Now a century old, Anchorage has at various times during its short history proclaimed itself the “Air Crossroads of the World,” a “City of Lights” and a place of “Big Wild Life” (the latter for the community’s “perfect blend of urbanity and wilderness”). But I have long believed—and yes, opined in my writings—that Alaska’s urban center could easily be called the “City of Moose.” I’m not the only one to publicly express this view. Earlier this year, former state wildlife manager Rick Sinnott, now a contributor to the Alaska Dispatch News, went so far as to write a cover story for the ADN’s Sunday magazine playfully promoting the City of Moose idea.
The question of how to weave our urban lives with wild nature is one faced in different forms all around the world.
Not only do hundreds of moose inhabit the city’s landscape, most of the 300,000 or so people who live here appreciate the ungulates’ big, wild presence. Clear evidence of that was demonstrated in a study conducted in 2009 for the Alaska Department of Game by a company called Responsive Management.
Anchorage’s human residents share their city with hundreds of moose, who must negotiate assorted urban challenges. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and GameA moose dines on the fruit of an ornamental shrub in an Anchorage yard. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Among the findings: “While acknowledging that moose cause some problems, the large majority of Anchorage residents (87%) say that encounters with moose make life in Anchorage seem more interesting and special. A further indication of tolerance toward moose is that an overwhelming majority (94%) indicate that they have enjoyed watching moose in the Anchorage area in the past 2 years.”
Still, not everyone likes having moose around. Some folks are angered by the animals’ taste for ornamental plants and garden vegetables and would like their numbers thinned. Others, particularly parents with children, understandably worry about the dangers moose present. And a vocal minority argues that cities are for people, period, and moose shouldn’t be allowed here (nor should any other big, wild animals that can inflict injuries be tolerated, most notably bears, or so the argument goes).
A young moose takes up temporary residence in the yard of an Anchorage homeowner. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Inevitable conflicts between people and moose, some of which lead to injury or even death, show the challenges of living with wildlife—and, more generally, wild nature—in an urban community, even in a place where most residents feel a close connection to what might be called the “natural world” and where people place great value on outdoors activities.
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Most of the city’s human residents live in what’s called the “Anchorage Bowl,” a roughly triangular piece of lowland bounded on two sides by the waters of Cook Inlet and on the third by the Chugach Mountains. That bowl is also year-round home to an estimated 200 to 300 moose, with winter numbers tripling, to between 700 and 1,000 animals, when they’re driven out of neighboring hills by deepening snow and lured into the city by Anchorage’s relative abundance of winter food, much of it in the form of fruit-bearing ornamental trees and shrubs.
Though their density varies through the year, moose can be found throughout Anchorage in any season, even in the heavily commercialized downtown and midtown areas. In fact, I’d wager that for much of the year there’s no better locale in Alaska to see North America’s largest member of the deer family. Many that inhabit the city prefer the parks, greenbelts and wooded lots of west Anchorage, including the Turnagain area, where I have lived since 2006 after more than a dozen years on the city’s Hillside.
A cow moose nuzzles its newborn calf; cows are protective moms and will aggressively defend their young, especially in the days immediately following their birth. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and GameCinnamon colored, moose calves usually weigh 30 to 35 pounds when they’re born in late May or early June and will weigh 300 to 400 pounds by the fall. Photo: Doug Lindstrand
One cow moose, often accompanied by a calf or two, inhabits pockets of woods near Anchorage’s much-beloved Coastal Trail, where I regularly walk my dog. Occasionally a bull will amble down the street, munching as he goes. And it’s not rare, especially in winter, to find moose bedded down in either my yard or those of my neighbors.
I’ve always felt confident that I could track down an urban moose or two on short notice, if asked to show off the local wildlife by visiting family or friends. That confidence was put to the test when my mother’s two sisters visited us a few years after Mom moved to Alaska from the East Coast in 2002.
As their early summer visit wound down, the three sisters agreed they’d had a grand reunion. But neither of my aunts had seen much of the local wildlife. On something of a whim, my girlfriend and I took Mom and one of her sisters on a driving tour of West Anchorage in search of moose (the other sister had earlier headed to the hills east of town with her son, also to seek out moose).
About four-five minutes later, we spotted a cow and two yearlings, grazing among a small grove of birches, about 50 yards off the road that leads to Kincaid Park. We parked along the shoulder to watch the animals and within minutes, several other cars pulled over and a dozen murmuring people lined the road, many armed with binoculars, cameras and video recorders. Clearly we weren’t the only moose hunters out that night and I guessed evening expeditions like ours go on throughout the summer.
Former Alaska wildlife manager Jessy Coltrane watches a young moose that got “stuck” inside a fenced area and will need help finding its way out. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Pleased but not fully satisfied, we headed for a birch-spruce forest near Anchorage’s international airport. Leaving pavement for a dusty gravel road, we slowed to a crawl. Within a few minutes, a young bull appeared in a meadow behind some birch trees. Approaching to within 25 feet of our parked car, the yearling nonchalantly picked leaves from atop a willow. Later we spotted a mature cow browsing among the birches, likely the young bull’s mom. Engine off, we watched silently for several minutes. Both moose gorged on greens, unconcerned by our presence.
Nearly 10 pm, with the light dimming, we headed back. Still, we didn’t stop looking. About 5 minutes from home I noticed two shadowy forms beside heavily traveled Northern Lights Boulevard.
“More moose,” I shouted to the others. “And this time there’s a little one.”
Little indeed. A tiny, chestnut-colored calf the size of a small pony stood beside its mother in an open, grassy area. We pulled over to the shoulder and, our windows wide open, paused nearby the pair. Because cow moose are notoriously protective of their young, I watched for any signs of upset. But this one showed no evidence of being the least bit agitated. She lifted her head slightly and looked our way, then calmly resumed her grazing.
We lingered less than a minute. Then in deepening darkness we finished our tour, more impressed than ever by the city’s abundance of people-tolerant moose.
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For all the remarkable tolerance they show—especially given our species’ sometimes foolish, stubborn, or mean-spirited behaviors—even urban moose remain wild animals. If pushed too far, or surprised by a close encounter, they’ll sometimes respond aggressively, especially when already stressed by circumstances.
Cow moose with newborn calves can be every bit as dangerous as bears. In 2012, for example, one protective mom injured two young girls playing in their yard. Following that attack in Eagle River (a community that’s part of the Anchorage municipality, just north of the city), local wildlife manager Jessy Coltrane told a reporter that the girls “didn’t do anything wrong. It was one of those accidental chance encounters.” Coltrane (who has since taken a job outside Alaska) further explained that cows are especially protective of their young the first two weeks after their birth, when the newborns are most vulnerable. “After that, they run like the wind and mom isn’t as aggressive in defending them.”
A moose pauses while crossing an Anchorage street; moose-vehicle collisions are especially a concern in winter driving conditions. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and GameThough most Anchorage residents love sharing their city with moose, conflicts are inevitable, for example when moose and outdoors enthusiasts meet along trails. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Mature bulls, which can weigh 1,000 pounds or more, are nearly as dangerous during the autumn rut, when they stop eating and fight each other for mating rights. The battles can take a substantial toll, leading to exhaustion, injuries, and agitated animals, and what we humans might call short-tempered behavior. And then there’s winter, when extreme cold or deep-snow conditions may lead to stressed-out moose that sometimes attack a person with little or no apparent provocation.
Dogs, of course, add to the stress in all these circumstances, and lots of Anchorage residents have dogs that they take walking, running, biking, skiing, and mushing. Though Anchorage has leash laws, many people allow their dogs off leash when using local trails. Some of those loose dogs end up harassing moose—and in turn are attacked. Fish and Game has estimated that moose injure 50 to 100 dogs each year, with a small number killed. In my estimation, it could be a lot worse; from what I’ve observed, in most situations Anchorage moose show remarkable tolerance of dogs as well as people.
Injuries to people are uncommon. Coltrane, the former wildlife manager, once estimated that moose harm five to ten people each year in the Anchorage area. Rarely are those injuries life threatening. But in 1993 and 1995, Anchorage residents were stomped to death by agitated moose. One fatal wintertime attack was caught on video and made national news when a cow moose with calf, apparently feeling cornered, trampled a man trying to enter a university building. It turned out that the moose had earlier been bombarded by snowballs, no doubt increasing its agitation and defensiveness.
Recognizing the fact that close encounters between people and moose can lead to harm (not only in Anchorage, but anywhere people and moose are likely to cross paths), the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has created a “Living with Moose” advisory that includes a section on “Safety in Moose Country.”
Up close and personal: portrait of a moose standing beside the window of an Anchorage home. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Though local media tends to emphasize the dangers of moose attacks, the primary danger that Alces alces presents to people is in moose-vehicle collisions. Alaska, it turns out, has one of the world’s highest rates of moose-vehicle collisions per mile driven. The danger is greatest in winter, when visibility is poorest, streets are often slick with ice and snow, and large snowfalls can prompt moose to seek the relatively easy traveling conditions offered by plowed streets (or packed trails). Besides the winter peak, moose are most frequently hit by cars following the calving season.
In Anchorage alone, an average of 150 moose are annually hit by vehicles. Almost always, the moose suffer fatal injuries. People are rarely killed, though two people died this past October in Anchorage, when on consecutive days their vehicles (one a car, the other a motorcycle) struck moose. More commonly, vehicles are “totaled” and human occupants injured, sometimes seriously. To minimize the danger, the state presents a series of safe-driving tips.
Whether they result from stompings or vehicle collisions, moose-caused injuries almost inevitably lead to calls for moose hunts within the Anchorage Bowl. Limited hunts are already allowed on the military’s neighboring Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER) and in the Chugach Mountains, but so far there’s been no widespread support for an in-city hunt.
The most recent calls for moose hunts in Anchorage proper have been tied to increased recreational use at West Anchorage’s Kincaid Park, most notably single-track biking. A particularly strong push was made in late 2014, when resident Ira Edwards officially proposed a Kincaid moose hunt to the Alaska Board of Game.
In a response to Edwards’ proposal and a story about it by Rick Sinnott, I wrote a commentary that explained why a Kincaid moose hunt was an awful idea. Among my main points: rather than “troublemaker” moose, human actions—and especially bad judgment—have largely contributed to the upswing of moose-human conflicts at Kincaid, whether in organized events or other, informal recreational activities.
To further borrow from my commentary, I noted:
We are supposedly the more intelligent species, yet we sometimes behave in remarkably foolish, ignorant, or stubborn ways.
To repeat: the problem at Kincaid Park isn’t trouble-making moose. The animals should not be hunted for public-safety reasons, Edwards’ chief rationale for starting a hunt there. And if a persistently dangerous moose is identified, authorities should remove it, not sport hunters.
Sinnott’s story also makes it clear that there’s been no upsurge in moose at Kincaid. In fact, based on F&G studies, it’s more likely moose numbers have dropped since the mid-1990s.
Nor is there any evidence that moose have become more aggressive. Based on my own experiences—I visit Kincaid many times throughout the year—I’d wager Kincaid moose are as habituated to people as they’ve ever been, if not more so. . . .
Though neither the number nor behavior of moose has changed substantially, what has shifted at Kincaid is the human element. As Sinnott wrote, ‘Nowadays the park crawls with people most of the year.’
Actually, ‘crawls’ isn’t the best word choice. Many of the people who recreate at Kincaid are moving fast: runners, soccer players, skiers, and especially cyclists. The explosion of single-track trails and those who use them are the single biggest change that’s contributed to Kincaid’s so-called moose ‘problem.’
Those trails have greatly fragmented what remained of Kincaid’s already diminished woodlands. Thus it’s now harder for moose to avoid us humans and that in turn means more encounters. More conflicts.
Those who say we must have either a moose preserve or a moose hunt are creating a false choice. We can have both moose and human recreation. But people need to take more responsibility for their actions, they need to pay more attention to—and show tolerance for—our wildlife neighbors.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
To its credit, the Board of Game refused to take action on the proposal, arguing it had no authority to make such a decision.
Future attempts to open Anchorage to moose hunts seem inevitable, especially as increased recreational use and fragmented habitat heighten the likelihood of moose-human encounters and conflicts. The question—even in outdoors- and wildlife-loving Alaska—is whether we humans, again, supposedly the more intelligent species, are willing to make the smart decisions and compromises necessary to harmoniously share the landscape with moose—or bears, or other wild species.
On the surface, the challenges may appear larger when dealing with sometimes agitated—or traffic ignorant—thousand-pound animals, but the question of how to weave our urban lives with wild nature is one faced in different forms all around the world. Moose simply make the challenges more obvious.
Gates, fences, walls. There are stories behind them. There are people behind them. Do you see them?
We noticed an extraordinary thing walking across Asia and Europe since January 2016: the absence and presence of fences.
It may not be extraordinary in the “I climbed Everest” kind of way. But, for us, it’s extraordinary in the “I walk slow enough to see how fences change” kind of way.
Why do fences matter? Because they show us what matters to people, cities, cultures, and countries.
Our 16,000-kilometer-walk-home is many things, and one of the things it has become is a social anthropology experiment. Observing, wondering, and questioning how people behave, interact, share, speak, and move through their cities, suburbs, and rural spaces has fascinated us since we set out from Bangkok in January 2016.
For more in the Bangkok to Barcelona series, click here.
As we shifted from Asia, Central Asia, the Balkans, and Western Europe and moved closer to Catalonia, the presence of fences—and the height of fences—is noticably different.
In many parts Asia—Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh and India, come to mind—there are very few fences.
Houses are typically built right up on the edge of the road; the lucky ones, have gravel shoulders seperating the asphalt and their living rooms or shops. In quieter farm areas, men and women work their fields, take their animals out to pasture, sweep the dust from their front doors (only to have trucks and buses blow it back a few minutes later), or head to work or school on rickety bicycles or mopeds. In cities, the pulse is frantic, chaotic, throbbing, surprising. All of life—from the joyous wedding ceremonies to the vibrant fruit and vegetable markets to the distressing poverty that forces people crippled with disease to roll their leg-less trunks through filthy streets—happens right there on the street.
Fences are not for the common people. Instead, they are decoration for temples, and sometimes schools. They seem to be inviting people inside. “Come, step through the gate. Find refuge here, find comfort from the noise, grime and hardness of life outside the fence,” I could feel them whisper, as we crossed the threshold and sought shade from the increasing heat.
Further on in Central Asia, through Old Silk regions, the “stans” of former Soviet places, wide-open spaces separate towns, and wooden pickets or some makeshift wired fence are typically used to protect sheep, goats and cows from predators. Sometimes, potato gardens are what need protecting in the daytime hours, from those same sheep and goats penned in at nightfall.
People, squeezing by on sustanenace animal farming, do the best they can to make their main sitting room and, if they are able to expand, the room where visitors can sleep, look comfortable. Beautiful, big rugs with exotic curves woven into the tapesty are on the floor and walls, guarding the family from the deep freeze of harsh continental and mountain winters. These people are settled now, but their traditions still ring with the kindness of nomads. They pull their dogs back, and open their doors to strangers.
This fenceless life through big chunks of South and Central area creates a different human dynamic than the one we are accustomed to in the West.
Without physical boundries separating passerbys from their grandmothers and children, people are often curious about us and want to know how we found ourselves there, in front of their houses. Without a common language, they are brave enough to approach us and talk to us. They most generously invite us into their homes, and the ceremony of getting to know one another unfolds over tea, bread and whatever else they can share. We are guests, and many of them feel it is their responsibility and duty to offer hospitality, take care of us, and treat us with respect and kindness.
Some of this vibe started to shift as we moved through Turkey, Greece, and the more developed parts of the Balkans, namely Croatia and Slovenia. There, houses are a bit further off the streets, with well-manicured gardens with blooming roses and blossoming fruit and nut trees winding up the entranceways.
Short, thigh-or-waist-high decorative iron or wired metal fences line the perimeter of houses and gardens. Metal gates, with customized details or welded out geometric patterns, close around the driveway. There is something subtle about the fence placement. Instead of keeping people out, they appear to reflect pride that comes with hard work, something that says, “Look at us. We’re doing pretty well for ourselves. We worked hard, we sacrificed, we saved money, and now we have a nice house and a pretty garden.”
More importantly, people in these southeastern European regions, still feel within arm’s reach. Although there is inkling of “This is mine, not yours” emanting from the properties, people sitting on their porches don’t appear to feel threatened by us, the strangers strangely walking through their town, some faraway place from the usual tourist destinations. They look up from pruning their rose bushes or having coffee with friends, and tell us to join them, at least for a little while. Invitations to enter their homes become a less common occurence. We are invited passed the gate, beyond the rose bushes and up the front stairs. But, it stops at the doorway of the house, the more private and intimate parts of their lives.
By the time we reach Italy, neck-high fences become commonplace. They are marked with signs about the presenence of video surveillance cameras and security alarms; indeed, nearly every private and public building bears this warning. And, there are dogs in almost every yard of nearly town we cross—two, three, six of them, howling and growling at our unexpected and uninvited arrival. Signs on fences also bellow “Beware of the dogs”, and some also chide “Beware of the owners”, which we didn’t always read a a joke.
Northern Italy is obviously richer and far more industrialized than other places we have walked. People have—and feel that they have—more valuable things that need to be better watched over. They have fancier televisions, computers, cars, jewelery, lifestyles that could be temptations to “those less fortunate people” who would steal their way in the capitalistic loop spinninng the world around.
Despite the “We’ll call police” threat the fences invoke, Italians are social people. Along with the many congratulatory “bravissomos” handshakes extended to us along the Po River, came several unexpected and always-welcome, come-sit-down invitations to share life together in the form of a coffee, a meal (which usually included pasta, wine, and cheese) or a night inside out of the cold dampness.
These invitations surprised us. We thought the most kindness we would get would come in the form of a “bongiorno” or hello, maybe a smile and wave. We figured we would be too familiar to Italians, just another couple of backpackers wandering about admiring the countryside and enjoying good food in the bigger towns and cities. It was a Bosnian woman, who escaped war during her teenage years and now is a raising a family with her Italian husband, who provided deeper insight. “People here won’t invite you inside their homes because they have no idea what it feels like to be hungry,” she tellls us, leading the way into her home and into our hearts. “They have never done anything out of the comfort zone, and they have never experienced real thirst or hunger.”
What we expected to find in Europe caught up with us in France.
Coming down from Alps and cutting across the southern part of France, we start noticing the very high walls delinating gardens, homes, and lives. Some houses originally had shorter, waist-high concrete walls, just enough to mark property division. But, over the years, many people have extended those original walls with more concrete or bricks. They planted trees and thick bushes, which now have grown many meters high and are wide enough to prevent any view of the house or the kind of life lived behind the barricade. Newer houses have walls that often are more than two meters high (more than six feet), and the message seems clear to us: You stay on your side of the wall, and I will stay on my side.
This made France feel like one of the most unwelcoming places we have stepped through in our entire 3.5-year walk. It’s hard to shake off the sensation of intentional distancing they want to keep, not just from strangers and people they don’t know, but from each other, from their neighbors.
In France, we find ourselves confused. Having walked through two continents and passing hundreds, thousands of villages, towns and cities overflowing with people, we can understand the need for quiet, silent, and safe places to think, live, and rest. On the other hand, we are troubled by the growing sense of isolation, disconnect, and separateness we see dividing our global community, and are disillusioned by this widening wave of “protecting what’s mine.”
Gates, fences, walls. There are stories behind them. There are people behind them. Do you see them?
Nilofar* leans over to pour us more tea. All conversations in Central Asia seem to start with tea.
What role can cities play in promoting gender equality among the recently-graduated population?
She is asking questions about our trip, wondering why we are walking from Bangkok to Barcelona. She wants to know if we have always traveled, how we can afford the trip, if women can travel alone.
She wants to visit London and New York, and sure, Barcelona would be nice, too. Her eyes light up when she thinks about the idea of exploring the world and visiting cities she has seen on TV. But, first she has to finish university. She has a year to go.
Pamir girls, Tajik young women (this is a general comment, not specifically about these kids): Many girls and young women in Central Asia go to school, but their future after high school or university is uncertain. They feel the pressure to marry and have children at young ages. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
She’s studying to be a teacher, and from where we’re sitting, we think she would make a great addition to any school. She is compassionate, generous, enthusiastic, observant, smart, funny, beautiful, and a great conversationalist. She speaks her local Pamiri language and the dialect down the road. She also speaks Tajik, Russian, English and some Arabic and Iranian.
She’s the kind of young woman the world deserves. The Earth needs her talent and her smile, we think, enamored by her and the many other young women we are meeting and connecting with on this leg of our trip through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Then the shoe hits the floor. There’s a marriage proposal on the table, and Nilofar is considering it. The deal, though, isn’t a fairytale story. The man, a family friend, has already told her that when they get married she will have to stay home to raise the children they will inevitably have and she won’t be allowed to go out with her friends like she does now.
Nilofar’s father, like many of the fathers we met in the Pamir region, talks with pride when he speaks of his daughter. He worked many years in Russia, and sees Nilofar’s love of foreign languages as a gift that will serve her well at home or abroad. He doesn’t appear to be a father who would want his daughter to be in a loveless marriage or hidden in the background.
Still, Nilofar thinks she has to accept the proposal. Saying no would disappoint her family, she believes. She feels stuck, not sure where her place is in the world.
Milking the family’s cows is one of the daily task many young women perform in rural areas of Central Asia. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
This, like the conversation surrounding migrant workers, is a story that repeats itself in many of the towns and cities we walk through. Young women on the verge of joining the workforce—multilingual women entering the world with accounting, biology, business, chemistry, finance, and teaching degrees—will trade in their many years of study to be confined at home.
Young tajik woman. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
Losing our valuable natural resources
Somehow we have stepped into a delicate space. We are now tiptoeing around complex, far-reaching social justice issues that have broad implications for nations, cities, families, and individuals. I recognize that we are on shaky ground, and that we are bearing witness to the loss of one of the Earth’s most precious resources: a smart, empowered woman.
It’s the kind of conversation that raises more questions than answers, and it’s difficult for us to explain this to Nilofar.
How can we, as a global community, spend as much as we have on educating girls and create a value system justifying the investment as critically important to the entire world and then turn around and leave these women unsupported when they graduate from high school or university?
How can we close the gap between knowing that better educated girls lead to better educated women who take better care of their families and help improve their countries’ GDPs and the unspoken knowledge that we will lose natural and school-taught skills when women are limited to a stay-at-home family setting?
How do we provide equal access to education to boys and young men and empower them to stand with women and question the limited gender roles society imposes on everyone, male and female?
If parents have invested whatever money they could afford to educate their daughters beyond the state-mandated level, shouldn’t they expect and trust their daughters to think for themselves and choose a life path that shapes their own unique spot in the world?
Why do we waste our time fighting for girls’ education if we are not willing to make the longer-term commitment to see them grow in the workforce or support them as they seek out their place in the world?
I walk in the shadow of majestic mountains mulling over these puzzling questions. Answers, I think, don’t really exist in the realm of a multi-national approach. Organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the many others we can rattle off, are powerful forces in shaping and setting international educational and workplace milestones and finding ways to hold nations accountable to achieving those goals. But they lack the grassroots enthusiasm that individuals want to latch onto and need to rationalize personal choices that are influenced by familial, cultural, social, and religious values.
Because I love cities, and because I feel cities are the lifeline to communities unreachable at a nation-state level, I believe there is a place for issues like this on the city agenda. Cities are bridges between an individual’s day-to-day life and the lofty, idealistic international dialogs happening in big conference halls. Cities, along with the schools and businesses that operate in them, are the frontmen dealing with the loss of these valuable human resources.
We’re not sure what this picture means and we were not able to speak with them, but we like to think it’s a political statement opposing the shackling of young women to a man she is forced to marry. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
Creating space for the dialog
As we struggle through our conversation with Nilofar, trying to balance compassionate guidance while remaining sensitive to her situation, my mind wanders to city-level stories I have heard about and the models they are implementing to break gender barriers.
Closing the wage gaps is one such tactic. Three Minnesota cities—Rochester, Minneapolis, and St. Paul—rank highest on this list of cities, where women earn almost as much as men. Boston is taking the idea even further with its 100% Talent: The Boston Women’s Compact, a voluntary pledge that more than 50 companies in the city have signed to indicate their commitment to closing the gender wage gap in the workplace.
Wage gap issues, however, are much further down the line when filtering the conversation through a Central Asian film.
Here, young women first need to be able to understand that they have options, that they can choose which barriers to break, and which values they hold onto. Education has given them the fundamental groundwork to prepare them for this discussion. More is needed.
Nilofar is only one woman having an internal debate about her place in the world. We tried to help her get a little farther down her path. But, there are many, many more women like her. How will your city ensure that we don’t lose their voices and their minds?
*Her name has been changed to protect her identity. Some details are not unique to the woman identified here, but, rather, are representative of conversations we have had with several women in Central Asia.
Story notes: Cities face many challenges with competing solutions: climate change, economic inequality, lack of access to resources and opportunities, and social and political conflict. Can we plan and design for outcomes that serve nature, provide nature-based solutions to real urban problems, and support human rights? Toni L. Griffin (Director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City) and David Maddox (Founder and Editor of The Natures of Cities), have a conversation at the 2014 MAS Summit to initiate a year-long collaboration with the MAS Global Practitioner Network on creating green and just cities.
For The Nature of Cities it is the start of an international project with partners in cities around the world to discus the relationship of the green city to the just city, and moreover to craft actionable metrics for connecting green and open space to justice, equitability, and fairness. These metrics must incorporate concepts for access to open space, but access to minimum standards for types of and qualities of green and open space. This project is funded, in part, by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
Open space maps in New York City and Mumbai. Lower left a map of a greened canal in Mumbai. Credits: (upper left) New York City Department of Parks and Recreation; (upper right and lower left): P.K. Das
A review of “Epitomes,” an exhibition by Yumiko Ono, on view at Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei through 2 February 2020.
Not antagonistic of city versus nature, Ono’s drawings come across like peaceful meetings between two forces that we so often see as opposites. Here, city and nature create form together.
Situated a few blocks from Taipei’s central train station in an old school building, MOCA Taipei is currently hosting a large exhibition of catastrophic visions of past, present, and future. As large, loud, and exciting as the exhibition is, it is ultimately the most simple of works in the museum that wins the viewer’s eye and mind.
Tucked into a corner of the first floor of the MOCA building, away from the catastrophes represented in the main show, Yumiko Ono’s Epitomes offers us subtle, yet vital reflections on our urban structures, and the cultures and natures that form them.
Pencil drawings from Yumiko Ono’s “Cloud City” series at MOCA Taipei. Photo: CC BY/SA, Patrick M. Lydon
The central works of Ono’s exhibition are her Cloud City series. These simply presented works of pencil on tracing paper are unassuming at first glance, however in both their content and context, they stand out as some of the most deeply moving pieces in the museum.
Within Ono’s drawings, varied architectural elements from Taiwan are pieced together in pleasantly delirious sequence. From afar, they appear truly as a floating cloud cities, urban worlds suspended in space with no roots, cities as inverted caves, spires poking out top and bottom, stalactite, stalagmite.
The works come across like a marriage of Escher’s etchings and the words of Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
These Cloud Cities of Ono’s are not simply a hodgepodge of architectural forms. The matter of the buildings tells the tale of the environment. On close inspection, wall faces here reveal subtle natural motifs. These motifs seem to offer suggestions of Taiwan’s leaves, rivers, winds, mountains, and waters, coalescing to form the walls. Interestingly, the motifs Ono chooses seem to act not as murals on the walls, but as the walls themselves.
There is no solidity to these cities of Ono’s. Instead there are ever-changing cycles — patterns of nature, framed in the architectural styles and structures of humanity.
Detail view of pencil drawings from Yumiko Ono’s “Cloud City” series at MOCA Taipei. Photo: CC BY/SA, Patrick M. Lydon
Not antagonistic of city versus nature, Ono’s drawings come across like peaceful meetings between two forces that we so often see as opposites. Here, city and nature create form together.
Also on view in this exhibition are Ono’s Pan-City 10 porcelain sculptures, products of the artist’s experience living in Russia and the United States, among brutalist architecture.
Ono’s shiny, urbanesque objects give a softness and lightness to typical brutalist form, appearing something like blocks of white butter, stacked atop each other on a summer afternoon. Their weight is made cunningly visible by Ono, as the blocky sculptures seem to slope and cave inward. One might imagine these sculptures as representations of human logic, utilitarian apartment blocks and office buildings given form, and then melting into lumpy puddles of toilet-bowl-white sameness.
Porcelain sculpture from Yumiko Ono’s “Pan-City 10” series at MOCA Taipei. Photo: CC BY/SA, Patrick M. Lydon
The porcelain works—bleak, characterless visions of cities as structures of anthropocentricism—are powerful, yet here they seem purposefully outwitted here by the quietly incisive power of Ono’s simple pencil drawings.
In simplicity of material, the delicate drawings offer a vision of cities as a melding of human ingenuity with nature’s rhythms. Within each drawing, one can find the cycle of life and death as a city, floating in space, along with the clouds.
Detail view of pencil drawings from Yumiko Ono’s “Cloud City” series at MOCA Taipei. Photo: CC BY/SA, Patrick M. Lydon
The juxtaposition of the porcelain sculptures with the pencil drawings in the same space is a good thing. If one provides form and fluidity, the other gives character and context. If one offers subtle critique of the gross, the other offers subtle idolization of the sublime.
It reminds one of the strong Taoist influences here Taiwan, and of the saying by the ancient philosopher Chuang Tzu, that “One who wants to have right without wrong, order without disorder, does not understand the principles of nature … to refuse one is to refuse both.”
Ono reminds us here, not only that there is merit to both sides, but that to follow nature in a city means to accept both the hard and the soft, the solid and the flowing, the growing and the decaying, all in their turn.
As any truly resilient city knows, all forms have their roles.
While there is much talk about co-creation and the many opportunities it offers, knowledge about how to set-up and facilitate co-creation processes is limited. Given the novelty and experimental nature of co-creation, there is a need for global learning about when and how to do co-creation.
