To move towards more sustainable and resilient cities, it is essential that we connect urban ecology researchers and practitioners to find and implement solutions to urban environmental issues. The question, though, is how to do this?
The Challenge of Managing Urban Ecosystems
Cities are increasingly understood as mosaics of grey, green, and blue infrastructure that interact in complex ways to affect the wellbeing of urban residents (Ahern 2007, Svendsen and Northridge 2012). In particular, green and blue infrastructure provides important benefits to urban residents (Lovell and Taylor 2013) such as flood protection by urban wetlands and forests (Lennon et al. 2014), improved mental health from greener streets and park visitation (Bragg and Atkins 2016, Shanahan et al. 2016), and food production from community gardens (Russo et al. 2017). This ecological infrastructure also supports key wildlife populations in urban areas (Hough et al. 2004). However, with this new view of cities comes a key challenge: how to integrate specialized knowledge and ecologically-sound management practices into urban planning in order to maintain natural areas and promote urban ecosystem services.
Urban parks and green infrastructure like Calgary’s Nose Hill (left) and Montreal’s Mount Royal (right) parks protect important ecosystems and provide key benefits to urban residents. Photos: M. Mitchell
Just as grey infrastructure can falter without proper care and maintenance, green and blue infrastructure—and the benefits it provides—can break down if urban ecosystems are not properly managed. Improper selection of street trees can lead to increased allergen exposure or property damage (Roy et al. 2012), failure to effectively manage forested areas in or near cities can lead to infrastructure damage when wildfires occur (Calkin et al. 2014), and unfamiliarity with animal movement corridors can lead to car accidents and loss of both animal and human life (Malo et al. 2004). Added complexities include understanding the social aspects of the workers who are maintaining urban green and blue infrastructure (Bardekjian 2016), as well as navigating the values and preferences of the multicultural communities that make up today’s cities (Wilkerson et al. 2018).
Managing urban ecosystems is not simple; it requires understanding of both the ecology of these ecosystems—how living organisms relate and interact with each other and their surroundings (Lepczyk et al. 2017), and the socioecology of cities—how human, built, green and blue infrastructure, ecosystems, and social-economic systems interact across urban areas (Andersson et al. 2014). In other words, decision-making must draw on and effectively integrate urban ecology and urban planning/management knowledge (Aronson et al. 2017, Groffman et al. 2017).
In order to move towards more sustainable Canadian cities, our municipal governments need to adopt a collaborative systems approach, where conversation and cooperation among urban planners, managers, arborists, landscape architects and ecologists is the norm rather than the exception.
Canada and the integration of urban ecology and planning
Eighty percent of Canadians that live in cities are directly affected when urban temperatures increase, urbanization leads to flooding, or species shifts lead to human-wildlife conflict in cities. Urban ecology focuses on topics that have direct implications for the ecosystem services that contribute to human wellbeing in urban areas (Ziter 2016) and thus can provide valuable information about how to manage the places where most Canadians live. However, despite the rapid increase in attention to urban ecology around the world (Mayer 2010, McDonald 2016), there has historically been relatively little focus on urban ecosystems among the Canadian ecological community compared to other regions (e.g., Europe, US, Australia). Rather, there has been an emphasis on ecology in “natural” areas, or production systems (e.g. forestry, agriculture), which cities don’t readily fit into. For example, an urban ecology session has been only been part of the two most recent (i.e. 2017, 2018) annual conferences of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, despite the organization’s 13 year history. If Canadians want to build sustainable cities where green and blue infrastructure is effectively managed, urban ecology research that can inform—and is informed by—urban planning needs to be accelerated, supported, and valued.
Edmonton’s river valley green space provides key recreation, wildlife, flood regulation, and urban cooling benefits to local residents. Photo: Merijana cc by-sa
Furthermore—or perhaps consequently—urban planning and ecology research in Canada (as often occurs elsewhere) currently operate too often in parallel, rather than cooperatively. Several key challenges to effective collaboration exist in cities. Academics and city staff may have different goals, unequal understanding of the concerns of urban residents, and thus ask different types of questions. Planners and decision-makers must operate within the constraints of economic systems and budgets that are often unfamiliar to academic ecologists. Different professions often speak different “disciplinary languages” that must be bridged. Early career researchers (e.g. students, postdocs) may be new to a region or on a short term contract, and thus lack the time or connections to build the relationships necessary for co-produced work. And academic incentive structures may not sufficiently support or encourage collaboration of this type. In Canada, it is a particular challenge that federal agencies explicitly separate funding for natural science (NSERC), social science (SSHRC), and health research (CIHR). This means there is limited support for research that explores complex urban socio-ecological systems (Conway 2018).
Increasing awareness of urban ecology in Canada, however, offers an opportunity to ensure that urban ecologists work together with Canadian urban planners/decision-makers to produce rigorous and practical solutions for Canada’s cities. Development of a national culture emphasizing collaborations among urban ecology researchers and practitioners will have two primary benefits. One, it will ensure that ecologists engage in research that can be meaningfully applied to urban management challenges. Two, municipal planners will more rapidly gain the knowledge they need to effectively design and manage green and blue infrastructure in cities. To move towards more sustainable and resilient cities, it is essential that we connect Canadian urban ecology researchers and practitioners to find and implement solutions to urban environmental issues.
The question though, is how to best do this?
Fortunately, we can look towards a number of Canadian case studies as examples of urban ecology initiatives that successfully transcend disciplinary boundaries and overcome some of the above challenges to connect ecologists and planners for the benefit of Canadian cities and their residents. The following three examples (contributed by participants of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution’s inaugural urban ecology symposium in 2017) demonstrate the benefits of building partnerships between researchers and practitioners, connecting ecological knowledge to people, and speaking the language of urban governments.
Case Study 1: Managing urban invasive species
The District of North Saanich, British Columbia, increasingly has to deal with invasive species that threaten parks and natural areas. For example, recent invasion by Carpet Burweed (Soliva sessilis) has reduced the use and enjoyment of public spaces for recreation. However, dealing with invasive species can be extremely expensive, and can be controversial since some people like problematic species (e.g. Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus) for its fruit). Faced with difficult decisions around invasive removal, North Saanich staff recognized the potential for ecologists to advise on best strategies. In 2012, North Saanich developed an Invasive Species Management Strategy (Manton and Schaefer 2011) that was widely successful. It provides clear direction and a coordinated approach for dealing with the invasive species, and has subsequently been a model for other locations (e.g. Kathrens et al. 2016). Integral to this success was the establishment of strong partnerships between ecologists, planners, municipal staff, and the public.
Exclosures like this one at Cattle Point in Oak Bay, adjacent to the District of Saanich, help contain the spread the invasive species Carpet Burweed by people and pets. Photo: V. Schaefer
The Strategy has largely been successful because it was developed through an inclusive process that allowed it to be harmonized with other local municipal and provincial plans, policies, and legislation. The process included presentations and publication of comprehensive educational materials; facilitator-led workshops and interviews with politicians, management, operations staff, volunteers and the public; and an Open House and online survey to facilitate input from the public. This extensive consultation process introduced the public to the technical, logistic, and political issues of invasive species management. This was critical to deal with challenges such as collaboration and sharing of resources across different municipalities within the region.
The inclusive process helped inform the urban ecology contributions to the Strategy and their harmonization with the policy goals of North Saanich, and provided a valuable learning opportunity for the ecologists involved. For example, urban ecologists helped to develop “Watch Lists” to identify which species should be publicized amongst staff and the general public to report new sightings. Ecologists also guided management and removal efforts for heavily impacted public areas; prioritizing removal of species that affect important ecosystem processes (e.g. Garlic mustard) or present public health threats (e.g. Giant hogweed). Finally, ecologists worked with municipality staff to determine which species should be maintained at current levels rather than eradicated, which frees municipalities from some public pressure to undertake costly and often unfeasible complete eradication of invasive species.
Ecologists, in turn, learned how to effectively work within the political and regulatory framework familiar to urban planners and decision-makers. Guidelines integrated into the Strategy couldn’t be based solely on ecological values, but had to agree with the values and goals of several additional plans (e.g., the Saanich Park and Natural Areas Guidelines, Bylaw Policies and Legislation, and Provincial and Federal Environmental Protection Legislation, to name only a few). By virtue of substantial involvement of volunteers and community organizations in regional invasive species management and the development of the Strategy, ecologists also gained insight into community engaged approaches to science that are often outside the traditional academic repertoire. Taking adequate time to ensure that all involved groups were “speaking the same language” was a key component of long-term success.
Since its inception, the Strategy has resulted in a strengthened working relationship between local stakeholders in the region, clear statements of the vision and goal for invasive species management in North Saanich, and a plan for optimizing municipal resources for invasive species control. This has, and continues to be, facilitated by the strong academic-municipal-public partnerships built during the creation of the Strategy.
Further Resources:
Kathrens L, Jennings J, Schaefer VH. University of Victoria Invasive Species Management Strategy. Victoria, BC: Office of Campus Planning and Sustainability. University of Victoria; 2016. Available at: https://www.uvic.ca/sustainability/assets/docs/fund/CSF003-invasive-species-mgmt-plan.pdf
Manton C, Schaefer VH. Invasive Species Management Strategy for Saanich. Saanich, BC: District of Saanich; 2012. Available at: http://www.saanich.ca/assets/Parks~Recreation~and~Culture/Documents/InvasiveSpeciesManagementStrategy.pdf
Case Study 2: Providing guidance for urban forest climate adaptation and design
Metro Vancouver—a federation of 21 municipalities, one Electoral Area and one Treaty First Nation that collaboratively plans for and delivers regional-scale services—has identified climate adaptation as an important piece of building and maintaining a livable region. Consequently, the region is currently incorporating climate adaptation into its policies and regulations to both conserve biodiversity and enhance quality of life.
Urban forests, including park forests and street trees, were identified as a particular policy focus due to their contribution to multiple ecosystem services and role in climate adaptation. However, practical region-specific guidance on how to plan and manage urban forests within the built environment and in a changing climate was lacking. To address this knowledge gap, an advisory panel of planners, urban foresters, and ecologists (from academia and government) worked together to develop the Urban Forest Climate Adaptation Framework and Design Guidebook based on the most recent science. This work includes a tree species selection database with 144 species to support evidence-based decision making. Multiple perspectives were critical to finalizing these recommendations. For example, the database was specifically designed to balance the practical difficulties of tree survival in harsh conditions (a frequent planning justification for planting of non-native trees) against the need to be cautious about planting invasive species (a value often held by ecologists and conservation groups). Navigating this challenge required careful consideration and discussion of the concerns and goals of different stakeholders, including negotiation of values held by different parties. Discussions ultimately resulted in a compromise among planners and ecologists, recognizing the validity of arguments on each side. This compromise involved inclusion of a strong communications strategy around invasive species built into the resultant products, and recommendations to prioritize native plantings in locations in close proximity to natural areas—but without eliminating non-native trees from the guide altogether.
Metro Vancouver’s Urban Forest Climate Adaptation Framework and Design Guidebook will ensure that street tree selection and management in the region takes into account likely future climate change. Photo: Canuckdon cc by-sa
The creation of the Framework and Design Guidebook demonstrates the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to develop strong, evidence-based recommendations for urban planning. Those involved in the process also highlighted the importance of identifying the unique levers and barriers for each stakeholder group to make progress, and the need to take time to appropriately tailor their messages. Planners learned to be open to the suggestions of ecologists, while ecologists in turn learned the importance of recognizing values outside of their own, and of adapting their language and messages to a new audience. The next step—and an ongoing challenge—of this project includes looking at ways to increase the ease and accessibility of this information to different end users, which will be critical to support the implementation of urban forest plans and climate adaptation strategies across the Metro Vancouver region. A promising early success has been the recent incorporation of the Framework into the University of British Columbia’s Urban Forestry Masters Program, which educates the next generation of urban foresters.
Case study 3: Partners in Action: A shade policy in the City of Toronto for skin cancer prevention
It is not often that medical doctors, dermatologists, urban foresters, researchers, health consultants, planners, architects, landscape architects, urban designers and municipal employees come together to address a common goal. However, the creation of Toronto’s shade policy represents a successful synergy linking ultraviolet radiation awareness and skin cancer prevention with public health, city planning, urban forestry, civic design and health promotion policy. Integrating the expertise of these diverse groups to inform policy in Canada’s most populous city demonstrates the strength of building diverse partnerships across academia, practitioners, and other stakeholders, and the importance of aligning ecological knowledge with key urban policy goals.
The provision of shade (natural, built, and mobile) is a key method of preventing skin cancer caused by environmental ultraviolet radiation. Public policy to support shade creation is thus an important component of skin cancer prevention. The Toronto Cancer Prevention Coalition Ultraviolet Radiation Working Group (TCPC – UVRWG) successfully put shade on the city’s cancer prevention agenda through collaborative pilot projects. Although the group’s goals were medically motivated, an ecological perspective was important to the success of the strategy as outdoor access to shade is a result of urban planning, site design and landscaping decisions, requiring strong knowledge of urban forestry.
Selection of urban street trees in Toronto will now have to incorporate consideration of shade. Photo: Vanessa Sabino cc by 3.0
The formation of such a large, interdisciplinary group, as TCPC-UVRWG represents, presented challenges in negotiating multiple perspectives and agendas. Ensuring that each member was heard necessitated the creation of mechanisms whereby everybody had an opportunity to speak or contribute – particularly in a situation where a wide array of educational and professional backgrounds was represented. Ultimately, this broad representation was critical to the policy’s success. The City of Toronto is now the first city in Canada to have implemented a Shade Policy (2015), including guidelines for the selection of shade trees. The official nature of the policy has resulted in an increased awareness of the relationship between green spaces and public health, at both the general public and institutional levels. Additionally, several communities across Canada have since approached the TCPC for help in developing their own shade policies, encouraging urban forestry initiatives in cities more broadly.
Incorporating urban ecology knowledge into urban planning and policy is increasingly essential as Canadians seek to improve human well-being and biodiversity outcomes in cities. The challenge is how to do this effectively in the complex social-ecological landscapes cities represent. Our case studies exemplify how urban ecology, when attentive to the social, governmental, and practical considerations that come into play when managing urban systems, can help inform urban management and lead to positive outcomes.
Key to this are processes that facilitate communication and understanding between the diverse groups involved in urban planning. Urban ecologists, in particular, must be prepared to adapt their language and approach for new audiences, and embrace the need for compromise when faced with alternative value systems. In addition, improved incentives within the Canadian university system for this type of work are also required, including more opportunities to develop long-term research partnerships with city governments. In the meantime, urban ecologists and planners in Canada and worldwide—whether working for government or as part of academic or NGO organizations—should continue to strive to work collaboratively to ensure that urban management strategies are based on sound, current, and relevant ecological knowledge.
1Department of Integrative Biology, University of Wisconsin-Madison 2Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia 3Faculty of Forestry, Department of Forest Resources Management, University of British Columbia, and Tree Canada 4Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto 5Sustainability Group – Planning, Urban Design and Sustainability, City of Vancouver 6David Suzuki Foundation 7Parks, Planning and Environment Department, Metro Vancouver 8Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University 9Department of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria
Acknowledgements
This article is the result of a symposium organized by Carly Ziter and Matthew Mitchell at the 2017 Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution Annual Meeting entitled “Accelerating urban ecology in Canada: Identifying current research approaches, gaps, and needs in Canadian cities”. Ziter is supported by a Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship and a PEO Scholar Award. Mitchell is supported by a Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship.
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Matthew Mitchell is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. His work focuses on identifying ways to better manage human-dominated urban and agricultural landscapes for both people and nature.
Dr. Adrina C. Bardekjian is an urban forestry researcher, writer, educator and public speaker. She works with Tree Canada as Manager of Urban Forestry and Research Development. Her current academic research examines women's roles, experiences and gender equity in arboriculture and urban forestry. She is also an Adjunct Professor with Forestry at the University of Toronto.
Tenley Conway is a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research explores on socio-ecological interactions in urban landscapes, with a focus on urban forests and green infrastructure.
Angela Danyluk is a Senior Sustainability Specialist at the City of Vancouver. Angela is a biologist and works across disciplines on projects and programs related to adaptation to sea level rise and heat as well as ecology and biodiversity.
Michelle Molnar works at the David Suzuki Foundation as an Environmental Economist and Policy Analyst, where she focuses on the conservation of natural capital using various tools of ecological economics, policy analysis, and public outreach.
Marcin Pachcinski oversees planning for Metro Vancouver’s Electoral Area A and leads the regional planning environment portfolio, which is focused on advancing ecological health in the region.
Justin Podur is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Ongoing projects in his lab include research on urban parks and on urban human-squirrel relations.
Val Schaefer is the Academic Administrator for Restoration Programs at the University of Victoria. He is a biologist and ecologist by training who has developed a unique expertise in ecological restoration and the emerging field of Urban Ecology.
Josephine Clark is a Regional Environmental Planner at Metro Vancouver. As a professional biologist and GIS specialist, her work focuses on using geospatial analysis to inform complex ecological issues.
Sinead is a sustainability strategist and environmental planner with expertise driving strategic initiatives to create impact at the intersection of human and ecological health in cities.
UBHub arose as a response to gaps and bottlenecks in urban biodiversity planning and management. Developed with practitioners in mind, its goals are increasing capacity of local governments and their partners to develop knowledge-driven biodiversity strategies
Cities that plan for biodiversity recognize the potential of healthy ecosystems to mitigate urban problems and enhance quality of life but, due to limited capacity, can struggle with developing and managing their biodiversity strategies. Our team at the Urban Biodiversity Hub (UBHub) has compiled thousands of examples of biodiversity work from local governments and environmental NGOs around the world that can help. After two years of development, we have now publicly launched the largest public database of urban biodiversity activities worldwide. Our database is a one-stop shop that makes it easier for people to explore urban biodiversity practices and select from helpful resources.
In defining the scope of the database, we use a broad definition of urban biodiversity that encompasses all activities and information related to urban nature and the influence of cities on conservation, including individual species plans, green and blue infrastructure, impact on regional landscapes and global conservation goals, environmental education, and more. Together, these data consolidate information previously scattered across hundreds of sites into one searchable location.
The UBHub database has two parts, now available and free to explore at www.ubhub.org: (1) an interactive map of biodiversity in practice, consisting of plans, reports and activities, and (2) a resource guide that organizes and compares tools for urban biodiversity.
Screenshot showing the largest database of urban biodiversity activities worldwide, by the Urban Biodiversity Hub. Image from www.ubhub.org/map.
About the map
The UBHub map visualizes global and regional patterns of what cities and other actors are doing to improve local biodiversity. Each of the map’s 1,200+ markers (as of October 2018) contains a list of urban biodiversity activities, documents, programs, and awards related to that location, along with links to the original sources. The data can also be filtered by city parameters to locate comparable biodiversity efforts. Markers on the map can be searched by keyword and can be highlighted by program or filtered according to several variables, including scale, population, density, biome, and conservation status. The map database is also available in a summary or in table form.
The data available via the map are already proving useful for practitioners and researchers. Staff at the City of Los Angeles, in preparation for creating their own biodiversity strategy, used the UBHub map to locate other municipalities that have instituted specific programs and activities of interest. Researchers have used the database to quickly locate government documents and summarize current practices in urban biodiversity. Our team also harnessed the database to put together a summary report of current practice as contributors to The Nature Conservancy’s Nature in the Urban Centuryassessment (McDonald et al. 2018).
Of the variety of document types (reports, plans, declarations, maps, etc.) in our database, the most comprehensive data so far are on municipal biodiversity reports and plans. We have identified at least 123 cities from 31 countries that have produced a biodiversity report and/or a biodiversity plan; 108 of these have published biodiversity plans, 46 have published biodiversity reports, and 31 have published both. Cities around the world have taken part, although the majority of documents were produced by cities in Europe, followed by North America and then Asia. Cities of all sizes are planning for biodiversity, from towns with populations of less than 100,000, such as Curridabat, Costa Rica, to megacities such as Shanghai, China.
Graph of the number of cities (by continent) that have published urban biodiversity plans and/or reports. A biodiversity plan is an official government document that indicates the intended strategy for biodiversity conservation. A biodiversity report is a document that summarizes the current conditions of biodiversity within a particular area. Data are based on the public database at www.ubhub.org/map and originally produced for McDonald et al. (2018).
Another comprehensive data set is a compilation of municipal participants in biodiversity programs. Programs help cities manage or plan for biodiversity by offering a standardized index or series of steps that sometimes comes with institutional support. Examples of such programs include the Singapore Index (also known as the City Biodiversity Index or Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity), the Ecological Footprint, the Biophilic Cities Networkand other international programs. We mapped municipal participants in 26 frameworks and programs that are specific to urban biodiversity and are in use in more than one country.
Graph of municipalities participating in various international urban biodiversity programs. Note that these data do not include city-states, such as Singapore. Data from www.ubhub.org/map, produced for McDonald et al. (2018).
About the guide
In addition to the map, the UBHub website also includes a guide, which is a collection of resources that are useful for urban biodiversity practitioners. The resources are organized by category and linked back to the original source. Categories include public engagement, regulations, data repositories, conferences, measurement tools, blogs, and more.
One feature of the guide is a program comparison to help practitioners make an informed decision about their biodiversity approach by comparing nine systems at once. The comparison includes a basic description of each program, the program steps, participation requirements, and the pros and cons of each. This comparison can help a city more efficiently select a program that is right for them. Practitioners often have little time to research comparable efforts in other cities or compare approaches, and may end up either developing a system on their own or adopting a pre-existing framework without having the opportunity to analyze or even find out about alternatives. With the many numerous urban biodiversity strategies and programs being applied around the globe, it is difficult to discover and select an appropriate program. We hope that this comparison will help practitioners identify the most suitableprogram for their city or community.
Forum
We recognize that capacity and needs vary from region to region and city to city, and that knowledge of urban biodiversity and related topics is spread around the world. We therefore believe that an international exchange of knowledge and resources can bring important insights and offer opportunities for future collaboration. To that end, the UBHub website also includes a dedicated discussion forum accessible to logged-in users. On the forum, users can post or respond to questions and vote up or down on content to ensure quality. Positive votes on a user’s contributions add to the user’s reputation points in recognition of their contribution to the dialogue.
Future plans
We are now developing the myIndicators web platform for cities and their partner organizations to select and manage biodiversity indicators. City representatives will be able to log in, connect to the dashboard for their city, invite collaborators to join their dashboard, select their indicators, and start managing their biodiversity strategy. They may choose from several pre-existing index programs or create their own custom set of indicators. Indicators can include quantitative trends such as the amount of tree canopy cover or number of participants in education programs, or qualitative steps such as approval of a biodiversity plan by city council. The myIndicators dashboard will provide practitioners with a summary of their city’s progress and downloadable reports to use and share. It will also link to the forum, where practitioners can connect with researchers and one another to compare approaches and share techniques.
We are working with several cities and NGOs in our beta testing program to refine the myIndicators platform over the upcoming years. These beta testers are leaders in the field of urban biodiversity and pioneers in the measurement and management of urban biodiversity indicators. Ultimately, the myIndicators platform will help cities and communities manage their indicators, track their data, generate reports, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their biodiversity planning and management.
Collectively, UBHub’s components—the map, guide, forum, and myIndicators—arose as a response to the gaps and bottlenecks in urban biodiversity planning and management. While developing UBHub, we spoke with many researchers and practitioners who told us that urban biodiversity is generally championed by one or a few passionate staff members who take on the city’s biodiversity or conservation-related efforts on top of other responsibilities. We developed UBHub’s components with these practitioners in mind, with the goals ofincreasing the capacity of local governments and their partners to develop biodiversity strategies and of making urban biodiversity resources more widely available.
As we move forward in partnership with our beta test cities in developing myIndicators and other tools, we invite interested parties to join us in promoting the value of urban biodiversity and facilitating better urban biodiversity management by adding and using data, as a volunteer, or as an organizational partner.
Melissa Barton, Jennifer Rae Pierce, Mika Mei Jia Tan & Juan de Dios Morales Portland, Vancouver, Los Baños & Guayaquil
McDonald RI, Colbert M, Hamann M, Simkin R, Walsh B, Ascensão F, Barton M, Crossman K, Edgecomb M, Elmqvist T, Gonzalez A, Guneralp B, Haase D, Hillel O, Huang K, Maddox D, Mansur A, Paque J, Pereira HM, Pierce JR, Weller R, Seto K, Tan MMJ, Ziter C. 2018. Nature in the Urban Century: A global assessment of important areas for safeguarding biodiversity and human well-being. The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA. http://www.nature.org/urban100
About the UBHub Team:
Our team at UBHub originally came together in December of 2016 at the 13th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity, out of mutual interest in promoting measurable biodiversity actions in cities around the world. We have members in 18 countries who all volunteer their time to create a one-stop shop for current practices in urban biodiversity.
Jennifer Rae Pierce heads the Urban Biodiversity Hub’s Partnerships and Engagement team and is a steering committee member. She is a political ecologist and urban biodiversity planner. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on the topic of engagement in urban biodiversity planning.
By night, Mika Mei Jia Tan leads the Urban Biodiversity Hub’s Steering Committee. In the day, she is Coordinator of the ASEAN Youth Biodiversity Programme at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Biodiversity Centre. An interdisciplinary thinker, she holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies (Conservation Biology) from Middlebury College, USA.
Juan de Dios Morales is the founder of the Wild GYE Initiative, which promotes Guayaquil’s biodiversity through photography. He has worked on different aspects of environmental management, communication, and education and is knowledgeable on ecological research, environmental policy and planning strategies, and project management. He has dedicated more than 8 years to nature photography and become an environmental communication leader.
Urban cemeteries such as Lakshmipuram serve diverse important purposes. By bringing the ecological, social, historical, and sacred together can bridge nature and culture of cities.
The word “cemetery” is derived from the Greek word ‘koimeterion’ meaning ‘dormitory’ or “resting place”. But cemeteries in cities can be more than resting sites for the deceased, or for their loved ones to visit and mourn. They are spaces that harbour a rich biodiversity including trees and plants of conservation value. Famous cemeteries also attract a large footfall of visitors, such as the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, France, where a galaxy of famous artists, authors, and musicians are buried. As Francis et al (2000: 43) say, cemeteries can play an important role in “anchoring cultural communities”. The Lakshmipuram cemetery situated in Ulsoor, at the centre of Bengaluru, is one such space―where multiple urban worlds collide.
Over the years, we have visited the Lakshmipuram cemetery in Bengaluru, which covers 7.07 ha, documenting tree diversity, and learning about the social and cultural significance of this cemetery for residents of the city.
Lakshmipuram cemetery situated in Ulsoor, Bengaluru
Tree diversity of Lakshmipuram cemetery
During a research study of Bengaluru’s cemeteries (Jaganmohan et al. 2018), we counted a total of 556 trees of 15 species in Lakshmipuram cemetery, of which eight were introduced and seven were native species. Most trees (504 of 556 trees) belonged to native species, with the Indian beech (Pongamia pinnata) accounting for as much as 83 percent of all trees. We spoke to a grave designer, who told us that many visitors who buried family members in the cemetery paid him to plant a tree near the grave ― and they prefer the Indian beech. He attributed the abundance of this species in the cemetery to this practice.
Indian beech planted near the graves Photo: Seema Mundoli
Other commonly seen native species were banyan (Ficus benghalensis) and peepul (Ficus religiosa), both of which are of cultural and sacred value, especially to Hindus (this is a Hindu cemetery). There were also jamun trees (Syzygium cumini), and wood apple trees (Limonia acidissima); the latter is a species believed to be sacred to the Hindu God Shiva, in whose honour the Maha Shivaratri festival is celebrated each year at the cemetery. The other native species were the Pride of India (Lagerstroemia speciosa), and the Indian mast tree (Polyalthia longifolia). Among the introduced species were Indian siris (Albizia lebbeck), cook pine (Araucaria cookii), pink cassia (Cassia nodosa), golden cassia (Cassia spectabilis), sausage tree (Kigelia pinnata), Nile tulip (Markhamia lutea), raintree (Samaneasaman), and African tulip (Spathodea campanulata).
Tree cover in the cemetery of both native and introduced species Photo: Seema Mundoli
The cultural significance of Lakshmipuram cemetery
The Lakshmipuram cemetery is of special cultural significance to communities from Ulsoor, as well as for those who have moved away, but who still have family members buried there. While the exact origins of the cemetery are unclear, we found a grave dated 29 September 1887, indicating that the cemetery is of considerable antiquity.
Some of the oldest graves in the cemetery Photo: Seema Mundoli
Our visits and interviews focused on the annual festival of Maha Shivaratri―a celebration at the Lakshmipuram cemetery that transforms the otherwise quiet space into a bustling fair. The festival of Maha Shivaratri is held in spring on a new moon night to commemorate the marriage of Lord Shiva to the Goddess Parvati. Shiva is a very important god in the Hindu pantheon who is seen as a creator, protector, and destroyer. The festival begins with the worship of Shiva followed by that of his consort Parvati, the next day as Kali, the destroyer of evil. The priestess explained the significance, saying:
“We perform puja there [cemetery], because, the Goddess Parvati and Shiva will be together only in the graveyard. When Shiva takes his angry form in the graveyard, he can be pacified only by Goddess Parvati. So we first worship Shiva until 12 am, then the goddess after that.”
On the night of Maha Shivaratri, devotees stay awake, praying, meditating, and chanting hymns in praise of Shiva. In Lakshmipuram, the day following the all-night vigil is celebrated in a unique fashion, with a visit to the temples in the cemetery, followed by offerings of food and drink by family members to the graves of their loved ones.
There are six temples in the cemetery. Four are dedicated to the female Goddess Kali (considered to be a form of Parvati), while one is a shrine to the snake gods and the last is a Satyaharishchandra Temple, dedicated to a legendary Hindu king known for his honesty and righteousness. Perhaps the most spectacular of the Kali idols, and one that forms the centre of the Maha Shivaratri festival, is the one of her lying supine on the floor. This idol is made of mud and is shaped to take the form of the goddess 15 days prior to this festival. This Kali has a disproportionately large head, and a truncated torso and legs. The eyes and nose are large, and the mouth is shaped into a hole. On this festival day, the idol is decorated with coloured cloth, and strewn with flowers.
The Goddess Kali made from mud and decorated with coloured cloth and flowers Photo: Seema Mundoli
Several rituals take place around the Kali idol. The priestess blessed lemons that were stepped on, and eggs and cucumbers were waved around the head and touched on the shoulder of the person to ward off the evil eye. Another ritual involved specifically protecting young children from the evil eye and illness. The assistant to the priestess carries a child and places the child briefly on a cloth laid out near the open mouth of the Kali. Chickens were also offered for sacrifice by devotees. We observed several locks on the grills around the enclosure where the idol lay. We were told that the locks were offerings by devotees seeking intervention in resolving fights and altercations. Explaining the reason for the locks, the priestess said:
“It is a symbol to close people’s mouth. If someone is talking ill of us behind our backs, we take their name and put a lock there in the temple. Two people have told me that this has actually worked. I had to remove the locks as they told me that they could not talk.”
The offering of locks, with the supine Kali in the background Photo: Seema Mundoli
While the temple witnesses a steady stream of devotees, worship at individual graves was also being carried out. In the days leading up to Maha Shivaratri, family members visit the cemetery to clean the area around the graves, removing fallen leaves and any trash. The graves range from simple mud graves with no headstones, to large graves made of expensive granite, some with elaborate headstones that have photographs of the deceased. The family members repair the graves, decorate them with flowers, and paint them. Splashes of red, pink, yellow, blue, and orange from freshly painted graves provide a visual contrast with the fresh green leaves of the Indian beech that shades many of the graves. Graves are decorated with simple floral or geometric patterns. We also saw some interesting drawings—for example one of the graves was painted in the hues of the Brazilian flag with a design of the flag and a football.
Grave with the Brazilian flag painted on it Photo: Seema Mundoli
During worship, family members place lit earthen lamps and lit incense sticks on the graves, or in the triangular alcoves that some of the graves. They apply turmeric and vermilion in dots and stripes on the graves and use rice powder to draw patterns on the graves.
Worshipping the grave of the ancestors Photo: Seema Mundoli
An important aspect is to provide offerings of food and beverages to the deceased. Family members prepare food at home, or occasionally purchase food from outside, placing these in plates made of leaves, plastic, and paper on the graves. The food served could be the food cooked at home that day, but often special, multi-course meals were provided, sometimes taking care to include the favourite food of the person buried. We observed a variety of food placed on the graves, ranging from a homemade traditional meal of ragi mudde (a dish made of finger millet, Eleusine coracana) to cake purchased from local bakeries. Beverages including water, buttermilk, and juice were placed on the graves. We even observed a couple of graves with bottles of beer, and alcohol poured into glasses. The visiting family members ate some food at the grave. What was left was collected by young boys waiting eagerly around, and beggars. Dogs ate their fill of food, dozing on the graves afterwards, while crows (Corvus splendens) and black kites (Milvus migrans) circled the air and looked on from the trees, grabbing pieces of meat and other food once people moved away.
Food and beer offered at the grave Photo: Seema MundoliA black kite waiting its turn to get at the food Photo: Seema Mundoli
On the day of the Shivaratri festival, the path from the entrance of the cemetery to the temples was filled with vendors selling snacks, ice cream, and candy floss. Others were selling inexpensive plastic toys and vessels of steel and aluminium. In 2019, the local corporator helped install a large LCD screen that was playing devotional and film songs. We were also told by the interviewees about a live orchestra in the evening that was a major attraction, with the cemetery lit up with floodlights.
Trinkets being sold as the cemetery takes on the atmosphere of a fair Photo: Seema Mundoli
After the festivities around Shivaratri end, the cemetery returns to a quiet place with hardly any visitors for most of the year. Some visitors do come to pray at the festival of Ugadi, locally celebrated as the New Year, which falls between late March and early April. Family members also visited the graves during the birth and death anniversaries of those buried at the cemetery to pay their respects. Women came during the year to pray for a good marriage, and for a child, at the nagarkallus (snake shrine). An Indian beech at the snake shrine was tied with sacred threads. The base of the shrine was surrounded by several small cradles, fertility offerings to the snake god.
Snake shrine with cradles and sacred thread tied to the Indian beech tree behind Photo: Seema Mundoli
Lakshmipuram cemetery as a social space
The cemetery was home to three families who resided within the premises, in charge of burials. We saw children and adults from these families during our field visits. Sometimes there were visitors who came with a specific purpose. The grave designer spoke of a neighbour, a lady whose daughter was buried in the cemetery. Every year, on her daughter’s birthday, she would take a cake to the cemetery, invite her neighbours to join her, and cut the cake next to her daughter’s grave―almost like a picnic according to the grave designer. The grave designer said:
“Yes, sometimes we get the departed people in our dreams. When that happens, we go to visit the person’s grave and ask them what the problem is. My wife goes to visit our son’s grave like that.”
The graves lie overgrown with weeds—till the next Maha Shivaratri festival Photo: Dechamma CS
In our interviews with some of the visitors to the cemetery on the Maha Shivaratri festival day, they reminisced about their childhood and said that they used to come to play cricket in the cemetery. We were told that youth from the area continue to play cricket in an open patch in the cemetery. The grave designer also said that,
“There are some local youths, who drink and smoke and play cards in one corner of the cemetery. I have also seen some destitute people sleeping inside. When I asked one of then he said he sleeps well inside.”
We attended a cultural event at the cemetery ― Karagadhe Kathegalu (stories of the Karaga). This event was organised by The Aravani Art Trust, an NGO that uses art as a medium to create awareness about the transgender community and women’s issues. The Karaga is a festival celebrated by some local communities, is dedicated to Draupadi from the epic Mahabharatha. In the ritual, a man dresses up as a woman and dances carrying an elaborately decorated pot embodying Draupadi. In this event at the cemetery, a man dressed up as a woman performed with members of the transgender community. At the event, the organisers explained the connection between cemeteries and transgendered people, who face extreme discrimination from family members and society and are excluded from accessing public spaces such as parks that are open to others. The cemetery is one location in the city where the community feels safe, not shouted at or shooed away, and not judged. For the community, the cemetery is a place where they can find peace before and after death.
Celebration of the Karaga festival Photo: Sukanya Basu
Cemeteries are for the dead, but can be also for the living
Cemeteries can be quiet, tranquil places that allow for reflection, or social sites used for recreation by urban residents. They can be of sacred or cultural significance, or be habitats for different kinds of biodiversity both floral and faunal especially native species that reflect the ecological history of the city. They can be places to mourn the dead or be sites that enable encounters between different cultures and religions in a heterogeneous urban community (Swensen and Skår 2018, Swensen 2018). Or, as the case of Lakhsmipuram cemetery has shown, serve diverse purposes―sacred, cultural, social, and ecological. Above all, urban cemeteries such as Lakshmipuram by bringing the ecological, social, historical, and sacred together can bridge nature and culture of cities.
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.
We thank Muthyalappa Lakshmi for first introducing us to the Lakshmipuram cemetery, sharing her memories, and taking us with her to witness the ceremonies. We are grateful to all who spoke to us for their time and inputs. We thank Manujanth B, Varsha Bhaskar, Kshiraja Krishnan, Dechamma CS, and Sukanya Basu for their assistance with field visits, Enakshi Bhar for preparing the study area map, and Azim Premji University for funding this research.
References
Francis, D., Kellaher, L., Neophytou, G. (2000) Sustaining cemeteries: The user perspective. Mortality, 5(1): 34–52.
Jaganmohan, M., Vailshery, L.S., Mundoli, S. Nagendra, H. (2018) Biodiversity in sacred urban spaces of Bengaluru, India, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 32: 64–70.
Swensen, G. (2018) Between romantic historic landscapes, rational management models and obliterations: Urban cemeteries as green memory sites. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 33: 58–65.
Swensen, G., Skår, M. (2018) Urban cemeteries’ potential as sites for cultural encounters. Mortality, 24 (3): 333–356.
(Nota: A versão em Português segue imediatamente.)
The tropical urban landscapes of Rio de Janeiro, a city of 6.3 million inhabitants, are really impressive and unique. It is the outcome of five centuries of nature-human interaction. Last week UNESCO elected part of the city as a World Cultural Heritage.
It is quite meaningful that most of the selected images show the high biodiversity Atlantic Rainforest that have regenerated after centuries of natural resources exploitation and agricultural practices that had eliminated most of the native land cover (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1100/ viewed 07.05.2012). Actually the forests are fragmented, surrounded by dense urban occupation, and under pressure of further expansion repeating the same mistakes made in the past. The urbanized areas occupy mainly the lowlands, where ocean lagoons and wetlands were land filled with the devastation of several hills. One of the elected sites, the FlamengoPark, is a huge 1.2 km² created land, where the world renowned landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx was responsible for the magnificent gardens.
View from the Tijuca National Park, Christ the Redeemer (left) and Sugar Loaf (far center): reforested hills and the city. Photo by Cecilia Herzog.
In the Tijuca massif, where the famous Christ the Redeemer oversees the city, coffee plantations replaced forests and then were abandoned leaving a grassy and dry landscape until the XIX Century, when their slopes were partially replanted to restore the water sources. Nature took care of the rest, with the regeneration of vast areas of the two major massifs: Tijuca and Pedra Branca. Both are protected areas today. Tijuca National Park is one of the UNESCO elected sites. In the last 25 years a successful city reforestation program called “Mutirão Reflorestamento” (“common effort to restore forests”) has effectively replanted trees on slopes to prevent landslides, mainly close to the favelas. It is a social-ecological program because local people are hired and trained to work in the planting and monitoring process, becoming stewards of the forest.
View from the favela (slum) Santa Marta, with formal city in the lower areas. Christ the Redeemer in the right side. The city has high contrasts of forests and dense urbanized areas. Photo by Cecilia Herzog.
Green Yields to Grey
Although nature is present in our scenic views, the urbanized areas are heavily impervious and gray, especially in the Northern zones with almost no remaining green areas, not even public squares. The city has diverse environments, with pleasant forests and nice parks contrasting with arid, hot and noisy streets where the majority of the population lives. Most of the time the city is fairly hot. For instance, today is winter and the temperature is 29°C (84.2°F) at mid-day. I live very close to the forest, where it is quite pleasant with many trees, birds and insects. Native and invasive species are present, and should be permanently managed. Biodiversity abounds even close to the ecosystem remnants. In fact, if we let the windows open in the morning, monkeys (Cebus apella) come inside our apartment. Many residents feed them, consequently they keep coming back after easy junk food. Meanwhile, if I walk down one block, the traffic jam is constant, the temperature is much higher, and the street trees are old, under severe pressure in unsuitable situations, and many are dying and not being replaced.
Monkey in our balcony, with an onion. Photo by Alex Herzog.
People value the forested hills and the beaches mainly for recreation, biking, walking, hiking or just contemplating. I am not sure how they acknowledge and value the ecosystems services the forests and the urban trees provide. There is a great opportunity for further research about urban ecology and urban/regional landscape planning in Brazil, but there still isn’t formal education in these fields. Urban biodiversity and human-nature relations are not current issues in the majority of the Brazilian cities either, where in the last 20 years shopping malls and manicured gardens of gated communities are replacing open public spaces as recreation areas.
Urban Nature is not a Rio de Janeiro Decision-maker’s Priority
The decision makers in Rio de Janeiro do not make urban nature a priority. There is a lack of real comprehension of the role of biodiversity for a healthy city. The urbanized areas are subject to frequent floods and landslides because of the historic change in land use and vegetation cover. The World Cup and Olympic games that will take place here in the coming years drive a fast urban expansion that follows the same land cover pattern transformation in the remaining lowlands located in the western zone, in the Jacarepaguá and Guaratiba watersheds. Wetlands are being filled to create land for new expressways (cars and BRT’s) and by the real estate speculative process. The last legally protected mangrove remnant is under threat of excessive salinization because a new highway was built with traditional engineering techniques that interfere with the hydrologic flows, block the fresh water in the residential side, and, according to residents, cause more severe and recurrent floods. Other roads are under construction with no care for the landscape ecological processes and flows, eliminating biodiversity and changing water flows.
Aerial view of Jacarepaguá lowlands: Modernist urbanization based on car transportation, gated communities and shopping malls. Parks along the riparian corridors designed by Fernando Chacel. There is an opportunity for the Green Corridors plan to protect and enhance nature-human interaction for more sustainable and resilient urban landscapes. Photo: courtesy of Carvalho Hosken S.A.
Planning for Green Corridors
On the other hand, the City’s Environmental Department is working on a new Green Corridors plan to reconnect fragmented forested patches and to try to contain irreversible ecological damages in the urban expansion areas. Celso Junius, the head of the Mosaico Carioca, together with 20 specialists from 8 city departments constituted the working group that developed the initial proposition for the Green Corridors (available at http://mosaico-carioca.blogspot.com.br/search?updated-max=2012-05-23T22:41:00-03:00&max-results=3). The Environmental Department has done a great job of mapping all the Atlantic Rainforest ecosystems fragments and making it available on line ( http://sigfloresta.rio.rj.gov.br/ viewed 07.05.2012). “Sigfloresta” mapping is an important tool to effectively monitor the land cover in real time and is being used to develop the Green Corridors plan.
Green Corridors proposal connecting Tijuca, Pedra Branca and Gericinó massifs. City Zones: (1) Central; (2) South; (3) North; (4) Jacarepaguá watershed – Olympic Green Corridor; (5) Guaratiba watershed; (6) West. Most of the UNESCO Cultural Heritage Landscape is in zone 2, except the Tijuca National Park that separates the city. The Jacaperaguá watershed is delimited in red. Image adapted from Mosaico Carioca – Corredores Verdes – SMAC-RJ.
Design that Mimics Nature in the City
INVERDE is collaborating, on a voluntary basis, to further develop the green infrastructure plan, focusing first on the Jacarepaguá watershed, where the construction of many of the Olympic venues is driving urban expansion with high impact on the ecological landscape. The watershed is vulnerable to sea level rise, with most of its area no more than 1 meter above sea level. The wetlands and the low areas are being landfilled and rivers are being rectified and channelized.
Pierre Martin, a French landscape architect (partner of Embya studio located in Rio), and I are committed to helping improve the final report for the “Olympic Green Corridors”, which will link fragments of Tijuca and Pedra Branca massifs through the Jacarepaguá lowlands. The objective is to deepen and illustrate the proposals at the watershed and the site scale for a better understanding of the huge opportunities there are to shift to a new paradigm of social-ecological multifunctional and high performance urban landscape planning and design that mimics nature in the city.
Illustration of the urban green infrastructure new paradigm to reconcile multiple functions: road, clean mobility, pedestrians and bicycles, biodiversity and water. Illustration by Embya Studio, Rio de Janeiro.
We also believe that education and raising public awareness is vital to gain support for the proposition. We coordinated and recorded an open lecture at INVERDE in May 2012, which will be available on Youtube soon. We also co-organized a seminar with the City Environmental Department and the Botanic Garden Research Institute during the Rio+20 congress. It was an official event that focused on specialists and scientists working together to enhance the plan with a scientific foundation.We are all committed to taking this plan further on a continuous basis, with more research on urban ecology to better understand the abiotic and biotic processes and flows, as well as social-ecological relationships.The idea is not to greenwash the urban expansion, but to shift to a new transdisciplinary planning process and to design methods that incorporate science-based social-ecological knowledge.
City flood prone areas. Source: Gusmão, P.P. et al., Rio Próximos 100 anos, 2008.River being canalized, a new road will be built where once there were the riparian corridors: monofunctional hard engineering to drain water, in Jacarepaguá lowlands. Photo by Gisela Santana.
Fernando Chacel
There are already local examples of ecological restorations that were designed by Fernando Chacel, a pioneer landscape architect with a systemic vision. He planned and designed state-of-the-art parks along the lagoons of Jacarepaguá, the urban expansion lowlands where Rio+20 took place. He started the designed restoration of the lagoons riparian corridors in 1980’s until he fell sick in 2009 (unfortunately he passed away last year). He recomposed degraded landscapes, beautifully reintroducing native ecosystems and respecting the phytosociology. He worked with a multidisciplinary team.
Landfill in Jacarepaguá lowlands. Photo by Celso Junius.
His legacy must be known, and therefore serve as inspiration to new professionals: he developed the “ecogenesis” theory, where he learned from nature to restore degraded mangrove, sandbank and wet forests. His book Landscape Architecture and Ecogenesis should be available in all Brazilian schools (it is in Portuguese and English).
Fernando Chacel ecogenesis concept: park design with mangrove and sandbank ecosystems, at Peninsula in the Jacarepaguá lowlands. Photo by Cecilia Herzog.
Rio de Janeiro’s Green Potential
Rio de Janeiro has an enormous potential to be one of the greenest cities in the world, not only in GHG emissions mitigation or garbage collection and disposal (main targets of this administration).
