s “2015 City Park Facts,” which also reports that among the 100 largest cities in the US, more than half have park systems that are more than 50% natural. More than 1/3 of the parks under the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation (NYCDPR) are natural areas, and they have been under the care and study of the NYCDPR Natural Resources Group (NRG) since it was established in 1984—more than 30 years ago.
So what do people actually think about nature in the form of parks, and what are the social interactions that people have with parks and nature? What do they look for when they go to a park, and how far are they willing to travel to get there? Are they looking for experience with nature that are active, as in fishing or birding, or passive, as in simply experiencing nature and finding a place of refuge there?
Those were some of the questions asked by researchers from the US Forest Service (USFS), working with the Natural Areas Conservancy (NAC), a recently founded non-profit partner to NYCDPR and NRG, and with NYCDPR/NRG staff. The study, led by USFS researchers Erika S. Svendsen, Lindsay K. Campbell , Nancy F. Sonti and Michelle L. Johnson, working with Bram Gunther, Sarah Charlop Powers, Helen Forgione and Clare Pregitzer of the NAC/NRG, was done through interviews with park visitors to NYC parks along Jamaica Bay in southern Queens and Brooklyn in 2013. “Reading the Landscape: A Social Assessment of Parks and Their Natural Areas in Jamaica Bay Communities” was issued in March of this year, and it contains fascinating documentation of how New Yorkers interact with their parks along Jamaica Bay, many of them natural, with tidal wetlands, coastal meadows and forests, and even freshwater wetlands. This “social assessment” was done in coordination with a city-wide ecological assessment of the 10,000 acres of NYCDPR natural areas conducted by the NAC/NRG.
Study survey team getting to work. Photo: USFS, Social Assessment project.
The primary questions guiding the study were these: “How do New Yorkers use, value and assign meaning to parks, and in particular, to less programmed or ‘wilder’ spaces in parks? How might we collect this data in a comprehensive yet efficient way so that it can be used by land managers and, ultimately, benefit the public?”
Interviewer team reviewing responses. Photo: USFS, Social Assessment project.
The study looked at 17 parks encompassing 2,140 acres along the edge of Jamaica Bay, whose adjacent neighborhoods have over 900,000 residents—more than many of the largest American cities. Those neighborhoods are also quite diverse racially, economically, and ethnically, including African-Americans, whites, Latinos and Asians. Field observations were made to document usage patterns, and the research teams conducted 681 in-person interviews with park users.
Site interview taking place at Jamaica Bay. Photo: USFS, Social Assessment project.
While there is much to be gleaned in the details of the assessment, here were the broad findings:
Parks provide for an important number and range of activities that are beneficial to human beings.
Parks serve as local resources, but are connected through their users to a wider network of outdoor sites.
Parks are a crucial form of ‘nearby nature’ that provides space for activities, recreation, socialization, and engagement with the environment and supports social ties and place attachment.
The majority of adult park users do not participate in formal environmental stewardship groups, but information about other forms of engagement and barriers to stewardship provides insight on potential for increasing stewardship.
Although relatively few park users commented independently on Hurricane Sandy, those that did discussed the way in which parks and neighborhood residents were affected by the event.
Of great interest to me was that city residents were willing to travel to get to these parks: though 37 percent of the people polled lived within ¼ mile of the park, 26 percent lived from ½ to I mile away, and 37 percent traveled more than I mile to get to the parks. In our work, the Trust for Public Land has found that most city residents are not willing to walk more than about ½ mile to get to a park. Mass transit options to get to most of the Jamaica Bay parks are extremely limited, which means that more than a third of visitors to these parks are traveling more than a mile to get there by driving, walking, or bicycling, primarily. So it’s possible that visitors are getting fit not just in the parks, but on their way to them.
Jamaica Bay on descent to JFK. Credit: Erlend Bjørtvedt.
As may be expected, almost 70 percent of visitors were there for active pursuits, including sports, walking, dog-walking, bicycling, and running. But almost 10 percent were engaged in a passive activity, and more than 4 percent were pursuing nature recreation. In interviews, a “prevalent theme for 14.7% of respondents was the ability to connect with material qualities of nature and the outdoors,” and “of the numerous sub-themes identified, the most commonly referenced attributes of nature were “fish”, “shade”, “views”, “water”, and “trees.” Also mentioned were qualities of the air, including “fresh air”, “breeze”, and “cool.” Other wildlife mentioned includes crabs, birds, and eels. Similarly, “13.7% of respondents identified the ways in which the park serves as a site of refuge. Interviewees sought out green space in order to get away from the crowds, sounds, and traffic of New York City. In particular, they sought out the sense of isolation (e.g. “to get away from crowds”) and peace and quiet that they could find in parks.”
Waterfront along Pelham Bay Park. Photo: USFS, Social Assessment project
The importance of the USFS/NAC/NYCDPR social assessment cannot be overstated. While many scientists are studying the life of nature in the city, and the roles of natural systems in providing ecosystems services, little is known about the social values of parks and nature and the way that people interact with them. Furthermore, many of the users are from economically underserved areas, who count on these parks for social connections to people and to the natural world.
This assessment is eye-opening, and it will be interesting to see the results of a second, city-wide assessment carried out in 2014. But as people increasingly move to and live in cities, scientific and social viewpoints on human and nature interactions will be important areas to study so our cities can use the data to make policy. While the cute stories of wily coyotes and people interacting describe one point of contact, the survival (and happiness) of humans and the other life forms with whom we share our cities will depend on mutually reinforcing, symbiotic contact. The 1933 movie “King Kong” ends with movie maker Carl Denham who, when asked about how the airplanes killed the giant ape, says “It was beauty killed the beast” (that is, Fay Wray, not the planes). Our coda can be “…and beauty and the beast lived happily ever after.”
King Kong and Fay Wray. Credit: RKO Radio Pictures
“…and thus we layered a continent with asphalt and linoleum.”—Eric Sanderson (Terra Nova)
In 2010, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West was transformed with a protected bike lane and pedestrian refuges. Overnight, speeding traffic was replaced with lighter, calmer car flow and increasing throngs of families walking and cycling to the adjacent park. The project nonetheless met fierce opposition from residents upset about the loss of driving and parking space, and it was not long until these local opponents took to public protest. “Your Bike Lane? Not on my Speedway!” and “Don’t be Conned by Sadik-Khan” read a few of the more outrageous signs. Of course, we responded with our own counter-protest. My friend and fellow sustainable streets advocate, Aaron Naparstek, was there. He was clutching Transportation Alternatives’ battery-powered megaphone and he was not afraid to use it:
“This is not just a about a battle for a bike lane. This is about our addiction to oil. This is about our wars in the Middle East. This is about global warming. This is about generations of kids not being able to move around and get the exercise they need to be healthy. This is a battle for the new American Dream.”
“Right On!” I think I shouted. But to others within earshot, Aaron’s megaphone manifesto may have missed the mark. What the heck do bike lanes have to do with national security, anyway?
A lot, it turns out, but it’s a much longer story. In Terra Nova: The World After Cars, Oil and Suburbs, Eric W. Sanderson tries to tell it like nobody ever has, in 350 pages rife with detailed infographics and illustrations by Pentagram’sEddie Opara.
If you read Sanderson’s last book, the acclaimed and best-selling Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, you know that, like Manhattan itself, he really likes to pack it in. Terra Nova is also crowded, like the future utopia it describes. There are a thousand facts here, and sixty-five pages of notes, citations and “elaborations” just for good measure. But the thing about density, as any urban planner will tell you, is that it yields unparalleled benefits if you are sure to layer in swift transportation and attractive open spaces. Sanderson does density right, sweeping his reader quickly from place to place, from a primeval history of oil to the collapse of the suburban housing market in 2008, to a convincing outline of a smarter future tax structure. And the gifted Opara provides plenty of eye-candy accompaniment, with more than 70 captivating charts and diagrams. (My favorite: ‘Tranportation Space’, which clearly illustrates the space-saving magic of walking, cycling, and surface transit).
But Sanderson is trying to do more than just take us on an entertaining and educational journey. He clearly wants this book to spark a revolution in how we live, and to do this he has to touch and motivate our souls. For this he deploys a few mythological frames, invoking Homer and Native American lore. The promise of the car was one of three seductive Sirens, and the heroic striving for a better world harks to the epic task of Nanapush, hero of the Lenape creation myth. These work pretty well, but they seem a bit forced. I think Sanderson would have made these devices more relevant and powerful had he used more modern versions of these ancient archetypes, or simply made some new ones up himself. If George Lucas can do it, so can a brilliant storyteller like Sanderson.
An infographic from Terra Nova, by graphic artist Eddie Opara.
The pith of the book is Terra Nova itself, the blueprint outline for denser, greener cities coursed with alternative transportation and governed by smart taxes that discourage waste and reward thrift of our limited resources. But before he unveils this ideal future, Sanderson marshals history, physics, biology, chemistry, and economics to carefully explain why transitioning to Terra Nova is much more complicated than changing a light bulb, or swapping your SUV for a hydrogen fuel cell sedan. “The goal is to imagine a future without also having to appeal to some miraculous technological fix,” he says early on. Getting to a post-car utopia requires coming to grips with the systemic nature of our problem: decades of short-sighted decisions have warped our energy, economic, transportation, settlement and political systems into a grossly inefficient dependency on greenfield land and cheap oil.
Other authors have delved deeper into the history of the car in the city (Fighting Traffic by Peter Norton), the march of suburbia (Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson), and the century-long consolidation of our transportation system into a monoculture of driving (Asphalt Nation by Jane Holtz Kay). James Howard Kunstler has done pioneering work weaving this all together, but with a touch of conspiratorial crankiness that has kept his important ideas on the fringe. Sanderson connects the big dots, but does it with the authority of a world-class science explainer, and without letting his ego get in the way. Even when Sanderson does occasionally lapse into eco-sermoning, he does it consciously and convincingly. We’ll move our bodies more in Terra Nova, and more daily walking, “combats depression, bolsters the immune system, fights osteoporosis, helps prevent diabetes, and improves sex life.” Preach!
I wish Sanderson spent more time on “Ramifications”, by far the shortest of the book’s three sections. Most of this section is dedicated to extolling the many benefits of trading resource extraction for renewables, sprawl for density, and cars for transit and human power. It’s important to point out the enticements—that there is future money to be made in retrofitting our systems and in selling streetcars. But much more interesting is the shorter subsection in which Sanderson treats the obstacles—we will have to pay more for gas, and give up the habituated convenience of cars and suburban living. And the biggest obstacle of all, evinced in the above-mentioned battle for Prospect Park West, is figuring out how to evolve past our NIMBYism, aversion to change, and new people using our street or moving into our neighborhood. While we mostly-accepting New Yorkers have by definition overcome this obstacle, we can still relate to Sanderson when he writes:
“One challenge that will come with living closer together is that we will need to face up to a social and psychological fact clearly in evidence in our democracy: other people can be really annoying. In the best of circumstances, density is fun and profitable; in the worst of conditions, it foments antipathy for humanity and certain individuals in particular.”
To solve the downsides to density, Sanderson calls for more tolerance, better urban design to give us peace and seclusion when we need it, and people-friendly public spaces where we can rely on Jane Jacobs’ ‘eyes on the street’ to bring out the good neighbor in all of us. This discussion of the cultural evolution required to reach the density requirements of Terra Nova is worthy of much more than a few pages, but perhaps here we have the seed of Sanderson’s next pioneering project, or the next George Lucas-produced motion picture. I eagerly await the next installment.
“The more we know of other forms of life, the more we enjoy and respect ourselves…Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.”
— E.O. Wilson
A recent, satirical New Yorker piece by Andy Borowitz quoted a fictitious resident who blamed scientists “for failing to warn us of the true cost of climate change. They always said that polar bears would starve to death, but they never told us our lawns would look like crap.” Although this does not represent a real person’s exact feelings, the underlying sentiment sadly has more than a hint of truth. To many people, the impact of a changing environment seems distant and completely separate from our existence until we are directly confronted with the negative results.
Poorly conceived design visibly divided us in urban areas from our wilds and contributed to our recent ability to see nature as something isolated from us. Yet reinvigorating our bond with nature is a challenge architecture and urban design are well placed to address. Architects and designers have control over our built environment; by changing the way we design cities and buildings to connectto rather than disconnect from nature, we can change our proximity to nature and shift our physical relationship to the environment.
Photo: Schristia. Creative Commons.
The separation that we have crafted over the centuries through our isolating designs hasn’t come without costs. Obesity, ADHD, autism, a decline in creativity—these are all connected to a lack of environmental connection. Unfortunately, this estrangement from nature has not only directly impacted our health, it has impacted our ability to respond to crucial modern challenges, such as climate change, because these dire environmental topics feel removed from us. The environment appears distant because we designed it as such. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan describe this impact in their seminal book, Ecological Design:
“What do we learn from this kind of ‘nowhere’ environment? When living and working in nowhere places becomes normal, it is no wonder that we literally lose some of our sensitivity toward nature. Through the daily experience of the designed environment, we learn detachment… As nature has receded from our daily lives, it has receded from our ethics.”
Yet despite putting up physical barriers between nature and us, we still cannot shake our deep tie to and need for other species. Humans have an ingrained desire to connect. E.O. Wilson describes this impulse in his ‘Biophilia Hypothesis’ in which he explains,
“…When human beings remove themselves from the natural environment, the biophilic learning rules are not replaced by modern versions equally well adapted to artifacts. Instead, they persist from generation to generation. For the indefinite future… urban dwellers will go on dreaming of snakes for reasons they cannot explain.”
We crave connection to the natural world, even if we, individually, have always been seemingly divided from it. By calling architects and urban designers to ‘Make Nature Visible,’ as Van der Ryn and Cowan request in Ecological Design, we can begin to design places grounded in their own unique environment. In this way, designers can revive an awareness of the natural systems that affect us and recover place-based knowledge.
The advantages of interacting with and seeing nature are numerous. Beyond technical benefits, feeling the presence of the living world around us elevates the spirit. Supporting this movement, many architects and urban designers are inventively finding ways to reconnect us with the touch and feel of our wider biological community.
Photo credit: Thorbjõrn Hansen
Schools
Children seem particularly moved by biophilia and quickly gain many advantages from access to the outdoors. Schools that get children outside into natural places find that their students perform better academically (this has proven especially true for low-income students) and are more engaged and motivated to learn. These benefits come in addition to decreasing the need for disciplinary action, reducing stress, and increasing student attention spans. But the gains are not just performance-based—it turns out that the outdoors even improves vision and increases Vitamin D levels, all advantages that make students healthier. There are some great schools that strive to put children outside and reflect this philosophy in their design.
Photo credit: Thorbjõrn Hansen
Daycare Center in Holbæk, Denmark
Sitting at the highest point in the neighborhood, the daycare center on the outskirts of Holbæk, Denmark provides a base for an outdoor-oriented school. Teaching children outside has long been a traditional education approach in Denmark, with ‘forest schools’ dating back to the 1950s. This daycare, designed by Henning Larsen, includes large south-facing windows, a green roof, and gardens to allow children to play outside throughout the entire year.
Fuji Kindergarten in Japan
Physically encircling a tree, the innovative Fuji Kindergarten, designed by Yui and Takaharu Tezuka, highlights nature as a teacher every day. The children can play on an outdoor structure that surrounds the tree, climb the tree itself, or just admire the tree from every room in the school. The school furthers its connection to nature with lots of glass and open air, which means the outdoors flow seamlessly into the indoors.
Photo by Katsuhisa Kida/FOTOTECA.
Bronx Zoo School Proposal in the Bronx, New York
In the New York City borough of the Bronx, few people have close interaction with their natural environment. This proposal, which I designed for a public school in the Bronx zoo, was aimed at rectifying this problem. Our connection to the ecological systems becomes apparent day-to-day through this school’s open architecture and outdoor classrooms and is bolstered by the whooping crane breeding program, which is integrated into the school and managed by the students.
Image courtesy of Whitney Hopkins.
Hospitals
Connecting patients to nature has been innately valued for centuries—the first health centers were at remote monasteries intended to foster the tie between healing and the environment. Now, a growing body of modern scientific evidence supports this notion; patient outcomes appear to be closely related to interacting with nature. Connection to the natural environment has been shown to improve overall healthcare quality in multiple ways by reducing staff stress and fatigue, increasing the effectiveness in delivering care, improving patient safety, and reducing patient stress. All this leads to improve health outcomes and patients who are happier and heal faster. Hospitals foster this by having views, natural light, and access to gardens or the outdoors. The few following hospitals do this exceedingly well.
Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California
Designed in the early 1960s on the California coast, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula was ahead of its time in pulling the outdoors inside a healing environment. The patient rooms and public spaces have large panoramic views of the surrounding forest, gardens, and courtyards and a flow between all the indoor and outdoor spaces. It has been recently expanded and remodeled by HOK to be state of the art while maintaining the original natural tranquility.
Photo: Frank Keillor. Creative Commons.
Children’s Psychiatry Center (KPC) in Genk, Netherlands
In an artistically crafted, patient-centric building, the Children’s Psychiatry Center in the Dutch city of Genk innovatively marries a designed outdoor environment with the hospital. Children’s well being was at the core of OSAR’s design, so every space in the center captures views of internal courtyards, gardens, or the forest. In so doing, the hospital reduces the stress of the patients, their families, and the staff and creates a safe and warm atmosphere within the center.
Children Psychiatric Center, Genk, Belgium. Photo courtesy of OSAR. www.osar.be
Workplace
Because the evidence of diverse benefits is so strong, contact with nature in the workplace has become a central element in the design of healthy office spaces. Various studies have repeatedly shown that access to outdoor gardens or parks, indoor plants, and windows with views of natural places reduce worker stress levels. Beyond manipulating stress levels, it appears that employees are also happier and more productive with a connection to nature. And firms greatly benefit because sick leave and worker turnover is reduced. With all these advantages, it is no wonder that creating contact between nature and workers is happening in offices, manufacturing plants, and every type of work environment in between.
Photo by Greg Williams. Creative Commons.
Ford Rouge Factory in Dearborn, Michigan
A historic manufacturing facility that had been deemed a heavily polluted brownfield site, Ford transformed the facility into a vibrant, sustainable new factory. Nature takes center stage at the facilities, which boast the largest green roof in North America, various treatment ponds and gardens, natural vegetation, and ample day lighting. As a result, the productivity of the workers increased and sick days decreased. One complaint: the amplified bird poop from the population that has taken up residence on the factory premise.
selgascano offices in Madrid, Spain
Within the urban area of Madrid, the architectural firm of selgascano made waves with their design for their own office. Sunken into the ground, curved glass opens the office up to spectacular and unusual views of the surrounding woods. The space is filled with natural light that bounce of the bright interior colors. Reportedly, employees love working in the space.
selgascano office. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Cities
In urban areas, the expanse of human construction can particularly estrange people from the environment, so it becomes crucial to consciously give residents access to natural places. A recent Danish study by Stigsdotter and colleagues found that people who lived more than 1 kilometer away from green space were generally less healthy. They also showed worse vitality, were at higher risk for depression, and reported higher levels of stress and pain. These advantages must partly contribute to the increased values of real estate adjacent to urban green space. Some cities are working hard to bring nature into the urban core by creating or revitalizing parks and seeing green space as an essential element in their infrastructure.
Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul, with a highway running over it.
Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, South Korea
A stream runs through the center of Seoul, but for decades, most people would never have known. After years of polluting the Cheonggyecheon river, the city covered it in 1968 with an elevated, 8-lane hightway, hiding the river from view. But in 2003, the mayor began an initiative to improve traffic and restore the river. The Cheonggyecheon park opened in 2005, bringing people into close contact with the water and newly established parks through a central urban corridor. This project revitalized the local busineesess, improved transportation, and made the citizens happy by providing them with a delightful green space and reconnecting them to their historic river.
Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul. Photo: David Maddox
In partnership with nature
With nature providing such joy and many health benefits, it is time that architects and planners leverage designs that highlight the environment in our built spaces. We can hope that beyond making a healthier and happier world, we can also prompt a more ethical relationship to nature.
As Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan conclude:
“Design transforms awareness. Designs that grow out of and celebrate place ground us in place. Designs that work in partnership with nature articulate an implicit hope that we might do the same.”
Cities have long been known as hotspots for innovation. In the past, much of this could be attributed to cities being the centralised physical location of businesses, investors, consumers, markets, and places of learning, and as nodes for connecting with other people and cities around the world. Yet in the new era of global communication, including crowd-sourced funding, online learning, and virtual marketplaces, this dependence on physical proximity is decoupling. Even as our world’s human population becomes increasingly urbanised, our transport and communication infrastructure are simultaneously changing our physical dependence on a city location for an “urban” lifestyle. This leads to a shift in our understanding of what it means to be “urban”, with previous understandings of urban as a physically defined “urbanized” landscape becoming replaced with a much more nuanced “continuum of urbanity”.
If we are shifting our conceptual focus from urbanisation to urbanity, what does this mean for the way we design, plan, and manage our cities and other landscapes for people and biodiversity? We currently have a large and growing scientific and practical knowledge base regarding how to create sustainable, resilient, biophilic, and biodiverse cities. Are there opportunities to draw upon this knowledge to pre-empt the challenges of retrofitting solutions and reintroducing nature and wildlife (including plants) into landscapes dominated by people? Could we instead begin designing how people can be successfully integrated into landscapes that can remain dominated by nature and biodiversity?
In this essay, I will try to explore this question by bringing together two initially disparate, but fundamentally related, topics that I have been actively thinking about over the past few months. I’ll start by sharing my recent encounters with the “continuum of urbanity” , before moving on to the ecological adaptations of organisms to urban environments. I’ll finish by drawing these two ideas together and showing how they can be combined to improve outcomes for people and nature across the full spectrum of urbanity, both now and in the future.
The “Continuum of Urbanity”
I recently encountered this continuum of urbanity when I attended the 2014 URBIO conference in Incheon in the Republic of Korea. Incheon has a population of 2.8 million people, and can be considered a satellite city within the larger Seoul Capital Area of 25.6 million people. During my visit, I encountered many examples of the new “urbanity”, but I will share three of them here, as they have made the largest impression on me.
From the street, the Songdo area within Incheon looks like typical new urban development with the usual configuration of buildings, parks, streets, and amenities. However, what isn’t apparent is the level of sophistication connecting the roads, properties, and residents with each other and the larger world. The advanced technology behind the centralised garbage disposal systems and road traffic control system, and the degree of virtual connectivity provided to the residents, were only revealed to me when a friend shared a link to a BBC series on Connected Cities, which featured the Songdo development. While these may seem like trivial differences, they are likely to have a profound effect on the social-ecological system through subtle changes in the behaviour of residents, and the implications for the environmental conditions associated with this urban landscape. How will personalised in-home conference facilities change the transportation patterns of residents and their preferred modes and locations for physical exercise? What will this mean for their relationship with nature and the external environment? What impact will the significant reduction in access to anthropogenic food resources redirected through centralised waste disposal systems have on the local wildlife populations? Can traffic flows be engineered to benefit wildlife as well as optimising travel times for people?
2. Rural features in urban landscapes
In contrast to the hidden shift to urbanity, I also encountered several examples of the inter-digitization of urban and rural developments. On one occasion, I chanced upon an example where a rural village had been encased within a larger neighbourhood of high-density urban development; the activities occurring in that landscape reflected an “urban” lifestyle, and the connection with the “rural” past was largely confined to the architecture of the buildings and laneways. On another occasion, I went for a walk through an area surrounded by urban development, yet the residents were still actively farming the land and living a much more “rural” lifestyle, whilst encased within the larger landscape of the city.
These encounters with the interdigitized “urbanity” have also prompted me to look for examples where the reverse may have happened. I didn’t have to look much further than my own backyard. A few months ago, my family and I relocated from Melbourne, a city of 4 million people, to a nearby regional centre of 100,000 people. My commute time to work is still roughly just over 1 hour, yet we have essentially joined millions of other people around the world who have made a tree change or sea change and “escaped to the country”. The very same transport and communication technologies that are making our cities more sophisticated are also enabling people to live an “urban” lifestyle in areas that have previously been considered “non-urban”. While this may have some positive benefits for biodiversity, such as the large-scale, spontaneous regeneration of tree cover in central Victoria that has accompanied the shift from commercial farming to hobby farming practices, there are also likely to be many distinctly “urban” impacts. For example, what impact does this low-density development and the associated increases in artificial night lighting infrastructure have on local plant and animal communities? How do human activities in these landscapes change the soundscape? What happens when areas that were traditionally used as “weekend escapes” become permanent residences?