“Co-creation” has garnered much buzz as a promising enabler of greener and better cities for all. During a hands-on session (“Co-creating inclusive green cities: European examples and global learning opportunities”) at the Nature of Cities Summit in Paris (June 4-7, 2019) with co-creation experts and cities—co-organised by Connecting Nature partners Alice Reil (ICLEI Europe) and Katharina Hölscher (DRIFT)—local policymakers, scientists, practitioners and civil society representatives jointly learned about why and how to co-create nature-based interventions in cities. Co-creation was unanimously embraced as an opportunity for designing more innovative, inclusive and multifunctional nature-based interventions as well as boosting community capacities and empowerment. However, co-creation is no panacea, and different contexts pose different challenges, including cultural issues like criminality, ethnicity and gender.
Co-creation engenders a focus on process of greening cities rather than on results only. Alexander van der Jagt (Utrecht University) introduced co-creation as collaborative knowledge sharing between local policymakers, researchers, citizens, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and practically any kind of actor bringing in specific knowledge about local needs and solutions, building on insights from the NATURVATION and GREEN SURGE projects. Session participants echoed the need to step away from pre-defined issues and solutions towards reframing problems that open up the view on what interventions are needed and possible. Co-creation allows engagement with unusualsuspects, such as the horticulture industry, and to thus enhance quality of solutions. Governments are not able to green cities on their own and seek to tap into the strengths of communities: co-creation empowers and strengthens capacities of local communities by sharing responsibilities and cultures. Experiences from developing country contexts enrich the European perspectives in Connecting Nature on co-creation: the absence of an identity of citizenry was highlighted as key challenge for creating greener and better cities in for example Brazilian and Somalian contexts. Here, co-creation is a way to support identity-building, as well as to collect knowledge in the absence of data and to deal with informal activities.
While there is much talk about co-creation and the many opportunities it offers, knowledge about how to set-up and facilitate co-creation processes is limited. Katharina Hölscher presented a practice-oriented design framework for co-creating nature-based interventions. Drawing on the work of Niki Frantzeskaki (Swineburne University of Technology), the framework highlights quality principles and provides guidance for inclusive, legitimate, and open co-creation processes that result in policy and planning relevant knowledge, new solutions and empowerment.
Inclusivity for bringing together diverse actors and multiple types of knowledge at equal level.
Openness to adopt, integrate and share knowledge throughout.
Legitimacy to ensure that the process includes legitimate and credible knowledge and is trusted by participants and wider urban actors.
Actionable knowledge ensures that the co-produced knowledge outputs are immediate relevant and translated into policy and planning.
Usable knowledge and empowerment ensure that the co-produced knowledge outputs are valuable to and taken up by multiple urban actors.
Extending institutions ensures that the co-produced knowledge outputs connect to multiple goals, strategies and agendas within the city to create synergies across sectors.
The principles were connected to practice: three cities shared and discussed their experiences in designing co-creation processes. Antonio Prieto González (City of A Coruña, Spain) shared the multiple co-creation activities for the re-development of the port of the Connecting Nature city, including expert forums, an ideas competition, online discussion and voting and public workshops and exhibitions during a temporary pavilion (Tribuna Pública). The process benefitted from high level political support, and the inclusion of expert and technical knowledge was considered important for ensuring legitimacy.
Highlighting opportunities for linking citizen initiatives and formal policy frameworks, Gilles Lecuir (Ile-de-France Regional Authority for Biodiversity, France) reflected on the long-term collaboration between citizens and the local governments to greening, and maintaining greened, sidewalks in French cities. While the initiative has grown out of a citizen initiative, the local governments took over to coordinate and facilitate the greening, for example by allocating and depaving lots for greening.
An example from outside Europe was presented by Ana Pellegrino (City of Niteroi, Brazil): a lasting challenge is to get citizens to participate, also due to fear from speaking out against powerful actors. Actively going out to communities and holding regular meetings that are open to the entire community are important conditions for enabling co-creation. Getting inhabitants from different communities to participate helped to enhance shared understanding between such, showing that there is common agreement about needs and desires.
The examples from the three cities demonstrated the multiple faces and facets of co-creation, but the sharing of experiences also revealed opportunities for learning from each other. Given the novelty and experimental nature of co-creation, there is a need for global learning about when and how to do co-creation. Alice Reil presented the Connecting Nature UrbanByNature Programme, which offers such learning opportunities for urban nature pioneers. The challenge is to identify transferable lessons—for example about when to involve what type of people and how to create space for co-creation. Co-creation goes against the usual policy and planning logics in cities worldwide: to ensure financing, projects usually have to first be developed.
Next to transferable lessons, it became clear during the session that context and local culture matters. In developing country cities, co-creating greener and better cities needs to first overcome lack of local identities and lack of trust in fair and safe participation opportunities.
Katharina Holscher and Alice Reil
Rotterdam and Freiburg
This TNOC Summit Seed Session included the following participants: Alice Reil, Arun Mishra, Adèle Gaveau, Ryan Bellinson, Aimee Gauthier, Simon Pittman, Kristin Ohlson, Thibaud Griessinger, François Mancebo, Yeowon Kim, Katharina Holscher, Katherine Moseley, Katalin Czippan, Mariana Nicolletti, Ines Vaittinen, Giles Lecuir, Gillian Dick, Catherine Harris, Alexander van der Jagt, Ferne Edwards, Kim Ressar, Valerie Gwinner, Camille Tallon, Anouck Barcat, Cecilia Herzog, Judy Bush, Oliver Hillel, Aidan ffrench
Alice Reil (she/her) is an urban geographer who strives to bring more biodiverse, urban nature into public spaces. She led the biodiversity and nature-based solutions team at ICLEI Europe, a global city network, and now works at the City of Munich’s green space planning department.
Earth dreams, songs, and storytelling are gifts for our participants to co-produce in response and build emotional resonance through art around the interdependency between humans and nature.
Art and activism have a great potential to communicate social-ecological messages, and to engage the public in exploring local ecological knowledge. Where and how local ecological knowledge (LEK) appear in urban environments through artwork? We are in a great position to be able to share the reflections of one of the sessions at The Nature of Cities Festival (TNOC). The workshop happened on 22 February (2021) and was organized by the DiGe project team (ERC-StG-2016) linking the following concepts: LEK & ART & CITY.
More than ten case studies were shared from various perspectives (the pre-agreed presenters and moderators in the picture below).As a brief introduction, Rick Hall shared examples from the work of ignite! Julia Prakofjewa shared the concept of craftivism and direct&indirect quotation of LEK through artworks. Nataliya Stryamets brought the participants to Ukraine and the use of wild flowers during the festivities. Andra Simanova added a case study of House of Fairy tales. Eva Bubla explored how cultural initiative szabadonbalaton draws attention to the ecological needs and risks of Lake Balaton and its region, aiming to transform public awareness and practices. Another example come from Riga and contemporary art scene there, namely, Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, which in its recent iteration was focused on using locally produced materials when creating new artworks and re-using these materials after the end of the exhibition. One of the examples was an art installation by Lina Lapelytė and Mantas Petraitis — the use of 2,000 pine logs which formed a large scale installation in Daugava river during the exhibition and was later re-used by a local wood manufacturing factory. Anna Varga brought to the discussion a project on wood pastures, ancient trees and LEK into formal education. Colin Meurk who joined our discussion from New Zealand used key words as spontaneous urban wild during his talk on Connectivity – Symbiosis – Transcultural Partnerships. Lara Eva shared street art across Tilcara in northern Argentina which reflects the local community knowledge of the ecological processes around the area. Marthe Derkzen, from the Netherlands brought a problem driven approach, questioning how art may be applied to get people together and gain direct experience with nature (including the empowering process communities within the process). This was complemented further by Ivan Greco and Ezequiel Filgueira Risso from Red ECCCO Foundation (Buenos Aires) who shared a work of art and sustainability in slum neighborhoods as well as introduced steps of this collaborative work e.g. the application of Horacio Sanchez Fantino´s techniques.
#1 LEK’s evidence in traditional and modern artworks
“Culture plays a vital room in social unification – and craft practices usually have a very strong identity”.
— Julia Prakofjewa
Contributors from several locations in Eastern Europe including Ukraine and Belarus shared wonderful pieces of art that breathe local knowledge and imaginations of nature and ecology. Colorful embroideries of plants, seeds and flowers seem to have influenced fashion for generations and are regaining interest at present. Including nature representations in clothing and fabric is evidence of the sense of wonder and awe that people experience in their relationships with their local ecology: the nature surrounding them. The session participants Julia Prakofjewa and Nataliya Stryamets shared examples of novel applications of LEK in modern artworks, inspired by the craft of embroidery.
Credit: extract from Nataliya Stryamets presentation
These examples triggered us to think about the differences and commonalities between LEK (local ecological knowledge) and TEK (traditional ecological knowledge). One valuable reaction came from Julia Prakofjewa: the term traditional implies knowledge handed down through generations in the form of oral history, in contrast to local ecological knowledge that is based on direct experiences. Lindsay Campbell added that the two are often seen used alongside each other, but with LEK being broader for all localized knowledge systems and TEK implying longer continuity of cultural practices and often Indigenous knowledge/worldviews/practices. We welcome any fresh ideas on this!
#2 LEK and activism
“…beyond the ecological knowledge of our experts in the team, the traditional ecological knowledge of local stakeholders (local farming, fishing, etc.), or citizen science is also of great importance”. — Eva Bubla
A second perspective that appeared from our session was presenting ways of utilizing art or crafts for activism. Crafts and art exist for more reasons than just aesthetics and inspiration, they can also help convey a message that triggers action or embody the action itself. This is when we started speaking about “craftivism”: a form of activism that uses creative energy to engage people around social, political or environmental issues in a peaceful and indirect way. Session participant Julia Prakofjewa showed inspiring examples of craftivism in Belarus.
Credit: extract from Julia Prakofjewa presentation
Art and activism have a great potential to communicate social-ecological messages, and to engage the public in exploring LEK. Session attendee Lindsay Campbell from the USDA Forest Service shared a collaborative exhibition Who Takes Care of New York? This exhibit aims to amplify the voices and practices of civic stewards and inspire the public of their own capacity to take action. First mounted at the Queens Museum in New York City and now online via The Nature of Cities, the exhibition combines art, mapping, and storytelling to make visible the ways in which everyday acts of caretaking and advocacy transform our urban environments. Eva Bubla from PAD Foundation for Environmental Justice presented the ecological x cultural platform szabadonbalaton (“free Balaton”). The interdisciplinary platform produces ecological art projects to raise awareness on the precarious ecological state of Lake Balaton, Hungary’s biggest lake, including opportunities for climate change adaptation. Inclusion of the social dimension is key to the project and the first creations addressed diverse social groups. A brilliant example was the 2019 Blue Ribbon regatta where a sailboat served as the visual platform of the initiative, raising awareness on the disappearance of the coastal vegetation and reed beds, aiming to shed light on the importance of these areas and their conservation. In the concept bars of szabadonbalaton Balaton-specific cocktails are served in order to taste and contemplate on processes like algae-bloom, reed die-back or mud formation, creating an opportunity to directly discuss these issues with the groups involved. Another positive approach to LEK and activism!
Credit: extract from Eva Bubla (PAD) presentation (Photo: PAD / Neogrády-Kiss Barnabás)
#3 LEK&ART in the urban reality
“I always think that artists are the most eloquent advocates for creativity and curiosity”. — Rick Hall
And finally, how does LEK reveal itself in everyday life? This was the third perspective that came to the table. Several participants turned out to be working on LEK in the urban reality. We had the pleasure to hear about street art in Tilcara, Argentina from Lara Eva Bustamante. Taking us on a short digital tour of the city streets, Lara Eva showed how these art expressions in everyday city life reflect residents’ knowledge of local ecological processes. That this is a practice without borders, was evidenced by the Africa led TNOC Festival plenary session on 25 February entitled “How does street art influence urban perception, city landscape and development planning?”
Credit: extract from Lara Eva Bustamante presentation
For another urban reality, Colin Meurk took us to Christchurch, New Zealand, to share his vision on urbanity and human-nature connections. Colin sketched out an urban ideal of connected nature areas that contributes to local (Aotearoa) identity and is fit for modern city planning, by thinking beyond borders and reshaping local symbiosis. This led Marthe Derkzen, working on green and healthy cities in the Netherlands, to pose a question that was echoed by several others as the core question: How can art serve to connect people locally, to each other and to the place? And how could this foster, or build on, LEK? This point returned a few days later at another TNOC discussion table, namely in Lindsay Campbell’s story telling session where participants shared ways in which LEK through ART could facilitate stewardship of place(s).
Luckily, Iván Greco and Ezequiel Filgueira Risso from Fundación Red ECCCO (Argentina) presented in our LEK&ART&CITY session to share their wonderful collaborative, sustainable art project in a slum settlement in Buenos Aires. The case studies presented showed that co- creating a map of Buenos Aires slums with used beverage cans enabled a link with the local community, the emergence of local stories, reducing the gap between popular art and contemporary art. Finally, they concluded that these techniques trigger creative dialogue and critical thinking that helps local and owned design for alternative solutions to socio-environmental issues.
Credit: extract from Iván Greco and Ezequiel Filgueria Risso presentation
Session attendee, Jaime Jackson, Artist Director Salt Road and New Leaf from the United Kingdom, introduces us with an activity of Good Living as well as provides insight on Biophilic arts. Good Living: a co-produced artwork exploration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) linking young people from indigenous communities with those living in cities in the UK, Argentina, and elsewhere. To collaboratively create content for a Virtual Reality artwork. Based on intrinsic nature-based wisdom in indigenous peoples, a live and lived experience of interdependency with nature. To creatively share indigenous knowledge as inspiration for art making.
Earth dreams, songs and storytelling are gifts for our participants to co-produce in response and build emotional resonance through art around the interdependency between humans and nature. It relates to biophilia part of the Biophilic City Network (biophilia means loving nature. Biophilic art challenges our perceived separation from the rest of nature.) As biophilic design integrates nature into our cities, biophilic art is a process that helps us presence a connection with our natural selves. By summoning the senses and sense experience, and becoming present in and with nature, a pause moment is created. This develops into a more discerning emotional awareness of the climate and ecological crisis. Creating a parity of engagement and creative opportunity for young people with different levels of knowledge – indigenous and otherwise.
Credit: extract from Colin D. Meurk presentation
What’s next?
The moderators of the session, Baiba Pruse and Cristina Flora as well as the rest of the organizing team, are grateful for the attention given by the participants and the continuity of the activities. As outlined at the end of the session, we foresee to work on an academic study based on the case studies presented as well as hope to bring the discussions further. We welcome more contributions to be presented as part of the upcoming study! Please, reach out to Baiba Pruse [baiba.pruse(@)unive.it] if you foresee that your study/case answers the central question of the session: where and how LEK appears in urban environments through artworks? We also welcome more examples through the interactive tool regarding LEK in the city through art: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/1/edit?mid=18uN5NuYctWWElX2pBf-xJovUvacfrIcM&usp=sharing
We also thank the organizers of the Festival for the option to bring this diverse group together! And please, reach out to Baiba if you want to hear the full session through the recording.
Baiba Pruse, Marthe Derkzen, Eva Bubla, Ivan Greco, Ezequiel Filgueira Risso, Lindsay Campbell, Jaime Jackson, Julia Prakofjewa, Rick Hall, Lara Eva Bustamante, Colin D. Meurk, Nataliya Stryamets, Andra Simanova, Anna Varga, Cristina Flora Venice, Arnhem, Bermingham, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Christchurch, New York, Nottingham, Pécs, Riga,
Dr. Marthe Derkzen is a researcher and lecturer with the Health and Society chair group. She studies urban nature from a social justice perspective with an interest in climate adaptation, local food, healthy neighborhoods and stewardship of the commons.
Economist from the University of Buenos Aires with a Master of Science in Sustainable Development from the University of Uppsala. Iván has participated in several projects, building local knowledge with vulnerable communities in Buenos Aires and Central Chile, which served as the foundations for the co-design of locally owned initiatives with economic and environmental impact.
Creator and head of the Red ECCCO Foundation: for Education, Science, Community Cultures and Cooperation; whose program The Citizen Voice and its community art and culture days have been declared of cultural interest by the Legislature of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and the UNESCO Chair of Education for Peace and International Understanding.
Lindsay K. Campbell is a research social scientist with the USDA Forest Service. Her current research explores the dynamics of urban politics, stewardship, and sustainability policymaking.
Jaime is a coordinator for Culture Declares Emergency, director of New Leaf Sustainability Ltd, Salt Road and member of Climate Museum UK. Jaime is a lead artist in the Biophilic City Network (Birmingham is a Biophilic City), he collaborates with dancers to make artworks, layering imagery from nature onto the costumes of the dancers to produce looped and layered installations.
Currently a doctoral candidate in Environmental Sciences, her research interests include local ecological knowledge of useful plant diversity for healthcare, food security and subsistence. She continuously expands her expertise on digital environmental communication and social and cultural aspects of human-nature relationships.
Rick is the founder of Ignite! an education charity that promotes creativity and curiosity. By encouraging children, young people and families to consider STEM subjects as innately creative, the charity works across learning disciplines with artists and scientists to reveal, discover and explore the connections between curiosity, creativity and community.
Landscape planning and design professional. Looking to expand the limits of what she thinks the landscape is. Working on public policies for sustainable development and climate change mitigation. Studying art in cartographies (or cartographies in art). Collaborating in the participatory construction of spaces and knowledges in the city of Buenos Aires.
Dr Colin Meurk, ONZM, is an Associate at Manaaki Whenua, a NZ government research institute specialising in characterisation, understanding and sustainable use of terrestrial resources. He holds adjunct positions at Canterbury and Lincoln Universities. His interests are applied biogeography, ecological restoration and design, landscape dynamics, urban ecology, conservation biology, and citizen science.
PhD in Forestry and Forest Sciences. Working with ethnobiology, sustainability issues, nature protection, climate change, non governmental organizations and rural development. Science and art promoter (working in museums), traveler, photographer and love to cook.
PhD in folklore studies (traditional ecological knowledge and wild plants in Latvia and Eastern Europe). Activities in non-governmental organizations regarding environmental and cultural education. Development of educational programs combining traditional ecological knowledge and environmental education, nature art and crafts.
Anna Varga is a biologist, a forest pedagogist and a weaver. In her PhD, she worked on ethnobiology, environmental history and vegetation science of forest grazing and wood pastures. She developed local and traditional, and art based environmental education projects about wood pastures and local protected sites. S
BS in Chemistry and current MS student in Environmental Sciences. Art lover, science communication amateur, passionate about all the forms of collaboration between art, science and technology.
Tim Beatley (2000: 224) cites Portland, Oregon as one example of progressive regional, bioregional, and metropolitan-scale greenspace planning in the country. Portland is also known for its land use planning and sustainability practices. Indeed, the city has more LEED (Leadership in Environmental Design) buildings than any other city. While the nation had increased greenhouse gases by 13%, Portland’s fell by 12% between 1990 and 2001. During a comparable period public transit ridership grew by 75% and bicycle commuting by 500%. Between 1990 and 2000 the Portland region’s population grew by 31% but consumed only 4% more land to accommodate that growth. By contrast the Chicago region grew by 4% yet consumed 36% more land (Chicago Wilderness, 1999: 21).
However, until the late 1980s Portland’s urban nature agenda had lagged behind other sustainability initiatives. Competing policies pitted otherwise progressive planning objectives against natural resource protection. Urban planners’ focus on compact urban form and containing sprawl to protect farm land had dominated their thinking. Protecting “too much” urban greenspace, they argued, would result in loss of the buildable lands inside the region’s Urban Growth Boundary (UGB). Many politicians also made this argument. As a result the Portland metropolitan region had failed to adequately protect natural resources within the region’s Urban Growth Boundary (Houck and Labbe, 2007, 40) (Wiley, 2001).
My involvement in urban nature issues began in 1982 when I was approached by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) with a proposal to fund Audubon Society of Portland to take the lead role for inventorying fish and wildlife habitat as part of our statewide land use planning process. Each city and county in Oregon was, and still is, responsible for conducting inventories of their wetlands, open space and fish and wildlife habitat. ODFW felt their resources were better focused on “real” habitat beyond the urban and urbanizing portions of our region. With a $5,000 grant from the state’s nongame wildlife program our new Urban Naturalist Program began work in three counties and twenty-four cities in natural resource protection.
Lessons Learned
Between 1982 and 2007 we engaged with local and regional governments, sewer and stormwater agencies, federal and state agencies, and an emerging NGO network to build support for urban natural resource protection, restoration and management. Presently, we have moved from a planning philosophy which held there was “no place for nature in the city” to where access to nature is now considered an essential element of local and regional planning programs and park and recreation agendas. How did we achieve that shift in thinking? Why are health providers such as Kaiser Permanente and Moda Health, outdoor outfitters, and state and federal wildlife agencies, on board with urban nature programs? There are numerous lessons learned regarding how to mobilize political and public support for an urban nature agenda. The following are a few examples.
David Goode (2002). Photo Mike Houck
Power of the Outside Expert: I met Dr. David Goode, then Director of the London Ecology Unit in London, England at an urban wildlife conference in 1984. We invited Dr. Goode to Portland on five occasions, one of which was to speak at Portland’s premier civic organization, City Club. He said very little that diverged from what we had been saying for the past decade, the fact that he was from London and he spoke with a British accent, accorded him the gravitas that we lacked locally. His presence boosted our efforts considerably.
People Love Maps!: Prior to 1989 we had antiquated black and white aerial images of our region’s natural areas. In the spring of 1989 we flew the Portland-Vancouver region with color infrared photography that Portland State University digitized, producing for the first time in our region a map depicting all remaining natural areas. Maps are powerful organizing tools. People love maps! The first response I got when the map was released were angry phone calls, not from people who might have concern about private property rights, but from people who wanted to know why their favorite greenspace was not on the map. I used the map with an acetate overlay to begin generating lists of people who wanted to know the location of the closest greenspace near their home. The map became the rallying point for a regional vision for an interconnected system of natural areas.
Icons are Important: In 1986 I persuaded Portland’s mayor, Bud Clark, to designate the Great Blue Heron as the city’s official bird. While that may sound trivial, each year since Portland’s city council issues a proclamation for the annual Great Blue Heron Week, late May to early June, that spells out what the city will do to ensure herons continue to co-exist with the urban population. It’s our opportunity work with city council to spell out what conservation initiatives we can celebrate having been completed and which ones we will undertake the following year.
Heron, heron flyer and City Council proclamation.
Have Fun: The day the Great Blue Heron was adopted as Portland’s city bird several of us met to have a beer at Bridgeport Brewpub, Portland’s first microbrewery. The brewmaster walked by and asked what was new in the world of urban nature. After we told him that we’d just adopted the Great Blue Heron as the city’s official bird he said he’d just brewed a new ale he had yet to name. Voila, Great Blue Heron Ale was born. Again, that may sound trivial, but Blue Heron Ale became the official beer of the Metropolitan Greenspaces movement and Bridgport Brewpub “greenspace central” for meetings, planning sessions, and celebrations.
Blue Heron Ale became the “lubricant” for building social capital and strategic planning. Photos: Mike Houck
Build Social Capital: It’s All About Relationships: We have been rigorously intentional about establishing strong, long-term relationships among NGOs, government agencies, and the private sector. Many of those involved in the regional greenspaces movement have known one another for twenty to thirty years. During that time, frequently over Blue Heron Ale, good friendships and trust have been forged. Those relationships and trust have been essential to moving the urban greenspaces agenda forward.
Find Good Models: In our case we took elected officials and park professionals on two visits to East Bay Regional Park District to show an on-the-ground example of what we had been describing. Having elected-to-elected and park professional-to-park professional discussions with East Bay staff and their board provided our elected and park professionals with a fifty-year old system that we could emulate in our region. Our efforts to describe what we wanted to create in our region was made real by using East Bay’s program as a template. Similarly, visits to and by Chicago Wilderness allowed Chicago and Portland to enter into a friendly rivalry and to share best practices. As will be explained later, these relationships have expanded to a national Metropolitan Greenspaces network.
1990 visit to East Bay Regional Park District by elected officials and park professionals from Portland region. Photo: Mike Houck
Results
Today, we’ve begun to give serious attention to protecting nature in the city. We’ve passed three regional bond measures totaling more than $400 million to acquire and manage more than 16,000 acres of natural areas within and in close proximity to the region’s UGB.
Regional Park Land Additions 1870 to 2003, courtesy Jim Morgan, Metro
Stormwater and sewage management agencies have retooled and evolved into broader based watershed health organizations and have begun to incorporate green infrastructure into their formerly grey infrastructure dominated sewer and stormwater programs. No longer mere “sewage” agencies, they now address issues related to state and federal endangered species; they have robust invasive species removal initiatives; and they have recently begun to integrate the natural and built environments at the street-scale and neighborhood scale through innovative, “green” stormwater management programs. And local park providers, such as Portland Parks and Recreation, have re-discovered natural areas as a legitimate element of their parks systems.
Moving To A Collective Impact Model: The Intertwine Alliance
As successful as our efforts have been, they have for the most part been “one-offs.” For each effort we had to mobilize elected officials, civic leaders, and non-profits anew. Each of these efforts, for example the regional bond measures, required an inordinate amount of sweat equity and financial capital to succeed. By 2007 it was clear that we needed a more sustained, efficient model to carry the work forward.
In 2007 David Bragdon, then President of the Metro Council, convened leaders from around the region and brought leaders from around the country, including Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, for a Connecting Green symposium. The parks visionaries from around the US told their stories, and the lesson was clear. Behind every significant achievement, whether it be the completion of Millennium Park in Chicago or the River Ring trail network in St. Louis, there was a common denominator. Behind every accomplishment stood a coalition of public, private and nonprofit organizations and leaders.
With new inspiration and a clear confirmation of the power of the coalition model we set out to grow our coalition and to make it permanent. We thought: “rather than put this coalition together each time we want to do something big, why not put it together and keep it together and keep doing big things?”
The coalition started with four committed partners and quickly grew. Metro Council President David Bragdon and the Metro Council* took the emerging coalition under their wing for its initial four years, giving it time to grow and get stronger. The Alliance launched as a 501c3 on July 1, 2011 with 28 partners. In less than three years it quadrupled in size to 112 public, private and nonprofit partners.
* Metro is the only directly elected regional government in the United States. By law all twenty-four cities and three counties within its jurisdiction must amend their local plan to conform to the region’s land use planning, transportation, and natural resource regulations. Metro is an important convener of parties with interests in issues or regional importance (www.oregonmetro.gov)
The scope of The Alliance is broad
The Alliance exists to ensure the region’s trail network gets completed; that our natural areas get restored, and that people of all ages discover they can enjoy the outdoors near where they live. We exist to make our region more attractive to new businesses and to help our existing companies attract talent. We’re here to reduce utility and transportation costs and keep our water clean. Finally, we’re here to help our partner organizations build their capacity and become more successful.
Our coalition is diverse. It includes parks agencies, from the smallest municipality to the National Park Service. It includes nonprofit conservation organizations, active transportation organizations, sportswear companies, chambers of commerce, landscape architecture firms, water utilities, and health organizations. It has become a virtual “who’s who” of organizations that have a stake in more deeply integrating nature into the metropolitan region. While our partners share a commitment to nature, their individual missions can differ significantly and it is not uncommon for our partners to be on opposing sides of a local issue. To succeed the benefits of working together must be greater than the benefit of individual action. The forces bringing us together must be stronger than the forces that divide us. We’ve addressed this in three ways.
Focus on investment and engagement
We found that there are two things that our partners universally agree on:
1) We need to attract new investment in nature and better leverage existing investment, and 2) We need to more deeply engage the region’s residents and civic leaders.
We focus on the big things, investment and engagement, where the power of a coalition is truly needed, rather than the smaller issues that are more easily addressed by individual organizations and where there is less universal agreement.
Attend to fundamentals
The “lessons learned” outlined earlier apply as much today as they did early in our evolution. Social capital is particularly important. We host two summits per year and they always have a strong networking component. We celebrate our progress and set our sights on the next big thing. We don’t know what our successes will be, but we know for sure we’re going to celebrate them twice a year.
Mike Wetter of The Intertwine.
Our vision for the Portland-Vancouver region is made up of many inter-related parts and likewise our coalition is made up of many interrelated groups of interests. For example, some of our partners are primarily interested in building out our region’s trail network. Others are focused on natural area acquisition and restoration. Others operate parks. Rather than pick one or the other, we build and support these individual strands and weave them together into whole cloth. When we started our work, we focused on five issue areas, in the illustration at right. We quickly outgrew this model, and now, in addition to those in the diagram, we support initiatives focused on public engagement, race and equity, economic development, ecosystem services, and nature and health.
The Intertwine Alliance has created a public engagement campaign called Our Common Ground that we are implementing collaboratively
All these years we’ve been feeling our way along, trying things, keeping what worked and discarding the rest. We assumed we were pioneers, until we stumbled onto the Collective Impact Model. In 2011 an article appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled “Collective Impact.” The article described, with academic rigor and authoritative case studies, how the really complex challenges facing society today can’t be addressed by individual organizations working independently. They required coalitions of public, private and nonprofit organizations working in close alignment towards a set of shared outcomes.
Collective Impact is more rigorous and specific than collaboration among organizations. According to John Kania and Mark Kramer, Collective Impact’s originators, there are five conditions that, together, lead to meaningful results from Collective Impact:
Common Agenda: All participants have a shared vision for change including a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solving it through agreed upon actions
Shared Measurement: Collecting data and measuring results consistently across all participants ensures efforts remain aligned and participants hold each other accountable
Mutually Reinforcing Activities: Participant activities must be differentiated while still being coordinated through a mutually reinforcing plan of action
Continuous Communication: Consistent and open communication is needed across the many players to build trust, assure mutual objectives, and appreciate common motivation
Backbone Organization: Creating and managing collective impact requires a separate organization(s) with staff and a specific set of skills to serve as the backbone for the entire initiative and coordinate participating organizations and agencies
Collective Impact has been enormously helpful to our work in several ways:
We now have a global network of peers. Practitioners are applying collective impact across the globe to issues from education, to human health, to world hunger. We now have colleagues around the world to exchange best practices with.
Our approach has been validated. The approach we are taking is now being recognized as best practice when approaching complex social challenges. The United Way has adopted it for their community work nationally. Many foundations are supporting further development and application of the approach and we’re starting to see federal RFP’s calling for a collective impact approach.