The urban scale green infrastructure is outstanding and should be preserved and enhanced through the connection of the forest remnants, so they can exchange genetic faunal and floral material, in addition to providing clean human mobility for pedestrians and bicycles.
It is urgent that our decision makers have a real understanding of the role of urban biodiversity for healthy, safe, sustainable and resilient communities. Urban nature may offer numerous ecosystems services where people live, work and play: along the streets, in renaturalized canals, in roofs and yards, and in high performance, designed parks and squares with dense plantings of native trees.
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Conectando as Magníficas Paisagens do Rio de Janeiro
As paisagens da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, uma cidade com 6, 3 milhões de habitantes, são realmente impressionantes e únicas. É o resultado de cinco séculos de interações entre o homem e a natureza. Na semana passada a UNESCO elegeu parte da cidade como Patrimônio Cultural da Mundial.
É muito significativo que a maioria das imagens premiadas tenha os maciços cobertos por Mata Atlântica com alta biodiversidade que se regenerou dos impactos causados por séculos de exploração de recursos naturais e de práticas de agricultura que tinham eliminado a cobertura vegetal nativa (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1100/ visitado em 07.05.2012). Na verdade as florestas estão fragmentadas, cercadas por densa ocupação urbana e sob pressão de expansão que repete os mesmo enganos feitos no passado. As áreas urbanizadas ocupam prioritariamente as terras mais baixas, onde lagoas oceânicas e brejos foram aterrados com o desmonte de muitos morros. O Parque do Flamengo (um dos locais eleitos) é um enorme aterro com 1,2 Km², onde o paisagista Roberto Burle Marx, reconhecido mundialmente, foi o responsável pelos magníficos jardins.
No maciço da Tijuca, onde se situa o Cristo Redentor que olha sobre a cidade, plantações de café substituíram as florestas e depois foram abandonadas deixando uma paisagem seca coberta por gramíneas. No século XIX suas encostas foram parcialmente replantadas para restaurar as fontes de água, com a regeneração natural que ocorreu em vastas áreas dos dois maiores maciços da cidade: Tijuca e Pedra Branca. Ambos se tornaram áreas protegidas. O Parque Nacional da Tijuca é um dos locais eleitos pela UNESCO. Nos últimos 25 anos, o bem sucedido programa da Secretaria do Meio Ambiente “Mutirão Reflorestamento”, efetivamente replantou árvores com intuito de conter deslizamentos, muitos próximos a favelas. Trata-se de um programa sócio-ecológico porque emprega e capacita moradores das comunidades locais para o plantio e monitoramente, que acabam se tornando guardiões da floresta.
O Verde se Submete ao Cinza
Apesar da natureza estar quase sempre presente em nossas belas vistas, as áreas urbanizadas são altamente impermeáveis e cinzas, especialmente na Zona Norte onde não há quase nenhum remanescente de área verde, nem mesmo praças públicas. A cidade tem ambientes extremamente diversificados, com florestas luxuriantes e belos parques contrastando com ruas áridas, quentes e barulhentas onde a maioria da população vive. A maior parte do tempo faz muito calor. Por exemplo, hoje é inverno e a temperatura no meio do dia é de 29°C. Moro perto da floresta, onde é bastante agradável com muitas árvores, pássaros e insetos. Espécies nativas e exóticas invasoras estão presentes e deveriam ser permanentemente manejadas. A biodiversidade abunda especialmente perto dos remanescentes dos ecossistemas florestais. Na verdade, se deixar as janelas abertas de manhã macacos-prego (Cebus apella) entram no meu apartamento. Muitos moradores os alimentam, portanto retornam atrás de comida fácil e não apropriada para eles. Ao mesmo tempo, se eu descer um quarteirão, o engarrafamento é constante, as temperaturas são mais elevadas e as árvores das ruas estão velhas, sob intensa pressão em situações inadequadas, muitas estão morrendo e não estão sendo repostas.
As pessoas valorizam os morros com as florestas e as praias principalmente para recreação, para caminhar, andar de bicicleta ou apenas para contemplar. Não estou certa de como reconhecem e valorizam os serviços ecossistêmicos (ou ambientais, como são mais conhecidos) prestados pelas florestas e pelas árvores urbanas. Existe uma enorme oportunidade para pesquisar sobre ecologia urbana no Brasil, mas ainda há não educação formal nos campos de ecologia urbana e planejamento urbano/regional da paisagem. Biodiversidade urbana e as relações pessoas-natureza também ainda não são preocupações presentes na maioria das cidades brasileira, onde nos últimos 20 anos shopping centers e jardins cosméticos com tendências globalizadas localizados em condomínios fechados têm se tornado as áreas de lazer de grande parte das cidades, substituindo os espaços públicos abertos onde o encontro com diversidade social acontece.
Natureza Urbana não é uma prioridade para os tomadores de decisão do Rio de Janeiro
Para os tomadores de decisões do Rio de Janeiro a natureza urbana não é uma prioridade. Existe uma falta de compreensão do papel da biodiversidade para a qualidade de vida em uma cidade saudável. As áreas urbanizadas estão sujeitas a enchentes e deslizamentos devido às mudanças históricas do uso do solo e da cobertura vegetal. A Copa do Mundo e os Jogos Olímpicos irão ocorrer nos próximos anos e estão levando a uma rápida expansão urbana que segue os mesmos padrões de transformação dos remanescentes de áreas alagáveis localizados nas baixadas de Jacarepaguá e Guaratiba. Áreas alagadas estão sendo aterradas para dar lugar a estradas (para carros e BRT’s) e para o processo especulativo do mercado imobiliário. O último remanescente de manguezal legalmente protegido (Reserva Biológica de Guaratiba) está sob ameaça de desaparecer pelo excesso de salinidade, devido à nova estrada que foi construída com técnicas tradicionais de engenharia que interferem nos fluxos hidrológicos, que estão causando enchentes mais freqüentes e recorrentes nas áreas residenciais do outro lado da estrada, segundo seus moradores. Outras estradas estão sendo projetadas e construídas sem o devido entendimento da ecologia das paisagens, e seus processos e fluxos, com a eliminação da biodiversidade e alteração na dinâmica das águas.
Planejando Corredores Verdes
Por outro lado a Secretaria do Meio Ambiente da Cidade (SMAC) está trabalhando em um novo plano de Corredores Verdes para reconectar os fragmentos florestais e tentar conter danos ecológicos irreversíveis nas áreas de expansão urbana. Celso Junius, coordenador do Mosaico Carioca, junto com 20 especialista de 8 departamentos da cidade constituíram um Grupo de Trabalho que desenvolveu a proposta inicial para os Corredores Verdes (disponível em http://mosaico-carioca.blogspot.com.br/search?updated-max=2012-05-23T22:41:00-03:00&max-results=3). A Secretaria do Meio Ambiente fez um excelente trabalho com o mapeamento dos remanescentes de ecossistemas de Mata Atlântica da cidade e de disponibilizá-los amplamente na internet, onde é possível emitir relatórios de acordo com os diversos interesses ( http://sigfloresta.rio.rj.gov.br/ viewed 07.05.2012). O “Sigfloresta” é uma ferramenta importante para monitorar de forma efetiva a cobertura vegetal e está sendo usada para desenvolver o plano dos Corredores Verdes.
Projeto que Mimetiza a Natureza nas Cidades
O INVERDE está colaborando de forma voluntária, para desenvolver mais detalhadamente o plano de infraestrutura verde, focando inicialmente na baixada de Jacarepaguá. A bacia hidrográfica local é vulnerável à elevação do nível do mar, com a maior parte de suas áreas não tendo mais do que 1 metro acima do nível do mar atual. As áreas alagáveis e as áreas baixas estão sendo aterradas e os seus rios e córregos retificados e canalizados pelo sistema de macrodrenagem, que também é do século XX, quando se tinha a pretensão de controlar as forças da natureza.
Pierre Martin, paisagista formado na França (sócio do escritório Embya ) e eu estamos comprometidos a contribuir para incrementar o relatório final dos “Corredores Verdes Olímpicos”, os quais irão conectar os fragmentos protegidos pelos maciços da Pedra Branca e da Tijuca através da Baixada de Jacarepaguá. O objetivo é aprofundar e ilustrar as propostas na escala da bacia hidrográfica e local para uma melhor compreensão do imenso potencial que existe ao se mudar para o novo paradigma sócio-ecológico que mimetiza a natureza na cidade, e de planejar a paisagem urbana para que tenha alto desempenho em diversas funções: para as águas, a biodiversidade e as pessoas.
Nós do INVERDE, também acreditamos que educação e conscientização das pessoas é fundamental para que possamos obter suporte para a proposta. Nós promovemos e gravamos uma palestra aberta ao público de maio de 2012, a qual em breve estará disponível no Youtube. Nós também coorganizamos um seminário com a Secretaria do Meio Ambiente da Cidade e o Instituto de Pesquisas do Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro durante a Rio+20. Foi um evento oficial focado em especialistas e cientistas para trabalhar em conjunto para aprimorar o plano com base em ciência. Estamos todos comprometidos a dar andamento a esse plano de forma contínua, com mais pesquisas em ecologia urbana para melhor compreender os processos e fluxos abióticos e bióticos, bem como as relações sócio-ecológicas. A idéia não é fazer uma “maquiagem verde” (greenwashing) para a expansão urbana, mas mudar para um novo processo de planejamento transdisciplinar e para desenvolver métodos de projeto que incorporem conhecimentos científicos sócio-ecológicos.
Fernando Chacel
Existem exemplos locais de restauração ecológica que foram projetados por Fernando Chacel, o paisagista pioneiro com uma visão sistêmica. Ele planejou e projetou parques “estado-da-arte” ao longo das lagoas de Jacarepaguá, a baixada que sofre pressão de expansão urbana onde se localizou a Rio+20. Ele começou a projetar a recuperação dos corredores marginais das lagoas na década de 1980 até ficar doente em 2009 (infelizmente, faleceu no ano passado). Ele recompôs paisagens degradadas, reintroduzindo com grande beleza ecossistemas nativos e respeitando a sua fitosociologia. Ele trabalhou com equipes multidisciplinares.
Seu legado deve ser reconhecido e servir de inspiração para os novos profissionais: ele desenvolveu a teoria da “ecogênese”, onde foi aprender com a natureza para restaurar e proteger os manguezais, restingas e florestas paludosas de baixada. Seu livro “Landscape Architecture and Ecogenesis” deveria estar disponível em todas as escolas brasileiras que ensinam sobre o tema.
O Potencial Verde do Rio de Janeiro
O Rio de Janeiro tem um enorme potencial para ser uma das cidades mais verdes do mundo, não apenas em mitigação de gases efeito estufa e em coleta e disposição de resíduos sólidos (dois alvos prioritários dessa administração).
A infraestrutura verde na escala urbana é espetacular e deveria ser preservada e aprimorada através da conexão dos remanescentes florestais, para que possam fazer a troca de material genético de fauna e flora, além de oferecer mobilidade multimodal, sistêmica, limpa, confortável e segura para as pessoas, principalmente para pedestres e bicicletas.
É urgente que os tomadores de decisões tenham uma real compreensão do papel da biodiversidade urbana para comunidades saudáveis, seguras, sustentáveis e resilientes. A natureza urbana pode oferecer inúmeros serviços ecossistêmicos onde as pessoas vivem, trabalham e se divertem: ao longo das ruas, em canais renaturalizados, em tetos e quintais, em parques e praças projetados para ter alto desempenho sócio-ecológico com plantio intensivo de árvores nativas (não palmeiras!).
The TNOC Roundtable for October 2014 focused on green corridors in cities to support nature, and the ‘natural’ ecology that resides in the city. I am focused on the ecology of the city. The aim of ecologists and scientists to strengthen the capacity of the city to connect nature within and across it, is the same instinct that those of us who focus on the physical shape and function of city have: to enable connectivity than enhances the overall function of the whole.
I wrote in a previous post on this site about how cities are fundamentally natural—they are of a piece with nature, created by the interaction of people and place, and not artificial constructs, fated to always-at-odds-with-the-natural.
The contributors to the green corridor roundtable reinforced this for me. They’re eager for ways to enable connection, build and exchange natural capital, explore how linear spaces and corridors can encourage biotic movement, dispersal, address the challenges of predators and invasive species, and encourage ‘biotic connectivity’.
Look at how similar the challenges are for building the physical city for its human inhabitants, and how similarly people actually behave, with the other species with whom they share their urban home, in their use of it. We face various kinds of predators: over-heated real estate markets fueled by speculation; growing mono-cultures of single land-uses; sprawling residential development that bulldozes down diversities of all kinds.
The ways the physical city and its built environment can be created, in more authentic and organic ways, is a wonderful illustration of ‘biomimicry’: how human processes mimic natural ones.
I first came across this term when its conceiver, author and natural scientist Janine Benyus, came to Toronto in 1997 to speak at a conference on cities convened to celebrate the work of Jane Jacobs. Benyus had written a then little-known book of the same title, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, and Jacobs’ had requested she speak. The book soon catapulted to broad popularity and has spawned a movement to encourage innovation in all forms of design that learns from nature. A primer on the concept, written by Benyus, can be found here, and also another book here in which she writes about the connection of her work to city-building, published by the Jacobs’ inspired Center for the Living City, with Island Press.
In the TNOC Roundtable Kathryn Lwin writes “But to feed itself, a city must first feed its pollinators…[and] facilitate the ‘flow’ of wild pollinators and plants between the built environment, urban farms and nature reserves”.
Kathryn could easily be describing the role of various forms connective tissue in a city, that link people with the resources, contacts and opportunities they seek to meet their needs and fulfill their aspirations. When I was a grant-maker working in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I was surrounded by colleagues from various other foundations also investing in the recovery, most of whom were guided by a ‘Theory of Change’ they had inherited or developed, an hypothesis that underpinned their granting strategy and helped guide their decision making about what they would invest in. I was very new to that foundation and arrived without the benefit (or constraint) of any preconceived strategy of where investment would be most ‘strategic’. In fact I bristled at the hubris of some of the assumptions of my colleagues, although I, over time, became more sympathetic that funders need some parameters. But my strategy was initially just to watch and learn from the locals, and see what emerged, see where the early stirrings were, where the new shoots of growth—new ideas—were taking root.
After a while we settled in on two things: cities need hubs and links: the connective tissue of a city. Both are needed to feed the human pollinators of the city.
Elevated walkway Rotterdam. Photo: Mary Rowe
The forms these hubs and links take are highly idiosyncratic, forming up in unique ways that reflect the particular circumstance, maybe influenced by topography, or local preferences. My work over the last several months has taken me to events in various cities where I see ingenious, indigenous forms of connective tissue springing up. Often this is organic, seems to have just emerged serendipitously, and in other cases smart urban planning and investment has encouraged it.
In the Colombian city of Mendellin, which hosted UN Habitat’s World Urban Forum (WUF) this Spring, we saw two extraordinary examples of contemporary urban connective tissue. The escalators of Communa 13, which brought connection to the lower income hillside communities that were isolated from the commerce and cultural center of the city in the valley below. The effect of this intervention, which allows school children and workers access to previously in accessible opportunities, was obvious to the thousands of WUF delegates. Adjacent to the escalators are wonderful locally create murals, and there was even evidence of local business activity at the landings of each escalator, with small signs offering cell phone minutes, baked goods and tailoring services. Neighboring houses were provided with paint.
Medellín escalators. Photo: Mary Rowe.Medellín escalators. Photo: Mary Rowe.
Also in Medellin is an aerial gondola system, again connecting the city across class and geography. Interestingly, in addition to citing a significant public library branch at the upper terminus of one of the lines, the city has even added a small biblio in one of the stations, where you can take a book along for the ride (although it’s hard to imagine the view from one of the ride ever getting old ..)
Also part of the WUF program was a side trip to see the Walk of Life—an ambitious construction and landscaping project to create walking paths being constructed to circumnavigate the top of the bowl in which the city sits, again, connecting previously disconnected neighborhoods. (I was reminded of this when reading TNOC Roundtable contributor Na Xiu’s description of the ring corridors in Chinese cities).
Entrance to the Walk of Life. Phjoto: Mary RowePhoto: Mary Rowe
This is a perfect example of where the fostering and encouragement of social and natural capital meet—the project is part of an effort to protect the environmental and rural attributes of the Aburrá Valley’s mountainside. But what I also observed was the opportunity for people to connect.
In communities there can be anxiety when new forms of connective tissue are introduced that better connect people across class and race. (In the Roundtable, Colin Meurk asks the question whether green corridors enhance biodiversity, or accelerate pest dispersion. There is a human version of that question too, not as innocuous.)
Shot from Nola bridge obstructing access to the Lower 9th Ward: no pedestrians beyond this point. Photo: Mary Rowe
But a city’s capacity to adapt, self-correct, and thrive is totally dependent on connectivity and connection. Isolation of any one group of neighborhood spells disaster.
What’s interesting is to think about the interchangeability of infrastructure that provides these connections. Abandoned railway lines and elevated roadways being converted to linear parks brings social and ecological benefits to cities. Other assets created years before but no longer relevant to contemporary urban life are also suitable for transformation. The danger is that governments may lack resources, or imagination, or both—and miss opportunities to convert these assets into places that better meet contemporary urban needs. The High Line in New York City has become the much touted poster-girl of adaptive reuse of an obsolete elevated cargo rail spur. But that initiative came from two community members, who saw the possibility in that place and then marshaled the resources of government, local businesses and philanthropy to develop the most fabulous designs and transform it. So what was industrial—man-made—has been brought back to the natural (although with significant engineering and design help).
As cities become denser and less attractive to cars, streets (a city’s prime connective tissue) are being transformed into shared places for cycling, walking, and watching. Similarly, what people in Britain call ‘meanwhile spaces’—places in transition waiting for development—can easily be converted to civic uses, and made available for natural purposes (as Timon McPherson has argued so persuasively in this space). But this kind of transformation is only possible when city residents have the agency to make creative uses emerge. And these initiatives needn’t be as ambitious as New York’s High Line: they can be much more modest and simpler, requiring next to capital investment. Just a table, or two. And permission. Streets and sidewalks continue to be used as commercial and social corridors—through formal retail, or informal exchanges, used by self promoters or community groups.
Walking in the city of course is the best form of connective tissue, encouraging serendipitous connections, either informally or through the intentional programs to build urban literacy like the international Jane’s Walk.
Photo: Mary RoweChurch jumble sale. Photo: Mary Rowecards and plaiying fields. Photo: Mary RoweBryant Park (New York) tai chi. Photo: Mary RowePhoto: Mary RoweJane’s walk Queensbridge. Photo: Mary Rowe
I’ve been pretty much consumed for several months, with support from the Knight Foundation here in the US, looking at how cities can better harness the potential of the physical assets they, or another level of government, own—libraries, community centers, pools, rinks, armories, markets, post offices, community hospitals, parks and parkettes—to better fulfill the purposes for which they were intended, that is to support the serendipity of the city that brings city dwellers together for common purposes.
And those purposes are really varied: they can be social, economic, cultural, spiritual, recreational. And its not just public facilities that cater to this fundamentally urban need to connect with ‘the other’. Private and institutional spaces provide this too: as we know by visiting our favorite coffee shop or gallery or faith place. People in cities look for hubs, places where they can do things they can’t, or would prefer not, to do alone or must do together. We’ve been referring to this mix of assets in any city as its civic commons, which I think mirrors the system of natural capital that courses through it, and that green corridors are intended to enable.
Kara Walker domino sugar factory installation. Photo: Mary Rowe
The nature of these shared activities has changed. We used to have public bathing. Town squares were used for hearings, public meetings, exchanges of goods and services. Port cities, like the one in which I live, have a deep history of enabling exchange. Although containerized shipping altered the nature of our ports, those spaces remain pivotally located along waterfronts, prime real estate often occupied by aging buildings and crumbling infrastructure.
But these places are ripe for reimagining into a new contemporary civic purpose, ideally located on the edges, the liminal spaces, where urban meets nature. Similarly, old industrial spaces offer opportunities for art and expression, attracting a diverse following. The gob-smackingly poignant Kara Walker exhibit, staged by Creative Time in the soon to be demolished Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn, attracted thousands this summer.
In addition to changes in transport, over time lots of other factors have contributed to alter our places and patterns of collective experience and pursuit. We can buy a lot of things on-line; people of means can build their own swimming pools and private clubs. But still that urban urge to congregate, to intersect with difference and recombine to create something new and innovative persists. And our preferences continue to evolve. We may not bathe in public anymore, but more and more of us are looking for places to do our freelance work alongside others.
Or buy a hand-made piece of jewelry.
Or watch a movie.
La Boheme in Lincoln Square, New York. Photo: Mary Rowe
TNOC readers know that monocultures of every kind, if operating in isolation, will eventually die. The hubs we see in cities can become too self-similar, serving a smaller and less diverse user base, and offering a narrower band of activities and programs. They’re doomed: to shrinking funding sources, to diminishing variety of programs. Whether they’re run by governments or as a business, places with a diverse client base are much more resilient to change and circumstance, than ones that only serve a narrow band of users. Bringing connectivity between these often vibrant hubs can inject new energy and resources to them, and the system of which they are a part.
One of the ways to up the diversity of the user base may be to introduce more flexible programming, management, financing and governance of these spaces. In San Francisco, the city government offered a local architect/developer Doug Burnham an opportunity to create something on a few vacant lots adjacent to a narrow green park. He created Hayes Valley Proxy, a pop up space that uses shipping containers to house start up businesses, and a communal space for outdoor exercise classes, movie showings and various cultural events offered by neighbors. A local, apparently homeless, person voluntarily planted the borders of the lots and maintains them. (You see, people even mimic the concept of biotic ‘volunteers’!).
Hayes Valley pop up. Photo: Mary RoweHayes Valley pop up. Photo: Mary RoweHayes Valley pop up. Photo: Mary RoweHayes Valley green volunteer patch. Photo: Mary Rowe
In the large and small cities of Europe you see the story of the flexible, evolving civic commons every day, with ancient buildings having alternatively housed religious, secular and civic purposes over the centuries (and perhaps all three at the same time). Civic squares, part of the vernacular design of traditional cities, are now used to host flash mobs, farmers markets, outdoor concerts, protests and public health clinics. Part the work we are beginning to advance here in the US is to think of a city’s civic assets as a system—an ecosystem—the civic commons, that could operate much more optimally were it better connected, coordinated, integrated.
And the provenance and current ownership of these spaces and places matters less and less, as city dwellers move freely between the public and private realms, often not knowing who actually owns what. Community hospitals house coffee shops; transit stations house libraries; parks host exercise classes. Can we move to a more sophisticated model of cross sectorial sharing- where civic functions are co-housed, co-curated, co-managed, co-financed by all sectors (no longer just government), and playing to the strongest skills, talents and capacities of each sector? We think yes. Lots of things are propelling us in that direction: scarcer public resources, innovative private/public partnership tools, and new demands from users.
The civic commons as matrix. Courtesy WXY Studio
New technologies make an aligned and integrated civic commons much more possible. Public libraries have been the early adopters of digital technology enhancements: we can reserve, borrow and return hard copy and e-books and movies. Parks are offering free wireless access, as are pubs and cafes, and Laundromats!
Nomat book club. Photo: Mary Rowe
The potential is even greater than just the benefits of new apps and digital reading tools. The Estonian city of Tallinn has led the way in exploring the potential of digitizing civic services and functions—from postage to parking. Surely we’re not far from a time when our library card can also be our drivers license, be swiped at the local park to reserve a basketball court, used to redeem bonuses for fruit and vegetable purchases, or entrance into a public art gallery. The City of New York is joining other US cities in offering a municipal photo identification card to all city residents, regardless of immigration status, that also includes free admission to various cultural institutions. Access to the city: and the connective tissue that makes it work: its civic commons!
As is crucial to the natural life of cities, tools that enable the free movement of people and the social capital they create—civic corridors of connection—provide opportunities for both stimulation/pollination and respite. These are critical to the sustainability of the city as an organism, offering an attractive feature to a transient work force looking for a productive and attractive place to land and live.
But the best is always when the natural and human elements of the city intertwine, as they did for me on a recent visit to New Orleans, where I came upon the oldest form of self-fueling, aided by a local.
Photo: Mary RowePhoto: Mary RowePhoto: Mary Rowe
Finally, nature and city perhaps most poignantly intersected most recently in the various marches and civil actions stage in cities around the word in September, acts of solidarity concerning the need for action to halt and adapt to climate change.
I happened to be in London, UK that day. The tube enabled our travel. The streets and public spaces of Westminster allowed us to congregate and express our collective aspirations for a sustainable future. We refueled in cafes (and later, pubs) along the route.
Climate march green. Photo: Mary RoweCimate march giraffes. Photo: Mary Rowe
We cross-pollinated throughout, making the most pointed and profound case that we are, in fact, all connected in the ecology of the planet, of which cities are the crucial element.
As Marina Alberti said in her TNOC essay of spring 2014:
Paul Hirsch and Bryan Norton in Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, (2012, MIT Press) articulate a new environmental ethics by suggesting that we “think like a planet.” Building on Hirsch and Norton’s idea, we need to expand the dimensional space of our mental models of urban design and planning to the planetary scale.
The Black Sea, streaked with sun rays, stretches out as far as I can see on one side of the highway. Buildings housing thousands of people living their dreams line the other side of the road.
There’s another one. And another one. And another one. And, yes, there’s one more over there…and over there.
I’m noticing the many new apartment buildings dotting—defining—Turkey’s Black Sea coastline. From Hopa to Samsun, and nearly all of the cities and towns in between the 500-kilometer stretch we have done so far in this country, it’s hard not to notice these high-rises. They seem to be everywhere, in various states of construction.
New construction dots the Black Sea coastline. Photo: Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot.
This stretch of the route took us from Batumi, Georgia, primarily along the Black Sea Coastal Road/state road D-010 to Samsun, Turkey. Some of the cities we passed through include: Hopa, Rize, Trabzon, Görele, Giresun, Ordu, Fatsa, Ünye, Çarşamba and Samsun.
We notice other things, too.
Our route takes us around the jagged coast. The smell of salt air and, in some places, tea wafting through plantations and out of processing plants hangs heavy. Through this stretch, we’re lucky to see some kiwi groves and hundreds of hazelnut trees (Turkey produces 75 percent of the world’s hazelnuts, and most of that comes from the Black Sea region, according to Turkey’s Hazelnut Promotion Group (FTG); walking so many months along roads without many trees makes every one we see that much more special. Snow-capped mountains in the distance make us happy to be in the sun looking at a blue sea on a chilly autumn day, even as we wonder about the impact new and under-construction airports will have on maritime ecology. We walk slowly under the weight of 23+-kilogram backpacks on the wide shoulder of the D-010, a regionally important and well-maintained coastal highway bridging east-west trade routes. Giant stones, scooped out of the earth, mark the limit where land and sea meet. Sometimes, these boundaries, especially in larger cities, blend with bike lanes, jogging straightaways, parks with public exercise equipment and promenades where locals walk, sit, and sip the region’s beverage of choice, tea.
Black Sea stone coast. Photo: Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot
But when I’m not looking at the small waves hitting the stone coastline or minding the constant flow of long-distance trailer trucks moving contemporary conveniences, I’m wondering about these new buildings. The sheer number of them along our way gives me pause. “What’s happening here?” is a question that turns over in my head and rolls out of my mouth when in conversation with locals.
Development is what’s happening here. Like in other places in the world, Turkey’s strategy to leap forward, in part, involves new construction to house its citizens, stimulate the economy, create jobs, and raise the quality of life of its residents.
New buildings in various states of construction dot Turkey’s Black Sea coast. Photos: Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot
More than a few people tell me that the Black Sea development—read, these new buildings—is linked to Turkey’s nationwide modernization efforts. Central government incentives, usually in the form of what we interpret to be short-term, low-interest loans, has allowed individuals and families to tear down outdated and, perhaps structurally unsound, buildings and replace them with multi-story dwellings that, superficially at least, shine with a “Look how great we are doing” feel.
Developers, people tell us, have won permission to erect buildings, businesses, and commercial centers, among other things, which are converting many once-rural or suburban towns into bigger urban hubs. I later read reports in several publications, including We Build Value, the Daily Sabah, PwC, about the billions and billions of dollars of investment being poured into Turkey’s ambitious economy-boosting Vision 2023 plan, which calls for nationwide construction of new airports, bridges, roads, tunnels, railways, high-speed trains, irrigation canals, electricity generation capacity, and a Panama-like canal that will serve as an alternate route to the Bosphorous Strait linking the Black and Marmara seas. I read other reports about people protesting the environmental impact of a planned gold mine and questioning if the housing construction boom will soon burst.
My head spins. Again, like in other places I have walked, I can’t help but think about the price of progress and the trade-offs that may eventually affect all of us, one way or another.
I believe, of course, that the world’s citizens—in this case, Turkish citizens—deserve a place where they can live with dignity, pride, and comfort. Having a safe place to sleep every night has taken on a deeper meaning during my two years of being a homeless nomad. I also appreciate that people want to spend their hard-earned money on a piece of property that creates long-term value and, hopefully, well-being and contentment. It’s just and equitable to give people access to public and private funds, resources and other tools so they can improve their lives and those of their families, participate in urban planning initiatives and walk along their seaside and through open green spaces without getting plowed down by an 18-wheeler.
But, I’m deflated by a question I find myself pondering over and over again during this 14,000-odd kilometer journey home and can’t seem to resolve: “Is this the best we can do?”
The root of my frustration largely revolves around long-term sustainability.
Hauling stones and reconstructing the coastline. Photo: Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot
Why is the widespread view of development the world over still entangled with the idea of cutting down forests, expanding our environmentally insensitive footprint, extending our shores with questionable materials, raising houses on unstable foundations and selling the capitalist dream of high profits, big returns and having the best new house, car, phone or whatever else defines “doing well.”
At the same time, I benefit from development efforts wherever I go in the world. Transportation, energy-acquisition, and infrastructure improvement projects allow me to move, communicate, and connect with other people with relative ease and comfort.
I’m not alone in sorting through the mental mess development like what I see in Turkey creates in my head and heart. Different points of view on this surface as we walk through Turkey’s northern coast and share conversation with locals holding small glasses of fresh brewed tea.
New buildings dot Turkey’s Black Sea coast. Photo: Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot
One man, a seaman, working on international cargo ships who has a soft spot for the wide-open mountain spaces he discovers on his motorcycle, tells us the region’s fast development over the last 10-15 years has helped many families who were struggling to keep up with repairs on their single-family homes. By leveling those properties and moving into recently constructed ones, people have a new lease on life, a stronger sense of security, and a feeling that they are progressing. Their quality of life is better now than before, he says, adding that the construction boom has ushered in economic, logistics and infrastructure improvements throughout the region.
Many plots of land are up for sale as development initiatives continue along the Black Sea. Photo: Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot
A younger cyclist and outdoor enthusiast shares with us his concern about the stability of the buildings and the high price that comes with development like this: Losing the coast’s natural beauty and resources to accommodate the growing number of people who are leaving behind their rural inland homes, farms, and livestock grazing areas to become city dwellers. Heavy rain is common in this part of the country and increasing floods in areas where erosion-stopping trees no longer exist put many more people at risk, he laments. We recall a news report that ran on TV a few days earlier showing part of a house wrecked during a downpour that triggered flooding along a river up the coast. We shake our heads with dismay.
I see both perspectives but understand less and less as I come to know more about the places I pass. Conquering the sea, conquering nature, has liberated many people. Conquering the sea, conquering nature, has also unlocked a wave of unpredictable outcomes.
Besides new buildings, development has also brought parks, seaside promenades and open spaces for residents to enjoy. Photos: Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot
I walk on, glad to be on the promenade made for walkers, runners, cyclists and picnickers instead of hugging the shoulder hoping trucks and cars don’t weave in my direction. The Black Sea, streaked with sun rays, stretches out as far as I can see on one side of the highway. Buildings housing thousands of people living their dreams line the other side of the road. For a moment, everything appears in balance. But, is it?
As urban areas explode around us, competition is heightened between nature and built landscapes. There is a salient competition between biodiversity on the one hand and structures—infrastructure installations—on the other. In Kampala, this competition is manifest in how deliberate actions of development clear natural areas for housing structures and infrastructure, thereby accelerating biodiversity loss. But it also manifests in the form of desire for aesthetically pleasing landscapes in the built-up patches of urban landscapes that are considered for leisure more than for ecological benefits.
Given the current debates around sustainable development and climate change mitigation, this competition is taking an interesting twist in which publically initiated programs and activities are starting to recognize the importance of nature and biodiversity as one among the various solutions.
In this article, I present a case of a municipally initiated effort to ‘green’ the city of Kampala with the motive of addressing climate change mitigation. This initiative has its good aspects, enhancing green patches and biodiversity, but also comes with problems depending on the choice of species planted for greening the city. Caught in the midst of global and regional debates about dealing with climate change, this low-emitting city of Kampala is embarking on a number of climate smart initiatives for mitigation and adaptation. One of these activities that the municipal authority is planning to embark on is the planting of 500,000 trees in the city. This sounds like good news for biodiversity and ecological enhancement, but it also comes with challenges from which lessons can be drawn on urban space creation and biodiversity.
Urban space as understood from everyday life
Urban space is an interesting combination of structures and green areas, as illustrated by many cities including Kampala. From a practical point of view, urban space goes beyond physical space to include social relations, processes, nature, and actors. Different urban spaces change in time according to function and the actors involved. For example, it is important to think about specific areas as residential zones to which people retreat to rest from work and vibrant city life. But these residential spaces are understood from everyday life experiences based on how an individual, group, or neighborhood makes use of the space.
To this end, it is possible to find commercial and/or production activities within residential spaces. It is this mix of functions, people, and relations that creates urban space. To illustrate this view, the street has also been described as an important spatial entity of understanding urban space, where a series of activities from trading, social relating, communication, networking, to commuting occur. There is little consideration of biodiversity as a component of residential urban spaces, yet we know that trees and animals exist in these spaces. It is also known that enhancing these spaces with urban forestry can pave the way for a return of animals if the forests measure up to habitats for such species. The return of animals such as primates and other medium sized animals redefines the urban space and can be a practical strategy for living in harmony with nature in cities such as Kampala.
Photo: Shuaib Lwasa
Greening Kampala and the return of primates
As I mentioned earlier, Kampala City Council Authority is in the process of embarking on planting trees in Kampala, with a high target of planting 500,000 The species are yet to be determined, as this has to be elaborated by the Landscaping Unit of the city authority. The planting of trees is part of an effort to ‘green’ the city, where greening was initially conceived as getting more tree coverage in a city that is already considerably green. But greening has been expanded to include low carbon development and institutional energy balancing by the City authority. The loss of trees is occurring at an alarming rate, especially on hilltops and lowland areas in this tropical landscape known for dense vegetation and tree canopy. The city is located in an area that previously had natural land cover dominated by tropical rain forests that were habitat for primates. The remnants of these forests still accommodate primates, but these animals have moved or have been killed through time as built up areas intensified.
The greening activity is part of the effort to build climate resilience in the city, which has been envisaged to have multiple benefits. Green cover would enhance aesthetics, reduce common flash floods through increased infiltration, and sequester greenhouse gases. But one unforeseen possibility of the greening program is the return or increase of the primate population in the city as habitat is re-created. To this end, it is important for planners and practitioners of urban space re-creation in Kampala to think about tree species that would attract the return of primates, whose persistence has continuously communicated that they will not be left out of the city. Given this potential for the return of primates in big numbers, should greening be KCCA-led or led by a private developer? If there is appreciation of urban spaces that create harmony between nature and built forms, how can the greening activity be utilized to improve habitats and return primates to Kampala? What would be the motivations for increased biodiversity in the city?
Photo: Shuaib Lwasa
Competing motivations
In the process of greening, there are competing issues. The desire to identify with global initiatives of reducing emissions by sequestering greenhouse gases is motivated also by existing resource envelopes from which finances can be tapped by the city authorities. Thus, the selection of tree species is likely to be those with a high uptake of greenhouse gases—species that may not provide food and proper habitat for primates. Primates live in habitats with plenty of wild fruit trees from which to forage.
The other competing motivation for greening is the production of food by practicing urban agriculture. Though this can provide food for primates, urban agriculture tends to promote crops with high-value niches, which may not provide the right habitat for primates. And although, at the individual plot level, the motivation of aesthetic appeal achieved through landscaping may promote the return of primates, acceptance of their existence may not be guaranteed, as they may be seen as pests that should be driven out of urban spaces, residential or otherwise. Therefore, important considerations for the return of primates include tree species, planting systems, and who gets involved. Whereas the city authority’s plan to take the lead on planting the trees is plausible, the authority has very limited land, meaning that achieving their goal of 500,000 trees will remain challenging. Yet, this obstacle is also an opportunity if the authority recognizes the role that individual developers can do on their plots of land to plant trees towards the 500,000 goal. Since most land is held and owned by individuals, it is prudent that the approach to planting systems should involve the developers. A good number of hilltops are still covered by trees, and those cleared of trees can be replanted. The return of primates also has ecosystem co-benefits down the food chain, including increases in protein-rich insects, pollination, seed dispersing and ecosystem productivity.
How can greening pave the way for the return of primates in Kampala?
I summarize below the various ways that can be deliberately planned for the return of primates in Kampala.
The city is in an area that receives substantive amounts of rainfall ranging from 1200 to 1500 mm annually. With the established correlation between rainfall amounts and primate populations, there is a high possibility that well-targeted greening will pave the way for the return of primates in the city.
City authority-initiated greening is plausible, but may not be sufficient to achieve the targeted number of trees. Involving developers either through incentivizing tree planting or the inclusion of tree coverage on plots in development standards will most likely achieve the target in a more efficient way.
Tree species for planting are critical in that the inclusion of fruit-trees is important for the return of primates. This will ensure availability of food for primates, reducing fears about primates becoming pests and attacking homes in search for food.
Common fruit tree species in the area, such as fig trees, could be planted for the purpose of attracting primates.
Lowland areas and hilltops are appropriate areas for increasing tree cover and habitats for primates. There are co-benefits of focusing on these areas for increased tree coverage; if connected through vegetative corridors, these areas can enable primate thrive in the city. Hilltops and lowland areas covered mostly by wetlands in Kampala have a co-benefit of regulating hydrology of the city.
Incentivizing tree planting will be critical for Kampala to achieve its 500,000 tree target. Incentivizing can be in different forms. Municipal charges for development can be discounted with a clear tree-planting plan as part of the development. Providing seedlings and, where appropriate, subsidies for purchase may also be another way to incentive developers to engage in greening.
Conclusion
This article illustrates that urban spaces have largely been understood in physical terms and dominated by human population. Space definition, however, can be enhanced by including function such as biodiversity enhancement. Re-creating urban spaces in response to diverse motivations, such as climate change mitigation, is creating possibilities for the return or increase in the population of primates in Kampala. Though this may not be seen as an opportunity by many, the ecological benefits of primates in the city outweighs the risks associated with an increased number of primates. Living in harmony would be supported by targeted greening that includes planting trees that provide food for the primates while creating corridors that can enable migration, access to water, and a variety of food between lowland forests and hilltop forests. Given that Kampala lies in a tropical zone that receives substantive rainfall, the current small population of primates is likely to multiply, but attraction from nearby forest zones will also increase the primates in the city.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Pippin Anderson, Cape TownThe differences in the lives of our students is stark. With everybody heading home for lock down, the somewhat levelling experience of a shared campus has gone like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight. Some get to leave the ball as they arrived, and others are left with pumpkins and rats.
Isabelle Anguelovski, BarcelonaThe balance between keeping but delaying essential community engagement meetings, moving them online, or cancelling them all together, will be some of the many difficult decisions we will have to make in the near future.
Janice Astbury, Buenos AiresI hope that many people around the world are enjoying the sounds of voices and birdsong, and the experience of cleaner air flowing into their homes, and will want this to continue.
Carmen Bouyer, ParisI will keep dancing half an hour a day on Zoom with people from all over the world, and join the direct local actions that bring wonder, trust and care among people and among species, learning from the ways of trees and the songs of bees, together.
Lindsay Campbell, New YorkFor those of us privileged to be sheltering at home, the crisis has created a new sense of simplicity and attention to place. May we carry that forward wherever the future takes us
Sarah Charlop-Powers, New YorkWhile we’re all navigating through this extremely stressful—and sometimes downright scary—moment, I can’t imagine what my life, and the lives of all New Yorkers, would be like without our local parks.
Katrine Claassens, MontrealThe pandemic teaches us this: rapid, coherent change is possible. It has also laid bare that there is much to be actively dismantled, and much to be actively built.
M’Lisa Colbert, MontrealI am confronted with how much I need trees, grass, and fresh air to remain a sane human being. Being stuck between the four walls of my apartment all day feels foreign and unnatural.
Marcus Collier, DublinI have a new resolve to overcome my despondency and try harder to find a means to engage urban communities with wild nature. In this case, the first step is literally on the doorstep!
Paul Currie, Cape TownCovid has surfaced a key reality for me: choice. I will be paying more attention to how cities increase the promise and attainment of choice for their citizens, who are so often restricted by cost, geography or demography, to one option.
Samarth Das, MumbaiBeing locked up in the comfort of our homes is certainly a privilege. Social distancing in a time like this is a luxury afforded by a few—over 55% of Mumbai city’s 13 million inhabitants live in slums where 6-7 people share a single room.
Gillian Dick, GlasgowWe definitely need to take the opportunity to build back better, but we also need to pause and not rush when we hit the reset button. We need the right rebuilding, in the right place, at the right time, for the right communities.
Paul Downton, MelbourneCOVID-19 has forced changes that have given nature a breathing space, but I’m betting when the capitalist engine of destruction returns to “normal” it will raid the stores of nature like a selfish bully in a candy shop. It won’t be pretty.
Emilio Fantin, BolognaTalking about coronavirus, egoism needs to be switched into solidarity and sharing, but this cannot be done as a reaction to contagion fear or daily body count. It has to be the result of a long path towards the achievement of a new existential consciousness.
Todd Forrest, New YorkA garden feels empty and pointless without people to enjoy it. So does nature. While I have always felt strongly about the importance of nature to a person’s well-being, I have never been so keenly aware of the essential partnership people have with the natural world.
Andrew Grant, BathI have learned to take time to notice, and perhaps I have learned that however devastating Covid-19 is being, it has taught me to reflect on my Life, my Art, and my Nature.
Eduardo Guerrero, BogotáThe dilemma for a healthy planet is not: nature or people? The right approach must be people in nature, planning, and building resilient cities following ecological principles. Quoting Garcia Márquez: “I believe it’s not too late to build a utopia that allows us to share an Earth on which solidarity could become a reality”.
Bram Gunther, New YorkInstead of opening the streets up to cars again, muscling each other and spewing their nasty exhaust, we should keep the cars where they are now, inert. The city would transform itself, streets into nature trails lined with aster, sweet pepperbush, and oak trees. Our world-class electric-powered mass transportation system would connect all our neighborhoods as one equal family.
Dagmar Haase, LeipzigCOVID-19 is not just a natural, virus, or health crisis, it is a societal crisis. The response has to be given by the whole humankind. Urban nature, its maintenance, care and fair use, forms an important part of this global response.
Annegret Haase, BerlinThe crisis also sheds light on existing inequalities and injustices of our urban societies—in terms of how people can adapt to and cope with restrictions: It is much easier to stand restrictions in a large flat with balcony, garden or rooftop access and close to green spaces than in a small flat packed with people.
Fadi Hamdan, BeirutWhat we need is a value change in order to effect a paradigm shift in the way we produce, consume and live as societies.
Cecilia Herzog, Rio de JaneiroI am investing my time in isolation to improve my capacity to contribute to a wide discussion about urban nature, how it is important to sustain healthy lives and adapt to the ever-growing threat of extreme weather events.
Alex Herzog, Rio de JaneiroI believe there will be a strong enhancement of circular economy, increasing the value of local, its people and its businesses. Consequently, waste will decrease, and much of what before was seen as such, will begin to be reused. In other words, a syntropy in restauration.
Mike Houck, PortlandI will spend more time, personally and professionally, focusing on the green interstices of our city, the small, often scrappy, bits of nature nearby for my own psychological and physical health, and that of my city.
Matthew Jensen, New YorkBut who hasn’t dreamt about snapping their fingers and making air pollution go away? And all of a sudden we realize it is optional. Those scroll bar images are fun. Before. After. Before. After. What else is optional?
Panagiota Kotsila, Barcelona The balance between keeping but delaying essential community engagement meetings, moving them online, or cancelling them all together, will be some of the many difficult decisions we will have to make in the near future.
Gilles Lecuir, ParisThe confinement makes me feel intimately what I have known and said for many years now: the presence of nature in the city is not a decoration, it is a vital need for the city dweller. // Le confinement me donne à ressentir intimement ce que je sais et dis depuis de nombreuses années maintenant : la présence de la nature en ville n’est pas un décor, c’est un besoin vital pour le citadin.
Nina-Marie Lister, TorontoFor now, I take solace in the routine of daily bread. The measured pace of the knead, the proof, and the rise offers structure to my blurry days. Ultimately, it is the realization that this simple, measured act and its alchemy are both literally and figuratively what sustains us in its slow and patient way.
Kevin Lunzalu, NairobiThe COVID-19 curfew has given me the space to reflect on viable alternatives to my common practices: I am rethinking my food, modes of travel, entertainment, and forms of meeting people. Working from home for certain days may prove to be one of the best environmental practices. These ideas will greatly shape my post-crisis personality.
Patrick Lydon, OsakaWhat will be the new normal? Perhaps now is our chance to slow down, take care of ourselves and our fellow living beings a bit better, look to nature, and figure it out.
Yvonne Lynch, RiyadhI remain positive regarding a post-virus era because, notwithstanding the gravity of this situation, crisis always presents opportunity for positive transformation. Professionals in my field have always struggled to convince decision makers of the benefits of urban greening and climate adaptation. Not so much now.
Antonia Machado, PortlandThe coronavirus has exposed deep structural weaknesses, reinforcing the notion that working across silos and centering equity is imperative to building resilience and moving towards transformative change.
François Mancebo, ParisHidden behind any disaster, there always is a cost-benefits analysis that went wrong. Yet, more than often those who decide on the acceptability of a risk are not those who will be most exposed once the disaster happens. For the future, it is crucial to decide now who and what actions should be priority in the aftermath of Covid-19, and by whom these choices should be made.
Rob McDonald, WashingtonI have often been someone who threw himself at work, who saw work as not just a job but as a calling, who perhaps spent too much time working and not enough time at home. So, it is humbling to realize that, at this moment in time, perhaps the most important thing I can do in the universe is be with my family.