I would like to shift focus now to discuss the second topic which has also been occupying my thoughts over the past year. These topics are actually intricately interrelated, and both are fundamental to addressing the question that I have used to frame the title of this essay.
Over the past decade, thousands of urban ecology studies have been published that investigate how biodiversity has been affected by urbanisation. However, many of these studies have largely been focussing on questions related to patterns: the Who?, What?, Where? questions. These pattern questions can be considered as “low-hanging fruit”—they are often the focus in relatively young fields, as they act as important precursors to finding suitable scenarios where we can address more detailed questions related to processes: the Which?, How?, and Why? questions. However, with the explosion of energy and investment that is now going into urban ecology research around the world, it is time to move beyond the low-hanging fruit and really begin to understand why it is that some species of plant and animals persist in urban areas, whilst others disappear. Which features of urban landscapes tip the balance in favour of biodiversity losses or gains? Why do some organisms remain in urban areas and others disappear? How do species adapt to the new urban environmental conditions, and are there potential costs associated with their persistence?
Over the past year, I have been working with colleagues on a couple of different projects that are addressing these Which?, How?, and Why? questions. I would like to share a little bit of that experience now, as I think that both science and practice have much to gain from an increased understanding of these processes. Additionally, as a second emerging area of research interest and conceptual development, I think it is important to start making the links between process questions and urbanity very early on, so that they can grow and inform each other.
Which features of urban environments?
Understanding which features of urban landscapes are affecting urban biodiversity is one key building block for designing and creating urban areas that can support people and biodiversity. The active interplay between science and design has been critical for pushing urban ecology research in this direction over the past few years, and many useful insights are beginning to emerge. For example, there is now strong evidence supporting the importance of retaining large old trees in urban landscapes and recommendations for how we can create succession plans to retaining this resource into the future. There is also emerging evidence of the importance of the spatial configuration of greenspace, and the role of complex vertical and horizontal vegetation structure in providing habitat for a wider range of species. As there are already strong advancements being made in this area, I will keep this section relatively brief. These questions will continue to be important, although we may frameask them slightly differently when addressing them under the framework of urbanity. The outcomes from this reframed research will be critical when we begin looking at how to design “urbanitizing” landscapes to incorporate people without negatively impacting the existing biodiversity.
Why is it that some organisms persist and others disappear?
As we find with any system, if you tinker with one component, there are repercussions for another component. Understanding Which features of urban landscapes impact on biodiversity, depends upon Why individual organisms are affected by them. Consequently, there has been an increase in the number of studies that are looking for common characteristics of species that may help explain Why specific organisms experience urbanisation in a particular way. Guilds and functional traits have been one common approach to addressing this question. This approach groups species that share specific characteristics (such as insectivorous birds, predatory insects, short plants with small seeds, etc.), where a strong response within a guild or functional group may reveal an insight into Why that particular urban feature is so important. These types of research questions are also gaining prominence within urban ecology, and revealing important insights around how we can better design cities for biodiversity. The shift towards addressing the Why questions under a framework of urbanity will also enhance our understanding of how we can better design “urbanitizing” landscapes for people and biodiversity.
How do organisms adapt and evolve in response to urban environmental conditions?
We have now reached the question that has been most intriguing me over the past twelve months. The emerging information from the Which? And Why? questions can only be fully understood if we begin to investigate How organisms are able to persist in and respond to the altered environmental conditions that they find themselves in. Are there inherent advantages within certain guild or functional traits that mean a species is pre-adapted to life in urban environments? Or are there ways an organism can adjust their behaviour or physiology that allow them to adapt to the new environmental conditions? Are the adjustments made through some level of phenotypic plasticity, or are there associated changes in genetics that would indicate micro-evolution? Do the adjustments of one feature have consequences for another feature? Overall, are the adjustments advantageous and thus , or are they simply a consequence of random chance?
While many of these questions may seem to belong within the white walls of the ivory tower, I believe that they have just as much potential to shape and inform our actions around the creation and enhancement of landscapes for people and nature as the Which? and Why? questions. In fact, these How? questions may even be more critical as they will equip us with an understanding of how our ecological systems may change in the future under the pressures associated with global climate change and the shift towards urbanity. By understanding the behavioural and physiological responses that confer adaptation and persistence, we can also begin to identify where the limits to adaptation may occur, and therefore the thresholds where our systems may shift from one local state into another state entirely. Therefore, we cannot truly incorporate ecological resilience or evaluate the effectiveness of our actions until we have harvested these high-hanging fruit. The extent and interconnectivity of urbanity only adds to the importance of this task.
In the future, will we build cities for wildlife and design the countryside for people?
And so we return to my original question. It seems to me that much of the current discussion around biophilic and biodiverse cities is often focussed on the features that are lacking in urban environments, which help to explain why we are left with the species that currently persist. While this is a very general statement and there will obviously be exceptions, in most cases the actions we are taking to create and design biodiverse cities involve retrofitting and post-development innovations. This investment in creating cities where humans and biodiversity can co-habit remains critical for all of the reasons that have led to this movement beginning in the first place. However, with the reframing from urbanisation to urbanity, the physical location and spatial extent of the urban influence is going to change with subtle but significant cumulative impacts for biodiversity and ecosystems across the globe. By embracing the continuum of urbanity framework, we have a unique opportunity to begin identifying solutions for how urbanity can develop through a considered and deliberate effort to design people into these urbanitizing landscapes, while the biodiversity that already exists there retains the ability and opportunity to persist, adapt, and evolve.
We are only just beginning to understand how our urban biodiversity has successfully transitioned into urbanising landscapes; it is now our turn to explore how people might innovate and adapt to urbanitizing landscapes. I, for one, look forward to the challenge!
I like to simplify what constitutes urban nature in a given area. I therefore thought it might be interesting to provide an overview and to ask whether anything is missing, or erroneously included. This article expresses my view of the variety of forms that could be included under the “nature of cities” banner. On planning maps, nature is represented by polygons, lines, and points. Polygons are shapes, denoting area. Lines are linear features—though not necessarily straight ones. Points are individual features small enough not to require a shape to represent them.
Shapes
Cities fragment the landscape that they occupy. If that landscape was not already transformed by agriculture, the fragments may contain remnants of natural ecosystems. The sustainability of these relatively pristine ecosystems is dependent on their size, shape, and connectivity to one another, as well as the kind of pressures they experience from outside. In biodiversity hotspots such as the Cape Floristic Region in South Africa, every remnant is considered by conservationists to be a precious contribution to national and local targets to conserve representative samples as a percentage of original extent. Although these are the “purest” form of nature in cities, various studies, going back decades, suggest that they differ from their previous, un-fragmented state (see, for example, Andren 1994). Fragments may include wetlands, which are subject to the same pressures as other remnants as well as additional pollution and water extraction.
Natural vegetation. Photo: Brian Ralphs
Coastal cities can count the strip of the coastal zone—both beaches and the sea—as part of the urban nature assets. Though often heavily utilized and over-fished, these zones are connected to distant ecosystems and, around the world, have features and even species in common. Often city governments are also responsible for managing them, while residents and tourists rely on them heavily for recreation—from swims at the beach to whale-watching.
Camps Bay, Cape Town. Photo: sat.greatstock.co.za
Parks in cities can take a variety of forms but are typically mowed and manicured to some extent and, historically, little effort was made to naturalize them. Nowadays, many are breaking that mold. The Tiergarten in Berlin, for example, has sections that are allowed to grow wild, while others are manicured in the traditional way. Parks are for people and their nature will ultimately be determined by what the local populace prefers. With evolving ideas of the nature of cities we might see a future, therefore, in which the Tiergarten approach becomes more commonplace.
An urban park. Photo: Florent Lannoy.
In the average city, gardens probably far exceed parks in total area. They are, however, intensely compartmentalized, limiting the flow of genes between them except for flying animals and the plants dispersed by them and the wind. It is also likely that gardens contain a far greater variety of species than parks in a given city, though many or most may be exotic species that do not perform the same functions as original and larger ecosystems. They can be remarkably diverse, as demonstrated in the famous example of 2,673 species of plants and animals recorded in Leicester garden over the course of 30 years (Owen 2010).
Cottage garden. Photo: Garry Knight
Botanical gardens merit separate mention because of the educational experience they offer over parks and the more expansive (and more expensive) experience of nature they offer over private gardens. Often paired with greenhouses, educational exhibits, and restaurants, they concentrate the experience of nature into a thoroughly-managed space while often maximizing biodiversity. Some, like Cape Town’s breathtaking Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, transition into natural vegetation. As one moves further into Kirstenbosch and away from the restaurants, the garden gets wilder while the crowds become more sparse.
Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens, South Africa. Photo: sat.greatstock.co.za
Brownfield sites are the neglected cousins of the preceding categories. They have the added ignominy of an uncertain or terminal future, with many being earmarked for future development. Studies have shown, however, that they play a role in supporting biodiversity and even in providing a natural experience (Bonthoux et al. 2014). Importantly in the context of urban nature, a perceived value (often based on the presence of a single, iconic-enough species such as a breeding pair of birds) may be motivation enough for enhancing such sites or retaining a portion when they are developed, for the sake of nature.
Brownfield site. Photo: Russell James Smith
Lines
A variety of green infrastructure can fulfill the purpose of a natural green corridor. In systematic biodiversity planning, however, corridors are considered to be strips of natural vegetation and the ecosystems they support, which connect more substantial fragments of natural vegetation. Their effectiveness depends on their length and breadth, and the species that need to use them to traverse the urban matrix, and entire books have been written on the questions of how they should look in terms of width, length and quality (see for example Hilty J and Lidicker WZ. 2006).
Green corridors through a city. Photo: La Citta Vita
Avenuesof trees or shrubs along roads are, in some ways, the linear equivalents of parks. They are, however, typically less diverse and imaginative, despite offering an undeniable improvement on a treeless road. Singapore is a world leader in re-thinking the concept of an avenue. In this crowded city, where space is paramount, biodiversity authorities have responded accordingly by planting multi-species, multi-layer “avenues” that contribute to the biodiversity of the city as much as to its aesthetics.
A multi-species avenue in Singapore. Photo: Jeremy Woon
“Water lines” in cities range from relatively sterile concrete canals that carry only water, to rivers with a variety of plant and animal life and vegetated banks. The former is often a wasted opportunity to bring nature to the city, although it may be necessary where space is severely limited. The ecosystem services provided by naturalized water lines, such as flood attenuation, water purification and recreation may, however, surpass the benefits of a canal even in economic terms. Perhaps the most popular option is a compromise between these two ends of the spectrum. In Seoul, the Cheonggyecheon Stream—re-engineered after the demolition of a highway —attracts thousands of visitors but is expensive to maintain because water needs to be piped in from elsewhere. Retrofitting often tends to be expensive—a reminder of the importance of design in early-stage city planning.
Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul. Photo: d’n’c
Points
Many members of the public don’t think of any of the shapes and lines discussed above when considering nature in cities—they think of wild animals. Many “cosmopolitan”, or widespread, species play a role in various parts of the world. Some are appreciated by the public (squirrels, ducks), others abhorred (rats, cockroaches), and still others produce mixed feelings (pigeons, seagulls). Many such species have little value in terms of biodiversity due to their ubiquity and uniformity; nevertheless, they are nature, and must be counted as residents of cities. One common phenomenon regarding urban wildlife is that the rarer the species is, the more it is valued. This is demonstrated, for example, by the excited reaction of tourists having their first experience of a species that may be common and problematic in a city they are visiting for the first time, such as foxes, raccoons or mallard ducks. Animals in the city are usually mapped (i.e. treated as points) only if they are relatively rare.
Falcon chick. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York
Plants constitute many of the features discussed under shapes and lines, but in the urban context, or the context of the planner, they can also be points. This is especially true for large and iconic trees (see also Trees as Starting Points for Journeys of Learning About Local History and Heritage Trees of Cape Town (Continued) by Russell Galt), which may be located in a concrete matrix, as well as individuals of rare species in parks or gardens. Individual trees may have great natural and cultural relevance. In the seaside town of Mossel Bay, in South Africa, for example, the “post office tree” is an ancient milkwood (Sideroxylon inerme) and a national monument that acted as a mail system for sailors in the 1500s, who hung their shoes with notes in them for safe delivery.
Photo: London Trees
Others
It’s not always so clear whether a feature should be regarded as point, line or polygon. For example, a cluster of points can constitute a shape. A population of sedentary organisms (i.e. mostly plants), especially a rare species, may therefore be represented by a polygon of the area in which they are distributed, rather than by individual points.
Cluster of points constituting a polygon.
Green roofs and, to a greater extent, green walls, are difficult to categorize in the spatial sense but are also important contributions to urban nature.
Flower growing in a sandwich space. Photo: Anderson Mancini
As we get further into more-difficult-to-define features, we should not forget the “sandwich spaces” discussed by Timon McPhearson and Victoria Marshall—the spaces between buildings, rooftops, walls, curbs, sidewalk cracks, and other small-scale urban spaces that exist in the fissures between linear infrastructure (e.g. roads, bridges, tunnels, rail lines) and our three dimensional gridded cities. These spaces can be reservoirs for species, assist with water infiltration and offer other benefits discussed in McPherson and Marshall’s piece.
Green wall. Photo: Swiss.piton
Lastly, in cities, representations of nature are to be found in the intensively managed and artificial confines of zoos, aquariums, and museums. If urban nature is to be defined as that which provides us with an approximation of a natural experience, and if it contributes to the conservation of biodiversity, these cannot be excluded. Especially if education and awareness are our goals, these features need to be considered a part of the nature of cities.
Penguins at Edinburgh Zoo. Photo: Glen Bowman
Concluding remarks
This was a brief blow-by-blow summary of urban nature in categories, as seen through the eyes of a conservation biologist. The tools that are used to map and appoint attributes to these features, to indicate their location and importance, is often a geographic information systems (GIS)—a digital mapping device. We all use the resulting maps to get around cities with which we are not familiar, while city administrations increasingly focus on a network of green spaces as a key component of conserving biodiversity in the urban environment. For these reasons a holistic, spatial view of the nature of cities will always be an important contribution to our understanding and conservation of the nature of cities.
Andren H. 1994. Effects of habitat fragmentation on birds and mammals in landscapes with different proportions of suitable habitat: a review. Oikos. 71:355-366.
Bonthoux S, Brun M, Di Pietro F, Greulich S, Bouché-Pillon S. 2014. How can wastelands promote biodiversity in cities? A review. Landscape and Urban Planning. 132: 79-88.
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.
Joshua Burch, London As part of a young generation of conservationists, I see my photography as a way to inspire others to appreciate its beauty and influence a positive awareness towards conservation
Emilio Fantin, Bologna The chair recomposes the gap between time of nature and time of man; it evokes a moment of rest, a pause, a convivial and social function.
Mike Feller, New York For most New Yorkers, the subject is the gargantuan asphalt and cement deck upon which the urban throng careens. The estuary and the 22,000 acres of natural area is negative space. I want my images to confront and undermine this bias with the wonder, and pleasure that I experienced at the time and place of the photograph.
Andrés Flajszer, Barcelona From documentalism to fiction, I’m interested in witnessing the codes that are based on elements belonging to our bi-dimensional reality and, at the same time, that try to inhabit the in-between space enclosed by the apparent contradictions that shape and define our Anthropocene world.
Mike Houck, Portland A bronze beaver, installed to honor a lost husband, stands in a tiny but hard won nature preserve in Portland. Everyone knows it, interacts with it, adorns it as the seasons pass.
Chris Jordan, Seattle Perhaps uncomfortable feelings, inspired by images of destructive consumption, can become part of what connects us, serving as fuel for courageous individual and collective action as citizens of a new kind of global community. This hope continues to motivate my work.
Robin Lasser, Oakland The theme of a recent ZERO1 Biennial was “make your own world.” I thought, if I am to build my own world, over a river, in the age of climate change, the built environment best be prepared for floods, and take into consideration human needs, as well as the needs of other living creatures in the immediate eco system.
Monika Lawrence, Bemidji When we think of “nature”, we have rural areas, nature reserves, or national parks in mind rather than cities. Why do we often overlook the nature that indeed exists in cities?
Patrick Lydon, San Jose Can we meet a tree | as we would another human? | Well, of course | we can
David Maddox, New York In any collection of images from markets and nature-work in cities there is beauty, and bounty, and color—nature’s gifts in abundance. There is also back-breaking work and risk. These are scenes repeated around the world, from Andean or Amazonian markets to Jaipur to early morning truck unloading at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City.
Christopher Payne, New York What if these ruins were embodiments of the future and not just the past? The collapse of New York City and its return to a natural state had already happened on North Brother and I thought I had found a way to connect my pictures to a universal story, one that looks into the future and deals with the conundrum of our living in a natural world that we try to alter, but that always reasserts itself in the end.
Eric Sanderson, New York What was Henry Hudson thinking the day after he sailed into what would someday be New York harbor? Now it is all ancient history, but at this moment…We imagine him standing on the deck of the Halve Maen, watching the sun rise over Manhattan Island. Perhaps one of his men discharges a musket, scaring a flock of thousand passenger pigeons into the morning light. The day brims with rising warmth and possibility.
Jonathan Stenvall, Stockholm Our project aims to show the wildlife outside our doorstep—not only the large number of species that have adapted to live among us, but also the species that are dependent on the valuable green areas that exist in Stockholm and that are, in some cases, threatened. One of these areas is the lake Råstasjön, at risk from plans to construct high-rise buildings.
Benjamin Swett, New York In my work as a photographer of New York City’s trees, I have tried to show the trees as living objects around which many human associations may have gathered, and to think about what the places where they grow would be like if they were gone.
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
Photography, and art in general, can help us see. See in new ways. Indeed, it helps us be better at looking. One of the main themes of The Nature of Cities is the idea of “nature nearby”—that cities are not barren of nature, but rather teem with life, both human and non-human. This nature provides services from storm water management to habitat to beauty. Indeed, cities are ecosystems of nature, people, form, and space. Cities are human habitat, and are better designed and maintained when we appreciate them as such.
Yet many people in cities don’t see that nature around them, though they may sense it as part of the nature, or character of their city. Can we learn to look more thoughtfully, and therefore see more fully the natural vibrancy that is all around us in cities? And also along the way see what vibrancy our cities may be lacking? It is a vibrancy that weaves—or should weave—together nature and people and built form in ways that make cities rich—rich in biodiversity, human society, sustainability, resilience, and livability.
So in the spirit of looking more deeply, more finely in ways that can help us see, this is the first of what I hope will be many roundtables on artistic and creative expression on the nature of cities. As is TNOC’s way, the 14 represented here take diverse routes to seeing and sensing the city. What details do they find to make the city more vivid?
Hi I'm Josh, a 17 year old award winning wildlife photographer from the UK. As part of a young generation of conservationist I see my photography as a way to inspire others to appreciate its beauty and influence a positive awareness towards conservation.
Joshua Burch
I’ve grown up with an interest in nature since I was about 5, when I spent most of my time collecting all manner of bugs and creatures—generally, anything with more than two legs. My parents bought me my first camera at the age of 10 in the hope that it would reduce the number of escapees in our home!
Rather than grow out of it, my passion for the natural world has grown and now, as part of a young generation of conservationists, I see my photography as a way to inspire others to appreciate its beauty and influence a positive awareness towards conservation by actively supporting and contributing to initiatives like “A Focus On Nature“, a network for young conservationists.
I’m really keen to encourage and develop a network of young nature photographers and would love to connect with people, so please feel free to get in touch. I’m more than happy to share my experience and offer advice (I’m still learning as well), or simply to connect with anyone who shares my interest and passion.
Emilio Fantin is an artist working in Italy on multidisciplinary research.
He teaches at the Politecnico, Architecture, University of Milan, and acts as coordinator of the “Osservatorio Public Art”.
Emilio Fantin
The relationship between culture and nature is at the very core of the question of the urban and any issues concerning the landscape.
Wheelbarrow chair. S. Marino di Bentivoglio. Italy. 2011. Photo (copyright): Emilio Fantin
The chair is one of the most powerful symbols of the western culture. It is an unmovable political and religious symbol of power.
Five town hall chairs hung on the facade of the Palazzo Farnese (Ortona (Ps). Italy.1995. Photo (copyright): Emilio Fantin
At the same time, the chair recomposes the gap between time of nature and time of man; it evokes a moment of rest, a pause, a convivial and social function.
Row of chairs, Villa delle Rose Park. Bologna. Italy. 1995. Photo (copyright): Emilio Fantin
Mike Feller is an ecological consultant and nature photographer. He worked at NYC Parks for 31 years, where he was Chief Naturalist from 1987 until 2014.
Mike Feller
During the winter of 1985, I mapped archaeological features in the Bronx. One morning, as I stood in deep snow in the forest, I heard rustling behind me. Six feet away, a red-tailed hawk was struggling to subdue a squirrel. For the next half hour I watched the hawk gain control, eviscerate, and begin to eat its prey. I was close enough to see vapor waft from the squirrel’s body and to whiff bile. As the hawk flew away to finish her meal I resolved to buy a camera and begin to record my field experiences.
As a naturalist, photography serves me three ways. First, it allows me to create objective visual documents, record conditions, establish temporal baselines, and inventory specimens better left uncollected. Second, it satisfies my empirical need to record experiences and the aesthetic dimensions of places. It is also a powerful tool for creating experiences through storytelling, slide shows, and exhibits that reveal relationships and meaning to inspire interest, wonder, and sense of place. Third, photography is a conservation tool.
I am most invested in this last aspect. I know from my experience as a native New Yorker that for the majority, the iconic built city leaves no room in the imagination that beautiful, worthwhile natural areas exist. For most, the gargantuan asphalt and cement deck upon which the urban throng careens, is the subject. The estuary and the 22,000 acres of natural area is negative space. In New York Culture is figure, Nature is ground.
I want my images to confront and undermine this bias and to inoculate the viewer with the wonder, pleasure, and excitement or serenity that I experienced at the time and place of the photograph. My conservation heroes are John Muir and John Burroughs, Thomas Coale and Albert Bierstadt, William Henry Jackson and Ansel Adams: writers, artists, and photographers in the Romantic tradition who made their audiences feel deeply for their subjects and moved them to political action that resulted in the creation of national parks and state forest preserves.
I have three approaches to photographing nature in New York, each represented here.
• I shoot landscapes with a 4×5 view camera. It is a deliberate, contemplative process and the subjects I am drawn to are serene places and moments. Some of these shots can take as long as an hour to set up, compose, and wait for light to change or the breeze to diminish. I attempt to exclude people and artifice.
• “The Tall Grass Zoo”, a children’s book about exploring small spaces and observing small creatures made a big impression on me as a child. It inspired me to lie where I grew up in the land-filled, weedy edges of Jamaica Bay with chin perched on my hands and watch insects. This was my first experience of the Romantic’s Sublime, described by Joseph Addison as, “…an agreeable kind of horror”. I focus on the small, simultaneously seductive and repulsive, with my macro photography. The diversity of form, color, and life history details of insects provides endless visual interest and descriptions of predator-prey relationships that would curl Edgar Allan Poe’s toes.
• The long telephoto lens is my means of revealing to others the details of the city’s wildlife that I have observed through binoculars. There is nothing quite like viewing for the first time the sapphire eye of a double-crested cormorant or the ruby eye of the black-crowned night heron, radiant jewels hidden in plain sight.
Robber fly. Photo: (copyright) Mike FellerIslington Pond. Photo: (copyright) Mike FellerBlack-crowned night heron. Photo: (copyright) Mike Feller
Formed both as architect and photographer, Andrés lives and works in Barcelona. Since 2005 he develops a professional career in photography exploring the relational changes that take place between the built environment and human behavior as they define our contemporary condition.