We get new tools. Collective Impact is a framework to guide our work. It is helping us get much more intentional and disciplined about how we guide Intertwine Alliance initiatives.
There’s a name for what we do. What we are doing is a new way of doing business, which has always made it a little harder to explain. Collective Impact has given us language to describe what we do.
The Intertwine Alliance has sister organizations in other US cities, which have banded together to form the Metropolitan Greenspaces Alliance (MGA). Representatives of The Intertwine Alliance were in Denver March 13 through 15th for an MGA summit and conference. We themed our work at the conference around collective impact. Cities that have or are developing conservation coalitions like ours is almost doubling this year, from seven cities to thirteen. Each is applying the collective impact framework in their own fashion. It should make for a very dynamic and productive era for conservation in urban regions.
Mike Wetter is Executive Director of The Intertwine Alliance, where he leads a coalition of 112 organizations working to integrate nature into the Portland-Vancouver region.
Over the past two weeks I have experienced two very different aspects of urban ecology. The first centered on a pair of peregrine falcons nesting close to where I live in the city of Bath. The second was a visit to the Olympic Parklands which have been created for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. They illustrate well the range of issues and opportunities involved with nature in the city.
Peregrine falcon with pigeon on St John’s Church in Bath UK. Photo by David Goode
We are all familiar with the way that some species are particularly good at colonising urban areas. In the UK some groups of birds have been particularly successful, notably those of the crow family and a wide range of water birds, including a number of alien species. But the colonisation of towns and cities by peregrine falcons has been one of the most dramatic changes of recent years. Until the 1990s traditional nest sites of peregrines in Britain were restricted to mountain crags and sea cliffs. But as the population recovered from the low levels brought about by chemical pesticides in the 1960s some birds started to use quarries and artificial structures. The recent colonisation of urban areas has been spectacular. I remember the excitement amongst local birders when a pair first took up residence on Battersea Power Station in London in 2000. This was followed by enormous public interest when people were able to watch the birds through telescopes in central London when they became an established feature on the Tate Modern Art Gallery. Many thousands of people have enjoyed seeing the birds at first hand. My local pair in Bath is no exception. I regularly take my telescope for people to see the birds which nest on a city centre church. The standard reaction from almost everyone when they first see the bird is “Oh Wow!” This year they were given live national coverage by the BBC in it’s Springwatch programme.
The pace of this recent colonisation has been extraordinarily rapid. From a few scattered pairs in the late 1990s we now have a situation where many major cities have at least one pair. London now has over twenty pairs. Young birds raised in urban areas will find breeding sites in similar places and there are plenty to choose from. But for me the most significant feature of the colonisation of towns and cities is the discovery that these birds are gaining an advantage by hunting at night. Examination of prey remains by Ed Drewitt of Bristol Museum has shown that whilst feral pigeons form about half their diet, the other half is made up of a wide range of species, many of which are not local birds. In Bath their prey in winter months includes large numbers of woodcock which are thought to be migrants flying though the city. By using the lights of the city the peregrines are adapting very effectively to an urbanised lifestyle. But not everything is plain sailing. The urban environment poses a variety of hazards for young birds when they take their first flight and I have witnessed numerous mishaps. But they also have the advantage of being watched over by many people during the critical period and the proportion of young birds that have been rescued is remarkably high. Local members of the Hawk and Owl Trust have been kept busy. One young bird had to be fished out of the river twice last week!
Once the peregrine nesting season had finished I went to see the venue for the London Olympics. You may think that the Olympic Games is all about sporting events and has little to do with nature. But the reality is very different. London set out to put sustainability at the heart of the 2012 Games and this meant that biodiversity had to be addressed as part of the overall plan. Construction of the Olympic Parklands with its various sports arenas and Athletes Village includes a range of newly created naturalistic habitats designed to
River valley wetlands created alongside the River Lea with the Olympic Stadium and Aquatic Centre behind. Photo by David Goode
enhance the wildlife of the Lea Valley in which the venue is situated. After the Games are over the area will become the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park which has been designed to provide high quality green infrastructure alongside a mixture of residential, sporting and commercial development. The legacy of the Olympics will be to revitalise an area of London which had suffered severe post-industrial blight and create a new high-quality environment incorporating sustainable drainage schemes, green roofs, and forty-five hectares of new ecological landscapes as part of a much wider area of newly accessible green space.
The London Olympics Velodrome with herb-rich grassland in foreground. Photo David Goode
Looking round the park last week I was impressed by the transformation that has been achieved. Although there are six major sporting venues in the park, including the Olympic Stadium, Velodrome, Aquatic Centre, also Hockey and Basketball pitches there was a sense of space, with river channels and wetlands, as well as more formal areas representing the gardens of the world. But what I particularly liked was the effort that had been made to incorporate nearly 700 bird boxes and bat boxes into all the built structures. So gabions of the bridges had large numbers of bird boxes built in to accommodate species such as swift, house sparrow, starling and one of the local rarities the black redstart. Elsewhere there are artificial banks for kingfishers, and sand martins. Needless to say the martins were using holes intended for kingfishers. There are also artificial holts for otters. Reed warblers and reed buntings were singing from the newly created reedbeds and large numbers of native black poplar have been planted to create wet woodlands. The process involved clearance of extensive areas of invasive plants including giant hogweed, Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed.
Both land and water were heavily polluted. The Velodrome is built on what was locally known as “fridge-mountain”. The whole area of the park has been restored to create high-quality habitats. Ecological features of post-industrial landscapes have been retained by creation of stone and rubble banks supporting vegetation characteristic of urban wastelands. It is hoped that these will provide suitable habitat for locally endangered invertebrate species, such as the brown-banded carder bee and toadflax brocade moth. This is all far removed from one’s normal perception of Olympic Games!
I didn’t get to see the Athlete’s Village, there was too much security, but I’m told that the buildings all have green roofs and there are further areas of species-rich grassland with a large lake for flood alleviation, all of which will be maintained when the athlete’s accommodation becomes a residential area. Biodiversity is only one element of the overall design for sustainability. The carbon footprint of the Games has been mapped in great detail and the pursuit of sustainability has affected the design of every aspect of the park and the staging of the games. There is much talk of designing new urban areas to improve their environmental performance, especially in the context of climate change, but also to improve the quality of urban life for their residents.
The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park provides a microcosm of what is possible.
But it can only happen if sustainability is central to design and if there is the political will to make it happen. The Olympic Park could provide a new model for urban development. Its legacy will not only be in the new landscapes and buildings that have been created, but also in what everyone involved has learnt from doing it. The culture change in addressing sustainability in such detail has been immense. It has affected everyone from architects and civil engineers to all those involved in the vast supply chain of materials and in the actual staging of the Games. It has been a unique opportunity to develop solutions that can now be applied more widely. London 2012 has been dubbed the One Planet Olympics. The benefits will go far beyond London.
Newly created wetland habitats and Athletes Village for the 2012 Olympics. Photo by David Goode
We live in an era where integrating diverse nature and diverse human experiences is crucial for cities to better plan their future sustainability. To do this we’ll need better studies of how people perceive and value urban nature.
Many cities around the world are planning to enhance urban nature. For example, many global cities have promised to plant a million trees, such as Shanghai, New York, Singapore, and Miami, and there are large tree planting initiatives in Uttar Pradesh, Ethiopia, and China, among many others.
But most of these plans to enhance urban nature usually rely on the premise of technical expertise, such as planting the right amount and types of trees, in the right places, to provide the desired benefits.
However, plans to enhance urban nature will not be successful unless these plans reflect what is important to the diverse range of people living in cities today. To understand these needs, we must first understand how the community perceives urban nature and its benefits.
Here we discuss what it means to consider diversity in people’s perceptions of urban nature, with a focus on urban forests and urban trees. We refer to diversity in four ways: 1) the diversity of urban nature places, 2) the diversity of urban people, 3) the diversity of how people perceive things, and 4) the diversity of how we study this perception. This is based on our own recently published research.
We recognize that our lens is tree-centred. We do not talk about other important aspects of urban nature, such as wildlife, gardens, and water bodies. However, this lens provides us with an opportunity to speak more concretely about how people perceive this key element of urban nature, one that is constantly being planted, removed, and distributed in our cities. Ultimately, people perceive nature as concrete elements or landscapes: a tree, a park with trees, a forest, rather than as an abstract concept: a green space, the green infrastructure of the city, the canopy cover of an urban area.
Before we continue, we want to clarify that we write about the science of studying diversity in people’s perception of urban nature, and not its politics. We are interested in understanding how these perceptions are studied by considering diversity. We are cognizant that our research has political implications, some of which we discuss, but our intention is not to discuss diversity in political terms, such as the political issues behind trees, biodiversity, native vs. non-native nature, immigration, ethnicity, and gender, among other aspects.
What do we mean by diversity in people’s perceptions?
Diversity is integral to people’s perceptions of nature as it refers to the diverse experiences people have with urban nature. Perceptions can tell us how people process the information from these experiences. Processing this information is key to activating the benefits we may derive from urban nature, such as reduced stress levels after spending time in a treed area.
A useful way to understand the diversity of how people perceive things is to distinguish more abstract and stable perceptions, such as values (what people consider important) and beliefs (what people think is true), from less abstract and more variable perceptions, such as attitudes (people’s disposition towards something) and preferences (whether people like something). Let us illustrate this.
If we ask you, “How do you perceive the tree in front of your window?”, you may tell us you don’t like that type of tree, or that you really love its fall colours, or that you used to climb it as a child. But if we ask you “How do you perceive all the trees in your city?”, this may activate thoughts about trees being good, or the city being better with trees. The first set of responses are more concrete, more variable perceptions, and the second are more abstract, more stable perceptions. Less abstract perceptions usually tap into the notion of what we like in a particular situation, or people’s attitudes and preferences. More abstract perceptions usually tap into the notion of how important trees are in general, or people’s values and beliefs.
This shows how there is not one way of perceiving something; there are many. It also illustrates how difficult it is to simplify people’s perceptions or generalize all perceptions across all people and all situations. The previous example is a theorized and ideal situation with direct, simplified answers. In reality, a person responding to these questions may mix different types of perceptions depending on what they want to talk about. Calling perceptions values, beliefs, attitudes, or preferences is how to codify things for research purposes, but people do not think in such strict cognitive codes.
Diversity can also refer to the various forms of urban nature. Different places with trees may prompt very different human meanings and are likely to be associated with very different perceptions. Trees are found in parks, streets, backyards, in natural forested areas, and sometimes on rooftops (Figure 1). If we ask someone how they perceive a street tree, a tree surrounded by other trees, a tree that they planted, or a fruit tree, the answer may be different. Again, this is how we codify nature for research purposes: people may perceive things in different ways, such as perceiving the landscape more than its elements, or vice versa.
Figure 1: Different contexts in which urban trees are perceived, including (from top left-hand clockwise): a public park in Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam; gardens in Melbourne, Australia; a pedestrian walk with trees and fruit trees in an intersection in Toronto, Canada (photos by ®COrdóñez and ®JKowalski)
Diversity also refers to the diversity of who is perceiving (Figure 2). Many cities are diverse in their people, with many ages, genders, sexualities, abilities, cultural identities, nationalities, ethnicities, and religions living next to each other. Many Western cities today are ethnically and culturally diverse mostly due to recent immigration. For example, Toronto boasts a foreign-born population of about 50%. In Australia, 25% of the population is foreign-born. In many European cities, this is about 15-20% or higher. Read an interesting post in TNOC about urban nature in multicultural cities. So, to study people’s perceptions, we can choose to recruit people into studies who represent certain populations that represent certain age, gender, cultural background, or other minority demographics, or sample with an intention to generalize across majority demographics.
Figure 2: Different people perceiving and capturing their perceptions in different ways, including (from top left-hand clockwise): a public park in Toronto, Canada; a large forest in Köln, Germany; a group talk about trees, in Pereira, Colombia; people filling personal diaries about trees in Cali, Pereira, and Bogotá, Colombia (photos by ®COrdóñez and ®JKowalski)
Finally, diversity can also refer to the ways we study people’s perceptions. Decisions about which perceptions to measure, what is being perceived, where to measure these perceptions, and who to study, are fundamental to how we study things. We can use techniques such as surveys, photos, field trips, personal diaries, and group conversations to capture empirical data, as well as recruit different amounts of people, and analyse answers in different ways depending on what we want out of the data.
What the literature says
We asked the following questions of the literature on people’s perceptions of urban forests or urban trees:
What urban forest places are investigated?
What methods of data collection are used?
How are people sampled and recruited?
What types of urban forest perception responses are examined and how is the diversity of responses treated?
We collected 178 articles using academic databases by using systematic, replicable searches. All these studies were relevant to people’s perceptions of urban forests or urban trees. To analyze the articles in the collection we developed a classification mechanism to identify patterns on how diversity was treated across studies. We also analyzed the text of the articles using text analysis algorithms with the goal of generating semantic maps based on the relationship of terms and concepts in the articles.
Figure 3 provides an overview of the content of the articles. Most studies took place in the US, although there are studies around the world. Most studies have been published recently. Most studies focused on asking people about what they thought about trees in general or in a park context. Most studies used surveys with predetermined answers that pre-defined what people were supposed to perceive. Few of the studies examined perceptions in more than one city or country. While most studies considered demographics and reported demographic profiles, these considerations were restricted to gender and limited to the differences between (cis) men and women. Only a fraction of the studies examined people in the minority of the countries and regions involved, such as ethnic, racial, gender, and age (e.g., seniors, children) minorities. And finally, most studies only focused on people’s positive perceptions or perceptions of benefits.
Figure 3: Characteristics of the studies found, including countries and cities where they took place, year of publication, research approach, context of investigation, data collection technique, geographical unit – such as one city, one country, or many –, and whether ethnic and demographic diversity were considered (images reproduced with some changes from the original article by the authors)
What it means
Overall, our results demonstrated that the current research on people’s perceptions of urban forests and urban trees does not consider diversity adequately. It is narrowly focused on certain perceptions, one method to capture these perceptions, and minimal considerations of demographic diversity.
Deriving practical implications, such as planting the right type of tree in the right place to provide the right benefits, has been a primary motivation of the research on people’s perception of urban nature. However, our analyses show that using the existing evidence to apply actions broadly across all people and situations can have profoundly negative impacts for people and urban nature. For instance, the studies we reviewed investigated people’s perceptions of trees in different situations, both as concrete elements (specific trees in specific streets or parks) and as abstract notions (all the trees in a city). These different contexts mean that people are perceiving different things, making it very difficult to generalize how people give meaning to trees in cities and deduce what is the best tree to plant in which situation. Many of the studies we examined were motivated either by including trees in urban planning and design or by identifying how people assumed to represent the majority give meaning to urban trees, rather than by coming up with the best way of dealing with urban trees in specific situations and by specific people.
A lot of research in urban nature today is focused on how unevenly nature is distributed across the city. While this can help us understand issues of resource distribution and where to place management efforts, a complementary, but often overlooked, aspect of this is giving people a platform to express how they think, feel, and behave with urban nature. Failing to recognize these diverse ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, can be detrimental to our plans of enhancing urban nature. For example, failing to recognize how different people perceive urban nature may potentially replicate structural racism and may perpetuate normative and inaccurate beliefs about how people perceive the worth of urban nature. In other words, there is a risk that the way we study people’s perception of urban nature today can (re)produce colonial Anglo- and hetero-normative, as well as ableist perspectives in the ways we manage urban nature. It is not just remiss of researchers to overlook this diversity; it risks reproducing non-diverse and unjust forms of domination that exclude nature and people in cities.
Recently, many studies have criticized the literature on people’s perception of urban trees. For instance, some authors have conceptually argued against notions such as:
People may perceive urban trees in similar ways, but some of these perceptions may also depend on the situation or the person.
Knowledge of the benefits of trees may change some, but not all, perceptions since many perceptions are more fundamental and abstract and developed through lived experiences.
Not everybody holds normative positive beliefs about urban trees.
People value urban trees for many different reasons including aesthetic, cultural, ecological, economic, environmental, health, psychological, and social reasons.
The public is always a reliable source to understand what makes urban trees important to urban communities.
We also think that a deeper examination of diversity in people’s perceptions about urban nature is needed. We live in an era where integrating diverse nature and diverse human experiences is crucial for cities to better plan their future sustainability. Understanding such diversity is a necessary step in connecting humans to the natural environment and facilitating biodiversity planning and decision-making. Such information can inform better approaches to meet community needs and promote the wide range of benefits from urban nature.
Efforts to advance this research should include: 1) stronger interdisciplinary collaborations between the natural and social sciences; 2) a clear definition of what is being perceived, how it is being perceived, and who is perceiving it; and 3) addressing the diversity of perceptions, places, people, and methods with intention. Diversity should become a core goal of researchers and practitioners alike.
Camilo Ordóñez Barona and Janina M. Kowalski Melbourne and Toronto
Many thanks to our colleagues Drs. Jason Byrne (University of Tasmania), Dave Kendal (University of Tasmania), Kathleen Wolf (University of Washington), and Tenley Conway (University of Toronto) for their support and co-authorship of the original work referenced in this article.
Janina Kowalski (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the governance, accessibility, and human-nature interactions of urban food trees.
For traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture is a method to stimulate specific points of the body to change or regulate a specific pathology and benefit the broader system. In this sense, Jaime Lerner, in the new English Edition of his Urban Acupuncture, proposes to point to specific evidence and specific actions in the city to comfort general urban illness.
Modern urban reform in early 1950´s sought to control land use and zoning, compartmentalizing human activity into the three spheres of action: dwelling, work, and leisure. During the 60’s and 70’s, urban planners and architects worked to create connections between the ideals of theory and the realities of daily life, offering residents the possibility of taking part in these processes.
Nowadays, a contemporary movement of planners and designers of the city gathers actions that reinvent our daily lives and reoccupies urban space with new uses or recovering the collective memory. The academic work of Jan Gehl, described in his book Cities for People is focused in a methodology approach to improve the urban qualities and enrich people´s urban life.
Lerner’s book encourages planners, public officials and citizens to articulate common sense urban tools to change cities, and to make and promote simple, focused actions and initiatives that ripple outward to uplift city life. In this view all cities have the opportunity to experiment with changes and promote urban transformations by reading and responding to the people’s needs. Lerner’s work provides a global perspective on recent urban transformations and encourages cities that still have challenges ahead to improve urban conditions for people. The way that Lerner tells us about different urban experiences is as if we travel around the world through the pages of this book. He offers notes from experience not only as a renowned urban designer, but also someone with a very high sense of humanity. The readers of this work will find the roots and spirit of the concepts developed by Jane Jacobs, William Whyte and many other thinkers on cities around the world.
As shown by Lerner in this book through his own professional experience, urban changes don´t need to be large-scale and cities don´t necessarily need expensive budgets to be transformed. Curitiba was transformed into a global model of sustainability and livability through its initiatives in integrated public transit, public parks and the restructure of land use, turning the city into an urban model not only for Latin America, but around the world. Each city needs to find their own potential to operate in different urban scales: from a specific location, to a neighborhood or an urban infrastructure.
The book is written in the way Italio Calvinos´s Invisible Cities (1972) and encourages the reader to penetrate deep inside the city and sharpen the perception to understand simple situations that value the citizen. The book is structured in short chapters introduced by a title that summarizes a concept to take an initiative in different cities around the world. For example rescuing a river (Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul), the street sounds, colors and scents (Sihanoukville, Cambodia), or how to find someone in a city, the need of meeting points and how Caracas or Tokio improved their places of reference for people.
In 2007, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) launched a research project called Actions: What You Can Do With the City. It has taken the form of an exhibition, presented at the CCA (Montreal, 2008), the Graham Foundation (Chicago, 2009) and the X Bienal de Arquitetura (São Paulo, 2013) and also made a publication and a website. This work engages in a dialogue with Lerner´s compilation of urban experiences, focusing the attention on the city. It takes a close look at things that a citizen could aspire to or need in a city. It invites us to debate and define new ways of thinking “urbanity”.
Through Urban Acupuncture´s pages we dive into concepts such as eco-clock were the author invites us to reflect how committed we are with the environment in terms of the proportion of what we spend compared to what we save.
A true urban acupuncture means to be conscious that planning is a process, with no immediate transformation. Sometimes an urban intervention begins with a focal point that allows articulate deeper urban transformations; such are the cases of Cannery district in San Francisco, the Güell Park in Barcelona or the creations of cultural machines as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Pares or Gehry´s Guggenheim Bilbao museum. Those interventions have taken the premise to re-think people needs and allow giving a new sense to the neighborhood or the area. In many cases those transformations give a new image to the place with international impact.
In many moments in the book, Lerner stops to reflect on the growth and urban development, as in the case of the city of Beijing, which has lost the image cut in the landscape: the sea of bicycles, the city of people. Today the enormous freeways and the ultra modern and eclectic building mass dehumanize the scale of pedestrians. Beijing may need a good dose of urban acupuncture to reclaim its rightful place in the sun, Lerner writes.
Many cities define urban spaces through the experiences of open markets. This is an interesting typology of organic space changing through time. A kind of moveable feast that rises early and packs up with the sun. Street markets around the world allow us to experience the daily transformation of space through time.
This book is easy to read and understand. Each story, each concept or virtue of a city follows the other. The main interest of this book is the rich vision that the author has to comment how urban strategies transform the cities. Perhaps the only weakness of the book is the lack of extension in each study case. Someone who wants to learn more about the actions made in the cities described will need to seek out further reading.
It is up to the reader to know how to dive in among these concepts and explore all that is relevant to a particular city. I recommend this book as an overview of contemporary urban aspects and complexities, one that could help enrich the discussion about where we are going with our cities.
Every month 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.
Paul Downton, MelbourneJane Jacobs & Robert Goodman: planning for people vs self-interest. Whose side are you on?
Johan Enqvist, StockholmDiversity creates vibrant cities & better ways to govern commons, but how does diverse place meanings affect collaboration in communities?
Lisa Gansky, San FranciscoSomething quiet and massive happened right in the middle of the 20th century: our cities stopped truly being “ours”.
Mathieu Hélie, MontrealJane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom connect at the point where cities must be both economically dynamic and architecturally emergent.
Mark Hostetler, Gainesville How to develop a societal “norm” where citizens recreate in parks in a sustainable manner?
Michelle Johnson, New YorkTaking a worm’s eye view enabled Jacobs and Ostrom to see systems differently and contribute design solutions.
Marianne Krasny, IthacaUrban environmental education can work alongside other actors to enhance Ostrom’s polycentric governance systems.
Alex Russ, IthacaUrban environmental education can work alongside other actors to enhance Ostrom’s polycentric governance systems.
Harini Nagendra, BangaloreThere is much that growing cities can learn from the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom, especially that local communities often intuitively know what is best for their own environments.
Raul Pacheco-Vega, AguascalienteWould Jane Jacobs agree with the unaffordability of Vancouver, where she implemented many of her teachings?
Michael Mehaffy, PortlandIf we fail to fully utilize the creative power of physical people and their interactions within public spaces, we are going to be in increasing trouble.
Mary Rowe, New YorkCities are a product of the natural human impulse to self–organize—how we gather, and derive mutual benefit, from all that we hold in common.
Laura Shillington, Montreal & ManaguaThe attention to the importance of the everyday scale is, in my opinion, what made Jacobs and Ostrom so influential and visionary.
Anne Trumble, Los AngelesJacobs described nature and culture as two separate entities that only overlap insofar as the former is an analogy for studying the latter—a position that will limit the relevance of her work in contemporary urban socio-ecology.
Arjen Wals, WageningenConflict and diversity can be utilised to create a mutually beneficial social learning process that can shed new light on wicked sustainability issues.
Abigail York, TempeThey refused to accept orthodoxy in the academy or bureaucracy; instead they looked out to the streets, neighborhoods, and communities.
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.
Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom were both giants in their impact on how we think about communities, cities, and common resources such as space and nature. But we don’t often put them together to recognize the common threads in their ideas.
Jacobs is rightly famous for her books, including The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and for her belief that people, vibrant spaces and small-scale interactions make great cities—that cities are “living beings” and function like ecosystems. Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work in economic governance, especially as it relates to the Commons. She was an early developer of a social-ecological framework for the governance of natural resources and ecosystems.
These streams of ideas clearly resonate together in how they bind people, economies, places, and nature into a single, ecosystem-driven framework of thought and planning—themes that deeply motivate The Nature of Cities. In this roundtable, we ask 16 people to talk about some key ideas that motivate their work, and how these ideas have roots in the ideas of either Jacobs or Ostrom, or both.
For more of their ideas, directly from them, good places to start are:
Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, New York, USA.
Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Writer, architect, urban evolutionary, founding convener of Urban Ecology Australia and a recognised ‘ecocity pioneer’. Paul has championed ecological cities for years but has become disenchanted with how such a beautiful concept can be perverted and misinterpreted – ‘Neom' anyone? Paul is nevertheless working on an artistic/publishing project with the working title ‘The Wild Cities’ coming soon to a crowd-funding site near you!
I confess, I knew little about Elinor Ostrom before being invited to join in this roundtable, but I did know something about Jane Jacobs.
The key idea that I took from my Jacobean/Goodman reading was that planning and development are intertwined and intrinsically political.
Great ideas affect many more people than the few who study them directly and this must be particularly true of the work of Jacobs and Ostrom. Whole urban populations have felt the Jacobean effect who have never heard of her. As a student of architecture in Cardiff, Wales, it was years before I knew much about Jane Jacobs directly, but her ideas and influence reached me even before I’d graduated, as I learned about Jacobs indirectly, reading Robert Goodman’s After the Planners in the early 70s.
Goodman followed in Jacobs’ footsteps, denouncing bureaucratic post-war planning experiments for their impact on local communities. His approach was polemical and overtly political and suited to the mood of its times—a mood informed by what Jacobs had published a decade earlier. It was a time when growing alienation in the public realm was accompanied by the dawning awareness that professionals were not as neutral as they presented themselves to be.
Looking back at this early history, I guess the key idea that I took from my Jacobean/Goodman reading was that planning and development are intertwined and intrinsically political, and the results of that entanglement invariably lead to power struggles in which the ascendancy of money and vested interests are guaranteed. As a corollary of that, any success in the planning system that the community might enjoy was likely to be peripheral and only achievable by the community organising to mount directly political attacks on the process itself. That made sense to me in the 1970s. It still does.
As a recently graduated architecture student, I supported the group in my city that was most heavily involved in challenging the local version of “demolish and develop”. “Cardiff Housing Action Group” was made up of concerned citizens who fought against plans for the demolition of homes and communities and their replacement by—mostly—high-rise office buildings.
In 1976-77 I worked with Bob Dumbleton, titular leader of the group, producing the illustrations and doing the paste-up for his booklet about planning and development in South Wales called ‘The Second Blitz – The demolition and rebuilding of town centres in South Wales”. I don’t remember discussing Jane Jacobs with Bob, but he must have been inspired by her work.
“Illustration from The Second Blitz”. Image: Paul Downton
Tellingly, Cardiff Housing Action is still in action today, as rents rocket and housing options dwindle for ‘Generation Rent’ and the new urban poor in the UK.
The central thesis in both Goodman and Jacobs’ work, drawn from her years of working with the warp and weft of living neighbourhoods, is that community is key. If planning isn’t about people, it’s a conceit, a convenient tool used by power élites to get the development outcomes they want.
My exposure to dangerous ideas about social justice and equity in housing was paralleled and reinforced by exposure to the wild and wonderful, uber-green phenomenon of Street Farm, who embedded their vision of “people power” in landscapes of cities taken over by vegetation, where the tall, anonymous high-rise monuments to modernism were demolished by nature to make room for healthy eco-communities.
None of these influences have left me. I’ve spent my entire career giving preference to community and ecological projects and probably enjoyed fewer lucrative commissions as a result. But the one Jacobean lesson that has stuck with me through my professional career is that in an industry with unparalleled power to shape landscapes, communities, and urban futures, you have to decide whose side you’re on.
PS: I’m going to find out more about the work of Elinor Ostrom. I have a feeling I might like it.
Johan Enqvist is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the African Climate and Development Initiative at University of Cape Town and Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. He wants to know what makes people care.
“To understand cities, we have to deal outright with combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomena.” (Jacobs 1961, p. 188).
Cities are special. Compared to most other areas, they rely less on locally produced resources and use trade and transport to meet most of their needs. However, one resource cannot be brought in from the outside, and is consequently also often scarce in cities: space. Limited public space constitutes a “commons” since users cannot easily be excluded, and one person’s use reduces the availability for others.
Sense of place varies—two people can be equally attached to the same place even though that place means different things to each of them.
Public space in cities is under pressure not only from those who want to acquire it for development, but also from being used for several different purposes by different people. A waterfront can be a gym, a science classroom, a bathroom, or a theatre; a park can be a place to forage for mushrooms, meditate, or meet friends for a picnic. In Jane Jacobs’ (1961) view, more diverse use of public spaces is better since it means people are present during more times of the day, which improves safety and promotes vibrant city neighborhoods.
But how can public spaces be managed when there are several different ideas of what their purpose should be? And how does this effect non-human “users” of a place—are diverse neighborhoods better at creating and protecting nature in cities?
In her insightful work on how to govern the commons, Elinor Ostrom (1990) joined Jacobs in arguing for the capacity and competence of local communities to determine what is best for their community. A city’s residents are the foremost experts on how their environments function, which is essential information for administrators (Jacobs 1961). With effective communication and enough trust, local communities can create norms, rules, and property rights systems to equitably manage scarce resources (Ostrom 1990). But how do you trust someone who insists on riding their jet ski in the river where you have rowing practice? Do you dare to confront the drunkards using your favorite park as a bathroom? What is the right way to communicate that you disapprove of someone washing their clothes or fishing in the lake where you want to watch birds?
Picture 1. Volunteer divers and students from local schools come together to clean up Coney Island Creek during an “It’s My Estuary” day in South Brooklyn, New York. Photo: Johan Enqvist
Picture 2.Memorial plaque of Elinor Ostrom from 2009, when she planted a tree for the community-led restoration of Kaikondrahalli lake in Bangalore. Photo: Johan Enqvist
These are all real examples of dilemmas faced by people I have interviewed in Bangalore and New York, where residents have come together to form groups to protect, restore, manage, or improve access to natural areas in and around water bodies. Both cities are great examples of how diversity can manifest in very different ways depending on culture, wealth, religion, age, and local traditions.