Brian McGrath, New YorkI with others have recently postulated a metacity framework—a more flexible and adaptable form of architectural space—for the future adaptation of cities as we face a global climate crisis—such as the current pandemic. My hope for a positive outcome of this tragic virus is the development of new infrastructures in solidarity towards a just transition based on the feminist/ecologist metacity matrix.
Siobhán McQuaid, DublinWe are facing now into a pivotal moment in time where it is possible to contemplate an alternative recovery plan. Governments and decision-makers need to take time out to reflect on the importance of small business, local business and nature-based business for community resilience.
Ragene Palma, LondonI call for urban practitioners and legislators to immerse in the daily lives of those who have been sidetracked for the longest time, and work from there to begin championing spatial equality—visit slums, converse with the homeless, and know what it’s like to live on the verge of the city. Our previous “normal”should not be recreated. // Hinihikayat ko ang mga nasa larangan ng pagpaplano at mambabatas na pananaliksik ng pamumuhay ng nakararami—bisitahin natin ang mga iskwater, kausapin natin ang mga walang tirahan, at alamin natin kung ano ang kalagayan ng mga namumuhay sa loob at labas ng mga lungsod.
Diane Pataki, New YorkWhat about poverty, inequality, food insecurity, lack of access to clean water, climate change, and pollution? Now that I know we can act in response to COVID-19, there’s no turning back. Our society can change – completely and rapidly. The next time we have a daring solution, let’s not take “no” for an answer.
Mitch Pavao-Zuckerman, College ParkNot all of our students have the desire to learn online, and not all have the resources to do so. There is talk about impacts to university budgets and student enrollments. This experience is teaching many about the real lives and experiences of our students, and we need to be sure that any transformations in the new normal reflect on inequities in access to time, technology, and privacy.
Steward Pickett, PoughkeepsieThis changes everything … again. Will those of us who survive learn this time? All of us are on some verge.
Mary Rowe, TorontoI think the most profound challenge for any of us working in urbanism through and after COVID, is now that we have seen how our cities truly function at their most vulnerable, what possible excuse do we now have to not emerge solely committed to fixing it?
Andrew Rudd, New YorkI am frequently in mourning that after this crisis the world will never be the same. I am also hopeful that after this crisis the world will never be the same.
Eric Sanderson, New YorkWhat is life, if not hope? What are our cities, if not an investment in our future? Great things will come again. Take care, my friends; hold on; and invest what you can into the long now.
Olivier Scheffer, BordeauxWe are standing at the edge of the cliff, and the coronavirus is right behind us…So how do we urgently change the urban metabolism to something highly resilient?
Huda Shaka, DubaiI have been reminded of the privileges I have which others do not: having the option to work remotely, having access to quality public space and amenities at my door step, having a choice about how I travel and where I spend my leisure time—and having leisure time. I will work harder personally and professionally to bring those privileges to others, I hope.
Laura Shillington, MontrealWhile we may be sharing a global experience of living in a pandemic, how we experience it is very specific to place, age, class, race, and gender. Can we use this experience to create a new normal with each of us as more ethical subjects to imagine new worlds?
Elisa Silva, CaracasIt is clear that the way we have been living and the patterns of governance we have chosen could be very different, they could change the second we decide to make them a priority and work collectively toward their fulfilment.
David Simon, LondonThe adaptational effort will be immense. While certain other activities are amenable to onlin-isation, others are not—some activities will simply be impossible. All bets are off.
Mary Hall Surface, WashingtonAt its best, theatre is a unique forum where communities can imagine together. We gather and literally align our beating hearts as a story unfolds told by actors who breathe our same air. My nightmare new normal is a Romeo and Juliet who never touch, watched by a masked audience too afraid to believe the story.
Erika Svendsen, New YorkI am grateful for all those who are working outside during this crisis and the sacrifices they have made all these days. Nature’s stage crew, so to speak. In the future, I’d like to explore ways to help strengthen our green workforce and support those within it that are most vulnerable during times of crisis.
Abdallah Tawfic, CairoPlanting is a representation of peace and hope and we should continue to encourage, support and spread it in such critical time, for the sake of our health and wellbeing. Let’s be hopeful and revive victory gardens again all over the world, let’s get back to our roots, and grow food and hope inside our cities.
Christine Thuring, VancouverI’m contemplating alternative and new ways by which to engage my energy, expertise, and love for the world. It is a bit of an existential place, which enlists the whole range of my creative and scientific faculties. If this is the new normal, where “business as usual” no longer applies, then how do I wish to contribute?
Naomi Tsur, JerusalemSince we are supposed to go no more than 500 meters from our homes, this is clearly a good time to see if we have all we need within that perimeter. A grocer’s? A small park? A school? A community garden?… Perhaps it is time to think just what is needed for a happy neighborhood and ask whether we have it.
Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, ParisCan we, as artists, organize ourselves to inspire our institutions and societies to keep the engine on slow and never start again the machinery of neoliberal destruction? We talked long enough about politics in art. Time for action and art-as-politics.
Andreas Weber, BerlinI wonder what we will make of the insight that we are suddenly so vulnerable. I watch the glittering insects in the sun, much less numerous than some years ago behind this same window, and listen to the nightingale that plucks those insects from the twigs to feed their young. I sit in silence, until the first bat is out and shatters the pale sky with its ragged path.
Diana Wiesner, BogotáWe are the birds that make up their nest with everything they find: branches, bark, feathers, leaves, hair, and even strands of wool, any material to protect the essential: creatively reinventing what will emerge from this process of caring for the global nest. // Somos las aves que componen su nido con todo lo que encuentran: ramas, cortezas, plumas, hojas, pelos, y hasta hebras de lana, cualquier material para proteger lo esencial: reinventando creativamente lo que va a emerger de este proceso de cuidar el nido global.
Darlene Wolnik, New OrleansMy work supporting farmers’ markets across the U.S. remains very much the same. The markets are innovating contactless procedures at a furious pace: new “drive-thru” markets, ticketed entry walk-thru markets, curbside pickup, “click and collect” pre-ordering procedures. My days start early and go late, and at the end of each I wonder if I could have done more. Yet it is such hopeful work
Xin Yu, SchenzhenWill the pandemic flame urban residents’ passion to get in touch with Nature? I really hope so. Will people further respect and take care of Nature after the post-pandemic world becomes the new normal? We need to find out and do more.
Carly Ziter, MontrealI desperately miss interacting with family, friends, and colleagues in person—but I do plan to be more intentional about the choices I make, and to appreciate every family visit, conference, and chat in the hallway a little bit more as we make our way to a new normal.
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.
We are all confined to our homes—if we are lucky (more on that later). Which is something, since most of us are “outdoor types”, “people types”.. Can we find meaning, motivation, and renewed spirit for action in this contemplative but deeply strange time? We find ourselves wondering, doubting, planning our next steps or perhaps second-guessing our last ones. We are trying to keep all the parts of lives still stuck together and not flying apart. Good luck with that. Bonne chance. Buena suerte. In bocca al lupo. सौभाग्य. בהצלחה. Boa sorte. Viel Glück. 頑張れ. Buti na lang. حظا طيبا وفقك الله (Please pardon any clumsy use of Google Translate.)
Now that we have seen how our cities around the world truly function at their most vulnerable, what possible excuse do we now have to not emerge solely committed to fixing it? Maybe in searching for a new post-Covid “normal”, we need to act on the idea that the old normal was a big part of the problem.
Perhaps we are somewhat like ascetics in caves, contemplating a potentially perfectible life outside, somewhere else and out of reach. For myself, I have been wondering how we will be changed by this experience: as people with dreams, families, and styles of behavior; and also as urban professionals.
So we, as we tend to do, gave a wide variety of people—artists to architects, scientists to planners—the following prompt: How do you imagine you might be changed by Covid, both professionally, but also personally as you negotiate a new post-virus “normal”?
In this prompt we intended to ask a professional question, but also a deeply personal one. All of us now know people personally who have been sick; many (even all?) of us know people who have died. All of us have had lives upended, lost opportunities, had careers and livelihoods set back or even wrecked.
How do we pick up the pieces? What pieces are even still available to us? Which pieces should we cast aside, and leave on the ash heap?
There are a few key threads in this collection of 58 people from 24 countries, and many hopeful responses:
We see (or can simply hear more clearly) more wildlife. Can we hold on to this and build on momentum for and the dream of greener cities for all?
New modes of communication and teaching have a lot of potential, but are also fraught. Meeting in person has real, intangible, and alchemical value. Not all of our students have the desire to learn online, and not all have the resources to do so.
Many of us are slowing down, “smelling the lilacs”, baking more bread, finding new ways to connect to others. Can contemplation and mindfulness be sustained?
Many are amazed at the clean air and reduced consumption. Can a new normal for the fight against climate change and for livability be embedded in our social actions?
Several note that after years of hearing “no you can’t change that”, or “these activities are not optional”, suddenly in a matter of days or weeks we changed fundamental ways of operating. Paraphrasing Diane Pataki below: let’s not take “no” for an answer next time. Or quoting Matt Jensen: “What else is optional” in our lives?
Let’s make sure not be too glib or tin-eared about the joy of greenery and songbirds, wonderful though they are. Most in this collection have jobs at big organizations that continue to pay salaries. Some in this collection work for small organizations or are free-lancers. Their lives are not simply changed by working at home until they go back to the office; life trajectories may be fundamentally altered. Some have lost opportunities that may not exist in the future.
We are lucky to be sheltering at home. Many beyond this collection have to go to work, brave public transportation. Or have no work at all. David Simon in this collection has two children who are emergency room physicians. (Our gratitude to them.) The New York Times and others reported recently that most new Covid cases are people who are working outside the home, such as in grocery stores. They probably don’t have a choice. Covid’s consequences seem to hit hard communities that already are challenged. For example, 70% of Covid deaths in Louisiana are African American. In Kibera, Dharavi, and other slums of the world, who knows?
We are The Nature of Cities—that is, the character of cities that we believe in: green, certainly, but also a thriving mix of communities, and immigrants, and restaurants, and performing arts, and cultural institutions, and civil society, and innovation, and diversity, and opportunities, and … people. I love cities. I fear for their immediate future and the people who live in them. Let’s remain focused on what we can now see are the fault lines and the possibilities for change in cities. As Mary Rowe says below: “now that we have seen how our cities around the world truly function at their most vulnerable, what possible excuse do we now have to not emerge solely committed to fixing it?”
Maybe in searching for a new post-Covid “normal”, we need to act on the idea that the old normal was a big part of the problem. Both personally and professionally, let’s take nothing for granted.
* * *
The banner image above is a nested necklace, jewelry by Ligia Ceballos de Wiesner, who happens to be the mother of one of our contributors here, Diana Wiesner Ceballos. (Photo by María José Velasco.) To me the piece symbolizes much of what we discuss in this roundtable: the act of nesting in our homes (our nests) during quarantine, the interconnectedness (the intricate tagle of nests) of communities, and the new life and ideas (eggs) nurtured within nests.
Pippin Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, is an African urban ecologist who enjoys the untidiness of cities where society and nature must thrive together.
FULL BIO
The differences in the lives of our students is stark. With everybody heading home for lock down, the somewhat levelling experience of a shared campus has gone like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight. Some get to leave the ball as they arrived, and others are left with pumpkins and rats.
The comma is used to package ideas and thoughts, to give meaning to phrases strung out across a sentence. Importantly, it also signals to the reader when and where to breathe. I recall as a child reading aloud and skipping over the commas, uncertain of their purpose, and being quite desperate for air by the end of the sentence. I like to think this pandemic is a comma in my life. It’s a pause. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a moment of idleness, of downed tools (this is no luxurious paragraph break). It is a pause that packages what came before into one entity, and similarly will give meaning to what comes after.
Professionally I have been moving all my teaching and supervision engagements to online platforms. This is a novel, and rather fun challenge in it is most basic form. I am not technologically savvy and have been on some steep learning curves. Less cheering is navigating paths with students who do not have access to internet services or devices or live in circumstances that preclude participating. The differences in the lives of our students is stark. With everybody heading home for lock down, the somewhat levelling experience of a shared campus has gone like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight. Some get to leave the ball as they arrived, and others are left with pumpkins and rats. The route ahead for these students through their degrees is at best difficult, but most likely devastating. This harsh reminder of the true South Africa, one of such gross inequity, is certainly reason to pause for thought. This is something to be tackled with greater conviction into the future. I hope the second half of this sentence has healing, and optimism.
To be at home in lock down with my family has been a pleasure. My husband is a delightful office companion, and my children drift into our office to chat, share an idea (did you know Genghis Khan has 16 million male offspring?), or to ask a question (can I tie-dye the bedsheets?) and then bumble off to get on with school work (we hope). Lunches have a holiday atmosphere of bread and cheese in the sun. I have had the time to notice the daily passage of light through my house at this time of year. Like other parts of the world with the muted city we hear birds as we never have before. I am aware this is not everyone’s experience of being home in lockdown and count myself lucky. It’s most certainly a pause, and one to be relished. We all know what lies ahead will be difficult to navigate. This brief time however will give us happy memories and familial resilience. We are certainly drawing breath for what is to come.
I hope the second half of my sentence will be slower, more thoughtful, and less cluttered than the first half. I hope it has resolution in it, healing, and optimism
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.
The balance between keeping but delaying community engagement meetings, moving them online, or cancelling them all together, will be some of the many difficult decisions we will have to make in the near future.
One most recent and direct impact we have had in our practice is the need to rethink and cancel multi-stakeholder meetings we were preparing as researchers and academics from the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability on the topic of creating more just and sustainable cities, and which were going to take place in Barcelona during spring-summer 2020.
One of them, focused on ongoing urban socio-environmental conflicts and struggles, was originally planned for March 19, 2020. The event was going to bring together activist platforms in the city who are working to address real estate speculation and large-scale redevelopment in their perspective neighborhoods while, at the same time, fighting for greener and sustainable neighborhoods for long-time residents – rather than for visitors, tourists, or high-income residents. Our idea as conveners was to reflect with participants on the common issues they are facing and to strategize on possible alliances and coalitions. Our meeting was going to be supported by short videos that filmmaker Alberto Bougleux was in the process of filming about each neighborhood struggle. Needless to say, both the event and the videos have been postponed for later this summer. Because of the topic of the event and the types of activists—vulnerable residents, local groups within one city—the idea of moving the meeting online is not in order. The challenge here lies in being able to grasp how the epidemic has changed activists’ priorities and abilities to participate amidst a process of recovering from a pandemic, while also in maintaining a thematic focus that is relevant, as the timeliness of activist oriented events is key to their meaningful outcomes.
The second event was a European wide Arena event in Barcelona, planned for June 4th and 5th 2020, which would bring together academics, urban planners, practitioners, and civic groups from across Europe and thus invite a transversal (cross-domain, transdisciplinary, intersectional) dialogue on the manifestations and drivers of urban injustice in the context of sustainability planning. Some of the questions on the table have been: How does racialized or ethnically exclusionary urbanization create inequalities in access to green amenities? How does tokenistic participation in urban planning reproduce exclusion in planning more sustainable and equitable food systems? How does urban regeneration create new inequalities in planning sustainable neighborhoods and eco-districts?
For this event, organized within the framework of the UrbanA EU project, the greater uncertainty surrounding international travel, even within Europe, for the next 3-6 months, has prompted us to transform it into a two-day series of small webinars (Agenda available here). The event will thus host already registered participants and hopefully welcome additional participants who might not have been able to participate before (due to time or travel restrictions) but now might find renewed opportunity to attend and—and can now apply online.
Apart from the different type of interaction that an online event can bring (and this restrictions in building connections between our participants and Community of Practice), an important caveat here is that people will probably be “Zoomed out” by June 2020 and thus might be discouraged by the prospect of online meetings. Our plan is to have highly interactive, short webinars, with concrete outputs, rather than long online sessions. We also intend to invest quite some time in engaging participants with the ideas and the people that will be “present” in each online conversation.
The balance between keeping but delaying community engagement meetings, moving them online, or cancelling them all together, will be some of the many difficult decisions we will have to make in the near future.
Panagiota Kotsila has a PhD in Development Studies and is a postdoctoral researcher at ICTA-UAB and the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ). Her research examines the unequal distribution of health risks and how the very concepts of disease, health and well-being are constructed, mobilised and interpreted through and for power.
Janice Astbury is a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield where she is working on the Breathing Infrastructures project undertaking action research related to green infrastructure, air quality, wellbeing and connecting schools with urban nature in Buenos Aires.
I hope that many people around the world are enjoying the sounds of voices and birdsong, and the experience of cleaner air flowing into their homes, and will want this to continue.
I arrived in Buenos Aires on March 3rd. That was the day that the first case of Covid-19 was identified here. I came to collaborate with colleagues at the University of Buenos Aires working on green infrastructure in schoolyards, with a goal of reducing the concentration of air pollutants that reach children, and also generating other benefits associated with greening and enhancing nearby nature for children to interact with. I had barely got started when the national quarantine began. Today is day 40.
Street trees of Buenos Aires. Photo: Janice Astbury
I was lucky to find somewhere to live in the neighbourhood of Palermo. The first things I noticed were the tall beautiful street trees, the balconies from which people could interact with the street, and the array of small local shops and cafes. The next things I noticed were the high volume of traffic on my residential street, the noise it created, and the exhaust fumes that seemed to flow directly into my second floor apartment. Sitting on my balcony felt like sitting on the side of a motorway and I soon stopped doing it.
Now I sit on the balcony to work most mornings and enjoy the immersion in the street life, beginning with the custodians of the various apartment buildings chatting to one another and the swish of their wet brooms as they clean the pavement outside their buildings. I think how nice it would be if they were also watering gardens. The high-end buildings across the street feature only a few stalks of bamboo in pots—one arrangement is in a glass case.
Post-green planting. Photo: Janice Astury.
Later come the deliveries, I like the ones from the local shops where staff push shopping carts up the middle of the street. Less appealing is the daily visit from the massive truck delivering bottled water. I’m not sure about this “essential” service in an area with perfectly good tap water. I think one of the important things to come out of this experience is thinking about what’s essential, as governments all over the world deliberate on what should be included in necessities and what special permissions should be allowed. Allowing access to green space and nature is continuing to challenge many countries (including this one) and I am hoping that accessible nature will come to be seen as essential, not only during crises.
Having come here to work on a project with a focus on air quality and its impact on children’s health and development, I am thinking about the widely presumed essentialness of driving. Currently, if people want to drive somewhere, they have to fill in an online declaration stating which of the allowable exceptions justifies their movements during this health emergency.
By day 9 of the quarantine, air pollution in Buenos Aires was halved. If this can work to confront the Covid-19 health emergency, why shouldn’t it work to combat the greater illness and death caused by air pollution? Some people would still drive in the city but it would be considered exceptional, they would need to justify their travel by car. Rather than being the obvious choice, it would be the last resort. This will involve, among other things, maintaining online work practices, facilitating more active transport, and adapting public transport so that people feel it is safe to use.
I hope that some cities in the world will show the way by applying the sorts of systems they have put in place for the coronavirus pandemic to tackling the air quality and climate change crises. I hope that I myself will continue my work with greater confidence that big, rapid, creative interventions that change urban life for the better are possible. And I hope that many people around the world are enjoying the sounds of voices and birdsong, and the experience of cleaner air flowing into their homes, and will want this to continue.
Notes:
[1] Pollution in Buenos Aires went down to half due to the quarantine “La contaminación en Buenos Aires bajó a la mitad por la cuarentena” Clarin, 29 March 2020
[2] In 2016 (last WHO global assessment) 91% of the world population was living in places where the WHO air quality guidelines levels were not met and ambient air pollution was estimated to cause 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide. (WHO, Ambient air pollution: a global assessment of exposure and burden of disease, 2016)
Essential service? Photo: Janice Astury.
I will keep dancing half an hour a day on Zoom with people from all over the world, and join the direct local actions that bring wonder, trust and care among people and among species, learning from the ways of trees and the songs of bees, together.
There is a place in the village where I live that beautifully embodies what I wish for the post Covid-19 era. It is a public orchard, imagined about two years ago by Nathalie, a woman living here in a small village by the Seine river, about one hour South of Paris. Last November, the first trees were planted in a great community gathering on a land belonging to the municipality. Pear, Peach, Plum, Apple, Cherry trees, blackcurrant, gooseberry bushes, borage, cosmos, rowan, etc. all bought and planted collectively by the town’s inhabitants. The orchard belongs to no one and to everybody. It is a collective good, a common that has been reclaimed. Open to all, everyone can grow food for everyone. Orchestrated as a food forest, this urban edible landscape is a space of freedom, conviviality and pedagogy. There, villagers can learn how to plant roots, how to grow food for strangers and for themselves, and how to respect the soil and biodiversity that enable us all to do so. This place embodies collectivity among humans and non humans. Indeed a third of the garden is wild and looks just like how it was when the orchard group came, and it will stay so. As my life both slows down with the quarantine and is shaken by the daily news of Covid-19 related sanitary and economical crisis, I feel the deep urge to participate in such communal initiatives. Not only to grow food as it is vital that we reclaim our knowledge in that sacred field, but also to grow profound intimacy with the earth and the local community. This time asks us to practice deep self care and in such deep care for the world, and this is political. We are experiencing how deeply we are all inter-related, intertwined in the fabric of a world that we all share. I feel the call to be more radical in this statement today, as work projects might become more scarce, time opens to nurture these relationships with the natural world, with neighbors of all kinds, with old time friends, dear ones and the unknown. I know that art will bring poetry, colors and balm to this humbling period of collective uncertainty. It will enable us to experience togetherness in ways so new and old, and accompany a much needed transition to more grounded ways of life. I will definitely try to participate in this movement, using the creative skills I developed since many years, but with more energy because of how pressing this need is now. I will keep dancing half an hour a day on Zoom with people from all over the world, and join the direct local actions that bring wonder, trust and care among people and among species, learning from the ways of trees and the songs of bees, together.
“Le verger citoyen”, a communal orchard supported by both the municipality and the locale association La Manufacture de Samois, in Samois-sur-Seine, France. Photo: Carmen Bouyer
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.
For those of us privileged to be sheltering at home, the crisis has created a new sense of simplicity and attention to place. May we carry that forward wherever the future takes us.
I find myself hesitant to write this post, to say anything for public consumption just yet, in the midst of so much rapid change and crisis. When time has become so fluid—is it Monday or Thursday?—yet one week ago feels like an eternity. Speculating about the “post-virus” era feels like begging to offer something dated and irrelevant. Most of all, I feel so privileged to be salaried, housed, healthy, and home with my family. But at the same time my life is completely transformed, as are all of our lives. So I write this dispatch in the midst of the “during-virus, non-normal” moment, from a quiet corner in Red Hook, Brooklyn—proximate but worlds away from the epicenter here in New York City.
Over the years, my thinking and writing has focused on reciprocal relationships of care between people and their environments. Along with three of my colleagues (Erika Svensden, Michelle Johnson, and Laura Landau), we started a collective journaling effort of our observations of our changing experiences with nature, stewardship, civil society, and environmental governance in the time of COVID-19, all throughlines in our pre-existing research. The effort began with a series of text exchanges and then a shared google document we started on March 13. We have been writing near-daily since then from our homes across Brooklyn and Queens, sharing our reflections, photos, links: messages of hope and sadness that we encounter in our virtual and physical communities. The process has been deeply therapeutic for me and I think will feed our research for years to come. On a personal level, it led me to the story I’d like to share today.
Lilacs are one of my favorite plants and a wonderful signal of spring and warmer days ahead. Last week I saw some images online from the (closed) Brooklyn Botanic Garden of their beautiful lilac collection and it made me have a visceral yearning to see and smell the plant. I knew we had some in Red Hook, but I couldn’t recall their location. So I texted my plant-savvy friend and neighbor, Gillian, to ask if she knew some lilac whereabouts and she immediately responded, telling me she had smelled some yesterday just a few blocks from where I live. So my husband, daughter and I immediately walked over to visit them; and it was certainly the highlight of my day.
I think this vignette is revealing of how I—and perhaps many others—are experiencing nature in the time of COVID-19. I braid together virtual communities (the botanic garden post), personal social networks aided by technology (the text message exchange), and embodied experiences with my immediate family in my hyper-local environment. I tune into the simple beauty and sensuous experience of nature. I slow down and move at my toddler’s pace. I don’t mind if it takes me 20 minutes to walk one block to my neighborhood park, because I literally have nowhere else to go. My daughter has learned the words daffodil, tulip, and dandelion (or candylion, to her); she logrolls in the grass, because the playgrounds are closed. I walk and walk and walk, grateful to live just a block from the harbor, where I can smell the salt spray and watch the setting sun.
I appreciate this keener observation of our socio-natural world and I know that others around the globe are tuning in as well—to birdsong, to the wind on their face, to the sun shining through their window, to the sound of applause and cowbells from our neighbors—separate but together—cheering for the frontline workers. For those of us privileged to be sheltering at home, the crisis has created a new sense of simplicity and attention to place. May we carry that forward wherever the future takes us.
Sarah Charlop-Powers is the Executive Director of the Natural Areas Conservancy, with a background in land use planning, economics and environmental management.
While we’re all navigating through this extremely stressful—and sometimes downright scary—moment, I can’t imagine what my life, and the lives of all New Yorkers, would be like without our local parks.
When I present about the work of the Natural Areas Conservancy, I frequently lead with two research findings: NYC’s forests are surprisingly healthy—85% of canopy trees are native species; and 50% of New Yorkers primarily rely on NYC’s parks for recreation and access to nature. New York City’s 7,300 acres of forested natural areas are a critical form of nearby nature. And, they require financial and community investments to ensure their longevity and to continue providing significant social and environmental benefits.
While I often speak about these important points, COVID-19 has made them even more significant and real for me personally. In March, as I shed my everyday routine—like my subway commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan; bus rides with my son to preschool; Saturday morning trips to the farmers market, followed by muffins on a park bench and a visit to the local playground—I started feeling as if life in our very dense urban neighborhood was unbearable.
As my wife and I began splitting our days into a relay of childcare and working from home, I started a new daily ritual: visiting natural areas with our three-year-old. I anxiously put on our masks, and as we ride the elevator from the fourteenth floor to the lobby I remind my son not to touch anything. When we arrive at a park and take that first step into the woods, we both exhale. During a recent hike in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, we spotted a skunk, a herd of deer, and an eagle catching a fish. In Forest Park in Queens, my son spent 30 minutes throwing sticks into a pond. And in Brooklyn’s Marine Park, we wandered through the park’s shrubby maritime forest and experienced the thrill of exiting the woods onto a smooth beach. Together, we are experiencing the simple pleasures that come from spending time in nature.
Right now, many families are relying on their local parks for respite, breathing room, and relaxation. With playgrounds and recreational facilities closed, we are seeing increased visitation in our natural areas, not only in New York City, but in cities around the world.
The lines between my personal and professional identities have now blurred. I am experiencing first hand the importance of local parks and natural areas—not simply in a “nice to have” context, but out of necessity. And while we’re all navigating through this extremely stressful—and sometimes downright scary—moment, I can’t imagine what my life, and the lives of all New Yorkers, would be like without our local parks.
Katrine Claassens' paintings reflect her interest in climate change, urban ecology, and internet memes. She also works as a science, policy and climate change communicator for universities, think tanks, and governments in South Africa and Canada.
The pandemic teaches us this: rapid, coherent change is possible. It has also laid bare that there is much to be actively dismantled, and much to be actively built.
I write this on the day I was meant to be hanging my paintings in a Cape Town gallery, an event now indefinitely postponed, as so many things have been.
Here in Montreal, my home studio window looks out onto Parc Laurier. With this view, I have been drawn with a cord of tenderness into the intricate politics of neighbourhood cats, the love between a chickadee couple, the diligent industry of iridescent black birds nesting in a nearby tree, the aesthetically pleasing daily walk of the man in the red coat with the dalmatian, and the ceaseless antics of the squirrels.
This year has been one of partings without end: one billion animals dead in the Australian fires, swarms of locusts in Africa on a scale never seen in living memory, mass bleaching of the coral reefs, the warmest January on record. And now, with COVID-19, partings of a different kind, that rob us nonetheless of the same precious thing: of life and of a map for the future.
In this context of extreme ecological collapse and human despair, I have found some comfort in the stories of nature “rebounding” as documented by locked-down urban residents from their windows around the world. Shy but adventurous wild boars, coyotes, and deer wandering the empty streets; skies clearing to reveal faraway mountain ranges not seen from industrial cities in a lifetime; the canal waters of Venice almost crystalline (with rumours of dolphins!). It is breathtaking, the sudden clarity, the speed, the utter brilliance of the blue, and green, and the rough fur of the wild against our city surfaces.
And these visions of a different world are a powerful thing. While COVID-19 restrictions are unlikely to meaningfully move the needle on climate change and its attendant horrors, these stories offer a peephole to another kind of city. One that is wilder, one that is allowed to go to seed, one with cleaner water and skies. Once you have seen the mountains, you will know to miss them.
And through this eyelet of possibility comes a lesson, a warning, a flare. The pandemic teaches us this: rapid, coherent change is possible. It has also laid bare that there is much to be actively dismantled, and much to be actively built. For guidance on how to do this we can ask the questions that a gardener asks at the time when seasons change. What will we bury, and put to sleep? What seeds will we save? When will it be safe to sow? What wild seeds have travelled to our soil on the wind, and lie dormant waiting to be weeded or to delight?
Down in the park, I found the body of a young squirrel, small and sleek, under a tree. I marked its place with the most ancient of human writing, pushing sticks into the frozen ground, setting a circle of stones around it. An act to bear witness to life at a time when life seems so worth witnessing, and as a call for dog walkers and gentle children to observe the perfection of its paws and the almond shape of its closed eyes.
I am confronted with how much I need trees, grass, and fresh air to remain a sane human being. Being stuck between the four walls of my apartment all day feels foreign and unnatural.
I am changed by it. Everything in my small apartment looks more precious to me than it did a few months ago. I keep thinking about how to be careful with everything—the dishwasher, brushing my teeth, not wasting any food—because finding a technician, taking a trip to the dentist or risking it at the grocery store are all incredibly difficult and dangerous things to do right now. I feel constrained, uncomfortable, and anxious, and yet I am also ashamed of this because the majority of people around the world live like this on a daily basis.
My best friend sent me a GIF from Venezuela that asks of the rest of the world: “Oh, rationing, first time?”
It also makes me think about arguments I’ve made for increasing density in cities. Let’s build up. But how much do we build? And where? Is there a point where it because unsafe? I live in an area of Montreal that is food poor. They built condos, and leased main strip commercial space to expensive restaurants and boutique clothing stores to build out marketing campaigns for realtors that raised housing prices, but groceries stores and other practical services are scarce. This is ordinarily a heavily contested urban planning problem we argue about in our community, but the pandemic is highlighting just how critical it is, and will be for the future, to mix public services and access to diverse services in each borough in a city.
Mostly though, I am confronted with how much I need trees, grass, and fresh air to remain a sane human being. Being stuck between the four walls of my apartment all day feels foreign and unnatural. If this isn’t a stark reminder of just how much a part of nature humans are, I am not sure anything will push us to remember. I remain hopeful though, that this just might be the thing to do it.
Marcus is a sustainability scientist and his research covers a wide range of human-environment interconnectivity, environmental risk and resilience, transdisciplinary methodologies and novel ecosystems.
“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word “crisis”; one brush stroke stands for danger, the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger—but recognize the opportunity.” John F. Kennedy, April, 1959
I have a new resolve to overcome my despondency and try harder to find a means to engage urban communities with wild nature. In this case, the first step is literally on the doorstep!
While the first part of this quotation is now recognised as a mistranslation followed by a misinterpretation of Chinese characters, in my opinion the second part is more relevant as an aphorism for me during the COVID crisis. As an ecologist and sustainability scientist, I am well aware of how crisis or disturbance in an ecosystem can negatively impact some species, even to the point of extinction, but also provide opportunities for others. We live in a world of both natural disturbances and, as we all know, significant anthropogenic disturbances. Cities are, for me, the ultimate of anthropogenic disturbances. Their presence and operation does not permit “natural” processes to adapt and/or recover at the same rate as would historically have occurred, and therefore cities are a continual “danger” and “crisis”, to follow JFKs sentiments. This is the part of my work that fascinates me, and this is why I am a more than a little obsessed with urban novel ecosystems! While urban areas of all sizes and scales are increasingly dominating our global ecosystem, within them we observe many differing life forms coping, adapting, and in many cases, thriving. So while I am “trapped” indoors during the COVID crisis, I feel myself wanting to emulate these urban life forms and forcing myself to cope, adapt, and (I hope) thrive. You see, my mission to understand and quantify urban novel ecosystems has been faltering lately, and I have been growing increasingly despondent particularly with my inability to attract funding and interest for creating a citizen science approach to recording the effects of urban novel ecosystems on human behaviour.
Photo: Marcus Collier
However, during the COVID lockdown period I have noticed a significant increase on observations of nature in cities with a plethora of new websites, social medial feeds, and mainstream media observations of nature in cities. The absence of large numbers of people and vehicular traffic is permitting many animals to be brazen; unashamedly wandering through what were once busy streets. It should be said here that it is not the case that there are more animals or more bird song, however it is the case that we are better able to observe them now that the noisy, chaotic background of human activity has been removed and we are forced to “stop and smell the roses”. I love that people are posting their observations, some of them for the first time, and this will make my job a lot easier when I am trying to convey the diversity and resilience of species in urban environments. What is even more exciting is that urban ecologists are being provided, free of charge, with a growing data resource complete with images and geolocations. We are being given a snapshot of what cities could be like when nature is permitted to do its own thing, and thus we have more opportunities for generating theory and measuring urban ecological processes and characteristics. Indeed, this data resource could be an opportunity, in combination with data from transport, air and water quality, and so on, for convincing urban communities, planners and policy-makers of the values of adopting urban regreening strategies. Moreover, this is possibly our best opportunity to definitively prove to our fellow humans that by changing our behaviour we can have greener and healthier cities, and that these greener cities will make us healthier in mind and body; yes, we can cope, adapt and thrive!
Photo: Marcus Collier
Wait, I’m beginning to think that COVID might be doing me out of a job! Well no. With all sorts of tiny wildernesses appearing on walls, or in cracks in the pavement, or in the unmanaged corners of parking lots and parks, for me personally this crisis is providing an opportunity for some of the poorest members of our society, who perhaps cannot afford to visit a national park some distance from the city, to experience what wild nature really looks like. I have been speaking of the potential values of urban novel ecosystems for many years, and finally I am starting to see people voluntarily commenting on the emergent wildness of cities; emergent nature in cities! So, I am excited by the prospect of being able to demonstrate the values of urban novel ecosystems “in the flesh” as it were, and this has provided me with a new resolve to overcome my despondency and try harder to find a means to engage urban communities with wild nature. In this case, the first step is literally on the doorstep!
Paul Currie is a Director of the Urban Systems Unit at ICLEI Africa. He is a researcher of African urban resource and service systems, with interest in connecting quantitative analysis with storytelling and visual elicitation.
Covid has surfaced a key reality for me: choice. I will be paying more attention to how cities increase the promise and attainment of choice for their citizens, who are so often restricted by cost, geography or demography, to one option.
I am caught in tension between two hopes: I hope everything can return to normal: that no one suffers further loss of life and loved ones. And I hope that nothing is ever the same again: that everyone’s calls to action for a transformed post-covid society will bear fruit.
Covid has shown how quickly we can dismantle our globally interdependent society. It has shown the disastrous consequences of negligent leaders, and offered the basis for solidarity and pride. It has shown the stark differences between what we consider to be necessities. It has shown how meaningless these words are when cash flow stops and we can’t feed ourselves and our dependents. And unfortunately, it has reminded us that true commitment and action is so often dependent on a crisis.
Have we not for decades been demanding radical transformative action to realize social justice, environmental restoration, and equity across multiple realities or expressions? How do we get the powers that be to acknowledge the slow crises? How do we get them to acknowledge the crises of climate change, structural inequality, racism, gender-based exclusion and violence, child stunting and environmental degradation? I am moved by our president in South Africa, who has issued the first call to a nation since 1994. I am moved by his acknowledgement of the failings to achieve an equal post-apartheid society. I hope now that when the declared national disaster for Covid is lifted, he immediately declares another national disaster that has been decades in the making, and coordinates action to address structural, rather than surface, ills.
In my work, I trace the hidden flows in cities that we tend to take for granted. These are the flows of resources that support our lives: where does our water flow? How does food grow and find us? How do we power our homes? And whither our waste be gone? A crisis shows these ignorances plain and none more so now than food and mobility. I have ever argued that some of the best infrastructure systems are based on people, and we see now the great losses as people are halted, as workplaces are closed, as informal workers are deemed non-essential, as cities grind to a halt. But we also see the new infrastructures of solidarity emerge as communities share supplies and food. In the imaginaries of future cities, I hope we don’t lose sight of the importance of people in shaping their homes, communities, and societies.
Covid has surfaced a key reality for me: choice. I will be paying more attention to how cities increase the promise and attainment of choice for their citizens, who are so often restricted by cost, geography or demography, to one option. In our efforts to improve food, water and energy security, how are we considering choice and agency? The city of the future lays options before all citizens, regardless of circumstance.
Samarth Das is an Urban Designer and Architect based in Mumbai. Having practiced professionally in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and subsequently in New York City, his work focuses on engaging actively in both public as well as private sectors—to design articulate shared spaces within cities that promote participation and interaction amongst people.
Being locked up in the comfort of our homes is certainly a privilege. Social distancing in a time like this is a luxury afforded by a few—over 55% of Mumbai city’s 13 million inhabitants live in slums where 6-7 people share a single room.
The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly brought normal life to a grinding halt. Following the spread of the virus worldwide, the Indian government under Prime Minister Modi took the bold step of enforcing a nationwide lockdown—initially for a period of 3 weeks which has since then been extended for another 18 days. India has done surprising well so far and the numbers speak for themselves.
This duration of the lockdown has offered a lot of time to reflect and critically think about work and other daily engagements. We all certainly have found ways to ensure that the work flow of our offices are not too hampered. As an architectural practice such as ours, it was difficult to cope and manage design work. But this was overcome through adapting several modes of communication and a certain up-skilling that individuals have undertaken. This testing time has certainly thrown light on finding efficient ways of communication, collaboration and co-producing work. Human desire to succeed in tough situations prevails, and with it brings copious amounts of positivity and hope.
But being locked up in the comfort of our homes is certainly a privilege. Social distancing in a time like this is a luxury afforded by a few. Over 55% of Mumbai city’s 13 million inhabitants live in slums where 6-7 people share a single room in most cases. The fate of daily wage workers who live hand to mouth is truly deplorable. With industries and businesses coming to a standstill, these workers are completely cut off from their daily source of income. Despite the state’s efforts in providing food and water to this vast and mobile people, are isolated, stranded in cities with no way home to the comfort of their loved ones. It does hit one hard.
We are all hyper aware of the pandemic at this moment in time, but the fact is that a majority of the urban poor in our country live in and encounter pandemic like scenarios on a daily basis with no access to formal housing, affordable healthcare, stable employment or any other sense of social security. It has certainly made me think about how we utilise our resources be it water, energy, produce, products, etc.
The Covid-19 pandemic has paralysed the world economy and taken countless lives. It has been close to 100 years since the devastating Spanish flu of 1918, but the frequency of such epidemics is bound to increase as we move forward. As an architect, it certainly fuels my drive to pursue large scale affordable housing as well as promote the development of accessible amenities and open public spaces for the urban masses. The general quality of everyday living must improve for the vast majorities who are often neglected in our development agenda. The change must happen now. A structural change in the way we approach policies and strategies that promote equitable distribution of resources, housing, healthcare, education and livelihoods must be taken up immediately.
The silver lining amidst this crisis has been the respite that our natural environment is receiving. With no human activity, our beaches and waterfronts are cleaner than even before, coastal marine life has come to the fore, the air is the cleanest it has been in decades and the continuous noise of cars has been replaced by the swelling sounds of bird calls. Nature is getting its much deserved break, albeit temporary. What will be the new ‘normal’ we aspire to achieve once this is behind us?
We definitely need to take the opportunity to build back better, but we also need to pause and not rush when we hit the reset button. We need the right rebuilding, in the right place, at the right time, for the right communities.
Looking Back to discover the new normal
It crept up slowly, the tension building. Work on Friday 13th March was relatively normal. Work on Monday 16th March was not. The train was crowded and uncomfortable. People looked worried. We were still in “herd immunity” policy. Social distancing had started and we were playing a waiting game. By the time I went home we were heading towards lock down. A week later we were there. We offered a collective sigh of relief. Then into how to we make this work. Our IT systems were not ready and some of our team members found themselves in full on hack mode. It took us a week to get our planning service up and running again. Unlike our colleagues dealing with Parks, Roads and Environmental Health, we quickly discovered that there was lots of work that we could do from home. Planning applications still need to be processed; government consultations still need to be responded to and, as Planners, we started to think about how to get our communities back on their feet once we come out of lockdown. The sheer tenacity and resilience of my team astounds me every day
Firth of Clyde—Home. Photo: Gillian Dick
I revisited a set of essays that were published after the Christchurch earthquake in 2011. They were grouped under a set of headings that to my mind builds a framework for the future and makes me think differently about what the new normal of urban planning will be and where modern British Town Planning came from:
Making Plans: We’ve always made spatial plans. The idea goes right the way back to the UK response to the Cholera epidemic in 1848. The first planned places came from the first Public health act that recognised that in order to be healthy people need space.
Selling the plan: The Boar War exposed the poor health of recruits and led directly to the first UK planning legislation in 1909.
Rewriting the rules: The idea to plan for places grew following the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which led to a greater emphasis on the need to have open space within housing areas and on to the garden city movement.
Considering the common good: The devastation of WW2 led to the 1947 Planning Act that viewed unregulated market forces as a threat to public health.
Thinking Big: Post war urban planning sought to rethink and reimagine communities that were fit for modern living
Acting Small: Gradually planning and health disconnected. But communities started to think that there was a better way. Community empowerment and activism started to grow.
Meeting in the middle: Covid-19 is changing everything. Are our resilient communities still going to be there? Is a new community spirit emerging?
Building back better: In lockdown people need space both within and around buildings that they can call their own. Balconies, roof gardens and more generous building space requirements are needed.
Reimaging recovery: There is a new normal coming for our communities. A new way of being and a new way of living. Will we embrace a more locally connected world? Will we return to the old normal?
Covid-19 has upended all my normal routines. I’m optimistic that the new normal creates a more resilient; equitable place where more people work flexibly and in different ways. I don’t think any of the folk that I work with think that we will go back to where we were four weeks ago. It’s an opportunity to reset, reinvent, and reimagine. We definitely need to take the opportunity to build back better, but we also need to pause and not rush when we hit the reset button. We need the right rebuilding, in the right place, at the right time, for the right communities.
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!
COVID-19 has forced changes that have given nature a breathing space, but I’m betting when the capitalist engine of destruction returns to “normal” it will raid the stores of nature like a selfish bully in a candy shop. It won’t be pretty.
“Let us talk, I will isolate myself.”
The title and all other quotations are from “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster, first published in 1909.
The usual routines of my wife and I are minimally affected by the pandemic as I work from home and have long relied on electronic communications. The dog gets a walk on the beach every day but I no longer plan to do anything else. In a world turned on its head my frustrations are trivial. But I’m angry.
Australia has dealt quite well with COVID-19 but we hold a fraction of the world population. Trump wants to sacrifice lives to rescue the US economy whilst making “democracy” and “freedom” meaningless globally. America is fighting a bizarre civil war and I’m wondering when “the Hunger Games” will start in earnest…
Imagine, if you can, a small room…
In Forster’s prescient 111 year old story “The Machine Stops”, Vashti lives a static life in a single room, nevertheless, like an avid Facebook user:
She knew several thousand people…
Dealing with the pandemic would be unthinkable without the internet.
…in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously…
COVID-19 has accelerated changes already underway. Our doctor offers phone consultations and our grandchildren are attending school virtually; families are zooming in to teleconferencing…
“I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you.”
We accept being isolated in order to talk to others, we accept a simulacrum of someone’s image on a screen and mechanical reconstitution of their voice as if they were the real thing.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms.
Public space has been central to urban civilisation but life in personal bubbles mediated by machines is part of modern urbanism and pre-COVID-19 we were already abandoning meetings in the flesh.
She made the room dark and slept; she awoke and made the room light; she ate and exchanged ideas with her friends, and listened to music and attended lectures; she made the room dark and slept… Those funny old days, when men went for a change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!
Air-conditioning and artificial light have separated urban generations from reliance on diurnal cycles and a sense of how the earth moves through space has been eroded to a point of irrelevance for much of our industrial civilisation. COVID-19 seems likely to exacerbate this condition. As we connect on-line, we disconnect from the planet. It becomes harder to understand the poison gas we can’t see and that other great invisible force pressing on our civlisation. Global heating will take many more lives than this pandemic, and there’s no quick fix.
“Have you been on the surface of the earth since we spoke last?”
Few people experience anything wild in a world of industrialised civilisation. Children ape their elders thinking that farmland is “nature”. Many will never stand on the pre-industrial surface of the earth.
And if Kuno himself, flesh of her flesh, stood close beside her at last, what profit was there in that? She was too well-bred to shake him by the hand.
Tactility is part of being human but now it’s anti-social and dangerous. Social distancing, facilitated by reliance on the virtual, presages a disaster in terms of healthy human evolution. How is it not possible to feel angry and worried about this? Is it just too “abstract”?
“You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated’, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves.”
Like many of us, I’m reviewing assumptions about the way physical social space functions in our cities. I don’t have any answers yet. Then there’s our relationship to the rest of nature. COVID-19 has forced changes that have given nature a breathing space, but I’m betting when the capitalist engine of destruction returns to “normal” it will raid the stores of nature like a selfish bully in a candy shop. It won’t be pretty. But it’s hard to be an optimist as the Trumps and Bolsanaros make things unnecessarily worse and the world outside our “western” universe isn’t looking too good, with estimates of 3 million or more likely to die in the next 12 months in Africa alone.
Forster’s story doesn’t end well but allows a glimmer of hope, with others “…hiding in the mist and the ferns until our civilisation stops…”.
Emilio Fantin is an artist working in Italy on multidisciplinary research.
He teaches at the Politecnico, Architecture, University of Milan, and acts as coordinator of the “Osservatorio Public Art”.
Talking about coronavirus, egoism needs to be switched into solidarity and sharing, but this cannot be done as a reaction to contagion fear or daily body count. It has to be the result of a long path towards the achievement of a new existential consciousness.
Many people define this pandemia as a war. If you look at what has been happening since second world war, I would say that nothing is going to change in a short time. In Italy, after the first moment of depression, we had the economic boom. That meant the improvement of health, poverty, and social conditions due to the circulation of a huge amount of money, as a consequence of reconstruction of houses, streets, bridges. A new man arose, apparently happier, but more cynical and more individualistic than before. So, if you look at the long term situation, you can understand that war didn’t bring a real change in ethics and moral. What happened, was exactly the contrary.