Andrés Flajszer
Landscape is both object and representation at the same time. Originally a segment of the vast territory, a portion of land becomes a landscape when a multi-layered pack of forces (environmental, political, economical, social, etc.) shapes it in a specific way or direction. All landscapes have visible and invisible sides, always depending on the eye that beholds them. Ever since Nicéphore Nièpce succeeded in capturing his view from a window at Le Gras in 1826 (what is considered to be the first photograph is actually an image of an urban landscape), the world became obsessed with photography as the ultimate tool to capture reality in an accurate and permanent way, an exercise in revealing the truth. Almost two-hundred years have gone by—we’ve moved from daguerreotype to bits and bytes—and so Documentalism gradually gave way to Fiction. We no longer believe in or seek the absolute truth; rather, we try to understand the multiple realities, each real and artificial, that shape and define our Anthropocene world. So, from documentalism to fiction, I’m interested in witnessing the codes that are based on elements belonging to this bi-dimensional reality and, at the same time, that try to inhabit the in-between space enclosed by this apparent contradiction. The result portrays a wide range of elements, from people’s flow to architecture; they are brought to the world of imagery with no will to constitute a proof of reality, but rather to evoke the multiple forces that originated it. One last thing: whenever people are absent from the picture, that which is being portrayed makes them protagonist, because the urban landscape displays the traces of human presence written in our “new” nature.
Mike Houck is a founding member of The Nature of Cities and is currently a TNOC board member. He is The Urban Naturalist for the Urban Greenspaces Institute (www.urbangreenspaces.org), on the board of The Intertwine Alliance and is a member of the City of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission.
Mike Houck
Much Beloved Beaver
In the early 1980s, we fought a three-year pitched battle to save Heron Pointe Wetland, the only remnant wetland on the West side of the Willamette River near downtown Portland, Oregon. The developer’s consultant argued, as even some natural resource agencies are wont to do, that the less- than-one-acre wetland was so small as to be insignificant from an ecological perspective. Those of us who engaged in efforts to protect the wetland, including a city commissioner’s staffer, a U. S. EPA wetland ecologist, citizen activists, and the Audubon Society of Portland, argued that while the wetland had less ecological value than the nearby 450-acre Ross Island archipelago, it’s true significance lay in the fact that thousands of people would pass by the wetland as they ran, walked or cycled on the Willamette Greenway trail. It would also hold great value, we argued, to the residents of the condominiums that sat adjacent to the trail.
Working with the commissioner of parks and the city’s park bureau, we installed an interpretive sign, hoping to educate passersby about the value of even this small remnant wetland. Thirty years later, an elderly resident of the adjacent Heron Pointe condos installed a two-foot tall bronze beaver to honor her husband, who had succumbed to Alzheimer’s. As the gnawed stumps of several cottonwood trees near the sign attest, her choice was ecologically apropos: beaver actually do use even the small wetland scrap, as do a surprising diversity of avifauna.
I have taken to walking the greenway trail on a five-mile loop twice a week for the past two years, and have been taken with how much the sculpture is loved by passersby. From day one, walkers seem unable to resist giving the beaver a pat on the head, leaving a token of small twigs, a flower, or some other token of their affection. More recently, one greenway frequenter has taken to bestowing seasonally appropriate attire on the beaver, whether it be Easter, Halloween, or the coming of spring. While I always look forward to seeing the feisty Anna’s Hummingbird fiercely guarding his nearby perch on a red-osier dogwood, I am sometimes even more delighted to see what new trinket, beaver-chewed twig, or outfit has been visited on what is a much beloved wetland icon.
Young Naturalist
Eight years ago, while leading a natural history tour of the 160-acre Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, we fell in behind two parents who were, I assume, taking their young naturalist on a walk through the black cottonwood and big-leaf maple riparian forest. I was immediately reminded of Robert Michael Pyle’s book, “The Thunder Tree”, in which he postulated what has become one of my touchstones regarding our decades-long effort to ensure every child has access to nature nearby. Pyle, in a chapter titled “Extinction of Experience,” poses the question, “What’s the extinction of the Condor to a child who has never known a wren?”
Indeed. I have used this image numerous times, and it has even appeared in a prior The Nature of Cities blog by Marianne Krasny. The image of parents taking their happy little camper on a stroll in a wetland that is within a stone’s throw of downtown Portland represents to me the essence of urban nature. This young boy or girl (I’ve never come to a firm conclusion which, but am guessing boy) with the disproportionately large maple leaf has never failed to elicit a strong emotional response during numerous lectures, whether the audience members are agency ecologists, elected officials, or the general public. Long before Richard Louv launched what is now a national child-nature movement, Pyle started the conversation regarding the importance of nature to children’s emotional and physical well-being, regardless of the setting, but particularly in the urban context.
Young Naturalist, Oaks Bottom. Photo: Mike Houck
Condos and Great Blue Herons
I was paddling my kayak around Ross Island in downtown Portland and was blown away by the juxtaposition of the Great Blue Heron colony on the downstream tip of Ross Island with the new condominium towers at South Waterfront, Portland’s newest neighborhood on the west bank of the Willamette. We talk a lot in Portland about integrating the built and natural landscapes, and this comes close to what I have in mind regarding that effort, which we still have a long way to go to truly achieve. While the habitat improvements at South Waterfront have not panned out in the manner we had hoped it would twelve years ago, after two years of planning the Willamette River Greenway, the residents of the condos can now actually observe Bald Eagle picking young herons out of their nests. Not for the squeamish, perhaps, but pretty damn impressive in the heart of downtown Portland. This heron colony is the remnant of a 55-nest colony farther upstream on Ross Island, after the eagles took over six years ago. I have to say, having testified before our city council in 1979, almost forty years ago, to establish a 350-foot buffer around the heron colony from adjacent sand and gravel extraction, I beheld the eagle intrusion with mixed feelings. Still, we now have both eagles and herons sharing Ross Island, a stone’s throw from our CBD and one of Portland’s newest neighborhoods.
Condos, Great Blue Heron Nests, Ross Island and South Waterfront Condominiums. Photo: (copyright) Mike Houck
Chris Jordan’s work explores the collective shadow of contemporary mass culture from a variety of photographic and conceptual perspectives. Edge-walking the lines between beauty and horror, abstraction and representation, the near and the far, the visible and the invisible, Jordan’s images confront the enormous power of humanity’s collective will.
Chris Jordan
These images are drawn from three shows, each depicting scenes from the destructive and consumptive sides of human-nature interactions.
In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster. This series, photographed in New Orleans in November and December of 2005, portrays the cost of Hurricane Katrina on a personal scale. Although the subjects are quite different from those in my earlier Intolerable Beauty series, this project is motivated by the same concerns about our runaway consumerism. There is evidence to suggest that Katrina was not an entirely natural event like an earthquake or tsunami. The 2005 hurricane season’s extraordinary severity can be linked to global warming, which America contributes to in disproportionate measure through our extravagant consumer and industrial practices. Never before have the cumulative effects of our consumerism become so powerfully focused into a visible form, like the sun’s rays narrowed through a magnifying glass. Almost 300,000 Americans lost everything they owned in the Katrina disaster. The question in my mind is whether we are all responsible to some degree.
Remains of a business, St. Bernard Parish. Photo: (copyright) Chris Jordan
Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption (2003 – 2005). Exploring the USA’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress. I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity. The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively, we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.
As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag, but my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.
Circuit boards #2, New Orleans 2005 44 x 57″. Image: (copyright) Chris Jordan
Running the Numbers II: Portraits of global mass culture (2009 – Current). This ongoing series looks at mass phenomena that occur on a global scale. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: the number of tuna fished from the world’s oceans every fifteen minutes, for example. Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses. Instead, we are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these phenomena through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions. Compounding this challenge is our sense of insignificance as individuals in a world of 6.7 billion people. And if we fully open ourselves to the horrors of our times, we also risk becoming overwhelmed, panicked, or emotionally paralyzed. I believe it is worth connecting with these issues and allowing them to matter to us personally, despite the complex mixtures of anger, fear, grief, and rage that this process can entail.
Gyre, 2009 8×11 feet, in three vertical panels. Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean. Image: (copyright) Chris JordanDetail of Gyre. The image above (Gyre) is very large. This GIF zooms to a closeup of the image and the pieces of plastic of which it is made.
Perhaps these uncomfortable feelings can become part of what connects us, serving as fuel for courageous individual and collective action as citizens of a new kind of global community. This hope continues to motivate my work.
Robin Lasser produces photographs, sound, video, site-specific installations and public art dealing with environmental and social justice issues.
Robin Lasser
Floating World: A Tent City Campground For Displaced Human and Bird Song commissioned by The San Jose Public Art Program
In thinking about imaging the urban wild, a public art installation I created for the city of San Jose, in California, USA springs to mind. I was offered an opportunity to create a public work for the ZERO1 Biennial. The theme of the biennial that year was “make your own world.” The site for this installation is located above an urban cement riverbed and under a busy freeway overpass. I thought, if I am to build my own world, over a river, in the age of climate change, the built environment best be prepared for floods, and take into consideration human needs, as well as the needs of other living creatures in the immediate ecosystem. In collaboration with Marguerite Perrret, we created twenty-one miniature disaster relief tents that are cantilevered off the guardrail gracing the bridge that crosses over the Guadalupe River. The tents are built on stilts; the architecture is designed to protect occupants from the possibility of floods. The tent designs are fashioned after temporary relief shelters, and are scaled for birds. Each tent interior contains a speaker or microphone and lantern. The tents are a conflation of human and bird design elements. They provide sanctuary or shelter for bird and human song, water compositions, and interviews with scientists who speak about the Guadalupe Watershed, birds, flooding, and the relationship of floods to climate change.
The site is at once a habitat and transitionary space; it embodies a river, road, and air that supports migration of humans, birds, and fish. This corridor also references a site for potential displacement of animals and people.
The miniature tents provide sanctuary for bird and human song. The sound is a collage of audio interviews with scientists, environmental educators, urban planners, and kids who love the river. These interviews are mixed with water songs written by locals. The water composition is filtered by precipitation data archived during the most severe floods occurring in San Jose over the past half century.
Birds are changing their tune in order to be heard over local anthropogenic noise. Microphones on site pick up the ambient nose and modify the birdcalls recorded and amplified from speakers in the tent interiors.
The flags refer to the health, ecology and culture of the river. Patterns on the flags are based on mercury molecules, greenhouse gases, native bird species, and macro invertebrates—all indicators of water quality.
Viewing the video and photo documentation of the Floating World sculpture will help to bring these ideas to life. See it here. My work is also part of the show review elsewhere on TNOC.
Floating World at Sunset. Work by Robin Lasser and Marguerite Perret. Photo: Robin LasserFloating Wold at Night. Work by Robin Lasser and Marguerite Perret. Photo: Robin LasserFloating World White Tents at Night. Work by Robin Lasser and Marguerite Perret. Photo: Robin Lasser
Monika Lawrence is a German photographer who moved to the US in 2007. She lives in Bemidji, MN where she teaches photography and photojournalism at Bemidji State University.
Monika Lawrence
When we think of “nature”, we have rural areas, nature reserves, or national parks in mind, rather than cities. Why do we often overlook the nature that indeed exists in cities?
More and more wildlife are pulled into new, urban habitats with the decline of natural areas through intensive agriculture, mining, and urban sprawl on the one hand, and enough food and shelter on the other. Moreover, city heat and climate change enable a growing variety of flora and fauna to overwinter in central European latitudes.
Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, is a city of 200,000 situated in the heart of Germany. It looks back at a history of more than 12 centuries still visible in its medieval inner city; at the same time, it’s a contemporary urban place with modern infrastructure, including a substantial network of public transport and bike trails. More than 50 percent of Erfurt’s population lives in the densely built, relatively small center—a rising tendency as more people seek accessible living environments.
Situated at the transition between the Thuringian basin and the mountain ranges of the Thuringian Forest and the Harz, lots of small streams drain Erfurt’s urban area. Today’s city benefits from several decisions made more than a century ago. A large flood canal (Flutgraben) dug around the old town protects the medieval center from annual flooding. The canal is now a green belt of floodplain forest stretching through the town together with a trail for hikers and bikers. The richness in water bodies provides ideal habitats for insects, frogs, and fish which in turn feed numerous “rural” bird species such as swallows, herons, ducks, or owls. Almost 30 medieval church towers dominate the old town’s silhouette, most with winged inhabitants like falcons or kestrels. Steeples substitute for natural cliffs, including thermal winds for bold flight maneuvers and nesting niches in safe heights. Park landscapes also serve as foraging and hunting areas. Erfurt’s greenspace investments of past centuries are especially important to maintain today, with growing pressures on natural environments elsewhere.
A convergence of needs—human and nonhuman alike—is possible, and in the past 25 years, both Erfurt’s people and its municipal authorities have become more involved in conserving and creating green space. Urban fallows were opened for temporary green space (Zwischennutzung), including an oasis reclaimed from industrial land now used as a community garden. Housing projects densely built at the periphery of the town in socialist times were partially dismantled, opening new spaces, and in the inner city, a planned shopping center had to give way for greenspace with a playground after citizens’ protests. Long-neglected front gardens have been revived, façade greening is getting more popular, newly planted trees give bare streets a fresh look, and competitions for the most beautiful balcony greenings trigger creativity. “Side effects” include a more beautiful city, raised identification with the town, a healthier climate for a city once with quite poor air quality, and more local recreational opportunities. In other words: quality of life.
The inspiration for my photo project came from a course about urban biodiversity my husband Mark gave as a guest lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences Erfurt in 2012. Exploring the urban nature of Erfurt with my camera gave me a whole new perspective on this town where I had been living and working for more than 20 years before I moved to Bemidji, a small town in Minnesota.
The flood canal, dug more than a century ago, today is not only a favorite local recreation destination, but also the favorite hunting ground for herons. Photo:(copyright) Monika LawrenceErfurt inhabitants enjoy today the greenspace investments of the past. Photo: (copyright) Monika LawrenceYoung kestrel overlooking the city from his nesting cave in a historic building. Photo: (copyright) Monika Lawrence
Patrick M. Lydon is an American ecological writer and artist based in Korea whose seeks to re-connect cities and their inhabitants with nature. He is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
Patrick Lydon
unconventional dialogues at the intersection of culture and ecology
In a quest to live ecologically a man seeks to know nature in different ways To know a tree as he knows a good friend living, growing, sensing renders betrayal of the tree improbable Can we meet a tree as we would another human? Well, of course we can
“Centre for Endless Growth” Building a space for reflection on nature and contemporary culture, Edinburgh, UK
Inspired by dubious proceedings at the World Forum on Natural Capital in Edinburgh, the Center for Endless Growthexhibition offered a public meeting and workspace for catalyzing new ways of thinking about growth, hinting not so quietly that our current methodologies in research and development for economic growth could benefit from direct awareness of ‘real’ growth.
A forest in an office seemed like the appropriate solution. Visitors came in and out during the week, holding meetings and events, and leaving their ideas for a more ecologically just future.
Centre for Endless Growth, installation image, Edinburgh, UK. Photo: Patrick M Lydon
“What is Food: Burger and Cabbage”.Questioning roles in consumption and production, Edinburgh, UK / Berkeley, USA
A living sculpture, What is Food, was created with the help of Vero Alanis and installed in TENT Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland. It pairs a food which takes very little energy to produce (the cabbage) with one of the most energy-hungry foods (the fast food cheeseburger).
In this role-reversal of sorts, the cabbage slowly feeds on the energy of the decomposing burger during the course of the gallery exhibition.
A living sculpture, What is Food was created with the help of Vero Alanis and installed in TENT Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo: Patrick M Lydon and Vero Alanis
“Disgeotic”. Seeing and feeling the city as a living organism in its own right. International
Disgeotic is a formal, yet almost surreal, photographic survey of urban nature in major cities around the world.
Not simply a matter of pitting growth against decay, these images—the products of walking, lying down, and sitting in cities alone, sometimes for days on end—emote something of the continuous and ever-changing flow of relationships between nature and structure.
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.
David Maddox
Often, and especially in places like Europe and North America—and in media such as The Nature of Cities—we talk of urban nature in the context of emotional benefits: beauty, biophilia, peacefulness. Another context is one of sustenance and work. One form of this work takes the form of agriculture, food, and harvest. In many regions of the world, we are divorced—physically and psychically—from the work of food, the work of nature and its role in human survival. We go to the grocery store, we buy food. Sometimes we go to farmers’ markets. One of the most vivid intersections of the natural and urban world is at markets. When I travel, key destinations for me are markets and areas of natural harvest—places in cities where people still make their living from the land. In any such a collection of images from markets and nature-work in cities there is certainly beauty, and bounty, and color—nature’s gifts in abundance. There is also back-straining work, and the risks of weather and poor harvests and uncertain incomes. Although all these images come from India, they are scenes repeated around the world, from Andean or Amazonian markets to early morning truck unloading at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City.
Cutting and harvesting grass outside the Taj Mahal, Agra. Photo (copyright): David MaddoxSorting lentils, Jaipur. Photo (copyright): David MaddoxVegetable sellers on a Jaipur street. Photo (copyright): David Maddox
Christopher Payne specializes in the documentation of America’s vanishing architecture and industrial landscape. Trained as an architect, he is the author of several books: New York’s Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind the Subway, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, and North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City.
Christopher Payne
North Brother Island
North Brother Island is among the most unexpected of places: an uninhabited island of ruins in New York City that hardly anyone knows; a secret existing in plain sight. Abandoned since 1963, the island was once home to a quarantine hospital and the final residence of Typhoid Mary. Today, it is a wildlife sanctuary closed to the public, but in 2008, Iwas granted official permission by the New York City Parks Department to take pictures.
I visited North Brother many times between 2008 and 2013, and each time I stepped off the boat I felt as if I had closed my eyes for a few minutes and awakened to find myself in another world, completely alone in the middle of a city. I could not have been happier. In just a few decades, a forest has sprung up where there had once been paved streets, sidewalks, and manicured lawns. If not for the decaying structures, one would never know this place had ever been anything else.
One question that kept nagging me was whether my pictures offered a deeper meaning, beyond their aesthetic appeal and documentary value. Their relationship to New York City and its history was strong, almost overwhelming. Could this small island be viewed in any other context? Did the boundaries of the project extend beyond the geography of the island and the city? Interpreting the ruins as metaphors for the transience of humanity seemed obvious, well-trodden territory. But what if these ruins were embodiments of the future and not just the past? What if all humankind suddenly vanished from the earth? This was the theory proposed by Alan Weisman in his fascinating book, The World Without Us, and it liberated my imagination. The collapse of New York City and its return to a natural state had already happened on North Brother, and Weisman’s words could well have been captions for my photographs. I thought I had found the affirmation I was looking for: a way to connect my pictures to a universal story, one that looks into the future and deals with the conundrum of our living in a natural world that we try to alter, but that always reasserts itself in the end.
Seasons North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City. Photo: (copyright) Christopher PayneBoilerplant Roof Interior, North Brother Island, NY, NY. Photo: (copyright) Christopher PayneBoilerplant from Morgue Roof, North Brother Island, NY, NY. Photo: (copyright) Christopher Payne
Eric Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.
Eric Sanderson
Mannahatta, c. 1609. Image: Markley Boyer / The Mannahatta Project / WCS. This image was created for the exhibition “Mannahatta / Manhattan” at the Museum of the City of New York in 2009.
Manahatta c. 1609.One way to frame the nature of cities is the nature that was there before the city was. This image shows a reconstruction of Manhattan Island at the moment of European discovery in September 1609. The moment is not important, but this snapshot of nature of that moment is important, because it illustrates why cities end up where they do. Cities are not randomly distributed in nature. Rather they tend to show up in places with good soils for growing food, reliable freshwater supplies, at defensible and well-connected places suitable for trade. Mannahatta, as the Lenape Native Americans knew it; New Amsterdam as the Dutch settlers would call it; and New York City as the English and Americans like to call it, exemplifies all of these geographic exigencies of cities. Manhattan had ok soils, but not exemplary soils. (Much better farmland was found in adjacent Queens and Brooklyn, and across the harbor, in Staten Island.) Manhattan did have over 66 miles of streams and 21 ponds and over 300 springs, including a 70 foot deep freshwater pond, the “Collect Pond”, a 20-minute walk from the tip of the island. That tip of a long, wooded island, where the city was founded in 1626, was surrounded by water on three sides, and hills and the pond behind, making it defensible. And the harbor waters, deep enough to float ocean-going vessels practically up to the shore, also connected to a flooded, north-south running fjord, the Hudson River, that ran a hundred miles inland. When the Hudson-Mohawk River systems were connected to the American Midwest by the Eire Canal in 1825, they turned New York City into the greatest mercantile city the world as ever seen.
A Hawks-eye View of the Hudson River, c. 1609. Image: Markley Boyer / The Mannahatta Project / WCS. This image was created for the exhibition “Mannahatta / Manhattan” at the Museum of the City of New York in 2009.
A Hawks-eye View of the Hudson River, c. 1609. Another advantage of a historical perspective on the nature of cities is that the past sometimes better reveals the nature of cities than the present can. Here, we imagined flying with a kettle of hawks south along the line of the Hudson River. Mannahatta (AKA Manhattan Island) is on the left; and “New Jersey” on the right. The hawk might been a broad-winged hawk or a kestrel or a bald eagle, peering down at the river, where fish such as Atlantic sturgeon, or American shad, or striped bass, were running out to sea. In the distance, a classic “V” of geese travel south. Mannahatta then, like Manhattan today, is a crossroads of migration. It is no wonder that the Statue of Liberty stands over New York harbor or Ellis Island, landing point for the ancestors of millions of Americans, are also located here. New York City is also at a climatic crossroads. The day-to-day weather of the city is highly variable, as it receives storms that travel across the continent from the West, weather tracking up the Atlantic seaboard from the south, and storm systems descending overland from the north. And of course the Hudson River estuary, where the river waters and ocean waters mix, is subject to changes in global sea level. Since the time Henry Hudson sailed into these waters, the ocean has come up about nine-tenths of a foot per century, accelerating more in the 20th and early 21st centuries.
Henry Hudson the day after, c. 1609. Image: Markley Boyer / The Mannahatta Project / WCS. This image was created for the exhibition “Mannahatta / Manhattan” at the Museum of the City of New York in 2009.
Henry Hudson the day after, c. 1609. What was Henry Hudson thinking the day after he sailed into what would someday be New York harbor? Here, we try to imagine that moment. Henry Hudson was possessed with the idea of opening up a northern trade route from Europe to China. He made four voyages during his life. The first two tried the Northeast Passage around Norway and Russia. Both times he was turned back by ice. On his third voyage, he was again instructed to go northeast, but having hit the ice again, he turned his ship around and sailed for America. Alighting on the coast near the English Jamestown colony in 1609, he started on a careful coastal route to the north, exploring the mouth of Delaware Bay, and eventually coming into New York harbor. Seeing the magnificent river, he thought perhaps he had found his way north, through a tidal strait, to riches and fame in the Orient. Instead, the river petered out around modern Albany, New York; Hudson would return disappointed to Europe. On his final journey, in 1610, he made it into the Bay that bears his name, where his crew mutinied, leaving Henry, his son, John, and a few loyal crewmen in a small boat to wait out the winter. They were never heard from again.
We know what happened now, because it is all ancient history, but at this moment, Henry Hudson had no idea what is fate would be. It is easy to imagine he was elated, buoyed by the possibilities of his future. We imagine him standing on the deck of the Halve Maen (“Half Moon”), watching the sun rise over Manhattan Island. Perhaps one of his men discharges a musket, scaring a flock of thousand passenger pigeons into the morning light. The day brims with rising warmth and possibility.
Of course, in that that moment, Hudson missed what was important for the future. His mind was all about tea-cups and trade goods. For us now, in Henry Hudson’s future, we have more teacups and other things from China than we know what do with. What we miss is the nature that Hudson took for granted, that was right in front of him. Nowhere in the world today, no national park, no nature preserve or wilderness, holds the kind of nature that Manhattan had that morning, nature with all its parts and with all its functions, including people as part and parcel of the whole.