They are also places where access to water bodies has been severely limited (considering the hundreds of miles of waterfront in New York, and hundreds of lakes in Bangalore), but where local groups are actively engaged in restoring both quality of and access to waters (Picture 1). My current research, conducted with help from master’s student Ailbhe Murphy at Stockholm Resilience Centre, unpacks how different ideas about “what a place is for” relate to how individuals’ engage in such groups.
As pointed out recently by Saskia Sassen in the Guardian, and Harini Nagendra in this roundtable, Jacobs and Ostrom teach us that sense of place is key for understanding cities. But sense of place varies—two people can be equally attached to the same place even though that place means different things to each of them. This is why we believe it is important to see what civic engagement looks like at the individual level, how it relates to personally or collectively held place meanings, and if diversity in sense of place presents a problem or serves as an asset for groups trying to create effective institutions for managing these places. To me, this is a great example of how Ostrom’s and Jacobs’ ideas influence current research about how urban dwellers negotiate conflicting claims on public space in order to create vibrant and loved places within their communities (Picture 2).
References:
Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, New York, USA.
Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Sheila R. Foster is a Professor of Law and Public Policy (joint appointment with McCourt School of Public Policy) at Georgetown University. Professor Foster is the author of numerous books, book chapters, and law journal articles on property, land use, environmental law, and antidiscrimination law.
If cities are the places where most of the world’s population will be living in the next century, as is predicted, it is not surprising that they have become sites of contestation over use and access to urban land, open space, infrastructure, and culture. The question posed by Saskia Sassen in a recent essay—“Who owns the city?”—is arguably at the root of these contestations and of social movements that resist the enclosure of cities by economic elites.
What are the possibilities of bringing more collaborative governance tools to decisions about how city space and common goods are used?
One answer to the question of who owns the city is that we all do. In my work I argue that the city is a common good or a “commons”—a shared resource that belongs to the collective, unorganized public. I have been writing about the urban commons for the last decade, very much inspired by the work of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom. The idea of the urban commons captures the ecological view of the city that characterizes Jane Jacobs’ classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It also builds on Elinor Ostrom’s finding that common resources are capable of being collaborative managed by their users in ways that support their needs, yet sustain the resource over the long run.
Jacobs analyzed cities as complex, organic systems and observed the activity within them at the neighborhood and street levels, much like an ecologist would study natural habitats and the species interacting within them. She emphasized the diversity of land use, of people and neighborhoods, and the interaction among them, as important to maintaining the ecological balance of urban life in great cities like New York. Jacob’s critique of the urban renewal slum clearance programs of the 1940s and 50s in the United States was focused not just on the destruction of physical neighborhoods, but also on the destruction of the “irreplaceable social capital”—the networks of residents who build and strengthen working relationships over time through trust and voluntary cooperation—necessary for “self-governance” of urban neighborhoods. As political scientist Douglas Rae has written, this social capital is the “civic fauna” of urbanism.
This social capital—the norms and networks of trust and voluntary cooperation—is also at the core of urban “commoning”. The term commoning, popularized by historian Peter Linsbaugh, captures the relationship between physical resources and the communities that live near them, utilize and depend on them for essential human needs and human flourishing. In other words, much of what gives a particular urban resource its value, and normative valence, is the function of the human activity and social network in which the resource is situated. As such, disputes over the destruction or loss of community gardens, of open and green spaces, and of spaces for small scale commercial and artistic activity are really disputes about the right to access and use (or share) urban resources like vacant lots, abandoned and underutilized structures, and buildings, to provide goods necessary for human flourishing.
The urban commons framework also begs the question to which Elinor Ostrom’s work provides an intriguing answer. Recognizing that there are many tangible and intangible urban resources on which differently situated individuals and communities depend to meet a variety of human needs, what are the possibilities of bringing more collaborative governance tools to decisions about how city space and common goods are used, who has access to them, and how their resources are allocated and distributed? Is it possible to effectively manage common resources without privatizing them or exercising monopolistic public regulatory control over them, especially given that regulators tendency to be captured by economic elites?
Ostrom’s groundbreaking work demonstrated that there are options for commons management that are neither exclusively public nor private. She found examples all over the world of resource users cooperatively managing a range of natural resources—land, fisheries, and forests—using “rich mixtures of public and private instrumentalities”. In many of these examples, users work with government agencies and public officials to design, enforce, and monitor the rules for using and managing the resource. Ostrom called this kind of decision making “polycentric” to capture the idea that while the government remains an essential player in facilitating, supporting, and even supplying the necessary tools to govern shared resources, the government is not the monopoly decision maker.
What might it look like to bring more polycentric tools to govern the city, or parts of the city, as a commons? How might local government officials become facilitators or enablers of more inclusive and collaborative decision-making and, hopefully, more equitable distribution of resources to support the needs of a broader swath of its residents? A number of researchers, including myself, are working on these questions and experimenting in cities around the world with forms of urban collaborative, polycentric governance. These efforts undoubtedly owe a great debt to Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom.
At her core, Lisa is a marketect and "impact junky" with a strong interest in breaking the edges of formerly happy business models and bringing together not-so-likely characters in the form of new offerings, teams and partnerships. She is also the author of "The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing".
Something quiet and massive happened right in the middle of the 20th century: our cities stopped truly being “ours”. Thanks to a postwar economic boom, money and ownership became synonymous with value and status. Anything that couldn’t easily be mass produced—think beauty, nature, health, belonging, peace and happiness—lingered either unrecognized or, for most, out of reach. In a shift that ran counter to the very essence of a city, what benefitted and mattered to the many took the far back seat to what was held precious by the few.
In past times, success and happiness were shaped by how we all were doing, and our concept of “self” was us, not me. Welcome to the pronoun crisis.
Cities, at their hearts, are not an echo chamber for the elite but rather platforms for massive sharing. Our voices, our collective participation, and our common goals and resources form the very core of what makes a city so much more than a collection of buildings inhabited by disparate people. In the words of Jane Jacobs, “Cities have the capability for providing something for everybody, only because and only when, they are created by everybody’’. Both Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom shaped our discourse about cities as places for people to flourish. Each brilliantly and fervently declared the supreme risk for the future of humanity in confusing the empty calories of materialism with stewardship for communities and the commons—the heart of our cities.
The umbrella of the commons includes raw materials like clean air and water, as well as the natural, intellectual and spiritual rights that inherently belong to all beings. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, our community scope had a much narrower focus and what we shared was of far greater value than anything each of us may have individually owned or desired. Success and happiness were shaped by how we all were doing, and our concept of “self” was us, not me. Welcome to the pronoun crisis.
Concurrent with the 2008 recession, people around the world began waking up and shaking off the tolerance for inequality and waning societal voice. We are all connected, and technology has played a pivotal role in making that essential reality undeniably conspicuous. In an age where climate challenges can fiercely and suddenly rearrange human existence, we are forced to acknowledge that we exist within a global society. The fantasy of the self as a unit has gone from creating a sense of security to unveiling intense vulnerability. Our connectedness is our most crucial gift, if we embrace it.
In the 20th century, most of humanity awoke into a finite game. The basic concept of a finite game is that to win, you must acquire more than me—in fact, you seek to gain from everyone everywhere. If you’re getting a Monopoly vibe, you’re on the right track, because the finite game is the very definition of “winner takes all”. So last century! In 2016, we are at the beginning of a societal shift in our Social Operating System—that is, we are rapidly adopting new aspirations, expectations and desires driven by a change in the core organizing principles of learning, work, communities and governments. We’re evolving towards the Infinite Game, where “winning” means you work to keep the most people in the game for as long as possible, and real success manifests in the game that never ends.
Interdependence
As we embark on an era of climate challenges, urban population explosion, institutional distrust, and massive philosophical polarity by citizens from Delhi to Dubai and Paris to Philadelphia, we are in the midst of a dissolution of institutional power and the rebirth of the commons. People around the world are conspicuously connected and are finding their voice unleashing the we that’s been idly enduring for decades. Nuit Debout gatherings spontaneously held nightly in Paris, rekindle public discourse while physically occupying the city’s commons—every pubic square, park and crevice holds the promise of reuniting people with a shared passion for creating community, animating citizenship and provoking unbounded participation.
Over the past eight years, I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with instigators from cities everywhere. Ouishare, a French born collective of vocal, creative and inspired people, have convened thousands of people to explore topics like the new face of work, collaborative design, tools for creative autonomy and are growing their international community quite organically and powerfully. Ouishare has created alliances with governments, large established corporations, WEF’s global shapers network and vital pockets of inspiration like Enspiral. More than any other community on the planet, I’ve been equally delighted and priviledged to conspire and learn from the fertile substrate that is Ouishare.
When I first encountered Jane Jacobs, I was a young student of economics being taught the conventional models of neoclassical economics, models whose purpose was to describe equilibrium states of the economy, or economic perfection.
What kind of solution does complexity science offer to the kind of problem a city is? The phenomenon of emergence.
The contents of Death and Life of Great American Cities, as well as the follow-ups, The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations, described an economic theory based not on perfection but on change. Through simple observation, Jane Jacobs detailed how the process of capital accumulation, both social and industrial, transformed cities towards greater wealth. She described how the variety of buildings and industries in a city, through a process by which the city’s physical and social structure adapts to itself iteratively, was the reason for its success. And ultimately, she proved how attempts to design an architecturally and economically perfect city, a city that has reached equilibrium, were pointless and self-destructive.
But if cities are impossible to architect to perfection, are we condemned to suffer total randomness and noise in urban space? While this was the proposition that Rem Koolhaas held in his analysis of postmodern urbanism, Jane Jacobs foresaw the rise of a new science of multivariable problems and solutions, to which she dedicated the last chapter of Death and Life, and which has arisen in our time under the umbrella term complexity science.
What kind of solution does complexity science offer to the kind of problem a city is? The phenomenon of emergence. Emergence occurs when many individuals collaborate and form links, connecting their collective efforts into a superstructure that supports their life and growth. It has been observed in termites, in simple computer programs called cellular automata, and it can also be observed in the world’s most attractive towns and cities, built by many cooperating individuals over centuries of changing economic fortunes and technologies.
Simple symmetry within window frames and sashes can connect old and new construction into larger, emergent patterns, freeing more expensive construction processes to use what is economical, and allowing adaptation of building uses to current needs. Photo: Old Montréal, by Mathieu Hélie
In these urban spaces, the connections formed by building acts over decades and centuries to create an increasingly complex landscape. Examples such as the Greek island of Santorini, or the inner city of Paris, show that emergent patterns of symmetry can generate long chains of harmonious spaces that attract residents and visitors, while providing for the perfectly adapted diversity of buildings and uses that are necessary for a city to be alive and growing.
If we can observe this phenomenon of emergence in historic cities, how can it be applied in modern cities? This is where the work of Elinor Ostrom becomes relevant. Ostrom, like Jacobs, enlarged the language of economics from its neoclassical orthodoxy by suggesting that public (state-provided) and private (market-provided) goods were not the only possible categories of economic goods, but that “common pool resources” also existed, where resources were too large and too variable to be efficiently subdivided, but could be produced through collaborating appropriators.
Emergent cities, I believe, are made through such collaborations by neighbors, similar to how emergent patterns are formed by neighbors in some cellular automata. The conditions described by Ostrom for the successful management of common pool resources could be the missing urban governance model that generates complex towns and cities.
Natural forest fragments within cities can be regarded as common-pool resources (CPRs) in that they are resources “used” by a wide variety of people. CPR is a term first coined by Elinor Ostrom, and city parks fit this definition because they are frequented by hikers, joggers, wildlife watchers and nature enthusiasts, and pet walkers.
How can a societal “norm” be developed where citizens recreate in parks in a sustainable manner?
At the same time, these city forests provide habitat for a variety of wildlife species, including birds, mammals, and insects. While this common-pool resource is owned by local or state governments, these forested areas are really self-managed by the local community, and day-to-day decisions by citizens can have substantial impacts on whether the forests continue to provide viable wildlife habitat. Thus, these forests are common property systems that need to be governed by common property protocols. An ecological balance can be achieved where people can recreate while maintaining the integrity of wildlife habitat.
A family enjoying a park in Portland, Oregon. Photo: www.travelportland.com
Elinor Ostrom studied a variety of common-pool resources, such as grazing lands, and demonstrated and championed the idea that these resources can be successfully managed by the people using them instead of being managed solely through a government institution. For forest parks and other semi-natural conserved areas in cities, there needs to be an engaged community in order to promote the conservation of wildlife habitat. Daily use by various people, living nearby and elsewhere, can have dramatically negative impacts on wildlife habitat. As I have previously argued, imagine ATV vehicles running off the trails into the forest and people letting dogs run off leash. Cumulatively, these individual decisions can destroy wildlife habitat and disrupt foraging and breeding activities of wildlife in these parks.
Thus, how do we promote “win-win” situations where these parks are enjoyed by the local populace and inhabited by a diversity of flora and fauna species? City park managers can create policies that are designed to “regulate” users to prevent misuse of the parks, such as for illegal dumping of trash. However, policing the parks, especially with limited funding and personnel, is not realistic in many cities around the world. Thus, users of the park need to cooperate on a level where their collective actions create sustainable recreation activities that minimize impacts on wildlife populations.
This cooperative governance, as advocated by Elinor, works if stakeholders are motivated by an economic return and have access to information about the consequences of their actions. For example, livestock owners, in a commonly used pasture, must be able to estimate the carrying capacity of the pasture and have an adequate monitoring system that indicates when the area is overstocked. In city parks, an economically motivated and informed populace does not exist. No direct economic return comes back to the users, and most do not know the consequence of their actions concerning the ecological integrity of a park.
This is a conundrum. Most cities cannot “regulate” all the users of the park and, collectively, users have neither the economic motivation nor ecological understanding of the consequences of their actions. How to create a societal “norm” where citizens recreate in parks in a sustainable manner?
I would suggest that city parks need to have educational programs that speak to sustainable behaviors, both in and outside of the parks. Sustainable behaviors include everything from staying on the trails to actions people take within their own yards and neighborhoods located next to parks (for details, click here). For instance, an active colony of feral cats in a nearby neighborhood could have huge consequences for wildlife in a park. Nearby neighborhoods should have educational opportunities to learn about connections between management of neighborhoods and their potential impacts on parks. In addition, “Friends of [a named park]” or such voluntary groups should be established, giving opportunities for citizens to help maintain and even restore sections of a park. These activities will help promote “ownership” of the park and create a functional, cooperative governance, along the lines of Elinor Ostrom’s work.
Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom are both well known for developing design principles. For Jacobs, it was design principles for planning cities that considered the interaction of physical design with social space at multiple scales. For Ostrom, it was design principles, or a set of social and ecological conditions, necessary for successful community-scale management of common pool resources.
As Jacobs and Ostrom demonstrated, empirically-grounded insights can lead to new understandings of social-ecological systems.
In each case, the methods they used and the way they went about deriving these design principles are what fascinate me. Jane Jacobs wrote of the neighborhood scale, “eyes on the street”, and the way that the vitality and diversity of neighborhoods enables a city to function as a system. She understood these things through the power of observation—through essentially inductive research. Elinor Ostrom asked the question: under what conditions can common pool resources be sustainably managed by a community? She built large datasets of lists and case studies that enabled her to identify a set of conditions where sustainable management actually was possible.
Both Jacobs and Ostrom examined systems from the bottom up, using rich empirical datasets, which provided a very different picture of a system than taking a bird’s eye view. In essence, the way they approached their work enabled another way of seeing the system—of an alternative to Robert Moses’ top-down planning in New York City and Garrett Hardin’s recommendation to regulate the commons, regardless of local conditions.
It is this idea of another way of seeing that I bring to my work—both in further understanding the urban social-ecological system in which we live and also looking to the possibilities of the future. Below, I share an example of each:
Understanding the system
At the New York City Urban Field Station, I have had the good fortune to join colleagues (Erika Svendsen and Lindsay Campbell) that research urban environmental stewardship. In New York City, there are over 2,800 stewardship organizations that care for the urban environment, working from the scale of a street corner to the entire five boroughs and beyond. These organizations are working in shared public space, towards common and diverse ends, and in communication and isolation from other organizations and government. Walking down the street, however, you may not be aware of their presence. Social space can sometimes be rendered invisible in cities. A cornerstone of stewardship research in New York City is the Stewardship and Assessment Mapping Project (STEW-MAP), started in 2007. Through this project, we mapped social space alongside green space, enabling others to, in essence, “see” the presence of these stewardship organizations. Organizations responded to a survey that addressed organizational characteristics, networks, and stewardship “turfs”, or areas where organizations worked. We included the results on an online, public map at OASIS. Efforts are underway for a decadal repeat in 2017, to examine how this set of organizations engaged in environmental stewardship has changed over time—in capacity, in location, in emphasis, and in communication and exchange with others.
Possibilities for the future
Switching gears from what is to what could be—thinking about the future and what could be is a difficult task. Past research has shown that one’s idea of the future becomes very fuzzy or goes blank after 10 to 15 years in the future. Yet, planning efforts are for the long-term—many comprehensive plans look 20 to 30 years in the future. Using an alternative futures approach to planning enables a community to see other possibilities than what is. This is particularly important where a community does not want the status quo to remain. Alternative futures, or scenarios, can be in written and/or visual formats—in the forms of stories, pictures, graphs, and maps. I am interested in scenarios not just as a tool for seeing what could be, but also, perhaps, as tools for increasing the breadth and depth of discussion about the future in cities and regions. Some research of mine, soon to be available in the journal Land Use Policy, has focused on how seeing alternative futures may affect an individual’s willingness to participate in planning activities. Reading a set of scenarios increased willingness to participate, but also increased self-efficacy, the concept that one can contribute to an outcome. Because of this, I see scenarios as a communication tool with the potential to increase the diversity of those involved in planning for communities’ futures.
Perhaps both of these projects I describe here—of mapping stewardship and understanding the impact of scenarios—may also lead down the path from new ways of seeing towards contributing to design principles for cities and regions. What a lofty goal, but what great examples we have in Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom to point the way, through their demonstration of how empirically-grounded insights can lead to new understandings of social-ecological systems.
Marianne Krasny is professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Director of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University, and leader of EPA’s national environmental education training program (“EECapacity”).
Search “environmental education” on Google images and you will be hard pressed to find anything that looks like a city. So what does environmental education have to do with cities, let alone Ostrom’s notions of polycentric governance?
Urban environmental education can work alongside other actors to enhance Ostrom’s polycentric governance systems.
One place to look for an answer is in recent scholarship about urban environmental education. We asked 82 scholars from 18 countries to contribute to a forthcoming textbook called the Urban Environmental Education Review (Russ and Krasny, Cornell University Press, 2017). Three themes emerged from the 30 chapters in the book: place, participation, and partnership.
Place as a theme in environmental education dates back to the turn of the 20th century. Concerned about children losing opportunities to learn from nature as farm families uprooted to cities, Cornell nature educators Anna Botsford Comstock and Liberty Hyde Bailey called for lessons to take place in urban nature. A century later, Richard Louv sounded the alarm about children spending too little time in nature in his book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. Chapter authors in our book take the notion of place one step beyond spending time in nature. They talk about how, through engagement in hands-on community gardening, oyster restoration, and other civic ecology practices, as well as in urban planning and policy-making, environmental education participants are helping to re-construct and re-create cities and urban nature, while also developing an ecological place meaning.
Participation as a theme in urban environmental education has a more recent history. Starting in the 1970s, then-PhD student Arjen Wals was researching environmental education in Detroit. He quickly realized that the curriculum developed at the University of Michigan was not going to work. His research helped launch a participatory action trend in environmental education, where youth help address local environmental problems through activities ranging from monitoring water quality to providing testimony at city council meetings. The Danes later expanded on this work, including Jeppe Laessoe, who proposed four types of participatory practices in environmental education—participation as encounters with nature, as social learning, as action, and as deliberative dialogue.
Participation in deliberative dialogue is linked to the third theme in our book—partnerships. Nearly every chapter describes the partnerships involved in conducting environmental education programs. Two chapters go one step further and explicitly focus on how environmental education organizations are actors in urban environmental governance networks. Whether the theme is intergenerational environmental education, environmental justice, or restoration-based education, the chapters mention the government, NGO, and business partners involved in the work.
If you gaze across the Bronx River from the youth organization Rocking the Boat, you can see Soundview Park, one of thousands of actors in green space stewardship and governance in New York City. According to Svendsen and Campbell (2008), nearly 70 percent of environmental stewardship organizations in NYC provide environmental education. Similarly, according to research of the SURGE project, a quarter of civil society organizations engaged in green space governance in 20 European cities provided education, and Enqvist has described how in Bangalore, India, one of the most important achievements cited by members of a green space governance network was raising public awareness about environmental issues.
In short, organizations that conduct environmental education are actors in governance networks in cities in Europe, India, and the U.S.—these are the very networks that form polycentric governance systems, which Ostrom demonstrated are critical to management and policy. So what does environmental education have to contribute to these environmental governance networks in cities?
We contend that environmental education is more than kids hugging trees—its participants do everything from mapping green space to documenting environmental injustices in videos, from restoring dunes to helping design pocket parks. As actors in governance networks, environmental education practitioners and scholars bring expertise in participatory approaches to addressing environmental issues, and in approaches that help residents understand and re-construct urban place—including its green infrastructure. We need to look at both sides of the river. Environmental educators can become aware of their role in governance networks—and share their insights with other governance actors (using place-based and participatory approaches). And other organizations in governance networks can seek out the expertise of environmental educators. In this way, urban environmental education can work alongside other actors to enhance Ostrom’s polycentric governance systems that are desperately needed in managing urban green space.
Alex Kudryavtsev (pen name: Alex Russ) is an online course instructor for EECapacity, an EPA-funded environment educator training project led by Cornell University and NAAEE.
Harini Nagendra is a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. She uses social and ecological approaches to examine the factors shaping the sustainability of forests and cities in the south Asian context. Her books include “Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities” and "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities" (Penguin India, 2023) (with Seema Mundoli), and “The Bangalore Detectives Club” historical mystery series set in 1920s colonial India.
The importance of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom’s ideas for urban commons in new and growing cities
The rapid growth of cities is changing the world in unprecedented ways. Across the world, long-enduring, sustainable rural landscapes transform into places of flux and chaos, as millions of migrants pour in to cities as far flung as Mumbai, São Paulo, and Kinshasa. What does the work of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom—scholar-practitioners of cities, whose urban work was largely located in North America—have to say in these contexts? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Local communities often intuitively know what is best for their own environments. They must be involved.
Growing cities face a challenge of the loss of community. This is particularly visible in peri-urban areas, which are self organized, and tend to lack intervention by formal urban planners. City fringes have a unique spatial character, with high fragmentation of urban land use, large fluxes of people, the domination of renters over home owners, and of recent migrants over long-term residents. Neighbourhoods are faced with the challenge of mobilising social capital for civic action in a governance gap, where city governments do little by the way of providing basic urban services.
Yet cities are also places for being exposed to, and appreciating, the new. How does one create “new commons” that enable disparate groups of migrants from different corners of the world to not just co-habit and co-exist, but also to appreciate and capitalise on their differences, using these productively to build new ideas, devise new skills, and forge new political approaches to collaboration? Here is where the work of Jane Jacobs on the importance of the home and neighbourhood in building communities and urban commons gains special importance. In low-income areas for instance, urban ecosystems tend to become locations of disservices rather than services, with water bodies becoming polluted, disease-infested sewage ponds, and groves of trees acting as rodent-infested nodes of crime and drugs, for instance. Yet in slums of Bangalore, for instance, women often expend tremendous effort to create small patches of greenery, planting shrubs with pretty flowers and sacred trees at lane crossings to brighten up their daily lives and provide shaded spaces for women to gather, play a game of cards, groom each other, and build social capital.
Certain types of urban ecosystems act as catalysts and antidotes to the loss of community, fostering a sense of place. Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons points to the importance of local context in shaping governance of the commons. Both Ostrom’s research and Jacobs’ careful observations of city life tell us that it is for people to get involved in, and in fact to vision, drive, and shape the outcomes of urban restoration. Mere planting of trees, or restoration of degraded wetlands and lakes will not guarantee urban renewal. A good example is the much touted “Million Tree” planting initiatives in many major U.S. cities. As several cities discovered, this process was driven mostly by city governments relying heavily on short term contract labour, with the result that neighbourhoods were disengaged from this process. Planting trees purely for aesthetic reasons, or driven by seemingly abstract motivations of biodiversity, does not take into account the context-specific needs and motivations of local residents. These could be considerations of sacredness in India, or of food in South Africa, or of both in China. This is an important lesson that emerges from the writings of both Jacobs and Ostrom, both of whom were keen, astute, and engaged actors in their own communities of practice.
Community gardens are a particularly exciting example of urban renewal, where people begin with gardening but often end up going well beyond this, engaging in transformative city change via acts as diverse as community entrepreneurship and engagement with city politics. Peri-urban landscapes in growing cities, being less crowded, can offer greater possibilities of open space for community gardening in comparison to older city centres, where land availability is typically scarce. These new spatial commons can provide powerful ways to integrate disparate groups of migrants speaking different languages, with different gardening skills, into close-knit communities of practice: thereby also making cities more welcoming and livable spaces for poor migrants who may often arrive in cities under situations of distress and insecurity.
Thus, there is much that growing cities can learn from the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom. A first and important idea is that local communities often intuitively know what is best for their own environments, a fact that planning experts still refuse to recognise. Ironically, despite the lament expressed about “unplanned” urbanization in the global South, this may in fact offer unique opportunities to build sustainable local commons in new urban areas across the world. A second aspect, stressed by both Ostrom and Jacobs, is that for local commons to emerge, strong sense of place is needed, built around local socio-cultural and ecological identity. The third is the importance of co-production and of multi-level governance—of city governments to recognize that they must co-design and co-produce neighbourhoods with local communities, rather than tear down and rebuild based on supposedly modern ideas of aesthetics.
Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom pointed to the importance of getting the process right, to achieve the outcomes we desire. Growing cities represent challenges but also opportunities to do things right, if we follow the basic principles that they so clearly, and thoughtfully, outline.
Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Public Policy at CIDE in Mexico. Raul’s research is interdisciplinary by nature, lying at the intersection of space, public policy, environment, and society. He is primarily interested in understanding the factors that contribute to (or hinder) cooperation in natural resource governance.
Two great women, two paradigms, one lasting legacy?
I am thrilled to join this global roundtable for The Nature of Cities on the topics of Elinor Ostrom and Jane Jacobs’ strong influences in how cities are built, operated, planned, designed, and lived within. Even if many people who have read Elinor Ostrom may not think that she had something to say about how cities are governed, much of her work focused on the governance of polycentric urban systems, particularly how public service delivery in metropolitan areas could pool resources and offer a more efficient model to serve citizens. Her early work on metropolitan resource allocation followed much of what her husband, Vincent Ostrom, had posited in 1961, but expanding it to resource governance made a long-lasting contribution.
Would Jane Jacobs agree with the unaffordability of Vancouver, where she implemented many of her teachings?
Jane Jacobs is very well known for her contributions to urban planning, although much less recognized for her understanding of economic development and growth. Her legacy is undeniable, and one of the most popular models for understanding a city through walking around it, Jane’s Walks, emerged as a response to her growing influence in how we see and understand cities.
I have a personal connection to both Elinor Ostrom and Jane Jacobs, even though I only met one of them (Elinor). My connection to Jacobs derives from the fact that I am a Vancouverite (from the Main and 16th Avenue area, in Mount Pleasant), and for 20 years of my life, before moving to Mexico, I saw firsthand the results of Jane Jacobs’ influence on Vancouver’s urban form. This urban design paradigm, called Vancouverism, is one of those long-lasting legacies of Jane Jacobs. The idea of a livable city, with high-density high rise buildings, mixed-use neighbourhoods and walkable areas, short distances to work, and sustainable transit, is at the core of the Vancouverism paradigm. Most importantly, Vancouverism as a legacy of Jane Jacobs is a way of looking at urban planning and urban design that integrates human beings and their needs at the core of the planning process. That said, and contrary to the legacy of Elinor Ostrom, Vancouverism has become a model of designing cities that has all but forgotten the need for collaborative processes to understand individual needs. Vancouver is considered one of the most (if not THE most) unaffordable cities in the world. How could a city that is so focused on being “livable” end up becoming one of the least affordable? Would Jane Jacobs agree with this unintended result of her teachings?
I met Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom on a sunny afternoon in 2002, when they visited Vancouver and The University of British Columbia and spent time there as visiting professors. I went out for lunch with the Ostroms and spent hours pondering the musings of common pool resource theory: the crazy idea that communities and entire societies were able to collaborate and cooperate amongst themselves to avoid excessive overconsumption and resource depletion. Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that for many resources, cooperation was possible by creating a collaborative framework of strong resource allocation and use rules as well as robust compliance and enforcement mechanisms. This cooperative approach would be possibly escalated at the community, city, and regional levels through polycentric governance models.
While both Elinor Ostrom and Jane Jacobs have had a very profound impact on my own work and life because of my interest and research in urban water governance, I am much more aligned with Ostrom’s work because I believe that water in cities should be governed not through a top-down paradigm (much like Vancouverism perpetuates, and much along the lines of what Jacobs would suggest), but instead through a bottom-up model where the emergence of polycentric governance is the result of collaborations across multiple stakeholders.
I celebrate both of their works, but I am keen to see whose legacy is more durable on the topic of urban planning and cities’ governance.
Michael W Mehaffy, Ph.D., is an author, researcher, educator, and practitioner in urban design and strategic urban development, with an international practice based in Portland, Oregon.
Just now we are seeing a welcome reassessment of Jane Jacobs’ work, around the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her birth. Unlike previous re-assessments (e.g., on the 50th anniversary of Death and Life, her best-known book) this one does not seem to have much of a revisionist momentum. Instead it seems to take seriously the idea that there is still a lot more to unpack, and to take forward.
If we fail to fully utilize the creative power of physical people and their interactions within public spaces, we are going to be in increasing trouble.
In part this may be because the occasion of her birthday is an unseemly moment to join in the ignorant revisionism that previously painted her as a libertarian ideologue, or a quixotic warrior against inevitable “modern” progress, or a closet racist, or an elitist who happily encouraged gentrification—depictions that are all fantasies, wholly unsupported by evidence. (I commented on these issues earlier.)