Talking about coronavirus, egoism needs to be switched into solidarity and sharing, but this cannot be done as a reaction to contagion fear or daily body count. It has to be the result of a long path towards the achievement of a new existential consciousness.
Many reflections and essays deal about the relationship between chemical and electromagnetic pollution and coronavirus. Some others speculate on how to reinforce our immunity system, but all conclusions bring to the same result: respect humans and not humans, love nature, take care of the environment, be sympathetic.
That’s why the new urbanism has to be thought as a care for the environment. The design of the city has to switch from a logistic and pragmatic vision to the consideration of those aspects which balance broken down rhythms and neurotic habits of city life. Time and space cannot be seen only in term of mobility and economic value, but we need to consider both in term of preserving human health end preventing possible diseases (I am not talking only about virus, but also about neurotic behavior and poisoning). We have to start such a process from below, reducing the number of our cars, limiting the use of our smart technologies, asking for new cycle lines, walking in our cities. The immunity system of the city will improve its force which depends on its inhabitants’ behavior. To fund healthcare doesn’t only mean to build more hospitals and provide new technologies. This approach comes from considering the view point of the “effects”. What should be done is taking into account also the “causes” (which mean low life quality). Rather than using the term urbanism we might find a more appropriate word in order of re-thinking the city as a living organism. If we don’t want this organism to get sick, we should ask politics to limit private interests in the building industry, to avoid the abuse of power into water business and not to break the balance between natural and artificial elements inside the city.
It looks simple, but it is extremely complex. Why? Because of profit, private interests, economic strategies, political conveniences? Yes of course, but it is also a matter of our action, in term of considering ourselves as a part of a “city organism”, by feeling its skin, heart and brain.
Todd Forrest is Arthur Ross Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections at The New York Botanical Garden. He oversees the team of managers, horticulturists, and curators who steward the Garden’s plant collections, natural areas, gardens, and glasshouses and has been a leader in the development of the Garden’s celebrated program of interdisciplinary exhibitions.
A garden feels empty and pointless without people to enjoy it. So does nature. While I have always felt strongly about the importance of nature to a person’s well-being, I have never been so keenly aware of the essential partnership people have with the natural world.
All is (too) Quiet in the Garden
Not long ago an accountant friend gleefully told me about an article he had read claiming that accountant and horticulturist are professions attractive to misanthropes. Knowing us both, it made sense to me. Each of us tends toward the gloomily irascible and neither of us would be the first person you would invite to a dinner party if you wanted to cultivate a fun, chatty vibe.
I didn’t consciously choose a career in horticulture because of its apparent appeal to grumpy people—I was fortunate to follow my lifelong passion for nature into the world of plants. Ironically, perhaps, given what my chosen profession says about me, I have spent nearly my entire career at The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), an institution founded in 1891 to educate, delight, and serve people.
But when my friend shared this observation, I thought a bit and realized that most public horticulturists I know do spend maybe a little too much time grousing about the sins an oblivious public delivers upon their beloved plants. Footprints in flower beds, bouquets of pilfered peonies, branches broken by would-be Tarzans. The tragedy of the commons! The only negative aspect about public gardens, a colleague once cracked, is the public.
But what is a garden if not a distillation of nature’s miracles organized just so for the enjoyment of people? People are not an imposition on a garden, they are its raison d’être. If I suspected this all along, the past six weeks at NYBG have proved it true. As a beautiful spring has unfolded in the eerie emptiness of pandemic New York, this magnificent place, which generations of gardeners have cultivated in partnership with nature for the benefit of the public, feels only half alive. Yes, there aren’t any footprints in the flower beds, but neither are there exclamations of amazement and wonder. This garden needs people just as much as people need this garden.
A garden feels empty and pointless without people to enjoy it. So does nature. While I have always felt strongly about the importance of nature to a person’s well-being, I have never been so keenly aware of the essential partnership people have with the natural world. We struggle to preserve nature; we thrill in revealing nature’s complexities; we delight in sharing nature’s beauty with others. We do this not for sake of nature, but for the benefit of humanity.
A now-questioning misanthrope, I look forward to seeing visitors here at NYBG soon so that the NYBG I love will feel whole again. I hope that those whose lives have been turned upside down by the pandemic will find some joy and solace here when they are allowed to return. I hope that once we have had a chance to put our lives and the lives of our loved ones in order, we will rededicate ourselves to nurturing our partnership with nature for the good of all.
Andrew formed Grant Associates in 1997 to explore the emerging frontiers of landscape architecture within sustainable development. He has a fascination with creative ecology and the promotion of quality and innovation in landscape design. Each of his projects responds to the place, its inherent ecology and its people.
I have learned to take time to notice, and perhaps I have learned that however devastating Covid-19 is being, it has taught me to reflect on my Life, my Art, and my Nature.
I have just read Station Eleven by Emily St.John Mandel. Published in 2014 and based around a global flu pandemic that wipes out 98% of the population, it is very hard not to use this book to imagine the potential consequences of an even more virulent Covid-19 outbreak leading to a total breakdown of life as we know it. No vehicles, ships, planes. No electricity, gas, clean water, gadgets. No government structures, schools, hospitals, prisons. Yet there are things that endure in the book. Art, music, reading, play, albeit on a basic analogue level. Then nature recovering and reclaiming the abandoned landscapes and cityscapes. People reverting to hunting, foraging, and farming for food. Life, Art, and Nature as enduring themes.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 has brutally illustrated how our values have been corrupted and I think it is time for Life, Art, and Nature to reassert themselves as fundamental components of our culture and approach to urban development. The images of streets and squares empty of vehicles all across the world just makes you wonder why we ever need to fill them up again with such a polluting, undemocratic model of people movement. At the same time, the spotlight on parks and green spaces and walks highlights how they are universally beneficial to our health and enjoyment. I hope we can move towards landscape based cities rather than road based cities from here on.
I also hope Covid-19 proves to be the “Tree Shaker” for my professional world. We were already seeing a distinct move towards nature-based systems, greening cities and inviting nature into our lives. The climate and biodiversity emergencies were, and still will be, key drivers for change in the way we all work. Can Covid-19 be the accelerant to that? Shifting urban planning and design from vehicle and economics dominated systems to people and nature motivated place making? To social, creative, and ecological models rather than financial?
At the heart of both our professional and private lives will be the need to adapt to the new post Covid-19 world. It might be one or two years before we are able to even think about this but in that time we are all going to change how we live and work. It will strip out waste and inefficiencies. It will make us understand the value of our life support systems of clean air, water, fresh and healthy food. It will see the end of unsustainable industries and perhaps even the rapid demise of anything fossil fuel and petrochemical related. It will inevitably mean all designers have to focus on cost effective sustainable solutions informed by resilience, circular economy concepts and availability of materials. Landscapes in cities will move away from hardscapes to softscapes. Rural landscapes will move towards rewilding in those areas of poor agricultural performance and to more productive farming in the better soils. Forest and woodlands will spread across the planet. Landscape as art will also become more relevant as we try to make marks on the land that make sense about our place in the world.
This Easter I sat outdoors each day watching the world turn green. Slow at first but then rapid unfurling of leaves of multiple hues of green fill my valley view. Birdsong almost saturates the soundscape. Sunshine warms the soil ready for planting out seedlings. For the first time we have had a hedgehog in the garden, newts and frogs bring new life to our natural pool. We have had a pink moon illuminating the nightscape. I have learned to take time to notice, and perhaps I have learned that however devastating Covid-19 is being, it has taught me to reflect on my Life, my Art, and my Nature.
Eduardo Guerrero is a biologist with over 20 years of experience in projects and initiatives involving environmental and sustainable development issues in Colombia and other South American countries.
The dilemma for a healthy planet is not: nature or people? The right approach must be people in nature, planning, and building resilient cities following ecological principles. Quoting Garcia Márquez: “I believe it’s not too late to build a utopia that allows us to share an Earth on which solidarity could become a reality”.
Pandemic prevention and management needs healthy nature in cities
Global crises as COVID-19 remind us that our cities are intrinsically part of nature, not only social and economically interconnected, but also part of ecologic corridors. So, in addition to social, health, and economic measures, solutions should be also nature-based.
From politics and economic perspectives, we human beings pretend to be apart from nature but, we ourselves, our economic models and our cities are functionally part of nature. If you prefer let’s call urban areas “transformed nature”.
A satellite image of the Earth at night (left image) resembles fungal mycelia (right image) which is like a natural internet connecting the forest through soils
Condominiums are like honeycombs or coral reefs; highways seem like a school of fish and our social networks resemble the fungal mycelia which are like a natural internet.
We are nature for good, not for bad. The problem is not to be a social animal that evolves by building an interconnected global society. The problem is acting as if nature is something alien to us instead being part of us. The problem is the air contamination and particulate material that causes cardiopulmonary diseases and facilitates virus dissemination. The problem is the illegal traffic of wild fauna and their habitat fragmentation which disrupt ecological balance and allows the zoonotic transmission of a virus from a wild animal to people.
The new coronavirus emergency has moved humanity to feel united in diversity and, at the same time, has obliged leaders and governments to make synergic decisions relating economy and human health.
Under this crisis, links between human health and environment have emerged more clearly than ever before. Biodiversity loss, climate change, and COVID-19 challenge humanity in similar manners. They are not just themes under a single-sector responsibility, not unidimensional problems assigned in a simplistic way to Environment or Health Secretaries. They are multidimensional and complex matters which require comprehensive approaches.
I hope government and corporate leaders will no longer act according to false dichotomies like economy vs social well-being or economy vs environment.
As many under this crisis, I feel anxious, expectant and concerned and, at the same time, I feel motivated and optimistic about the opportunities and challenges we face.
I imagine a post-COVID world in which human relationships are less physical in terms of contacts but emotionally closer with more real solidarity. I imagine a post-COVID stage in which nature is organically integrated into urban planning, not just as a “must be”, but as a “all of us appreciate it and want to”.
The dilemma for a healthy planet is not: nature or people? The right approach must be people in nature, planning, and building resilient cities following ecological principles.
The global crisis of COVID-19 poses a challenge to the dense and compact city model. However, the solution cannot be a radical change in urban development models, but the development of tools, redesigns and environmental adaptations that contribute to preventing, controlling and mitigating public health threats.
Many actions for a healthy urban environment are at the same time good practices for a healthy population to prevent and/or mitigate epidemics and other public health threats. Landscape architects and ecologists must talk and work together, as must economists, biologists and health professionals.
So, an effective management of post-COVID emergency will require integrative nature-based solutions.
We can develop approaches such as the following:
Sanitary safe access to green public space. Adaptation and / or redesign of public space, in order to generate functional, spatial and / or temporal isolation in the access of citizens.
Redesign and adjustment of green infrastructure, to reduce the risks of contagion.
Trees cleaning air contamination. Green areas and trees that capture particulate matter and generate wind tunnels to dissipate it.
Urban mobility solutions, strengthened of bike networks and rationalization of public transport.
Sustainable and sanitary consumption of green and local products. Involves the development of biosecurity measures for productive and commercial activities associated with the circular economy, green businesses (bio-commerce, urban ecotourism, etc.) and urban agriculture.
Urban forest restoration.
Today more than ever the challenge is to achieve economic, social, and ecological transitions towards sustainability, equity, and health.
Quoting Garcia Márquez: “I believe it’s not too late to build a utopia that allows us to share an Earth on which solidarity could become a reality”.
Bram Gunther, former Chief of Forestry, Horticulture, and Natural Resources for NYC Parks, is Co-founder of the Natural Areas Conservancy and sits on their board. A Fellow at The Nature of Cities, and a business partner at Plan it Wild, he just finished a novel about life in the age of climate change in NYC 2050.
Instead of opening the streets up to cars again, muscling each other and spewing their nasty exhaust, we should keep the cars where they are now, inert. The city would transform itself, streets into nature trails lined with aster, sweet pepperbush, and oak trees. Our world-class electric-powered mass transportation system would connect all our neighborhoods as one equal family.
Let me indulge myself, as I need some utopian escape during this dreadful moment.
In these images from my brother I can imagine the future, in part because I’ve walked these blocks thousands of times as a lifelong New Yorker. Its emptiness is its blank slate. The pandemic forced (most of) us inside, leaving our cars parked and silent, and the air is cleaner and so are our waterways. This then is the time to re-imagine the famous thoroughfare—Broadway and Times Square.
Four hundred or so years ago, Times Square area was composed of an oak-tulip forest, Appalachian oak-hickory and oak-pine forests, a red maple swamp, and marshy and rocky headwater streams.
The wildlife then—otters and whales in the harbor, wolves and bears on the land, the bees asteroids of yellow and black—was so abundant it was more biodiverse than that of Yellowstone National Park in the western United States.
Photo: Matt GuntherPhoto: Matt GuntherPhoto: Matt Gunther
We’re a forward-looking city but at the moment we’ve been forced into a more old-fashioned way of life. Things are quieter (for most of us), work is more fluid, and I can take longer breaks in between meetings and assignments to cook a hot lunch and talk with my son. I take stock of my relationships and make sure to express my feelings to those I love. I’m less focused on myself than the health of my community, my region. When I go out, cautiously, I go into nature as there is no Covid-19 hanging menacingly from a tree’s bark or on the flower of a daffodil.
Looking forward, instead of opening the streets up to cars again, muscling each other and spewing their nasty exhaust, we should keep the cars where they are now, inert, and let’s develop a program to buy automobiles back from owners and recycle their materials. I’m in! Then dig up the streets and sidewalks of Broadway and Times Square, where I’ve had numerous concrete jungle experiences, and restore it with some of the ecosystems, in miniature and in-between the towers, that used to thrive in this place.
Slowly, the whole city would transform itself in this way, streets turned into nature trails lined with aster, sweet pepperbush, and oak trees. (Our world-class electric-powered mass transportation system would connect all our neighborhoods as one equal family.) This would allow us to keep our emissions down and our rivers and harbor clean. Starting with Broadway as it intersects with 7th Avenue and forms Times Square, the city will brim with forest (but no bears and wolves), wetland, and garden, and it will change how we live: where cars used to be there is now nature, clean air and water, and because of this more time spent outside with neighbors and loved ones, especially the kids, surrounded by and healthy within the renewing biodiversity all around us.
Matt Gunther
Can you imagine a New York City like this? I can.
Photos: Matt Gunther is a New York City-based documentary and advertising photographer and director. He’s worked on photography campaigns for MSNBC, Harvard Business School, and NIKE, among other businesses and institutions. He has won numerous awards. He first monograph, Probable Cause, was published in fall 2017. He’s in the process of editing a film homage to summertime in NYC.
Dagmar Haase is a professor in urban ecology and urban land use modelling. Her main interests are in the integration of land-use change modelling and the assessment of ecosystem services, disservices and socio-environmental justice issues in cities, including urban land teleconnections.
COVID-19 is not just a natural, virus, or health crisis, it is a societal crisis. The response has to be given by the whole humankind. Urban nature, its maintenance, care and fair use, forms an important part of this global response.
Reflections about Corona pandemic and the nature of cities
An urban ecologist and an urban sociologist sharing under current social isolating measures in Germany one home office and—due to the nature of this matter—are constantly exchanging thoughts, experiences, and perceptions, wish to share the following reflections with a wider community interested in TNOC: Dagmar is convinced that, firstly, we need to rethink what we as urban ecologists mean be “co-evolution” in urban systems. Evolution in wilderness systems—regardless being situated in a city or beyond—has been continuously endangered by humans in a way that it—finally—endangered humans, in cities or beyond, with zoonosis. For cities, this means, sharing a larger habitat together, humans and wildlife need real niches in urban systems where wildlife can develop without disturbance surrounded by buffer zones access of humans and livestock is limited. Refraining from current increasing living space per urban capita, we have to understand that it is the size of the niches for wildlife in and around cities that has to increase first!
We have considerable knowledge about ranges of wildlife and diversities of healthy ecosystems in urban ecology discipline(s): we have to make use of them! Having understood that co-evolution does not always mean co-habitation, we will be able to create healthy cities embedded into a larger landscape that respect wildlife. Another core principle of urban ecology needs revival in relation the aforementioned:
Secondly, we should strictly follow the idea of a real network of open spaces in cities and its peripheries that allow for both human outdoor stays—also in such bad times of a pandemic—as well as safe outdoor life for wild animals. Providing space for a healthy stay outside without crowding effects and respective—when and whatever distancing, also in a non-pandemic sense—is possible in a “fair way” seems mandatory. Thus, we need clear limits for infill and densification in cities. We need space. When spatial resources are understood—at least in parts—as a commons, values like affordable flats and house prizes along with open green and blue spaces for humans and wildlife should be as rewarding as any economic return rate. Full accessibility of green and blue spaces for all would be prerequisites. And—what is important and relates back to the argument above—the human-used open space network does not interfere with the wildlife space. This way, we allow wildlife in and around cities to find space to form stable biocoenosis, including all vectors that belong to, and thus prevent the formation of zoonosis as best as we can. How can we achieve such conditions?
Thirdly, we need a novel thinking about values that guide our “do” and “don’t” imperatives in urban system where wildlife and humans interact and where humans exploit natural resources. Cities always were and will be social-ecological-technological systems (SETs) with a lot of—as we learned during the pandemic—critical infrastructure. Also critical resources like fresh air, green, blue and soil resources for the above mentioned co-habitation of humans and wildlife. To safe both, human life and wild animals life, we will need to shift our values for these resources from a very utilitarian to a more holistic one. From a pure economic and revenue-oriented to a common resource and habitat one. This does not mean that we should totally neglect market and market capitalism. However, we should let a commons thinking accompany the market-orientation and develop a multi-value system adopting the Dépense-system-idea, which involves a rethinking of the organization of society signalled by terms such as limits, care and sustainability.
What does this mean for cities, for urban society, for the interaction of people and nature in cities?
The crisis also sheds light on existing inequalities and injustices of our urban societies—in terms of how people can adapt to and cope with restrictions: It is much easier to stand restrictions in a large flat with balcony, garden or rooftop access and close to green spaces than in a small flat packed with people.
Annegret as an urban sociologist sees, after just very initial thinking and increased reading since about four weeks (which makes clear how much we are still at the beginning of a discourse), the following major points we have to consider:
Cities are hotspots of the crisis—since cities are densely populated and form hubs of mobility and interaction, they are especially likely to become also hubs of pandemic crises—as we experience now e.g. in Paris, Madrid, the urban Lombardy, NYC etc. Subsequently, pandemic crises of today and tomorrow will always be primarily urban crises and—at the time—hubs to deal with them. Therefore, it will be crucial to debate how we can make cities more resilient to pandemic crisis. Here, urban nature plays an important role. Under the circumstances of physical distancing and restrictions to meet as we experience them currently worldwide, the contact to urban green and nature, the stay in nature becomes even more important for human physical and mental health than normally. The stay in nature can counteract stress, depression and fears related to “curfew” condition and personal concerns about future, family, job etc.
Being in urban nature also admits contact to other people, even while keeping a physical distance. Insofar, urban nature represents an environment which may actively counteract social distancing, alienation and isolation. Next to parks and open spaces, also allotment gardens or community gardens play an important role as safe places for people allowing for distance and contact, especially also for current high risk groups as elderly people. To use this potential, easy access to urban nature, parks, gardens and other forms of open space for all urban inhabitants is indispensable, as the maintenance of the existing spaces. Here, we are in front of a multiple challenge.
The crisis also sheds light on existing inequalities and injustices of our urban societies—in terms of how people can adapt to and cope with restrictions: It is much easier to stand restrictions in a large flat with balcony, garden or rooftop access and close to green spaces than in a small flat packed with people. No easy access to high quality green space is a clear disadvantage under the conditions of restrictions. Not to speak of social support structures that are closed now and poor people are depending on. As we experience now, the crisis is aggravating existing injustices and runs the risk to lead to even larger injustices in the future; the longer restrictions endure, the larger injustices may become. First evidence in many affected countries shows this already now. To make our urban societies more resilient to pandemic crises, among others, an easy access to high-quality nature represents one crucial precondition, and urban planning and policy-making should consider this.
Putting justice and social responsibility into the centre of urban resilience thinking is thus not just a romantic dream but also a clear demand in the name of sustainability and liveability of our cities. Maybe, the recognition of such requisites belongs to what others call the “progressive or even productive moment” of the crisis or a chance for learning and making other decisions for the long-term future. Since it is not at all whether we experience just a temporary disturbance or a fundamental change of our ways of living, producing, working, travelling and interaction. Even more: The crisis also challenges our conceptual thinking about people-environment relations in cities: resilience, sustainability, health, justice etc. More than ever, there is a need of truly interdisciplinary thinking, and of a thinking that considers a fair co-existence of society and nature, not only, but particularly in cities where they come so close and intensely together. We have to look for cross-fertilizations of the mentioned concepts with terms like fairness, solidarity, weighting and, if needed, renouncement.
We as researchers on TNOC have many new questions to answer: What do urban green spaces mean in times of restrictions? What do restrictions do with visits to and use of urban green spaces? Will people appreciate urban nature differently under the current conditions? Will the crisis allow for a more responsible, wise and even more humble debate on nature and its values and our dependence on it? Will urban green become a considerable part of our resilience towards times with restrictions? And what about our co-habitation with wildlife: How do we ensure mutual respect; live and let live. We need truly interdisciplinary answers to this hyper-complex challenge.
COVID-19 is not just a natural, virus, or health crisis, it is a societal crisis. The response has to be given by the whole humankind. Urban nature, its maintenance, care and fair use, forms an important part of this global response.
Dr. Annegret Haase is a senior researcher at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ in Leipzig, Germany, at the Dept. of Urban and Environmental Sociology. Her research is focused on sustainable urban development, urban transformations and social-environmental processes in cities.
Fadi has more than 25 years of international experience in analysing the interaction between development, urbanism, disaster risk, climate change, conflict, and state fragility. Fadi cooperates with various companies, cities, and countries to protect people, assets, and the environment
What we need is a value change in order to effect a paradigm shift in the way we produce, consume and live as societies.
When it comes to risk, it has become clear that change is all around us. The past is no longer a reliable indicator of the future. Climate change is changing the severity and frequency of hydro-meteorological hazards, where now in many parts of the world we are witnessing successive yearly flash floods and storms of a severity that used to happen once in a decade or even less. Furthermore, the world population is at an unprecedented level, with ever increasing demands for land, food, energy and housing, leading to a continuous encroachment on natural habitat. At the same time, increasing numbers of people are living in cities, and megacities for that matter, for a variety of reasons- leading to a concentration of people, assets and infrastructures. In addition, climate change is leading to rural to urban migration; in particular rural to urban informal settlement migration, leaving people living there more vulnerable to other hazards such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Climate change and rural urban migration is also, in many parts of the world exacerbating poverty, unemployment, youth unemployment and inequality, thereby entrenching socio-economic exclusion where the latter is a main driver of violent extremism.
Concurrently, economically and politically, globalisation is also a game changer. Politically, it has undermined the democratic process in several democratic countries as people voting for certain welfare policies are told that big capital will leave if such policies are funded through additional taxation. It has also removed the bargaining power of organised labour in these countries by shifting production to other hemispheres of the earth. On the other hand, in third world countries it has helped people connect together, to lobby and mobilise for effecting change. Economically, it has led to just-in-time supply chain economics, thereby eliminating redundancy for the case of efficiency—and often at the expense of the environment.
The result is a world which is more connected than ever before, more populated than ever before, and where risks are more difficult to understand and more uncertain to predict. We now see systemic risks across connected social, environmental, and economic systems, interlinked at the global spatial level, with implications for the immediate, decadal and longer timelines. We can now talk about systemic failures which will take place if these systemic risks are not addressed.
What Covid-19 did was to move the above scenario from the realm of risk specialist to make it a reality for every citizen on our planet. While this forces us all to recognise and try to deal with uncertainty, it also provides an opportunity for us to mobilise in order to effect change. The old adage that humans prefer short term interests to long term risks is no longer applicable, as the risks of our economic, social, urban and environmental practices have finally caught up with us. This reinforces my belief that the political is the professional which is now the personal, more than ever. In all aspects of our lives, we must strive to effect positive change towards more inclusive and democratic societies that respects the environment and all creatures in it. This should be the post virus “normal”.
Cecilia Polacow Herzog is an urban landscape planner, retired professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She is an activist, being one of the pioneers to advocate to apply science into real urban planning, projects, and interventions to increase biodiversity and ecosystem services in Brazilian cities.
I am investing my time in isolation to improve my capacity to contribute to a wide discussion about urban nature, how it is important to sustain healthy lives and adapt to the ever-growing threat of extreme weather events.
Let nature be the solution to heal us all
I am being transformed by this sudden tragic pandemic that is affecting the whole of humanity. I am lucky to have a beautiful place in the countryside to be during this period of retreat. I have more questions than statements up to now. How will I go back to a new “normal” life? How long will take until I will be able to hug my granddaughters? My kids… Will I be able to be with my mother again? Those questions are on my mind every day, all day long.
I believe this is a life-changing event. When we lose the abstract confidence that life will go on forever in the same way, deep changes occur. Now I praise living more than ever. I miss my loved ones and fear for their lives. I miss my work, my colleagues, my presential classes, and so many other ‘normal’ activities I used to have.
I am eager to meet people, especially my family and friends, peers, students… I want to travel to be with my kids and grandkids. I also want to attend conferences and other events when my friends from other places get together. I value and long for presence: look in the eyes, be able to hug and laugh, sense the pleasure of having made friends from different cultures and meet them.
Life and human relations are the most important things for me.
Transformation. I have written a lot about urban transformation, and now in social distancing I have been wondering how this crisis will change cities and people’s minds.
Will our societies wake up for the immense challenges we face: growing social inequalities, climate change, loss of biodiversity and other threatening life disruptions?
I am interested in knowing how people will come out after a long period of isolation, mainly who live in apartments without contact with nature. Parks and squares will be there, and I believe people will praise common green spaces more than ever before. As I work with urban landscapes, my thoughts are about what will happen to them. Will they become more important and valued by people and decision makers? Once economic losses are affecting most of urban dwellers, what kind of low-cost experiences they will demand? How people will interact in urban spaces? What kind of open spaces will bloom to help societies recover from this traumatic period?
I am investing my time in isolation to improve my capacity to contribute to a wide discussion about urban nature, how it is important to sustain healthy lives and adapt to the ever-growing threat of extreme weather events. I believe nature-based solutions are the response to enhance our adaptive capacity and social justice. I am prepared to stay away for a long period of time before I will be able to restart a new “normal” life and face new challenges in the city. Let nature be the solution to heal us all.
In 2000, Alex opened a restaurant at Rio Design Barra shopping mall, where he then established the IN HOUSE Café-Bistrô. He developed his passion for food and cooking with his grandmother, who was a great Belgian cook. When he was a kid, used to he spend hours and hours in the kitchen helping and learning with her.
I believe there will be a strong enhancement of circular economy, increasing the value of local, its people and its businesses. Consequently, waste will decrease, and much of what before was seen as such, will begin to be reused. In other words, a syntropy in restauration.
Restaurants in syntropy
As Chef at a bistro in Rio de Janeiro, I try to imagine how the new “normal” will be, when restaurants finally get “discharged” from quarantine. How many will survive Covid, and reopen their doors? I believe that the ones that resist, will need resilience and high adaptation skills, in order to see a new way of making business emerge. I compare this crisis, to a drastic prune done to protect the whole tree. You cut branches, leaves, everything that seems like too much, and then, when the foliage sprouts, it’s an explosion of nature. I presume the same will happen with restaurants. Why? Well, people will have been confined for weeks, if not months, no going out, no visiting family, friends or coworkers.
At some point, everyone had to begin cooking for themselves. People will have, more than ever, the desire to go out, have fun, see friends, see the ones they like. One simple hug, will gain a never before seen proportion. For centuries, restaurants have been one of the best places to connect with one another. Parisian establishments such as Le Procope, founded in 1686, or “Bouillons”, that served soup for workers, so they could be “restored” (originating the name “restaurant”), are proof of all of that. These establishments have in their DNA: time for leisure, social gatherings, happiness, reunions, and of course many hugs.
Many will have to adapt to people’s fear and also to the new paradigm expected to rise following the crisis. Worries about hygiene and agglomerations, will reveal that people are going to prefer eating in open spaces. Cities and neighborhoods will have to adapt. Clients will be more educated and will stop taking for granted all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes in a restaurant. Local products will gain value. Inputs, with high ecological footprints, will become expensive.
Costs in the kitchens will have to be cut, preventing food waste. At the top of the list of many establishments, will be actions, such as donating “doggie bags”, to people in vulnerable situations. Following the same community-oriented actions, people will start to think more in a collective sense, engaging more with their community. People will end up living closer to their workplaces, decreasing the need to commute. We will have “smaller” cities, and in that sense, parks, gardens, public spaces will have to be re-conceived. Nature will be more appreciated. Restaurant outings will tend to stay within the same neighborhood, strengthening local businesses. And as they rise, chefs will have to review and rethink the ingredients used in their menu, begin to buy from local producers, and ultimately turn up their creativity in making dishes. There will be a change in the way people consume. They will stop buying just for sake of buying. Exotic inputs won’t be as interesting as before, as they will be hard to get and prices will high. Comfort meals will be more appreciated, bringing lost wellness during quarantine period.
Many businesses will increase their revenues through delivery. There will be a considerable investment in this area, once people will remain worried about a new pandemic wave. Delivery and frozen foods will have an important role in restaurant sales, as they will be the solution to keep them up well and running, even as new viruses appear.
Recapping, I believe there will be a strong enhancement of circular economy, increasing the value of local, its people and its businesses. Consequently, waste will decrease, and much of what before was seen as such, will begin to be reused. In other words, a syntropy in restauration.
{Syntropy: Is an integrated system within itself and in balance, where all the energy produced is consumed within its own system, without losses.}
Mike Houck is a founding member of The Nature of Cities and is currently a TNOC board member. He is The Urban Naturalist for the Urban Greenspaces Institute (www.urbangreenspaces.org), on the board of The Intertwine Alliance and is a member of the City of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission.
I will spend more time, personally and professionally, focusing on the green interstices of our city, the small, often scrappy, bits of nature nearby for my own psychological and physical health, and that of my city.
Nature Nearby, A Path To Resilience
Coming out of Covid-19 more robust psychologically and physically, individually and societally, I believe, will depend in large measure on access to nearby nature.
I have seen myriad online accounts of people’s interactions with nature from their apartments and nearby parks and natural areas and trails. I have had many of my own intimate experiences with nature nearby since being in lock-down. Recently, I happened to glance out of my living room window and noticed the cherry blossoms had just burst out, a profusion of pink filling the entire scene.Then a rapid, zig-zagging movement caught my eye as a female Anna’s hummingbird lit on a nearby branch. I managed to snap her image, her pollen-specked bill titled skyward. Was she looking for a predator or her territory obsessed mate? The pink blossoms and emerald-green avian buzz-bomb, calmed me, energized me, and I have no doubt left me healthier and happier for the rest of the day.
Not long ago while standing next to our newly installed rain garden I encountered a song sparrow perched next to our “backyard habitat” sign. That song sparrow has become my daily Covid-19 buddy. Each morning I stand next to him, much too close for proper “social distancing,” as he tilts back his head, puffs out his chest and belts out a beautiful, full-throated melody. I imitate him; he sings back, looking me in the eye I sing again; he flutters both wings, much as young birds do when begging their parents for food. We’ve connected; we continue our “dialogue” for several minutes after which I walk off, convinced we are both the better for the encounter. I often glance down from my second story flat to see a mother with her kids pointing at the song sparrow who’s perfectly happy to sing for anyone willing to take notice of him at the rain garden’s edge.
Scenes like this are repeated all over the city where small patches of greenspaces have been saved or woven into the urban fabric.Both personally and professionally I will spend more time focusing on the green interstices of our city, the small, often scrappy, bits of nature nearby for my own psychological and physical health, and that of my city.
Matthew Jensen is an interdisciplinary artist whose rigorous explorations of landscape combine walking, collecting, photography, mapping and extensive research. His projects investigate the relationships between people and local landscapes.
But who hasn’t dreamt about snapping their fingers and making air pollution go away? And all of a sudden we realize it is optional. Those scroll bar images are fun. Before. After. Before. After. What else is optional
Our apartment is on one of the highest hills in the Bronx and we can see out to Queens. Every plane out of LaGuardia flies up and over our building, directly over, before banking one way or another. I once took a picture of our rooftop from an airplane window, before banking one way or another.
Morning comes with deep silence; 10:00am is the new 3:00am. The sparrows tussle on the windowsill. This is nothing new. There is a male sparrow that has been advertising a hole in the eve for a few years. But now his morning chirps seem to shake the building.
My students are Zooming from across the globe. Or not at all. I am a tab now. Just another tab. Maybe even minimized. Whatever I just said was not that funny. What are they laughing at?
Spring is here. On time and ahead of schedule.
Everywhere, all at once, an entire species is changed while the rest go about their business. Except for those tigers at the Bronx Zoo.
We are on the sixth floor and the elevator is down for a few more weeks. Our neighbor across the hall, Alma, an 86-year-old wonder woman is stuck. No more senior center. Her granddaughter might die of Covid. But her daughters are worried about how she’ll can handle the news. Perhaps a virtual goodbye?
But who hasn’t dreamt about snapping their fingers and making air pollution go away? And all of a sudden we realize it is optional. Those scroll bar images are fun. Before. After. Before. After. What else is optional?
Callery Pear in bloom in empty New York City. Photo: Matthew Jensen.
Right. I am an artist. It is not like I can turn that off.
My life post-virus? But some recovered patients are testing positive again. Or is that clickbait? It is me who needs to stay positive. Chin-up-can-do-bootstraps-yes-we-can-dawn-horizon. I used to spend so much time in the future but now I’m afraid to go there.
Summer classes? Doubtful. Fall? Well, we have to wait for enrollment numbers. Wait, are we still charging money for school? What am I not getting here?
It is time for the 7:00pm clap session and sing-along out the windows of the building. Finally, something other than bird song! But now that “this is New York” song makes me want to cry. Is it a requiem? Our building has essential workers and our neighborhood is suddenly very essential.
Negotiate? Well, I guess the stimulus payment might be considered a settlement. Is there someone else I can talk to? Someone in charge?
I do remember that article about the 130,000 saiga antelope that dropped dead in Kazakhstan. But that was five years ago. Why am I thinking about it now? Were bats somehow involved?
How many wonderful parts of our civilization were symptoms or extensions of the worst parts? I am afraid of the answer.
I photographed all the flowers blooming around our building so our neighbors that cannot leave can enjoy a digital spring, a very silent spring.
Expert en écologie urbaine, en communication publique et en politiques publiques, Gilles Lecuir travaille pour l’Agence régionale de la Biodiversité en Île-de-France et anime le concours national Capitale française de la Biodiversité. // Expert in urban ecology, public communication and policies, Gilles Lecuir works for the Paris Region Agency for Biodiversity and animate the French Capital of Biodiversity Award.
The confinement makes me feel intimately what I have known and said for many years now: the presence of nature in the city is not a decoration, it is a vital need for the city dweller.
Paris, (too) mineral city
Sunday, March 15, 2020, I land at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport, back from a week of work in Montreal to discuss with local partners the idea of a French-language The Nature of Cities (but that’s another story, which we’ll tell you more about here soon). The next day, the President of the French Republics announce a strict confinement of the entire population except for those people essential to essential services. But already since Thursday in Quebec, the pre-confinement was already being felt, and I spent the last two days of my trip in my hotel.
Returning to my Parisian apartment, a stone’s throw from the Moulin Rouge, I kissed my wife and children and we were committed to a confinement of at least a month. As the days go by, I realize that in this nascent spring, I can’t observe a single floricultural insect (my main hobby, via the Suivi Photography of Insect Pollinaors, the SPIPOLL, a French participatory science program). I miss it.
From my window on the 1st floor, I can only see the sky through the reflections in the windows of the upper floors. I miss that too.Thanks to the ornithologist Maxime Zucca, who every day on Twitter describes a Parisian bird that can be observed and listened to from home, I watch the songs, I search. Only the Crow visits me. It nests in the tall trees of the nearby Montmartre cemetery, which is closed to the public, as is the small square of Deux-Nèthes; these are the only “green spaces” in my neighbourhood. Twice a week, I go out to buy vegetables and bread, and get some fresh air: not a single flower on the sidewalk, the feet of the large plane trees on Avenue de Clichy are dry and compact, and in any case, we took great care to put a geotextile sheet on them during the last renovation of the sidewalks, to make sure that no undesirable grass can grow there.
On my typical Haussmann-style street, which has two parking lanes and a one-way traffic lane, not a tree line. 100 metres away, a few flower boxes decorated with horticultural plants have been installed by the City of Paris, at the request of the inhabitants, to avoid the annoying parking of motorized two-wheelers on the pavement.
The confinement makes me feel intimately what I have known and said for many years now: the presence of nature in the city is not a decoration, it is a vital need for the city dweller.
What to do in the future? Remove at least one of the two rows of car parking, an unnecessary and polluting occupation of public space, and replace it with a grassy area planted with a few bushes and small trees. The City of Paris has started to create these “green streets” in an experimental way, such as Rue Blanche. It’s still very horticultural and not really low-tech, but it’s a start. We now need to massively generalize this principle of de-waterproofing and renaturalize car parking areas. This will limit the urban heat island effect caused both by the paving materials (bitumen and stone) and by the canyon-like shape of our streets which reverberate and store solar energy during the day, making the night stifling and dangerous for the most fragile among us during heat wave episodes. It is also an opportunity to devote part of the roadway to bicycles alone…
* * *
Le confinement me donne à ressentir intimement ce que je sais et dis depuis de nombreuses années maintenant : la présence de la nature en ville n’est pas un décor, c’est un besoin vital pour le citadin.
Paris, ville (trop) minérale
Dimanche 15 mars 2020, j’atterris à l’aéroport Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, de retour d’une semaine de travail à Montréal pour notamment évoquer avec les partenaires locaux de l’idée d’un The Nature of Cities francophone (mais c’est une autre histoire, dont on vous reparlera ici bientôt). Le Président de la République française annoncera le lendemain un confinement strict de toute la population sauf les personnes indispensables aux services essentiels. Mais déjà depuis le jeudi au Québec, le pré-confinement se faisait sentir, et je passais les deux derniers jours de mon voyage dans mon hôtel.
Regagnant mon appartement parisien, à deux pas du Moulin rouge, j’embrasse ma femme et mes enfants et nous voilà engagés dans un confinement d’un mois au moins. Au fur et à mesure que les jours passent, je me rends compte qu’en ce printemps naissant, je ne peux pas observer un seul insecte floricole (mon loisir principal, via le Suivi photographique des Insectes polinisateurs, le SPIPOLL, un programme de sciences participatives français). Cela me manque.
Depuis ma fenêtre du 1er étage, je n’aperçois le ciel qu’à travers les reflets dans les vitres des étages supérieurs. Cela me manque aussi.Grâce à l’ornithologue Maxime Zucca, qui décrit chaque jour sur Twitter un oiseau parisien qu’on peut observer et écouter depuis chez soi, je guette les chants, je cherche : seule la Corneille me rend visite. Elle niche dans les grands arbres du cimetière de Montmartre voisin, fermé au public, tout comme le petit square des Deux-Nèthes ; ce sont les seuls « espaces verts » de mon quartier. Deux fois par semaine, je sors acheter des légumes et du pain, m’aérer un peu : pas une fleur de trottoir, les pieds des grands platanes de l’avenue de Clichy sont secs et tassés, et de toute façon on a bien pris soin d’y mettre une bâche géotextile lors de la dernière rénovation des trottoirs, pour être bien certain de ne pas voir s’exprimer une herbe indésirable.
Dans ma rue haussmannienne typique, qui comprend deux voies de stationnement automobile et une voie de circulation à sens unique, pas un arbre d’alignement. A 100 mètres, quelques jardinières ornées de plantes horticoles ont été installé par la ville de Paris, à la demande des habitants, pour éviter le stationnement gênant des deux-roues motorisés sur le trottoir.
Le confinement me donne à ressentir intimement ce que je sais et dis depuis de nombreuses années maintenant : la présence de la nature en ville n’est pas un décor, c’est un besoin vital pour le citadin.
Que faire demain ? Supprimer au moins l’une des deux rangées de stationnement automobile, occupation inutile et polluante de l’espace public, et la remplacer par une zone enherbée et plantée de quelques buissons et petits arbres. La Ville de Paris a commencé à créer ces « rues végétales » de manière expérimentale, comme par exemple rue Blanche. C’est encore très horticole et pas vraiment low-tech, mais c’est un début. Il faut maintenant généraliser massivement ce principe de désimperméabilisation et renaturer les zones de stationnement automobile. Cela limitera l’effet d’îlot de chaleur urbain provoqué à la fois par les matériaux de revêtement (bitume et pierre) et par la forme en canyon de nos rues qui réverbèrent et emmagasinent l’énergie solaire en journée, rendant la nuit étouffante et dangereuse pour les plus fragiles d’entre nous lors d’épisodes de canicule. L’occasion aussi de consacrer une partie de la chaussée aux seuls vélos…
For now, I take solace in the routine of daily bread. The measured pace of the knead, the proof, and the rise offers structure to my blurry days. Ultimately, it is the realization that this simple, measured act and its alchemy are both literally and figuratively what sustains us in its slow and patient way.
Pandemic Pause
I am frustrated as I turn the loaf in the old cast iron oven. I can’t tell if the heat is even or the crust is charred. Wood-fired sourdough is a learning curve. I’ve always been a baker, and I’m (not so secretly) proud of my sourdough, made with my lively 6-year-old home-grown ferment. But here, on the farm in isolation things are more basic. No thermometer, electronic scale, artisan flour, or exotic sea salt. I have just the raw elements: flour, salt, water—plus the basic biology of fermentation, the alchemy of microbes at work. The irony does not escape me that the coronavirus pandemic seems to have catalysed the (re)discovery of yeast… and baking. The store shelves are devoid of flour. Instagram photos of home baking have surged. I wonder, have the microbes have conspired to distract us?
In these hazy locked-down days that blend from one to the other, along with (but apart from) many others, I am doing a lot of baking. I am also exhausted and yet I can’t remember what time it is. I am always on the computer or the phone, contingency planning or organising food deliveries. I admit there are too many wine bottles in the recycling bin. I swing between euphoria and depression, caught in the pandemic pendulum. Everything has changed in a relative blink: we’ve pivoted from working in close physical and social proximity to virtualizing our offices (albeit clumsily and tenuously), blending our home and work lives into a slurry that slips between chaos and creativity.
Of course, our homelives are just that, homes, often shared with children, elders, pets, and plants that creep and crash into our Zoom screens as an abrupt reminder of these now-blurred boundaries of live, work, and play. Many are struggling with the more immediate social and economic fallout of the pandemic pivot: risk, hunger, poverty, bankruptcy, abuse, despair, fear, loneliness, and of course, sickness and death. No one wants to be here, everyone wants to go back/forward/anywhere but this. Being “at home” is now loaded; it means so much more suddenly. More pressures to combat doing nothing at the office by doing everything in the home: Learn a new language, homeschool the kids, take up dance, play an instrument, write a book, organise those pictures, master knitting, sewing, singing, baking. Anything to keep busy, pass time, distract and deflect our attention from what is really happening. We don’t want to see or feel, let alone be in this moment. I think we want to bake our way into oblivion.
But crisis is where we will learn who we are. Really, we need to just STOP. Breathe. Slowly. Sit, as Donna Haraway reminded us, with the trouble. I don’t know when this will end. I can’t tell my students or my kids with any certainty at all. But I do know it has changed us, and what matters is what we will do with this change. For this we need to stop, breathe and think a while. Steep in the pandemic pause. Look up and around, notice, listen, SEE. The air is cleaner, the waters are clearer. Wildlife are roaming our streets, returning to the places we’ve abandoned. We say the cities are “eerily quiet”, but this really means less traffic, construction noise and airplanes. When I listen, I hear the songs of people, birds, frogs… and the earth breathing.
What are we learning in this in-between, in the months where time seems suspended? What will we take from this turn? The invisible force of a virus catalyzed a change in human behavior that only months ago was unimaginable: we shut down the global economy, and we paused. For a brief moment, humanity acted together, for our own collective good. And the planet breathed. So in the headlong rush to return to “normal”, will we lose the gift of this foresight, a glimpse of the possible in the pandemic pause? I don’t know, but I hope.
And for now, I take solace in the routine of daily bread. The measured pace of the knead, the proof, and the rise offers structure to my blurry days. Ultimately, it is the realization that this simple, measured act and its alchemy are both literally and figuratively what sustains us in its slow and patient way.
Kevin Lunzalu is a young conservation leader from Nairobi, Kenya. Through his work, Lunzalu strives to strike a balance between environmental conservation and humanity. He strongly believes in the power of innovative youth-led solutions to drive the global sustainability agenda. Kevin is the country coordinator the Kenyan Youth Biodiversity Network.
The COVID-19 curfew has given me the space to reflect on viable alternatives to my common practices: I am rethinking my food, modes of travel, entertainment, and forms of meeting people. Working from home for certain days may prove to be one of the best environmental practices. These ideas will greatly shape my post-crisis personality.
To say the crisis has disrupted professional and personal endeavors is an understatement. The pandemic will evidently leave behind a permanent scar, likely to reshape our professional and personal practices. New practices will come to life while some existing ones may be forgotten. With new developments come new adaptations-skills, techniques, rituals, and modules. This resilient and adoptive nature of humanity has enabled it to survive centuries of occasional unprecedented calamities, each time coming out stronger, unified, and wiser than before. COVID-19 is not an exemption.
As a coordinator of a national youth network, I anticipate that the pandemic will catalyze several important alterations to our work. We have to reassess, restructure, and re-plan how our grass-root projects, youth workshops, training, and related impact will play out both in the short and long run. In the very least, digitization and automation will be at the core of things. Minimizing human interactions while scaling up our work will mean exploring technological tools that are at our disposal.
Youth capacity-building workshops, campaigns, policy meetings, and related document reviews, and training modules will be largely be conducted online. However, while all these options seem feasible, we cannot be blind to the fact that access to technology and internet solutions is still a challenge in many developing countries, including Kenya, especially at the local level where most conservation work happens.
This crisis lays a tangible test on the ability of many organizations in Africa to adapt to the super-changing technological provisions and also embrace circularity. Exploring partnerships beyond our niches to include cloud computing service providers and digital companies is one of the strategies we have to embrace. This is also the time for me to evaluate my professional landscape in terms of what I need to adjust and learn, to grow and attain my personal career goals in the post-crisis era.