We created this image because we feel that every day is full of warmth and possibility. What will we use it for? Will we make the Hudsonian mistake of taking nature for granted? Or we will dedicate ourselves to granting back to nature warmth and possibility in the cities where we live?
I’m a photographer born 1997 and based in Stockholm, Sweden. Right now I’m working on a book project about the urban nature and environment in the Stockholm region. You can read more about the project here
Jonathan Stenvall
My project started in the spring 2014; during that spring, I was awarded one of the Hasselblads Foundation’s stipends in nature photography for my project about the urban nature in Stockholm. This project aims to conclude in a book that will show the wildlife outside our doorstep—not only the big amount of species that have adapted to live among us, but also the species that are dependent on the valuable green areas that exists in Stockholm and that are, in some cases, also threatened.
One of these areas is the lake Råstasjön. Råstasjön is a big part of the project mainly because it is threatened by plans to construct high-rise buildings around the lake, which will destroy valuable parts of nature. Råstasjön is a unique lake because of its urban location, just 6 kilometers from central Stockholm and right behind Sweden’s new national ”Friends arena”. Because of its urban surroundings, Råstasjön is visited by thousands of people every week, from bird watchers to joggers, schools, and kindergartens. All sorts of people travel to Råstasjön to enjoy the wonderful nature that is located in the middle of Stockholm and easy to reach by train, subway, or bus.
Råstasjön also has about 60 nesting bird species. It is one of the best examples of urban nature in Stockholm, with high biodiversity. At the same time, Råstasjön’s urban location opens it up for everybody to see. What makes me worried is that if the construction companies can get permission to build around this lake, one of the most valuable ones in Stockholm, then what stops them from getting building permissions at any other urban lakes in Stockholm and in the rest of Sweden?
With my pictures and this project, I want to show how valuable and how wonderful the nature we get so close to our homes is. I also hope to show that nature with high biodiversity is possible in the middle of the cities, which is why we have to protect it—not only for the large number of animals, birds and plants, but also for our own sake.
Grey herons at Råstasjön. Photo: (copyright) JonathanStenvallUrban Gull. Photo: (copyright) Jonathan StenvallUrban Red Squirrel. Photo: (copyright) Jonathan Stenvall.
Benjamin Swett is a New York-based writer and photographer with a particular interest in combining photographs with text. His books include New York City of Trees (2013), The Hudson Valley: A Cultural Guide (2009), Route 22 (2007), and Great Trees of New York City: A Guide (2000).
Benjamin Swett
New York City contains an estimated 5.2 million trees, which might seem like a lot until you realize that the city also has nearly 8.5 million people. Trees in places such as New York exist in relation to the people and grow, in a sense, at the people’s whim. Much has been written about how trees improve the quality of life in cities by cooling and filtering the air, absorbing excess rainwater, and making neighborhoods more attractive. Less has been said about how they act as storehouses of a city’s past.
In one sense, trees function as living archives, physically storing bits of information about the world around them in their annual growth layers. When studied by dendrochronologists, these layers reveal useful information about the amounts and ratios of sunlight, water, and carbon that reach a tree during a given year. Looked at together, the layers form a pattern that tells a story about the world the tree has experienced during its lifetime. For humans, such records have been valuable in understanding the natural histories of places, and for urban historians in particular, of neighborhoods and cities.
In another way, though, because the lifespans of trees are often so much longer than those of the people who live nearby, and because trees so often assume unusual forms in response to the shapes of the places where they grow, certain trees become focal points for neighborhoods and gather personal associations for the people who live near them or see them every day. It is as if the trees are both part of the urban architecture and separate from it, living things that follow their own organic patterns and change by the seasons and by what goes on around them rather than by the human clock. People develop highly personal emotional connections to these living pieces of architecture and sometimes are not even aware of these connections until the tree is gone. Then suddenly a hole is seen, as if not so much a tree as part of one’s life is missing. If you think of the number of people who live in or regularly pass through different parts of the city, you can begin to picture the number of associations that can develop around a tree that grows there, and the number of people who will be affected if it is gone. This is another kind of history that urban trees carry with them, the history of the many lives that have intersected with them and of the many associations that have gathered around them.
In my work as a photographer of New York City’s trees, I have tried to show the trees as living objects around which such associations may have gathered, and to think about what the places where they grow would be like if they were gone.
American Elm, Bay Ridge Brooklyn, April 28, 2010. Photo: (copyright) Benjamin SwettEnglish Elm. Washington Square Park, Manhattan. November 17, 2010. Photo: (copyright) Benjamin SwettTree of Heaven, 30th Street at 11th Avenue, Manhattan, May28, 2002. Copyright Benjamin Swett
From a leafy suburb in the shadow of Table Mountain, I need not venture far to encounter a myriad of remarkable creatures employing clever survival strategies. Fighting, stalking, feigning, loving, dancing, stealing, and darting, biodiversity spills into and out of my garden. It burrows beneath the lawn, slithers through the leaf litter, creeps up the drain pipes, hunts by the porch lights, and hides in my shoes.
Marvelling at Cape Town’s biodiversity through the lens of an ecologist is akin to gazing into the heavens through the telescope of an astronomer: equally humbling, spellbinding, and seductive. In my modest abode, there are not only remarkable species; there is a vibrant ecological community. It exists not in isolation, but as one tiny island in an archipelago of interconnected public and private greenspace, extending adjacent to the metaphorical mainland of Table Mountain National Park.
Figure 1. One of the many remarkabe creatures residing in my garden: a Cape Dwarf Chameleon (Bradypodion pumilum) unleashes its long sticky tongue to strike at a beetle. Image: Russell Galt
With a pair of binoculars, some old field guides, an iSpot account, an eco-literate girlfriend and a little patience, I have identified literally hundreds of species in my own backyard. Simply observing how they interact through the cycle of seasons, I have exacted immense pleasure.
Figure 2. A pensive John Muir. Image: Wikimedia Commons
The Scottish naturalist, John Muir, famously wrote:
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
Does this assertion hold true in cities? Can Nature’s long chains of ecological interaction persist in urban landscapes?
Picking out a single tree
Let’s return to my garden, or rather to my neighbour’s garden, where an old Wild Peach tree (Kiggelaria africana) towers over the partitioning wall. The Wild Peach is an indigenous evergreen species unrelated to the well-known fruit-producing Peach tree (Prunus persica). The early European settlers had a habit of naming indigenous South African trees after similar looking species known in Europe e.g. Cape Holly (Ilex mitis), Cape Beech (Rapanea melanophloeos), and African Red Alder (Cunonia capensis). Insofar as the garden is concerned, the Wild Peach tree is a pillar of the ecological community. Its summertime bounty of bell-shaped flowers may have enticed a queen Honeybee (Apis mellifera capensis) to establish her colony in a nearby abandoned car tyre, imparting wafts of sweet caramel into the air. The tree also brings music to the garden: its autumnal orange fruits are relished by the melodic Olive Thrush (Turdus olivaceus), slurring Cape Robin (Cossypha caffra) and chattering Cape White-eye (Zosterops virens).
Figure 3. Cape Honeybees (Apis mellifera capensis) building a hive in an old car tyre in the garden. Image: Georgina Avlonitis
The leaves of the Wild Peach are toxic, but gleefully tolerated by one herbivorous species: the Garden Acraea (Acraea horta), a bright orange butterfly whose clutches of 40-150 tiny beige eggs and armies of black spiny caterpillars abound on the leaves all year round (see figure 4). The caterpillars feast voraciously, sometimes stripping the tree almost bare of foliage. By ingesting the Wild Peach’s poison, the caterpillars are themselves rendered toxic and thus unpalatable to would-be predators. However, certain cuckoos, like the Klaas’s Cuckoo (Chrysococcyx klaas), will visit the garden to gorge greedily on the Garden Acraea with seemingly negligible side-effects.
Box 1.Figure 4. Clockwise from top left: female Garden Acraea ovipositing on a Wild Peach leaf; clusters of eggs on the underside of a Wild Peach leaf; pupating larvae on silk mats (seen through a glass window); pupae attached to a wall; a pupa; a newly emerged imago. Images: Russell GaltFigure 5. A Lesser Double-collared Sunbird (Cinnyris chalybeus subsp. chalybeus) feeds a juvenile Klaas’s cuckoo. Image: Pikavaai on iSpot
The caterpillars pass through several instars before abseiling off the Wild Peach tree on strands of silk. They disperse in droves, crawling across the flowerbed, lawn and patio, until they reach a suitable pupation site, whereat each caterpillar spins a silk mat before hardening into a chrysalis. The walls of my house are popular—at any given time, hundreds, if not thousands, of these pupae can be found fastened to the paintwork.
Besides the ravenous cuckoos, the Garden Acraea must contend with a range of deadly parasites, including braconid wasps (e.g. Apantales Acraea), ichneumon wasps (e.g. Charops spp.), chalcid wasps (e.g. Brachymeria kassallensis), bristle flies and fungus (see the Box below).
Figure 6. Left to right: The parasitic wasp, Brachymeria kassallensis, eyes a pupating Garden Acraea larva (image: Les Powrie iSpot); an empty pupa with a small round hole through which a B. kassallensis will have emerged. Image: Russell Galt
The metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a butterfly must be one of the most exquisite processes in the natural world. The small percentage of Garden Acraea to pass unscathed through the gauntlet of predation and parasitism emerge after a fortnight’s pupation as fully-formed adults. They warm themselves in sunshine before setting off, flying clumsily from flower to flower. If they can escape the cuckoos, they will mate and the females will lay eggs on the leaves of the Wild Peach tree, thus recommencing the life-cycle.
A fulcrum in a fragment
It seems that if I were to “pick out” the Wild Peach tree “by itself”, I would lose an awful lot of biodiversity that is currently “hitched” to it; from birds and butterflies to bees and bristle flies. I now look at the old tree with a renewed sense of appreciation. It is a fulcrum in a fragment of greenspace.
There could be many other species playing important roles in the garden’s ecological community. They could be linchpins in long chains of ecological interaction that I barely understand: the family of Cape Dwarf Chameleons (Bradypodion pumilum) which hunt small flying insects in the Blue Felicia Bush (Felicia amelloides); the scores of Egyptian Fruit Bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) which come to feast on the berries of the Outeniqua Yellowwood (Afrocarpus falcatus); or the pollinating sunbirds which extract nectar from the tubular flowers of the Wild Dagga (Leonotis leonorus).
The example of the Wild Peach tree and the species hitched to it, suggests that:
Indigenous trees can facilitate the establishment of vibrant ecological communities,
Small private gardens can make substantial contributions to native biodiversity, and
Long chains of ecological interaction can persist in urban landscapes.
Through the lens into the mirror
Looking into the mirror through the lens of an ecologist can be as uncomfortable as it is necessary. We might ask, what role do we play in the ecosystem and what is our net impact on Nature? Do we practice what we preach and persuade others to follow suit? Which aspects of our lifestyles need to change?
Contributors to The Nature of Cities have documented various ways to ameliorate our relationship with Nature. Their examples speak of the extraordinary power with which humans can enhance or degrade biodiversity. Clearly, like the Wild Peach tree, we too are part of ecological communities and may constitute links in long chains of ecological interaction. Knowingly or unknowingly, we interact with species both near and far, for better and for worse: the garden irrigation system confounds precipitation patterns and disfavours drought-adapted plants; the electric lights lure countless nocturnal insects to be preyed upon by Marbled Leaf-toed Geckos (Afrogecko porphyreus); the washing machine spews toxic grey water into precious wetlands situated 20 km away; the smooth morning coffee accelerates soil erosion half a continent away.
There is much that we can learn from the example of the old Wild Peach tree. It reminds us that no individual is an island unto itself and that even individuals can render positive and far-reaching ecological benefits. Like the tree, we too are “hitched” to the universe, and any pretension otherwise is delusional and dangerous.
“Boxer Bob Wanders in the Mansion Ruins” by Robin Lasser.
For such a far-reaching social and ecological exposition, Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture centers on a surprisingly small piece of man-made land known as the Albany Bulb. A decommissioned construction landfill, the “Bulb”, as it is affectionately known, pokes out into the San Francisco Bay like, well, a bulb…or a mushroom with a long neck (see below).
The residents of the Bulb themselves built their homes on top of decades of industrial garbage.
An unofficial community created by those without community, this thickly layered pile of refuse on top of the bay was home to a salmagundi of unsanctioned homes, gardens, and artworks for decades from the latter half of the 1980’s until their eventual eviction in 2014.
“Albany Bulb and Neck” by Robin Lasser.
To some, it was an example of a kind of unstructured harmony between individuals and a tract of land, both of which had been cast from society. To others, it was a literal hell on earth of anarchy, drugs, and social misfits.
The reality, as this ambitious interdisciplinary exhibition explores–looking at everything from homeless housing to an invasive tree species–is both in between and to each extreme.
“Boxer Bob’s Mansion West View” point cloud 3D Image by F3 and Associates with Danielle Siembieda, and Robin Lasser.
The show highlights works from dozens of professional artists, urban planners, landscape architects, activists, academics, and university students. Robin Lasser, Professor of Art at San Jose State University and the show’s lead artist, says of the exhibition’s curators “we did not so much ‘curate’ the artworks, as connect and gather vantage points from those who had a stake in the Bulb.”
To that end, the exhibition included much collaboration and even several works of art from former Albany Bulb residents, the last of whom were–in a melancholic twist–evicted from the land before the exhibition opening as the city of Albany prepared to convert the former landfill into an “officially sanctioned” public recreational space to be managed by the state of California. This transitional process is now well underway, so the exhibition also acts, in some respects, as an archive.
From practical solutions for the homeless to expressive works of sculpture, the array of pieces in the exhibition is a bit bewildering at first. Yet as one moves through the SOMArts gallery, past a ramshackle home made from trash; pieces of art constructed from landfill gems; striking images of landfill tenants; and historical surveys of the land, nature and human occupation, one begins to put together a sense of what this land was.
A home, a gallery, an accidental nature reserve, the Bulb is conveyed here as a place where people with little traction in the social system in which they lived could try–and in many cases succeeded–to produce an alternative way of living.
“Mobile Homeless Homes” by Greg Kloehn, image courtesy of the artist.
On the practical side are pieces such as Greg Kloehn’s “Mobile Homeless Homes.” As resident of Oakland, California, Kloenh writes that he was “impressed by the structures in the homeless encampments…” A sculptor by trade, he decided to attempt making a home from illegally dumped garbage, which he then gave to a homeless couple. His curious experiment has since turned into a small production line, with Kloenh having donated twenty such homes to date. The process by which these homes are built and freely given echoes the fortitude, ingenuity, and at times amazingly supportive community of Albany Bulb residents.
The residents of the Bulb themselves built their homes on top of decades of industrial garbage: telephone poles, wires, lead paint, engines and oil, and, reportedly, the entirety of Richmond City Hall when it was torn down to build a rapid transit line.
Such stories are explored through a short video documentary by Robin Lasser. The documentary gives an honest and explicit picture of the push and tug relationship between the city, the environment, and the residents themselves. Lasser’s compelling visual narrative is complimented here by the thoughtful and poignant commentary of well-known lawyer, artist, and activist Osha Neuman. Neuman, a friend and consultant to many of those at the Bulb, talks of the land from a point of view which intertwines social justice and the arts.
Artworks from the Bulb by James Lee Bailey (AKA Jimbow the Hobow).
More than a home for social outcasts and artists, Albany Bulb is also “an impressive urban forest that emerged on its own following the closure of the landfill in 1983”, quips another of the installations in the exhibition. This one, titled Albany Bulb Atlas, is a project from the Global Urban Humanities initiative at U.C. Berkeley, part of an ongoing project directed by Susan Moffatt which looks at the intertwining of the lives of people and trees at Albany Bulb.
“Tree Houses, Tree People” a study by the U.C. Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative.
Drawing comparisons between the environment and those who inhabit it, the work whimsically notes that the tree which thrived here most, the black wood acacia, mirrored the characteristics of the Bulb’s human inhabitants. “In shallow soil or where roots compete, it is a bad actor. Yet in the right place it is well-behaved and beautiful, vigorous and dependable under difficult conditions or of poor soil, wind, and drought.”
The UC Berkeley urban humanities piece is not simply a study or appraisal of landscape transformation, or a cataloging of the natural environment, or even a vision for the future of the land. Rather, it is an effort to build a seamless, almost non-disciplinary review of interactions between people and place.
“Untitled” from the Albany Bulb by SNIFF, paint on wood.
That sentiment is a good appraisal of what the Refuge in Refuse exhibition does as a whole. It gives an impression that the land as it had been stewarded over the past few decades, with minimal intervention, minimal infrastructure, and yet maximum tenacity and creativity, was brought to a far more natural state than could have been achieved otherwise.
“You see how nature can take over and restore what we have destroyed”, says Neumann of the Bulb’s environment.
Although ‘more natural’ is likely a true statement in this case, the debate over whether this state is better or worse than any other is not necessarily an assertion which this exhibition pushes explicitly. More of a strength than a fault, such broad reach allows freedom for the various parts of the show to independently poke and prod at both sides of the issue.
“Boxer Bob with Sugar Ray at Landfill Mansion” photograph by Robin Lasser.
More than a display of artworks, the Refuge in Refuse exhibition, which moves to UC Berkeley this fall through the Global Urban Humanities initiative, is a place to study and know the story of the Bulb.
Through its diversity of views into how people, nature, and the built environment coalesce, this substantial show serves as a reference point for alternative socio-ecological possibilities, not just in a landfill on the San Francisco Bay, but any place in the world where social and ecological well being are prone to clash with contemporary agendas.
Story notes: Marianne Krasny and Keith Tidball of Cornell’s Civic Ecology Lab convened a workshop in Annapolis Maryland, at the offices of The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, or SESYNC. (I [David Maddox] facilitated.) The workshop was a gathering of 25 scholars and practitioners, come to talk about civic ecology.
But what is civic ecology? I asked each of the participants to give their short definition. This episode reveals their answers, and there is lots of nuance around some common themes. The work was supported in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and SESNYC. Special thanks to Jennifer Klein for directing the recordings.
You can also see a video version on youtube:
In order of appearance, the participants were:
Keith Tidball Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University http://dnr.cals.cornell.edu/people/keith-tidball Keith Tidball wants you to get a land ethic fit for the 21st century. He studies how people and nature interact to make communities more resilient.
Zahra Golshani Nature Cleaners, Iran https://www.facebook.com/Nature.Cleaners.IR Nature Cleaners strives to build community and a sense of environmentalism through voluntary trash collection in Iran.
Traci Sooter Drury University, Springfield, Missouri http://www.drury.edu/architecture/Traci-D-Sooter/ Traci Sooter uses her expertise as a green architecture to complete community-focused design projects with a focus on sustainability.
Rebecca Salminen Witt The Greening of Detroit http://www.greeningofdetroit.com The Greening of Detroit is invested in providing a greener future for Detroit by “inspiring sustainable growth of a healthy urban community”
Erika Svendsen U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station, New York http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us The Northern Research Station of the USFS works to understand forests in a human-disturbed landscape that includes NYC.
Jill Wrigley Collins Avenue Streamside Community
Baltimore, Maryland http://collinsavenuestreamside.org The Collins Avenue Streamside Community is a collective of households attempting social & ecological reconciliation in their neighborhood.
Veronica Kyle Faith in Place http://www.faithinplace.org Working with over 1,000 congregations of all faiths on issues of environmental stewardship. Based in Chicago.
Anniruddha Abhyankar The Ugly Indian, Bangalore http://www.theuglyindian.com The Ugly Indian is a community movement generating voluntary cleanup drives across India in hopes of changing civic standards.
Marianne Krasny Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University http://dnr.cals.cornell.edu/people/marianne-krasny Marianne Krasny wants to know how civic ecology practices affect individuals, communities, and the environment.
Dustin Alger Higher Ground Sun Valley http://www.highergroundsv.org Higher Ground Sun Valley gives individuals with disabilities, especially veterans, the chance to experience the outdoors through recreation and therapy.
Anandi Premlall Sustainable Queens, The Queensway http://www.about.me/aapremlall Sustainable Queens cultivates sustainable living, wellness, creativity, & empowerment through community gardens in underserved communities.
Laurel Kearns Drew Theological School, Madison, New Jersey http://users.drew.edu/lkearns/ Laurel Kearns trains religious leaders to understand the changing relationships between people and the environment.
Robert Hughes Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation http://epcamr.org/home/ EPCAMR is a coalition of individuals & organizations that supports abandoned mine reclamation for community use.
Rosalba Lopez Ramirez Kelly Street Garden, New York http://www.kellystgreen.com A community garden in the South Bronx. Their mission? To grow food, grow community, grow wellness, and grow leaders.
Carrie Samis Maryland Coastal Bays Program http://www.mdcoastalbays.org/ MCBP’s goal is to protect and conserve the watershed of Maryland’s five coastal bays through research, education, outreach, and restoration.
Lance Gunderson Department of Environmental Sciences, Emory University http://envs.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/gunderson_lance.html Lance Gunderson is an ecologist interested in how scientific understanding influences resource policy and management.
Kellen Marshall Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, University of Illinois at Chicago https://sites.google.com/site/kellenmarshallgillespie/ Kellen Marshall is a graduate student with interdisciplinary interests related to stresses on urban ecosystems.
Arjen Wals Waginengen University, University of Gothenburg
https://www.wageningenur.nl/en/Persons/Arjen-Wals.htm Arjen Wals studies how to better engage the public in academic research in order to strengthen society.
Caroline Lewis The CLEO Institute http://www.cleoinstitute.org/ The CLEO Institute is a non-profit dedicated to improving environmental education of the public as a means to support climate resilience.
Dennis Chestnut Groundwork Anacostia River, Washington, D.C. http://groundworkdc.org GARDC’s uses environmental restoration goals as a vehicle for community development in communities around the Anacostia River.
Louise Chawla Environmental Design Program, University of Colorado, Boulder http://www.colorado.edu/envd/people/faculty/louise-chawla Louise Chawla is interested in integrating nature into our every day, particularly through the engagement of children and youth.
Rebecca Jordan Departments of Human Ecology and Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey http://www.rebeccajordan.org A one-time evolutionary biologist of Lake Malawi’s cichlid fish, Rebecca Jordan’s current focus is on science education and citizen science.
Philip Silva Treekit; Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University http://treekit.org Philip Silva studies how citizen science helps monitor urban forests. TreeKit makes tools for measuring, mapping, & managing street trees.
Karim-Aly Kassam Environmental and Indigenous Studies, Cornell University http://www2.dnr.cornell.edu/kassam/ Dr. Kassam’s research interests are broad, but generally include ways of knowing as they relate to ecology.
Smart city technology is going beyond data-collecting sensors in streetlights and on garbage containers. It’s expanding to beaches and parks, creating a feedback loop that will allow local Barcelona Metropolitan Area officials to better manage public spaces.
Barcelona coastline. Photo: Jennifer Baljko
This technology adds a layer of big-data information that, ideally, will help cities fill gaps where their smart city development and environment sustainability plans intersect.
As in many urban areas, the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) is gradually updating how they engage with residents and looking for innovative, tech-driven ways to deliver greater efficiency and cost effectiveness from their everyday activities.
Many cities globally are already using these kinds of solutions to monitor traffic patterns, improve trash pickup schedules and adjust street lightning as conditions change. The next logical step is to see how citizens use open, public spaces—such as beaches and parks—to figure out how city departments can respond to changing needs, make necessary repairs to park and beach areas, and communicate information to park users and beach goers.
The technology leap
AMB is heading in this solutions-driven direction thanks to a deal with IBM.
A few months ago, AMB and IBM announced an agreement to use the company’s Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) software, cloud computing, and analytics tools to access, use, and respond to real-time information from parks and beaches within its 36-city jurisdiction.
Photo: Jennifer Baljko
The scale of the project will potentially impact millions of residents and visitors. The greater Barcelona metro area accounts for about 43 percent of the approximately 7.5 million person-population of the autonomous region of Catalonia, and generates 51 percent of Catalonia’s GDP, according to the IBM press release and government statistics. Similarly, Barcelona and its surroundings continue to attract an increasing number of international and regional visitors, many of whom will likely find themselves strolling through local parks and nearby green spaces or enjoying the long stretches of the Mediterranean coastline during their stay.