Perhaps, though, the greater insight on offer this time reflects a genuine maturing of the discourse, recognizing some commonality in our understanding of the nature of our challenges today, and Jacobs’ helpful role in clarifying them. In this consilience we can see strong parallels to the works of others, and in my own work I have explored parallels to Christopher Alexander, Bruno Latour, René Thom, Alfred North Whitehead, Henry George, and others.
To that list we can make the notable addition of Elinor Ostrom, whose work on commons-based economics, and culture, won her a Nobel Prize, among other accolades. Her model can best be described as a network of polycentric organizations whose business is managing a resource commons. There are strong parallels to Jacobs’ “web way of thinking” and to Chris Alexander’s attack on modernist planning for creating “cities as trees”, mathematically speaking. Following Alexander’s work, we might summarize Ostrom’s insights as “commons governance is not a tree”.
Ostrom did express a debt to Jacobs’ insights for her own work, and the philosophical connection between them is easy to see. Aside from the web-network approach to problem-solving, both acknowledged that economic productivity is not simply about the linear transformations of inert resources within a commons, but about how human beings interact within that physical and urban commons to create and manage the transformations, whose structure is quite complex. Jacobs’ less well known books on that economic topic are marvels of insight, building on the more directly urban insights of Death and Life.
In essence, Jacobs said, economic expansion happens as the result of creative differentiation, and that creativity is firmly rooted in the physical structure of a city (or town) and its public spaces. This is the stage for the “sidewalk ballet”, the physical anchor of the social network in which people encounter one another, are introduced to strangers, make connections, and begin the process of creating “knowledge spillovers”—the exchanges that create new syntheses and new efficiencies from existing resources. (They are now called “Jacobs Spillovers” in honor of her seminal work.)
Other networks are important too—professional, electronic, and so on—but they must supplement, and not replace, the physical system consisting of physical people and their interactions within public spaces. (This is a core reason, economically speaking, why we create cities at all.) But if we try to get rid of this core network, or fail to fully utilize its creative power, we are going to be in increasing trouble. So we are.
The alternative response—very much on display around the world today—is simply to increase the rate at which we are plundering natural assets beyond the planet’s carrying capacity. This is a miserable approach, not only because it is fundamentally unsustainable, but because it systematically degrades quality of life beyond a few pockets of momentary excess. Its urban manifestation is sprawl, what Leon Krier has called our “collective obesity.” It is the “crack cocaine” of economic development—a quick and intense high, followed by a planetary hangover.
Jacobs warned of the terrible consequences of this continued approach—not only for the depletion of resources, but for the erosion of the foundations of human institutions, and the “dark age ahead” if we do not get a handle on it (the title of her last admonitory book). Ostrom, too, pointed to the dangers of an overly rigid approach, a model of “governance as a tree,” and its increasing institutional, economic, and ecological failures.
To transition away from this unsustainable era, we are going to need powerful tools and insights, and we are lucky that Jacobs and Ostrom have offered us several of the most powerful. To them we could add, among others, Henry George and his economics of the Commons, conserved in part by a taxation system that supports increases in its creative and efficient uses. (Essentially, consumption of resources including land is taxed more heavily than human creativity, which penalizes depletion and waste, and rewards doing more with less.) We urgently need these systemic changes to our economic feedback systems, especially around so-called “externalities”, as Jacobs and Ostrom both pointed out.
When she died, Jacobs was known to be working on a book with the subject of “the coming age of human capital”. By that she seemed to mean, the age in which we will replace the stripping of massive quantities of natural resources out of the Earth at unsustainable rates, with the creation of a no less prosperous time—indeed a more prosperous time, because it will focus on true prosperity: the ability to live a fulfilling life of creative richness and beauty, within our own means. We had better get to work on that essential goal.
Mary W. Rowe is an urbanist and civic entrepreneur. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada, the traditional territories of the Anishinabewaki, Huron-Wendat and Haudenosauneega Confederacy, and works with government, business and civil society organizations to strengthen the economic, social, cultural and environmental resilience of the city and its neighborhoods.
Elinor Ostrom and Jane Jacobs, and the power of self-organization
It’s interesting that two women outside the traditional field of economics have made such remarkable contributions to our understanding of the economy. Both rose to prominence in fields dominated by men, pursuing independent careers in the 1960s, just as Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring laid out their brilliant indictments of the status quo put in place by men. Up came Jacobs and Ostrom, too, calling out the emperors in their respective domains.
Cities are a product of the natural human impulse to self–organize—how we gather, and derive mutual benefit, from all that we hold in common.
Elinor Ostrom was, in fact, trained as a political scientist, having been rejected by UCLA for their PhD program in economics, because she hadn’t done the math. (We all sympathize.) She opted for political science instead, and went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics some 35 years later for her seminal work on governance models for the commons, and particularly common-pooled resources, which she eventually laid out in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.
Jane Jacobs had no advanced degree, other than continuing education credits from Columbia she earned while working as a magazine journalist. Her intellectual interests were famously varied; she read widely where her curiosity led, including metallurgy, geology, and biology. She went on to write arguably the most influential book on city development of the 20th century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and then subsequent volumes on the crucial role of cities in the economy. Late in her life, there was talk about a potential nomination for the Nobel Prize, but it was seen as unfathomable that it would be bestowed on a non-academic, let alone one who perhaps only graduated high school.
The incisive trait that both these women share is their power of observation, perhaps borne from their curiosity to understand how human behavior actually works. Most strikingly, each advocated for policy approaches to their domains of interest that were predicated on the capacity of human behaviour to self-organize, regulate, and course correct, without government regulation or intrusion.
Ostrom focused on ‘common pooled resources’ like fisheries and pasture-land, and how local governance strategies could be effective in both generating needed incomes and stewarding the long term survival of the asset. Jacobs’ focus was the city, which she viewed as a commons of places and spaces and functions that made possible both productive individual lives and generative collective pursuits. Both averred grand-schemed, one-size-fits all approaches, imposed by governments at the exclusion of the particulars of every circumstance. Ostrom preferred an Adaptive Governance approach, locally tailored, where layered systems could be applied and adjusted based on results. (Resilience advocates, take note).
In her last published piece (published on the day of her death, in fact) “Green from the Grassroots”, Ostrom spoke cautiously about assuming that a global agreement on climate change from the UN Rio+20 meeting would be the answer:
“Decades of research demonstrate that a variety of overlapping policies at city, subnational, national, and international levels is more likely to succeed than are single, overarching binding agreements. Such an evolutionary approach to policy provides essential safety nets should one or more policies fail… “.
She concludes that article:
“…Worldwide, we are seeing a heterogeneous collection of cities interacting in a way that could have far-reaching influence on how Earth’s entire life-support system evolves. These cities are learning from one another, building on good ideas and jettisoning poorer ones. Los Angeles took decades to implement pollution controls, but other cities, like Beijing, converted rapidly when they saw the benefits. In the coming decades, we may see a global system of interconnected sustainable cities emerging. If successful, everyone will want to join the club”.
Hard to imagine a more Jacobean sentiment that that.
In a 1998 interview with the journal Government Technology, Jacobs said “I hate the government for making my life absurd”, which was more a pointed objection to how often government got it wrong and required citizen activism to oppose wrong-headed policies. But more fundamentally, Jacobs knew from observation, that the city and its economy behaved like an organism, and would naturally course-correct, and adapt to changing conditions, if enabled to do so. Like Ostrom, she deduced that people could in fact pursue their individual interests, while at the same time recognize the importance of collaboration and mutual trust. Government intervention was too often overly proscriptive and controlling, large-scale, and imposing general rules to particular conditions. And failing. Ostrom and Jacobs agreed: better that local communities—of fisherman, of park users, of stock exchanges—develop systems of self-organization that put in place locally-specific feedback loops to alert users that a course correction is needed.
Jacobs and Ostrom are thought leaders in understanding the particularity of human ecology, providing a badly needed bridge between the misanthropic purists of the environmental movement (who for decades have seen people as the problem, preferring they just go away…) and a more holistic understanding that places people, and their cities, as an integral part of the ecosystems they inhabit.
Following the success of Death and Life, Jacobs continued for another 40 years to explore the dynamics of contemporary life, and its economy, and the values systems that underpin and sustain it. Ostrom’s ideas gestated for years before Governing was released, and appear to have continued to evolve. How interested they both would be to see how digital technology is enabling a more prudent stewardship of common pooled resources—urban and rural—as a renewed sharing economy emerges that reduces deleterious impacts and economizes use.
To what extent was their perspective shaped by their gender? And their temperaments? And their personal experience: both experienced their greatest successes later in their careers, each writing well into the last years of their lives. I only knew Jacobs, but I wonder if Ostrom, too, saw the world with empathic eyes, trained by years of close observation?
Just as this blog continues to make clear, nature and cities are one. Cities are a product of the natural human impulse to self–organize—how we gather, and derive mutual benefit, from all that we hold in common.
Laura Shillington is faculty in the Department of Geoscience and the Social Science Methods Programme at John Abbott College (Montréal). She is also a Research Associate at the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre, Concordia University (Montréal).
Everyday streets and local institutions: Jacobs and Ostrom’s everyday scales
Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom were seminal figures in their respective fields. Both were on my comprehensive reading lists for my doctoral exams—albeit for different fields. Jane Jacobs was on my list for urban geography and Elinor Ostrom for my human-environment/political ecology list. My third list was feminist geography. Seemingly disparate fields, but there were two key ideas that tied these lists together: the concepts of socio-natural relations (or socio-ecology) and scale.
The attention to the importance of the everyday scale is, in my opinion, what made Jacobs and Ostrom so influential and visionary.
As a trained feminist political ecologist, I am interested in socio-nature relations at the everyday scale. And both Jacobs and Ostrom were female scholars who paid attention to the scale of the everyday. While neither Jacobs nor Ostrom considered themselves feminist scholars, their attention to the everyday scale paralleled feminist analyses of the home, streets, city and country. Feminist geographers have long insisted that everyday spaces (such as the home and community) are intimately tied up with a myriad of relations and processes in other places and scales. Such analysis has been critical to changing the way we understand different spaces, and Ostrom and Jacobs were forerunners in showing how social-ecologies are just as scaled as the social processes that feminist scholars examined. Jacobs and Ostrom used the scale of the everyday to emphasise two key points: the importance of paying attention to the everyday scale, and the embeddedness of the everyday in larger scale processes.
Both Jacobs and Ostrom showed how the decisions and negotiations that took place at the everyday scale (the household, community and streets) were critical to understanding how the city in Jacob’s case and natural resources in Ostrom’s work are used, viewed, experienced, and managed. Jacobs wrote about the link between urban neighbourhoods and urban economics. Her everyday space was the street. The street was where the private and public spaces intersected, where diversity was created and economies born. For Jacobs, the aggregation of quotidian routines was what produced vibrant city spaces and economies. Scattered throughout her early writings were references to urban nature and the importance of these to daily life and economies in cities. She saw economies, social life, and nature as very connected and necessary for a well-functioning city:
“The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.” —Jacobs 1992 [1961], p. 111
The neighbourhood was, for Jacobs, a key space in producing liveable, lively cities. Jacobs viewed local communities as critical resources for day-to-day well-being. She wrote about acts that took place on streets in neighbourhoods and in parks that keep them safe, lively, and diverse. Her phrase “eyes on the street” has been widely quoted. Indeed, Jacobs’ eyes on the streets can be understood as the rules and small-scale institutions in Ostrom’s work.
Ostrom’s scale of the everyday also comprised the individual and the community. She saw the community as a key player in governing society and argued that communities (of individuals) are also institutions. Ostrom was concerned about the limited definition of institutions typically used in political science (in particular based solely on the market and state) and redefined institution to include the rules and processes at work in the everyday.
“Institutions are the prescriptions that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions including those within families, neighborhoods, markets, firms, sports, leagues, churches, private associations, and governments at all scales” —Ostrom 2005, p. 3
Using her definition of institutions and rules, she countered Hardin’s tragedy of the commons by arguing that governing the commons is not only done by the market or state (as Hardin contends). Rather, because institutions are much more complex, diverse, and scalar, she argued that governing common resources is also done through local institutions where individuals and communities are able to create the ‘rules of the game’. Individuals and communities, Ostrom suggested, have intimate knowledge of how natural resources are understood and used on a daily basis. As such, rules created by local individuals and their institutions matter.
At the same time that they both stressed the importance of everyday life, they also recognised that everyday life was never separate from the larger scale economic and political processes. Jacobs’ early work was heavily critiqued for her lack of connection to broader processes. This is something she addresses in later works, where she makes clear links between her everyday streets and larger urban spaces and economies. Her key argument was that the stimulating effects of diverse economies and the neighbourhood scale created larger urban economies. The everyday scale caused urban economic development, which in turn produced economic development in areas outside cities. As Soja (2009) comments, Jacobs argued that cities created economic development “…not because people are smarter in cities but rather because urban densities and proximities produce a concentration of need and increased incentives to think about problems in new ways” (p. 269).
Similar to Jacobs, Ostrom also contended that local communities were very capable of managing natural resources sustainably by developing rules for extraction, appropriation, and use. She did not romanticise the community, however, and was very aware that the community was one scale in a complex landscape. In 2009, Ostrom wrote an article in Science outlining a general framework for analysing the sustainability of social-ecological systems. She argued that “all humanly used resources are embedded in complex social-ecological systems (SES),” which is shaped by interconnected scales: resource system (e.g., a coastal fishery), resource units (e.g., lobsters), users (fishers), and governance systems (organizations and rules that govern fishing on the coast)(p. 419).
The attention to the importance of the everyday scale is, in my opinion, what made Jacobs and Ostrom so influential and visionary. Without a view from the street (whether it be urban or rural), we have only a partial understanding of how socio-ecological systems function.
References:
Jacobs, J. (1992 [1961]) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books
Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding institutional diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ostrom, E. (2009) A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems, Science 32 (July 24): 419-422.
Soja, E. (2009) Regional Planning and Development Theories, in R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, pp. 259-270. Oxford: Elsevier
The first armload of heavy “textbooks” I lugged out of my college bookstore included The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. As a wide-eyed teenager on my own for the first time, the weight of choosing a course of study was also heavy. An instructor presented Jacobs’ observations of the social valuables on display in plain sight in Great Cities. Her methods were inspiring, and they provided comforting answers in a complex world. As I commenced a life in landscape architecture and urban design, Death and Life remained a guide, a gospel even, frequently referenced by colleagues, clients, and citizens.
Jacobs described nature and culture as two separate entities—a position that will limit the relevance of her work in contemporary urban socio-ecology.
I carried with me her courageous resistance to the powerful city gatekeepers she saw in opposition to the well-being of regular people, especially the marginalized and poor. I carried with me her exquisite observations of the nuances of everyday city life, and their widely adopted metrics for good and bad urban design. I declared an intention to visit her New York City’s Greenwich Village. It was painted with colors she argued did not exist in the dull, lifeless suburbs surrounding the farm where I grew up. She assured me that Boston’s North End was a suitable surrogate if I couldn’t make it to the urban pot of gold on the Hudson River.
As I began to think about the similarities between urban activist Jane Jacobs and political economist Elinor Ostrom, I realized that I had not read Death and Life since college. In the 20-years since, I lived in Jacobs’ Greenwich Village and tenaciously explored the nuances of New York City. I also encountered the ideas of Elinor Ostrom.
Ostrom’s Nobel Prize winning work on the commons in the governance of ecosystems is lesser known in landscape architecture and urban design circles. But it captured the attention of a team of geneticists I worked alongside in Madagascar. They were constructing critical habitat for the island’s endangered lemurs. Tavy, or slash and burn agriculture, and hunting lemurs as a food source, exemplified the tragedy of the commons. But the geneticists were developing their own system of reforestation, food security, and education, for mutual benefit of humans and lemurs. They were solving the commons problem locally and independently without state intervention, as Ostrom documented in cases across the world. In this context, her work explained what was happening in Madagascar. It also clearly demonstrated that understanding nature and culture as inseparable is critical to solving the commons problem.
Jane Jacobs solved a tragedy of the commons in her place and time by saving irreplaceable urban fabric and its social life from devastating urban renewal. However, Jacobs established a position in Death and Life that will limit the relevance of her work in contemporary urban socio-ecology. She described nature and culture as two separate entities that only overlap insofar as the former is an analogy for studying the latter. She explained: “By city ecology, I mean something different from, yet similar to, natural ecology, as students of wilderness address the subject”. She defined a natural ecosystem as “composed of physical, chemical, biological processes active within a space time unit of any magnitude,” and a city ecosystem as “composed of physical, economic, ethical processes active at a given time within a city and its close dependencies.” In conclusion, she stated: “The two sorts of ecosystems, one created by nature, the other by human beings, have fundamental principles in common. Cities are natural ecosystems for humans.”
Jacobs constructed many binaries throughout her writings: powerful versus poor, city versus suburb, credentialed versus un-credentialed, good design versus bad design, and foot people versus car people. But in separating nature from city ecosystems, her nature versus culture binary is perhaps the most limiting to the future of cities. As we enter a new geologic epoch, The Anthropocene, marked by the completion and permanence of human impact on the terrestrial biosphere, the cultural perception of a pristine nature separate from humans no longer exists. The future of all species, including our own, now sits entirely in our hands. Cities are more important than ever, as hybrids of culture and nature, if we wish to create landscapes that nurture all species in the new epoch.
Jane Jacobs, like Elinor Ostrom, was more interested in the dynamics of civilization than city planning itself. She revered the accretion of culture over time; how new kinds of work in vital societies evolve from old forms. If we can learn from and evolve both the successes and omissions of her ideas to solve present day challenges of the urban commons, I believe Jane Jacobs, the unceasing contrarian and independent thinker, would be pleased.
Arjen Wals is a professor whose teaching and research focus on designing learning processes and learning spaces that enable people to contribute meaningfully to sustainability. A central question in his work is: how to create conditions that support (new) forms of learning which take full advantage of the diversity, creativity, and resourcefulness that is all around us?
Dialogical deconstruction for meaningful living within planetary boundaries: Ostrom’s and Jacob’s clues for addressing wicked sustainability issues
We have entered the Anthropocene: an era of human-caused global systemic dysfunction where human also will have a responsibility to disrupt and transform highly resilient but inherently unsustainable routines, lifestyles, and systems. A transition to, or, in some cases, a return to genius loci-based integral design of urban spaces that breathe sustainability, well-being and inclusiveness while recognizing cycles and planetary boundaries, is critical if “we” are to continue to live on the Earth.
Conflict and diversity can be utilised to create a mutually beneficial social learning process that can shed new light on wicked sustainability issues.
How to live lightly, equitably, meaningfully and empathically (i.e., towards the past and the future, towards different cultures, the non-human and more-than-human world) on the Earth is the key question of our time. People across the globe are increasingly aware of and exposed to interrelated phenomena such as: climate change, loss of biodiversity, inequity- and natural disaster-related refugees, toxification of water, soils, air and bodies, and so on. Such issues, basically manifestations of the earlier referred to global systemic dysfunction, can be described as wicked in that they are inevitably ill-structured, ill-defined, inter-connected, highly contextual, complex, and drenched in ambiguity, controversy, and uncertainty. Does the work of Ostrom and Jacobs offer clues for learning our way out of persistent unsustainability?
Although they wrote in a different time and used different words, Elinor Ostrom and Jane Jacobs emphasize self-governance, autonomous thinking, and meaningful and playful interaction. So-called dialectical encounters in heterogeneous settings appear critical for addressing wicked problems and creating more sustainable communities (indeed they did not use the term ‘sustainable’). In today’s ‘transition movements’—sometimes related to energy, food, water, sometimes to a shared economy and solidarity, sometimes all in connection—we can identify these “principles”. Ostrom’s and Jacobs’ thinking has paved the way for a more relational and organic understanding of the world. The creation of a ‘sustainable’ community or urban area requires, along with a sense of place, identity and belonging, continuous dialogue between all involved to shape and re-shape ever changing situations and conditions. A dialogue here requires that the stakeholders involved can and want to participate as equals in an open communication process which invites diversity and conflict as a driving force for transformation.
Dialogue and social cohesion are prerequisites for tapping into the change-potential of conflict and diversity. Viewed as such, dialogue becomes both a purpose and possibility for acting and forms the basis for purposeful action. The work of Jane Jacobs in particular reminds us of the importance of dialogical deconstruction, which refers to a stepwise process described by a former colleague of mine, Fanny Heymann, characterised by the unravelling and untangling of assumptions about the diverging perspectives of those involved in an interactive process revolving around sometimes controversial issues (e.g. is organic sustainable, affordable?). In the world of individual learners, images are constructed based on often fixed meanings of the elements that comprise the image, which are of a cognitive (i.e. knowledge), affective (i.e. emotions) and social (i.e. relations) nature. Deconstructing salient images requires the softening and untying of construed meanings in order to create space for alternative meanings and composite images. In dialogical deconstruction, an on-going process of deconstructing and reconstructing creates a mutual frame of reference that allows for a more open, more sensitive, and better-informed discussion of diverging, sometimes conflicting, values and interests.
Conflict and diversity can, when properly introduced and guided, be utilised to create a mutually beneficial social learning process that can shed new light on wicked sustainability issues. Individual interests may, in the end, still be in conflict with collective ones, as long as they are no longer dominated by inaccurate assumptions and implicit knowledge that distort reality and block future learning. Through dialogical deconstruction, a negotiation process can gradually transform into a process of dialogue and mutual inquiry that puts the collective interests on centre stage. Here, we meet Elinor Ostrom’s emphasis on community participation and local knowledge, and collective self-determination in governing common spaces.
A more sustainable world will require space for transformative and even transgressive learning. Such space includes: space for alternative paths of development; space for new ways of thinking, valuing, and doing; space for participation minimally distorted by power relations; space for pluralism, diversity, and minority perspectives; space for deep consensus, but also for respectful disagreement and differences; space for autonomous and deviant thinking; space for self-determination; and, finally, space for contextual differences. This reminds us of John Dewey’s views on education and democracy, almost a century ago, whose ideas can also be found in Jacob’s and Ostrom’s work. Dewey argued that education should realize a sense of self, a sense of other, and a sense of community; it should create space for self-determination as individuals and/or members of groups exercise greater degrees of autonomous thinking in a social context. The same could be argued for community engagement in livable and sustainable cities.
Abigail York, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Governance at Arizona State University, where she directs the Environmental Social Science PhD Program.
Blessed to be a student of Elinor Ostrom, I find that, sadly, my visceral memories of her voice, warm hugs, and firm handshake are slowly fading, yet I think of her every day. Tasked with reflecting on her influence in my work all I can think to say is…I would not be me without her. Her tutelage, patience, and advice shaped who I am as a person and scholar in almost every way. As a graduate student, Lin brought me onto an interdisciplinary research project on urbanization and the environment; this incredibly diverse team used mixed methods, theories from across the sciences, and an ethic of respect for the communities that we engaged with. I attempt to replicate this approach to science, Lin’s approach to science, on every project. This apprenticeship enabled me to envision a new type of academic career that eschewed traditional academic boundaries and made an impact both within and outside the ivory tower.
Jacobs and Ostrom understood that we must leverage multiple ways of knowing and forge new interdisciplinary perspectives to tackle complex social dilemmas.
Several years ago, I nervously spoke with Lin about my tenure, worried that my interdisciplinary portfolio—including collaborations with mathematicians, ecologists, and archaeologists—would not “fit” with the standards of the day. She urged me to let my passion drive my research and not to attempt to strategize for each milestone in the academy. In her view, my science would be better if I followed my passion, and so would my sanity! Academic boundaries and the disciplinary silos of academic associations all too often stymy good work. Based on that advice, I continued to follow my academic heart from research project to project in the quest to better understand how people solve collective action problems.
Ostrom’s work transcends boundaries and silos: academic, nation-state, ivory tower and “real world”. Driven by puzzles presented through every day experience, she transformed these questions into elegant hypotheses and theories to be tested through the hard work of empirical research.
From the author’s research studying invasive species and community forestry in Chitwan, Nepal. Photo: Abigail York
Inspired by the sacrifice and collective action surrounding her childhood during the Depression and World War II, Lin was unwilling to accept that “everyday folks” could not self-organize to solve commons dilemmas. She demonstrated that with the right conditions, collective action was possible and that the diverse array of rules and norms created throughout the world was astounding; for this groundbreaking work she was awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
In the 1970s and 80s, Lin was one of a few policy scholars pushing back against the technocratic solutions of public administration and their desire for consolidated governments. Her innovative mixed method work on policing illustrated that sometimes, but not always, local control leads to better outcomes for communities.
From the author’s research in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Photo: Abigail York
While working on planning and zoning as a graduate student, Lin encouraged me to read Jane Jacobs. I found fascinating overlap in the perspectives of these two academic giants. The common threads between Ostrom and Jacobs include the respect for the common person and the need to understand things in the field. One of my favorite passages is Jacob’s discussion of planners’ who cling to the orthodoxy of theory, “when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening to shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside (Jacbos 1961: 8)”. These women refused to accept orthodoxy in the academy or bureaucracy; instead they looked out to the streets, neighborhoods, and communities.
They understood that we must leverage multiple ways of knowing and forge new interdisciplinary perspectives to tackle complex social dilemmas. They understood that it was the responsibility of the academician to look toward the “real world” for better questions and answers. These unorthodox and wonderfully irreverent women reshaped the study, science, and practice of cities and the environment forever.
Nature-Based Solutions can and often do provide an impressively large set of socio-ecological benefits. But the expectations that they can fast-fix, or even mask, the deeper socio-political urban troubles behind desires for eternal and “green” economic growth are largely unfounded and bound to disappoint.
Traditional chinampa cultivation as a way to restore water-stressed ecosystem services in Mexico City’s artificial wetland areas conquered from the sea in Tianjin Harbour … a network of bug-friendly bushes and patches of green along cycling routes in Scotland … an urban forest strategy in Melbourne promoting the plantating of 3,000 trees of diverse species.
You might wonder what these seemingly unrelated programs have in common. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), what these interventions have come to represent, is a term with varied meanings, perhaps still in flux. The European Commission (2015) defines NBS as actions inspired or supported by nature, while IUCN (Cohen-Shacham et al. 2016) delimits NBS to projects that protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems (thus focusing more on biodiversity and social development aspects). NBS mark a surge in planners’ interest in urban greening, especially with the prospect of climate and biodiversity havoc looming close and large (IPBES 2019, IPCC 2014). In a wave of rising demand for urban renaturing, we were part of a team of six universities, located across Europe that conducted an in-depth study of more than fifty NBS in 18 world cities (Kiss et al. 2019). The study attempted to cover a diversity of geographies, and pin down innovative responses to urban sustainability challenges, while noting barriers and contestations along the way (www.naturvation.eu). We have looked into various types of NBS, including diverse plans and strategies for urban greening, comprising: parks, urban forests and greenways; eco-districts; urban gardens; green buildings and roofs; insect-based interventions; water- and river-fronts; and measures dealing with water scarcity. Insights from two years of work are plentiful.
First and foremost, one factor that intersects with the scale and extent of greening in urban areas has to do with the old urban-sprawl-versus-urban-densification conundrum. On the one hand, urban sprawl consumes more undeveloped land (including that used for formal or informal agriculture). Recently built districts with sustainability features such as Leidsche Rijn in Utrecht, Park Marianne in Montpelier, or the Ecocity in Tianjin are “NBS in the sprawl”. Yet urban sprawl consumes rather than produces (more) nature. Densification on the other hand is meant to prevent the extension of urban limits to peripheral pristine and “natural” space. Yet, densification reduces the type and amount of green space and urban nature available for residents and can conflict with land use regulations and priorities. In the case of Leipzig, for example, planting more trees is especially challenging in residential areas where vegetation siting has not been incorporated into the design of existing infrastructure, and clashes with the needs of transport, parking, water sanitation, and the provision of electricity. That said, on the ground many cities strategically opt for “green densification” in combination with “green sprawl”, an agenda fostered by the prevalent logic and imperative of eternal economic (and consumption) growth (Colenbrander 2016).
The green and the grey, how much of each for a just city? Barcelona city from Parc Guell. Photo: Filka Sekulova Tsvetlova
“Green” urban sprawl
Overall, most newly developed sprawling districts that incorporate NBS measures lack comprehensive participation processes. Examples include Utrecht’s Leidsche Rijn neighbourhood, Montpellier’s Parc Marianne building district and Tianjin’s Ecovalley. In the cases of Little France Park in Edinburgh and Two Rivers Urban Park in Cape Town, competing interests (real estate construction versus expansion of greening) resulted in an unsatisfactory or mechanistic participation process for those stakeholders with less institutional power. A perceived sense by citizen groups that proposed urbanization/NBS would go ahead regardless of public consultations has been particularly visible in Newcastle’s public parks planning, the new management plan of Barcelona’s Collserola natural zone, and in Athens’ newly planned Hellenikon Park. Generally, technical plans and (green) strategies tend to reach the public at advanced stages of development, through short-term advice and in formats that are not easy the public to digest. Furthermore, access to participation is often biased toward legally established groups.
Even worse, rather than contributing to climate resilience, biodiversity preservation, air quality, public health, and social justice, NBS interventions might actually facilitate the sprawl of new grey development and infrastructure. In Hellenikon (Athens) and Tolka Valley Park (Dublin), for instance, extensive new real estate development was needed for the NBS to realize their full potential. In addition, the flood alleviation schemes implemented in several of our cases have paved the way for new development, or made existing real estate more sustainable, attractive and thus more expensive (i.e., Newcastle Brunton Park Flood Alleviation Scheme, and Utrecht Leidsche Rijn neighbourhood).
One major concern is the inclusivity of eco-districts. In Montpellier’s Parc Marianne Eco-district, for example, a park-side real estate costs twice as much as similar housing elsewhere. In the Tianjin Eco-district, although 10% of the planned housing is supposed to be “affordable”, there is little prospect for blue collar jobs, as the proposed industries within the eco-city are mainly geared towards the so-called high-tech and creative class.