As a pan-African, I strongly believe in the power of coming together as a community and largely as a society. African Traditional cultural provision are largely based on human interaction. The current crisis provides a challenge to rethink a new “norm” concerning cultural engagements.
In my personal space, I enjoy diverse cuisines, making new friends, meeting people, being entertained, and traveling. The COVID-19 curfew and stay-at-home directives paralyzed transportation, and the closure of entertainment places (including a halt to football matches) have given me the space to reflect on viable alternatives to these practices. For instance, I am rethinking my food consumption patterns, the modes in which I travel, what entertainment options I have, and different forms of meeting people. With reports of pollution levels going down during the pandemic, I am being convinced that working from home for certain days of the week may prove to be one of the best environmental practices as it reduces traffic pollution, office space needed, and use of facilities that may be directly harming our natural world. I have also started appreciating nature found around my home, doing balcony gardens, and generally converting the home space to be greener. Some of these practices will greatly shape my post-crisis personality.
Patrick M. Lydon is an American ecological writer and artist based in Korea whose seeks to re-connect cities and their inhabitants with nature. He writes The Possible City series, is co-founder of City as Nature (Daejeon). He is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
What will be the new normal? Perhaps now is our chance to slow down, take care of ourselves and our fellow living beings a bit better, look to nature, and figure it out.
Remembering: What We’ve Been Needing
A haphazard series of slight changes, sometimes seemingly disconnected, have occurred here in Osaka. Shops close early, big gatherings are prohibited, people are going to their offices less, nearly everyone wears a mask. The tourists are gone too, which in Osaka means about 10 million would-be consumers will have vanished from streets and balance sheets by year end if this continues.
On the other hand, suddenly more people visit parks and green spaces in the middle of the week, cars are fewer, and many of the trains and public buildings that once relied on climate control, now have their windows open to encourage fresh air instead.
Physical distancing at Nakanoshima Park in central Osaka, Japan / CC BY-SA, Patrick M. Lydon
Privately here in our home, coronavirus has meant more time spent cooking—and growing—new foods, sewing and fixing clothes instead of buying them, and working to enjoy the process of finding where we can slow down and be more attentive, to ourselves, to our neighbors, to our environments.
Much of my work as a writer and artist—and my wife as an herbalist—is becoming more virtual. After six months of preparation, an exhibition in Kyoto was canceled just days before we were set to open due to COVID-19. We went ahead virtually instead, substituting an in-person audience for an “online” audience thanks to The Nature of Cities’ new Urban Ecological Arts Forum.
We’re now trying to expand this opportunity, to help more urban artists who are in similarly difficult positions.
The closed exhibition ‘Typhoon Queens, Exhibition #1’ at Art Spot Korin in Kyoto, Japan / CC BY-SA, Typhoon Queens
It seems this is a theme across other disciplines too. Helping those in need suddenly becomes the obvious thing to do, when we realize so clearly that all humans, and the entire living world around us, are in need.
It seems many other urban needs are finally being realized at this time, too.
In most industrialized nations, we have been in need of a slowdown, of more time listening to nature, of more urban gardens, of clean air, clean water, and of bringing and end to jobs that degrade the environment and human health. We’ve also been in need of ways to feed and house our fellow mortals—as ecologist Larry Korn liked to say—in ways that support the wellness of all beings.
We’ve needed these things in our cities for a long time.
Now, suddenly, miraculously, seemingly accidentally, so many of these needs are being revealed to us in very potent ways. Outdoor air pollution —which kills over 4 million people every year—is giving way to blue skies that have not been seen for lifetimes, and the same is true for the reduction of urban noise pollution. There are Coronavirus Victory Gardens popping up all around Los Angeles. Tiny homes for homeless are being built in San Jose at rapid pace, and Americans are suddenly listening to birds, and going out into nature in such numbers that authorities don’t know how to handle the new influx of nature lovers.
With these revelations, come some inevitable questions. How do we keep the skies blue, the herons cackling, and the gardens growing, after this is all over?
What will be the new normal?
Perhaps now is our chance to slow down, take care of ourselves and our fellow living beings a bit better, look to nature, and figure it out.
I remain positive regarding a post-virus era because, notwithstanding the gravity of this situation, crisis always presents opportunity for positive transformation. Professionals in my field have always struggled to convince decision makers of the benefits of urban greening and climate adaptation. Not so much now.
Living and working in Riyadh, I have been predominantly insulated from the tragic chaos that has gripped major cities around the world. Measures here were put in place swiftly, healthcare was made freely available to all and stockpiling did not occur. Work is now conducted remotely and has very much continued at the same pace, so it’s quite possible that proactive resilience planning measures here will result in a quick bounce back to business in the post-virus era.
Riyadh city is in the midst of delivering several megaprojects that will transform the urban fabric with the introduction of a world class metro rail and bus network, more than 3,300 new parks and gardens, one of the world’s largest urban parks, 7.5 million new trees and the development of a water recycling network. These projects are part of implementing the Vision 2030 for Saudi Arabia which is an incredibly well articulated strategy to drive economic diversification and greatly improve liveability. This work is unlikely to falter.
In general, I remain positive regarding a post-virus era because, notwithstanding the gravity of this situation, crisis always presents opportunity for positive transformation. Professionals in my field have always struggled to convince decision makers of the benefits of urban greening and climate adaptation. Increasingly now, I am hearing people everywhere extoll the virtues of urban nature and express gratitude for their trees, parks and gardens during their lockdowns. This growing vocalisation and awareness of the benefits of urban nature presents an unprecedented opportunity to create a persuasive and powerful narrative linking social and urban resilience to nature. Strong communities are healthy communities, and healthy communities have easy access to nature.
We will undoubtedly experience a global economic downturn for at least two years, and I think we will see the cities that have resilience plans move forward to execute ambitious projects. Already, proactive leaders are driving change that was previously opposed or planned for gradual implementation. Europe is speeding a transition to a low car future with the Mayors of Paris and Milan leading the way with plans for extensive bike paths.
Unfortunately, the cities that are not prepared will start to slash budgets with greening amongst the top items on the list. Some of our peers will lose their jobs, others will have their budgets dramatically reduced. Those of us who are not affected, must take the time to consider how we can help our peers, so that we can maintain and grow the momentum that has been created in recent years.
As things return to normal, and they will, we need to continually and collectively drive home the message that dramatic changes are possible and to articulate the business case for creating a new and improved normal.
Antonia Machado is the Strategic Partnerships Project Manager for the Natural Systems Enhancement and Stewardship Department at Clean Water Services in Hillsboro, Oregon.
The coronavirus has exposed deep structural weaknesses, reinforcing the notion that working across silos and centering equity is imperative to building resilience and moving towards transformative change.
Most schoolchildren in Puerto Rico experience at least one field trip to El Yunque National Rainforest, the only tropical rainforest in the United States’ national forest system. Careening through the humid rainforest in noisy buses while learning about one of the Caribbean’s most precious natural resources is a unifying national experience. A particularly memorable lesson learned on these excursions is that hurricanes are mechanisms for forest renewal, ultimately increasing the resilience of the ecosystem. This lesson shaped my understanding of these occurrences, providing a sense of assurance when hurricanes pummeled the island and left us without power or running water. In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, I cling to the same hope that we are in the midst of a transformative event from which we will emerge more resilient.
A pandemic is undoubtedly different from a hurricane, but these disasters share key similarities. When I returned to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, I flew in over a sea of blue tarps that covered all of the structures where the roofs had been torn off, a patchwork of blue squares against the denuded landscape. While the pandemic has left our houses intact, it has managed to pull the roof off the top of our systems, like prying the lid from a fuse box, allowing us to peer inside. Two definitions are useful here: The word “crisis” derives from the Greek word krisis, which means “decisive moment”. The word “emergency” is derived from the Latin emergere, “to bring to light”. Indeed, this crisis provides an opportunity to recognize the interdependence between our social-ecological systems, and to consider how we can act upon that recognition to increase our collective resilience.
My work centers itself around developing strategies for catalyzing transformative partnerships through Tree for All, a collaborative landscape-scale restoration program in the Tualatin River Watershed, just west of Portland, Oregon. Tree for All counts more than 35 organizations as partners, enabling the program to be one of the nation’s most successful large-scale conservation programs. In the midst of this pandemic, I am peering into the metaphorical fuse box and contemplating the role of transformational partnerships and collective impact to rebuild from this crisis.
It is well established that the impacts of large-scale conservation extend far beyond the ecological arena, providing significant benefits to the local community and economy. How do we expand upon this model, leveraging our collective capacities to pursue interdisciplinary and multi-sector approaches to wicked problems such as houselessness and climate change? This work is beyond the capacity or resources of any single organization or institution. The coronavirus has exposed deep structural weaknesses, reinforcing the notion that working across silos and centering equity is imperative to building resilience and moving towards transformative change. Our collective health is only as strong as the most vulnerable among us, and as such, this issue is not beyond the mission of any sector. A characteristic endemic to all crises is their ability to uncover the weaknesses in our structures, but it is ultimately our responsibility to use that information to inform our rebuilding efforts. My unbridled hope is that we may use these lessons to provoke an era of innovation in the form of interdisciplinary partnerships that spur transformational change.
Well hidden behind any disaster, there always is a cost-benefits analysis that went wrong. Yet, more than often those who decide on the acceptability of a risk are not those who will be most exposed once the disaster happens. For the future, it is crucial to decide now who and what actions should be priority in the aftermath of Covid-19, and by whom these choices should be made.
Staying at home all day long is not something new for me: a good part of my job consists in writing articles, books, project reports, reviewing papers, etc. And usually, I like all of it. But not now, because now I don’t stay at home. I am contained at home, which rhymes nicely with detained. I didn’t decide it. It was imposed upon me to counteract a plausible risk: a virus. But wait a moment, is this virus looks the only bad guy in the story. I don’t think so.
Covid-19 is not the reason why all activity stopped in the world. The ultimate reason is fear: anticipation of a disaster amplified by social networks. The situation reminds me of two quotes from Montaigne, a French Renaissance philosopher too little-known in English speaking countries and a very good reading during containment: “There is no passion so contagious as that of fear” and “A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens”. Well, putting aside collective fear what is actually happening with this virus.
Covid-19 did not go viral by itself. Hyper-mobile human beings did the job. Covid-19 is not a serial killer. Human failures in most countries concerning warning and early response procedures turned it into a serial killer. There is nothing natural about pandemics. They depend on how humans deal with their living environment and what risks they are willing to take by adopting such-or-such urbanization pattern or ways of living. For example, choosing to promote hyperconnected global cities —Wuhan, New York, Paris, etc.— that generate massive flows of people and goods is a pretty risky option as far as pandemics and other disasters are concerned. Well hidden behind any disaster, there always is a cost-benefits analysis that went wrong.
Yet, more than often those who decide on the acceptability of a risk are not those who will be most exposed once the disaster happens. To prevent a similar situation in the aftermath of the pandemic, it is crucial to decide now who and what actions should be priority in the aftermath of Covid-19, and by whom these choices should be made. And it won’t be easy to decide upon these priorities, since we are dealing here with what can typically be considered wicked problems, namely problems which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizeable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole, neither rational, nor completely chaotic. A wicked problem never entails a single answer. There always are many, which differ according to how the person or the group who proposes an answer perceive his environment and his best interests. All are equally valid, but usually result in conflicting solutions. There is no magic bullet here. Always keep in mind that after the crisis, everything could very well start over it was before, but even worse!
When the containment period began and millions of French urbanites discretely fled with their friends to the countryside, what does this tell us about the domination exerted by urban centers on rural areas? When—at the same moment—millions of others flew to distant sunny countries to escape the pandemic and get some extra vacation, and when the virus finally arrived in the “paradise” where they were staying—an easily predictable situation—rushed to the airports and embassies asking to be repatriated for free, what does this tell us about the human nature and the colonial type consumer relation people in developed countries have with the rest of the world and with their own country? Right now, it is the evening in Paris. I am looking out the window: very few lights in the apartments, most people walked off.
Dr. Robert McDonald is Lead Scientist for the Global Cities program at The Nature Conservancy. He researches the impact and dependences of cities on the natural world, and help direct the science behind much of the Conservancy’s urban conservation work.
I have often been someone who threw himself at work, who saw work as not just a job but as a calling, who perhaps spent too much time working and not enough time at home. So, it is humbling to realize that, at this moment in time, perhaps the most important thing I can do in the universe is be with my family.
Both personally and professionally in this time of Covid19, what I thought was important is changing.
A pandemic like this has a way of clarifying what is important, and what is not truly important, in one’s personal life. I am on day 39 of self-quarantining with my family in our little apartment in Washington, DC. It has been an intense event, for all the usual cliched reasons but also for more spiritual ones. I could make jokes about the challenges of home schooling two kids while two spouses do Zoom calls to people in all time zones around the world, etc. But those jokes seem already fully played out in popular culture, and don’t capture what I find novel about the experience.
Rather unexpectedly, I have found all this time at home with my family to be a spiritually clarifying moment. It has given me an increased appreciation of the power of family in a time such as this. I have often been someone who threw himself at work, who saw work as not just a job but as a calling, who perhaps spent too much time working and not enough time at home. So, it is humbling to realize that, at this moment in time, perhaps the most important thing I can do in the universe is be with my family. We are lucky to all be healthy, and for both my spouse and I to have jobs that allow us to work at home, so I don’t mean to imply that it was a particularly hard lot for me. Rather, just that I have realized the work of teaching my kids and psychologically connecting with my family, of helping us survive and thrive mentally as a family, was more important than any of my official work as an urban ecologist.
Professionally, this pandemic has brought some big changes for me. The Nature Conservancy, like many non-profits around the world, will have its budget significantly impacted by the economic crisis we are in. This will lead to significant changes in how our urban work is structured, which we are still working through as an organization. Moreover, it seems clear to me that the “traditional” agenda of urban conservationists, of pushing for nature-based solutions in cities for the ecosystem services they provide, for resilience and human well-being, may not be enough. There are hard questions being asked within the conservation movement right now. What is the value of nature during a pandemic? Does nature matter in cities post-coronavirus? Is there even a future for cities post-coronavirus, and if so, what is it? How can we talk about the links between nature and health, which are real and significant, without seeming trite compared with the enormity of the health impact of this pandemic? While we are beginning to find some answers to these questions, they will take months or years for the conservation movement to fully ponder. I truly don’t know yet how much our movement will change, or how.
Brian McGrath is Professor of Urban Design at Parsons School of Design at The New School and Associate Director of the Tishman Center for Environment and Design where he leads the Infrastructure, Design and Justice Lab. The focus of his work is the architecture of urban adaptation and change from social justice and ecological resilience perspectives.
I with others have recently postulated a metacity framework—a more flexible and adaptable form of architectural space—for the future adaptation of cities as we face a global climate crisis—such as the current pandemic. My hope for a positive outcome of this tragic virus is the development of new infrastructures in solidarity towards a just transition based on the feminist/ecologist metacity matrix.
New York, the current epicenter of the coronavirus, has transformed into H.G. Wells’ fictional Time Machine with a tragic twist: instead of armies of laborers working underground while the elite frolic in the open air, public life is now occupied by essential workers in service of the millions trapped indoors. Life goes on for those lucky enough to stay in our homes and still able to work. Days pass into night, Spring erratically arrives. We sleep, fitfully dream, wake up, eat, zoom, exercise, rest and sleep again. My Parsons architectural design studio class, after dispersing across the globe, has reassembled online to complete the semester. A few international students and locals remain unable to escape from New York. For many here, a contemplative life has replaced a New Yorker’s frantic pace. As someone who recently moved out of the city, the end of commuting is a relief, with a few hours gained a day. Horribly, thousands of our fellow citizens have been exposed to a cataclysmic respiratory assault, but Earth is finding an easier time breathing. Humans have substantially reduced their carbon footprints overnight; a behavior shift that five decades of scientific warnings about climate change barely budged. The Himalayas are in view again from India’s northern cities, and dolphins are swimming in Venice’s calm canals. Reading the architecture of cities provides a way to understand the past and the future of human responses to disease and climate. Societies have long designed cities as protective spaces for biological and cultural reproduction. Architectural inerventions such as walls, moats, spaces for worship, and blocks of houses with open spaces between, were not built not just for protection from armies, but also as strategies to avoid the spread of disease. Interestingly, Michel Foucault begins his “Panopticism” chapter in Discipilne and Punish not with the history of the architecture of criminal incarceration, but with the strategies developed in Europe for the spatial separation of lepers, and later the architecture of segmentation to contain infection during the plague. Of course, social inequity was the object of his study just as it was for Wells. With the advancement of medical science, cities have been designed to make us individually more separated, society more segmented and wilderness more remote. Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow was born in the antiseptic afterglow following the 1918 Spanish Flu. Urban “reformers” cleared away the crowded segmented space of Foucault’s Victorian City, creating the towers in the park and open free plans of modernity. Ecologists Steward Pickett, urban design theorist David Grahame Shane, and I have recently postulated a metacity framework for the future adaptation of cities as we face a global climate crisis. This current pandemic is just one of the multiple climate disturbances we face in the coming years. Through the metacity we search for more resilient city forms in the face of such an unstable future. In the 1981 essay for Heresies Magazine, Susana Torre developed a feminist concept of “space as matrix”, which advocated for a more flexible and adaptable form of architectural space that was neither the room, closet, corridor arrangement of Foucault’s Victorian age, nor the complete erasure of privacy and security promoted by the modernist free plan. This matrix spatial logic is nature’s own, and in the matrix strategy of the metacity, neighborhood units are understood as social patches within larger natural systems of nitrogen and carbon fluxes. This social-natural strategy aided by medical science may provide a way to have an open urban society where we can maintain Earth and public health without reverting to further personal isolation and social segmentation. My hope for a positive outcome of this tragic virus is the development of new infrastructures in solidarity towards a just transition based on the feminist/ecologist metacity matrix.
Siobhan is the Associate Director of Innovation at the Centre for Social Innovation in Trinity College Dublin where she heads up research and innovation activities under the themes of sustainability and resilience.
We are facing now into a pivotal moment in time where it is possible to contemplate an alternative recovery plan. Governments and decision-makers need to take time out to reflect on the importance of small business, local business and nature-based business for community resilience.
Post-COVID – an opportunity for a new type of business?
Over the last five years I’ve had the privilege of working with some innovative companies who are passionate about bringing more nature into cities —sometimes they’re community enterprises designing and developing “growing” projects to meet the needs of vulnerable groups. Other times they’re commercial entities who have leveraged their horticultural knowledge to create new innovations like green living rooms. Such interventions can instantly transform concrete squares into urban oases, enticing children with little exposure to nature to engage, happily picking strawberries from green walls. More recently, I’ve met start-ups harnessing satellite technology to come up with so-called “green-prints” to help cities plan, monitor and benchmark greener, healthier and happier urban environments.
In February this year, Connecting Nature, an EU-funded initiative, launched a survey to explore more widely the concept of nature and business. What type of business can nature support? How can business support nature and society? Just as Europe began to shut down country by country, we reached our first goal of 100 survey responses. A preliminary analysis shows that nature-based enterprises offer considerable potential in a post-COVID environment—not just to create much-needed jobs but equally importantly at a social and environmental level. Nature-based enterprises offer sustainable solutions to transform grey spaces into green lungs for cities, lifelines for apartment-dwellers, for homeless gym-bunnies, for communities as a whole, for nature.
This month we launch a mini-follow up survey to find out how these businesses have been affected by COVID-19. Anecdotally we have seen a wide divergence in impact. Any kind of food-growing business has seen interest skyrocket; the more local and natural the produce, the more insanely busy they have become. On the other hand, nature-based businesses depending on the construction or public sector have virtually closed down overnight, with tons of plants wilting on pallets waiting for on-site construction which has effectively been put on hold.
With plans afoot for the gradual re-opening of society, what will a post-COVID world look like for these nature-based businesses? Faced with mounting pressure, will the public sector, business and construction sector put nature on the long finger again? Will governments roll out short term economic stimulus packages focusing on a return to “business as usual” as quickly as possible? Will workers return in their hoards to city-centre offices on packed commutes? Or will government and businesses seize this opportunity to reflect and consider the situation we were in before this crisis—where “business as usual” led to unsustainable economic cycles contributing to climate change and biodiversity devastation in another type of emergency.
We are facing now into a pivotal moment in time where it is possible to contemplate an alternative recovery plan. Governments and decision-makers need to take time out to reflect on the importance of small business, local business and nature-based business for community resilience. Business leaders need to consider the proven benefits of bringing nature into work environments or even better the possibility of creating new working environments in commune with nature. We have the opportunity to incubate a new business sector, to stimulate the start-up of new nature-based enterprises and support the re-emergence and growth of existing nature-based businesses. Can each of us make the case in our own community for investment in a different type of business, nature-based businesses that contribute to resilience, community connectivity and that most crucial element we have all come to appreciate—quality of life?
(Note: The Connecting Nature survey of nature-based enterprises is open to enterprises globally. We welcome your insights on the impacts of COVID 19 and future opportunities for this sector. Click here for more information.)
Source: Borzykowski, B. “The outdoor office spaces where workers commune with nature” BBC (2017) https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170517-the-outdoor-office-spaces-where-workers-commune-with-nature (accessed 22/4/2020)The ouidoor office. BBC (2017) https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170517-the-outdoor-office-spaces-where-workers-commune-with-nature(accessed 22/4/2020). Photo: Siobhán McQuaid.Exploring nature on a mobile green living room. Photo credit: Jonathon Muller, Helix PflantzenGetting in touch with nature on the mobile green living room. Photo credit: Jonathon Muller, Helix Pflantzen
Ragene Palma is a Filipino urbanist currently studying International Planning at the University of Westminster, London, as a Chevening scholar. Follow her work at littlemissurbanite.com.
I call for urban practitioners and legislators to immerse in the daily lives of those who have been sidetracked for the longest time, and work from there to begin championing spatial equality—visit slums, converse with the homeless, and know what it’s like to live on the verge of the city. Our previous “normal”should not be recreated.
I write this piece about COVID-19 with a consciousness on my privilege of being able to do so—I am comfortable in the confines of my tiny flat in central London, and continuing my postgraduate education and scholarship online. I have the option to turn off the ghastly coronavirus death toll whenever I need a mental health “break”; I ensure daily, transborder communication with my family in the Philippines; and I get to have my supplies delivered to my doorstep.
I cannot help but contrast this privilege with the plight of so many others, who are vulnerable to the coronavirus.
Years before this pandemic, urbanists have emphasised the reality of the world’s historical urban crisis, from sporadic economic challenges in the last century to today’s spatial inequality—a powerful few dominate the “rest” and the “others”, and we live segregated lives, because we simply cannot afford to live in the city anymore. Urban literature points to gentrification, “accumulation by dispossession”, and the urban-suburb dynamic, caused by intertwined factors: globalisation, neoliberalism, and urbanisation all grew hand in hand. Migrants, slum-dwellers, and the working class experience spatial discrimination in their daily life, an unfortunate reality that has become the norm.
Now, this health crisis literally exposes the reality of an urban crisis. Around the world, those without homes, or those who have been deprived of work opportunities, show us where our plans, and our cities have failed. World leaders are faced with massive challenges—in the US, a staggering 17 million people have filed for unemployment; in the UK, authorities address the rough sleepers, and look into eviction protection; in Japan, the government moves to house “internet cafe refugees” (the homeless are associated with internet cafes to access sleeping areas and showers). In the Global South, South Africa’s struggles are haunted by the apartheid; in the Philippines, regional lockdowns threaten at least 11 million informal workers, including farmers; and in India, migrant workers have been forced to walk thousands of miles due to lack of transport provisions.
In the planning profession, we deal with the elements and components of cities that have the potential to improve how we deal with pandemics: housing, mobility, urban design, ecological integrity. These are also crucial in “redoing” a new “normal”. In revisiting how we model our plans and shape our cities, we can begin with addressing inclusion and equality.
As a start, I call for urban practitioners and legislators to immerse in the daily lives of those who have been sidetracked for the longest time, and work from there to begin championing spatial equality—visit slums, converse with the homeless, and know what it’s like to live on the verge of the city. Spatially, our previous “normal” saw our urban areas create a new breed of “colonisers”, enclaves and borders, and a push-out of the “rest” of society. This was never supposed to be a “normal” in the first place; we should not revert to what went wrong, but move towards spatial solutions that provide for all, and not just the powerful few.
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Hinihikayat ko ang mga nasa larangan ng pagpaplano at mambabatas na pananaliksik ng pamumuhay ng nakararami—bisitahin natin ang mga iskwater, kausapin natin ang mga walang tirahan, at alamin natin kung ano ang kalagayan ng mga namumuhay sa loob at labas ng mga lungsod.
Sinusulat ko itong sanaysay tungkol sa COVID-19 nang may kamalayan ukol sa aking pribelehiyo—kumportable akong nasa loob ng isang maliit na kuwarto sa London, at pinagpapatuloy ang aking pag-aaral ng master’s sa online na pamamaraan. Maaari kong hindi pakinggan ang balita kapag ninais kong huminga nang panandalian sa nakaririmarim na bilang ng mga namatay na; araw-araw, sinisiguro kong makausap ang aking pamilya sa Pilipinas; at habang nandirito, madali naman sa aking magpa-deliver na lang ng mga pangangailangan.
Napakasuwerte ko sa ganitong kalagayan; marami sa atin ang halos walang laban sa sakit na dulot ng coronavirus.
Bago ang sakuna na dulot ng pandemic, nagsulat ang mga urbanista tungkol sa krisis na pinagdaraanan ng napakaraming lungsod, mula sa problema ng mga ekonomiya sa mundo, hanggang sa kakulangan ng patas na espasyo para sa nakararami. Ang ilan lamang na nakaaangat ang nagpapatakbo ng karamihan ng negosyo, habang ang iba naman ay nabubukod sa oportunidad, at nawawalan ng kakayahang mamuhay sa loob ng siyudad. Sa pag-aaral ng urbanismo, malalaman natin ang tungkol sa hentripikasyon (o ang pagpapaganda ng isang lugar para sa mga may kakayahan), ang pagkakamal ng lupa at pag-aari habang ang iba ay nawawalan ng titirhan, at ang kagunayan ng lungsod at ng mga nakapaligid sa lungsod. Ito ay bunga ng globalisasyon (ang koneksyon ng mga ekonomiya sa iba’t ibang bansa), neoliberalismo (ang kalagayan kung saan may kawalan ng regulasyon sa ekonomiya), at urbanisasyon (ang paglago ng tao at kanilang pangangailangan). Tinatamaan ng mga ito ang mga migrante, mahihirap, mga nasa iskwater, at ang mga nagtatrabaho; nagiging karaniwan ang hindi pantay-pantay na pamumuhay.
Inuugnay natin ang krisis ng coronavirus sa kalusugan at medikal na larangan, ngunit pinapakita rin into ang isang krisis tungkol sa ating espasyo at mga lungsod. Maraming siyudad sa mundo ang naglalantad ng mga pagkukulang sa pabahay at trabaho. Sa Estados Unidos, 17 milyon ang humihingi ng benepisyo dahil sa kawalan ng hanapbuhay; sa Inglatera, binibigyang pansin ngayon ang pagpapaalis ng mga umuupa; sa Japan, binibigyan ng pabahay ang mga walang tirahan. Ang mga umuunlad na bansa ay may mga dagdag na suliranin sa pagtugon sa krisis, tulad ng kasaysayan ng apartheid ng South Africa, ang pagtigil ng kabuhayan ng 11 milyon sa impormal na sektor ng Pilipinas, at ang puwersadong paglalakad pauwi ng mga naghahanapbuhay sa India, dulot ng kawalang ng pampublikong serbisyo at transportasyon.
Sa pagpaplano, binibigyang halaga at probiso ang mga bagay na kailangan upang kalabanin ang pandemic: pabahay, paggalaw at transportasyon, disenyo ng pampublikong espasyo, at pangangalaga sa kalikasan. Kailangang kilatisin ang mga ito upang maisaayos ang laganap na kahirapan at problema sa ating mga espasyo.
Hinihikayat ko ang mga nasa larangan ng pagpaplano at mambabatas na pananaliksik ng pamumuhay ng nakararami—bisitahin natin ang mga iskwater, kausapin natin ang mga walang tirahan, at alamin natin kung ano ang kalagayan ng mga namumuhay sa loob at labas ng mga lungsod. Ang nakasanayan natin ay dakilain ang may kaya at may kapangyarihan, habang naiiwan ang ‘iba’ at nakararami. Kung tutuusin, hindi ito ‘normal’, at kailangan nating talakayin kung paano tayo magkakaroon ng patas na pamumuhay pagkatapos nitong krisis.
Si Ragene Palma ay isang urbanista o tagapagplano, at kasalukuyang nag-aaral ng International Planning sa University of Westminster, sa London, bilang isang iskolar ng programang Chevening.
Diane Pataki is a Professor of Biological Sciences, an Adjunct Professor of City & Metropolitan Planning, and Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Utah. She studies the role of urban landscaping and forestry in the socioecology of cities.]
What about poverty, inequality, food insecurity, lack of access to clean water, climate change, and pollution? Now that I know we can act in response to COVID-19, there’s no turning back. Our society can change – completely and rapidly. The next time we have a daring solution, let’s not take “no” for an answer.
I now have a completely different perspective about the speed at which our society can change. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been told that rapid transformations to society, to cities, and to our relationship with the environment are impossible. Many of us spend countless hours brainstorming, discussing, and envisioning daring and far-reaching solutions to urban problems, only to be told “no”—that such solutions can never be implemented. How many times have we heard that there are too many barriers to change, especially in the face of uncertainties about future risks such as climate change?
I no longer find this argument valid. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen massive changes to almost every element of our society, implemented at unprecedented speed. We shut down businesses, sent workers and school children online, closed streets to cars, and changed social norms about what to wear. For my entire career as an academic, I was told that universities were slow to change and would take years to fully embrace online education. Yet, virtually every campus in the United States transitioned to online teaching in a matter of weeks, sometimes days. Professionally, most of us kept up air travel to meetings that could have easily been held online, even though we knew we shouldn’t. We didn’t want to change—until suddenly we did.
All of this happened under massive uncertainty: we still don’t know how many COVID cases there really are, whether the virus will persist through the summer, whether anyone really has immunity even after they’ve recovered, and how long it will take to develop a vaccine—if ever. And yet still, we acted. We acted because lives were at risk, or because it was the right thing to do, or because we were afraid, or because we were compelled, or because the risk of not acting seemed greater than the risk of change.
This is not to say that the societal changes we’ve seen so far have been positive. Many have been devastating. In New York City, where I grew up and where my family still lives, the changes are heartbreaking. In the New York borough of Queens, a global epicenter of COVID-19, my elderly family members no longer step outside. Every two weeks my brother dons protective gear and visits several grocery stores to find enough food for all of them, quietly delivering their groceries without saying a word or going inside. Family friends became infected, and one died when the hospitals refused admission for three days in a row because the ICUs were full.
The human toll has been horrific, and many governments were, in fact, too slow to respond given the circumstances. Yet still, I’ve seen more wide-reaching government and societal action in the last two months than in my entire life. When lives are threatened, we can change the way we do things to a phenomenal extent.
So what about the other ways that lives and wellbeing are threatened in cities? What about poverty, inequality, food insecurity, lack of access to clean water, climate change, and pollution? Now that I know we can act in response to COVID-19, there’s no turning back. Our society can change – completely and rapidly. We transformed when it was necessary and we can do it again. Radical changes are possible, and urgent. The next time we have a daring solution, let’s not take “no” for an answer.
Dr. Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. He is an ecologist studying the interactions of decision making, design, and environmental change on ecosystem processes in urban landscapes.
Not all of our students have the desire to learn online, and not all have the resources to do so. There is talk about how the new normal will impact university budgets and student enrollments. This experience is teaching many about the real lives and experiences of our students, and we need to be sure that any transformations in the new normal reflect on inequities in access to time, technology, and privacy.
I held my last non-virtual class of the semester over 6 weeks ago in a course on urban ecosystem services. We were focused mainly on my nascent plans for moving to online instruction. To my surprise the students pivoted this discussion to talking about the potential for cities to be transformed by the impacts of COVID. These are the inspired and creative moments in the classroom that we live for! Having taught online before (and not during a crisis), I knew having discussions like that would be more difficult. Still, as my students were quick to realize, COVID will provide an opportunity for transformation. How will COVID will change teaching—and how will it change teaching for the better?
Six weeks later, we’ve all experienced the challenges of teaching online—how much more time it takes, the drain of using Zoom, and the disconnection we have if we aren’t able to use technology to connect directly with students. The relative stability of campus life has dissolved for many students as they cope with the need to find jobs to help parents who are newly unemployed, care for sick family members, and the lack of internet and computers to connect with online courses. It is clear though; our students are hungry for the opportunity to engage and to help make a difference within our local communities. How can this transformative moment support this hunger?
At my university we talk a lot about the “land grant mission”—that research and education should be linked to improve communities and the environment—but that mission is not integrated well into the classroom. As we plan for the new normal, we are anticipating remaining online to some degree for the near future. We are looking for ways to modify internships and capstone experiences to fit a distance education format. We seek to transform these experiences so that students can problem solve and gain service-learning experiences in addition to professional development and research skills. If we succeed in bringing this land-grant model into online courses, this is a transformation that we need to maintain once we are back in the classroom.
Not all of our students have the desire to learn online, and not all have the resources to do so. There is talk about how the new normal will impact university budgets and student enrollments. This experience is teaching many about the real lives and experiences of our students, and we need to be sure that any transformations in the new normal reflect on inequities in access to time, technology, and privacy.
Personally, I’m still figuring out the new normal, but one thing COVID is teaching me is about the illusion of time. In some ways, we seem to have more of it: spending time with old friends across the country playing virtual games and listening to music, baking, taking long daily walks, and watching our kids explore along the streams in our neighborhood. This time to connect has been a welcome source of joy and normalcy. Post-virus, I hope these transformations stick for the better too.
Steward Pickett is a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. His research focuses on the ecological structure of urban areas and the temporal dynamics of vegetation.
This changes everything … again; Will those of us who survive learn this time? All of us are on some verge.
This Changes Everything
In this Time of Pandemic: You can’t see your friends; You hunger for a simple hug, even a fist bump; You must stay home for months; You must manage time better and keep from an emotional abyss; You must remember this is real and serious. You understand this is part of a system of ignorance, forgetfulness, and greed; Face has been saved with lives lost; This has happened before.
In Uncertain Times: Euphemisms emerge; They will sell you a car along with a dose of sincerity.
In the Time of Climate Change: Spring comes in all wrong; Floods happen too soon, or find welcome places far from floodplains; The ocean steals into coastal water supplies; People move as if from tectonic disaster.
In an Era of Unprecedented Fire: Entire towns are consumed, just as in the days of wooden cities and timber camps; We have to learn new ways to fight fire, or how to give up, or how to prepare.
In the Era of Globalization: Jobs are snatched away, Philanthropy grows huge, but distant and blind; You have interesting new neighbors, and your cousin moves to a place where your language won’t work.
In a Time of Civil Unrest: People let go their anger; People stomp their frustration in the street; The pawn shops and big box stores are empty of guns. Fear is the order of the day. Power is still in the same hands as usual.
In the Time of the Slave Trade: The mythology of race matures and finds a home in “the natural order of things;” Some people are capital; Those who are capital are forbidden to acquire the other tools of capitalism, and so unto the generations.
Under Jim Crow: White supremacy emerges again in the public sphere, and is legally and habitually reinforced for the next ninety years; The monster cannot be subdued by individual action, and it kills, corrals, humiliates, and excludes at will.
In an Age of Mass Incarceration: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within…” (Amendment XIII); Private prisons are profitable business; The burden falls inequitably; Jim Crow is dead/long live Jim Crow.
In the Time of the Scapegoat: Fear becomes personified; Political and commercial accountability is subverted; Chinese Americans have been insulted and assaulted in the name of COVID19; in some places mask wearers are honored, while in others vilified.
In the Time of Cholera: A time that has never ended; A time that rises from time to time in different places, from squalor and untreated water; A proper name for pandemics past.
In a Time of Increasing Automation: A threat to workers in city and country; The missing tellers, clerks, help desks; The lost wages and gained profits; The idle, hungry hands that cannot leave.
In this Crazy Time: The label that comes up when my friends and I text or video chat.
In this time…You can’t see your friends; You hunger for a simple hug, even a fist bump; You must stay home for months; You must manage time better and keep from an emotional abyss. Some friends have moved away looking for jobs; They’ve lost their pride and hope as work they might have aspired to dries up; Others have died long ago from drugs and the endless litany of the pandemics in whose times we continue to live; This changes everything – again; Will those of us who survive learn this time? All of us are on some verge.
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.
I think the most profound challenge for any of us working in urbanism through and after COVID, is now that we have seen how our cities truly function at their most vulnerable, what possible excuse do we now have to not emerge solely committed to fixing it?
Better Normal
A few months before COVID I accepted a position to lead a national charity focused on the quality of life in Canadian cities. Canada’s Urban Institute was founded 30 years ago, before cities were as widely acknowledged as the dominant unit of human settlement of the 21stcentury. But in 2020 they are. Canada is one of the most urbanized countries in the world with close to 90% of the population living in communities of 5000 people or more. Two-thirds of this nation’s GDP comes out of six urban centres. But the dominant narrative in Canada does not reflect this reality. We still perpetuate a settler story: rural communities, smaller towns, two or three “global” but more likely niche cities, and an agrarian and resource extraction-based economy.
The dilemma that aged story presents Canada is an absence of coordinated urban policies and inconsistent public investment commitments to address real challenges.
To create a more realistic and compelling narrative to lead to systemic change, my focus taking this gig was to focus on creating new forms of connective tissue: to foster an ecosystem of urbanism—horizontal, peer-to-peer learning in a vast country whose governance has historically run vertical: from municipalities to provinces to the federal government. What if we were able to catalyze connections between city builders—in every sector, people engaged in making their urban places more livable and resilient?
We were headed on to doing that, planning urban “residencies” in a dozen cities where we would set up a week of deep listening and connecting. The first were to be in April in two cities hardest hit by the global collapse of the oil industry: Edmonton and Calgary.
The COVID hit and travel plans were dashed.
COVID seems to have acted like a particle accelerator—a term I borrow from NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who first used the analogy to describe the how the 1995 heatwave in Chicago exposed all the neighborhood dysfunction that existed before that July, leaving poorly designed and resourced neighborhoods much more vulnerable than others. We see the same in our urban neighborhoods in Canada here in 2020. Where density was imposed without adequate public amenities, creating isolated, often over-crowded buildings, the impacts of COVID—and stay at home orders—have been devastating. Similarly, our city shelter systems, safe consumption sites, food banks—none of these have proven adequate to provide these essential services in safe, socially-distanced ways. Victoria has moved their support operations to town parks; Toronto shelters to sports arenas; public library parking lots are now foodbank depots (with librarians now stocking pantry shelves).
Our efforts during COVID have been to create three live platforms to grow our connective tissue and create a dynamic narrative: www.citywatchcanada.ca, www.citysharecanada.ca, and www.citytalkcanada.ca. These are being populated daily by hundreds of partners and volunteers. That’s the connective tissue value proposition: it tells the good (how responsive local governments and resourceful communities have been), the bad (areas where resources are badly lacking and planning and design has utterly failed) and the ugly (the starkness of underlying inadequacies in so many areas). I think the most profound challenge for any of us working in urbanism through and after COVID, is now that we have seen how our cities truly function at their most vulnerable, what possible excuse do we now have to not emerge solely committed to fixing it?
Andrew Rudd is the Urban Environment Officer for UN-Habitat’s Urban Planning & Design Branch in New York, where he leads substantive advocacy for the urban dimension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (including the SDGs).
I am frequently in mourning that after this crisis the world will never be the same. I am also hopeful that after this crisis the world will never be the same.
I wake up without an alarm—bad dreams are just as effective—and take 100 ujjayi breaths, then brew coffee while we air out our 60m2 apartment. This is our morning ritual. Much bird song pours in during these 20 bracing minutes and I realize that my only previous memory of hearing springtime birds through an open window is from the 1980s at my great-grandmother’s house in the Appalachian foothills. Either I never took the time to notice the springs of intervening years or the reduced noise of background traffic during the last 42 days (apart from ambulance sirens) has brought them to the fore. All the same, the indifference of nature is comforting. Sparrows gather in the honey locust in front of our building while, inside, neighbours text-quarrel over common space protocols. Some have started leading yoga from the courtyard balconies. Two weeks ago, when I first went outside, clustering teenagers brandished their normalcy and callery pear trees blossomed in oblivion to their invasive stigma. New York is as quirkily convenient as ever, and food and supplies can be delivered right to our doors. However, this ability to conduct life (almost) as normal exposes the ugly class divide between those who can afford to self-quarantine and those who cannot. Here COVID-19 prevalence is highest not in the dense core, but in peripheral neighbourhoods where those with the highest occupational hazard can afford to live. The national health director of the US claims that the role of federal government is merely to ‘facilitate’ the pandemic response in cities, but this left New York with distressingly fewer ventilators from our own national government (400) than others around the world (1,000 from China). Now is also a sobering time for urbanists. A number of columnists are arguing unfoundedly against compact living and attempting to resurrect segregated, car-centric living patterns. Samuel Kling writes that the scapegoating of urban space for disease is nothing new. But we again have the task of revealing the socioeconomic causes of our social ills so that cities’ positive potential can be maximized. People are social animals, and they require co-existence in shared physical places. So does climate action. One of my tasks at the UN will be to help frame a more convincing argument that, rather than sharing space, the more likely transmission factors are destruction of natural habitat, excessive air travel and disintegrating (or nonexistent) public health systems. Another will be to research urban form and human behaviour, including surface touch and close-contact networks. Cities are going to need this evidence if they are going to build for survival. And my colleagues and I will have to design solutions that accommodate the impact of our actions at multiple scales—the immediate, near and far. Mariana Mazzucato writes that we now have the opportunity to rethink capitalism and rebuild the public sector into more than a fixer of crises. I am frequently in mourning that after this crisis the world will never be the same. I am also hopeful that after this crisis the world will never be the same.
Eric Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.
What is life, if not hope? What are our cities, if not an investment in our future? Great things will come again. Take care, my friends; hold on; and invest what you can into the long now.
A few great things
I was in the middle of a really great thing when the COVID-19 pandemic came to town.
Last spring, I was offered one of fifteen coveted fellowships at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. For nine months, I was going to commit entirely (well, almost entirely) to one project: to complete research on a book I longed to write, summarizing everything I had learned from two decades of study about the historical ecology of all of New York City, as a kind of sequel and complement to my earlier book, on Manhattan (sensu Mannahatta). The forests of Bushwick, the wetlands of Jamaica Bay, the schisty basements of the Bronx, and the towering hills of Staten Island, and their ancient forefathers and Earth mothers, were my topic. Generations on generations of relationships, human and mostly not, developed through the planet’s long and dramatic history, had been expressed in extraordinary, beautiful, biological splendor right here, in the place where the five boroughs came to be. If the streams, meadows, and indigenous inhabitants had been forgotten under the relentless onslaught of concrete and asphalt of the 21st century city, then some old maps, dusty books, and our remaining natural areas, plus a bit of historical and ecological puzzle-solving, could help me remember them for all of us.
Outside the library, on “Library Way,” also known as East 41st street, this quote from John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies is embedded in the sidewalk. I used to walk by it every day on my way to the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
The very best part, though, was that I had lucked into spending nine months of my working life with people unlike my usual science-oriented cohort at the WCS. My fellow fellows were novelists, journalists, poets, translators, philosophers, and historians, all scholars and writers committed to plumbing the human heart and exploring the reaches of the human mind, not a scientist amongst them save me. They could carry on in ancient tongues or witty English. They ruminated on the pros and cons of back story. They knew engrossing details about people I had never heard of. Lunch time conversations ran from Nabokov to the National Book Award to techniques for baking the best sourdough bread. Yes, we were baking and breaking bread long before the library was shuttered, and we were all forced to skedaddle.
I totally understand that the breakup of our fellowship is among the lightest of burdens to carry during the pandemic. Although a few of us have been sick, none have died; and we all have some version of a home to which we can return. The library is closed, but not insolvent. Our work is largely imaginative and portable. Like so many, we now zoom and text and email; we connect as best we can; we share rumors and speculations; and we try to claw out of the vacuum vortex of talking only about COVID-19. We live and work cognizant of better days to come, if only because every other disaster we have ever seen or read about has had better days that followed worse ones, as dawn follows night.
What does any of this have to do with the Nature of Cities? Everything really. Cities are successful because of the kind of interactions the Cullman Center exemplifies: new people, new ideas, new expressions, new feelings, new friends. Scientists in conversation with artists, artists laughing with librarians, librarians effusing to philosophers. Cities, such as New York, which have been in the urban business a long time, have invested in institutional structures to foment such connections.In much the same vein, The Nature of Cities connects our global community of urban-obsessed, nature-loving, polyglots.
Of course, this same trick of determined confrontation with difference is the genius of nature too, though in manifestly more diverse ways and means. Nature is all about felicitous combination, shaped by the conditions and circumstances of place and time, informed by the past, but not bound to it, channeling an effervescent hope for the future.
What is life, if not hope? What are our cities, if not an investment in our future? Great things will come again. Take care, my friends; hold on; and invest what you can into the long now.
Some books by this year’s fellows at the Cullman Center. How are books like these made? Through the magic of the nature of cities.
Olivier Scheffer is a consultant in responsible strategy and innovation, the former Managing Director at NOBATEK/INEF4 (the French national Institute for Energetic Transition of the AEC sector), former R&D Director of XTU Architects, a board member of the French Committee of Biomimicry Europa, and a strategic adviser to the CEEBIOS.
We are standing at the edge of the cliff, and the coronavirus is right behind us…So how do we urgently change the urban metabolism to something highly resilient?
The post-Covid Cities
The Coronavirus pandemic has had the effect of a giant X-ray on our liberal globalized economies, of which megacities are the utmost expression.
We’ve discovered (or directly experienced) that our food autonomy is only of a few days. The city of Paris, France, for example, would only have a 3-days food stock if food supply stopped (be it because of trucking strikes, energy supply shortfalls or … a pandemic).
Moreover, food travels hundreds of miles (“food miles”) before reaching citizens (an average of 660 km in Paris[i], and up to 3500 km for a yogurt[ii]). The Paris Region (“Ile-de-France”) produces only 10% of the food its inhabitants eat, so most of the food is imported from “outside” the Paris area. On a national scale, 30,000 semi-trailers cross France every day to supply factories, warehouses and retail chains just-in-time[iii]… which in the context of freight traffic disruption, might simply cut the supply of a large array of food products.