At its core, the software will centralize all the park management information and provide AMB officials with a dashboard view of real-time happenings, scheduled events, and infrastructure needs. At the beach, the technology will be used to assess and organize demand for sports and entertainment usage and will help in monitoring and managing red flag warnings when there are rough ocean conditions or jellyfish, according to the press release.
Photo: Jennifer Baljko
Here are a few other examples of how this centralization will work. As the software is deployed, AMB will be able to inform its 3.2 million residents living in the area about park remodeling projects, special event closures, and other things people would want to know about. From the citizen side, residents can report issues such as broken park benches with their mobile phones and check on the status of repairs. Eventually, AMB and its participating municipalities will be able to tap into additional areas using other IOC capabilities.
Despite several requests for an in-person interview and email responses to questions about how the technology would be used in today’s real-life scenarios and plans to expand it in the future, AMB officials declined to comment or provide additional details about the project pending municipal elections across Spain at the end of May, an AMB spokesperson said via email.
Generally speaking, IBM’s IOC solutions combine hardware, software services (both in the cloud or hosted onsite), preconfigured models analysis and best practices in urban systems management. They are specifically designed for emergencies and transportation and water management, Elisa Martín Garijo, director of innovation and technology at IBM Spain, told me via email.
In the case of water management—an important environmental concern for many urban regions, including Barcelona—the IOC solution helps cities to more efficiently manage water resources and to improve flood protection measures, Martín Garijo said. She added that some cities using the technology have been able to reduce water leakage within the municipal or regional supply system by up to 20 percent. The Netherlands, for example, launched a program a couple of years ago to optimize its flood control system and the country’s entire water system.
Photo: Jennifer Baljko
Madrid, too, is improving its environmental services with the help of technology, said Martín Garijo. The city’s recently announced the MiNT program, the largest project in IBM’s environmental services management portfolio, addresses several areas, including irrigation, tree and fountain management.
As these projects show, it’s just a matter of time before we see more smart solutions and big-data tools being applied to urban environmental sustainability projects. With luck, they will allow residents and city governments to make better open-space use decisions based on user-generated data and citizen needs rather than political agendas or budgetary limitations.
How are you seeing technology being used to integrate nature, big data, and the smart city? Tell us via Twitter @TNatureofCities.
This marks the fourth year that my partner Suhee Kang and I have been studying, working with, living with, and learning from individuals in East Asia and the U.S. who are at the forefront of the sustainable (agri)culture movement.
During this time, our primary goal has been the making of a documentary film, “Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness”. The film is an international exploration of the ecological mindset and lifestyle of “natural farmers,” most of whom are urban transplants, and some of whom still live or work in an urban context.
Kazuaki Okitsu teaching at his natural farm in Shikoku, Japan. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
Much can be learned from these natural farmers. Their mindset and actions agree with our most fundamental ideas of what true sustainability should be, placing human beings within nature, working together with nature as integrated parts in an arrangement where both the land and humans benefit.
Yet this mindset also comes across as idealistic, remote, and, quite frankly, very far away from the reality of our mainstream consciousness.
As we came close to finishing the film, we were understandably concerned that urban audiences wouldn’t be able to connect with such an idea in the space of a 74-minute documentary. So we ran a series of test screenings for urbanites before finishing the film to see where our audience was.
To our delight, urban audiences responded with tremendous enthusiasm and recognition; an overwhelming majority of the test audiences at our rough cut screenings were not only vocal in saying that we should “live in a more connected way with nature and the earth,” but were also largely animated to find out how they could take actions in their own lives.
We are waiting to grow roots
It is a great indication for the urban nature movement that the awareness of our need to connect in some meaningful way with our environment is there within people. Yet it is raw; by all means this impulse requires some delicate and constant cultivation in order to grow into a robust culture of individuals who value nature inherently.
Curiously, these individuals—especially 20- and 30-somethings who are second-generation city dwellers—did not express great concern with justifying the importance of the environment, or with reducing CO2 levels, or with calculating their daily impact on their ecological surroundings.
Final Straw rough cut screenings in Seoul and Daejeon, South Korea. Photos: Heeyoung Park, Booyoung Song
But what these groups lack in concern for environmental quantification or philosophy, they make up for with ample desire to learn how to connect—that is, they desire to understand their relationship to nature and the earth in some meaningful way which transcends the science, numbers, and traditional philosophical rationale.
In our view, then, the more ways we can give these audiences to ‘experience’ nature in a productive, meaningful, personal way, the more successful our efforts at building socially and ecologically equitable cities will be.
The good news here is twofold. First, there are many ways already being developed to enact a more meaningful, productive connection with nature; second, there is good reason to believe that the small groups of individuals we encountered so far—around 200 people over the course of several such screenings—are reflective of a substantial and growing group of people spread throughout urban cores and suburban tracts around the world. All of these individuals know that there needs to be a tremendous change in the way we live our lives: in our consumption, in the way we produce food and goods, and in the way we treat each other and our planet.
Volunteer Maki Sobajima at the Akame Natural Farm School in Sakurai, Japan. Photo: Patrick Lydon
From our conversations with these individuals, it is nearly unanimous for those who have the desire to act but are not acting, that they simply have no idea where to start.
One of our suggestions for them—and for people, cities, and organizations in general—is to start with the garden city. That is, not necessarily a garden city as a structure, but rather a garden city as a cultural mindset.
What do I mean by a garden city cultural mindset? For that, I invite you to follow me on a short personal journey…
Discovering a modern garden city
Growing up in the suburb-laden city of San Jose, California, I remember having an obsession with maps and cities. This obsession drew me one day to a book containing works by Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City concepts that he had so beautifully planned. “They seem so cool!” I thought as a young teenager. “But where are these garden cities and why haven’t I ever seen one?”
It wasn’t until a decade later that I realized the sprawling suburbia I grew up in was more or less the result—or perversion—of the Garden City design ideal: a manifestation of garden cities as the prevailing ‘practical’ culture saw it. This realization was disappointing to say the least.
Again, a bit later on in life, my practice became more focused on the interactions of people and places.
During a year spent living thriftily (often on couches) in European and Asian cities of differing shapes and sizes, I witnessed with impressive clarity how the culture of a people who inhabit a place seemed to impress far more of an effect on the outcomes and uses of that place, than the place’s physical design. In both formal and informal urban design, this is an often seen—and not often enough talked about—misalignment between design and culture.
If our urban sustainability issues are indeed so deeply entrenched in culture, it follows that successful urban nature design—indeed, successful sustainable cities in general—can only be achieved in concert with a deep and sustained cultural awareness of the importance of nature. To do otherwise would be like giving a choir a beautifully orchestrated musical score, and not teaching them how to sing. To be sure, this is how many otherwise brilliant ecologically-minded projects turn out.
The mechanisms to build this awareness, to teach our choir of citizens to sing in harmony, are also something which, with the exception of small pockets of influence (in terms of food, I can think immediately of Alice Water’sEdible Schoolyard project, and Food Corps, as good examples) are mostly absent from our cities.
Getting to the root of the issue, I’d like to take a look at the idea of garden city culture with an appropriate example.
The unlikely garden city
This is ‘Dae-dong’, an old, tightly-packed, lower-income neighborhood in the South Korean city of Daejeon.
Dae-dong neighborhood in Daejeon, South Korea. Photo: Patrick Lydon
Okay. Admittedly, it doesn’t look like an urban gardener’s heaven. But in this neighborhood, almost no plot of soil—and in many cases no slab of idle asphalt, no matter how tiny—is left without tended plants, whether it be flowers or a few corn stalks.
The neighborhood’s design certainly doesn’t have much love for urban gardens, but the residents overwhelmingly do. As my partner Suhee and I found out during a three-month stay as artists in residence here, love for nature is the deciding factor in Dae-dong.
The scale and seemingly hectic layout of the neighborhood is by no means a help to the would-be gardener, and it is quite the opposite of what most American cities aim for. Dae-dong is built to a supremely human-scale, so much so that even the smallest of Korean cars feels awkward to navigate its widest streets. In fact, most of its streets are pathways, barely wide enough for two persons to pass comfortably.
The layout of the neighborhood forces utility of space.
Space cultivation map and images from the Dae-dong neighborhood in Daejeon, South Korea. Graphic and photos: Patrick Lydon and Suhee Kang
Yet as Suhee and I strolled through the rolling, twisting maze of alleys to meet and talk with locals during our stay, we noticed that gardens are everywhere here. It’s not just a garden in someone’s pint-sized backyard, it’s a proliferation of earth cultivation everywhere in the neighborhood, even in the smallest piece of soil, or in an old bathtub on top of the concrete of the aforementioned narrow walkways.
I realized that what I had found in Dae-dong was a ‘real’ garden city. That is to say, a thriving garden city culture without a garden city plan; a neighborhood with nearly zero planned space for gardens, yet with hundreds of gardens.
How did it happen?
To be clear about the circumstances, the people who partake in this activity in this neighborhood—I fondly refer to them as garden ‘hacking’ grandmothers—are generally from a generation who can still remember the times when they were starving, when Korea had little political organization, much strife through a forced occupation, war, and generally very rough times. The neighborhood was also a home for refugees during the war, some of whom live here still today.
Dae-dong is a success story, at least to show what possibilities exist in small spaces, to show the resiliency and transformation possible when a certain kind of culture pervades, and to reinforce the idea that greening our neighborhoods need not always require large and expensive physical restructuring of those neighborhoods.
An old bath tub filled with soil is used for growing along the narrow street. Photo: Patrick Lydon
However, in the years since this older generation of urban farmers began their work in Dae-dong, South Korea has quickly become a technological and industrial mega-power. The development within the country is almost unprecedented, change occurs at quick pace, and most South Koreans under the age of 40 are more concerned with work, study, or vying for a desk at Hyundai or Samsung than they are about a garden.
The cultural connection to and relevance of the natural environment dissolved in South Korea in the space of a single generation, and when the old residents of Dae-dong are gone, the gardens will likely be gone along with them.
That sounds like a dismal point. You may be left mulling over examples of this in your own community; this is inevitable because it feels as though the same story is repeating itself around the industrialized and industrializing world.
We can easily point to laws, regulations, politics, economics, work habits, and other barriers, yet all of these barriers are created, at their root, by the cultural mindset of a place.
Of course, culture, history, and motivation are quite different between places like Dae-Dong and, for example, the garden-suburb-without-many-gardens where I grew up in the United States. Yet in pointing to culture, we also must admit to ourselves that given its very nature, culture is something that is itself cultivated, always growing, always changing.
Hand planting rice at a small natural farm in South Korea. Photo: Patrick Lydon
If a culture of nature-connectedness could be removed from South Korea in a generation, so it could be built again in another.
We must know it in ourselves then, despite the view we have from the culture that we live within here and now—wherever here and now is for us—that the creation of a culture which lives in relative harmony with the natural environment is something which can be cultivated within humanity, first on a local scale, as some are currently experiencing, and, in time, on a global scale, as well.
Kazuaki Okitsu, one of the farmers we spent a good deal of time with during our documentary filming, explained this concept very eloquently:
“Every time we stand in nature
with the plants, the animals, and the vast sky above
we can feel joy in that simple moment
smile if only because we are a part of life on earth
Everyone has these small moments
Everyone gets it, even if we don’t realize it
We understand nature inside ourselves
We just need to cultivate this understanding”
By any measure, or perhaps through lack of the measurable, true sustainable action has much to do with our human capacity to feel, to have compassion, and to experience empathy.
For Suhee and myself, our current tools for approaching this sentiment happen to be in the realm of film and trans-disciplinary community-connected arts projects, but there are endless ways to catalyze beyond this.
The important bit seems to be in facilitating ways to listen to nature, to disconnect from the things which cause destruction of social and ecological life, and to re-connect with our basic human capacity for empathy with the vast, often hidden, living world around us. In his book “The Lost Language of Plants,” author Stephen Buhner writes to this point: “We are by species history and genetic tendency, encoded for the recognition of the aliveness of the world and an emotional bonding with it.” In this statement, Buhner is condensing the concept of “biophilia” as gleaned from biologist E. O. Wilson: a fondness for other life forms.
This is what the natural farmers we worked with have cultivated.
This is what the old grandmothers in Dae-Dong’s unlikely garden plots have cultivated.
And for our part, this is what we must also begin to cultivate in ourselves by reaching for a ‘depth’ of awareness, rethinking our relationship not only ‘to’ but ‘with’ what is around us.
There has been a great receptiveness to such notions so far, one of many signs that a great shift in mentality—and a great shift in culture—is working its way into society.
The ecologically successful culture
In the Final Straw film, we point quite specifically to natural farmers as being examples of ecologically successful microcultures operating within the modern economic landscape, and if we look at the roots of their culture, we see that it is based on all of nature having some kind of sacred or intrinsic value. A recent TNOC roundtable on the sacredness of nature tackles this topic well.
Yet we tend to shy away from concepts such as sacredness and empathy at all costs when we approach the subject in public, and as a result, our language for the importance of nature has become anemic, stunted, and ineffective—an issue in and of itself, of which nature writer Robert MacFarlane recently gave a grand account.
Instead of fostering connection, we insert rationalities, numbers, and balance sheets in between ourselves and the environment, all of which are related to each other, and none of which are so much related to nature in any real way.
These are tools which can certainly be used to facilitate useful conversations, yet reliance on them as the fundamental basis for what we do is perhaps the single greatest inhibition to the growth and sustained influence of ecological thinking and action.
The walls we are used to working with (numbers, balance sheets, etc…) don’t have to disappear, but they must acquire some porousness to them, some breathing holes. With this breathing room, urban nature gains a deeper aspect, economic reasons for destroying natural habitat become unjustifiable, and garden cities have the potential to blossom in any city regardless of its design.
Gardens in the Daedong neighborhood of Daejeon, South Korea. Photo: Patrick Lydon
In our experience working with natural farmers and young and eager urban dwellers, as soon as you begin to prick holes and open doors in the walls created by our typical logic-oriented language, a natural appreciation of nature comes quite easily to most human beings. All it takes is an exercise in opening our minds a bit to feel why nature is important for each of us as individuals,
This cultivation can come in many forms and growing food is certainly only one way to carry out such intense and delicate cultivation of individuals, but it’s not the only way, nor is it the only output of value that can be had from a cultural bonding with nature.
A recent TNOC writing by Lindsay Campbell gave a beautiful personal account of “Encountering the Urban Forest,” calling for us to share stories of our personal interactions with trees in order to understand more fully “why we create and maintain urban forests.”
Whether it’s tree planting, urban gardening, artist-led workshops on connecting to nature, talking with Korean grandmother urban garden hackers, or, heck, even talking with trees, we’ve all likely experienced such moments of transformation.
At this point, I would like to pose these open questions to readers:
What actions have you taken where changes occur in how you view your relationship with the environment? How have mindsets changed in these instances? How were these mindsets cultivated and how might they be transferred to other situations?
As I have iterated in the past, the more examples the world has of ways to cultivate sensitivity and connection to nature, the better position we will be in as we continue to understand more deeply what it means to build a sustainable future.
Regardless of how we achieve it, we know that the need and willingness are there within people, and we should believe that a great future is ahead of us, one where sustainable design, planning, nature, and culture coalesce through a re-connecting of people with a deep-rooted awareness of and connection to the earth with which they live.
In October 2014, we had a great opportunity to explore different green areas of several Chinese cities within the project “Sustainable green infrastructure in urban-rural areas of China based on eco-civilization,” which was sponsored by the Chinese Government. It was particularly interesting to see different types of greenery that reflects the development of planning structure in Chinese cities.
Classic Chinese private gardens (scholar and imperial gardens) and scenic spots (specially chosen for their scenic natural landscapes) were the dominant type of green space in Chinese cities for almost 2000 years. These gardens were based on the philosophical canons of harmony and beauty (Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism).
One of the traditional historic Suzhou gardens. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
European public elements of green spaces, such as lawns and flowerbeds, were introduced to China by foreign missionaries during the First Opium War (1839-1842). After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, some remnants of colonial gardens were transformed into public parks for the local inhabitants. In the 1950s, as a result of the “Learning from the Soviet Union” policy, public, multifunctional parks (similar to the USSR’s concept of Parks of Recreation and Culture) became an integral feature of greenspaces in China.
Xing Qing Gong Park in Xi’an City (built in 1958) can truly be called a “people’s” park. Photos: Maria Ignatieva
Since the Chinese Economic Reform in 1978, the use of Western forms for green areas has sped up. Governmental officials had a chance to go abroad and rediscover European Renaissance-Baroque styles, followed by English as well as Modernist styles of landscape architecture. They “fell in love” with manicured lawns and colorful flowerbeds. Finally, when China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it was included in the process of globalization and globalized landscapes arrived to China.
However, this influx did not take into consideration the different climatic conditions or local cultural traditions. Well-mown lawns together with huge plazas, scattered broad leaved trees and regular flower beds became a symbol of success of the Chinese market economy model. Nobody was embarrassed by the high maintenance costs and low environmental value of such new, placeless urban landscapes.
One of the public parks in Yangling. Lawns are prohibited for public use in Chinese parks, but they are nevertheless actively used by visitors. Photo: Maria IgnatievaInfluence of globalization: annual flower display in Jinan. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
However, increasing densification, traffic problems, and air pollution forced Chinese landscape architects to start the process of searching for local identity of place and new sustainable models for urban development.
Nowadays, design for urban green areas is done mostly by Chinese private architectural or landscape architectural firms as well as by special planning municipal institutions. In some cases, foreign landscape firms and consultants are also involved in the design and planning stages, especially in large-scale projects such as the Olympic Park in Beijing.
One of the most common types of green areas in Chinese cities is the public park. We were pleasantly surprised to see some principles of Feng shui in the overall design schemes of such parks (orientation, axis etc.). Traditional Chinese garden elements such as rocks, water bodies, classic architecture in Chinese style (pavilions, winding corridors, pagodas and bridges), and paving with stones are actively included in the latest public parks.
However, even these kinds of references to Chinese character are in some cases purely decorative and have lost the spiritual meaningfulness they would have held in Chinese classical gardens. Still, some carving stones mimic the original, very important masterpieces of Chinese calligraphy and provide historic information about the site. We were impressed by the very active use of public parks spaces by people during the weekdays and on holidays.
Qujiang Heritage Park in Xi’an. Photos: Maria IgnatievaAn intensive green roof in Jinan. Yin/Yangg pavement motif is inherited from classical Chinese gardens. Photo: Maria IgnatievaThe Pictorial Garden with annual plants is an attraction for visitors; it represents a Chinese interpretation of a very European idea. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Green areas inside living neighborhoods (multifamily houses of 4-12 floors). The availability of green areas is varied. From a very limited amount in the living quarters of the 1970-1980s, such spaces grew to a quite reasonable size in the 1990s, and in the 2000s-2010s came to include the greenery of bigger inner yards. In such areas, there is a clear tendency to turning away from productive green areas (no lawns) to more decorative pre-designed areas with standardized lawns, hedges, topiary shrubs, and some ground covers.
However, even in the most recent neighborhoods (established in 2012-2014) people have turned some of these lawns into community gardens. Many urban communities have a specially designated urban agriculture area within their neighborhood. We connected this phenomenon to the agricultural past of people who have left their countryside farms and moved, seeking a better life in the city.
A spontaneous orchard on a lawn and a community orchard in the modern neighborhoods of Yangling. Photos: Maria Ignatieva
We found a limited number of tree species used for landscape design in Chinese cities. Monocultures—for example, rows of one tree species—are the rule rather than the exception. A “prefabricated” design palette with open lawns, trimmed bushes, and scattered trees landscapes reminded us of classical Western patterns. Famous English Landscape designer Capability Brown would be very pleased seeing such fruitful results of his ideas on Chinese soil. Since the 1990s, China has turned towards using more global plant material.
One of the public parks in Xian with manicured lawns and solo trees. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Suprisingly for us, we were able to identify quite a few Chinese species. These plants, including Koelreuteria paniculata, Gingko biloba, Lagerstroemia indica,Osmanthus fragrans, and Sophora japonica, were also included in the global “pool” of plants for modern urban landscapes and probably date from the late 1990s. They are used in many countries around the world.
We identified one uniquely Chinese type of urban green area—urban nursery plantations for the growing and sale of plant material. Commercial growing of this type fulfills an important ecosystem services in cities. Compared to Western European countries that principally use global nurseries (from a few particular countries specialized in producing plant material), today China has its own local plant nursery market.
Plan for a maple nursery, which is going to be established on a reclaimed area in Jinan. Maple is in high demand today due to its relationship with traditional Chinese garden culture. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Street tree design is also standardized with a tendency to monoculture. Importantly, this particular type of green area plays a very significant role in Chinese cities because of high levels of urban air pollution. The traditional grandeur of formal planning structure in cities such as Xi’an illustrates the key role of the plazas in the front of historic monuments and administrative buildings. Here lawns and annual flowerbeds cover tremendous spaces. The management of such places is the most intensive and is thus incredibly expansive. There are also some surrounding native forests that are used as public parks.
One of the streets in Xi’an. Photo: Maria IgnatievaGrand scale design: Campus of Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Yangling. Photo: Maria IgnatievaCity of Jinan. New multifamily neighborhood. Surrounding forest (on hills with Platycladus orientalis ) is used as a neighborhood park. New pathways and traditional pavilions are arranged following canons of classic Chinese parks. Local rocks are used in the construction of the park and in inner green areas. Here, the landscape architect tried to have identity of place by using local material. Local people influenced the choice of plant material so the plant list is a bit different from the one that we have earlier described. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
In a new multifamily neighborhood in Jinan, surrounding forest (on hills with Platycladus orientalis) is used as a neighborhood park. New pathways and traditional pavilions are arranged following canons of classic Chinese parks. Local rocks are used in the construction of the park and in inner green areas. Here, the landscape architect tried to have identity of place by using local material. Local people influenced the choice of plant material so the plant list is a bit different from the one that we have earlier described.
“Gated” community phenomenon
We found the existence of “gated,” highly secured and walled urban communities to be a real surprise considering that before the 1990s, most of the urban green spaces in residential areas (next to homes) were accessible to all people from different areas. According to Chinese colleagues, this gated community phenomenon related to the change of society towards a more individualistic market economy. Other authors argued that this phenomenon is closely related to the old tradition of people living as one family unit separated from busy street life. We observed especially strict control related to these communities in the most recently-developed, rich neighborhood-villa areas.
One of the gated neighborhoods in Xian (2013-2014). Photo: Maria Ignatieva
In recent years as a result of searching for new sustainable solutions, the green roof concept is also becoming quite fashionable. There are still not many green roofs, and the most dominant form is the intensive green roof located on high-rise buildings in dense downtowns. Such roofs no doubt provide several ecosystem services, but they are expensive to manage and maintain. According to landscape architecture practitioners, this is becoming a restrictive factor for mass use of green roofs in China.
Fuli Green Roof in the City of Chengdu. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Established in 2009-2011
Intensive green roof on the top of the building belonging to Real Estate Corporation
7000 m2, structure: roof drainage, sand 30 cm and 80 cm of soil
Big area of lawns. Maintenance of lawns is 50% from whole green roof maintenance. 7 yuan per m2 for lawn maintenance. In summer: every 10 days need mowing. Main argument of having lawn: it’s “cooling” effect (compare to hard surfaces) and absence of appropriate ground covers.
One of the main functions of all green areas in Chinese cities is reduction of air pollution. Today, even a small green area is a very valuable contributor to the physical and spiritual health of Chinese cities.
What we can also conclude from the observation of existing Chinese green areas is that there is a necessity of exchanging good experiences dealing with green areas from Western perspective as well as successful case studies developed by Chinese landscape architects.
We call for creating more hybrid approach emerging positive western and eastern experience.
Na Xiu, landscape architect and PhD student in Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala. Interested in how green and blue spaces in cities can be strongly connected, landscape history and theory in Scandinavia and China.
Born in China, Fengping Yang is a PhD student in Landscape Architecture at department of Urban and Rural development in Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).