Gardening in appropriated public gardens, Barcelona, 15 May movement. Photo: Filka Sekulova Tsvetlova
Community garden L’Illa Dels 3 Horts, part of Empty Spaces project of Barcelona Municipality. Photo: Filka Sekulova Tsvetlova
“Greening” urban densification
One example of the green densification trend is the conversion of former rail corridors within the city core into new parks and greenways. Boston’s Greenway, Winnipeg’s Northeast Pioneers Greenway, and Parkbogen Ost in Leipzig are just a few examples that the Naturvation project examined. Another pattern of NBS in dense urban set-ups are insect-oriented initiatives, such as the John Muir Pollinator Way and the Square Meter for Butterflies in Edinburgh, the bee-keeping practices in Győr’s Audi Factor and in the urban centres of Newcastle and Sofia. Likewise, the role and greening potential of “free” or “derelict” urban spaces and fringes is remarkable, especially in contexts of crises and austerity.
While expanding urban “nature” is fundamental for public health, well-being or/and climate change adaptation, green densification can be expensive, and hence exclusive. Green roofs, for example, often enhance the attractiveness and appeal of buildings. The management and maintenance efforts and costs these entail, however, are high and frequently underestimated. Greened avenues tend to reconfigure local economies, attracting residents with higher purchasing power and associated local businesses (cafes, bars, restaurants). In Boston, waterfront green resilient projects that aim to protect harbour neighbourhoods against the impacts of sea level rise create spaces for business and leisure used by elite residents and consumers for their attractive and “resilient locations”. Here, weak social housing regulations frequently result in waterfronts that reflect privilege and the intersection of social and racial inequalities.
In contrast, the chronic lack of equitably distributed green space and the civil mobilizations for healthy and liveable urban space are often a motor behind community-managed urban gardens and forested areas, such as the Sofia City Forest plan or the initial stages of East Boston Greenway development. Most of the community-initiated gardens or forests areas studied within the Naturvation project emerge through acts of opposition to further construction or to enduring industrial pollution. Even though urban gardens enhance social cohesion and neighbourhood vitality, they tend to lack longstanding municipal support, (examples are the Pla Buits gardens in Barcelona or the Weaver Square gardens in Dublin). They are often rendered mobile or temporary, and implicitly granted a lower status by urban planners and private developers. Overall, combining densification with greening could potentially end up contributing more to social inclusion, conviviality, and cohesion than green-aesthetics or green-fashion urban sprawl, yet when distributed equally, and without aiming on financial returns.
“Okupa y resiste” (occupy and resist). Barcelona. Photo: Hristo Velichkov
Role of public participation
Some of the good NBS governance practices spotted in our research occur and materialize when frequent communication within and between public departments are reported, and collaboration with the local community (citizens and non-for-profit) is genuine and open. Easy-to-set, though less transformative, forms of public participation are those occurring through non-conflictive, online, or educational events and tools, for example the nomination of sites for greening in Melbourne. Our cases demonstrate that the inclusivity of public consultations looks good on paper but is difficult to operationalize, especially when it comes to the participation of vulnerable groups. Lack of trust is a strong impediment for municipalities to openly engage with civil groups in consultation and decision-making processes (as in the example of Montpellier’s Green and Blue Network, among multiple others).
Indeed, including a diversity of voices towards the co-production of NBS implies the representation and negotiation of diverse and conflicting interests, and eventually impossible socio-economic trade-offs. Some large-scale river re-scaping, for example, tend to be riddled with rather narrow techno-visions, where participation often seems tailored toward the needs of the establishment, as in the case of the Leipzig Luppe River re-wilding intervention and the Moson-Danube project in Győr.
Nevertheless, citizen engagement, whenever and however achieved, scales up the social justice component of NBS. This is particularly visible in NBS targeting water scarcity, where concerns with justice and gender have been an imminent feature of their design. The Cape Town Atlantis Aquifer Clearing Pilot Project, for example, is entirely led by community members, mostly women, who have been acting as the main protagonists of water preservation attitudes. In contexts of high inequality, the operationalization of NBS can be, and needs to be, intertwined with sustaining and transforming livelihoods where employment goes hand in hand with enhancing the provisioning and regulating functions of local ecosystems (as in the case of Mexico City Water Forest).
Needless to say, Nature-Based Solutions can and often do provide an impressively large set of socio-ecological benefits. The expectations, though, that they can fast-fix, or even mask the deeper socio-political urban troubles behind desires for, and imaginaries of, eternal and “green” economic growth are largely unfounded and bound to fail or disappoint.
Filka Sekulova, Isabelle Anguelovski, Francesc Baro, and Bernadett Kiss Barcleona, Barcleona, Barcleona, Lund
EC (2015): Nature-Based Solutions & Re-Naturing Cities Final Report of the Horizon 2020 Expert Group on Nature-Based Solutions and Re-Naturing Cities.
Cohen-Shacham, E., Walters, G., Janzen, C. and Maginnis, S. (eds.) (2016). Nature-based Solutions to address global societal challenges. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN.
Colenbrander, Sarah. 2016. Cities as engines of economic growth. The case for providing basic infrastructure and services in urban areas; D’Alisa et al. 2014 Degrowth Vocabulary for a New Era
IPCC, 2014: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change.Contribution of Work-ing Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IPBES, 2019: Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services
Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.
Francesc Baro is a postdoctoral researcher at ICTA/Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and member of the Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice. He is an environmental scientist trained in landscape and urban planning and explores the operationalization of ecosystem services in urban social-ecological systems.
Bernadett Kiss is Lecturer at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics/Lund University. Her main scientific interests include system-wide policy assessment, energy efficient buildings, technology, markets, the role of actors, learning, innovation, and sustainable urban transformation.
On a Friday night at the end of November 2014, nearly 200 people arrived in the departures zone of Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport for five hours of presentations, working groups and community-led exhibitions. A projection screen stood on the baggage carousel, and former glass-walled airport offices held bulletin boards and tables of sticky notes for brainstorming sessions. Exhibition boards in the front half of the hall featured topics ranging from community gardening to unicycling and performance art. The occasion? A consultation on the management strategy for Tempelhof Park, Berlin’s former inner-city airport, once the site of the Berlin Airlift and now preserved for green and community uses. A prominent theme in discussions was the ecology on site, particularly the “pioneer programs” for urban agriculture.
While arguably the most talked-about new park in Berlin in recent years, Tempelhof is by no means the only green space in the city that has received this type of attention recently. Berliners are passionate about their neighborhoods (or in local terms, Kieze) and the city is known throughout Europe for its green spaces—whether parks, protected woodland or “leftover spaces” found along historic stretches of the Berlin Wall. 338 Natural Protection Areas and 112 Landscape Protection Areas fall within the city’s boundaries, and about 45% of the city is occupied by green space or water, including 20% protected woodland. Berlin’s parks often feature a mix of these types of spaces, and as a result have led to a rich tradition of the study of urban ecology.
These green spaces serve an important role in local communities, providing recreation space and breathing room, particularly in central districts where the majority of homes are rented apartments. As a result, community activism has a strong tie to local green spaces. Berlin’s planning processes also have an extensive tradition of community involvement and are proactive in their efforts to incorporate local interests into newly designed parks, as well as into the technical Landscape Plan for the city as a whole.
Two recent, acclaimed park projects in Berlin offer different but equally striking stories of public involvement in the development process: Tempelhofer Feld and Am Gleisdreieck. In both cases, a thorough public process guided a design competition for a large-scale, reclaimed public space. Yet in one case, citizen participation successfully shaped the design outcome, while in the other case citizen activism transformed the fate of a green space beyond its initially intended use.
Tempelhofer Feld
The Tempelhof Park consultation event followed a citizen-initiated May 2014 Referendum on the future development of the 380-hectare site. Larger than Central Park in New York City, the entire site will remain as parkland due to the Referendum, leading discussions to shift from the design potential for the site, to the optimal approach to managing it as an exclusively green space. Berlin’s Senate Department of Urban Development and Environment is now in the midst of work on an EPP (“Entwicklungs & Pflegeplan” or “Development & Maintenance Plan”), until autumn 2015. The process will involve open community meetings, citizen working groups and a recently-launched online platform. Much of the discussion is likely to focus on the feasibility of continuing existing “pioneer projects” in the park and means of incorporating citizen groups into long-term decision-making structures.
Tempelhofer Feld Community Workshop for the park’s emerging “Development & Management Plan”, held on Friday November 28th in Tempelhof Airport Terminal Building. Photo: Katharine Burgess
Prior to the Referendum, public engagement and activism about Tempelhof had been underway for years. Many of the discussions initially focused on preventing the closure of the historic airport itself, which was to be phased out due to diminishing financial returns and plans for a new regional hub. However, a 2008 Referendum in favor of its continued use was void due to low voter turn-out. Subsequently, thousands of Berliners participated in the Senate Department of Urban Development and Environment’s site planning process in advance of an international design competition to determine the future of the site.
Public meetings and forums about the project began in 2007, while the airport remained open, and eventually included meetings, tours, exhibitions and lectures on broad and specialist subjects. Information-gathering included a 2007 web dialogue, which drew 68,000 users and 2,500 idea contributors, and a survey distributed to 6,000 local households and 1,000 households elsewhere in Berlin, which garnered a respectable 25% response rate. An additional 17 moderated focus groups sought to engage migrants groups which historically had not participated in surveys, with individuals contacted via associations, religious groups and the City’s Quartiersmanagement program. Meanwhile, the City developed a brief for the development of the site which called to preserve the character of the open space, proposing that surrounding development be “climate-friendly and resource-efficient,” “future-oriented” and “integrated” or inclusive.
After the closure of the airport in 2008, in-person consultation continued, with numerous large-scale public events. 3,500 attended a 2009 “Call for Ideas” held in a hangar on site, which was re-opened for the first time since the airport’s closure. 2,400 also visited a subsequent Open House showcasing the concepts developed by the six finalists in the international design competition. Proposals focused on a mixed-use development strategy to relink the site with the surrounding city, including partial use as a park alongside the development of housing and a major new public library envisioned to be an equivalent to Paris’ Pompidou Center. To the City, the site offered the opportunity to create much-needed affordable housing and include large-scale cultural uses such as the library, which would rehouse the famous America Memorial Library collection. Alongside consultation efforts about the park and site as a whole, a parallel consultation, exhibition and design competition process was also underway for the library building proposal. Public scepticism focused on the library to some degree, given Berlin’s recent history with cost overruns for large-scale public projects, such as the new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport.
Meanwhile, community interest in the site grew, particularly after the vast space opened as a temporary park in 2010 in advance of the design competition outcome. With the runways open for biking and kitesurfing and the launch of a popular community garden, the park and its unique historical setting captured the imagination of the city. The nearly treeless setting was far different than any other park in the city, and the immense space became a canvas for community interests. “Pioneer” groups piloted projects to test out uses for the park, including the community garden, public art and sports initiatives. The success of the pioneer projects influenced the direction of the design competition, with the jury selecting a proposal that was seen to capture and reinforce the essence of the site’s wide-open spaces.
Community gardens and recreational spaces, Tempelhofer Feld, September 2014. Photos: Katharine Burgess
Citizen initiatives soon began to advocate for a preservation of the site as a whole, with a petition led by the “100% Tempelhofer Feld” group ultimately bringing about the Referendum that determined the future of the site. This majority vote then preserved the site as a park, eliminating the possibility of residential or community facility development and shifting public discussion towards the future management of the green space. The Referendum decision also determined that preserving the existing atmosphere and ecology of the park would be a priority—meaning that the site’s non-traditional, sparsely planted “temporary” landscape would soon become permanent.
The City’s current consultation on the “Development & Management Plan” is unlikely to attract the numbers that engaged in the prior planning process, but the project remains an interesting case study of public participation in open space development. The citizen engagement process is unlikely to be easy, as many citizens were vocal about their distrust of development proposals during the design competition phase. Another challenge will be complying with post-Referendum legal and financial realities—such as the now-prescribed lack of building—while still considering a range of ideas for the site. Finally, it is of course a challenge for the City to administer an engagement process for a project that has evolved so starkly from original plans. Regardless of these concerns, the City continues to seek a broad range of park users to advance the “Development & Management” plan, with discussions focused on the opportunities and trade-offs of maintaining a park of this size. While some individuals have shown resistance to working within the framework, the process seems to have been generally accepted and has attracted participants of a range of ages and interests.
After this month’s event and the launch of an online program, the City envisions that interested citizens will form a series of Tempelhof working groups, on topics ranging from recreation to climate issues. Their input will then influence the development of the site management plan, developed in three phases of activity:
• Phase 1, Inventory, Oct 2014–Feb 2015: An extensive series of public events coinciding with an online information-gathering phase. The City anticipates using the themes and comments from online and in-person dialogue to structure and advance an overall strategy.
• Phase 2, Working Groups, March–June 2015: After a public Forum on the findings of Phase 1, Working Groups will develop more detailed strategies and input on topics such as nature, sport, recreation, landscape and urban climate.
• Phase 3, Analysis, Summary and Public Discussion, July 2015–Sept 2015: A final summer of analysis, collation and dialogue will lead to the completion of the “Development & Care Plan.”
Public events punctuate these three phases, from focused workshop sessions to larger plenaries on the overall findings. Moving forward, it is clear that the City intends to build on citizen commitment to the park and establish the type of open and transparent process that citizen groups would like to see. However, an ongoing challenge will be maintaining trust between all parties, as well as developing a maintenance plan which is both feasible and respectful of community aspirations for the site.
Am Gleisdreieck
While the Tempelhof community activity ultimately led to the preservation of an existing site, the Am Gleisdreieck process instead led to the development of a completely new public park, albeit one very much rooted in its particular history and ecology.
A winter view of the western half of Am Gleisdreieck Park, including the U-Bahn infrastructure. Photo: Katharine Burgess
Northwest of Tempelhof, the 36-hectare Am Gleisdreieck Park of today is in some ways a microcosm of the many types of green spaces in its surrounding city. Located on a disused railway site, the park’s name means “Triangle of Rails” and its history is still quite visible through the historic infrastructure incorporated into the park design. The site plan transformed this previously abandoned space into “two halves,” a buzzy western park developed with sports fields, play areas and a sun terrace, and a quieter and more naturalistic eastern park, incorporating a nature preserve (das Wäldchen) and preserved sections of the historic tracks. A key aspect of the park is the preservation of the unique ecologies that proliferated in its years of abandonment, including the grove which grew undisturbed on the goods yard site over about 50 years.
The park opened in phases in 2011 and 2013 after a public process and design competition won by design firm Atelier Loidl. While now a celebrated public space, the site initially represented a complex array of stakeholder interests, ranging from the privatized railway company, to the Berlin City government, the three adjacent Bezirk (local district) governments and the developers from nearby Potsdamer Platz, which largely financed the park development. Parts of the site also served as a staging area for Potsdamer Platz—at the time, considered the “largest construction site in Europe”—for a significant amount of time prior to its identification as future park space.
As was the case with Tempelhof, community groups had an active role throughout the design process. In particular, community group “AG Gleisdreieck” was a consistent voice advocating for the preservation of the space as parkland and for the implementation of an “inter-national” community garden. The group began advocating for community gardening on site as early as 15 years before completion, with interest partially piqued by an international conference on micro-farming at the Technical University of Berlin. The group later began an intercultural local agriculture project on site, modelled after the Community Gardens of New York. These gardens moved into use before the official completion of the rest of the park and the surrounding park was then designed to accommodate them permanently.
Once the City proposed the site for park use in 2006, a public engagement process began to determine the design priorities. Initially, the City sent 1600 surveys to all within a 20-minute walk of the park, garnering 400 responses, a response rate roughly equivalent to that at Tempelhof. Walking tours of the site and its unique ecologies drew 2200 neighbors, and developed the project slogan of “Off we go to the Park at Gleisdreieck,” on account of the labelled balloons at the tour meeting points.
Other public events included workshops, exhibitions of design competition concepts and a “planning weekend” with the short listed landscape architects from the design competition. Designers who entered the competition were required to participate in the planning weekend and the City heralded the event as a success, both in terms of participation and ideas generated. Roughly 500-600 citizens attended the weekend, which featured moderated forums and an exhibition of design concepts that encouraged direct dialogue between the designers, jury and citizens. The design firms used the overall community comments from this weekend to continue to develop their proposals and the jury also used the event as a compass for selecting the overall competition winner.
A parallel online engagement process collected resident citizen concepts for the park, with roughly 500 concepts proposed through this medium. Finally, as the design process gained momentum, 32 working groups were established to inform the development of the plan. These many moving parts of the community engagement process involved people from the three adjacent districts of Kreuzberg, Schoenberg and Mitte and galvanized community interest in a space that had the potential to unite the three districts. The only criticism that City officials have articulated was a difficulty in fully engaging the immigrant communities, despite focus group invitations, translated surveys and other efforts.
The City found that two primary interest groups existed within those engaging in the consultation process: one sought a quiet, natural park and the other was interested in a heavily-programmed park offering opportunities for sports and activities. From these interests, and the unusual geography of the site, the concept of the “park of two speeds” emerged. Another main theme from public dialogue that influenced the design process was Spurensicherung—the gathering of evidence, or the protection of the traces of history (and tracks) on the site.
This wide range of uses within the park framework can also be at least partially attributed to the themes emerging from extensive public consultation. The community gardens were one clear priority for the surrounding community. In addition, the now highly successful “Experiencing Nature” pilot project—a natural area for children’s exploration—was also developed from community concepts.
Am Gleisdreieck is something special—a park that preserves unique ecologies while also providing attractive spaces for active recreation and fulfilling community visions of what the space could be. The extensive conversations with surrounding communities throughout the design competition and planning process should be considered an exemplar for other parks in Berlin and internationally.
The current process of consultation at Tempelhof is in some ways more complex given the history of the site, the legal framework established by the Referendum and the cost realities of managing such a vast green space. However, the extensive process recently launched by the City indicates an interest in finding a feasible site management approach compatible with community interests. Over the next 10 months, time will tell how community groups engage with the process and what will community-generated concepts can be embedded in the park management plan, perhaps also creating a model for interested communities further afield.
Take a abandoned industrial site in New York City, design a long-promised park, with oil tanks converted into art spaces, children’s play spaces, vertical gardens. It was imaginative reuse that honored the past and lived the present. It almost happened.
As a student, I walked the narrow river, sliding along edges to reach the massive curves of the abandoned grain elevators, rising in the sunlight reflecting off frayed elephantine concrete skins. My father worked in the steel mills of Buffalo, where I visited the incredible mile-long buildings that I felt demonstrated the curvature of the earth. I slipped out to explore the surrounding industrial landscapes including the abandoned elevators that would inspire me to become an architect.
The Grain Elevators of Buffalo, the largest collection in the world. Source: BuffaloHistory.com
There is a surprisingly common contradiction hidden within centers and scattered along critical edges of the most diverse cities around the world: abandoned and obsolescent industrial structures. This is the narrative of one such place, grounded in its complex natural and industrial history, suspended for a moment in the center of a transforming community in the heart of a growing global city.
From the vibrant centers of expanding cities, to crumbling relics of former metropolitan centers, lurk massive and abandoned industrial architecture, structures, and artifacts. Along waterfronts, former railway lines, pressed up against highways, tracing the gaps between divided communities, we can find the detritus of a former industrial urban revolution. These are the architecture and artifacts that once drove the massive growth of cities in the industrial era, that time of extraordinary expansion from the 19th through the mid 20thcentury. These structures fueled and transformed urban expansion around the world, encouraging abrupt enormities of scale, a repetition and growth of urban form previously unprecedented in human history. Many of these complexes and structures remain but today are decrepit, polluted, underutilized, or simply abandoned, facing imminent destruction.
These former industrial sites pose one of the great urban challenges and opportunities for the early 21stcentury. In this time of the ascendancy of cities around the world, how can we address the urgent challenges that industrial scale helped to create? And how do these ruined former industrial collections of buildings offer particular opportunities on an unprecedented scale to address the current needs of our cities: greater equity, access to green spaces, habitat restoration, and the need to address resiliency in a time of profound climate change? The former industrial Brooklyn waterfront is one place that brings all these challenges together.
We were waiting in a green room in the heart of Manhattan, backstage at The Municipal Art Society Summit. At this conference dedicated to urban innovation, I was presenting our designs to encourage greater equity at Halletts Point, a waterfront community combining mixed-income housing, public schools, green infrastructure, and resilient multi-level waterfront park. Seated next to me were two young women in their early 30s, Stacey Anderson and Karen Zabarsky, who had just presented their idea for a new kind of waterfront community green space named “Maker Park”. Their idea grew out of a previous innovative plan for the Brooklyn waterfront, which had partly gone wrong.
Stacey Anderson and Karen Zabarsky, founders of The Tanks and Maker Park, at Bushwick Inlet, Brooklyn, NY. Photo: 6Sqft.
In 2005, when New York City rezoned the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the Bloomberg Administration attempted to strike a balance between public benefits and private investment. The city’s plans rezoned an underutilized industrial waterfront to create significant new housing with 20 percent affordable residences and waterfront green spaces—including, a large public park located around a natural feature, Bushwick inlet.
Bushwick Inlet also featured the abandoned Bayside Oil works: a former industrial site containing ten cylindrical steel tanks used to store petroleum. The tanks comprised two concentric cylinders of three sizes and placed in a picturesque composition along this inaccessible waterfront on the East River overlooking Manhattan. Years before, the tanks had been emptied and cleaned; tall grass grew up between them to recreate a surprisingly lush landscape supporting wildlife on this rare natural inlet within the tidal estuary uniting Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.
The city’s rezoning was approved and executed surprisingly rapidly. New residential towers rose precipitously within former industrial sites, waterfront parks and ferry stops reconnected inaccessible waterfronts, historic warehouses were renovated, and economic, cultural, and social forces transformed a former working class community one subway stop from Manhattan into an innovative residential community—while escalating forces of gentrification and eradicating much of its history.
And one part of the plan wasn’t realized: where was the park?
Community Members post signs along Bushwick Inlet asking: Where’s Our Park?
The city unfortunately failed to gain control of the land designated for the park before the end of the administration; as values soared, owners refused to sell. With the rapid escalation of adjacent developments, the historic Brooklyn industrial waterfront was being rapidly erased by more anonymous architecture, and by 2007, the National Trust for Historic Preservation declared the Brooklyn industrial waterfront as one of the top 11 most endangered spaces in the United States. Stacey and Karen had looked closely at Bushwick Inlet park site and proposed a radical idea: instead of tearing down the former industrial structures, could they be reused to create a new kind of public park for this remarkable and rapidly transforming community?
Advertisement for Charles Pratt’s Astral Oil Works depicting manufacturing buildings on Bushwick Inlet / Portrait of Mr. Pratt, founder of The Pratt Institute. Source: Pratt Institute Library
I was struck by Stacey’s and Karen’s vison. Their idea was grounded in this special site where nature, industry, and oil combined in a unique urban history: a natural inlet with significant wetland habitat. It was transformed by early industry: the site of the shipyard in 1861 for historic iron-clad, semi-submerged ship theMonitorand the site of an early American industrial story: Astral Oil Works. Founded by one of America’s extraordinary philanthropic entrepreneurs, Charles Pratt, who sold the site to arch-rival John Rockefeller and used the money to found philanthropic endeavors including social worker housing and the Pratt Institute, his progressive institution offering low-cost educations to diverse students including women and people of color. Stacey and Karen, along with the third original founder, Zac Waldman, and inspired by these stories named their proposal “Maker Park” to respond to the neighborhood’s history and current potential.
I suggested if these young activists wanted to explore making their vision into a reality, they would need concrete design proposals to galvanize support and demonstrate to the community what their park could be. My architecture firm STUDIO V Architecture worked with officials, communities, and consultants on actual waterfront projects, and I offered our services pro bono, suggesting we’d need a team to explore their vision and address the complex needs of a public waterfront park.We would need many kinds of expertise, so we reached out to world class landscape architects, scientists, environmental lawyers, remediation specialists, and structural engineers. Not a single person or firm whom we asked turned us down; everyone worked for free. Ken Smith the internationally known landscape architect signed on as our key design collaborator. And the team that created Maker Park was born.
We slipped through a narrow gap in the hoarding. An abrupt jump-cut shifting from teeming urban street to the quiet hush of overgrown urban woods surrounding a hidden inlet. Sights and sounds shift, the din of the streets fading to gentle waves lapping rocky shores, points of light fragment leaves and water surround a waterfowl rising into the sky against the modeled shadows of ten massive cylinders framing the skyline of Manhattan.
Photo of the Tanks at Bushwick Inlet Overlooking the Manhattan Skyline with one of the Original Founders, Zac Waldman
We began with a series of principles. A decade before when the city proposed the park, they conducted community outreach, and our team immediately decided to incorporate every element the public requested: athletic fields, a great lawn, boat launches. The team also studied what was not included in the city’s 2005 studies. The proposed park made no provision for habitat restoration, no reference to the site’s history, and no facilities for the community’s innovative culture of arts and performance.
Finally, there was no mention of resiliency but the inlet was a gateway to flooding the surrounding neighborhood during Superstorm Sandy. Our team saw opportunities to combine new ideas with older ones to improve the design for the community.
Aerial view of existing site of Bushwick Inlet. Source: Bing
The design vision for Maker Park/The Tanks. Image: STUDIO V Architecture, Ken Smith Workshop
The team worked together on a collective design that incorporated these ideas, and more. The tanks, just five percent of the park area, represented a unique opportunity to create something completely new: a series of circular gardens that would preserve and reinvent the site’s history in a new way. By removing the roof of each central tank and adding passages and openings, the former tanks would feature a unique series of circular gardens connected by paths. Each tank would offer a different garden or amenity: a grove of trees for picnicking, a pool of water encircled by vines, a children’s adventure playground wrapped with murals by local artists, and a performance amphitheater topped with an observation platform overlooking the skyline.
The Tanks would be transformed into a series of unique gardens, playgrounds, performances spaces, and galleries. Image: STUDIO V Architecture, Ken Smith Workshop
A tank converted into a vertical garden. Image: STUDIO V Architecture, Ken Smith Workshop
A tank converted into a children’s adventure playground surrounded by artwork painted by local artists. Image: STUDIO V Architecture, Ken Smith Workshop
A tank converted into a pool and lily garden with vertical vines. Image: STUDIO V Architecture, Ken Smith Workshop
There were challenges. We knew the site was polluted, so our voluntary team of scientists and attorneys utilized the Freedom of Information Law to obtain 10,000 pages of documents from multiple agencies describing the site’s conditions. The team created a RAWP (Remedial Action Work Plan) that explored options and costs for remediation. We did detailed cost analyses, determining that if the site was dug out, it would cost $220 Million, but if we filled the tanks with soil, used their concrete foundations to cap the site, the gardens would bio-remediate-in-place the limited petroleum for only $23 Million, or one tenth the cost—with the savings going to build the park faster and more safely for the community.
One early idea was the park would not be static, but offer changeable uses. Some tanks could offer changeable venues and installations while others were fixed. We included a large open lawn with a circular boat launch and curved planted berm encouraging performances while shielding the neighborhood from storm surges. And we re-designed the inlet with salt water low and high marshes, introducing gradients to restore native species and promote habitat restoration. The team began to display and publish initial designs and concepts, to gain input and support.
When we proposed our ideas, we didn’t know what to expect. Over time, hundreds of people came out in support of the vision, and the design gained recognition from state, national, and local design and non-profit organizations: the American Institute of Architects, Architizer, World Architecture Festival, and many more.
But nothing in New York is without controversy. A few key community members opposed the design, saying that the site needed to be wiped clean, and wanted all memories of the former industrial artifacts erased as a bad memory of their fight to create a park. They stated that nothing could remain, and only open space mattered.
Compromises were struck. A non-profit, the Waterfront Alliance, offered to mediate between the opposing visions– but the community leaders declined to talk. There was a debate over open space. The original design proposed renovating an existing small building as a community “maker space” for local residents with an accessible green roof– but not everyone supported this and felt it reduced the open space. The founders debated and decided to eliminate the building to address the community’s concerns and focus on the tank gardens. Differences in opinion led to Zac leaving the group. Stacey and Karen redoubled their efforts to engage with the community, and the design team rallied to support them. As the design focused on the circular gardens they renamed their non-profit vision The Tanks.
In the final stages of the design, a final and remarkable new idea was proposed. Another non-profit group, the Billion Oyster Project is dedicated to restoring New York’s harbor through rebuilding its original oyster habitat. This group spent years exploring this idea creating oyster research stations through NYC’s waterways, and using tanks at the NY Harbor school to grow young oyster embryos on donated oyster shells from restaurants to seed the harbor to restore the necessary reefs to reestablish the harbor. Their current entire oyster-growing tank capacity reached 10,000 gallons. We proposed redesigning one tank as an oyster habitat laboratory and educational center, holding nearly a million gallons and allowing oysters to be restored directly to Bushwick Inlet, which their research had shown was one of the most favorable locations for oyster habitat on the entire waterfront. The design featured a spiraling ramp inspired by the Guggenheim Museum allowing school children to ascend the tank, engage the oyster restoration efforts, while learning the story of the destruction and restoration of the New York Harbor.
A tank would be converted into an aquarium to grow oysters in order to clean the East River. Image: STUDIO V Architecture
A social media petition went on line at savethetanks.org. It started gathering hundreds of signatures per day. But perhaps it was now too late. The machinery of government had set into motion at last. Lacking funds to build the park, facing criticism from the community leaders who insisted on wiping the site clean, the government needed to show it was doing something after so many years. So, it did the only thing it could to show change at the site. It finally tore the tanks down.
Now the site of the tanks is an empty rubble and dirt covered lot, wrapped by fences, all the verdant greenery stripped bare.
The site of the former Tanks at Bushwick Inlet is now an empty rubble and dirt covered lot, all the verdant greenery stripped bare.
CODA to an INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Even as these industrial artifacts came down, it was ironic to see the support, including signatures and awards for the project only continue to grow. They continue to do so today.
Perhaps there are some lessons in this story. First, there is never enough community outreach, and people must speak to one another, early and often in any public process to reach consensus and show the potential. Social media can provide a tool for gathering the real support for people don’t always attend public meetings. We shouldn’t be afraid of innovative ideas to create new kinds of public spaces. And in an age of ever-increasing obsolescence of buildings and structures: we shouldn’t be afraid to recognize and address our own history and reuse structures in creative ways.