Last but not least, the whole food production value chain, from agriculture to food processing and distribution, relies heavily on energy. Researchers have calculated that for the U.S. food system, it takes 7.3 calories (one unit of energy) as fossil fuel to recover 1 calorie as food[iv], and the same is true for most industrialized countries with intensive agricultures, like France. Energy has always been used to produce food, but the major shift that happened from the 1960s on, with the “Green Revolution”, is that it started depending heavily on fossil energy, with peak oil behind us and shale oil EROEI plunging[v].
Harchaoui S, Chatzimpiros P. 2018. [vi]On top of that, biodiversity and climate emergencies are still looming behind the Sars-Cov-2, putting our agriculture and food system at very high risks, as was stated as early as 2015 by the Lloyd’s[vii] and later by the IPCC[viii].
Regionalized projections of the soil relative humidity index (spring average), compared to 1970. (IPCC RCP 6.0 scenario: 3 ° C in 2100). Source: Drias-climat (www.drias-climat.fr)
We are standing at the edge of the cliff, and the coronavirus is right behind us…
So how do we urgently change the urban metabolism to something higly resilient?
A study of the food autonomy of Paris[ix] by Sabine Barles, Professor of town planning and development at the University of Paris 1, concluded that it would take the whole Seine watershed area to produce organic food for parisians, who would have adopted a demitarian regime (50% cut in animal proteins). Commenting the study, she stated “Of course, it requires a strong political will. And above all, that public authorities and the State control land in cities as well as in peri-urban areas. We can therefore hope for development policies where the security of agricultural land is effective and where we develop a housing policy that consumes less space.”[x]
As for the low-tech technical solutions to agriculture, they already exist with permaculture, agro-forestry or ecological agriculture.
[v] We know that peak oil is now behind us and that it has become a critical raw material as “Today approximately 90% of the supply chain of all industrially manufactured products depend on the availability of oil derived products, or oil derived services. […] Approximately 70% of our daily oil supply comes from oil fields discovered prior to 1970. […] Since 2008, the Shale revolution (North-american tight oil or fracked oil) has increased global oil supply which stabilized increased demand.“[v] But as we move from conventional oil to shale oil, the EROEI is falling from 10-15 to 4-5 at best, and down to 1,4 for tight oil – and with the current fall in demand and prices, exploration investments will be postponed.
Michaux Simon, « Oil from a Critical Raw Material Perspective », Geological Survey of Finland (GTK), December 2019 (http://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/70_2019.pdf)
[vi] Harchaoui S, Chatzimpiros P. 2018. Energy, Nitrogen, and Farm Surplus Transitions in Agriculture from Historical Data Modeling. France, 1882–2013. Journal of Industrial Ecology. doi:10.1111/jiec.12760
Huda's experience and training combine urban planning, sustainable development and public health. She is a chartered town planner (MRTPI) and a chartered environmentalist (CEnv) with over 15 years' experience focused on visionary master plans and city plans across the Arabian Gulf. She is passionate about influencing Arab cities towards sustainable development.
I have been reminded of the privileges I have which others do not: having the option to work remotely, having access to quality public space and amenities at my door step, having a choice about how I travel and where I spend my leisure time—and having leisure time. I will work harder personally and professionally to bring those privileges to others, I hope.
As an urban planner, I am hopeful that COVID-19 will bring a renewed understanding and appreciation for urban resilience and what it means for communities, infrastructure, facilities, and governance. I am not simply referring to measures to facilitate life with physical distancing. In fact, I hope that we do not get stuck on the concept of physical distancing. It is a necessary extreme measure which is needed while we live through the pandemic. However, the next shock to face our cities will likely not be a pandemic and it will likely require a different set of responses. We need to be more strategic and plan for more holistic inclusivity, flexibility and robustness in our urban systems.
I am hopeful that my work will look at the planning and design of housing and public spaces differently. I am hopeful that developers and local authorities will be more interested in minimum standards that provide acceptable and accessible outdoor and indoor spaces for all. I am hoping that there will be more interest in promoting “complete communities” where basic amenities are provided within walking distance. I am hoping that there will be renewed interest in facilitating active travel, and in ensuring that our streets and policies are flexible enough to accommodate people’s needs and lifestyles.
As for how I do my work, COVID-19 has highlighted to me the importance of face-to-face office interactions. No amount of video calls can replace unplanned, informal chats with colleagues and clients or over-hearing project discussions happening in the background. At the same time, I realized how many of our planned, formal meetings can occur virtually, and maybe even more successfully. For one thing, its easier for me to keep quiet and focus on listening when there is a mute button!
On a personal level, the pandemic has helped me realise my fragility and dependency on others, particularly for my mental wellbeing. I hope that my post-COVID “normal” will include being more accepting of my limitations and weaknesses, and more open to reaching out to others. I expect that I will be more aware of my level of anxiety and better able to manage it. I will no longer expect certainty.
I have been reminded what it means to have three meals a day with family, and I hope to have more of those days even after I go back to working from the office. I have also been reminded of the privileges I have which others do not: having the option to work remotely, having access to quality public space and amenities at my door step, having a choice about how I travel and where I spend my leisure time, and having leisure time. I will work harder personally and professionally to bring those privileges to others, I hope.
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).
“It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine” — REM, 1987, Document
While we may be sharing a global experience of living in a pandemic, how we experience it is very specific to place, age, class, race, and gender. Can we use this experience to create a new normal with each of us as more ethical subjects to imagine new worlds?
Like many who read and write on The Nature of Cities, my hope is that the world at all scales (from personal to global) is radically changed as we slowly emerge from the global COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, I hope that we have not forgotten that we were in a crisis before this—the climate crisis—and that perhaps living through this pandemic and seeing how the world has changed (for example, the clear waters and skies in cities normally clouded in smog) will persuade more individuals to take the climate crisis as seriously as the coronavirus pandemic. Reflecting on how I have been professionally and personally changed by the pandemic is an interesting task. As a geography professor, I have continued to teach my classes online, so my schedule and life has altered little. Just as my college closed, I was about to start economic (development) and population geography in my “Introduction to Human Geography” class. As I prepared to pivot online, I altered the course content to incorporate the pandemic. In doing so, I revisited my books and articles on feminist political economy and political ecology. I wanted to give students new ways of thinking about economies, populations, health and, most importantly, the role of individuals within a collective. Two books, specifically, have become essential to me during this troubled time: The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) (1996) and A Post-Capitalist Politics (2006), both by JK Gibson-Graham.
As I re-read, I was reminded how insightful, instructive and inspiring the books were and still are. There are two broad ideas that can help us transition into thinking in radically new ways as we negotiate a new post-virus normal. The first is that we already live in a world of diverse economies. Despite the taken-for-granted assumption that we are a globalized, capitalist economy, and that this economy was the pinnacle of so-called development. Yet there have always existed other economies, but such economies tend to be viewed as not important, stuck in the past, and a threat to profits. Without diverse economies, what we know as capitalism would not have emerged and functioned. In the current pandemic, we are seeing the importance of these other economies, especially the care economy. Other economics, especially economies of care, have greater potential to bring about not just social justice, but also ecological. Recognising the important of other economies will (hopefully) lead us to “ethical practices of thinking economy and becoming different kinds of economic beings” (2006, p. xxviii).
Gibson-Graham’s second main idea is the importance of collective action and the politics of the subject (2006, p. 127). They ask and attempt to answer: “How we might become post-capitalist subjects?” We can add to this how we are different post-pandemic subjects. The politics of the subject for Gibson-Graham is a complex, not-so-neat process of “resubjectivation” – “the mobilization and transformation of desires, the cultivation of capacities, and the making of new identifications with something as vague and unspecified as a ‘community economy’ ” (2006, p. xxxvi). The process is reciprocal: as we change ourselves as subjects, we also change our worlds.
Indeed, there is a reciprocity in the current global pandemic. It is changing us as subjects (individual and collective) as well as changing our worlds. While we may be sharing a global experience of living in a pandemic, how we experience it is very specific to place, age, class, race, and gender. Can we use this experience to create a new normal with each of us as more ethical subjects to imagine new worlds?
“It takes a world to create a locality, and an imagined world to transform ourselves in place” (2006, p. 196)
Elisa Silva is director and founder of Enlace Arquitectura 2007 and Enlace Foundation 2017, established in Caracas, Venezuela. Projects focus on raising awareness of spatial inequality and the urban environment through public space, the integration of informal settlements and community engagement in rural landscapes.
It is clear that the way we have been living and the patterns of governance we have chosen could be very different, they could change the second we decide to make them a priority and work collectively toward their fulfilment.
An Optimistic Legacy for Covid-19
The misnamed Spanish flu of 1918 infected over 500 million people and was responsible for 100 million deaths. Since it coincided with WWI and economic depression it is difficult to separate the effects the epidemic might have had on the way people live from the equally devastating effects of war and famine. As we collectively devour articles, scouring over the past in order to find clues of what may lie ahead in our near future, I find myself most curious about the long-term effects Covid-19 will have on our lives. Re-dimensioning circulation corridors for social distancing, inserting sneeze guards at checkout counters and increasing the number of divisions within homes seems to me akin to other spatial investments in the past such as underground bunkers in German homes, or bullet proof glass separations in convenient stores in Brooklyn. In other words, they may have been absolutely critical for a finite period of time, but not structural in the way we live or the choices we make.
As a direct consequence of the Spanish flu, so far, I have been able to identify two clear long-term outcomes. The first one involves changes in interior design and furniture motivated by sanitary reasons. It was believed that increased light, air and openness would help kill germs, (the flu’s exact cause was still unknown) and the elimination of bacteria-lodging-crevices in ornament, and dust-collecting draperies typical of 19h century homes came to be seen as a deterrent for maintaining homes free of disease.[i] In other words, the white, spacious interiors flooded with light associated with modern architecture and the continuous surfaces of bent wood and tubular steel, used by Alvar Aalto, Marcel Brewer, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe in their furniture design, was as much a consequence of increased concern for hygiene as it was about practicality and the industrial aesthetic.
The other even more amazing change to which I have become aware, is the story behind Sweden’s modern welfare state. The flu affected the town of Östersund particularly hard, due to the fact that it hosted several army regiments, which in response to the war had increased in number to the point of swelling the town’s population by 50%. They were stationed in close quarters which facilitated the spread of the diseases. Another factor that aggravated the situation was the severe inequality that had resulted from the industrialization process of previous decades. Many families lived in cramped quarters, wooden shacks and tents. Apparently, this all changed when the city’s bank director Carl Lignell, decided to take matters into his own hands by using federal funds to turn a school into a hospital, since the city did not have one.[ii] He had people quarantined in their homes, he convened a medical team to scour the city for victims and moved the sick into the transformed school. These efforts were strengthened with city-wide cooperation to organize relief, raise funds, feed and clothe the most vulnerable. After the epidemic, what had been a week state, adopted the cooperative approach to social reform and one hundred years later, Sweden boasts one of the world’s most exemplary welfare systems.
So, what might be the long-term effects of COVID-19 in 2020? I would like to believe they will also be closely tied to both eliminating what is superfluous and the empowerment of institutions focused on mitigating inequality. We have all been shocked to see how quickly pollution levels have diminished in the atmosphere and nearly extinct animals have reclaimed their habitats. What is superfluous and unnecessary in this case is the way we contaminate and destroy the environment, the way we overgraze our share of a planet that is shared with other beings. Considering the second point, not surprisingly, we have witnessed the complete impotence of people living in informal settlements and the homeless to defend themselves from the virus’ eminent spread. Might we, like the Swedes, collectively grow indignant of what has thus far remained a tacitly tolerated humanitarian injustice, or will we continue to embrace our indifference as a society to these manifestations of inequality. In either case, it is clear that the way we have been living and the patterns of governance we have chosen could be very different, they could change the second we decide to make them a priority and work collectively toward their fulfilment.
Maps by NASA’s Earth Observatory. Levels of nitrous dioxide NO2
Notes:
[i] Paul Overy, Light Air and Openness: Modern Architecture Between the Wars, London: Thames & Hudson, 2008.
[ii] Brian Melican, “How Spanish flu helped create Sweden’s modern welfare state”. The Guardian August 29, 2018.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
The adaptational effort will be immense. While certain other activities are amenable to onlin-isation, others are not—some activities will simply be impossible. All bets are off.
Inevitably, the personal and professional aspects of my life are closely intertwined. At one level, coping with the disruption and uncertainties at all levels has been greatly facilitated by no longer having dependent children at home who need home schooling and boundless time and energy in so many ways. We also no longer have elderly parents or in-laws and their siblings to worry about and care for.
On the other hand, our elder son and his fiancée are both intensive care doctors who have been under relentless pressure on the frontline in two London hospitals. Given the risk to unprotected healthcare workers, exacerbated by the ongoing shortages of personal protective equipment and ongoing inadequacy of the testing regime for staff, this has been a nagging worry on them and us.
I am also immensely privileged in living in a detached house with good-sized garden on the very edge of the green belt, and with the forested expanses and beauty of Virginia Water lake in Windsor Great Park just around the corner. Unlike so many, I have therefore been able to swap my regular squash and tennis for training cycles “in nature” as the daily exercise for which, along with essential shopping and medical appointments, we are allowed to leave the house under the UK version of lockdown. Moreover, the 90% reduction of daily flights into and out of nearby Heathrow Airport has greatly reduced ambient background noise, making the birdlife far more audible.
Professionally, the progressive shutdown of travel and the universities caused anxiety and indefinite postponements of long-distance travel for research work, related workshops in Kenya, a PhD defence in Germany, and a guest university lecture in Luxemburg. Where practicable, rather like the teaching and assessment work of my university, we have rapidly reorganized to do the work online, so the guest lecture will go ahead on schedule.
While I have already done one UK PhD defence via Skype, the German system involves a whole ritual including a public lecture by the candidate and then a debate with the examiners. Hence the host university refused to countenance a slimmed down online version and we have set a provisional alternative date in mid-July. All bets are off.
Conversely, while certain other activities are amenable to onlin-isation, others are not. The bulk of planned fieldwork, multi-stakeholder discussions and academic writing training workshop for PhD students and early career researchers in Kenya require travel and face to face engagement. To date it has been impossible to reschedule this because the team comprises colleagues from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, India, Argentina, the UK and Sweden and each country has different restrictions and lockdowns, timelines and so forth. Who knows when all will be clear, flights will resume, visas be obtainable, the respective universities have rejigged their activities to cope with lost time, and thus leave of absence be granted?
Kenya’s universities will struggle since they have been unable to go online because many students lack wifi at home, let alone stable electricity, personal computers, and enough domestic space to be able to study quietly. As I started writing this, my own university has announced radical plans to reconfigure next academic year’s curriculum and modes of delivery, on the assumption that something resembling normality for our global student catchment will be unachievable before next January. The adaptational effort will be immense, and thus, apart from contractually agreed circumstances, sabbatical leave (which I have due for Sept to December this year) has summarily been postponed a year. What this means for the grant-funded research projects I hope to win and start in September/October, not to mention other activities incompatible with intensive curriculum redevelopment and teaching…
Mary Hall Surface is a playwright, director, and teaching artist. She is devoted to intergenerational audiences, multidisciplinary collaborations, and to transforming communities, museums and schools through the arts.
At its best, theatre is a unique forum where communities can imagine together. We gather and literally align our beating hearts as a story unfolds told by actors who breathe our same air. My nightmare new normal is a Romeo and Juliet who never touch, watched by a masked audience too afraid to believe the story.
February 1, 2020. Almost 10am. Actors gather for rehearsal. Effusive, affectionate comrades greet, hug, laugh in each other’s faces. They do a quick warm up, their bodies interacting, giving and taking weight, close, dance-like. They circle in and breathe together as their voices send sound across the shared space. Three actors then stand tightly together and move in sync to hoist another high above their heads. She’s flying! Theatre magic.
February 1, 2021. Almost 10am. Actors arrive for rehearsal. Cautious, efficient troopers leave their shoes at the door, wash their hands, wave across the large room. They stretch, run in place, alone in six-foot intervals of space. They circle wide, backs to one another as they warm up their voices, muffled behind facemasks. Three actors then stand in separate spots and raise their arms on cue as a fourth, lifted only by her own toes, grounded, spreads her arms like wings. She’s flying. Maybe.
When trying to imagine theatre in the new post-virus “normal,” my colleagues tend to focus on audiences. How far apart can we seat people? Do we hand out masks at the door? Take temperatures before taking tickets? These are shattering images. But what keeps me awake at night is picturing a socially distanced rehearsal process that leads to a performance by face-masked actors who never physically connect. My nightmare new normal is a Romeo and Juliet who never touch, watched by an audience too afraid to believe the story.
At its best, theatre is a unique forum where communities can imagine together. We gather and literally align our beating hearts as a story unfolds told by actors who breathe our same air. Theatre can challenge, lead, comfort, and heal. My grief for my shuttered profession is tempered by my knowledge that theatre has always risen from the ashes of past plagues and disasters. But a return to live performances, the kind we treasured only two months ago, is now far in the future.
So what happens between now and then? And what will “then” look like once we live through the journey forward? Will we create vibrant virtual spaces that can fill the role that theatre has played in our cities and communities? What essential aspects of the art form can exist now when what defines it—its in person shared live-ness—is impossible? Theatre companies worldwide are rushing to create on-line content. But can we truly convene on line as we do on stage? Can we collectively think and feel about our humanity, our interconnectedness, our systems and shortfalls on Zoom? If we can, then live theatre will change. When we reach “then,” what kind of rehearsal room will I return to?
April 22, 2020. Almost 10pm. A director/playwright wrestles with her core beliefs about what theatre requires and what it provides. COVID-19 simultaneously erodes and strengthens what she knows to be true. Her next play is in process, under development, with no set opening date. But she has the beginnings of a story line.
Dr. Erika Svendsen is a social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station and is based in New York City. Erika studies environmental stewardship and issues related to hybrid governance, collective resilience and human well-being.
I am grateful for all those who are working outside during this crisis and the sacrifices they have made all these days. Nature’s stage crew, so to speak. In the future, I’d like to explore ways to help strengthen our green workforce and support those within it that are most vulnerable during times of crisis.
Nature’s Stage Crew
It’s true that my normal weekly routine has changed, but I have returned to an activity that I have always enjoyed: walking and watching.
At the beginning of this crisis, I was walking with friends. Then, with just one friend. Then, only with my husband. And then, alone. And in doing so, I remembered how much of my early research had been inspired by everyday urban nature-human observations. These days, before my household is awake, I rush outside to walk and look for signs. Signs that remind me of the reciprocity between humans and the non-human world. Signs that spark my curiosity. And signs that give me hope. I see sign on fences thanking hospital staff, teachers, and restaurant workers. I see purple ribbons tied around trees. I notice new vegetable plots carved out of front lawns and side yards. I see people setting out window boxes and planters.
I started to think about how my friends and family have been telling me how grateful they are for nature. Grateful for the trees and the trails, the forested parks and gardens, the playgrounds and lawns, the bikeways and waterfront parks. All providing bit of solace during these tragic times. I have to admit that I started to get a little defensive in my mind as I thought, “That’s cool. But do people realize that there is a stage crew that helps to put on this amazing public nature show?” I took my own walk in nearby Prospect Park in order to regain some calm repose and an inner voice reminded me, “Hey, remember that all this natural beauty doesn’t come easy.”
Each day, I look out the window to see the park across the street from my apartment. It has been locked for weeks. When the emergency orders began, people flocked to the parks for some fresh air. People gathered in a way that was too close for comfort, so many of the parks have closed. I watch as an elderly woman pushes a cart and stops at the gate. She looks defeated as she ponders the lock and chain. I think to myself, “Does she have another place to go? Where can she rest around here? She can’t possibly get on the subway or a bus to find another park!”
I recognize a park regular as he sits down on the edge of a street tree guard. He sets out a small cup for change. I see a worker walk toward the park with a morning coffee and bagel. He quickly pivots to sit on a stoop across the street. I hope no one comes out to usher him along before he finishes breakfast. I see a woman simply standing at the corner of the park. I see she is closing her eyes and tilting her face up, toward the sun.
As time goes on during the stay-at-home order, I see fewer people around the park. I still look out that window, waiting for my favorite redbud trees (Cercis canadensis) to bloom. I notice there are two people who return to the park each day. They arrive at different times. The morning person is a park worker, wearing a bright NYC Parks t-shirt. She is sweeping the park, picking up the occasional food scrap (sorry, squirrels) and straightening up. I now realize she has always been there, since the beginning of this crisis and long before.
In the afternoon, a man appears in the park and gets to work quickly, tending to the flowers and my redbud trees. Weeding and a bit of pruning today. I know him to be a park volunteer. I think about that. Where does he find the time? Like the park worker, he is wearing a mask and working alone, not speaking to anyone.
My thoughts go back to all the park workers out there, the volunteers and the greening NGOs in my city. In our parks, they are bravely showing up despite their own challenges. I know that many of these park workers are seasonal or temporary. I know that the greening NGOs are trying to find ways to adapt their field work, funding and programs as a result of this crisis so they can continue to support the nature just outside my window and well beyond.
I am grateful for all those who are working outside during this crisis and the sacrifices they have made all these days. Nature’s stage crew, so to speak. I am also proud of the network of people that I work with in my field of forestry and natural resource stewardship. In the future, I’d like to explore ways to help strengthen our green workforce and support those within it that are most vulnerable during times of crisis.
Abdallah is an architect, environmentalist and urban farmer. He works at the German International Cooperation (GIZ) and he is also the cofounder of Urban Greens Egypt, a startup aiming to promote the concept of Urban Agriculture in Cairo.
Planting is a representation of peace and hope and we should continue to encourage, support and spread it in such critical time, for the sake of our health and wellbeing. Let’s be hopeful and revive victory gardens again all over the world, let’s get back to our roots, and grow food and hope inside our cities.
Growing Hope in the time of a Pandemic
Do you think its the first-time humanity faced a dark cloud? Skimming through history books, mankind has been through serious and tough plights. But I always wondered what keeps us going in the face of any adversity. We as Human Beings are remarkably resilient as a species. We don’t fully understand the science, but we know that the “support of one another” is crucial and is what keeping us strong during such difficult times. The experiences that we are going through nowadays will probably stay in our hearts before our minds for the rest of our lives. Covid-19 should be a lesson to all of us on how to go beyond the norms and routines of our daily “for granted” lives and be more dynamic and resilient inside our cities and within our communities. It should also allow us to have a glimpse through our past, learn and reflect from previous times of distress, and highlight and get inspired by solutions, innovations and successes that we always refer to in our history books with pride and admiration.
Urban Agriculture’s loyalty through stormy seas of our history. Through history Urban Agriculture has been an effective tool and a supportive friend for lots of cities worldwide, especially during critical times of humanity. Urban Agriculture is nothing new. In fact, it’s been around for as long as humans have lived in cities! Through time, the significance of urban Agriculture has taken on different levels of meaning; from serving as tools for social reform, to promoting environmental justice, and as subsistence in times of food insecurity during wars or pandemics, and even as a simple pastime and leisure in times of prosperity.
During World War I and World War II, most supplies and food were prioritized for the war effort, leaving many at home to deal with scarcity. In order to boost food supplies, many countries promoted “Victory Gardens” or “War gardens”, or gardens cultivated by citizens on private and public land. Besides alleviating the strain on the public food supply, it also was a way to boost morale and patriotism. In the US, President Woodrow Wilson asked Americans to plant Victory Gardens to prevent food shortages. Victory gardens were responsible for about 41% of all consumed vegetable produce in the US in the year 1943 according to some resources 1.
Nowadays Urban agriculture can be crucial to feeding more than half of the world’s population, whom are residing in cities, potentially producing as much as 180 million tons of food a year—or about 10% of the global output of pulses and vegetables, according to a 2018 study published in the journal Earth’s Future 2.
World War II poster created by the United States Office of Emergency Management, circa 1941-1945. Image courtesy of Pinterest
Do we have a potential to grow food during this critical times ? Balconies, gardens, empty lots and roofs are potential spaces that we can make good use of and start growing different types of productive crops, and decrease stresses happening nowadays on our global food supplies. Panic buying in some countries during this crisis has led to empty supermarket shelves and an uptick in the purchase of seeds, according to media reports. Many urban farms across the world are switching to this kind of community-supported-agriculture model (CSA), which guarantees a weekly supply of produce and may save their recipients trips to crowded supermarkets. The idea can also have a direct impact on our usual visits to busy local markets and thus decrease possible health compromises from social interactions we unfortunately aren’t encouraged to do nowadays.
Planting is a representation of peace and hope and we should continue to encourage, support and spread it in such critical time, for the sake of our health and wellbeing. Let’s be hopeful and revive victory gardens again all over the world, let’s get back to our roots, and grow food and hope inside our cities.
Christine Thuring is a plant ecologist who integrates her love of life into creative collaborations and educational dialogues. While her expertise is expressed particularly in the built environment (green roofs, living walls, habitat gardens), she is passionately practical and enjoys restoring peatlands, mentoring students, leading interpretive walks, and advocating sustainable and healthy lifestyles.
I’m contemplating alternative and new ways by which to engage my energy, expertise,, and love for the world. It is a bit of an existential place, which enlists the whole range of my creative and scientific faculties. If this is the new normal, where “business as usual” no longer applies, then how do I wish to contribute?
How surreal, to be alive during this global pandemic. Surreal in the sense of living through a prophesy I recall from the beginning of my career. My memory may be hazy, but I’m certain that my cohort (Environmental Science and Biology, Trent University, 1995) discussed, even debated, which organism, if any, would put a dent into the irrepressible population of Homo sapiens? Would Kingdom Fungi, or Bacteria, reign supreme? The Viruses? Or would we bring it upon ourselves by permitting our leaders to ignore the precautionary principle?
Personally and professionally, COVID-19 has changed my life in various ways. I’m growing food and traveling less. I’m teaching online, which has actually been a big deal. I’ve always enjoyed teaching, but now I’m not so sure anymore. Maybe the “virtual classroom” will grow on me, I don’t know. The 2-dimensional quality gives a limited sense of connection with my students, and I’ve been quite stressed by the massive prep time required and the steep learning curve.
Meantime, I’m contemplating alternative and new ways by which to engage my energy, expertise, and love for the world. It is a bit of an existential place, which enlists the whole range of my creative and scientific faculties. If this is the new normal, where “business as usual” no longer applies, then how do I wish to contribute?
Do I stay with what I’ve been doing, teaching and advocating for ecological green infrastructure? Do I start up a new enterprise, to help re-build up the economy and the ecology? The latter idea is inspired by that aspect of the Great Depression in which governments created employment schemes to get some of the population working on public projects, like building infrastructure. In this moment in time, much work needs to be done on creating climate jobs, building resilience, transitioning to post carbon society, getting off pesticides, restoring degraded habitats, etc. Another contemplation is whether I should get into politics, and serve as a vocal force for good. I want to see an end to perverse subsidies (e.g., industries of war, fossil fuels) and for those funds to be transferred towards life affirming industries (e.g., renewable energy, organic agriculture, small business). I imagine that the latter are like small trees in a forest, waiting for the big trees to fall. Perhaps this pandemic is the equivalent of some big trees falling, creating a gap in the canopy, and now those alternative industries can get their share of the sunlight and move into the mainstream.
The tragedies of the pandemic are inconsolable, and much gratitude is owed to the small and large acts of kindness everyday. Whether this virus’ effect becomes that of a Plague remains to be seen. At the very least, it has created a space for us to slow down. Recalling the debate, Kingdoms Fungi and Bacteria will always reign supreme. The big question is whether Homo sapiens can organise itself in line with the precautionary principle.
Naomi Tsur is Founder and Chair of the Israel Urban Forum, Chair of the Jerusalem Green Fund, Founder and Head of Green Pilgrim Jerusalem, and served a term as Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, responsible for planning and the environment.
Since we are supposed to go no more than 500 meters from our homes, this is clearly a good time to see if we have all we need within that perimeter. A grocer’s? A small park? A school? A community garden?… Perhaps it is time to think just what is needed for a happy neighborhood and ask whether we have it.
Time to Rethink and Reset Our Urban Systems?
Many of us are spending time in contemplation and reflection during these difficult days. We have a gut feeling that beyond the immediate and severe impact of the global Corona pandemic, there will need to be game-changing restructuring of our systems in the period following it. However, post-Corona is as yet an indistinct concept, too hazy to consider, especially as we are barely managing to cope with the storm of the pandemic as it rages.
There is an inherent contradiction in our current circumstances—we need and want to pull together, but must do so while observing strict social distancing. Virtual work meetings and social interaction are all well and good, but not as productive nor as enjoyable as real-time human interactions. Moreover, the current shut-down throws the whole world into severely challenging economic territory.
I am among those who believe that in the post-Corona age the main shift will have to be in our economic thinking and planning. When Adam Smith wrote his famous treatise, “The Wealth of Nations”, published in 1776 (the same year that the U.S.A. gained independence….) he laid the foundations of modern economic thinking. He could not have been expected to, nor did he take into account that 250 years later the world’s population would have reached its current size, and that there would be a serious danger that global resources would no longer be sufficient to provide food, water, energy and other needs for the ever spiraling numbers. In 1776 the global population was 800,000,000, compared to 7,795,000,000 today. He could certainly not have anticipated a world in which 90 percent of the total population live in cities, nor one in which more than half of us are over the age of sixty. Add to that the current on-going climate crisis, with the steady rise of sea-levels, the increasing incidence of natural disasters and the life-threatening rise in temperatures, and you might agree that there is a sufficient basis to re-think our way of looking at things, even before the recent outbreak of Covid-19.
In spite of the rise of democracy in the western world, and the attempt made in some countries to establish a welfare state (my own country, Israel, among them), the free market economy is globally predominant. Adam Smith’s “hidden hand” still moves and shakes global economic trends.
Economics students are taught that the economy is healthy when there is growth. However, as early as the mid twentieth century, some economic thinkers were already pointing out that growth cannot go on forever, especially if we take into account the dwindling resources of a finite planet. So we currently live in a world where we have to over-consume in order to maintain a healthy economy, yet we must live modestly and consume mindfully, if we are to enable our planet to continue to support human life. I am sure that many will join me in finding an inherent contradiction here.
Adam Smith claimed that the job of government is to protect national borders, to enforce civil law and to engage in public works (education, infrastructure etc.). In our over-populated world of dwindling and finite resources, it makes sense for governments to invest in the kind of infrastructure that will conserve and protect natural resources—renewable energy, sewage treatment, desalination, innovative methods of food-growing, sustainable transportation, public health, social welfare and so on. I would humbly point out that most world governments are failing in this. Moreover, in the face of the current global Corona pandemic, world leaders are talking about a “temporary” breakdown of their economies, with the goal of picking up on production and consumption levels when this nasty patch is over.
How does Covid-19 fit into these dilemmas? The pandemic is first and foremost an equalizer, since it does not make any distinction between rich and poor, or people of different faiths, and has proved that it is truly borderless. Countries round the world are maintaining only essential services, and a tremendous drop in pollution levels has been marked worldwide as a result. On the other hand, we are paying a heavy economic price. There is a genuine spirit of community support, but a real danger that elderly people, living in physical isolation, may develop depression and anxiety.
In my own urban world, in a locked-down neighborhood of Jerusalem, I find it a fascinating game to try and reconcile the restrictions imposed on us with the concept of “local is good”, that reflects the spirit of modern sustainable urbanism. Since we are supposed to go no more than 500 meters from our homes, this is clearly a good time to see if we have all we need within that perimeter. A grocer’s? A small park? A shaded path to walk on without noise and air pollution? Kindergartens? A school? A family clinic? A community garden? A day center for the elderly? A post office? A glimpse of nature? Perhaps it is time to think just what is needed for a happy neighborhood. We might be surprised to learn the positive health impact of one that offers clean air, a taste of nature, plenty shade and locally grown fruit and vegetables…..
Looking ahead to the post-Corona era, dare we hope and strive for a better world, in which economic security does not go hand in hand with over-taxing of our natural and finite resources? Can we “repair our world”, by basing our economic planning on an equitable and sustainable system? If we do, we may look back on Corona as the chance we were given to rethink and reset our urban world, something we would have been much less likely to do if we had continued with business as usual.
Stéphane Verlet Bottéro (b. 1987) is an artist working at the intersection of social practice, installation, education, writing, gardening, and cooking. He is interested in the entanglements of community, materiality, body, and place. Based on site-specific research and durational interventions, his practice seeks to open spaces to unlearn and unsettle ways of inhabiting the world.
Can we, as artists, organize ourselves to inspire our institutions and societies to keep the engine on slow and never start again the machinery of neoliberal destruction? We talked long enough about politics in art. Time for action and art-as-politics.
On Valentine’s day this year, I was in Karlsruhe, Germany, to take care of the winter pruning of a fruit orchard with the ZKM museum staff. A few months before, I had made a proposal to the museum to reclaim and restore the abandoned meadow, legacy of a traditional fruit farming system that is among the most species-rich landscapes in Europe. The point was not only to regenerate a biodiversity hotspot and urban food forest, but also to sketch a terrestrial future in which museum would expand their maintenance practices, from human artifacts to non-human compositions.
This embodied experience came with a collective understanding of the institution’s necessary transformation towards radical sustainability, from carbon footprinting its upcoming exhibitions to an ongoing environmental policy working group. Landing on a world of pluriversal becomings implies to rethink all means of production, including cultural networks: travel slower, exhibit differently, etc.
Two months later, the world tipped. Bees thrive and trees blossom in the orchard field, giving a glimpse of those speculative projections. But darker futures may also be observed. Frontline struggles, unequal vulnerability, racist, sexist, and classist body politics. Artists are not spared: while symbolic work on trauma recovery will be essential, restrictions on travels and public gatherings will deeply inhibit this therapeutic function.
National culture agencies are setting up emergency funding. Museums and festivals are moving their programs online. I would also like to see in the current crisis, where and when it is possible, an encouragement to pause the race for audience figures, mega-exhibitions, hypermobility.
Like requests for conditional bailouts and calls to “not go back to normal” by other productive sectors, can we, as artists, organize ourselves to inspire our institutions and societies to keep the engine on slow and never start again the machinery of neoliberal destruction?
Ask museums, festivals and institutions to take binding environmental measures immediately (zero carbon venues, no flying policies, etc.)
Decolonize cultural networks and improve mobility for Global South artists
Shift focus to local/regional audiences and communities
Work towards stronger ethics, economic resilience and equality for staff and artists
End oil and other harmful corporate sponsorship
We talked long enough about politics in art. Time for action and art-as-politics.
Dr. Andreas Weber is a German academic, scholar and writer who holds degrees in Marine Biology and Cultural Studies. Andreas explores new understandings of life-as-meaning or ‘biopoetics’ and ‘biosemiotics’ in science and in the arts, and has authored 8 books.
I wonder what we will make of the insight that we are suddenly so vulnerable. I watch the glittering insects in the sun, much less numerous than some years ago behind this same window, and listen to the nightingale that plucks those insects from the twigs to feed their young. I sit in silence, until the first bat is out and shatters the pale sky with its ragged path.
The window of the room stands open and allows the late sunlight in. Outside, there is a big maple unfolding its green blossoms. On the small plot between my condo and the railway tracks stands an apple tree. The sun makes the blossoms shine with a creamy white. Insects oscillate in the air like dancing crystals.
Every couple of minutes a commuter train passes. I see a few people inside, widely dispersed, wearing face masks. After the train is gone, bird voices fill the silence. In the past, which ended a month and a half ago, this would have been a noisy work day afternoon in Berlin. Now there is stillness, and the quiet signs of all those which are not human.
Last summer I taught a seminar about “Collapse”. The summer had started like this, with a series of flamboyant and beautifully sunny days, for weeks in a row, without one drop of rain. I showed a movie from the early 2000s, “Children of Men”, by Alfonso Cuarón. The plot was set in a future about two decades on from the release date. Everything was pretty much the same, apart from the fact that no children were being born.
I retained the picture of a society trying to function in its usual incomplete way, while there was something deeply, profoundly off. It seemed invisible at first, but then you understood that the balance between birth and dying had invisibly shifted towards death. It felt like a grief over something immensely bad that could not be undone, like having killed somebody, or having lost a child. The birds sang, the sun poured its light into the evening, and somehow there was grief, and horror, and would not go away.We will live with the virus for some time to come. It is a strange plague that hits hard in some places, and is near to nonexistant in others, that seems to be terribly present and apathically absent at the same time. I sit at home and write and avoid the S-Bahn and the city, and the sun is warm, and something feels just slightly off, and unconsolably so.
I have been asking myself how much I will miss the clean air stirrend by the shining insects’ wings and the sweet waves of birdsong, when corona will be behind us. But in truth I doubt that we can plan for a time after. I watch the apple blossoms shiver in the sun, and I wonder that what awaits us, what has actually begun, is the time with corona.
It is a time where something is slightly off, and everything is changed, although we will be trying hard to pretend that we are going on with our business. It is a time where life has become radically cheaper. It’s a time where I won’t know if my next speaking gig, or the dinner with my son and his friends, will turn out to be life-threatening, for me, or for others.
I wonder what we will make of the insight that we are suddenly so vulnerable. I watch the glittering insects in the sun, much less numerous than some years ago behind this same window, and listen to the nightingale that plucks those insects from the twigs to feed their young. I sit in silence, until the first bat is out and shatters the pale sky with its ragged path.
We are the birds that make up their nest with everything they find: branches, bark, feathers, leaves, hair, and even strands of wool, any material to protect the essential: creatively reinventing what will emerge from this process of caring for the global nest.
We can imagine various scales of nests, of ways of housing, of inhabiting. From the constructions of the insects, to the planet nesting in the inhabited universe. This strange period, during which we live within a micro shelter, makes us understand the termite nest, the bird’s nest, and the social system of many forms of life. Some keep their social group, as it happens with bees or ants. Insects make their homes as protection for their offspring because they are delicate and in their immature stages need it. Thus, we are seeing ourselves in a global fabric of shared feelings and uncertainty. The nest contains the process of what is brewing inside it. Inside the social group, or the being itself. We are not even clear about what form that which is evolving is going to take.
Nest. Jewelry by Ligia Ceballos de Wiesner. Photo: María José VelascoImage of Okaina’s basketry. Photograph by Cecilia Duque. Creative language of the ethnic groups. Indigenous people of Colombia. Suramericana Publishers. 2012.
Bogota, a tropical megacity now led by an exceptional, gay woman, full of energy and enthusiasm, has managed to orient the supportive citizenry towards the self-care and care of the elders and the most vulnerable. In this period of another speed of perception and reality, where both in Bogota and in the other cities of Colombia development plans are being reconciled, the pandemic gives us an opportunity to rethink the ways of planning cities and territories. These plans will surely adjust to the new priorities that are being developed in the minds, of each individual, family niche and social group: to take care of the other is to take care of any manifestation of life. Participation and action take a priority role.
The world reacts to the ways of being connected and understanding that we function as a system and we must remain and decide together. Nesting has given us new time to relate, to slow down, to be more observant and to have a thought tied to the speed of the ancestral steps and paths. This vital interconnection is evident in networks: the world sings simultaneously. The neighbors integrate in gestures of solidarity and talk between balconies. This period, where the desire for the green becomes the great opportunity for those of us who have dreamed for years that the order would dance to the rhythm of the water and the soil. The public and mental health, which has finally taken relevance as never before, show the importance for each human being to feel their own breath walking in a place that privileges nature.
In the case of Bogota we hope that this will happen.
Ecology and economy are coming closer than ever, the era of valuing what is really productive has begun.
Nesting from our homes of introspection, we feel this great universal connection that will derive in new forms of education in a great global conversation.
In this period we have created and are perfecting the channels to have this great conversation. This pandemic has opened a crack for consensus among all global inhabitants. In this crack, citizen actions are already flourishing: consumption from local producers, strengthened solidarity and support networks, questioning of traditional pedagogical methods, forms of citizen participation, and valuing the essence of the inner nest.
We are the birds that make up their nest with everything they find: branches, bark, feathers, leaves, hair, and even strands of wool, any material to protect the essential: creatively reinventing what will emerge from this process of caring for the global nest.
Nested necklace, jewelry by Ligia Ceballos de Wiesner. Photo María José Velasco.
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TIEMPOS DE ANIDAMIENTO: Elogio al cuidado del otro
Somos las aves que componen su nido con todo lo que encuentran: ramas, cortezas, plumas, hojas, pelos, y hasta hebras de lana, cualquier material para proteger lo esencial: reinventando creativamente lo que va a emerger de este proceso de cuidar el nido global.
Podemos imaginar diversas escalas de nidos, de formas de alojarse, de habitar. Desde las construcciones de los insectos, hasta el planeta anidando en el universo habitado. Este extraño periodo que vivimos dentro de un micro resguardo nos hace comprender el nido del termitero, el de las aves, y el sistema social de muchas formas de vida. Algunos, guardan su grupo social, como sucede con las abejas o las hormigas. Los insectos, hacen su casa como protección de su prole, porque son delicados y en sus etapas inmaduras lo necesitan. Así nos estamos viendo en un tejido global de sentimientos e incertidumbre compartida. El nido contiene el proceso de lo que se está gestando en su interior. En el interior del grupo social, o del propio ser. Ni siquiera tenemos claridad de qué forma va a tomar aquello que está evolucionando.
Nido. Joya de Ligia Ceballos de Wiesner. Foto: María José VelascoImagen de la cestería de Okaina. Fotografía de Cecilia Duque. Lenguaje creativo de las Etnias. Indígenas de Colombia. Suramericana Editores. 2012.
Bogotá, una mega ciudad tropical recientemente liderada por una excepcional mujer gay, llena de energía y entusiasmo, ha logrado orientar a la ciudadanía solidaria hacia el autocuidado y el cuidado del abuelo y del más vulnerable. En este período de otra velocidad de percepción y de realidad, en donde tanto en Bogotá y como en las demás las ciudades de Colombia se están conciliando los planes de desarrollo, la pandemia nos da una oportunidad de replantear las formas de planear las ciudades y los territorios. Estos planes seguramente se ajustaran a las nuevas prioridades que se gestan en las cabezas de cada individuo, nicho familiar y grupo social: cuidar del otro, es cuidar cualquier manifestación de vida. La participación y la acción toman un papel prioritario. El mundo reacciona respecto a las formas de estar conectados y entender que funcionamos como sistema y debemos permanecer y decidir juntos. La anidación nos ha dado nuevos tiempos de relacionarnos, en ir más despacio, ser más observadores y tener un pensamiento atado a la velocidad de los pasos y caminos ancestrales. Esa interconexión vital se evidencia en las redes: el mundo canta en simultáneo. Los vecinos se integran en gestos solidarios y conversan entre balcones. Este periodo, donde el deseo por lo verde se convierte en la gran oportunidad para quienes soñamos desde años que el ordenamiento baile con el ritmo del agua y del suelo. La salud pública y mental, que por fin ha tomado relevancia como nunca, evidencian la importancia para cada ser humano a sentir su propia respiración caminando en un lugar que privilegie a la naturaleza. En el caso bogotano esperamos que suceda.
La ecología y la economía se acercan como nunca, se inicia la era de valorar lo realmente productivo.
Anidando desde nuestros hogares de introspección, sentimos esta gran conexión universal que derivará en nuevas formas de educación en una gran conversación global.
En este periodo hemos creado y perfeccionado los canales para tener esta gran conversación. Esta pandemia ha abierto la grieta para consensuar entre todos los habitantes globales. En esta grieta ya están floreciendo acciones ciudadanas: consumo a productores locales, redes de solidaridad y apoyo fortalecidas, cuestionamiento a métodos tradicionales pedagógicos, formas de participación ciudadanas y valoración a lo esencial del nido interior.
Somos las aves que componen su nido con todo lo que encuentran: ramas, cortezas, plumas, hojas, pelos, y hasta hebras de lana, cualquier material para proteger lo esencial: reinventando creativamente lo que va a emerger de este proceso de cuidar el nido global.
Collar anidado de Ligia Ceballos de Wiesner. Foto María José Velasco.
Working since the 1980s on social change issues while encouraging civic activity across North America, Dar provides support and consulting for localized food systems, especially farmers markets.
My work supporting farmers’ markets across the U.S. remains very much the same. The markets are innovating contactless procedures at a furious pace: new “drive-thru” markets, ticketed entry walk-thru markets, curbside pickup, “click and collect” pre-ordering procedures. My days start early and go late, and at the end of each I wonder if I could have done more. Yet it is such hopeful work.
/Today, on my walk around my neighborhood, I saw a total of around 40 people in the French Quarter where I would have seen thousands of workers, hustlers, visitors, and residents a month ago. And with the festivals cancelling until 2021, we expect a very slow return to our single economy (tourism) for the foreseeable future.
Even with that sobering reality looming over us in the next year or two, most residents still support our fierce public health-focused mayor who is determined to slow and then stop the massive rate of infection that New Orleans has suffered with since mid-March. That rate has as much to do with the health inequities that African-Americans live with at a higher rate as it is about the huge carnival celebration we hosted in January and February. Black New Orleans, who make up 60% of the city and only 34% of the state’s population, have a 70% of the infections. Even so, blaming it on our hedonistic Mardi Gras is the narrative assigned to us, and feels like the same misguided reproof we felt after Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t help our mood.
On the other hand, my work supporting the field of farmers’ markets across the U.S. remains very much the same. Our national organization has always been a remote workplace, providing technical assistance and advocacy for around 10,000 market sites, managed by about 4,000 different sizes and type organizations. Depending on their sophistication and their support, these organizations have (a) been able to open without too much trouble, (b) been delayed by government authorities in reopening when other food retail has not, or (c) unable to open at all because authorities too often confuse farmers markets with festivals. The markets are innovating contactless procedures at a furious pace: new “drive-thru” markets, ticketed entry walk-thru markets, curbside pickup, “click and collect” pre-ordering procedures. My days start early and go late with calls, video conferencing, texts, and emails asking for a resource, to share a triumph, or for me to connect them with a peer having the same issue. Right now, I work 7 days a week and wonder at the end of each if I could have done more, answered one more email, hosted another webinar or group call.
Yet it is such hopeful work.
I pick up food from local farmers and fishers a few times per month, having contacted them by phone or email. (Ironically, my nearby farmers markets have not yet reopened.) Tomorrow a group of friends will meet a fishing family outside of a friend’s house to get our seasonal drum, sheepshead, catfish, softshell crab, and shrimp orders. My family and friends check in with me regularly and my 80-year old mother keeps in touch by text. Yesterday I dropped off beignets outside of her door, which were made by a relatively new upstart bakery downriver that has pivoted its bustling sit-down café to a 3-hours per day window service offering its culturally appropriate items like Chantilly cake, yak-a-mein, and golden beignets covered in powdered sugar. She texted me later that they were the best she had eaten in years.