A review of Green Infrastructure: A Landscape Approach, by David C. Rouse and Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa. 2013. ISBN: 978-1-611900-62-0. Report Number 571. Planning Advisory Service. American Planning Association. 157 pages. Available here.
This PAS Report, in line with the current principles of sustainability, discusses green infrastructure (GI) as the visible expression of natural and human ecosystem processes that work across scales and contexts to provide multiple benefits for people and their environments. Unlike other approaches that envision green infrastructure from the standpoint of social infrastructure (e.g., by building capacity in improved health, job opportunities, community cohesion, etc.), this report addresses it first within the matrix or context of hard infrastructure.
The authors D. C. Rouse and I. F. Bunster-Ossa, two landscape architects and designers, along with contributions from a number of professionals, transmit their holistic views of an integrated landscape, in which ecology, community health and identity, infrastructure, recreation, and public art merge. They also urge professionals involved in these issues to apply multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches in their projects.
The authors renew the holistic call of many anonymous voices from distant civilizations and seminal work from the 19th and 20th centuries to work with Nature and not against it. The need to interconnect natural or “green” systems with the ecosystem services they provide to sustain a functioning community is not new. This concept was applied by many ancient civilizations and held up by important professionals like Penn (1681), the Olmsteds (1870-1900), the Eliots, Manning (1923), McHarg (1969) and A.W.Spirn (1984) and by concepts developed by the present sustainable, ecological and biourbanism. Unfortunately this conception lost strength with the advance of modernity, and because involved professionals have tended to operate independently of one another. Nature devaluation became apparent by the middle of the 20th century, engineered infrastructure eclipsed landscape as the primary driver of urban development. The progress of urbanization and associated infrastructure (roads, utilities, and flood control works), based on hard engineering, had huge and exponential impacts on the landscape, increasing problems instead of bringing solutions.
Rouse and Bunster-Ossa show clearly that GI is a complex system, that spans planning and design disciplines, urban, suburban, and rural contexts and scales. As a term, GI is relatively new to the lexicon of urban planning and landscape design. It appeared in the late 1990s with the intent of elevating the societal value and functions of natural systems to the same importance level as grey infrastructure.
In four chapters the authors present GI as a multifunctional system with components (trees, soil, and constructed infrastructure); organized into a pattern (the landscape); and that performs functions (e.g., stormwater management and the removal of air and water pollutants) that provide benefits. Moreover, they note that GI is part of a hierarchy: it incorporates multiple subsystems (e.g., hydrology, vegetation, and movement) and in turn is a subsystem within a larger system (e.g., region, city, or neighborhood), where it interacts with other systems such as transportation, economy, and governance.
Chapter 2 elaborates on the evolution and basic attributes of GI as a multifunctional system. Chapter 3 addresses its implications for practitioners, with a focus on integrating the work of urban planners and landscape architects. Here the authors bring a set of six unifying principles that can be used by different professions to advance green infrastructure solutions at different scales. In each GI planning practice the principles of multifunctionality, connectivity, habitability, resiliency, identity and return on investment must not be forgotten. Half of the report—Chapter 4—is devoted to eleven American case studies illuminating examples of green infrastructure at the regional scale, in large cities and in smaller communities. Four of these examples discuss parks, greenways, and river corridors. As a bonus, at the end the authors show how the reported case studies embody the six principles laid out earlier in the report.
The Appendix includes a model of an integrated regulatory framework for GI that brings together existing regulations and review processes with new approaches to optimize the interactions between natural and built systems.
The key chapter in this book—Chapter 3—shows how, planners can plan and promote green infrastructure to achieve triple-bottom-line benefits at different scales in different contexts, strikingly presented using the six principles mentioned above.
Green Infrastructure: A Landscape Approach gives the reader a framework for a sustainable urban and regional future, how can it be implemented, and how planners and designers can play leading and responsive roles in addressing these issues. Although this report was intended for planners, landscape architects, architects, civil engineers, scientists, and others interested in the spatial structure, functions, and values (environmental, economic, and social) of natural and built landscapes, its simple and enjoyable writing makes it useful for educators, students, citizen groups and conservationists. While all case studies were drawn from communities within the United States, implementing the mentioned principles through green infrastructure initiatives, the variety of contexts and scales make them applicable worldwide.
The fractal idea revisited in an attempt to make the concept clearer on a day-to-day, more visceral basis.
In my first blog for TNOC I outlined my concept of an ‘urban fractal’ and noted my fascination with the idea that “one might be able to identify patterns in urban systems that could provide a systematic model for developing cities that can always and simultaneously incorporate the essential characteristics of ecologically sustainable urbanism—and that this might be applicable across the spectrum from eco-village to metropolis.” I described an urban fractal as “a network that contains the essential characteristics of the larger network of the city” and that “Each fractal will possess nodes, or centres, and patterns of connectivity that define its structure and organisation, and it will exhibit characteristics of community associated with living processes.”
The ‘essential characteristics’ of ecologically sustainable urbanism most certainly have to do with physical structures and infrastructures that deliver energy and water efficiency, low-to-no waste regimes, clean air and biophysically healthy environments but those are relatively easy to describe. The hard bits are to do with the requirement that each fractal “will exhibit characteristics of community associated with living processes”. It’s hard because communities and living processes are messy, squishy, fluid, tricky to define and full of people who may have their own ideas about how to make their community.
For some time I’ve been wanting to flesh out the idea of urban fractals so that non-specialists might find it more readily understandable and to reinforce the message that this concept is not about making arcane geometric patterns but is about the patterns that manifest in the tapestry of activities and relationships that make up daily life. It’s personal and it’s political.
Urban fractals can be described in terms of acceptable metrics and there are superb analyses of the fractal nature of city form and development (notably by Salat et al and Batty and Longley) but these invariably discuss the workings of urban life in formalistic terms and, of necessity, resort to jargon. I don’t think most citizens affected by these things would make much sense of the language that professionals employ to discuss them. Too often, planning processes tend away from reification and towards generalities and abstraction and unintended alienation. As both an urban theorist and a real person, I have to admit that this preoccupies me. It preoccupies me because when one’s rhetoric is all about community engagement, and claims that an urban fractal is “a particular type of cultural fractal”, I think it should be accessible to non-specialists and, well, ‘ordinary’ citizens.
A place called Semaphore
This blog is thus an attempt to describe some of the ‘essential characteristics’ of urban fractals in a way that non-specialist might find acceptable and accessible. Based on my own experience of the neighbourhood I’ve lived in for the past three years, it describes parts of the urban fractal idea using the example of a place called Semaphore, in South Australia. It is part photo-essay but the images are not generic, they are specific to a particular place. The same could be done for any neighbourhood as a way to find its fractal threads.
There are any number of characteristics that might be used to define an urban fractal but to try and keep the list reasonably manageable I propose the following:
For these to become attributes of an ecocity or ecopolis, each characteristic has to be adjusted accordingly:
It’s the only town in the world named after a flag-waving communications system . Write a letter addressed simply to Semaphore, and there is no other destination it could be headed to (although whether modern, machine-based postal sorting systems can handle that level of simplicity is a moot point). On a reserve close to the foreshore, Semaphore boasts one of the world’s remaining 60 or so timeballs, still standing, still signalling the need to synchronise our chronometers if we want to find our longitude at sea without GPS.
Until it’s occupied, a town, village or city is not alive. Though its buildings, streets and squares may resonate with the marks of human manufacture it remains as dead as an archaeological dig, its timeball frozen until its empty vessels are filled with people doing all the messy, amazing things that people do to bring urban structures to life. Technology doesn’t make cities. People make cities. All the technology in the world can’t guarantee that things will perform as planned, act as advised or deliver as prescribed. The most advanced aircraft in the world can still be flown into a mountain.
Invisible people
I keep coming back to the realisation that the things that make all the difference, the things that make it all work, don’t show up in plans at all. The blueprints for our cities don’t show people. The professionals involved in the making of our built environment rarely embrace the engagement of the wider community in their planning processes. A lot of architects prefer that their buildings are photographed without people in the shots.
Then there are all the non-human species that help make up the populations of our cities and towns. For the most part they are ignored or regarded as a nuisance or even an enemy. Yes, I know that there are now a lot more design professionals who understand that trees and landscaping deserve more important consideration in their plans than that of merely providing decorative finishes to streetscapes or making generic green space, but I’m not convinced that they are yet in the ascendant—proof to the contrary remains elusive. And there is so much more to non-human occupation of our urban systems than that.
Very few of the human population of a city are ever asked directly about their needs and demands; some take advantage of electoral processes and other ways to influence decision-makers but true plebiscites are rare. The non-human population has no voice or representation at all apart from departments of the environment and sundry under-funded activists. In the absence of Dr Dolittle, who can present a voice for the animals? We have to make do with environmental campaigners and ecologists! The insights and information provided by them needs to be built into design and development programs for our cities and urban systems; think in terms of creating design guidelines for non-human species. No ecocity urban fractal can be complete without them. This blog only begins to hint at the wealth of life that can be found in an unassuming non-ecocity urban fractal—imagine what might be there if we were shaping our neighbourhoods with non-human species given equal weight to us.
Urban fractals are about describing society and its relationship with the environment. Thus they are inevitably about society, culture, politics and, to my own surprise, an acknowledgement of the importance of the people who are the social glue, the people who are cultural catalysts and make us laugh and cry and think, and the much maligned people who stir the pot of politics.
Although it has a strong sense of identity, Semaphore has no autonomy as a political entity. It has been subsumed as a suburb within the City of Port Adelaide Enfield, which is a relatively recent creation that incorporates previously separate council areas and has boundaries which reflect political expediency rather than any sense of place. As Jayne Engle and Nik Luka remind us: “Cities must be seen holistically as containing overlapping and nested neighborhoods.” Neighbourhoods are getting noticed. In Amsterdam, as the city’s compact centre begins to suffer from too much pedestrian traffic (in Australian car-centric cities we can only dream of such a thing) neighbourhoods are being rediscovered as a funky new tourist destinations. This reinforces the idea that the liveliness of cities is not only found in their centres but is part of their whole fabric, manifest in the local communities of neighbourhoods. We’ve known how to make neighbourhoods intuitively for generations, now there’s increasing interest in figuring out what defines and makes a neighbourhood work – and refining the concept of the urban fractal is part of that quest.
Community by numbers?
How do you make community? You can’t really prescribe it, even if products like the Green Star – Communities rating tool developed by the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) do an excellent job of melding business and environmental concerns with developer interests in a way that incorporates ‘stakeholder engagement’. Developed “in close collaboration with the market, including all three tiers of government, public and private sector developers, professional services providers, academia, product manufacturers and suppliers and other industry groups” the tool will assuredly help create better developments than might otherwise occur. But a cynic might argue that it is also a product of how curiously neutered political life is at the civic level. It is more about cautious market research than it is about stirring the body politic to new heights of creativity and imagination. It is nicely ordered stuff. But surely, there’s more to real life than that?
Of course, there’s probably an algorithm for it all, but if we are going to rely on any kind of professionally distanced or centralised systems to identify the patterns that inform the algorithms that shape the spaces that house the neighbourhood then we abdicate the imperatives of real community that cause people to talk to each other and explore the myriad possibilities of relationships and actions that are nascent in human society. Community, like a sense of place, is an emergent property of place, circumstance and behaviour and a computer algorithm or rating tool can’t force it into existence. Sub-cultures and communities of interest, be they chambers of commerce or knitting circles, are the grit that can catalyse the production of neighbourhood pearls. Almost any situation involving some level of conflict or difficulty can catalyse the coming together of people that begins community, and so can spontaneous mutual aid, where people cooperate to help each other out because each person benefits in some way from that cooperation. It doesn’t have to be dramatic—“The people who live along the beachside street walk each others dogs, have street parties and collect their neighbours’ bins”—and whether it’s based on self-interest or altruism really doesn’t matter if the result is “We’ve become friends and it makes it easier because everyone looks out for each other” (‘Friends sharing and caring on Arthur St’ p.3 Portside Messenger 25 March 2015 ).
Neighbourhoods are increasingly recognised as a key reasons in selecting a home
The community that I know, the fractal that supports me, is one with a main street that has almost every shop and service that Chérie and I need on a daily basis. The butcher, the barber, the newsagent, the multi-cultural cafés, the post office, the small, friendly supermarkets, the pub, the pharmacies, the takeaway Chinese joint, the record store that still sells real records, all get a visit on a regular basis; the local service station, the dry cleaner where they remodel clothes, the shoe shop, the optometrist, the physiotherapist, banks, they’re all within easy walking distance; and when the grandchildren come around there’s a playground, the foreshore and the beach. And there’s much more, including churches, schools, dentists, a sweet shop (candy store), pet and garden store, sports grounds, meeting halls, and a community garden. And there’s the legendary RSL (Returned Servicemen’s League) club with cheap curries, live music and a remarkable history.
My neighbour brought me gluten-free muffins morning as I wrote this essay.
This is but a sample of what this neighbourhood can provide. Properly speaking, it is a small town. It has a strong sense of neighbourhood. It’s the sort of place where informal discounts are common, pay tomorrow that’s OK is acceptable, where an expectation of honesty is the default condition. It’s a place where people still seem to trust each other. Even the troubled and damaged citizens living on welfare are treated like the human beings they are, rather than statistics or worse. And all the time there is a strong connection with nature, with the ever-changing sea always visible right down the end of the main street. This place is alive.
How does one design for this to happen? Is it possible?
Stuart Gifford’s streetscape drawings
Someone else’s perception of this urban fractal will be different. There will be shared dots in the picture but connected to form a slightly different pattern. The network of connections is very unlikely be the same for any two Semaphorians but the effect of completeness and general daily experience will be very similar. The range of possible patterns of connection is enormous (I’d love a statistician work out a few figures because quoting numbers always lends an air of authority to this sort of thing – offers anyone?) and this is part of what underpins the perception of rich diversity in a well-used place. And isn’t that true of ecosystems generally? The larger the number of potential destinations, the more potential there is for forming different connections and the richer and more diverse are the observable patterns of behaviour.
The energy of a place like Semaphore comes from people who live and work there and maintain the luxuries and necessities of daily life. The future of a place like Semaphore is determined, in part, by its history, and the course of history is disrupted by people who have dreams or despair of how it might turn out. Ordinary people are rarely ordinary. The Semaphore Workers’ Club was the home of Australia’s strongest Communist Party for many years (and arguably still is). Under the cloak of normalcy, visions stir. Operator of tills, cookers, kitchen sinks and the iconic small business of Sarah’s Sister’s Sustainable Café, Semaphorian Stuart Gifford is one who constantly tears that cloak in response to such stirrings. His drawings of the main street of Semaphore capture something of its diversity and richness of place. The industrial past of Port Adelaide is barely a mile away from Semaphore and is, in some ways, its Siamese twin. Knowing this, Stuart’s drawings of how the Port could transform into an ecological city give more than a few clues as to how Semaphore itself might be trained to develop into the kind of place that might survive this era of catastrophic climate change.
The streetscape sketches are by Stuart Gifford from a few years ago. Some of the names have shifted or changed but I think that the general effect and sense of the diversity of the place comes through beautifully. Drawing by Stuart Gifford, used with permission.
Musings on design guidelines for non-human species
When we design and build environments for particular human purposes—a school perhaps, or a sports facility—we draw on the expertise of people we are familiar with and their requirements in order to write an appropriate brief. The same should apply when we want to build in a way that actively supports, rather than merely tolerates, the needs of other species. The equation is a simple one, the basis of straightforward programming:
IF we want A, THEN we have to have B
IF we want X, THEN we need Y.
There are examples: the specification of particular species of flora to attract particular species of fauna to assist in maintaining biodiversity.
Non-human species do sometimes get consideration in urban planning and management; in this case the City of Port Adelaide Enfield seeks help in trying to protect coastal biodiversity.
The hard thing is to find a way to give the other species priority. From their point of view, there is precious little evidence to date that we have done anything other than seek to eradicate or diminish the environment on which they (and ultimately, we) depend. A major cultural shift is needed and it needs to be a shift that does not rely on monetised values of nature for its legitimacy. The market is slippery and unfair and gives very high value to things and processes that create massive environmental (and social) damage. In the perverse world of the market, whether free, controlled or clandestine, the last tigers, elephants—you name it—are being killed because they are so valuable in monetised terms. As the number of dodos diminished, they were valued ever more highly by the market. The cultural shift has to be one that recognises the intrinsic value of other species, not their price in the market place.
Humans adopt their own priorities as they continually change the environment for all species and ecosystems
In the same way that everyone is a distinct individual, every community is unique. It is special within itself, but like every living system on the planet it dies or thrives in response to objective conditions and the level of nurture it can obtain from its environment. As our species has grown ever more invasive and manipulative, so those objective conditions have become increasingly dependent on human behaviour. Unknowingly, or with intent, we play god. That play takes place on the world stage and threatens the viability of the global biosphere, and it takes place in living rooms and backyards whenever we make a choice about how we obtain our energy, water and daily bread. And however individual those choices may seem, we are inescapably social creatures so they are always the result of feelings shared and exchanged, the communing of minds and the dance of personalities.
We know from experience that the world is susceptible to our collective action and that action is grounded in community. It is there, for good or ill, that we make things happen. Semaphore may not be an ecological city, but like many small communities around the world, within its fractal essence, it bears the seeds that could grow one. But for those seeds to grow, there needs to be some effective planning at the neighbourhood scale.
Long-distance seasonal visitors, like this Pacific Gull, make Semaphore their home and meld with the edges of its ecology
“Neighborhood plans should contain a practical utopian vision for the neighborhood within the larger city, which is translated into medium-term policies and programs but also actions that can be taken on a short-term timeframe”, write Jayne Engle & Nik Luka. This doesn’t really exist in Semaphore. The closest it gets is local government planning and that happens at a level of scale which is outside that of the Semaphore fractal. There have been local business organisations that had some impact on creating events (the Semaphore Street Fair still runs annually) and there have been some attempts by small groups of interested locals to organise events to bring together and catalyse neighbourhood energy, notably through the auspices of Stuart Gifford’s café, but there is no effective organisation that can claim to be undertaking planning for the neighbourhood based on any kind of vision of what Semaphore might become. In this, Semaphore is not unusual, but to gird our loins for the battle with climate change and ecological instability that’s now rising on the horizon like a tsunami, every neighbourhood urban fractal needs to be planning for itself, working out how to turn its social energy into an effective force for positive change so that the patterns that make daily life functional, fun or fulfilling can continue.
Rising seas are an uncomfortable fact and will have to be factored into any serious plans for the future
In the long term, to continue this thought experiment further—if Semaphore were to evolve into an ecocity urban fractal it would need to exhibit the characteristics of a fully-featured ecopolis [see my first blog and the box] in order to possess the resilience and autonomy required for surviving climate change and the 7 metres of sea level rise that would transform it into an island.
Story notes: A conversation about civic ecology between Lance Gunderson, a landscape ecologist from Emory University in Atlanta; Caroline Lewis, of Climate Leadership Engagement Opportunities, or CLEO, in Miami; and Arjen Wals, a professor of social learning and sustainable development at Wageningen University, The Netherlands.
Climate change and other stresses on cities represent great challenges to societies. Some of these challenges are systematic and somehow “knowable”—that is, we know generally what to expect, even if we aren’t sure how to respond. Other threats and stresses are unexpected, even random in the appearance. Things happen that put pressure on our systems, organizations, and communities that we didn’t expect, and didn’t necessarily plan for—freak storms, or economic stress, or the loss of a charismatic leader. Our ability to respond to the unexpected is one aspect to the idea of resilience. Are our communities flexible or brittle in the face of shocks?
This episode of This Is The Nature of Cities discusses these issues and role Civic Ecology plays is maintaining resilient and vibrant communities. What is civic ecology? Think community gardens, or faith groups working in sustainability, river restoration organizations, or friends of parks groups. Such organizations form key and critical elements to the functioning of resilient communities, not just in their direct action, but in their contribution to social cohesion.
Since moving from Edinburgh to London, I have greatly missed my bicycle commute along the former’s Union Canal. There are similar routes in London, but they’re unfortunately not on my way to work. I have always sought out such corridors and they have sometimes influenced my destinations. In response to the “Why are you interested in this position?” question in a job interview, I once admitted that getting to work via Montreal’s Lachine Canal was a big draw.
Nostalgic for Edinburgh’s Union Canal. Photo: Janice Astbury
While I’ve long been aware of the positive effects of daily opportunities to get away from traffic and closer to some form of nature, it is only recently that I have given serious thought to the wider significance of green transport corridors in cities. I have written previously about how urban landscapes convey forceful messages concerning the nature of cities and the role of citizens. In that article, I described how certain landscapes can invite citizens to collaborate with nature in ways that make cities more socially and ecologically resilient. The ‘Inviting Landscape’ in question is most typically a neglected space that is transformed into a garden or pocket park—but what about the landscapes we travel through en route to our daily destinations?
Experiencing the city through its transport infrastructure
Top: Shared path in Manchester. Bottom: On the road in Manchester. Photos: Janice Astbury
In my quest to locate Inviting Landscapes (as part of my PhD research), I journeyed to almost every corner of Manchester. If you’ve ever been there and noticed the elevated motorway running through the city centre, it will come as no surprise that Manchester’s planners have not always considered the needs of pedestrians and cyclists when designing transport infrastructure; there are some terrible roads from a cycling point of view. Fortunately, Manchester also has cycleways and footpaths (and, increasingly, paths shared by cyclists and pedestrians) and I set out to navigate these.As I moved through Manchester’s less visible transport infrastructure, I became increasingly conscious of the significance of transport corridors in defining perceptions of the city. I once spent a childhood holiday on a canal boat and although cars must have crossed bridges over our route, I thought for many years that I had been to places where the streets were water. I sometimes come close to reliving that experience when I arrive in new places via green corridors. It gives me a different sense of my destination and of the city overall.
Transport infrastructure takes up a lot of space in cities. Road networks and car parking cover huge areas of most cities and therefore tend to be key features in the urban landscape that most of us carry around in our heads. Such a grey and monotonous landscape, with little sign of nature or people (other than those encased in cars), constitutes a major part of many people’s daily experience of being outside. Large scale and imposing infrastructure is characterised by obduracy (Hommels, 2005)—that is, it feels like it will be there forever and we mere humans have no capacity to change it.
Very different transport corridors. Photo: Janice Astbury
But moving through a city along a footpath or cycleway, a place of wildflowers and birdsong may reveal itself. One might graze on berries if hungry and enjoy the microclimate of a well-vegetated corridor on a hot day. Such corridors provide health and well-being benefits for people who use them (Tzoulas et al., 2007), and the multi-functional aspect of connective green infrastructure, with its social value in terms of recreation and movement networks, has been recognised in the practice literature (Town and Country Planning Association, 2007). For people who consistently use green corridors, the regular contact with nature also helps to begin to conceive of the city as embedded in nature—as part of an ecosystem, or a social-ecological system, where such green infrastructure is the norm.
Green transport routes provide everyday contact with nature—and more
A key feature of this movement among everyday destinations is that it is not a recreational foray outside the daily lived experience of the city, and accessing it should not require setting aside time and other resources. I was interested to hear mention in a recent TNOC podcast of the potential of linear parks to increase equitable access to nature. I would emphasise that attending to their transport function further enhances this potential and may serve other functions, as well. Here in London, a community leader in Tottenham has pointed out that good cycling infrastructure along the River Lea would increase access to jobs as well as to nature for people who find other forms of private and public transport too costly.
Path cared for by neighbours. Photo: Janice Astbury
That green transport corridors are part of their users’ daily lives, as well as natural places close to home for the many people who live along them, facilitates the engagement of citizens interested in looking after them. However, more efforts are required to extend the invitation to engage to both users and stewards. The UK is relatively blessed with alternative transport networks because of a tradition of footpaths and protection of rights of way. But in recent years, the same lack of care that has affected other urban landscapes has made green corridors uninviting to many people. If people are fearful or uncomfortable about using these areas, none of the benefits described above will accrue.