At the same time, the principals we established for our design continue to inform and transform our work today: reusing artifacts from our industrial past and giving them new life, and creating public spaces that are transformable, to respond to the ever-increasing forces of technological obsolescence. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, this example has reinforced for us more than ever that our waterfront designs must promote habitat and help our beleaguered waterfront cities address the urgent need for resiliency in a time of profound climate change.
Perhaps a few others saw the lessons as well. While showing our work for the Tanks and Maker Park, I was asked to go back to revisit those structures I explored as a young student. Today STUDIO V is redesigning the abandoned grain elevators in Buffalo, into an arts and cultural center, including a sustainable residential and commercial community within the old industrial structures.
The new design and architectural vision for Silo City, Buffalo, NY. Image: STUDIO V Architecture
And the two women that founded the original concept? One was traveling overseas recently, and was asked in Tel Aviv if she had heard of a project called The Tanks. Surprised, she answered yes—she not only knew about it, but was one of the founders, although it had sadly now ended with their destruction. They happily informed her that their city was inspired by our designs, and had designated one of their own former industrial tank farms as a public park—and was using our design as a model to explore creating a new kind of park with circular gardens in their tanks.
As designers and urbanists we all want to realize our visions for cities. And we’re disappointed when they fail to be realized. But sometimes, an idea may in itself be a beginning. And if strong enough, if it resonates with enough people, if it tells our stories, addresses our collective myths and challenges, maybe an idea is enough to carry on, and assist other communities and cultures, to help their people address their needs for new kinds of public spaces, cultural amenities, historic preservation, resiliency, and creative new designs for green open spaces.
This is how I believe we will work together to successfully reinvent our cities.
A review of America’s Urban Future: Lessons from North of the Border, by Ray Tomalty and Alan Mallach. 2016. ISBN:9781610915960. Island Press. 312 pages. Buy the book.
Canada and the United States share the longest unprotected border between two sovereign nations in the world. Current electoral politics in the U.S. aside, that status is unlikely to change, ever. Connected as they are by geography and commerce, it’s reasonable to assume that high degrees of similarity across several domains (economy, culture, etc.) will continue to exist. But, strangely, there are many fundamental differences between American and Canadian ‘ways’, many of which America’s Urban Future, published by Island Press in February, expose.
If I had to choose one word to describe the difference between U.S. and Canadian cities, it would be: more. In the U.S., more innovation. More poverty. More complexity.
I was born in Canada and spent the first half of my working life living there, working on civic issues—mostly in cities. As my consulting practice grew, more and more of my clients were in the U.S., and I have worked in the U.S. for 25 years. Ten years ago, I accepted a fellowship with a U.S.-based foundation, and moved. My tenure living in the U.S. has been largely spent in two very distinct cities: New Orleans and New York. In both cases, when Canadians have asked how I find living in the United States, I have replied: “I don’t live in the United States, I live in New Orleans (or New York).”
Cities in the U.S. are not monolithic, and the two I have found myself living in are quite different both from each other and from any other place in America. My living experience has been both inspirational and dispiriting, often at the same time. I think if I had to choose one word to describe what I know to be the difference between U.S. and Canadian cities, it would be: more. In the U.S., there is more innovation. More poverty. More culture. More commerce. More stress. More opportunity. More complexity.
When I was growing up in Canada, there was an enormous northward flow of popular culture, and there was a not-always-so-subtle hubris Canadians harboured towards the United States: that somehow we were better, more evolved. (I think it’s still the case in many quarters: particularly among those who elected the new federal regime in Canada, looking down on our current national election discourse in the U.S.) Our values were more progressive; we weren’t as materialistic; our native culture was purer. Canada, with all its economic and cultural insecurities, was less brash—and yes, nicer—and that was a good thing. It wasn’t until much later, as my professional life took me to the U.S., that I was confronted with the much harsher reality of the cultural differences between the two countries, and how those have manifested in the ways cities have formed in each country.
The sheer numbers of cities in the U.S., and the scale of its urban regions, are truly hard to forget when you live here.
As more people move to cities in Canada and the United States, and our economies continue to evolve away from resource extraction and manufacturing to the service, knowledge creation and creative sectors, and tech, I am hopeful we’ll have better learning networks connecting urban practitioners across the 49th parallel, who can report on what is working, and what is not. America’s Urban Future is a solid start.
Ray Tomalty and Allan Mallach have done an exemplary job at analyzing various historical factors that have influenced the development of cities in Canada and the US. They’re both practitioner academics: one based in Montreal and the other in Washington, and they bring an appropriate mix of data analysis and more subjective commentary into this book.
As a bi-national citizen, it continues to strike me as odd that we don’t have more mechanisms to foster learning between communities in Canada and the U.S. There are surprisingly few such mechanisms, particularly focused on urban life, and this volume is a worthy addition to what I hope will be a growing inquiry between the two most urbanized countries in the world. But the framing of this volume reflects a salient reality: the authors set out as their goal to look to Canada to find solutions to the problems in U.S. cities. American geo-political power and—when compared to Canada—sheer population numbers, constitute one explanation of the ethno-narcissism that is America. It pretty much is always about us here (I live in New York City). But surely, cities in both countries have lessons to learn and teach.
In Chapter 22 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban sage Jane Jacobs, who chose to live in arguably the two most successful cities in the U.S. and Canada —New York and Toronto—set out “The kind of problem a city is ….”. She proceeded to debunk the pathologising of cities, advancing instead an analysis of cities as complex systems. Raised in a mid-sized city in Canada (London), I always found the literary depictions of cities as centers of depravity far from my experience—obviously I didn’t get out much). But in the U.S., cities come by that reputation more honestly because of a raft of trends, encouraged by horribly wrong-headed policy directions, that literally drove people from living downtown in dense, diverse neighborhoods, to moving to spacious, mono-cultural suburbs. The racial history of segregation, and the dynamics that remain to echo it, are unique to American cities and simply unavoidable. I was working here for more than a year before someone tipped me off that ‘urban’ was actually code for ‘black’, as was ‘inner-city’.
What the urban exodus of the 1970s in U.S. cities, colloquially referred to as ‘white flight’, left in its wake is sobering: sparsely populated neighborhoods with boarded up properties and vacant lots, stark public spaces euphemistically called ‘parks’, long-forgotten movie theaters and desolate main streets stripped of any vibrant retail.
I suspect one of the dilemmas these authors faced was trying to glean useful observations from the ‘success’ of Canadian cities that U.S. policy makers could actually implement. That’s pretty difficult because the socio-cultural circumstances, and resultant policy differences, are so fundamental, and so much of the ‘damage’ is already done. The federal government in Canada did not raze entire neighborhoods and destroy historically significant urban fabric; there was no ‘redlining’; and freeways, with a few notable exceptions, were not run through downtown cores, eradicating commercial corridors.
On the face of it, in general Canadian cities are superior by many measures. America’s Urban Future lays that out, chapter after chapter. They are denser, they have better transit, fewer vacant lots, less intense racial segregation, better mechanisms for regional cooperation and, in some cases, planning (!). But a Canadian reading this book may be less than satisfied with its focus on comparing the performance of Canadian cities to American ones: it doesn’t seem to acknowledge the challenges many Canadians experience living in their own cities.
For instance, Canadian cities have their own versions of contemporary segregation, often relegating newcomers earning lower incomes to the inner and outer suburbs. And particularly in the west, cities such as Saskatoon, Edmonton, and Winnipeg have serious poverty challenges that disproportionately affect the aboriginal populations that have relocated over the last 40 years from rural communities. Granted, Canadian cities weren’t hollowed out to the extent that American ones were over the last few decades. And they didn’t experience the rampant demolitions of urban renewal that continue to scar so many U.S. downtowns.
Nevertheless, both countries saw development trends, beginning in the post war period and ramping up in the 1980s and 90s, that favoured new housing development in the suburbs. So even though Canadian urban dwellers may not have been fleeing anything in particular, they certainly bought into the notion of large homes, lawns, and country clubs. When I drive now to Canmore (Alberta) or Sherbrooke (Quebec) or Owen Sound (Ontario), I am staggered by endless stretches of new housing developments with twee names: Harrison Creek, Chemin Bleu. The main drag of my hometown, Dundas Street in London, still languishes in its efforts to draw shoppers away from the vast parking lots and chain shopping of the White Oaks mall, some 12 miles away from the once lively downtown core.
In both countries, car-centric policy and investment continues to prevail. I remember a workshop I led in Calgary a dozen years ago to focus on the pressing controversy at the time: the siting of two new highway interchanges. Only last year, the Toronto City Council rejected an option to dismantle a section of its crumbling lakeside Gardiner expressway and replace it with a boulevard, instead opting—at double the cost—to shore it back up, ostensibly maintaining a three-minute commuting advantage! This, at a time when fewer and fewer teens are bothering to get their driver licenses, and the car industry—vital to both nation’s economies—is sputtering. And here in New York City, we can’t secure a commitment for funding for the busiest transit center on the continent—Penn Station—but billions are spent restoring a bridge across the Hudson River.
The population of the United States is roughly 10 times bigger than that of Canada. A slightly higher percentage of the Canadian population is urbanized, but more highly concentrated in three urban regions, whereas the U.S. has dozens of mid-sized cities in addition to its half a dozen mega-city (10 million +) regions. One of the ways you notice this is in terms of labour mobility: Americans with a professional education move more than Canadians. My colleagues here have done stints in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Miami, and New Orleans. My colleagues in Toronto or Montreal tend to have made their careers in only one place. This matters, not only to the kind of housing stock needed (more rentals in U.S. cities), but also to how experience is shared across jurisdictions and how Canadian cities learn (or not).
Although I am not an academic, I have a grudging respect for scholarly analysis that informs public policy. America’s Urban Future, despite its reflection of the U.S.’s cultural narcissism, presents a thoughtful case as to why Canadian cities, in the main, work better. In its concluding chapter, it recommends:
integrating local planning into regional and state systems that ensure sustainability and regulate growth
better coordinating land use and transit planning through a strong legal and fiscal framework
making more municipal service delivery systems more efficient, potentially through new state ‘machinery’ that make consolidation and reconfiguring boundaries possible
more state leadership in ensuring levels of funding to city schools and transit infrastructure
broader application of impact fees/development charges on developers to offset the real costs of infrastructure provision
altering tax policy that currently encourages automobile travel and the assumption of higher mortgages to finance suburban housing
create incentives for mixed income and use developments
reforming immigration rules and practices to encourage and support newcomer settlement back into cities
Of all these, to my practical mind, the biggest challenge facing most of America’s cities is their lack of population: immigration to the U.S. has significantly lagged behind immigration to cities in Canada. Last year I spoke at a conference of New Jersey Mayors, which happened to follow the weekend North American media was flooded with images of Syrian refugees arriving to various European cities. I asked the New Jersey contingent: what if you were having to prepare to receive several thousand new residents over the next few days? To which, to a person, they replied: bring them on! Canada’s significantly higher rates of foreign immigration continues to revitalize its cities, perhaps making lower levels of internal migration moot.
I came away from reading America’s Urban Future worrying that it presented too favourably the relative success of Canadian cities, attributing it largely to there being better mechanisms for regional cooperation and the heavier involvement of the provinces. There is a subtext of paternalism here, which rubbed me the wrong way, as I tend to defer to options that maximize local autonomy and control. But I sympathize: there are so many struggling mid-size cities in the U.S. which seemingly continue to abandon common sense and permit development that will ultimately prove unsustainable. In the absence of any limiting, or even guiding, state authority, such ill-conceived development proceeds unchecked.
Yet many Canadian urban leaders have expressed a kind of ‘empowerment envy’ for the strong mayor system often present in the U.S. But, as these authors point out, that’s not always a good thing in the long run, as these mayors pine for policy leadership from ‘senior’ levels of government. (And Canada has had its share recently of flagrantly awful mayors, where a ‘weak’ mayor system thankfully limits the damage.) As in Canada, in the U.S., the federal government is where the public money lands, so suggesting that there be strings attached that incentivize transit investment and dense development is logical—but because the U.S. is so dominated by sophisticated federal lobbyists, the manifestation of such a system is hard to imagine any time soon.
To wit, the recommendations in the book’s final chapter which I summarized above included that the U.S. ‘create stronger state machinery to further [the] consolidation and reconfiguration of municipal boundaries and service delivery systems’—as if they’ve been such a raging success in Canada—is a terrible idea. Toronto is still suffering the extraordinary ill effects (financial, service delivery, local identity) of a forced amalgamation in the late 1990s, and a similar sweeping change imposed on Montreal by the Province of Quebec was actually overturned.
Just as the elders in my childhood could demonize America, I am apprehensive that these authors have tended to idealize Canadian cities for many of the wrong reasons. Are Canadian cities better because their provincial or federal overlords were more enlightened? Hardly. I think some of the reasons they are ‘better’ is simply because Canadian cities didn’t have the extraordinary concentration of wealth that spurred industrial development across the post-war United States of America, obliterating everything in its wake. Economic booms and busts in the U.S. are more like bumps and sneezes in Canada: it has a very stable banking system, and the peaks and valleys are much shallower. That insulates it: in good and bad ways.
So what if Canadian cities are more ‘livable’? What is curiously missing from this volume are any measures that speak to the economic or cultural productivity of each city. Which have the higher GDP? Are making better civic spaces? Generate more patents? Attract more visitors? Create better art? Obviously, measurement is difficult, especially when it comes to the intangible things that make cities wonderful. Both of the authors are planners, so of course they’re going to focus on those outcomes that planning influences. But so much of what a city is, what makes it great, is outside of the immediate purview of planning.
At the same time, I recognize that the quality and attributes of places do shape our experiences of them, and, over time I suspect, the values we bring to them. Are Canadian cities generally more livable because of the values of those Canadians who designed them, or, are the values of urban Canada evolving, reflecting their experience of living in their cities?
To, alas, return to a common observation: in the main, Canadians are nicer—and so are their cities. But that just may not be enough of a reason for the U.S. readers of America’s Urban Future to adopt its recommendations. The U.S. remains the most productive economy in the world, and its economic success is largely driven by its cities. Until the costs of bad urbanization threaten to imperil the success of the U.S. economy, I think major course corrections are unlikely, just to make cities tidier, or nicer. Perhaps for their next book, Messrs Tomalty and Mallach could write about America’s Future, period, and the crucial role its cities will play in ensuring it.
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.
Helga Jakobson built a synthesizer system that reads the bioelectric impulse of the plants, and would clip alligator clips onto their leaves. Then the system reads the bioelectric impulse of the plant. More than figuring out what the plants sound like, Helga had to figure out who was singing.
In early 2018, the Assiniboine Park Conservancy, which is located in the western part of the city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, announced that they would be demolishing their conservatory in April, citing the end of the structure’s lifespan. At that time, artist Helga Jakobson was experimenting with designs for capacitors that could capture plant reactions, and she asked if she could take her inventions into the space to record the sounds of its inhabitants before they were displaced or uprooted permanently. In just three months, she collected over 500 hours of plant song and, for the past five years, she has been composing these sounds into a symphony. Information on the final product, Entropic Symphony, can be found on her website.
Lucie Lederhendler, who is curating an exhibition including new work by Jakobson this September, asked to speak with her about this ambitious project. The following interview has been edited for form and clarity.
The cover for the soon-to-be-released album Entropic Symphony by Helga Jakobson. Image: Helga Jakobson.
Lucie Lederhendler: I’d like to put the project into context first, because there’s something so meta-sociological in the framework, of the moment when you began your work, in the narrative of the conservancy.
Helga Jakobson: Sure. The Assiniboine Park Conservancy manages the park, the grounds around the conservatory, the zoo, all of the landscape within the zoo, all of the soil within the conservatory, and any other structures or features of that allocated zone.
The overseeing bodies that managed not only that conservatory building but also the larger grounds and the zoo were really the stewards of the space. Historically, there was a much larger volunteer base managing the visitor component, and so, as the conservancy was making decisions around not only around the closure of the space, but also around where the plants would go, which plants could move and which plants could not, they were also providing a lot of stewardship, and doing the work to figure out the new Leaf building at the same time.
I have a lot of respect for the conservancy and the way that they navigated the closure of the space. I found them to be thoughtful down to the microorganisms that they were the stewards of. The way that they spoke about soil, the way that they spoke about the interconnectivity of the bacteria, of the fungal bodies, and really thinking about how best to provide care for all of the organisms that live inside of the space. It was really magical to hear the depth to which they considered their roles.
The decision to close the conservatory was a really fraught and upsetting one, on so many levels. What was interesting about the closure was that it brought out these multi-layered aspects of grief that people felt on so many different fronts. For instance, there was the grief of the conservancy, the staff, who had worked there for a very long time, who had felt very personal relationships with the plants that they were stewards of, and then also the volunteers, and community members who were all losing these beings that were deeply, deeply cared for, down to a microbial level. Not to mention the community members, long-standing volunteers, and environmentalist groups, to name a few.
LL: There’s something about the idea of a conservatory that has a built-in obsolescence, but you wouldn’t take them away, right? That’s where I see the meta-sociological framework most clearly.
HJ: Oh, indeed. The conservatory itself, at Assiniboine Park specifically, but all conservatories are these really interesting meta-sociological spaces. They’re at once antiquated and also futuristic. They’re an ideal, this utopia, a kind of space of hopes and dreams and growth, while also being reliquaries–spaces that house something fantastical that could just never exist. The plants within a conservatory would never live so close to each other. They would live in more complicated relations, so there’s a layer of impossible, and also communal, space. For instance, the Assiniboine Park Conservatory was one of the last free conservatories or green spaces of that capacity in Canada. There are only a few left that are free of charge, which also speaks to a larger issue of the lack and loss of communal gathering spaces, of free commons for folks to enjoy.
LL: So, any displacement of plants will have obsolescence, but that’s okay.
HJ: I’m not sure even if it’s obsolescence so much as entropy. Of course, the space itself is man-made, but it’s clear in planting a plant that it will die―even trees, which have a longer life span. Most of the plants within that space just could not live as long as the humans that love them. One of the main reasons that the space itself closed, and this aligns more I think with what you’re getting at―was the boiler. The boiler was one of the biggest issues in the space, but really it was climate change. They built the building around this boiler in 1914 to manage all of the weather inside, and it was a massive beast of a machine that was built in a time before the weather fluctuated like it does now. It just couldn’t keep up. So, the boiler was slowly―and towards the end, rapidly―dying.
The Assiniboine Park Conservatory, 2018. Photo: Helga Jakobson.
It was fantastic in a way because some of the plants in the space, too, would just not stop growing. In this way, yes, the boiler became obsolete, but some of the plants, which should have stopped growing at a certain point, just didn’t. There was one that I really really loved, a gigantic palm that they kept topping―they would just cut it off and it would just keep growing. The first time that they topped it, it was because it had grown so tall that it had cracked one of the windows on the roof. I called it the roof-crushing palm. It just wouldn’t stop. The space had outgrown itself, roots were cracking the foundation, and the boiler―slowly, all together, they created this amazing chaos that had a kind of decadence of ruin that we’re all drawn to. Maybe not all, but I would say a lot of us, are drawn to the beauty in decline.
It felt like a really bombastic environment to be invited into. I had an exhibition that I was building machinery for at the time that would play plants. At the same time, I was feeling my own feelings about the space closing, and thinking about the inner workings of plants, and I thought I just had to reach out. When they invited me in, and I hadn’t built the machinery yet! I had to work around the clock to figure out this new system, a new recording device, and amplifier, while also trying to understand what it would be like to compose within that environment. I became an expert really fast in the synthesizer system that I built.
There was more and more news coverage about the space closing, so people started coming more and more. When I first started doing this work in residence, I would see three or four people in a day and, by the end, it was hundreds of people. It was completely out of control.
LL: When you say you were working in residence, you’re literally in among the plants and the soil?
HJ: Oh yeah, and in the rooftop―they allowed me access to the top tier that they water from so I could work away from the public, as well as access the leaves and green space up above the terrain level.
LL: When you talk about these people swarming to have a desperate last visit, it makes me think of a colleague of mine, Dr. Alysha Farrell, who talks about “unmetabolized grief” in the context of the climate crisis―this feeling of helplessness is just grief with no direction. When you think about grief and mourning in the context of the loss of these plants, and, in particular, I think there was a Norfolk Pine that they couldn’t save.
HJ: Yeah, that was the one that people had the most feelings about, for sure. It was an interesting one. It had been topped, I think they said, 13 times in its life. Without the context of direct conversations with the staff there, I would have felt that that was barbaric―or quite aggressive. Being able to see it from the top, though, from where the public would never have seen it, it was quite clear that topping is why this was such a majestic tree because it had been shaped by humans.
So, there was a funny feeling that I had about the Norfolk, and how I felt during the entire residency. My entire perspective was shifted back and forth so many times. Beforehand, I had some pretty romantic ideas about the conservatory. I grew to feel that it was a very colonial space, like a cabinet of curiosities.
Then I also had a community perspective. One of the people that I saw almost every day in the space, who really used the space and needed it, was a mother and her daughter. The mother was in her 80s and had dementia and found a lot of peace there. They were quite low-income and didn’t have a lot of physically accessible spaces to go [to] in Winnipeg in the winter, so it was an incredible resource for them, and they really valued it. So, I had this perspective of the space being a gathering place for folks like that.
Then as the news came out that the conservatory was closing, and people started coming more and more, there were so many really interesting stakeholders who were coming in protest. They had a lot of thoughts about right and wrong and weren’t informed about the very, very thoughtful process and practical components of the closure. I think that the idea of metabolizing feelings of eco-anxiety―there are a lot of different terms that you can put towards that kind of feeling―comes down to what do we do, and how do we live on a damaged earth?
The Norfolk Pine in the old Assiniboine Park Conservatory, 2018. Photo: Helga Jakobson
I think a lot of the reactions that people had to the closure were rooted in exactly that. The Norfolk was a great example. This idea that this tree was so beloved because of the size and the shape and the beauty of it, that the general public had no idea that it had been manicured so extremely for so many years, and that’s what created that majesty. That was an illuminating moment for me, compounded with the idea that that one tree can mean so much―I think it is a bit fantastical. The conservancy knew that people would have so many feelings about the Norfolk being cut down, and so they had worked to create cloned seeds from that tree to give out. I’m not sure if this ever happened but, in theory, you’d be able to grow your own, so to speak. They worked to create other registrations of the tree’s existence, going so far as to reach out to Bartholomäus Traubeck about creating a tree ring recording of it.
The whole experience was really a metaphor because you build yourself a little cabinet of curiosities, knowing that it’s going to eventually fail. It just cannot stay forever. The idea of roots breaking it down and reclaiming it recalled a Margaret Atwood kind of mindset for me, in the MaddAddam series when she talks about the kudzu taking over, and how these plants that weren’t really meant to be there would just take over the world anyways.
Some people that I spoke to found a lot of peace in the idea that nature just wins in the end. Even if that means that they’re allowed to die, like these palms, breaking free through the roof, even though they could not survive in this climate. Maybe they don’t want to live for this extended period of time that they’re being cared for. This Norfolk pine that has been topped so many times, its roots are the ones crushing the foundation. Is it saying, “Enough now, let me die”?
There’s a lot of really interesting takeaways, and when I wonder, did they―the Conservancy―let us grieve right? Did they allow people to do what they needed to do to get that kind of closure and peace? Did that closure remind us that we’re all living on this damaged earth that sometimes feels beyond repair? I think that they really did a good job of it. They allowed protesters to come in as choirs to sing to the trees, and me to come in and record all of these trees. They allowed all of their volunteers to have a private day after the closure and to walk through the space. So, I think when it came to grieving well, they did that. They were faced with a situation that was inevitable.
How do we live in community together with these systems that are going to fail? As our ecosystem is reaching some critical points, I think all that we can learn to do as humans is to grieve well. To be activated and informed and mobilize to create impact where we can individually and to lobby for structural change.
LL: The medium of symphonic arrangement is such a time-tested mode for the expression of grief. Did that idea begin with the concept? Was it, “I want to create an elegiac symphony”?
HJ: No, it wasn’t. I felt compelled, thinking about the deep and varied layers to the story of the closure. Grief, death, dying, ephemerality; these are all core elements of my art practice. Sound at that point was a very new component to my work. I approached it saying, I can do this thing, and then when they said yes, I had to figure out how to do it.
I have no interest in anthropomorphizing. I have no interest in speaking for things. I just had the impulse to allow these plants, or an impression of them, to be recorded. For posterity, but also to see what would happen, just as a pure research-based experiment. Because there were hundreds of plants, I needed to figure out a framework for how I would organize it. So, I decided to lay it out as an orchestra. Then, instead of trying to assign each plant according to, “You look like a tuba, so you’ll be the tuba,” I tried to just facilitate. That made it a lot easier to organize in that sense.
Then I really had to think about tonal qualities, I had to think about what MIDI libraries were readily available because I was working at a pretty fast pace. So, more than figuring out what the sounds would sound like, I had to figure out who was singing, and how to allow that to happen.
LL: There’s a parallel between the idea of handing the mic to the plants and letting them speak to the humanist idea of centring victims’ voices in conversations about trauma, in that both have to be done with structured care. So, how much intervention did you allow yourself? Did you set parameters for how much manipulation you would have in that voice collection?
HJ: Yeah, my clumsy way of working in that space was to act like Vinciane Despret, who speaks to the importance of being a polite visitor. There cannot be a world in which my hand is not involved. All that I can do is set up the most equal and fair parameters that will allow for a less biased expression. So, I worked with the MIDI libraries that were available to me through LogicPro, that way I was not tuning or amplifying one or the other in the recording process. I just simply let them play.
That’s been more of a consideration as I’ve been composing: where do I cut and where do I not? The first iteration of the symphony was just a 15-minute-long recording of all of the files all at once, which sounds very droney, very dull, very very low tones. There’s this great hum that happens. This is something where, had I walked in with a synthesizer built beforehand, I could have had a little more control, but it’s almost better for me and my perspective that I was learning with the plants, and so the recordings just were as they were. It felt like sympoiesis[1] in the sense that it was an adaptive and evolving knowledge base, a collectively-built system that could only grow as fast as I could build it, while also recording at this rapid pace. One led to the other, led to the other, led to the other. So, I do really feel that it was kind of a co-mingled experience.
LL: Can you describe how you’re actually collecting these noises? And what’s the current status of the project?
HJ: I built a synthesizer system that reads the bioelectric impulse of the plants, and I would clip alligator clips onto their leaves, stems, bark, or roots; all of these different plants, as many of them as I could in the timeframe I was allotted. Then the system reads the bioelectric impulse of the plant and outputs it as MIDI libraries. The MIDI libraries that I accessed were those readily available through LogicPro, so they’re pre-programmed as orchestral instruments.
I collected over 500 hours of recordings over those months in 2018, and I’ve been composing them into the symphony since then. The official title is Entropic Symphony, it’s 45 minutes long, and I received funding from Manitoba Art Council to produce a record of it, a physical LP. With supply chain issues, that pressing has not happened yet, but it will very soon.
LL: The idea of bioelectric energy, you’ve said before that it’s more interesting when it fluctuates, and it often fluctuates when it’s near to another bioelectric organism. Which makes the song about relationality, really. Your position to it, and its position to other plants, and other organisms. I remember you said that there’s a parallel in the relationship between the individual plant and the individual human; and the individual human and their touch screen. I love that because it helps me conceive of myself, essentially, as a bioelectric organism in the same way I can essentialize a plant. It really grounds us in the ecosystem and pulls away those distinctions.
HJ: I think one of the most poetic things that I’ve understood, through researching technology, biology, and more scientific frameworks for thinking with plants, has been the equalizers, the great equalizers on the planet. Those are water, electricity, and temporality. We’re all, all of the beings on the Earth, all of the terran beings, going to die, we all have to have water and nourishment, and we all have to have electricity running through us. There are so many moments in the human day that are affected by electricity.
It reminds me of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and this idea of bioelectric galvanization–the idea that you could shock dead animals, and they would live again. There was this great moment of reckoning where people in the arms race of scientific research were digging up dead bodies to experiment on, a massive race to be the first to capitalize on electricity in favour of immortality. Mary Shelley wrote a poignant piece about care and what would happen if they succeeded, and what is right and what is wrong in that.
In this ecosystem of thought, of scientific reasoning, of logic, of artistic expression, it’s really important to situate ways of thinking side by side to create a dynamic mode of thinking. Building these pieces of machinery and interfaces helped me to resituate myself on a one-to-one scale with the plants that I’m working with. There’s something just so magic about being able to touch a plant and hear your touch, to walk by a plant and see how that affects it and having another synapse or another sensorium for that experience. That’s part of what I hope to do with my work, to help people reposition themselves and to provide a conduit for compassion in a different way.
LL: When you were in among your musicians, the plants, can you describe your experience of your own aliveness? Of your mass? This question is also interested in the relationship between vitality and aliveness, vitalism, and life.
Jakobson recording a plant in the Assiniboine Park Conservatory as it responds to her touch, 2018. Photo: Helga Jakobson
HJ: It’s a really complicated idea, the idea of life and aliveness and being, and you know that’s why we have so many schools of thought and so many beautiful words for it. I think for me, my aliveness and my mass and my beingness all felt very present for me in the fact that it was such a whirlwind. I didn’t have a lot of time to pause, to reflect on being present. I was almost forced through the paces, racing against time, racing against the closure, racing against the decline of these plants or the displacement of them, to find a way to not think too much while working. Instead, I tried to get into a meditative state, and just be present. To just figure out with my hands and with my ears what was happening, and how to tune my instrument. It felt like holding a metal detector and walking over the earth, listening for fluctuations. As time went on, I was able to anticipate where there would be more deposits of excitement, of noise, of sound, of clarity in a certain way. I gained a really meaningful piece of wisdom that was passed on to me by my Amma, my grandmother, when I told her that I had the feeling that our family has a lot of people in it who see ghosts, folks with a relationship to the metaphysical or people who have prophetic dreams. I asked if she had a way of understanding that. I asked, “Do you think that there’s some psychic ability in our family or something like that?”
She said, “You know, I don’t know. That’s not up to me to understand, but what I do understand is that when I am very quiet and when I learn to listen better, I’m able to be more intuitive. And I think that intuition is like a muscle, and I think that you exercise it the more that you practice listening.”