Xin Yu (aka Fish) is Shenzhen Conservation Director and Youth Engagement Director of The Nature Conservancy China Program. Since 2017, he has overseen TNC’s first City project in Shenzhen, China, focusing on Sponge City
Will the pandemic flame urban residents’ passion to get in touch with Nature? I really hope so. Will people further respect and take care of Nature after the post-pandemic world becomes the new normal? We need to find out and do more.
I have often chatted with my colleagues at The Nature Conservancy about why we should pay more attention to urban conservation. Many don’t quite understand my overwhelming confidence in urbanism and its relationship with conversation or biodiversity. Some of them are used to working in the field and not in favor of being engaged in human society, and some of them might not be able to imagine what can happen to people’s urban world when one (re)integrates biodiversity.
Talking about COVID-19 pandemic, I’m certain that its enormous impact over the economy, governance, and people’s lifestyles is bringing us a different urban world, leaving us no choice but to change our ways of working. For those who are not familiar with urban conservation, I believe this has opened a door to them, allowing them to rethink based on the recent evidence from around the world showing a visual increase in urban biodiversity in just a few months, when most urban residents are staying home. These images press us to look at our cities as habitats shared by so many other types of creatures. This is a new lesson to teach most of us that urban land, rivers and coasts have never been truly taken away by humans from mother Nature.
Urban conservation is all about introducing changes to people’s minds and behaviors. However, due to COVID-19, urban residents are now changing themselves in many ways. It has become more difficult to organize them physically to participate in conservational actions.
In Shenzhen, the third largest city in China, after the pandemic curve has been flattened for a couple of weeks, we recently launched a responsive action called the “Grow together” Community Pro-nature Project. As a comforting nature education activity, social media and Zoom-like online conferencing tools were used to organize online workshops to provide trainings to community members about gardening. At same time, we distributed seed packets to the community while adhering to social distancing measures. Residents are now growing plants at home and will later transfer them to local community gardens or public green spaces.
It seems that rebuilding the relationship between people and Nature, as well as between people themselves are the keys to our future work. We need to gain more skills on communicating with people via remote platforms to encourage them to stay closer to Nature in a more united way. Will the pandemic flame urban residents’ passion to get in touch with Nature? I really hope so. Will people further respect and take care of Nature after the post-pandemic world becomes the new normal? We need to find out and do more.
Dr. Carly Ziter is a new Assistant Professor in the Biology department at Concordia University in Montreal, associated with Concordia's hub for Smart, Sustainable, and Resilient Cities and Communities.
I desperately miss interacting with family, friends, and colleagues in person—but I do plan to be more intentional about the choices I make, and to appreciate every family visit, conference, and chat in the hallway a little bit more as we make our way to a new normal.
As a new professor, I’ve spent the past year working with my very first cohort of graduate students, preparing for our first big field season, and generally setting the stage for a long-term research program. Covid has brought disappointments (the inevitable cancellation of professional opportunities), and tough decisions (which projects to put on hold, or let go entirely). It’s hard not to feel some sadness—or maybe self-pity—watching career opportunities fade away just when I felt I was gaining momentum. However, the increased media focus on urbanism and the importance of local nature has also re-invigorated my commitment to build a research program centred on co-production of greener, more sustainable cities.
I also feel incredibly fortunate to have a relatively secure position. Having made this transition so recently, I can’t help but empathize with students and early career researchers entering an (even more) uncertain job market. It’s clear Covid is no equalizer; disproportionately affecting those already disadvantaged by our current systems. Moving forward, I hope we can collectively find equitable ways to account for the inevitable disruptions to productivity, and protect those at vulnerable career stages. I know I will continue to reflect on how I can better use my position to support those facing difficult circumstances—Covid-related or otherwise.
Despite the many challenges, if there is a professional silver lining to our work-from-home reality it’s a strengthening of communities. Colleagues and collaborators have been incredibly generous with their time and advice throughout this transition, and I sincerely hope this collegiality and kindness continues long after we’re back in our physical workspaces and the hectic pace of academia resumes. I’m also encouraged by my students’ resilience—adjusting to online courses, developing new research directions after cancelled field seasons, and supporting peers. I’ve worked hard to build a positive lab environment this past year, and recent events have affirmed that a culture where we make time for and support each other must be a priority as we enter post-Covid life.
Finally, days full of Zoom, Slack, Moodle, and more have of course highlighted technological promises and pitfalls. Our department has embraced virtual communication, and my lab has finally developed a decent online workflow—changes that will improve communication long term. I will soon attend my first online conference, and am optimistic that virtual meetings will catalyze more climate-friendly, accessible options post-Covid. On a personal note, I video chat with family weekly, my college roommates have revived our years-old group chat, and my 85-year-old grandmother has learned to text. While I wish it hadn’t taken a pandemic, I am grateful for the reminder to slow down and prioritize connecting with the important people in my life. I won’t say I’m ready to go fully online or flight free in my work or personal life—I desperately miss interacting with family, friends, and colleagues in person—but I do plan to be more intentional about the choices I make, and to appreciate every family visit, conference, and chat in the hallway a little bit more as we make our way to a new normal.
The COVID-19 outbreak that began early in 2020 has been an accelerator of how outer public and private spaces are perceived and valued as places for shelter, amusement, and social gathering.
Urban public space has been a subject of rethinking for decades regarding its role as a catalyst for revitalization and as a promoter of social interaction. Thus, most cities have experienced substantial improvements which positioned them in a better ranking of liveable cities, since the type and quality of urban public space have also been associated with the quality of life.
Life quality constitutes a subjective state of comfort that a citizen has in relation to their experience of living and developing in the city. Safety, health, cultural activities, infrastructure, diversity of places, mobility, and citizen participation are some of the important issues that control it. It is clear that part of this satisfaction is linked to public space, which does not only depend on urban services and goods, but also involves factors related to social interaction and organization.
Urban greenspace has long been excellent as a fundamental component in the structuring of outdoor space for its contribution to well-being and mental health. This positioning gained strength in the era of Hygienism, long before the urban revitalization movements of recent decades were installed, focusing mainly on the functionality of public space.
The COVID-19 outbreak that began early in 2020 has been an accelerator of how outer public and private spaces are perceived and valued as places for shelter, amusement, and social gathering. Some previous TNOC essays and roundtables are worth reading again, as they bring an account of ideas to navigate the pandemic and rethink cities in the desired post-COVID era.
To explore the importance that people gave urban green during the pandemic, Baillie (2020) analysed over 40 million posts published through the social network Twitter, finding two trending topics: “enjoying nature from home” and “outdoor exercise”.
Globally, over the course of the COVID-19 outbreak, visits to parks and squares have increased, and new personal rituals and habits with their local environment developed in an effort to escape confinement. Parks, squares, and waterfronts became dance floors, gyms, and open-air halls to celebrate events. In other words, the pandemic strongly modified the relationship between neighbours and nearby green spaces (images below).
Square in Floresta Neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. Clowns with masks cheering the public while adults get vaccinated (A. Faggi August 2021)A beach in Puerto Madryn as a place to celebrate a wedding (A. Faggi January 2022)
In Argentina, between March and July 2020, only health, security, and food supply workers, or those involved in human care tasks were allowed to leave their houses. The rest of the inhabitants could only move around a radius of up to 500m from their homes for their essential supplies. During the strict confinement period (image below), visits to green spaces decreased by about 87%. Then these restrictions were gradually relaxed, and, by October 2020, the practices of outdoor physical activities and social meetings were finally permitted first to be performed in open spaces. As this happened, people visiting green spaces increased, reaching a level 45% below the baseline pre-COVID. Highly populated districts with low green areas densities showed the highest mobility rates (Apple 2020).
Empty streets and buses during the Corona virus lockdown (A. Faggi Buenos Aires, September 2020)
Green spaces became the meeting places in the first place. A recent publication comparing the perception of residents about the UG in Buenos Aires city pre, during, and post-pandemic, based on 1740 surveys and interviews (Marconi et al. 2022) gives interesting results. Respondents of diverse social and demographic profiles assigned similar meaning to UG when asked before and during the COVID-19 confinement. They recognize green areas as “places to be with nature”. This opinion changed post-lockdown as UG spaces were considered “important places in the city”.
This is striking, since in Buenos Aires the density of green areas per inhabitant is low (6.09 m2/person) and the spaces for the parks and squares were not planned in advance, parks being located in vacant lots. https://elgatoylacaja.com/pisar-el-cesped.
What other examples of change triggered by COVID-19 can be found in some cities in the south of Latin America?
As in other parts of the world, cities have reallocated road space from cars to provide more space for people to stay in bars and restaurants (image below), for bicycles and people to move safely, respecting physical distancing rules. One of the proposals that came with the pandemic is the slow streets, which remain closed to cars and are only accessible to pedestrians, bicycles, and roller skates.
Tables and chairs from a bar in Buenos Aires advancing on the street where cars used to park (A. Faggi January 2022)
Consumption habits have changed significantly due to fear of contagion, which added to strict confinement measures, and increased the number of workers making home deliveries. A study carried out by the IDB Lab and Digital Future Society shows a home delivery increase of 81% between March and June 2020 in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, a multi-stakeholder project created a bicycle parking space as a secure rest-waiting area for those workers, in what was previously a car parking lot, with sanitizing devices and solar energy charging for cell phones.
The pandemic also changed the way we work. With the installation of remote working, the desire to live in a garden city where infrastructure, nature, and landscape merge was realized by many families. Thus, many families moved to localities that were previously only summer tourist destinations. An example is Pinamar, a seaside resort in the South Atlantic that combines sea with forest. With 55,000 inhabitants it had a demographic growth of 17.5% in the last 18 months. Despite the economic retraction that Argentina is experiencing, building construction in Pinamar has grown 225%, eight times higher than the country average with 25 % more shops open than in 2019.
The 2,500 families who moved in the last few months appreciate a city that strives for nature conservation and an adaptive management of the waterfront.
Pinamar, a small town at the Atlantic coast, an attractive place to move and escape the hectic life of the Buenos Aires metropolis (December 2021)
Paradoxically, in the last two years, not only the virus has been mutating, cities did too.
The pandemic made visible shortcomings in the planning of public space, including accessibility, flexibility, design, management, connectivity, and equitable urban distribution. The cities that are best positioned are those who reacted quickly by adopting a political agenda that brings together urban planning, community development, environmental rehabilitation, and public health.
In these two years, the Coronavirus has been a catalyst for the magnificent ideas that the Danish architect Jan Gehl (2010) has preached since his graduation in 1960: Cities for people, with the urgent need to increase more square meters for common interests. His ideas indicate the need to plan cities on a human scale, where to find people: friendly and safe streets to walk along and stop to see details and for social interaction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL_RYm8zs28.
Let us hope that this street’s recognition as structuring channels in which social meaning, mobility, civic engagement, human health, and environmental integrity converge last forever, offering an encouraging future to our cities. If that were the case, the tragedy of the virus would not have been in vain.
Baillie R (2020) How social distancing has renewed our love for nature, and what it means for a sustainable future. Granite J 4(1):27–36
Gehl, Jan (2010) Cities for people. Washington, United States Island Press
Marconi P, Perelman P, Salgado V (2022) Green in times of COVID‑19: urban green space relevance during the COVID‑19 pandemic in Buenos Aires City Urban Ecosystems https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-022-01204-z
Dense and poor neighborhoods in Africa have special challenges for Covid-19 response, from the need to communicate health recommendations in local languages to the fact that migrant laborers, who fear deportation and retaliation by employers, have little incentive to embrace community-wide testing and report symptoms.
We live in, to say the least, a risky urban world. It is a historical fact that pandemics always impact cities differently. From the Athens plague in 430BC, which led to fundamental changes in city regulations and identities, to the Black Death in the Middle Ages, which disrupted class power structures in European societies, to the 2014-2015 specter of Ebola across sub-Saharan Africa that brought to bear the interconnected nature of cities in the global north and south, pandemics often reinvigorate urban systems. In the COVID-19 era, the most hard-hit areas in the world have been the cities of Wuhan (China), Milan (Italy), Madrid (Spain), and the New York City metro area (USA).
Richard Sennett, a professor of urban studies at MIT and senior adviser to the UN on its climate change and cities programme, believes that in the future there will be a renewed focus on finding urban design solutions for individual buildings and wider neighbourhoods that enable people to socialize without being packed “sardine-like” into compressed restaurants, bars and clubs—although, given the incredibly high cost of land in big cities like New York and Hong Kong, success here may depend on significant economic reforms as well[i]. By drawing on this expert opinion and the facts on ground, it is fair to argue that the stealth transmission of COVID-19 means getting comfortable with muddled urban systems.
Muddling urban systems
Ever since the introduction of COVID-19 transmission control measures, such as frequent hand washing and social distancing, there have been tensions between what urban dwellers (including health workers) are used to and the dramatic change in daily routines that are associated with the guidelines passed on by mayors and governors. Besides the constitutional scrutiny of COVID-19 measures at national and municipal levels, which has put technocrats in city halls on their tentacles, the public is increasingly asking when and how will mobility restrictions be unwound. Should lock downs be phased, extended or lifted sector by sector? These urban governance questions require clarity and consistent messaging, as scientists and their colleagues in policy circles take on the risky endeavour of presenting evidence that speaks truth to power. The stealth nature of COVID-19 transmissions and the possibilities of its rebound if restrictions are lifted, are making mathematical and epidemiological models muddled, thus yielding tensions between public health imperatives, economic decisions and civil liberties[ii].
The global stress of addressing critical supply shortages, including respirators, gloves, face shields, gowns, and hand sanitizer, has already indicated how the recycling and re-use of urban waste can be the solution to an unfolding global health and economic crisis. Medical health workers are fashioning personal protective equipment (PPE) out of clinical waste bags, plastic aprons and borrowed skiing goggles[iii]. Muddling life, however, is not only restricted to urban health systems—like a cardiac arrest in a body that already carries the scars of chronic, untreated disease[iv]—but also water, transport, sanitation, waste management, food, and energy systems. Auto parts like existing drugs and vaccines are being repurposed into the much-needed ventilators and clinical trials respectively, as part of the efforts around flattening the curve in American cities[v].
In Africa, COVID-19 has been confirmed in all nations, except Lesotho, between 12 March and 15 April 2020[vi]. Urban households in informal settlements, which are often logistically challenging areas in terms of executing the WHO guideline of identify, test, trace, isolate and treat cases due to poor-resourced local health units, may only practice prudence and patience around social distancing, hand-washing and self-isolation, if food, waste management services, and water are channelled to them either free-of-charge or at a much reduced cost. In addition, local communities in African cities need to understand the behavioural changes required using local dialects. Mobile phone penetration has been repurposed as a COVID-19 tech that educates the public through the use of USSD Codes (an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data code that is programmed into your SIM card or your cell phone to make it easier to perform certain actions, e.g. #165*2#). The USSD Codes have enabled mobile phone owners check and exchange information about exposure and testing for COVID-19, in a way that speaks to local dialects in Africa[vii].
South Korean soldiers in Seoul trying to control the spread of COVID-19, 6 March 2020. Credit: World Economic Forum
Looking ahead, cities across the world will inevitably have to make important public health, economic, governance, and ecological decisions with less information than usual and reverse recently adopted policies. This argument is based on latest research published by medical professionals, the World Health Organisation (WHO), Center for Disease Control (CDC), and other highly-regarded sources. Doctors and clinicians will need to assess disease severity and work out treatment options without being able to examine patient or measure pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, or oxygen saturation[viii]. Effective measures that match the constraints of the local context in African cities may call for a shift from reliance on centralised government-run water and sewerage systems, to innovative use of urban natural assets for water access (such as springs and swamps), and partnerships that create a safe and affordable system for sourcing clean water using locally-made water pumps[ix].
Quicker case identification and strengthening surveillance to trace contact and transmissions in communities, means exploring the interdependencies between analogue and technological options. Case data gathered as the outbreak proceeds (such as infections recorded at a health unit) will have to be coupled to the use of spatial media technologies for digitally mapping transmission rates in urban settlements, smart phones for visual content and artificial intelligence[x]. This data will also have to be compared with information on increased frequency and reach of travel, changing patterns of land use, changing diets, wars and social upheaval and climate change[xi], for the reason that such factors influence interactions between humans and the reservoir hosts of emerging pathogens, facilitating exposure to zoonotic viruses and spill over infections in people, and allow emerging viruses to spread more easily through human populations.
Amongst digitally literate urban populations, social distancing may be replaced by distant socialising, where people stay connected using smart technologies, due to the stress, loneliness and depression that arises from families and workmates being apart for a long time[xii]. Debunking myths and misinformation about the origins, spread, and effects of infectious diseases, including COVID-19, is not only restricted to the mandates of Infectious Disease Institutes, CDC and WHO, but also Tech Companies like Google and Facebook, as well as governors and mayors of city states and parents using credible sources of information to talk to their children[xiii]. Street and urban artists in Vietnam have now stepped out from the traditional roles organising mass gatherings for launching their albums, to using digital technologies (such as YouTube) to educate their funs about hand washing solutions using songs.
Re-thinking urban sustainability along COVID-19
As the globe navigates the tensions and contradictions associated with COVID-19, cities will have to match their sustainability plans and policies with the need to not only pull back the speed of transmissions and infections, but also moderate the risk of exacerbating poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. The suspension of intra-city public transport, closing entertainment venues and banning public gatherings[xiv] can bring about short-term gains, but there is need to know that such mobility restrictions may worsen existing sustainability challenges. Cities are habitats of mobile residents pursuing different livelihood options, which are part and parcel of the functioning of interconnected urban systems, including, employment, transport, food, water, security, energy, health, sanitation, waste management, and housing systems.
The lessons from the Ebola Outbreak of 2014-15 indicate that quarantines, which were used as response measure in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, resulted in large waste disposal needs and other water, sanitation and hygiene vulnerabilities that put a strain on the governance and delivery of services[xv]. At one point in Freetown-Liberia, nearly 50% of the population was under quarantine. This meant a huge number of households in often logistically challenging areas required food and water transported to them, coupled to flash floods that make neigbourhood paths impassable[xvi]. Migrants in urban neigbourhoods, who fear deportation and retaliation by employers, have little incentive to embrace community-wide testing and report symptoms of COVID-19 at designated health units and labs.
In the United States, 45 percent of adults between the ages 19 to 64 are inadequately insured and 44 million are underinsured as of 2018, leading to high co-pays and out-of-pocket costs[xvii]. These individuals may be less likely to seek care for early symptoms of covid-19, at high-risk of contracting the disease, and to then facilitate spread through whole populations. While they may help contain the spread of COVID-19, quarantines and isolation techniques that depend on demarcated borders between residential and commercial properties can be difficult to implement sustainably, because life and survival in cities is about inclusion, trust and power relations in urban spaces.
The resolve and determination of different urban dwellers can challenge the ability of municipal agents to sustain social distancing techniques. This has already been indicated by spring breakers in Miami who have continued to go for beach life despite dire health warnings over the coronavirus[xviii]. City lockdowns along apartment complexes and commercial routes did not stop Reilly Jennings and Amanda Wheeler to tie the knot on 20 March 2020 at a ceremony held on a small street in the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights[xix]. Schools and universities across cities in the world are closing for weeks or longer and this measure may be challenged by families that lack home-schooling habits and technology for virtual education, leading to delays in realizing the gains of containment strategies[xx]. Therefore risk-sensitive COVID-19 urban plans are required to reduce accumulated risk and to better consider the limitations of strategies that have worked in China.
Conclusions
Actions and inactions towards COVID-19 hold a transformative turn in the promise of inclusive and sustainable cities, as per Agenda 2030 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The argument that leapfrogging sustainability in cities means scaling up local solutions to incrementally upgrade urban systems, seems incongruent with the stealth transmission of COVID-19, the possibility of its rebound and the unprecedented breadth of restrictions that feed uncertainty into not only public health but also economic, social and ecological systems. Intrusive actions that lead to muddled urban systems is the reality we are being confronted with. Stay-at-home measures mirror the interconnected nature of urban housing, food, transport, energy, water, waste management and urban governance challenges, difficult to disentangle like the imperceptible or non-distinct nature of the illnesses associated with COVID-19. Therefore re-contextualizing the global goal of sustainable and inclusive cities will be necessary at international, national and municipal levels.
I began to wonder how we can foster attachment and investment without exclusionary territoriality…Through stewardship, suddenly I realized I’m using the word “we”.
Since spring 2014, I have been making humble attempts to care for the street tree in front of my apartment building—described here. In becoming a steward, I began to perceive neighbors and passers-by as potential threats to the tree. Trash, dog poop, car doors, children’s feet, bicycles, and road salt: these were my challenges to conquer. About the new cultural institution on my block, Pioneer Works, I wrote:
“Also, we had a new hipster art space just two doors down, and all the parties and openings to go with it; this led to a rise in the foot traffic and cigarette butts we encountered on the street. Most mornings I would stoop to clean the accumulated garbage out of the pit.”
Suddenly, I was feeling like the grumpy old man in cartoons shouting, “get off my lawn!” despite the arts space being just the kind of engaged institution that one hopes to see in a neighborhood. I didn’t want to feel this way, and began to wonder how we can foster attachment and investment without exclusionary territoriality.
As anyone knows who has tried to create or grow something in the public realm, there will always be setbacks: intentional vandalism, accidental breakage, and slow decay. Doing this sort of stewardship necessitates constant, ongoing, and determined investment of time, energy, material inputs, and money. It requires some mix of stubbornness and optimism. And I’m not sure whether it requires crazy wisdom or beginner-mind naiveté, or a mix of both.
A tree we stewarded on Pioneer St. Photo: Lindsay Campbell.
I certainly now see tree pits differently—I marvel at those who can create verdant 5 x 9 foot garden patches. I admire a well-crafted tree guard that can last through NYC winters. I want to learn the secrets from the winners of the Greenest Block in Brooklyn competition. I take pictures of everything from tomato plants and corn in mini-agricultural tree pits; to Midtown beds filled to the gills with manicured tulips, planted by building supers and Business Improvement Districts; to handmade tiny tree guards that look like the Brooklyn Bridge. I dream about tires, bathtubs, pickle barrels, boots, cinder blocks and many other forms of DIY container gardens that I see lovingly cared for on sidewalks and front yards. And I know that I *definitely* do not have a green thumb (yet).
Tulip flowers in tree bed, Midtown, Manhattan. Photo: Lindsay CampbellTire planter in Washington, D.C. Photo: Natalie Campbell
But how could I come to see my neighbors differently? Not as threats, but as allies, compatriots, and fellow travelers in the urban forest?
In 2015, I met Carmen Bouyer, an artist in residence at Pioneer Works, whose practice focuses on sustainability, dialogue, and urban landscape. It took a community garden on public housing in the Rockaways, where we both have worked on a project called Landscapes of Resilience, to bring me together with my neighbor, Carmen, who had been working just a few doors down. Carmen had led workshops at the site where I was doing research on community stewardship post-Hurricane Sandy out in the Rockaways, focused on creating signage and lighting, engaging residents in proclaiming their love, attachment, and pride in place for Beach 41st Street.
I learned that Carmen, a Parisian-Brooklynite, was organizing a series of local NYC “Cultures of Resilience” roundtables, timed to align with the COP21 Meeting in Paris, and talking about what we can do to practice sustainability and resilience every day at home. She also shared updates from the climate talks, conveyed through news reports and activist and artist friends back in Paris.
Carmen invited me over to Pioneer Works to tour her studio space and the rest of the artists’ studios and community spaces. While I had walked through gallery shows on the ground floor and relaxed in their lovely backyard, I had never walked up the stairs, despite the many open studios they held: until now. Now I began to see possibility: meeting rooms, gathering spaces, even a community radio station. My prior conceptions about a “hipster” art space began to shift.
Then, Carmen told me about plantings of native plants she had done along the Brooklyn waterfront and lightbulbs began to go off. I encouraged Carmen to see the trees just outside her door as an area for ecological engagement. Maybe if Carmen and I worked together, we could get Pioneer Works not only to care for its incredible, shire-like landscape inside its fence, but to turn its gaze outward onto its immediate street, where the young street trees on the still-industrial, heavily truck-trafficked route were struggling. Maybe they would even let us run a hose from their tap, so we wouldn’t have to carry 10 gallon buckets down from the fourth floor to water our trees in the summer.
Carmen’s “Clean, Prune, Mulch!” flyer. Image courtesy of Carmen Bouyer.
So, we decided to team up. I attended one of Carmen’s roundtables, and we worked together to organize a winter stewardship day on the block. We got mulch and bulbs from Gowanus Canal Conservancy, or GCC, and NYC Parks. Having a more established stewardship group from one neighborhood over lend us a hand with materials, knowledge, and human-power made our little stewardship day move from potential to possible. GCC brought a van filled with trowels, shovels, pole pruners, mulch, buckets, and hundreds of bulbs. They also brought stewardship expertise in the form of Bob Lesko and Leila Mougoui, GCC volunteer leaders, who showed us the ropes. Carmen and Bob were already certified as Citizen Pruners, so they gave some of the older trees a little spruce up. Several of our neighbors and roundtable attendees came out, but one of my favorite surprises was that cyclists along the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway stopped to admire our work and even join in. This was unplanned, spontaneous, and perfect.
Planting bulbs on our stewardship day. Photo: Lindsay CampbellStewards at work in front of the GCC truck. Photo: Lindsay CampbellCarmen and Bob pruning trees. Photo: Lindsay Campbell
Our little two-block stretch is already a vital corridor, despite its hardscrabble looks. It is situated at a bend in the Greenway, with Pioneer Works on one end, and Bait and Tackle bar on the other. We are a small, two block connector between the commercial heart of our neighborhood (Van Brunt Street) and our waterfront spine (Imlay and Conover Streets). While many feet and wheels already traverse this social corridor, we are now envisioning it as an enhanced social-ecological corridor. I would love for our sweat equity (instead of a dollar donation) to earn us recognition as the official “adoptees” of the two block spur. Maybe someday we could even be mapped as a perpendicular offshoot/feeder to the greenway itself.
We are having our second Pioneer Street tree stewardship event this June, and hoping our momentum will gather. NYC Parks is coming to give us training as Super Stewards, which will enable us to apply for mini-grants and access free materials. GCC is coming back again with their grow van. We want to continue to mulch, prune, and water. And we want to get beyond just flowers to also include perennial shrubs and native grasses. We would love to have interstitial planter boxes among the trees, inspired by the work of GCC.
Suddenly I realize I’m using the word “we.”
Our informal group of friends and neighbors is becoming, slowly, a stewardship group. I say “hi” to new friends I met at the mulching day on the B61 bus. Marisa Prefer, one of our volunteers, now got a job as the head gardener for Pioneer Works, thanks to her talents as a farmer/gardener and introductions facilitated through Carmen. Carmen and I are plotting designs for signs and flags for all of our trees. I’m sending them both research articles about urban agriculture and urban forestry. We are conspiring, dreaming, and laughing. Suddenly, on a rainy day in April, I’m helping Marisa mulch trees in the Pioneer Works yard—and I realize that my desire to pull them out onto the street has simultaneously pulled me in to embrace this space. Next thing I know, I’m fantasizing about their yard as a potential wedding locale for me and my fiancé.
For the last decade or so, I’ve been researching and working to help visualize and understand stewardship as a part of environmental governance in cities through the Forest Service’s STEW-MAP project. Stewards help conserve, manage, monitor, educate about, or advocate for the environment (Svendsen and Campbell 2008). We’ve found that there are hundreds of civic stewardship groups citywide and in other cities across the country where we have replicated the study (Baltimore, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Juan, PR). In New York City, about a third of the groups are like our Pioneer Street group—volunteer, emergent, unfunded—and half have no 501c3 status (STEW-MAP 2007; Fisher et al. 2012). At the same time, there are approximately a dozen professionalized, nonprofit umbrella groups that are playing a crucial brokering role, sharing information and resources between citywide public agencies and the local neighborhood grassroots (Connolly et al. 2013). These networked relationships present novel pathways for communication and shared action, and create a more flexible, adaptive approach to governance of the urban environment (Connolly et al. 2014).
Being a part of this progression from idea, to conversation between two people, to catalyzing a wider group of loose social ties, to networking with other organizations and institutions gives me a chance to study stewardship from within, to embody it.
As for the Pioneer Street stewards, we now have a vision of what is possible and we continue to transform our little corner of the world—ever so slightly. In so doing, I’ve realized that we also transform ourselves.
There is a difference between equality and equity. Equality says that everybody can participate in our success and equity says we need to make sure that everybody actually does participate in our success and in our growth. A just city is a city free from both inequity and inequality.
Growth for the sake of growth alone cannot solve inequality and inequity. But solving such inequalities and inequities can spur growth.
We pay a significant price for inequities—in the billions in our cities, in the trillions nationwide. Growth is commonly pointed to as a solution, but growth for the sake of growth alone cannot solve these inequalities and inequities. However, solving these inequalities and inequities gets us growth.
Inequities make our cities risky business ventures. We don’t have the workforce that we need because we are not getting everyone into the workforce; we don’t have the consumer base that we need because not everyone can afford to consume. It creates an atmosphere where people are hesitant to invest because they don’t know if they’re going to have the consumer base or the workforce base that they need.
My city of Minneapolis suffers from some of the largest racial disparities in America on almost any measure: Employment, housing, health, education, incarceration—the list goes on. For example, while 67 percent of white kids graduate on time from Minneapolis Public Schools, only 37 percent of African American and Latino kids do, and just 22 percent of American Indian kids. When you consider that in just a few years, a majority of Minneapolis’ population will be people of color, this disparity is economically unsustainable, in addition to being morally wrong.
Minneapolis is in the midst of a building boom; cranes dot the sky as far as the eye can see. But growth alone can’t solve our equity problem. It’s not turning Minneapolis into a just city, because our current growth doesn’t include everybody. Even though our overall unemployment rate has declined, the gap between white people and people of color remains the same.
The moral of this story is that if your boat is leaky or you don’t have one to begin with, the rising tide can’t and won’t lift you.
In our just city we must accept that inclusive growth is a better strategy than growth alone. Inclusive growth means that your life outcome is not determined by your race, age, gender, or zip code. Inclusive growth means we aren’t leaving any genius on the table. To achieve this, we need two things: universal shared goals about what we want for ourselves as a people and as a community, and the policies that will ensure that people get there.
What is a universally shared goal? There are a lot of them in America: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for starters, or dignity for our senior citizens through a safe retirement (Social Security) and accessible, affordable health care (Medicare). Often, we don’t even have to voice shared goals such as these to know that we all want them.
As mayor, one of my jobs is to help make sure that everybody in our community shares our goals as a city and has a say in the goal. Residents must understand that there’s something in it for them. When there’s something in it for everyone, everyone wants that something—and inclusive growth offers something for everyone.
For instance, in my region of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, if we eliminated all disparities by 2040, our regional planning agency estimates that 274,000 fewer people would live in poverty, 171,000 more people would have high school diplomas, 124,000 more people would have jobs—and all of us would benefit from $31.8 billion dollars more in personal income. The same pattern holds true globally—the International Monetary Fund found that for every 10 percent decrease in inequality, the length of periods of economic growth increase by 50 percent. So if we reduce our inequalities, we will grow faster and for longer than if we had done nothing at all. In America, we could add $1.2 trillion to our economy by eliminating inequity. Inclusive growth should be a shared goal—and must be one, if we are truly committed to building a just city.
Inclusive growth requires that we tailor our policies. Let’s say we have a goal: We want everybody to be able to look over a six-foot fence to see a ball game. Folks that are over six feet tall are going to be able to see over that fence without a problem, but because I’m short, I’m going to need a box to stand on to be able to look over that fence.
If we are all invested in making sure that everybody reaches a goal, because we know there’s something in it for all of us—whether we are white people, high-income people, people of color, or lower-income people—then we need to tailor policies to make sure that that happens. The great news is that we have tools to help make this happen.
Education spurs growth—and according to the Federal Reserve, there is a 15-17 percent return on investment for education in early childhood. It is one of the many reasons I started my Cradle to K initiative, which is focused on getting kids aged zero to three the brain development they need so they don’t begin their education at a severe, and often times insurmountable, disadvantage. The initiative is working on closing the word gap, parent involvement, early childhood screening, and improved mental health services. Now if you couple that with access to affordable childcare, which allows parents to participate in the workforce, and if that childcare becomes child development-centered childcare, you get a win: parents participate in the workforce, and kids get the development-centered childcare that will help them succeed. We can all support that.
In Minneapolis, we are also spending a fair amount of time on removing obstacles that keep people from participating in the workforce and in shared success. For example, we are participating in initiatives like President Obama’s TechHire to make sure people have the right training for the jobs that are available.
Another priority is connecting people to jobs. The data shows that investment in transit creates 31 percent more jobs than investment in roads and bridges, so we are focusing on transit as tool for growth. In Minneapolis and Saint Paul, $2 billion dollars’ worth of private investment was generated around our light rail green line before it even opened in 2014. Transit not only gets people to jobs, but bring jobs to people. That green line light rail serves some of the poorest neighborhoods in Saint Paul, and that development is going where that development is needed most. It’s a tailored strategy that is getting us to our overall goal: people being able to participate in growth.
Entrepreneurship, too, spurs growth. Another one of our universal goals is to dismantle Byzantine barriers to investing in small business. Our Open for Business Minneapolis initiative has completed a stem-to-stern review of all the regulations governing small businesses in Minneapolis to make sure that we’re eliminating the obstacles and we’re getting rid of the roadblocks like unnecessary background checks for specific licenses and increasing the number of inspectors serving the city. Taking this kind of action is good for anyone who wants to invest or develop in our city. It reduces obstacles for everyone. But it especially reduces obstacles for, and spurs investment among, entrepreneurs of color and immigrant entrepreneurs—which spurs growth for everyone, because we know that entrepreneurship in immigrant communities and communities of color is growing far faster than white entrepreneurship.
When it comes to creating ajust city, cities alone can’t do it, counties alone can’t do it, the federal government alone can’t do it. We all have to be working to build the relationships and partnerships with advocates, business leaders, federal and state delegations to make sure that we have the same universal goals and that we’re working together to get the ships sailing in the same direction. Building true partnerships across sectors and communities is the hardest thing we have to do, but it’s also the most powerful.
As Mayor it is my job to have the vision. But visions are worthless if you can’t build coalitions necessary to make them realities. Every day I work hard to bring people to the table, to make sure that all voices are not only being represented but heard. I also strongly believe in leading by example. I personally aim to set the standard for inclusive growth. My office is a living testament to what we can achieve.
We are not going to be able to grow our way into equity, but we can leverage equitable strategies to achieve growth. And once we achieve that, we will have a just city.
Nature is all around us. Plants, animals, soil, air and water inhabit and animate our daily lives, whether you live in the country or in the city. We are invigorated by nature. We are inspired by its creatures, their beauty, and their existential meaning. We depend on nature’s services and what they provide. We long for connection to nature, whether we are aware of this or not. Nature can represent metaphors for a “good life,” or for health, but also danger, “the wild,” and the un-domesticated. Animals have personality and images of them can convey ideas and emotions beyond their own existence. There are social ideas and controversies around the environment that inspire heated debate in conservation, climate change, and justice.
This is the nature of graffiti. It facilitates speech. It speaks to us. It stakes claims and makes statements. It tells stories.
We are part of nature, so it’s no surprise that nature is ubiquitous in art, from formal “indoor art” to outdoor murals and graffiti. These last two forms are the subject of a new collection of images and discussion curated by The Nature of Cities: “Up Against the Wall: A Gallery of Nature-Themed Graffiti and Street Art.” You can see the growing collection here.
And you can contribute to it, too: we’re just getting started, but we intend this gallery to be an evolving, crowd-sourced collection—a source of ideas, agitation and inspiration for creative place-making that is beyond the formal and sanctioned. We also hope this site will be a place where both artists and communities might merge to talk about the people-nature connection in outdoor art, a convening space where we can explore the meaning of graffiti and the nature of public space and creative place-making.
Graffiti has a multifaceted and sometimes controversial place in the urban landscape. Some say:
Graffiti reflects underlying decay and lawlessness, and is a menace to social order.
Others say:
Graffiti fulfills many important social functions, including making social commentary, claiming on space, and creating interesting public places.
Or maybe both. It is one of the few truly spontaneous elements in many urban landscapes.
Graffiti, revered and loathed by turn, provides insights into societal attitudes and perceptions. Whether for protest, art, comment or signaling, as a sometimes (but not always) illegal activity, graffiti can confront hegemony, saying what those in power don’t want to hear, or what isn’t part of the “mainstream” dialogue. However, sometimes it can support hegemony, such as politicians in 1980s Brazil and Argentina paying locals to paint covert political slogans. World War II histories contain many examples of Nazi graffiti. Paul Downton was inspired by a corporate advertisement masquerading as stenciled graffiti to write a TNOC essay about how public space can be covertly coopted.
These are the facts of graffiti and street art, and represent some of their many dualities: decay vs. renewal; illegal vs legal; ugly vs. beautiful; innovative vs. crass; overt vs. covert; inside vs. outside.
So what is graffiti and street art saying? What can it say? Some people view it as ‘out of place,’ deviant, symbolizing disorder and moral panic. On the other hand, as art that is created and experienced out in public spaces, graffiti and street art can be used to assert a claim to a particular place, in a sense create it—a territorial marker for the artist and all those they aim to represent. Graffiti also blurs the boundaries between private space (the buildings it is often painted on) and public (the visibility of graffiti from public places). At its best, graffiti can challenge dominant discourses and politics and communicate alternative, disruptive meaning. Street art, graffiti’s somewhat more formal cousin, can serve similar roles in creative place-making, especially when such art is inspired and commissioned by and for local communities.
Graffiti and street art styles are as diverse as their subject matter—tags, throw-ups, stencils, stickers, wildstyle, piece, blockbuster, murals, and more. In our gallery, we are interested in examples of all styles of graffiti and street art (broadly defined) that include themes from nature (also very broadly defined), or that have some element of ‘nature’ in their content, for whatever purpose. Nature-themed graffiti may relate to many issues in society, such as: (1) how we define and understand nature (e.g., a rural or agrarian ideal, wilderness); (2) political statements of all kinds, including but not limited to those addressing conservation or the environment; (3) comments on what is missing or needed in the city; (4) simple depictions of beauty; and (5) use of nature elements as tags or as messages that don’t involve the environment.
Pippin Anderson sowed the seed for this collection in her essay for TNOC on nature-themed graffiti in Cape Town. It turns out that there is a lot of graffiti and street art around the world that includes elements of nature. Examples illustrate stories and purposes that are rich, diverse, illuminating and provocative. We mention a few here, but there are more than 100 at the gallery, with more being added every week.
Already in the gallery, you can find pictures of nature’s place in our urban world, messages about environmental protection and images of cities as counter to a rural idyll. See, for example, the large mural in Barrio 13 in Medellín, Colombia—near the famous escalators that help people navigate the steep hillside community—depicting a scene of rural idyll. Perhaps these are offered in contrast to a difficult urban existence. There are scenes of mystery and beauty on dismal walls needing the remediation that natural images can provide. Contemplate the large (over 25 meters) image of Pumas stalking across a wall, also in Medellín. There is evocative graffiti of a vine growing out of a woman’s head in Cape Town, perhaps titled “Nature on my mind.” In Portland, Mike Houck commissioned the largest community mural in North America: over 55,000 square feet depicting an array of local birds.
A large community mural in Barrio 13, Medellín, Colombia. Photo: David MaddoxPumas stalk across a wall in Medellín, Colombia. Photo: David MaddoxNature on my mind, in the Woodstock Neighborhood of Cape Town, South Africa. Photo: Jaques de SatagePortland Mausoleum Mural. North America’s largest mural at 55,000 square feet,overlooking Oaks Bottom Preserve in Portland, Oregon. Commissioned and photographed by Mike Houck.Monsanto Mata—Monsanto Kills, in a fancy Buenos Aires park. Photo: David Maddox
There are calls to action, including for conservation causes and environmental controversies, but also scenes memorializing victims of violence.
There are statements of concern about the corporate role in environmental degradation and food security (for example, “Monsanto Mata,” or “Monsanto kills,” in a fancy downtown Buenos Aires park), or complaints about the obscure politics of environmentally and socially destructive infrastructure.
One such image is refers to a large and controversial dam—the Belo Monte dam—on a tributary of the Amazon River that has destroyed forest, displaced indigenous people and only produced a modest, less-than-promised amount of hydropower (“Belo Monte de Mentiras,” or “Belo Monte lies,” in Altamira, Brazil).
In Australia, a helpful stencil reports that “your children’s future is a fantasy, but thanks for the rock and roll.”
Belo Monte de Mentiras—Belo Monte Lies. Protests against a dam project in Altamira, Brazil. Photo: David MaddoxIn Adelaide, Australia “Your children’s future is a fantasy,” Photo: Paul Downton.
Conservation images and wildlife abound in Cape Town, such as a graffiti image of how few Rothschild Giraffes remain in the wild.
A young boy has the world in his hands in Barcelona, but that same world is a ticking time bomb in Cape Town.
There is a giant fanciful flying fish dinosaur skeleton—if that’s what it is—in Montreal.
And someone is fishing for birds in a parking lot in Panama City, Panama.
The conservation status of Rothschild Giraffe, in Cape Town. Photo: Jaques de SatageHe’s got the whole world in his hands, Barcelona, Spain. Photo: Jennifer Balkjo
The Earth is a ticking time bomb, in Cape Town. Photo: Pippin AndersonCrazy flying skeleton giraffe, or something. Montreal, Canada. Photo: David MaddoxFishing for birds in a Panama City, Panama parking lot. Photo: David MaddoxTripido (aka Diego Felipe Becerra) was murdered by the police in 2015—a policeman is serving time. Tripido’s tag was a Felix the Cat. Photo: Germán Gomez
Often, nature images are used to make points unrelated to the environment. Or maybe they are just part of the artist’s tag image. Or both.
For example, a well-known and influential graffiti artist, Tripido, was murdered by the police in Bogotá in 2015. A policeman is now serving jail time, with others under investigation. Tripido’s tag was a Felix the Cat. You can see many memorials to him—Felix the Cats—around Bogotá.
In the 12th Century, someone, perhaps a Templar knight, scratched a pelican in a castle wall to symbolize his devotion to Christianity—at that time Pelicans were symbols of the nurturing quality of the faith.
Maybe the Angel Cat along the famous High Line park in New York City is simply a memorial to a lost pet.
Who knows what the penguin in the life preserver is doing? Perhaps she is preparing to be cast out to sea after her ice flow melts into an ocean inexorably warming around her.
12th Century scratching in a Templar castle, representing a devotion of Christianity. Photo: David MaddoxAngel Cat along the famous High Line in New York City. Photo: David MaddoxPenguin in a life preserver, in the Santa Teresa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Peg Malloy
This is The Nature of Graffiti. It facilitates speech. It speaks to us. It stakes claims and makes statements. It tells stories.
We ought to listen to people about their perceptions and views on nature in cities, in order that we better promote the idea and value of nature in cities. In that rich vein, what does this graffiti tell us? It tells us there are voices of dissent out there, personal views not always captured by popular media or acted on by city managers or private developers. It tells us that that there are non-standard urban forms, and a desire for more nature, both in cities and beyond cities. It tells us that in even the most overwhelmingly urban environments, human beings are determined to find a way to express our connection with the rest of the living world. There’s a desire to tell personal stories as a form of creative and alternative place-making. Among all the individual stories embedded in these examples of graffiti and street start, there are larger, synthetic stories about society.
We hope that many will collaborate with us in creating this collection. Check it out. And when you see nature-themed graffiti or murals out on the street, take a picture, share it by uploading it, and leave a story about it location, context, and meaning to you. Artists too are invited to put their own work up. By gathering examples of such graffiti in cities globally, we aim to facilitate exploration of some interesting questions: What are examples of urban nature-themed graffiti around the world? What does it tell us about the nature of and in cities? What might stories we find in graffiti art tell us about urban (and rural) stories? How are people using nature to claim public spaces?
Join us.
David Maddox, Pippin Anderson, Paul Downton, Emilio Fantin, Germán Eliecer Gomez, Julie Goodness, Mike Houck, Todd Lester, Patrick Lydon, Patrice Milillo, Laura Shillington
New York, Cape Town, Adelaide, Bologna, Bogotá, Stockholm, Portland, Säo Paulo, Seoul/San Jose, Los Angeles, Managua/Montreal
Pippin Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, is an African urban ecologist who enjoys the untidiness of cities where society and nature must thrive together.
FULL BIO
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!
Emilio Fantin is an artist working in Italy on multidisciplinary research.
He teaches at the Politecnico, Architecture, University of Milan, and acts as coordinator of the “Osservatorio Public Art”.
Germán Eliecer Gomez is a sociologist working for the Ministry of Culture of Bogota, with expertise in communication and expert on issues related to urban cultural practices, especially young people, in expressions such as graffiti, football bars. Sociólogo con maestría en Comunicación. Expertos en temas relacionados con practicas culturales urbanas, principalmente de jovenes, en expresiones tales como el grafiti, las barras de fútbol.
Julie Goodness has a PhD in Sustainability Science from the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University; her research is focused on urban social-ecological systems, functional traits and ecosystem services, environmental education, design-thinking and design-based learning, social action and community development.
Mike Houck is a founding member of The Nature of Cities and is currently a TNOC board member. He is The Urban Naturalist for the Urban Greenspaces Institute (www.urbangreenspaces.org), on the board of The Intertwine Alliance and is a member of the City of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission.
Todd Lester is an artist and cultural producer. He has worked in leadership, advocacy and strategic planning roles at Global Arts Corps, Reporters sans frontiers, and Astraea Lesbian Justice Foundation. He founded freeDimensional and Lanchonete.org—a new project focused on daily life in the center of São Paulo.
Patrick M. Lydon is an American ecological writer and artist based in Korea whose seeks to re-connect cities and their inhabitants with nature. He writes The Possible City series, is co-founder of City as Nature (Daejeon). He is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
At Art is Power, Patrice focuses his energies full-time on working with and documenting visionary Arts initiatives from around the globe. Previously, he worked as a public school teacher in San Jose, California.
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).
Neglecting gender and the unequal dimension of access and decision-making rights would doom environmental movements to failure. Let us be imaginative. What does it mean to revisit what the promise of equality means in terms of integrating the importance of gender in socio-environmental inequalities?
These are times of crisis. One might even think that the COVID-19 crisis looks like a an alternative expression of crises that are already building, especially ecological ones. Harald Welzer in The Climate Wars shows that the feeling of crisis as well as fear is born in the face of the unpredictability of the times to come. However, it is not a question of following the idea of a generalized repetition of the collapse in the face of the crisis. No, our idea here is to explore the importance of women’s contributions to environmental crisis, a category understood here as gender and socio-biologically constructed, both in the current crisis and in the consideration of future ecosystem crises and their accompaniment.