Top: Uninviting and hard to get through in a hurry—while failing to eliminate motorbikes on the path. Bottom: Fencing off the green corridor. Photo: Janice Astbury
Making green transport infrastructure more inviting
Users of green corridors in Manchester spoke to me about some specific problems that seemed likely to inhibit use. They described how sections of canal towpaths and footpaths/cycleways were very isolated with few “escape routes” and uncertainty about possible obstructions around the next bend (often related to inadequate maintenance).
As I moved through these corridors on foot and on bicycle, I noted that the walls and fences and barbed wire separating these pathways from the surrounding neighbourhoods seemed designed to keep bad things in. They conveyed a message that the natural corridors of Manchester were dangerous places from which neighbours needed protection. A key moment occurs when deciding whether to enter the corridor, and inviting and uninviting entrances are an obvious factor.
Two green corridor entrances: ‘welcome’ versus ‘enter at your own risk’. Photos: Janice AstburyHow to get to the rest of the green corridor on the other side? Photo: Janice Astbury
There are also many examples of places along routes that make it unclear where to go next. One arrives at a dead end or there is a lack of signage—and natural corridors do not appear on the standard online GPS systems that people increasingly use to plan their routes. In other cases, the path is suddenly interrupted by infrastructure hostile to pedestrians and cyclists. It is clear that green and active transport routes are an afterthought, an add-on, rather than a core part of the city’s transport strategy.
Local government should invest in developing and maintaining the natural connective tissue of the city. In the same way that significant investment is made in arterial roads because they are believed to serve everyone and to connect up vital places, so inviting connective green infrastructure should be supported. The canals, footpaths, and cycleways that provide routes for active transport should appear prominently on maps and signage. Whole systems should be indicated when possible, even when portions of them are currently inaccessible, in order to enhance system understanding, and to encourage thinking about connecting up fragmented corridors.
Moving more than people along social-ecological corridors
Citizens moving plants. Photo: Janice Astbury
It is also worth thinking about how people moving around green corridors may be moving more than their own bodies. The October 2014 TNOC Roundtable raised some questions about the capacity of urban green corridors to contribute to habitat connectivity. Can people in these corridors help to enhance this connectivity?
As Andersson (2006, p. 3) points out in relation to maintaining spatial resilience: “There are two aspects of connectivity, the continuity of a certain habitat (structural connectivity) and the possibility for organisms to move within or between patches (functional connectivity).” The important thing is that they find a way to move, and sometimes people can facilitate this. A wildlife conservation manager discussing how increasing urban permeability would help species migrate and therefore survive climate change told me, half jokingly, that with respect to plants, “it might be quicker to just dig them up and move them through!” This comment has stayed with me in recent years as I have watched many citizens involved in transforming urban landscapes physically move plants around.
Plants en route. Photo: Janice Astbury
While most plants are still purchased and driven to private gardens (and have been known to create invasive species problems), there are more and more citizens who are moving plants in an effort to enhance social-ecological systems. They reintroduce indigenous species or create edible landscapes or plant wildflowers that make landscapes more attractive and inviting. The plants are often obtained from other citizens or community organisations engaged in similar efforts at other sites, and are frequently accompanied by the ideas and skills of the fellow citizens that bring them (often by bike and along natural corridors when possible).
It has been suggested that landscape ecology has limited applicability in cities because ecosystem processes have been so disrupted that function no longer follows form (Andersson, Ibid.). However, function perhaps still follows form, but the form is a ‘messy social-ecological system’ (Alessa, Kliskey, & Altaweel, 2009). It includes a variety of people, nature, and places bound together in a complex web of relationships. And people, with their visions of what the city is and can be, are often the ones facilitating system connections. Conventional infrastructure, which has long determined the flows of matter and energy in cities, still dominates, but people with different ideas are simultaneously carrying matter, skills, and inspiration among sites and along corridors in the context of a more collaborative relationship with nature.
Spring comes to the Rochdale Canal towpath. Photo: Janice Astbury
The more people feel comfortable and spend time in green (or greenable) spaces and corridors, the more likely they are to use them, to appropriate them, and to look after them. Those who move in these corridors begin to see the landscape of the whole city and our place in it from a different perspective. It allows us to reconceptualise urban systems, to shift away from a focus on large-scale systems—where people and nature are largely invisible—to more human-scale, systems where the importance of what nature is doing and what citizens are experiencing and doing can be seen and supported. Efforts to expand multifunctional green infrastructure should be accompanied by visions for cultural and experienced landscapes that redefine the city.
Alessa, L., Kliskey, A., & Altaweel, M. (2009). Toward a typology for social-ecological systems. Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy, 5(1).
Andersson, E. (2006). Urban landscapes and sustainable cities, 11(1).
Forman, R. T. T. (1995). Some general principles of landscape and regional ecology. Landscape Ecology, 10(3), 133–142.
Hommels, A.M. (2005). Unbuilding Cities. Obduracy in Urban Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press.
Town and Country Planning Association. (2007). The essential role of green infrastructure: eco-towns green infrastructure worksheet. Advice to Promoters and Planners. London.
Tzoulas, K., Korpela, K., Venn, S., Yli-Pelkonen, V., Kaźmierczak, A., Niemela, J., & James, P. (2007). Promoting ecosystem and human health in urban areas using Green Infrastructure: A literature review. Landscape and Urban Planning, 81(3), 167–178.
I was sitting comfortably in my favorite armchair, sipping coffee and listening to this podcast with my headphones on, when all of a sudden I heard: “We have been relatively good at discussing—not enough, but relatively good—at discussing the idea of environmental bads…” The whole idea was that we had not paid sufficient attention to environmental goods. “Green spaces”—especially linear parks—were described as paragons of environmental goods. I started thinking, Wow. Really? This idea stuck in my mind, because it clashed with my own experience. I am not convinced at all that actual urban policies focus mainly on what we could call environmental bads: building eco-districts and designing environmental friendly areas is creating environmental goods; both smart cities and resilient cities—two different and somewhat contradictory approaches—focus on the bright side of sustainability (designing the future) rather than the bad side. Besides, I am also unconvinced that green spaces are inherently “positive”, both from an environmental and social point of view. They may even, on some occasions, generate very negative and unexpected side effects.
The failure of Seine-St-Denis
In one of my more recently published articles —Combining Sustainability and Social Justice in the Paris Metropolitan Region—I showed that creating environmental goods and amenities such as parks “out of the blue” is absolutely not sufficient to enhance urban justice, be it distributive, restorative or interpersonal. Look at Seine-St-Denisnear Paris, a case that deserves special attention. At the scale of the Paris metropolitan region, this areahas a very poor image due to its industrial heritage and the presence of large social-housing units. It is associated with environmental shortcomings and low quality of life.
A gas plant in Seine-St-Denis (Usine du Landy) in 1919. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Parisians usually avoid this area because they see it as ugly and unsafe, while most of the inhabitants of Seine-St-Denis have the feeling that they live in a bad place, in which they consider themselves abandoned. They’d like to relocate, but they generally lack the financial ability to do so, or they are stuck in this area by their professional activity. So, their sense of belonging to the place they live in, their sense of ownership, and finally their self-esteem, are very low. A book about the industrial heritage of Seine-St-Denis between 1850 and 2000—Dangereux, insalubres et incommodes: paysages industriels en banlieue parisienne (XIXe-XXe siècles)—shows that the prejudice against Seine-St-Denis is strong. But guess what? The deindustrialization of Seine-St-Denis happened forty years ago. Since then, countless major urban regeneration and urban reconfiguration programs were developed, as explained by Sylvie Salles in her article “La reconversion de la Plaine Saint-Denis, le paysage à l’épreuve du territories”. Parks were created in former wastelands and brownfields; linear parks were designed along formal industrial transit roads, railroad tracks, and canals. Eco-districts of social housing were built, connected by hundred kilometers of tram tracks, new subway lines, and soft mobility systems (bikes and pedestrian paths). Better still, cultural amenities such as museums, libraries and theater companies were financed. Attractive heritage sites, such as Basilique de St-Denis—a very important one—or the industrial sites of the 19th century were restored with increased access for everybody. There are also two universities in Seine-St-Denis now.
Map of Paris urban riots of 2005. Only the Seine-St-Denis is concerned in the whole Paris metropolitan region. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Very little has been done to cope with the environmental bads, such as polluted soils or traffic noise. A lot of money has been invested to enhance or create environmental goods in Seine-St-Denis, yet nobody wants to live there. It remains a “bad area” and a stigmatizing place, whatever efforts have been made there. It is surely not a coincidence that almost all of the last years’ French urban riots took place in Seine-St-Denis.
The good, the bad, or the ugly: which should we prioritize?
Let’s play the devil’s advocate and consider what happens when urban policies focusing on environmental goods, green amenities, and nice ecosystem services, succeed in creating attractive areas. Is this situation positive for urban equity and urban justice? A first observation: urban injustice in the Paris metropolitan region increased significantly during the last twenty years. Curiously enough, this co-ocurred with the rising of sustainability policies. Was this some sort of accident? Probably not! In his article “Selective public policies: sustainability and neoliberal urban restructuring”, Vincent Béal points out that urban policies changed in the 1990s, as the sustainability issue became a top priority in a context of urban neoliberalization. Policies shifted with the development of a very aggressive urban marketing initiative designed to attract upper classes and the so-called “creative” classes to urban centers. This new orientation—linking together environmental and economic objectives—naturally induced spatial segregation and urban injustice, since poor people lost access to nice natural and living environments because they couldn’t afford to live in such locations anymore. Thus, green policies based on environmental goods may result in dramatic—if not intentional—negative side effects for urban justice.
The Seine-St-Denis today: Urban eco-regeneration — Les Grands Moulins de Pantin. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThe Seine-St-Denis today: Using the canals, greening and soft mobility nearly the Basilique St-Denis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
All things considered, there may be some good sense in coping first with the environmental “bads”, which, by the way, is not such a frequent attitude in real life. In the Paris Metropolitan Region, nearly 70 percent of the socially-deprived communes (the smallest local administrative division in France, governed by a mayor and a council) are exposed to cumulative nuisances, mainly north of Paris—essentially, Seine-St-Denis and Val-d’Oise. The west, the south,and Paris itself enjoy fewer nuisances and are inhabited by wealthy people. What are the determinants of such a distribution? Is it the attractiveness of a nice environment, or the avoidance of such nuisances? Put another way: is it the environmental “goods”, or the environmental “bads”? A report shows that in the Paris metropolitan region, nuisances and environmental degradation are the main reasons for people to move from the place they are living. Thus, the decision to move is strongly correlated to the desire to avoid environmental bads. This rejection is stronger than the attractiveness of environmental amenities (nature, silence, air and water quality, etc.). The question is: why? Why is the avoidance of real or imagined bad environmental conditions more decisive in explaining spatial distribution? Why does—in the case of the Paris region— the creation of amenities, green areas, or accessible ecosystem services have virtually no effect on attractiveness?
Creating environmental goods (Plage Bleue in Valenton). Photo: Wikimedia Commons
There are probably many reasons, and I hope that comments on this post will uncover a spectrum of answers. My answer is this: the environment cannot be reduced to those biophysical aspects that embody a proper functional integration of urban ecosystems. In France, so called “green spaces”, when coupled with social housing—as in Seine-St-Denis—are perceived by their inhabitants as buffer zones, created to separate them from the rest of the city. Conversely, the people living outside perceive them as dangerous areas frequented by rapists and dealers, as areas embodying fantasies about the social housing blocks. The result is that nobody ever uses these parks, even though they were originally designed to foster social and cultural intermingling, and to encourage social diversity. How ironic is that?
Maybe not so ironic—maybe perfectly in line with Parisian urban history. When Haussmann introduced greenery in the 19th century, one of his secondary objectives was to control the use of public space through a technical approach based on hygienism. The initiative’s main function was to bring more sunlight to the city and to better the air circulation. But, by doing so, the city’s life was marked by socio-spatial differentiation that was virtually segregative, embodied in a type of re-vegetation reduced to espaces verts. The very term espace vert (green space) instead of park or garden reveals its real nature: an indistinct area whose boundaries are decided in the abstract world of master plans. Nowadays, the same logic maintains itself: to separate, to distinguish, and to hide. The current regional master plan of the Paris metropolitan region proposes a quantitative objective of 10 m2 of public green area per inhabitant, as though it were sufficient to display a “green” label to become suddenly friendly and sustainable. The real issue is, does such a green label enable belonging and inclusion?
Indeed, one among the many challenges of urban sustainability should be developing the inclusiveness of the urban social fabric—a complex task—instead of adding parks and ecosystem services, which is relatively easy. Usually mayors, representatives, and other elected officials are not interested in improving what is already here, and they don’t like long-term commitments; their time horizon is usually the end of their term. There is no way to foster belonging and ownership in such a context.
Defining a good environment for green and just cities
What happens without dealing with the existing environmental bads (rail yard, gare de triage, and parking in Valenton, just behind the Plage Bleue). Photo: Wikimedia Commons
To design both a green and just city, it is crucial to know what a “good environment” is for the people and the communities living there, one in which the enhancement of environmental conditions improves living conditions and facilitates new lifestyles. A polluted environment can be a place where life is good. Just think about the price of a square meter in the very center of very noisy and very polluted Manhattan, Paris, or London. Conversely, an environment with clean air and clean water can be quite intolerable, as evidenced by windswept, segregated social-housing blocks settled in the middle of nowhere. This logic was reflected at the beginning of the TNOC podcast, which noted that urban justice is not only about equity, fairness and distribution—to affordable housing, for example—but also about choice and inclusion, which goes with ownership and participation in decision-making.
Finally, it is about the right of the inhabitants to be creative and to build a beautiful environment. I could not agree more. It follows, then, that both “green” and “just” policies should include among their deciders not only elected officials and companies, but also non-market institutions, local communities, and individuals able to form self-determined user associations, according to the idea of Elinor Ostrom’s work, who showed that user communities can manage common goods quite well.
An incinerator in the back of a park in St-Ouen. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Nobody is saying that it will be easy, but these principles are a necessary prerequisite for fostering collective appropriation of environmental policies by the inhabitants. Governing and managing a city by definition is a “wicked problem”: a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems (Rittel and Webber 1973). Such problems are made all the more difficult because they combine environmental action and social justice. As Bruno Latour and Michel Callon beautifully put it in their seminal article, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan”:
“There is no overall architect to guide it, and no design, however unreflected. Each town hall and each promoter, each king and each visionary claim to possess the overall plan and to understand the meaning of the story… Here and there one retires within oneself accepting the fate decided by others. Or else, one agrees to define oneself as an individual actor who will alter nothing more than the partitions in the apartment or the wallpaper in the bedroom. At other times actors who had always defined themselves and had always been defined as microactors ally themselves together around a threatened district, march to the town hall and enroll dissident architects. By their action they manage to have a radial road diverted or a tower that a macro-actor had built pulled down…”
Yes, fostering co-construction, inclusiveness, and ownership in urban policies is no picnic. But curiously, it usually works better when nobody tries to frame the procedure. It works better when nobody “looks”—when no public or private actor explains from the beginning to the population what the procedure should be, how people should act, and what should be their objectives. In my next post, I will present the case of a squatted wasteland in a poor place near social housing blocks—an environmental “bad”— that turned into a very popular park, combining leisure amenities and urban agriculture. In this case, an environmental bad was successfully converted into an environmental good precisely because no local authority or private company interfered. The inhabitants created this place by themselves, seeking their own objectives. In the end, the local authorities had no choice but to formalize what the community had already built.
Mancebo F., 2015, “Combining Sustainability and Social Justice in the Paris Metropolitan Region”, Sustainability in the Global City: Myth and Practice, Gary McDonogh G., Cindy Isenhour C., Checker M. eds, Series New Directions in Sustainability, Cambridge University Press.
“Stronger than the storm.” I can’t get this phrase out of my head, nearly one week into my sabbatical move to Venice, Italy. It so happens that we arrived on a week when the moon and the winds lined up to create acqua alta (high water) for six days in a row.
On day 1, I thought I could wait it out inside. On day 2, I got a little antsy, and bought 7 euro galoshes to pull over my brand new Doc Martins. On day 3, after springing a devastating leak in my right galosh while in shin deep water, I gave up and set out to buy stivali (boots). I was shocked to find a perfect pair for only 12 euros (about 15 dollars) at the hardware store on my corner, and that’s when it hit me: this is resilience, already in action, and right in your face. Thanks to their history, and their coastal position next to a rising sea, Venetians are used to storms, and know how work around them.
But are we all destined to need to make these kinds of changes?
Photo: Franco Montalto
Contemporary Venetian culture is heavily impacted by climate change. Two hours prior to every high water event, sirens followed by a sequence of eerie whistles sound throughout the city. The siren gets your attention, and the subsequent number of whistles tells you what the predicted high tide level will be. Each whistle indicates another 10 cm over 100 cm, the tidal elevation corresponding to 5 percent of the city under water. When you hear three whistles, as we did several times this week, 75 percent of the city is under water. When that happens, the city government deploys kilometers of passarelle (elevated wooden walkways) in the portions of the city with the deepest inundation. Shop owners place small barriers in front of every door, while continuing to hawk their wares. Sump pumps (that you never see) begin discharging water (of different colors) into the alleys through small plastic tubes, which you suddenly realize are all around you. And everyone, including the most dapper among them, sports boots. The young college girls wear black boots; the rugged delivery men where hip waders; the bridges and tunnels crowd, coming into Venice for work, wear garbage bags over their shoes. The Southeast Asian immigrants, who at other times of the year sell pocket lasers and fake Gucci bags, start selling boots and fluorescent galashes to the tourists in Piazza San Marco. But a basic pair of shin-high boots, like mine, gets you just about everywhere.
Photo: Franco Montalto
Walking through the flooded streets is another interesting experience. Everyone slows down—tremendously. It wasn’t initially clear to me why this was happening. Without cars, there’s always a lot of ground to cover in this city, and the average Venetian typically moves at a healthy gait. Feeling confident in my new stivali, I continued to move at this pace only to find out within a few minutes that I was suffering death by a thousand drops. It seems that each fast step kicks a few drops into the top of your boot. You don’t feel those individual drops, but keep it up and in a few minutes, your socks are soaked. I slowed down, realizing that alas, pazienza, everyone around me was used to this. When there’s acqua alta, it’s OK to be late, or to change the plan, or to cancel appointments. (Though, ironically, not for first graders. My daughter’s new teacher was careful to tell me that acqua alta is not an excuse to be late for school.) Venetians have adapted to contemporary acqua alta the way they adapted to life in a foggy lagoon over a thousand years ago. Life goes on despite it.
This said, the flooding is, of course, unpleasant. Though life continues, acqua alta is the subject of continuous conversation. At the supermarket, the woman in front of me on line at the cashier complains that the water level this morning was higher than was predicted by the sirens. The locals get extremely frustrated with tourists who block their way by stopping to take photos on the narrow passarelle. An elderly couple I encountered couldn’t get to the hospital to talk to their doctor because the vaporetto (boat bus) couldn’t fit under the Ponte dei Tre Archi due to the high water. In short, though Venetians have adapted, the situation is not welcome, and creates some very formidable challenges. Here is a city that is “stronger than the storm,” but definitely not voluntarily, and certainly not happily.
Photo: Franco Montalto
As I plod through the beautiful yet flooded streets, staring at the water ponded several inches on the marble tiles of cafés with delicious pastries in glass windows mere inches above the floor, I ask myself why our global culture can’t look at this example and make the changes necessary to avoid other coastal cities having to face the same fate. Sure, the vulnerable can try to adapt, and those with access to significant resources may, like the Venetians, achieve some level of resilience. But at what cost, and what fate faces those countries, cities, and peoples who can’t afford to build massive storm surge barriers, deploy kilometers of walkways, enforce new construction standards, or elevate critical infrastructure nodes? Why has the push for mitigation and the global cultural change necessary to significantly reduce emissions fallen so far behind the call for adaptation to an “unavoidable” future?
Yes, there is momentum in our emissions, and even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gasses today, a certain amount of change would still occur. And yes, it is politically naïve to think that there is any chance that significant cutbacks in global emissions will occur in a short time frame. For these reasons, we need to find ways to adapt to changes that are, in most cases, involuntarily imposed on us by an anthropogenically modified climate system (and especially in cities housing particularly vulnerable and economically challenged populations). But when will we pool our global resources and knowledge to develop true comprehensive global solutions to these problems?
Photo: Franco Montalto
There are some reasons to be cautiously optimistic. For example, I came across a recent New York Timesarticle titled “Leaders in Davos Urge Quick Action to Alter the Effects of Climate Change,” and found it intriguing that participants of the World Economic Forum, for years the targets of anti-globalization protests for their perceived advocacy of trade liberalization and corporate profit over environmental conservation, worker rights, social justice, and other contemporary sustainability goals, have now “redoubled their calls to combat climate change.” And here in Italy, the Pope is known to be preparing an encyclical on ecology that he will deliver in the months leading up to the December 2015 United Nations conference on climate change in Paris. The expectation is that he will make the case that disagreements regarding the specific causes of climate change do not preclude the need for action. The pontiff is also expected to say that care for all creation, and healthy global ecology are the basis for global development and world peace, as recently reported in the National Catholic Reporter.
Photo: Franco Montalto
But while these and other statements from global economic and religious leaders may be encouraging, progress in the US, a country that a recent study by Concordia University suggests is responsible for 20 percent of the global warming observed through 2005, is dismally slow. Democrats seek action but are blocked by a powerful Republican lobby that doesn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, or isn’t willing to consider legislation designed to reduce emissions significantly. In a hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, expressed concern that the recent focus of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on earth science (including climate science) is taking resources away from space exploration, what he considers to be its core mission. In January, the current leading Republican contender, Gov. Scott Walker, threatened to bring a lawsuit against the federal government if it passes legislation limiting carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. And Florida, home to Jeb Bush, another Republican presidential contender, restricted its Department of Environmental Protection employees from using the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in official correspondence.
As the drops seep deeper into my boots, I get frustrated at the pace of our collective inaction on climate change. We can talk about how to live in unpleasant situations, or we can attempt to reduce the likelihood of making our lives unpleasant. Is there not a great deal of hubris in thinking that we mortals can become stronger than nature? As I reach home to my children’s happy voices, I wonder if we will learn that lesson early enough to keep their feet dry.
A review of Nature in Towns and Cities, by David Goode. 2014. William Collins, New Naturalist Library. ISBN: 9780007242405. ISBN 10: 0007242409. 417 pages.
The newest title in The New Naturalist Library, Nature in Towns and Cities by Dr. David Goode, is trueto the series’ dual goals of “recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists” and “maintaining a high standard of accuracy in presenting the results of modern research.” Goode’s scientific background, deep personal interest in urban nature, and long-term involvement in, and advocacy for, Britain’s urban nature movement has created an entertaining and intellectually stimulating read for professional urban ecologists, planners and practitioners, amateur naturalists, and grass-root activists. While the book is specific to Britain, its descriptions of the ecological principles and the manner in which the urban conservation movement has grown over the past three decades, in Britain and beyond, are universally relevant.
Goode, with more than forty years’ experience as ecological advisor to local and regional governments, director of the London Ecology Unit, and Head of Environment at the Greater London Authority, is eminently qualified to document the urban conservation movement, including his own role as exponent, in Britain and abroad. But, beyond the institutional, political, and social factors that have contributed to changing attitudes toward urban nature, what makes Nature in Towns and Cities a practical and enjoyable read is Goode’s keen knowledge of natural history dating from the time he became a curious naturalist at the age of fourteen. Nature in Towns and Cities isn’t Goode’s first book on urban nature. His Wild in London inspired a generation of urban nature enthusiasts in the mid-1980s.
The Nature of Towns and Cities
Goode opens with “Nature In A Small City”, a description of British habitats through a tour of his home town of Bath, where plants and animals inhabit “deep basements and small courtyards”, sunbaked walls where leaking drainpipes and holes in masonry provide microclimates for lichens, ferns, and spiders; Peregrine falcons utilize a church steeple; and ancient graveyards, “with their rich humus and ample nutrients, support a rich array of native flora.” He offers the reader colorful and intimate illustrations whereby even in a built-up small town, a vast array of habitats host species that belong to native sites that have been engulfed by urban development and other species that are utterly unique to the urban scene where wildlife and plants live “cheek by jowl” with people. Bath, as a template city, represents a microcosm that is representative of similar towns and cities across Britain where densely built up cities, surrounded by suburbia, offer a patchwork of green spaces, wetlands, streams, rivers, and green corridors. All of these special habitats yield an amazing amount of biodiversity from city centers to the surrounding rural landscape.