That really struck a chord with me, and I felt it firsthand when I was in the space. I think by being very quiet, by trying hard not to impose, but instead to work with, and be in relation, I was very aware, not of my mass, but of my masslessness in a way. It made me feel as though my skin was simply a very thin barrier in-between that electric feeling that I have and the electric feeling that the plants have. To have something tangible representing that felt very empowering. I would walk away from the space feeling light-headed, almost in a trance, because it was so strange to breach that line. That felt really powerful and important.
LL: There was an article published by CTV a little while ago with the headline, “Yes, Plants Can Talk,” that was so infuriating. First of all, because everybody knows this, this is not new at all. It’s research out of Tel Aviv University that uses different sound sensing devices to record ultrasonic sounds, but in order to receive them they have to stress the plants. When I finished the article, I was a little bit disgusted. “You’re torturing them! You’re listening to them scream in pain and patting yourselves on the back!” They were doing things like not watering them, cutting them down to the quick. I understand the nuances that you were talking about with people getting more nostalgic than academic about these things, but surely, we shouldn’t be burying sentiment all together?
HJ: I got a lot of negative feedback myself from people riling against the work, saying that I was trying to say that plants spoke English, or other folks saying that I’m electrocuting them, “and all of this in their last days!” What are the ethics of listening to somebody as they’re dying, and doing nothing? People really have a lot of feelings. With that article―I probably get every article that comes out on major news sources ever, sent to me, from all places in the world, saying “Hey, it’s that thing you do!” All I can say is thanks so much for sending me this horrifying article. Because there are so many sensationally titled, almost clickbait, articles about the research on plants.
LL: The clarification you made there, of no, plants can’t speak English, but they can make sound, they can react, and we can record that reaction with different devices, is making me think about sound really differently. Sounds that are all around us but silent are still communication because there’s a directionality to the wave.
HJ: Well, it’s ephemeral, right? This point that you’re bringing up about the ultra-ultra-ultrasonic―you’re right there have been a thousand researchers doing a thousand bits of really important, and interesting, and also flippant and obscure, and wild experiments with plants for-ever. In the film The Secret Life of Plants, which is a great love of mine to this day, there’s a Japanese couple―a scientific researcher and his wife who’s an avid gardener―who poke a cactus with acupuncture needles. He gets her to start speaking to her plants, and you can clearly hear that the plant is somehow, through relationality, learning to speak the Japanese characters in response to her prompts. I don’t fully understand the mechanisms of how it happens, but it seems very similar to my work in that it taps into bioelectric capacitance, although outputting sine waves instead. It seems as though her hands and physical proximity create a response―the sounds seem to react to her movements.
I think this is a great example of exactly what we’re talking about. It’s truth-ish-ness, it’s scientific exploration, but more, it’s fabulation. Those endeavors are so important as exercises, which can be taken very seriously. That research should be done, and it’s very interesting, but there’s just such a mélange that it’s hard to really understand what is and is not real. Again, I’m not trying to propose that plants have humanesque thoughts, I’m not proposing that plants have the capability to learn language. But I do think that there’s a way that we relate to one another that can be shown through experiments like this, just as much as from a conversation with a granny who sings to her plants.
I’m talking about relationship-building, about how to be better together on this damaged earth. I’m thankful for all the research in that realm although sometimes I want to ask, “Why are you doing that, though? Why is that important to you?” Artists, academics, folks from philosophy backgrounds, from all kinds of different walks of life, have to be quite thoughtful when looking at science. Even in this wild time that we’re living in, with AI generators and all the panic that comes from that, critical voices who are applying thought, who are asking why, can reflect on how often the work is being done for capitalist ends. There can be very insidious backstories to the research.
LL: It seems to me that a lot of the pushback comes from scientific communities, and a lot of the research that’s being done is, like Monica Gagliano, people who tell the story of being exiled, or almost exiled, from the scientific community in order to pursue this work.
HJ: 100%, at least, there are a lot of people that I’m aware of. In The Secret Life Of Plants, there’s a great case study of Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, who presented his research showcasing the inner life of plants in front of the Royal Institution in London in 1897, and he was laughed out of the room. Because he was a person of colour, really.
Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about this in Braiding Sweetgrass. She says, “I went into biology because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful side by side, and when I told my Ph.D. advisor, they laughed at me.” There are all kinds of people from all walks of life who are invested and interested in this research, who are not listened to in the scientific community because it is a very colonial, very white supremacist, quite misogynistic field. It’s important to be critical about what research gets funded and what doesn’t.
Another book that came out, that tried to model itself after The Secret Life Of Plants, called Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence in which they talk about how the research of Cleve Backster, who’s one of the most famous case studies: him and his philodendrons and his lie detector. It talks about when that research was dropped, another researcher proposed that you could capitalize on building a neural relationship with plants and use your plants as an alarm! Or a garage door opener! The inference is that when you’re able to find some sort of capitalist function for these phenomena, then that research will be funded.
LL: I’ve been a little bit obsessed about the privileging of written language recently. It hurts to think about writing as a bad thing, as someone who’s so bookish. But a recent exhibition had me researching the Hindu cosmological cycle, the Chatur Yuga, which puts us in the age of destruction and despair. What happened at the beginning of this age? The most significant thing was that systems of writing were being introduced in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia. If that starts the age of destruction, maybe it’s because it creates a hierarchy of knowledge.
HJ: Indeed, it’s really true. This is also about the idea of what power is, but there are a lot of different ways of thinking and being in culture that can flatten out that power. Colonization is really in line with the written word or the printing press, in particular. It does make a lot of sense.
LL: These topics are all embedded in oneirophyte, which I’m curating and will include your and four other Winnipeg-based artists’ work. Though it shifts the thinking a little more towards the realm of imagination and dream, rather than the waking emotional realm. The theme of that exhibition emerged from artist research rather than preceding it, from observing what new and digital media artists seemed to be interested in right now, and I’m wondering if you think that there’s something about where you are, something about the city of Winnipeg, that might be directing artistic curiosity in this way?
HJ: That’s a good question. There was a really great exhibition that stirred me into this realm of thinking, years ago, in Winnipeg, put on by Video Pool, called Toxicity, that thought about bioart and the blend of science and art. That was a first. It happened shortly after Janet Cardiff was in town with the Forty Part Motet. So that might have contributed to it. There’s also something about living in such an extreme climate, where you can really feel the pull of climate change because you can see flooding happening, you can see new earth, like in Riding Mountain, where the glacial lake deposited. There’s really interesting geological and vegetative phenomena that happen around here. What’s more, I think being very rooted in farming gives folks a lot of different layers of understanding. It’s been a meeting place for Indigenous peoples since time immemorial, so a lot of minds gather here. It’s Treaty One Territory (1871), so it holds pre-colonial knowledge about relationships to the earth and to people. Maybe those are some elements that inspire artists to reflect on the earth that they’re on.
LL: When we talk about new media and digital media, it’s implied in what you’ve been talking about with this project, that there is a need for new tools of communication.
Jakobson’s workstation in the Conservatory, 2018. Photo: Helga Jakobson
HJ: Totally, and I think that there is a really big draw, especially right now, every year that carries on, moving more and more closer to midnight on the Global Doomsday Clock, we’re really feeling that pressure to live in a different way. In deepening our understanding of colonization and calls to action towards Truth and Reconciliation, there are a lot of political and practical reasons to reposition yourself to the land that you’re on. So, one perspective is social, and another emerges from living on a damaged earth.
LL: Right, just decentring ourselves in general. What replaced the conservatory is The Leaf, which is quite expensive, isn’t it?
HJ: Yes, it’s very expensive! But there are so many layers to that. Volunteerism is at an all-time low, and building materials are so expensive that to have a space like this, there does need to be a cost associated with it. That’s just living under late-stage capitalism. I’m not saying that I think it’s right, but there are reasons for it.
LL: It’s not malicious, it’s not profit-mongering.
HJ: No, it’s not, but it shouldn’t have to be like this.
It’s funny, with the opening, I’ve had a lot of people asking if I’ve gone yet, and I haven’t. I want this project to be done before I set foot in.
LL: That’s pretty sentimental of you.
HJ: I think so too! But there’s also a practical reason, which is that they’re still figuring out some of the hiccoughs in opening, and seeing ragged, over-touched butterflies is not a big draw for me; I think I would feel pretty sad to go in right now. It’s not a fault of the conservancy, it’s just the reality of human impact on space.
[1] “Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with.’ Nothing makes itself,” From Donna Haraway, Chapter 3: Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble. Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press: 2016. p 57.
On a tree-lined boulevard that leads to the central business district of Melbourne lies a building that trains performers. Few would know that the landscape surrounding the Victorian College of the Arts is also performing. This is one site among many in the city of Melbourne and its suburbs that are performing as a catchment for the citizens’ supply of water. Nature is fundamental to the process, working for the city as green and blue infrastructure.
Melbourne is at the forefront in creating performing landscapes that harvest, treat, and store stormwater for reuse. Every year, an equal volume of water is diverted as stormwater from the city to Port Phillip Bay as is consumed as potable water from the dams. Raingardens, grassy swales, wetlands, lakes, and other pieces of green and blue infrastructure are being constructed to harvest, treat, and store stormwater for fit-for-purpose use. Harvesting stormwater for treatment and reuse will provide water to supplement potable supply from dams. It will decrease the quantity and increase the quality of drainage flow to waterways in urban areas, with environmental benefits. It can ease the demand on existing infrastructure, so that its replacement can be delayed or avoided. It can mitigate the urban heat island effect, contributing to improved thermal comfort. It will certainly change the appearance of the city. It is assumed by many promoting green and blue infrastructure that landscape amenity will be improved, but how will the residents of Melbourne respond to the new form and structure of the city as a catchment?
Green and blue infrastructure is “the network of natural landscape assets which underpin the economic, sociocultural and environmental functionality of our cities and towns—i.e. the green spaces and water systems which intersperse, connect and provide vital life support for humans and other species within our urban environments”. These green spaces and water systems perform sustainable stormwater management, using natural processes to passively treat the water and store it for later use.
The system is very simple. Let’s look at raingardens. A raingarden is a shallow trough densely planted with vegetation that tolerates alternating wet and dry periods. Appropriate contours within the landscape direct stormwater run-off towards the raingarden. The water is then held within the raingarden and allowed to percolate through its carefully designed and structured soil media. Contaminants in the water are removed by entrapment or absorption by the soil media or adsorption by organisms on the media or roots of the plants. The treated water might then be diverted to the stormwater drainage system, where it passes to a local creek, river or bay. Alternatively, it might be stored nearby, for later use in irrigation of surrounding parklands, car washing, or some other approved purpose. Similar principles apply in the performance of grassy swales, street trees in bioretention pits, and even wetlands.
In front of the Victorian College of the Arts—a heritage-listed Victorian building—an interconnected series of seven raingardens, with an area of almost 58 m2, has replaced the lawn. The detail is quite playful and the water remains visible in order to engage passers-by and to alert them to the performance of the landscape in stormwater management. Downpipe spouts, in the form of eel heads, deliver water from the building’s roof into the raingardens, over which pedestrians can move on walkways.
Top: St Kilda Road, Melbourne, looking north. Image: www.flickr.com Bottom: Landscape of Victorian College of the Arts before 2008, without a raingarden. Image: essential-architecture.com. The Victorian College of the Arts sits on St Kilda Road, a leafy boulevard leading to the centre of Melbourne. Before 2008, the heritage-listed building was fronted by a lawn. This was replaced with a series of seven raingardens in 2008, which harvest and treat stormwater before it is discharged to nearby Port Phillip Bay.
Raingardens are appearing in the suburbs of Melbourne, too. In the streets of high-density inner suburbs, such as Richmond, with narrow footpaths and limited space, raingardens have been constructed within the road reserve, often defining on-street parking locations. In lower-density suburbs more distant from the city, such as Mentone, raingardens replace the traditional grassed nature strips that lie between the footpath and the road.
Raingardens in front of Victorian College of the Arts. Image: en.wikipedia.org.
Ways of looking: Four ways to perceive the environment around us
What do we know of the residents’ reactions to these raingardens? Do they appreciate them? Joan Nassasuer argues that cultural sustainability of ecologically functioning landscapes, such as these streetscapes with raingardens, demands that they be appreciated, valued, and cared for. If we know how people perceive these landscapes, we can design them to fulfil both technical and aesthetic functions. Such performing landscapes require maintenance to ensure their effective function. Participation of local residents in this maintenance, e.g. by removing rubbish, is important support for the local councils, which are responsible for the raingardens’ upkeep and the effective drainage of the suburbs. Are residents likely to help maintain these raingardens?
Of course, each individual perceives a landscape in a unique and personal way. Perception is a transaction between the individual and the landscape; the way in which a person perceives a particular landscape depends on particulars of the person and landscape, but also on the context in which this transaction occurs. Despite the millions of people looking at millions of landscapes, in Western cultures there are four main ways of looking at or perceiving a landscape. These perceptual lenses have been described as the scenic aesthetic, the ecological aesthetic, an aesthetic of care and the effect of knowledge, and an aesthetic of attachment and identity. The distinctions can help us understand what people want in their urban environments.
Two streets in Melbourne suburbs with raingardens: Cremorne Street, Richmond (top), and Stawell Street, Mentone (bottom). Both images: M. Dobbie.
The scenic aesthetic appreciates a landsc
ape as a static picture: Nature is idealised, stylised, and pristine. This aesthetic is thought to have arisen from 17th and 18th century aesthetic theory, expressed in paintings by such artists as Claude Lorrain and in landscape designs, typically by ‘Capability’ Brown. The elements within the landscape are appreciated visually according to formal design principles. The scenic aesthetic often applies in the appreciation of wildscapes, to which responses are predominantly affective (i.e. emotional).
Wildscapes can also be appreciated with an ecological aesthetic, but this involves a deeper understanding of nature and its processes. Knowledge is fundamental to an ecological appreciation of a landscape, which is recognised as dynamic and changing. All senses are engaged and the response is both cognitive and affective—that is, both thinking and feeling are involved. The aesthetic of care also requires knowledge, but knowledge of the role of humans in creating and managing the landscape.
The aesthetic of care applies to the appreciation of agricultural landscapes, in which order and stewardship harmonise with nature. Cues to human care are important in their appreciation. Thus, neatly fenced paddocks with even rows of crops are seen as beautiful. Overgrazed paddocks with tumbledown fencing and bare patches of earth showing through pasture grasses are not.
Finally, an aesthetic of place attachment and identity is active in the appreciation of cultural landscapes. In this aesthetic, appreciation is for cultural patterns at the landscape scale and material cultural artefacts at the site scale. For example, the inner suburbs of Melbourne have narrow cobbled lanes lined with tiny Victorian terraced houses, interspersed with industrial and commercial sites. Residents of such streets might feel a special attachment to these streets as a physical expression of the history of settlement of Melbourne. Living on these distinctive and historic streets might be an important aspect of these residents’ identity. If they were to live elsewhere, they wouldn’t feel as comfortable or as ‘at home’. Visitors to such streets might look at the crowded old houses squeezed between factories and office buildings and wonder how anyone could see beauty here. But with an aesthetic of place attachment and identity, residents of these streets do see ‘beauty’.
Graphic: M. Dobbie and L. Booth
Which of these perceptual lenses, or ways of looking, might apply in the appreciation of streetscapes with raingardens? How might the choice of lens affect acceptance of the change in landscape after raingardens are retrofitted into a suburban street? What can we do to enhance appreciation and acceptance of performing landscapes in our cities?
I am exploring all of these questions within a research project funded by the Co-operative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities. The research is almost complete and preliminary results suggest that more than one perceptual lens is used in the appreciation of streetscapes with raingardens. Which perceptual lens a person uses varies with individual context and the situational context of the landscape.
There is evidence to suggest that an aesthetic of care predominates in the perception of streetscapes with raingardens. Sedges, rushes and other tussocky plants are often used in raingardens because of their tolerance of periodic inundation and their ability to remove contaminants from the stormwater. As a consequence of the informal and loose shape of the plants, the raingardens can be perceived as messy, untidy, and uncared for. They might not be appreciated with this aesthetic, nor accepted.
Knowledge about form and functionis important in appreciation of raingardens. This knowledge might moderate unfavourable perceptions derived from an aesthetic of care, or cause an ecological aesthetic to operate. Knowledge that raingardens require a certain type of plant to perform in stormwater treatment might moderate a negative initial perception of ‘messiness’ associated with an aesthetic of (lack of) care. Although the planting might appear messy, the informed person would understand that this messiness is necessary and, indeed, intended. The raingarden is not neglected and uncared for; rather, it is a fabricated, functioning ecosystem, intentionally designed to fulfil an important technical role in sustainable stormwater management. In these circumstances, then, the raingarden might be appreciated and accepted. Alternatively, knowledge might trigger an ecological aesthetic in the appreciation of the raingardens. In this case, the streetscape with the raingardens is appreciated as a dynamic landscape, performing important ecological functions. In any case, appreciation is active and experiential. Appreciation with an ecological aesthetic is likely to lead to acceptance.
An aesthetic of place attachment and identity might operate in people very attached to their street, and for whom the street is integral to their sense of who they are. If the installation of raingardens complements the existing appearance of the street, the place attachment and sense of identity of the individual perceiving the raingarden might be preserved. In this case, the raingarden is likely to be appreciated and accepted. If the raingarden does not complement the appearance of the street, the individual’s place attachment and sense of identity might be challenged, with negative consequences for appreciation of the raingardens and their acceptance.
Using aesthetics to improve design
Understanding the perceptual lens through which people view their suburban landscapes can inform the design of raingardens in performing landscapes. Raingardens can then be designed so that they work well and look good, especially to the people who live on the street in which the raingardens are constructed. We can understand the perceptual lens of residents on a particular street simply by looking at their own gardens. People declare their landscaping preferences, and thus their perceptual lenses for suburban streetscapes, in their domestic gardens.
Most domestic gardens are neat and tidy; often, but not always, they have a formal layout. These gardens express an aesthetic of care. To accommodate this aesthetic in the design of a raingarden, selection of plants for the raingarden can be extended to include plants with a less ‘messy’ habit. Many of the plants used in the nearby gardens could be included in the raingarden, so long as 50 percent of the plants operate in removing contaminants from the stormwater. Maintenance regimes can ensure that plants are pruned regularly, and that the raingardens do not accumulate rubbish and appear untidy.
Some domestic gardens have a more unruly appearance, using indigenous plants in more organic and natural layouts. The owners of these gardens might use an ecological aesthetic in their appreciation of landscapes. Thus, raingardens installed into streets with predominantly naturalistic gardens need not be so ‘tidy’. A greater percentage of the plants within the raingarden could be those occurring in wetlands, so well adapted for alternating cycles of wet and dry, but often with a more ‘messy’ habit. Rubbish should always be removed, but regular pruning might be less important.
Operation of an aesthetic of place attachment and identity is less easily identified by simply looking at a residential street. Nevertheless, the same strategy applies, in that the design of the raingarden should reflect the landscape preferences of the residents of the street. These can be identified simply by observing their gardens. Plant selection and layout of the raingarden can be based on those of nearby domestic gardens.
Regardless of perceptual lens, appreciation for raingardens can be increased by providing information about the role of raingardens and their function, and the myriad benefits that they confer. The information can be disseminated through signage, letter drops, and other communication strategies. This knowledge might then trigger an ecological aesthetic or moderate the aesthetic of care or the aesthetic of place attachment and identity.
Performing landscapes are fundamental to cities operating as water supply catchments. Green-blue infrastructure will provide the stage for performances. Landscape amenity is certainly a potential benefit–sweet music–of this infrastructure. Attention to careful design of raingardens, one of the instruments of the orchestra, can ensure it.
It is misleading to greenwash, without caveats, conventional or high-tech agriculture in the city as sustainable.
Is it as simple as that? Sounds too good to be true and, as always, it is not simple. All urban agricultures are not sustainable, and some may even produce deleterious effects on the city inhabitants as well as on the city itself.
Let me be crystal clear: Community gardens, kitchen gardens, organic micro-farming, and rooftop farming are very positive for a city’s sustainability and for the well-being of its inhabitants. I am not trying to disparage urban agriculture. Quite the contrary, my intention is a kind of whistle blowing: to distinguish between the different types of urban agriculture and to denounce those which, under the disguise of promoting agriculture in the city, promote practices that are absolutely unsustainable.
Basically, urban agriculture is the practice of cultivating, processing, and distributing food in or around a village, town, or city. Although both are about growing edible plants in the city, we can distinguish between three very different categories, which share few things in common:
First are kitchen gardens and community gardens, as well as organic micro-farming characterized by collective or family type organization. These flourish at ground level of on rooftops. Second are parcels of conventional industrial farming land, which remain where urban growth incorporates farmlands into the urban fabric. This form is particularly pertinent for cities located in vine-growing or grain-growing regions. Third, is what has been described as “tree-like” skyscrapers for farming, a type of high-tech agriculture—in contrast with the two first categories, which can be considered low-tech—that is often associated with smart cities.
The new craze for urban agriculture, which began 20 years ago, primarily concerned organic micro-farming, and kitchen and community gardens, a type of agriculture that can enrich and transform the city positively and make it more sustainable. But it generated a sudden interest for urban agriculture in general, and drew the attention of many economic and political players, large building companies, architects looking for inspiration (and celebrity), and big farmers doing conventional farming. They generally did not have interest in bringing people together, or in fostering inclusiveness and ownership. Urban agriculture was a label used to sugarcoat the pill to maintain conventional farming in the city or to develop urban projects—like high-rise buildings—that otherwise would have been taken very badly by the people living in or on prospective sites.
Design for vertical farming by Chris Jacobs and Rolf Mohr. Image: Wikimedia Commons by Cjacobs627
Urban agriculture’s mania opened a window of opportunity to impose high-rise buildings or to turn intensive agriculture in the city “green”. All a sudden, concrete and glass towers became acceptable in places where not a single inhabitant would have accepted them before, provided that the buildings looked “green”. At the ground level, conventional urban farming became nice and acceptable, though it can generate nuisances such as dissemination of pesticides and fertilizers that have a negative impact on health and on the biodiversity in the city.
Those who greenwash conventional or high-tech agriculture in the city as sustainable mislead. It is deeply problematic, as I will show with two very different cases that are connected in one important way: the exposure to pesticides of city-dwellers living alongside fields cultivated under intensive conventional agriculture, and the potential destruction of the urban fabric by skyscrapers camouflaged in green.
Towers camouflaged in green
Let’s begin with the case of skyscrapers camouflaged in green, which, by the way, are paradigmatic of the problems that can be generated by mixing intensive agriculture with high-rise buildings. Have you never heard of these new architectures, which have been proliferating since the nineties in the wake of the Smart Cities movement? Tree-like skyscrapers, cultivating plants or breeding animals within tall greenhouse buildings or vertically inclined surfaces? The point of this farming laden with eco-technologies is to exploit synergies between the built environment and intensive—if not industrial—agriculture. Naturally, its promoters emphasize the supposed positive effects of tree-like skyscrapers on the urban environment: recirculating hydroponics and aeroponics that significantly reduce the amount of water needed, collecting rain and treating wastewater, producing photovoltaic green energy, etc. But, curiously, they forget to mention the dark side of it. There are many huge problems inherent to these agritectures:
Even if a building is largely fenestrated, plants still need soil and additional sunlight to survive. When sunlight is replaced by LEDs, it has a huge energy cost.
Controlling humidity and air circulation and evacuating the heat released by LEDS also has large energy costs.
Fertilizers are always necessary, as are pesticides, due to the mildew and other pests found in greenhouses today.
Besides, how could the urban fabric be inclusive of this type of farming? As highlighted by Saskia Sassen, in the broader perspective of the Smart Cities movement: “These technologies have not been sufficiently ‘urbanized’. It is not feasible simply to plop down a new technology in an urban space”.
As beautifully put by Stan Cox and David Van Tassel, tree-like skyscrapers look like a dreamy idea with a solid financial and political hidden agenda, which could ultimately become even more industrialized than modern rural agriculture. Indeed, to defend this type of urban farming, many authors argue that fossil fuels, fertilizers, and government subsidies to industrial farming are also expensive. In doing so, they implicitly assert that vertical farming and industrial farming should be of the same nature and have the same standards, which says a lot about the financial interests and real objectives of urban agriculture. Such a type of urban agriculture is all but sustainable, and can certainly not foster urban sustainability. There is obviously a huge discrepancy between the dream—or the nightmare—and the reality.
These “castles—or skyscrapers—in the sky” are not the most worrying misappropriations of the notion of urban agriculture. They have not been built, anyway (except for Stephano Boeri’s “Vertical Forest” in Milan, in the aftermath of the Expo 2015 “Feed the Planet, Energy For Life !”, but these buildings are not truly high-rise constructions, and besides they are not agricultural holdings but rather residential towers with trees, more like the hanging gardens of Babylon).
Get back to the ground level: conventional farming within cities is potentially a much graver concern, be it located in a skyscraper or just in the ground. The big issue here is the dissemination of pesticides and fertilizers as well as of the wastes and the by-products of industrial urban agriculture, especially in vine-growing or grain-growing regions—two agricultural productions with high added-value—where vines and fields are frequently incorporated in the city. The inhabitants of such cities are exposed to critical levels of pesticides on a daily basis without them even knowing. Well, they are beginning to know, and it appears that they are not happy at all. In France, many cities are concerned, such as Bordeaux, Reims (the capital of Champagne), and the medium-sized cities of the Parisian basin, such as Orleans or Chartres. It is probably the same elsewhere in Europe and worldwide.
Conventional urban farming: Would you enjoy a nice cup of pesticides?
Take the very well-documented example of Bordeaux. An emblematic case indeed, considering the reputation of Bordeaux wines. Today in France, vine-growing is the second largest consumer of pesticides (20 percent by volume of all the pesticides in France, for only 3.7 percent of farmland in use). You can imagine what the neighbors of these vines passively inhale and swallow. After years of omertà, the inhabitants of the Bordeaux urban area finally started standing up against this agriculture. Farmers and pesticide producers—and local authorities or farmer’s unions, who are sometimes considered as accomplices—are getting sued in court.
All this began in 2014, when twenty-three children and their teacher had been poisoned in their schoolyard in the city of Villeneuve. Last February, the people living near Bordeaux vineyards successfully organized a huge protest against the use of pesticides in urban areas. Several surveys had been disclosed in the preceding weeks that warned them about the impacts of plant protection products on health and on the urban environment. Wine-growing monoculture was especially targeted due to the very frequent spraying of chemicals, including fungicide treatments. According to one of these surveys, hair samples of children going to schools surrounded by vineyards in the Bordeaux region tested positive for 44 pesticides—authorized and unauthorized. Another report mentioned the risks of cancer linked to glyphosate (a systemic herbicide and an organophosphorus compound) used in wine production. The French Ministry of Environment called on the ANSES (Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire de l’Alimentation, de l’Environnement et du Travail) to revise this chemical’s existing authorization.
This situation is stupid, considering that many of these chemicals are ineffective, especially those targeting blight, oidium and gray mold, as demonstrated in 2015 by the INRA (French National Research Institute for Agronomy). Why should anyone keep on applying pesticides that yield no results? Well, it gives work to phytosanitary manufacturers and distributors. Besides, wine is an economic sector that carries weight in the Bordeaux area: wine production represents a yearly turnover of 4 billion euros, and is the largest employer in the region. Thus, among the different stakeholders nobody dares to call into question a system of which everyone benefits financially.
Hmmm, it smells good…Photo: Wikimedia Commons, USDA
The case of Bordeaux is just an example of a much broader issue. In 2015, the NGO Générations Futures carried out tests in houses and apartments located nearby vineyards, cornfields, and industrial orchards, with amazing results. The analysis showed that the inhabitants were living in what the report calls “a pesticide dust-bath.” On average, 20 different chemicals were detected in each dwelling: 14 when near cornfields, 23 when near industrial orchards, and (no surprise) 26 when near vineyards. Even diluron—a herbicide whose use has been officially banned in France since 2008—was discovered in many places. Among those chemicals are 12 endocrine disrupters, which represent 98 percent by weight of all the chemicals detected. Endocrine disrupters are suspected of provoking prostate, testicular, and breast cancers; of triggering hormone system disorders such as diabetes; and of generating fetal development disorders. How about that? Yes, living nearby intensive industrial agriculture in urban areas is not without consequences, and is certainly not sustainable.
When spraying foliage with a plant-protection chemical, only 30 percent to 50 percent of the active product hits its target. Where does the rest go? It is transported in the atmosphere, gets deposited on the ground, and eventually reaches groundwater by leaching. Supposing that you live nearby: you breathe it, you drink it, and—provided that you grow your own vegetables in the contaminated soil and irrigate them with polluted water—you eat it. South of Lyon, people living close to large orchards complain “When we see our neighbor, the farmer, arriving on his tractor wearing his ‘spacesuit’, we lock the kids and ourselves in the house with the doors and windows well closed”. This happens more then 20 times per year between March and September during the growing season, which is when people like to stay outdoors. Not only people living nearby need to be concerned: airborne pollutants are transported quite far from their source. AirParif (an agency accredited by the Ministry of Environment to monitor the air quality in Paris and in the Parisian Region) recently detected (2014) more than 80 different phytosanitary chemicals used in cereal farming in the very center of Paris.
Within the city, farmers and their non-farming neighbors share more than fencelines, and it can be quite challenging to live near industrial agriculture. A hammer can be used indifferently to knock in nails or to shatter skulls, but the hammer is neither bad nor good. It is the person that uses it who decides. The same goes for urban agriculture: All relies on who does what on its behalf.
Once again, my objective here is not to discredit urban agriculture. Conversely, my objective is to illustrate the difference between type of agricultures that help reconfigure more sustainable cities—which I have developed in former posts—and agricultures that endanger sustainability in the city.
Moving To A Collective Impact Model: The Intertwine Alliance
Attend to fundamentals 
Meanwhile, community interest in the site grew, particularly after the vast space 
Ray Tomalty and Allan Mallach have done an exemplary job at analyzing various historical factors that have influenced the development of cities in Canada and the US. They’re both practitioner academics: one based in Montreal and the other in Washington, and they bring an appropriate mix of data analysis and more subjective commentary into this book.
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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