Organization of the text
Two themes run throughout the book: scientifically sound descriptions of urban natural history through an ecological lens and a detailed recapitulation of the growth of the urban nature conservation movement. In “Urban Habitats” Goode methodically describes the ecology of “encapsulated countryside” woodlands, meadows, marshes, heathland and hillsides that have been subsumed and form a remnant of the surrounding rural landscape within the urban matrix. He describes the biota, both native and non-native, that has colonized canals, cemeteries, abandoned and active railways, post-industrial landscapes, “new” created wetlands, and concludes with more prosaic urban parks, squares and cemeteries. Goode provides examples of the influence of socio-economic and political factors in shaping urban habitats. For instance, he describes the manner in which “encapsulated woodlands” were transformed following the industrial revolution and in response to changes in transportation, particularly the national railroad network, and abandonment of traditional coppicing following adoption of coal for residential heating.
Regent’s Canal, London. Photo: Mike Houck
“Colonisers And Specialists” focuses on: birds new to the urban scene—“a motley crew” of opportunists; badgers and foxes; and pigeons, sparrows and swifts. A passion for urban nature, citizen science, keen natural history observation, and detective work are all illustrated in descriptions of a changing lifestyle of urban badgers since they attained protected status in 1973. What started as a colony of badgers concentrated in a small graveyard in Bath is now a badger population occupying more than 400 cities and towns across Britain, taking advantage of myriad habitats from wooded banks and gardens to golf courses. Anyone engaged in urban canid-human interactions will recognize challenges of managing the explosive colonization of urban foxes throughout Britain. The use of “swift towers”, “swift-bricks”, and nesting “boxes” in new building construction or retrofit projects will also resonate with those who have worked to introduce or reintroduce swifts into the urban environment.
The cover of a book about Britain’s urban foxes.
I found “Post-Industrial Ecology” to be especially interesting and relevant given the modern rush to repurpose brownfield sites for new industrial development. Goode makes a strong case for investigating the ecological value of post-industrial sites, no matter how contaminated, before proceeding to industrial reuse. Goode describes how Buglife, one of the myriad NGOs at work protecting brownfield sites for their unique ecological values, created a best practices guide for planners and developers that describes the importance of invertebrate species and the benefits of ecological landscaping to protect them. He also provides several examples where endangered or threatened species, with their narrow ecological requirements, have colonized highly alkaline or acidic sites in a “Tour of Britain’s Wastelands.” Goode describes the importance of gravel pits, disused wharves, canals, and railways for providing a patchwork of plant communities that offer a range of successional patterns within the urban matrix. He argues that urban “wastelands” are the “essence of urban ecology.”
Urban nature conservation
“Urban Nature Conservation” traces the changing philosophy regarding the role of conservation in the urban context, a shift he persuasively declares as “one of the most important ecological movements in the past half-century.” He follows the urban conservation movement from establishment of the Nature Conservancy in 1949—to protect the “gems of British wildlife” when little or no attention was accorded urban nature—to the eventual recognitions of the value of nature to humans and their longing for connection to nature where they live, work and play. Eventually, these shifts led to an explosion of interest in urban nature conservation. Goode recounts the origins of local natural history societies that sprang up during the Victorian era in cities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol.
In the post war era many of these volunteer, amateur societies turned their attention to protecting urban natural areas. In the 1970s professional urban planners and landscape designers turned their collective attention to urban areas. Goode gives a great deal of credit for the surge of interest in urban nature to Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside, and contributions from the U. S. in the form of John Kieran’s Natural History of New York City (1959). But it was The Endless Village, a publication of the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), that Goode argues “changed the rules overnight” by dispelling the myth that cities represented “ecological deserts.”
The cover of The Unofficial Countryside.
The 1980s: time for action
Anyone who has worked on urban nature conservation will relate to the assertion that, in the 1980s, urban conservation went viral across Britain with local conservation agendas leading the way. Goode uses a fight over a scrap of disused railroad property, the Gunnersby Triangle, to illustrate the rise of “Friends” organizations dedicated to the protection of small, locally important nature sites. A site of little ecological value in the traditional sense, the Triangle nonetheless became a cause célèbre due to its importance to the local population. Today it’s one of the London Wildlife Trust’s most important urban preserves. The 1980s saw an explosive growth of urban conservation groups and the integration of urban nature into formal urban planning schemes across Britain, a pattern repeated in the United States.
Urban planning
In “Urban Planning” Goode describes his own work as London’s first ecologist for the Greater London Council which was created in 1982. Goode and his ecological team were tasked with three primary functions: developing policies for ecological and nature conservation for London and the surrounding boroughs; establishing an ecological database for London; and providing ecological input and advice on issues related to land use planning and management of publicly-owned land. The team published a number of influential “nature conservation guides” for London and its surrounding boroughs which serve as excellent planning templates to this day.
The cover of A Nature Conservation Strategy for London.
Creating new habitats and planning for nature
Going above and beyond their mandate, Goode and his colleagues also participated in the development of ecology parks and nature centers. A premier example was the creation of Camley Street Natural Park which demonstrated the feasibility of creating a new wetland park out of what had been a derelict coal tip adjacent to the Regent’s Canal, literally a stones throw away from King’s Cross tube station. Not only did the creation of Camley Street demonstrate that new habitats, in this case a wetland, could be created amidst the most urbanized of urban environments but it also showed how a bit of green could be provided for children occupying nearby low-income housing. Camley’s success sparked urban revitalization projects across Britain and was the inspiration for similar efforts in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere in the United States.
The entrance to Camley Street Natural Park. Photo: Mike Houck
Nature in Towns and Cities includes an overview of the many international conferences, publications, and key innovators who succeeded in bringing the urban conservation movement into the mainstream. Goode also describes the evolution of London’s Nature Conservation Strategy, which, for the first time, introduced nature conservation as part of land use planning for London. The process the team of ecologists employed to inventory almost 2,000 sites not only painted a comprehensive picture of the city’s ecology but provided a template of a rigorous science-based approach to documenting the ecologically significant landscapes that is as relevant today as when they undertook the process in 1982.
One of the London Ecology Unit’s most important contributions to urban nature conservation was the development of a three-tiered hierarchy of ecological sites: London-wide; Borough-wide; and Local. Their work identified over 140 “Sites of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation” (London-wide). Surveys were also performed for 31 of the 33 London boroughs that resulted in the establishment of 1,300 “Sites of Borough or Local Importance” that together with sites of Metropolitan-wide significance represented almost 20 percent of the London area’s land base. All of this information has been described in thirty-one Ecology Handbooks published between 1985 and 2000, which constitute partial basis London’s biodiversity strategy today.
Access to nature, Biodiversity Action Plans, green infrastructure, ecosystem services, and new ecological landscapes
A conundrum for cities across the world is how much urban nature and greenspace is enough? What, in Tim Beatley’s Biophhilic Cities parlance is the “minimum daily requirement of nature?” Do we assess access to nature in hectares per capita, in quality of habitat, or rarity of habitat? One approach Goode describes is a national accessibility to nature standard developed by Natural England, which recommends at least two hectares in size within a five minute walk from home and at least one hectare of a site with the quality of a Local Nature Reserve per 1,000 population. He then describes London’s “Areas of Deficiency in Access to Nature”, which planners are using to identify where ecologically important sites can be improved, where points of accessibility can be expanded, or where new sites need to be created.
The London Wetland Centre. Photo: Mike Houck
The final chapters cover a host of emerging concepts in urban ecology including valuing nature’s ecosystem services and the creation of large new urban wetlands such London’s Wetland Centre which attracted 135 species of birds in its first year after construction. Nature in Towns and Cities ends with a description of the newest effort to introduce greenspaces into city centers through the creation of green roofs.
Whether you share The Guardian’s assertion that Nature in Towns and Cities is “probably the finest work on urban ecology ever written” (December 6, 2014), there is absolutely no doubt you will agree that it’s an essential addition to any serious urban naturalist’s library and an essential and inspirational guide to planning for urban nature in your own city, town or region.
A green wall in London. Photo: Mike Houck
***
Rating Nature in Towns and Cities: I highly recommend the book to the lay audience, urban planners, park planners, urban conservation advocates, and natural resource managers. I give Nature in Towns and Cities a five (flawless and fantastic) in The Nature of Cities parlance, even though some might find the Britain-centric nature of the book to be a slight disadvantage.
The book is full of high quality color photographs that illustrate the text. There are also excellent graphs, charts, and diagrams that accompany the quantitative oriented text. It’s hard to imagine what Goode might have left out, given its comprehensive nature. Even though these are evolving concepts he covers the ecological importance of green roofs, green infrastructure and the concept of ecosystem services. His references to important people and publications in the urban conservation movement provide seasoned veterans with inspiring reading and new-combers with motivating material to urge them into action in their own cities or towns.
Is neighborhood planning worth doing? We argued in our last blog entry (Part 1 of this series) that neighborhood planning has the potential to be transformative in improving community resilience, but that it also has a dark side. It can be divisive both spatially—by setting clear geographic ‘limits’ that signal exclusion or exclusivity—and socially, by putting local interests ahead of broad concerns such as urban connectedness and complexity. In this follow-up blog, we propose that neighborhood planning is worth doing if it integrates four key components of ‘nested’ neighborhood planning that link neighborhood-scale planning to the work of ensuring better outcomes for the city as a whole: (1) social innovation, (2) community-development practice integrated with theory, often simply termed ‘praxis’, (3) neighborhoods without borders, and (4) a vision of ecological democracy.
These four components are based on our practical experience with neighborhood planning and our examination of academic and professional literature on planning and community development. We speak normatively here, in terms of what ought to be done. We outline a multi-scalar approach that links dimensions of thinking, planning, and building which are often disparate: integrating scales from the neighborhood to the city to the city-region, integrating action across domains of civil society and the state, and integrating value systems of urban ecology and participatory democracy. In our next and final blog entry of this series, we will present a Montréal case study, and examine whether nested neighborhood planning can offer building blocks for better cities in a wide range of geographic, political, and cultural contexts, if all three types of integration are present.
Neighborhood planning component 1. Social innovation
Social innovation is both a new label for old practices and a significant new notion. As a concept, it has evolved in two important ways: (i) to make the connections between tangible ‘bottom-up’ actions where people take their own initiatives to effect change and much-needed transformations in governance; and (ii) to provide meaning that is both usefully ideological and critically robust, so that it can play an active role in debates of politics and social science (Nussbaumer and Moulaert, 2007: 73-78; in Moulaert et al., 2010: 7). How can we understand the dynamics of social innovation at the neighborhood level? Useful frameworks are found in a collection edited by Moulaert et al. (2010) titled Can Neighbourhoods Save the City? Community development and social innovation, in which contributions from various authors uncover the conditions and prerequisites for making neighborhood-scale initiatives pertinent at the city scale and beyond. The editors contend that ‘socially innovative neighbourhood initiatives’ share three objectives:
to satisfy human needs which are unmet by the state and markets;
to provide access rights which enhance human capabilities and are empowering to people and social processes; and
to change social relations and power structures that lead to more inclusive governance.
In their case studies from 10 European cities, the authors show how neighborhoods can be pivotal sites for driving social innovation, which typically happens through civil-society organizations (CSOs) working not only within local neighborhoods, but also working to connect them with the broader urban context, building bridges to the political realm. A vital success factor in the cases was a capacity and perspective of glocalism, or integration of spatial scales from neighborhood to city to global. A glocal perspective reminds us that ‘localist’ initiatives hold local culture and community interests as exclusive or predominant forces for determining development; this hinders the trans-local relationships, policies, and processes crucial for resilient and livable cities (Rohe, 2009; Moulaert et al., 2010).
City Mine(d) and its urban pop-up projects in Brussels, London, and Barcelona provide an example of ‘glocal’ action, as an international network of individuals and collectives involved with city and local action. Photo: citymined.org
In our own work, we have found another key reason that socially innovative organizations are poised to contribute to resilient and livable cities through neighborhood-based planning. We call this the expectations-motivation differential. This refers to a dichotomy: it is often in the (rational) interest of state institutions to keep the expectations of citizenry low, whereas progressive civil-society organizations seek to ‘raise the bar’ by inspiring people to have higher expectations for the collective work of city-building. In this perspective, the aim of planning is to inspire and educate people about possibilities for the city, and to explore the possibilities for learning and positive change at the local scale. When ordinary people feel empowered to plan for change in their own neighborhoods by critically assessing the current context, analyzing power dynamics and external forces, understanding that ‘a different city is possible’, and planning for a better future, it stands to reason that they will be more likely to take part in collective action for social change, thereby contributing to creating a more resilient and livable city.
Neighborhood planning component 2. The praxis of community development
The notion and praxis of ‘community development’ can be defined as thoughtfully designing, continually learning from, and creatively acting on processes of collective engagement associated with neighborhood planning. In other words, we need to strive for social learning by designing engagement processes that lead to knowledge creation, which can be translated into action that will feed the continued refinement of engagement processes.
Our notion of community-development praxis is influenced by work found in several bodies of literature including collaborative and participatory planning, community development, education and social science. We particularly value the idea of ‘phronesis’ or ‘practice-based wisdom’. To unravel what we mean here, we draw on Ledwith (2011a) to start with the notion of praxis as a synthesis of practice and theory, reflection and action, thinking and doing; we can then speak of critical praxis, which refers to the collective endeavor of making sense of the world and our own actions in order to transform it. Through praxis people gain critical awareness of their own condition and collectively work to shift balances in relationships of power in order to work toward social justice, empowerment, and liberation.
Paul Piccone calls praxis “that creative activity which reconstitutes the past in order to forge the political tools in the present to bring about a qualitatively different future” (1976: 493); similarly, Innes and Booher (2010: 89) suggest that
“… [e]ffective collaboration depends on praxis. That is, it depends on extended practical experience deeply informed by theorizing and reflection. Those who engage in collaboration build their capacity and intuition about how to proceed, while at the same time building theory about when and how collaboration can work. Praxis is practice interwoven with theory and theory informed by experience in the spirit of pragmatism.”
Margaret Ledwith (2011b) describes community development praxis as a ‘contested space’ between top-down and bottom-up approaches in which state and civil society participants continually negotiate their ways of working together and challenging one another. Drawing on Flyvbjerg (2001), she has argued that praxis ought to intermingle with phronesis, an approach to social science that emphasizes practical knowledge and practical ethics, which are based on context-dependent, pragmatic action and practical value-rationality (Ledwith, 2011a). Thus, the praxis of community development is unabashedly value-laden. Its aim is collective action for social change, and it is principled on social justice and a sustainable world, a critical analysis of power, and popular education for participatory democracy (Ledwith, 2011b; Ledwith and Springett, 2010).
Playscapes are ‘natural playgrounds’ designed by kids and landscape architects at Groundwork UK. They provide great neighborhood spaces for creative urban explorations. Photo: Groundwork UK Playscape project
If neighborhood planning processes are to be transformative in their capacity to contribute to more resilient and livable cities, they must be based on a strong ethos of community development (comprising both physical transformations and the qualitative development of individuals). If community development is to be carried out effectively, sustainably, and in a transformative way, the associated processes of local governance must be participatory and collaborative, building improve neighborhood capacity to manage change over time. This means that neighborhood planning processes must enable community members to mobilize their existing skills, reframe problems, work cooperatively, and use community assets in new ways. Principles of self-help, self-organization, and participation can guide flexible processes of revisiting neighborhood plans over time in order to identify concerns, continue dialogue, explore alternatives, reconsider priorities, and take effective action.
Neighborhood planning component 3: Neighborhoods without borders
A neighborhood plan typically defines an urban district and its boundaries (which might be natural or built elements, such as rivers, steep slopes, railroad tracks and/or large parks). Often the ‘official’ limits for planning follow some kind of public right-of-way, such as streets, roads, and highways. Municipal boundaries often run down the middle of rights-of-way, thus dividing these public spaces into separate jurisdictions. The logic here is not merely convenience or efficiency; it has long been presumed that clear neighborhood edges are needed in order to make neighborhoods ‘legible’ and to provide distinct, easily-recognized character (see e.g. Banerjee and Baer, 1984; Lynch, 1981; Perry, 2007 [1929]).
Our proposition of ‘neighborhoods without borders’ challenges the conventional wisdom of neighborhood planning in North America—that is, the usual prescription that neighborhoods be clearly demarcated by physical edges (usually arterial roads), derived from Clarence Perry’s ‘neighborhood unit’ as discussed by Banerjee and Baer (1984), Greenberg (1994), and Keating and Krumholz (2000). Instead, we argue that neighborhoods should be defined to encompass not only a range of activities, including housing, businesses, and community services, but also the public spaces of arterial and commercial streets often relegated to the outside margins. Neighborhoods defined as overlapping or nested configurations prevent the ‘spaces in between’ prone to becoming zones of social and spatial marginality. This situation is often exacerbated by superhuman-scaled arterial roads that can threaten the safety of residents and urban quality of local neighborhoods, contributing to health problems through pollution and accidents while often reducing opportunities for better integration of nature and biodiversity in dense urban environments.
The conventional 20th-century ‘superblock’ configuration should give way to a more integrated pattern of neighborhoods without boundaries. Credit: Nik Luka
Some argue that the spaces ‘separating’ neighborhoods should be a different category of space unto itself devoted to serving larger city functions. The logic could be seen as that of the ‘city efficient’ of the early 20th century, where activity areas were separated from transportation zones containing high-capacity roadways (see e.g. Van Nus, 1979). We instead argue that these ‘in-between zones’ should be defined as part of neighborhoods, enabling stakeholders to challenge the power structures that govern these spaces based on an understanding of how they are integral to creating better neighborhoods and cities. In a city of neighborhoods characterized by resilience, livability, and people-centered urban design, the whole cannot be greater than the sum of its parts. Cities must be seen holistically as containing overlapping and nested neighborhoods. Those parts should include a range of uses and street types; they cannot be an expression of formally or informally ‘gated’ enclaves—the solipsistic ‘burbclaves’ chillingly described by Neal Stephenson in his dystopic 1992 novel Snow Crash.
Good neighborhood plans should strengthen the public realm of neighborhoods. These shared spaces tend to garner attention, enthusiasm, and collective action, and we cannot forget that the largest share of public space in cities is occupied by streets. It could be argued that neighborhood streets represent the greatest opportunity for transformation in policy and practice toward building better cities. By rethinking our streets and the wide set of externalities that result from their construction, configurations, and use, we can reimagine how these spaces can provide all sorts of beneficial functions: more space for people walking and bicycling; vegetation and other forms of biomass, including urban agriculture and biodiversity corridors; playgrounds and the urban ‘living rooms’ seen in great cities large and small around the world (for examples, see Beatley, 2011; Gehl, 2010; Newman and Jennings, 2008; Register, 2006; Whyte, 1980).
Streets in Letchworth Garden City have extra wide sidewalks and shared space for community events. Photo: Jayne Engle
This prescriptive component is about rethinking how public spaces—specifically streets—in cities are used in an attempt to reverse over time the tendency to carve up cities with highways and instead to think of how these spaces can better integrate neighborhoods to redefine routes in cities so that they can better serve not only the needs of people walking, cycling, and using mass transit, but also as routes that can better facilitate increased nature and biodiversity.
It is important to clarify what we are not arguing. We do not contend that cities ought not to have clear edges. Clear boundaries around cities can be vital to contain urban sprawl and to provide good access to nature and biodiversity. We do not argue that resilient and livable cities must be based on specific templates for neighborhood design. Rather, we are asserting that the neighborhood is an appropriate scale to effectively plan for better cities, particularly in already-built contexts.
There is far more to resilient and livable cities than physical attributes. If there is no mechanism for the democratic engagement of citizens at the neighborhood scale to create better cities, no combination of good policies and planning will make a difference. Setting a vision for a better city from a neighborhood perspective is critical to bringing people together to organize collective action that will bring about social change. Neighborhood plans should contain a practical utopian vision for the neighborhood within the larger city, which is translated into medium-term policies and programs but also actions that can be taken on a short-term timeframe.
A holistic vision for a resilient and livable city is one of integral neighborhoods within an ecological democracy. By integral neighborhoods we mean what Richard Register and Paul Downton call ‘urban fractals’ or “portions of the city that embody the essential functions of the whole city on a smaller scale” (Register 2006: 128). Integral neighborhoods contain a mix of land uses to provide for housing and jobs, shops, and small manufacturing facilities. Key attributes include compact urban form, socio-economic diversity, organic agriculture, rooftop uses, and pedestrian-oriented streets. The natural and neighborhood environments relate synergistically, and biophysical characteristics, such as sun and wind conditions, play central roles in architectural and urban design and contribute to energy conservation. Compact design and mixed land uses provide for access by proximity, meaning that safe, affordable housing is provided near employment and services in ways that minimize car dependency and energy use (Register, 2006; UNEP, 2012).
Rather than being a traffic sewer, a major street can act as a seam with stacked functions and a mix of activities suitable for the neighborhoods through which it passes. Credit: Nik Luka
Randolph Hester’s (2006) notion of ecological democracy is the joining of urban ecology with participatory democracy; in the specific endeavor of designing better neighborhood and city form, it is particularly useful for our discussion:
“Ecological democracy, then, is government by the people emphasizing direct, hands-on involvement. Actions are guided by understanding natural processes and social relationships within our locality and the larger environmental context. This causes us to creatively reassess individual needs, happiness, and long-term community goods in the places we inhabit. Ecological democracy can change the form that our cities take, creating a new urban ecology. In turn, the form of our cities, from the shape of regional watersheds to a bench at a post office, can help build ecological democracy.”
How is the neighborhood scale important to the lofty aspirations of ecological democracy? Hester (2006: 32) argues that this is the “domain of deliberative face-to-face ecological democracy.” It is through everyday experiences in the everyday environments of neighborhoods that social change occurs. However, given that the concept of (radical) ecological democracy may not be workable within the context of many countries, is it helpful to bring this vision into the dialogue of neighborhood planning processes?
We argue that it is precisely through participatory practices such as neighborhood planning for resilient and livable cities that we can raise expectations of the public and work to bring about social changes necessary to realize the kinds of neighborhoods for the cities we need. In his book Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright (2010) sets out a set of models for social transformation that are instructive for thinking about how we can achieve better cities. Depending on the wider political and institutional context of a place, strategies for transformation will vary. In most cases strategies can be seen as processes of change in which fairly small transformations contribute cumulatively to a qualitative shift in the logic and dynamics of larger social systems. In terms of neighborhood planning, these metamorphoses occur in what we have described above as the contested space of community development praxis between top-down and bottom-up. This is the space where civil society and the state meet—and cooperate (or not) to some degree, even if certain citizen stakeholders are sometimes completely excluded from official planning processes. Exactly how social transformation comes about is highly context-dependent.
Whatever the political, cultural, or institutional context, most people around the world live in some form of neighborhood. The variations are great in terms of what those neighborhoods look like, how they function, and whether they contribute to creating better cities. What is true for all neighborhoods is that they are fundamentally defined by (and for) people. When people decide to come together to work for change, great things can happen.
In our final blog entry (Part 3 of Neighborhood Planning for Resilient and Livable Cities), we will examine how a Montréal civil-society organization successfully undertook neighborhood planning and what can be learned from this experience for making better cities around the world.
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Nik Luka is a professor of urban design who specialises in transdisciplinary approaches to understanding urban form and cultural landscapes with a particular interest in the everyday interfaces of nature and culture as experienced by individuals.
This PAS Report, in line with the current principles of sustainability, discusses green infrastructure (GI) as the visible expression of natural and human ecosystem processes that work across scales and contexts to provide multiple benefits for people and their environments. Unlike other approaches that envision green infrastructure from the standpoint of social infrastructure (e.g., by building capacity in improved health, job opportunities, community cohesion, etc.), this report addresses it first within the matrix or context of hard infrastructure.
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