It is generally accepted that the bulk of the ecological crisis is associated with lifestyles that over-consume resources and natural environments. Thus, the 1972 Club of Rome report obserserved that, at a time when it appears difficult to reform lifestyles or to go back on the idea of progress or growth, the first measures to protect nature should concern extraordinary species and spaces (whether wild, rare, endangered or victims of traffickers, etc).
A consequence of this observation is that the ordinary environment is disqualified in the field of environment protection or conservation, on the pretext that this everyday environment is often urban, or devoid of “environmental” qualities, as city and nature are often seen as opposites. As early as the 2000s (with the European Landscape Convention integrating ordinary landscapes), environmental concerns linked to the protection of everyday environments became less visible. The reason for this is that women, who make a massive contribution to the reproduction of the human species in all the activities linked to the upbringing of children, domestic work and personal care, occupy a central place in this ecology of everyday life[1].
Ordinary, grassroots environmentalism, composed of lifestyles and individual and collective mobilizations that structure the production of the environment, is first and foremost the work of women, whose role is crucial in this domestic sphere extended to the environment[2]. Moreover, at present, as in the past, the formal and informal collectives involved in local environmental protection, particularly in movements against major urban projects, are largely feminized and—which goes hand in hand—invisibilized.
On the contrary, the rescue of extraordinary biodiversity, rare species, and spaces offers new fields of adventure to a predominantly male population that is not bogged down in the maintenance of everyday living conditions. The media is immediately interested in such extraordinary behaviours, providing key support for the creation of sustained international networks for the safeguard of the planet[3].
It can be concluded that the present discrediting of the everyday living environment as a banal and difficult to mediate is linked to the undervaluation of the feminine. Women pay a high price for this undervaluation of the feminine and of the work women do to support the everyday environment. We already know that environmental changes have a greater impact on women than men. In recent years, many reports have focused on the importance of giving due consideration to socio-environmental inequalities, particularly gender inequalities[4]. Public policies and mobilizations have been proposed to promote equal access rights and the sharing of benefits and uses of ecosystems and natural resources. In this sense, the “capability approach”[5] aims to integrate discriminated populations, particularly women, linking individual and collective capabilities and access opportunities (for example, rights of access to land and natural resource ownership, to education)[6].
A shared garden lot in Kazan (Russia). Photo: Nathalie Blanc
The COVID-19 crisis highlights the importance of women’s work in times of disaster[7]. The professions or skills that are essential in the fight against COVID-19 and the support of daily life are those of care assistants, nurses or cashiers, and activities providing care in society or security of supply. The proportion of women is still rising among employees in retirement homes, home care workers, and day-care centres. Women are in the majority at checkouts in stores and pharmacies. Numerous women’s collectives have developed to provide for the artisanal manufacture of masks, as evidenced by the recent article in Entre les lignes, Entre les mots[8]. These women are relatively visible and taken into consideration, especially in the media, but they are often desribed in terms of the value placed on the work of caring: always described anecdotally, in the social facts sections of the bmedia, and secondary to the struggles of doctors and policy arbitrations, which mainly represented by male experts. (A distinction should be made here between reports in hospital wards, which may occasionally follow women, doctors, interns or nurses, and the staging of the “medical expert” on the television set, locked down in his or her home or filmed in her or his office, and represented outside and above the hands-on action.)
Homemade masks or meals delivered by chefs are indicative of a capacity shared in the ordinary world to quickly grasp what matters in the present situation and to mobilize one’s skills in the service of others. Yet, on a daily basis, the “experts” in the heroic fight against the pandemic and the little hands that humanize the conditions of the pandemic and try to make the world livable are seen as opposed and hierarchical. The providers of everyday capacity their contributions are considered as “care” and and thus are considered less important[9]. The media, including television, which has regained all its persuasive and ideological power, are thus creating, to the benefit of the dominant powers, a narrative of the crisis that firmly maintains the old categories of power.
Meanwhile, women are being massively impacted by the financial consequences of the COVID-19 crisis, an epidemic emerging from an environmental crisis and significant erosion of biodiversity. While 8% of men work part-time, 31% of women do, which means lower than average incomes. Regardless of their status as workers, 75% of women have to take full material and mental responsibility (“the mental load”) for domestic chores for about 3 hours a day. The gender wage gap for comparable jobs in France is, depending on the wage level, between 10% and 25%[10]. Jobs held by women continue to be undervalued and underpaid.
On the other hand, as Marlene Schiappa’s request for a report on gender bias among experts in the media shows[11], women have little presence in the public arena of the media and politics. While many male experts and men speak on radio and television, female experts and doctors, let alone nurses or nursing auxiliaries, are not questioned. This omnipresent male voice is a reminder of male domination, which is all the more evident in times of crisis. It is also a patriarchal reminder of the monopoly of expertise.
Let us say then—and this is the counterpart of our first hypothesis—that if women’s work, inventions, and intelligence play a crucial role in the production of a domestic sphere extended to everyday environments, they play, it seems, a supplementary and accompanying role in times of crisis, worthy of a reserve army that can be mobilised in times of war, if we adopt the rhetoric deployed in the early days of the COVID epidemic-19 by French President Macron. It is true that in times of war, particularly during the two World Wars, women worked in arms factories or were seamstresses, nurses, caretakers[12]. However, this rhetoric of war is also a way of consolidating gender inequality: care activities are in the “third line”. They maintain the thread of ordinary life, but are devalued and invisible in the same way as the “ordinary”. Is it not the permanent invisibilisation of women’s living and working conditions one major element that keeps an unsustainable socio-environmental system going at the price of growing socio-environmental inequalities?
Women, disasters and resilience
The essential work of women in maintaining everyday life forms has long been analysed in terms of environmental production. One can draw on the seminal text of the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, who, in a short essay in 1986 titled “The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction”, wrote :
Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher says in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. … for what’s the use of digging up a lot ofpotatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in—with or before the tool that forces energy outward,we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the “CarrierBag Theory” of human evolution.
Hence, according to Le Guin, it is necessary to think first of all of the contribution of women to the resource in terms of collecting and relating. The interesting aspects of the metaphor of the container is twofold; on the one hand, it reminds us how much we need containers as much as contents to make society; and on the other hand, it emphasizes the importance of understanding things as symbols of what makes society. For example, looking at the spear rather than the basket has hitherto been synonymous with the power granted to the hunter and the lack of interest in women who cultivated. This also leads to elevating in the public space the heroes who occasionally hunt over the heroines who constantly cultivate, harvest, and clean. In short, without pushing the metaphor beyond its limits, it allows us to think about the relationship between women and resources, as well as the division of material and symbolic labour, but also between what is offered to be seen (and considered) and what is largely invisible.
Moreover, if we believe the IPCC, and if we look at socio-environmental inequalities, women are the ones who will pay a great deal in terms of adaptation to climate change. On 8 August 2019, the IPCC has published a Special Report on “Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Flows in Terrestrial Ecosystems”[13]. Even if there are very great uncertainties in terms of adaptation, largely dependent on political choices, Asia and Africa are projected to have the greatest number of people likely to be dispossessed by desertification and environmental change ; women are the ones on whom this everyday disaster will weigh the heaviest. It is in for this reason that international agencies are constantly advocating for policies to empower women, given their importance in the resilience of local environments and communities[14]. Indeed, the effectiveness of the policies carried out will directly depend on the involvement of those in charge in these communities, especially women.
The loss of livelihoods can also be synonymous with an increase in gender-based violence. Women often face domestic violence and sexual abuse in times of disaster. First, for COVID-19, although it is a little early to draw conclusions about the impact of this epidemic, it is apparent that lockdown exacerbates domestic tensions and violence. Calls to domestic violence hotlines have increased by 30 percent[15]. Second, women often have limited access to the means of alerting or even repressing such violence, which is culturally entrenched and considered of secondary importance in times of disaster[16]. Finally, women as representatives in decision-making bodies at all levels on natural disaster risk reduction is particularly low and representation of women’s interests is rarely properly identified[17]. Numerous reports and works point to the following facts. Women are often poorer and therefore more vulnerable in times of crisis. For example, Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans (USA) in 2005, affected African-American women and their children more than other groups. In Sri Lanka, it was easier for men to survive the 2004 tsunami because they had the advantage of knowing how to swim and climb trees, skills that are only taught to boys.
With regard to adaptation to climate change, as the same IPCC report points out, increased droughts and water shortages will mainly affect women, who are the main collectors, users and managers of water in poor countries. Water scarcity may increase their workload and reduce their ability to devote their time to other tasks, such as education. The increase in climate-related epidemics, with COVID-19 being only one of many that will inevitably follow, will mainly impact women, who, as we can see today, spend much of their time caring for the sick and raising children. Finally, the erosion of biodiversity has an impact on women’s work, which depends on crop diversity and the proximity of food resources to adapt to climate variability. Women farmers are responsible for half of the world’s food production and produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food in most developing countries[18].
Similarly, women are essential in supporting households and communities and in implementing mechanisms for adaptation and resilience, as the drafters of the report on climate change and gender equality write[19]. In countries such as Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Vietnam, Indonesia and India, women are responsible for crop breeding, improving the quality and storage of seeds, and managing small livestock. In addition to knowledge, men and women have different natural resource management practices, all of which are necessary and transferable from one gender to the other for sustainable use and biodiversity conservation[20].
Eco-feminism and environmental care
It is not coincidence that an essential and seminal work on this subject is the work of a woman, namely Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. As early as 1962, Ms. Carson highlighted the deleterious effects of pesticides on the environment, natural life and bird noise—that is, its aesthetic and sensitive dimension—calling for immediate political responses. It was as a result of such work that DDT was banned in 1972 in the United States. The 1970s saw the emergence of important ecofeminist movements and works in different countries that highlighted the importance of the environment. In this sense, the environment has been an important cause and a triggering process for many feminist struggles. It is ecofeminists in the South who have revived environmental thinking, showing in a radical way how, in countries that suffer from the legacy of colonial domination that has powered their economic potential but degraded their environment, the environmental consequences of development have affected women more heavily.
In India, the Chipko movement in 1973 against deforestation and Vandana Shiva’s work on food and agricultural work is widely acclaimed[21]. One of the conclusions that may be drawn from these different works is the need to review environmental justice movements in terms of gender, especially in light of future disasters. A better understanding of the changing relationships between women and environments, and an analysis of the ways in which women contribute to relational approaches to environmental management, is essential for the future.
Neglecting gender and the unequal dimension of access and decision-making rights would doom environmental conservation to failure[22]. Indeed, according to the OECD (Social Institutions and Gender Index, SIGI), only 37 percent of the 160 countries studied give women and men equal access to land ownership and use. It is therefore important to develop a reflection on all future risks: the inequalities before the crisis (epidemic or other), during the crisis, the impact of these inequalities on the management of the crisis, and the consequences of the crisis on these inequalities. Post-disaster management must inevitably include the issues related to the existence of patriarchal systems.
Invisibilisation and domestication
It is critical to appreciate what we make visible and what we leave in the shadows, or make invisible. Should women choose to remain in the shadows, or do we demand recognition? Which, and how? If the place of women and their words is reduced, or even often attacked, it is because of their structural invisibility. It is then a question, beyond deploring them, to ask ourselves: what place is given to invisibility on the symbolic level and in the distribution of values? That the invisible does not translate so easily into the register of the visible, we sense it in the embarrassment we may feel at the discourse of heroisation of the ordinary providers of care, and not just for its hypocrisy. It is the whole difficulty of the ethics of care and of valuing the ordinary, the discreet, the “low”. It is all very well to accept to be invisible on condition that one is not devalued by the condition, and have the choice of being or not being. It’s also about having the choice of forms in which to make oneself visible, forms that are often narratives, narratives that go into detail, into the flesh of the ordinary world, that leave room for unforeseen bifurcations, reversals and the uncertainty of feelings, their inevitable ambiguity. Valuing the shadow in which women are held would mean changing an entire system of values so as to no longer make it the double darkness of the light. Therefore, sublimating (or aestheticizing) the ordinary does not always mean challenging the implicit hierarchy of what matters.
A key to resolving this fundamental theoretical difficulty lies in ordinary environmentalism. While the environmentalist movement has focused primarily on emblematic spaces and species, women around the world are confronted with the protection of this ordinary environment, in its everydayness, resourcefulness, both material and symbolic. The preceding analyses make it possible to distinguish between a “mainstream” environmentalism, that of the protection of natural spaces, characteristic of the Western white elites, and an “environmentalism of the poor”, which is concerned with pollution, environmental inequalities, vulnerable populations, rooted in the underprivileged countries, and the underprivileged spaces of our privileged societies[23]. This ordinary environmentalism is that of the least privileged social strata, including care workers. Two ideas of nature correspond to this social, cultural and gendered divide: one is that of “wild” nature, outside ordinary society, which must be protected as such, sheltered from human intervention; the other is that of a nature of which we are part, where we have relations of interdependence and responsibility. To put it another way, to ignore the fact that today we live in places where socio-environmental relationships need to be transformed is to forget what makes up the substratum of future disasters and to neglect the possibilities, in a changing environment, of profound cultural transformation of relationships with ecologies.
On the road to ordinary environmentalism
The development of the material wealth of societies has only been possible at the cost of the exploitation and enslavement of a large part of the planet, both human and non-human. Therefore, making an unjust system sustainable will not be enough to transform the symbolic and material values at the origin of this development. As regards the protection and productivity of ordinary environments, contempt for care activities has led to an incomplete the liberal conception of morality and justice; it poses a problematic conflict between society’s moral dimension and the actions perpetuates the society in its current forms (daily and invisible care, the production of the daily environment). Thus, the invisibility of care in moral theory condemns a society to disregard the source of its own conservation as a moral society. It reinforces or justifies ordinary indifference to care work in societies[24].
Environmental care, finally, is not a subspecies or extension of care to the non-human. Care for the environment (in both senses: attention to the ordinary environment and the well-being that this environment provides to individuals) is emblematic of the work of care : attention to what makes our lives possible, and which for that very reason we deliberately do not see and neglect. A radical vision of care forces us to see the whole form of life of the privileged as maintained by a caring activity produced by the dominated, but also by the siphoning off of the resources of the South that ensure the maintenance of life and the standard of living of the rich people of societies. The debates on climate change and the nations and cultures that are primarily and historically responsible for it are often characteristic of an ethico-political conception that is indifferent to care, and therefore fundamentally unjust. These are the same nations and cultures that make all the populations of the world bear the weight and responsibility for the transformations brought about by their own development. It is with environmental care that the nonsense of the opposition between care and justice appears, since it appears that only in the ethics of care can we take into account the issues of global justice. Research on the role of women in agricultural work, in resource or biodiversity management, in the preservation of daily lives are all ways to clarify the issues of justice associated with socio-ecological, technical and economic transitions. Research is therefore needed to perceive the limits of a development essentially oriented towards the preservation of lifestyles based on the over-exploitation of natural environments.
Let us be imaginative. What does it mean to revisit what the promise of equality means in terms of integrating the importance of gender in socio-environmental inequalities?
The following proposals are suggestions. Capabilities are defined here summarily as the capacities of citizens to mobilize their experiences and relationships with their environments, with a view to enriching their opportunities to be and act by becoming aware of the various factors that affect their living conditions[25]. They are central to an understanding of environmental justice “based on the interaction between social systems and long-term environmental change” known as transformational[26]. These capabilities also require us to think about co-producing risk adaptation policies with the actors concerned, that are contextualized and socially situated, and therefore take into account the gender issue[27]. In doing so, we embrace a conception of socio-environmental justice that links forms of political participation, the recognition of links to the environment and integrates distributive justice[28]. It is also about valuing the ability to interact with other components of the surrounding environment and to create value, be it social, cultural or environmental[29]. For women, it is also a question of being able to value the components of their living environment, whether it be water quality, social relations or local facilities. They must be able to choose to define together the choices to be made, in short to create or contribute to collective action, in order to produce this ordinary environment.
Transforming collective and public action means building on the differentiated relationships, particularly between women and men, to the symbolic and concrete environments and resources present in these environments. The main challenges are to generate situations of socio-ecological innovation, where social innovation depends on taking into account the ordinary environment. We define socio-ecological innovation as social innovation that builds on and enriches living environments to meet the challenges of local and global change[30]. The aim is thus to develop collective and public action to respond to the plural and evolving situations of the inhabitants and by highlighting the presence of women in these systems (for example, with regard to the food supply for solidarity, culinary practices, urban agriculture).
The debate on climate change and its trail of disasters as a challenge for living and living together at the level of families, buildings, neighbourhoods and regions is now necessary in a way that is open to a plurality of voices. The co-production of more transversal and diverse, and therefore less technocratic, visions of adaptation requires starting from the practices and feelings of the inhabitants to co-construct arguments by giving them a translation of public policy, for example with regard to the projects and associative initiatives included in the policies. The notion of care—in the active sense, of taking care of, caring for—can thus be applied to various everyday attitudes and practices of taking the environment into account: individual or collective behaviours that are concerned about the environment (sorting, calculating and limiting one’s carbon footprint, consumption of energy, materials, etc.).
It is therefore necessary to link ecology and sociality more closely by taking advantage of women’s practical, moral and aesthetic resources and skills: through restaurants stocked with unsold food, shared gardens in shelters, an awareness of the convivial and cultural aspect of the environments in which we live, etc. In short, we must pay attention to the mechanisms and approaches that can make it possible to articulate social and environmental justice and give women the opportunity to use their inventive capacities to transform daily life: ecological development taxation to support participatory adaptation projects based on living, living and living together, support for initiatives to organize local meals, childcare, gardening and support for the elderly. Making room for women’s power to act is a condition for democracy to take root on the ground and for the development of our collective capacity to live better and to resist in the disasters to come.
The current crisis is therefore finally raising awareness of the essential role of women in the production of the everyday environment everywhere in the world, but also of the risks to which all humans are exposed by the invisibility of women’s contribution and by the present disregard for all the tasks of care and maintenance of daily life.
Nathalie Blanc, Sandra Laugier, Pascale Molinier, Anne Querrien
Paris
[3] The focus of the scientific literature on the Greens, Friends of the Earth or the consideration of the environment in public administrations has contributed to reduce the environmental movement to its national actors and its contribution to public policies through its electoral successes and failures. This national prism is found in the United States where Kenneth Andrews and Bob Edwards note that the multiplication of national environmental organizations in the United States is very well documented, in contrast to that of local organizations, even though the latter help to define priorities and guide public debate at the national level. Based on a questionnaire survey of environmental organizations in North Carolina, they conclude that the more local the spatial listing of environmental organizations is, the less they mobilize expertise and institutional advocacy among their repertoires of action and the more likely they are to engage in radical discourse and partisan campaigning (Andrews and Edwards 2005). Thus, the image of an institutionalized environmental movement, versed in expertise, that has become cautious about radical social transformation corresponds in France essentially to the 1980s and is disproportionately important at the national level.
[4] Seager, J. (2014). Disasters are gendered: What’s new? In Zinta Zommers & Ashbindu Singh (Eds.), Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change. New York: Springer ; Seager, J. (2019). New visions for nature and nature’s contributions to people for the 21st century. New visions for nature and nature’s contributions to people for the 21st century. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Leach M, Scoones I, Stirling A, 2010, Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice, Earthscan.
[5] The capability approach was developed by Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum : Sen, A., 1979, Equality of What ?, The Tanner lecture on human values, Stanford University ; Sen, A., 2010, The idea of justice, London, Penguin books ; Nussbaum M. (2000). Women and human development.The capability approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
[6] We believe that this capability approach to disaster makes it possible to respond to the suspension of rights resulting from the emergency by evaluating concrete rights, which “ensures a normative resource” (Chavel, S. (2019) Le paradigme des capabilités face aux situations de désastre, raison-publique.fr, https://www.raison-publique.fr/article773.html), but also to relate subjective expectations to the possibilities of rights.
[7] Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women : Exposing Data Bias in a World Designer for Men (2019) explains than 29 millions articles have been published on Zika and Ebola, but less than 1% of publications was about gender issues. See : https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30526-2/fulltext
[9] Laugier S., Molinier P., Paperman P. Nous défendre – face au discours politique sur le Covid-19 AOC. Analyse Opinion critique, 7 avril 2019. On care Ethics Paperman P., Laugier S. (eds.) Le souci des autres, éthique et politique du care (2005) éditions de l’EHESS.
[11] Marlène Schiappa, in charge of Equality between Women and Men and the Fight against Discrimination, sent a mission letter to Céline Calvez, Member of Parliament for Hauts-de-Seine, to analyse the place of women experts in the media at large in this period of containment and crisis of COVID-19.
[14] However, critical attention must be paid to the risks of exploitation of rural women in the South, in particular through NGOs, and to their acculturation.
[16] Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Rome, 2016, Gender-responsivedisaster risk reduction in the agriculture sector, Guidance for policy-makers and practitioners.
[20] Aguilar, L., Mata, G. et Quesada-Aguilar, A., (2010), Gender and biodiversity, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
[21] Hache, E. (2016) Reclaim, recueil de textes écoféministes, textes choisis et présentés par Émilie Hache, postface de Catherine Larrère, éditions Cambourakis, Larrère, C. (2012): Féminisme écologique ou écologie féministe Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines.
[22] The issue of equity is consubstantially associated with that of sustainable development, as Gupta et al. (2019) show.
[23] Sandra Laugier (2016) Politics of Vulnerability and Responsibility for Ordinary Others, Critical Horizons, 17:2, 207-223, DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2016.1153891
[24] The philosopher Annette Baier reports on this in her article What do Women Want in Moral Theory? See also Laugier S. (ed.), Tous Vulnerables? Payot, 2012.
[25] Sen, A., 2010, The idea of justice, London, Penguin books .
[26] Blanc N., Laigle L, 2018. Narratives, capabilities and climate change : towards a sustainable culture, in Birkeland I., Burton R., Parra C., Siivonen K. (Eds), Cultural sustainability and the nature-culture interface. Livelihoods, policies, and methodologies. New York, Routledge, Chapter 13.
[27] Gupta, J., Seager, J. (2019). Re imagining the driver-pressure-state-impact-response framework from an equity and inclusive development perspective. Sustainability Science (2020) 15:503-520.
[28] Schlosberg, D. (2004) Reconceiving environmental justice: global movements and political theories. Environ Politics 13(3):517–540.
[29] The avenues discussed in this article take up the conclusions of the report of the CAPADAPT project funded under the GICC programme by ADEME (2017/2020), adaptation of cities to climate change and “capabilities”: towards an approach in terms of human development.
[30] This definition is the result of the CAPADAPT project in collaboration with L. Laigle.
Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France, and Senior Fellow of Institut Universitaire de France. She has extensively published on ordinary language philosophy , moral philosophy, and classic American philosophy.
Pascale Molinier is professor of social psychology at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and director of Les cahiers du genre. Her research themes are gendered division of labour, relationship between mental health and work, care ethics, feminist epistemology .
Anne Querrien, sociologist and political scientist, has been from 1985 to 2010 the editor of the main urban research journal in France Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine. She is involved in urban farming experiments in Paris Region with the Atelier d’architecture autogérée. Since 2008 she is co-director of the editorial board of the French journal Multitudes.
“A sustainable city is one which contributes to sustainable development, and to do this it must have a high level of urbanization. (…) Without urbanization, it’s nearly impossible to have important development and growth in the economy.To have a city that generates wealth, prosperity and jobs for young people, you need to have planned organization. (….) This is the price one needs to pay so that a city, on top of being a city, is a wealth-generating engine.” —A statement of one of the main speakers in the Urban Summit, a side event at the Rio+20 Conference.
When I heard this at the Summit, I thought I had misheard or misunderstood. It was hard to swallow such a statement considering the context—a the global environmental event—and the organization the speaker represented. Unfortunately I had heard correctly, and the speaker repeated the statement, complementing it with further arguments related to economic growth, development, efficiency. The speech closed with final recommendations for the mayors present, before giving the floor to the leader of a technology firm, a sponsor of the summit.
Well, they where being consistent with Mr Ban Ki-moon’s message to the delegates attending the 23rd ESSsion of the Governing Council of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) in Nairobi, Kenya (April 11, 2011), where he:
“…called for the use of science and technology to build better cities, saying that most global population growth in the coming years is expected to occur in urban areas of developing countries, with rising demand for land, housing, basic services and infrastructure.”
The only problem is that they forgot science. They also forgot wellbeing, equity, nature and…biodiversity.
Here, we want to suggest elements that could help widen the perspective on cities and sustainability. Based on facts and figures from Colombia, we focus on the close and unavoidable connection between ecosystems and economies, and on how cities determine and structure this relation, but not always in the best manner.
This leads to the second main focus of this essay: the importance of the urban-rural gradient, both for the economy and the ecology, including in both cases, the well-being of the living beings inside and outside the cities.
And finally, we suggest some questions we think are critical and urgent in order to address cities in this wider perspective.
Cities/economy/ecology: an unavoidable, yet uncertain relation
Not disregarding the huge importance of cities in human history and development, and of technology in urban growth, it is hard to understand how sustainability is the result of “high level of urbanization, “wealth-generation engines”, and technology (at least for me, we don’t know about you).
Without technology, no sustainability? If this is the question to answer, I have some more:
What kind of sustainability?
For whom?
What about the small cities that are not “wealth- generation engines”, and cannot afford peak technology? “Are they doomed?
What about the people and their wellbeing, what about the environment?
Fortunately, there are other approaches; approaches that read the figures and facts about cities and, more recently about the whole planet, in this so called “urban age”.
The meeting of mayors on “Cities and biodiversity” (BDC, Curitiba, Brazil, 2007) recognized that, particularly in developing countries, communities depend directly on goods and services from biodiversity (BD). Likewise, it established that the world’s cities occupy 2% of the surface of the planet, but their residents consume 75% of the total resources available. (Would they consume the same if not in the city? I guess not, cities are the “engines of consumption”) This unprecedented pressure on the BD has serious consequences for the supply of ecosystem services, climate dynamics and the well-being of the populations. Plenty of figures and facts.
Colombia, an “underdeveloped emerging” country, shares this statistic. It is estimated that by 2020, 80% of Colombia’s population, to be around 48 million at that moment, will live in urban centers, which in our case occupy about 2.5% of the national territory.
According to the statistics, Colombia could be considered an “urban country”, as many have already assured in their political speeches, mainly former city mayors running for president. (What about the other 98% of our country?)
But, are we really an “urban country? What does it really mean that we share statistics with the rest of the world? Probably, that statistics are tricky and can be misleading, if not understood in specific, yet wider, contexts.
Cities, between green and gray
The current development model encourages the location of higher productivity activities in urban areas all over the world.
In Colombia, the city network contributes 80% of national GDP (DNP 2011). Thus, the political, economic and social attributes of urban areas in terms of access to markets and social mobility expectations have steadily captured the interest of governments, creating a “attractiveness effect” on the inhabitants of the marginalized rural areas. attractiveness with perverse effects on both cities and fields, frequently regarded just as cities hinterland, without identity.
In this context, “environment” and “sustainability” are approached, addressed and managed in different and generally not complementary ways in rural territories (natural area protection and sustainability of agriculture and forestry) and in cities (mitigation of direct impacts on water, air and soil to ensure the quality of viad of “urbanites”). Strong conceptual and political boundaries between “urban areas” and the rest of the territory have disconnected the existing relationships, specially the ecological functionality.
As can be seen in the maps bellow, Colombian system of cities is basically located on the Andean and Caribbean regions. The National Policy diagnosis found that biodiversity loss rates in our country were dramatically evident. National studies have estimated that Caribbean ecosystems have been transformed by 72.4% and Andean ecosystems by 62.1% on average (NPCMBES 67). From 2005 to 2010, the Andean Region presented the highest national deforestation rate at 37% (87.090 Ha/year) followed by the Amazon at 33% (79.797 Ha/year). Thereby ecosystem fragmentation and expansion of the agricultural frontier, two of the main biodiversity loss cau ESS, are mostly due to urbanization expansion phenomena.
Population distribution and main cities. Source: Instituto Humboldt, 2011
Population concentration and crucial economic development processes (ESS) have taken place mostly in the Caribbean and Andean regions. Since 1950, national urbanization rates have growth exponentially. In 1951, 814 municipalities revealed a 38.9% rate of urbanization; in 2005, 1119 municipalities had a 74.4% rate of urbanization (National Statistics Department—DANE, per its acronym in Spanish).
The territorial changes that most affect the BD and ESS are directly related to urban expansion and its ecological footprint. Increased suburbanization around the cities, continued development of energy infrastructure, and the extension of infrastructure networks for interconnectivity are the main culprits.
Energy network Source: ISA 2009Primary and Secondary Roads. Source: Instituto Humboldt, 2011Deforestation rates map (1990-2005). Source: Instituto Humboldt 2011Mass removal risk and settlements. Source: Instituto Humboldt 2011Land use conflict (1990-2005). Source: Instituto Humboldt 2011Ecosystem Transformation. Source: Instituto Humboldt 2011
Due to the poor management of the basins and the deforestation of the Andean region, these areas are now more vulnerable. The situation is reflected in the direct relationship between the threat of floods and the threat of landslides. Here, the overlap between the city system maps and the risk maps demonstrate that land use conflict and deforestation make evident that the probability of disaster is higher in Colombian cities and their capacity for resilience is lower.
This fractional approach to social and environmental flows and trades is inequitable, unsustainable and politically obsolete. On the one hand, people who live in areas that support the demands and impacts of urban centers have significantly lower welfare conditions than urban dwellers. On the other, cities struggle to ensure good environmental conditions to a growing population. But, good environmental conditions “inside” the city don´t necessarily mean sustainability of the city. The unresolved stress between cities and not-urban territories has huge impacts in terms of loss and deterioration of BD and ESS, specially in countries like Colombia, where cities are located in rich but fragile ecosystems,
Beyond political and administrative boundaries, the impact of the city is not fully contained in the area that it occupies, but by the area that it needs to satisfy its demands.
The country has made conceptual and institutional efforts to achieve greater environmental quality in cities. However, the level of environmental degradation in the cities, the poorly structured relationship between urban and rural landscapes, and the widespread loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services clearly show that these efforts have not been sufficient and highlight the need to oxygenate the discussion and formulate new and innovative proposals, ones that recognize what is really at stake when talking about “cities and sustainability”.
Rural urban environments? Emerging ecosystems?
The Convention on Biodiversity, the multilateral treaty that tends actions for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their use, defines biodiversity as “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems”. As active member of the Convention, Colombia adopted a national policy for integrated management of biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is based on the recognition that “[B]iodiversity constitutes an important attribute of integrated ecological and social systems, in which the relationship between man and nature is manifested not only as the alteration of a natural system (conventional vision of conservation biology), but as a new system with emergent properties of self-organization, in which the constituent variables are no longer just “biophysical” or “social” but the result of interactions between these”.
Both in natural and emerging ecosystems, ecosystem services are the explicit link between biodiversity and human welfare, thus leading to a new and specific definition of sustainability: the ability to generate a steady and adequate supply of biodiversity and ecosystem services required for human welfare.
It is clear, therefore, that biodiversity and ecosystem services must be managed within the interactions between man and nature, this is, in socio-ecosystems.
This is where the debate on the interactions between man and nature is urgent. What new conceptual and methodological approaches are required to manage BD and the ESS in landscapes deeply transformed by land use change, waste management, emissions of greenhouse gases, infrastructure, among others? Cities and their areas of influence become the unit of analysis, “mandatory” for policy formulation that fosters sustainable development. New figures and facts become relevant, as below.
We must generate and consolidate in the society a new approach to the management of biodiversity and ESS in rural urban environments. This requires not only changing the paradigms of “environmental management” but also of planning, design and urban culture. It requires that we:
(1) rethink the questions from sustainability, uncertainty and dynamism of the (socio) urban-regional ecosystems;
(2) incorporate questions about terms of resilience and adaptability; and
(3) be open in the public policy field and civic culture to new patterns of knowledge and information.
The challenge is not based solely on the current and future demographic pressures. UN-HABITAT has estimated that the population of 46 countries—among which are Germany, Japan and Italy—will decrease by 2050 (Oliveira 2011). The reason for reviewing planning models is that the current models of BD and ESS treat biological, ecological and social systems differently, mainly due to new types of landscapes that don´t conform to the traditional definitions of “urban” and “rural”. Suburban, peri-urban, boundaries, and neo-rural are examples of new names that try to define new (emerging) ecosystems, not yet fully understood and, therefore poorly managed. Trying to consider them as subcategories from urban or rural lanscapes has narrowed the perspective and postponed a needed discussion.
Urban and suburban landscapes in Medellin, Colombia. Source: Medellin Planning Department /2006
While the impact of nature on the people of cities is of high significance (ecosystem services or natural disasters, for example), these interactions and flows have been weakly understood and inadequately included in regional urban planning (Forman 2011). On the other hand, the effects of the inhabitants on the nature lack a spatial understanding (or scale) and proper time, and therefore, its management is territorially limited because ecosystems are not recognized as places “open”, in terms of the ecosystem approach implemented by the CBD in 2004.
The urban-rural dialogue must be rebuilt in this new context. This relationship seeks to promote solutions through land planning and environmental governance strategies; local, regional and national agents must be informed about the potential implications of land transformation on biodiversity loss and thus, on human welfare (Andrade, GI; Sandino, JC; Aldana, J. 2011). In this regard, interdisciplinary research (among scientific centers) and science-policy research initiatives are essential to identify policy recommendations of sustainability “in” cities and “of” cities (Grimm et al. 2000; Wu 2008a in Breuste et al. 2011).
Finally, biodiversity and ecosystem services management implies the need to rethink which kind of information and knowledge is “relevant” to guarantee this urban-rural approach and coherence. Is it local, regional, or national?).
The comprehensive management on biodiversity and ecosystem services states considers the roll of scientific and academic information beyond its production and dissemination. Information and knowledge must be aligned to specific decision-making processes under systems of cooperation among stakeholders and across levels: inter-sectorial, interagency and social (CBD 2004).
Towards the right questions
Without disregarding the important conceptual, empirical and political efforts to address the relationship between biodiversity, ecosystem services and urban dynamics, instrumental developments and theoretical approaches to respond to changes in the socio-ecological urban systems do not yet appear to be evident in relation to decision-making processes and social appropriation interests.
For this purpose, it is necessary to advance in three complementary fields or components:
(1) the integral management of information and knowledge;
(2) policy management, administrative and institutional; and
(3) the management of information and communication.
“Ecosystems” and “cities” are not separate, independent entities, as has been traditionally considered. While the first are object of “conservation strategies” (mainly related to protected and untouchable areas), the second one focuses on “environmental quality” strategies (water, air and sewage treatment, public green areas).
In order to manage cities as ecosystems, first we must recognize that understanding the relationship between BD, ESS and urban-regional environments is essential to generating sustainable conditions. Second, we must recognize that this relationship has diverse manifestations depending on the scale of approach: (i) the network of cities and their impact on BD and the ESS of the country; (ii) the emerging urban-rural regions and their relationships of dependence (ecological footprint); and (iii) the urban area itself and its quality of life.
Taking into consideration the implications of management biodiversity and ecosystem services across urban-regional environments, we would identify the following preliminary questions:
To ensure their own persistence and welfare of human populations in specific territories, in a context of drastic change, what decisions should be taken by urban institutions in terms of BD and ESS management?
What socio-ecological criteria and priorities for action should guide public policy and its relation to sectorial and land actors in urban-rural landscapes?
How do we incorporate uncertainty, adaptability and resilience into planning and ecosystem management strategies among very different and changing territories?
What is the capacity for innovation and adaptation of institutions, stakeholders and communities?
How much information and knowledge do we already have to answer the above questions and to predict ESS tendencies?
How much do we really need to talk, cooperate and act?
These questions are motivating us to apply a multi-scalar approach to urban research initiatives, acknowledging the evident (but mostly forgotten) relationship between sustainability “within” cities and sustainability “of” cities, which we will discuss in future posts.
Juana Mariño Drews with the collaboration of María Angélica Mejía
Bogotá, Colombia
Designers and scientists are different. We think, communicate, and interact with the world in vastly different ways. For instance, designers often develop evocative renderings of our creations, varying in style, but of a similar nature to the image below: a collage perspective showing a scene explaining a design concept. For a designer, this form provides three-dimensional shape to the design, and helps communicate cues for spatial arrangement, the relationship of the building to the landscape, and the intention of human experience such as arrival and wayfinding.
The challenges are immense, but to expand the potential of projects we need to mediate the disconnect between science and design, building on positive strategies by ecologists and designers to increase collaboration and success.
What, however, would a scientist think of this image, and how would they interpret meaning? They would perhaps look at the vegetation and if it was appropriate to the site conditions, interpret the shape and size of patches of habitat and the ability to provide for the needs of different species, and perhaps wonder, again, why designers love to place flocks of birds in all of their drawings.
Conversely, scientists have a process and protocol for communication, using a distinct language, graphic style, and structure that allows for interpretation and analysis using proven scientific methods. Scientists hypothesize, reason, test, and verify, and then present this information in a format that can be inaccessible and daunting to lay-people, and perhaps similar to a scientist trying to derive meaning from a designers drawing, can be downright confounding when attempting to extract useful information to inform their work.
Integrating Habitats Design Competition.
Ecologists and landscape architects, however, are both key actors in preservation and enhancement of biodiversity in cities, and have unique opportunities to inform one another in the creation of environments for urban ecological design. Yes, we’re different. Our challenge, then, to achieve these shared goals is to better align the key strengths of each discipline—focusing the scientific analysis to achieve accessible and applied solutions, while integrating design synthesis that achieves cultural goals and rigorous, measurable ecological outcomes. There are many good examples of collaborations that result in positive urban habitat for flora, fauna, and people, often emerging from these interdisciplinary efforts. However, firms that include both designers and scientists on staff (i.e. integrated design/science firms) or even the inclusion of scientists on most design and planning teams is still relatively rare. The disciplinary boundaries continue to perpetuate a disconnect of academia and practice, resulting in scientific research that is inaccessible, offering little to designers, and design solutions that privilege aesthetics goals and offer shallow, ‘boutique’ ecologies lacking function.
As an extension of the TNOC’s January Roundtable “You say po-TAY-to. What ecologists and landscape architects don’t get about each other, but ought to”, contributor Mark Hostetler from University of Florida invited some folks, including myself, to a similar session at the recent International Urban Wildlife Conference in San Diego in early June. While the focus was on urban wildlife habitat, the broader idea of communication between scientists and designers offered another opportunity to discuss the dual issues between ecologists and designers. The concept of “Crossing the Design-Science Divide” provides the context for my part of the discussion, which is briefly summarized in the remainder of this essay.
Context
As some inspiration for my talk, I was thinking in terms of art and science, and stumbled upon some amazing images from artist Xavi Bou entitled Ornitographies, “…a balance between art and science; a nature-based dissemination project and a visual poetry exercise but above all, an invitation to perceive the world with the same curious and innocent look of the child we once were”. The chronophotographs depict the vibrancy of the movement of species of birds in new ways, and the child-like ‘way of seeing’ provided an apt metaphor for the distillation of complex ecological systems and visualization, with the result blending beauty and utility.
I was also thinking back to successful collaborations with interdisciplinary teams, including the winning entry for the Metro Integrating Habitats Design Competition in 2008, which had a goal to explore and create habitat-friendly development strategies. Our project, which included landscape architects, architects, engineers, wetland and ecological scientists, illustrators, and more, developed a concept of urban ecotones. An ecotone is the transitional zone between two biological communities, such as the shift from a forest to a grassland. Because the ecotone blends the species of each distinct zone, these areas, among other features, develop a high level of diversity. The usage was ecological and social in our design—to protect wetland enhancements, mediate impacts of climate change, and create an adaptable, flexible, and resilient big box development.
The Integrating Habitats Design Competition sponsored by Metro (2008) sought multi-disciplinary, collaborative designs of the future that integrate built and natural environments. The winning design proposal for Urban Ecotones: Transitional Spaces for Commerce and Culture, embodied this ideology through a team of scientists and designers that developed a plan for a big-box store that was adaptable to future climate change and restoration of natural lowland wetland habitats. Image: Jason King, Brett Milligan and Bruce Rodgers. Click on the image to expand.
The challenge of working with designers and scientists on wildlife friendly concepts was evident in a number of ways, including differing language, methods, and workflows. One way to achieve common ground came in starting to map out, on the site, specific flows, including biological and physical, as well as social patterns that identified both potential conflicts and opportunities. The resulting diagrammatic chaos is indicative of the challenge of mapping complexity, but also allows for a spatial investigation, by zooming in on key zones and seeing opportunities to engage with specific system, aesthetics, and technical requirements around stormwater for instance, as a functional amenity.
The interdisciplinary mapping between ecologists and designers was an opportunity to visualize complexity in a way to aid in decision-making. We developed ‘flow diagrams’ of flora, fauna, water, goods, and people on-site to identify conflicts and opportunities. Image: Jason King. Click on the image to expand.
Beyond the larger theoretical framework of urban ecotones, we are able to use this information in design strategies, applied to specific site areas to define gradients of protection and integration. This is illustrated in this section showing the transition from large-scale composting facility to community garden and plant production nursery, transitioning through recreational space and interior habitat patches, all of which allow flows of materials and resources for a number of species.
Sections show simplified relationships and highlight ecological flows of species and resources across the ecotone, from developed edges to natural buffered wetland resources. Image: Brett Milligan and Jason King. Click on the image to expand.
On a smaller scale, the concept of small scale patches of habitat, even on small scale and urban projects, provide value in urban areas that are perceived to be habitat free. The Move the House Apartments project in Portland allowed for investigation of which habitat would be able to live on small infill projects, and what strategies, such as plantings, could facilitate a successful mix of food, forage, and shelter for a number of species.
The relationship of planting species to provide food, forage, and shelter to multiple species is outlined in this diagram for Move the House Apartments, a dense infill project in Portland, Oregon. Image: Jason King. Click on the image to expand.
This is similarly explored in the context of green roofs, which provide not only stormwater management opportunities and aesthetic value to building residents, but provide proven options for viable urban habitat. The Bonneville Power Administration Headquarters that I designed in 2011, mixed topographic variation, substrate, three-dimensional habitat, and seasonal variations of flowering plants to expand the notion of flat sedum roofs to connected patches of urban wildlife habitat.
Green roofs, such as the Bonneville Power Administration Headquarters in Portland, Oregon, provide multiple opportunities for urban ecological function by promoting biodiversity and a range of habitat needs. Photo: Jason King
Doing it well by avoiding mistakes and maximizing value
Information of the right kind, in sufficient detail, and up-to-date, is essential to perceiving the city as a whole. The generation, collection, assimilation, and dissemination of information—information about the natural environment of a specific city, research on the urban natural environment and the investigation of potential applications of that research, and reports of successful case studies—are major but essential tasks. … More applied research, for example, is needed within specific scientific discipline, as well as across disciplinary boundaries.
— Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden (1985)
While the projects above provide a small snapshot of support from designers to maximize habitat, there are a number of questions that need to be addressed to avoid mistakes and maximize value. The definition of value changes depending on each project, but in this case our aspiration was true integration of ecological wisdom into the design process and solution. The opportunities for cross-disciplinary work informed by research is immense. There are, however, some key challenges. I presented at the 2014 Ecoroof Symposioum in Portland, and was inspired by the above quote as well as Ms. Sprin’s keynote address.
My presentation was a meta-analysis on ecoroof research literature, and analysis of how this information could better inform designers. I discovered a total of 202 peer reviewed articles on green roofs from over 52 Journals, spanning habitat, stormwater performance, energy, and more. While tapping into the research was one facet of this study, the other was to illuminate the lack of access to relevant research. Academics benefit from access to a plethora of research material through university and other supported means, while professionals are limited by paywalls and high costs of journal subscriptions and individual articles. In fact, of the 202 research articles I found, very few of them were available from open access journals. If I were to purchase them on an article-by-article basis, the total cost would be over $5,000.
Image: Policies for Action 2017
This access is acute, and reinforced by a recent article from Turning Research into Action, that outlined a short summary of issues and barriers, and identified that of the 2.5 million academic articles published “just 12 percent of those articles are published in open access journals”. Beyond access, there also needs to be attention on ways to communicate better, including issues such as:
Lack of a shared language
Lack of resources for integrated teams
Translating Facts into Values & Principles
Asking the Right Questions
Access to information
Communication
Strategies for success
While there are still barriers, a number of efforts provide guidance to moving forward with better collaboration between designers and scientists. Firms such as Andropogon have made a commitment to this evidence-based process, looking at operations and maintenance, with research documented on a separate Andropogon Research site. These design-science firms provide a model for new modes of practice.
The literature on urban ecology is also expanding, and there are good precedents for synthesizing this research into a language accessible by designers and planners. Now over 20 years old, by far still the gold standard for this is Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-Use Planning by Wenche Dramstad, James D. Olson, and Richard T.T. Forman. A slim but heavily graphic pamphlet, the premise is simple:
Landscape ecology has emerged in the past decade as an important and useful tool for land-use planners and landscape architects. While professionals and scholars have begun to incorporate aspects of this new field into their work, there remains a need for a summary of key principles and how they might be applied in design and planning. This volume fills that need. It is a concise handbook that lists and illustrates key principles in the field, presenting specific examples of how the principles can be applied in a range of scales and diverse types of landscapes around the world. Chapters cover: patches — size, number, and location, edges and boundaries, corridors and connectivity, mosaics, [and] summaries of case studies from around the world.
We need more examples like this, not to over-simplify concepts, but to deliver key principles and research in visual format to develop the shared language and allow designers to ask the right questions.
Another good model for research and design is healthcare, which has developed robust resources for evidence-based design (EBD) that is driven by the need for credible and defensible solutions that support theories of the environmental benefits of health outcomes. The Center for Health Design has pioneered the connection between designers and researchers through advancing best practices and empowering people with research. Similarly, sites like Research-Design Connections are an example of both a clearinghouse of information and synthesis of research accessible to designers. From their site, they connect “what cognitive scientists and other researchers in the social, design, and physical sciences have learned about how design affects human thoughts and behavior”. And also offer “design-relevant info in concise articles—some covering a single study, others integrating info from several analyses into a topical report, all written in everyday language—no jargon”. These types of evidence-based strategies, although more mature in a healthcare setting, can be expanded as models for sharing of urban ecological knowledge.
Developed by designers and scientists, Salmon-Safe offers a series of peer-reviewed certification and accreditation programs linking site development land management practices with the protection of agricultural and urban watershed. Image: Salmon Safe
Adoption of ecological principles in design can also be disseminated through certification and green rating systems. The most well-known is LEED, which incorporates site elements, however with wide consensus that it is more building-focused. This has opened up additional territory for site-based certification systems like the Sustainable Sites Initiative, which is a much more holistic framework informed by designers and scientists.
An ecologically informed system in the Pacific Northwest is Salmon Safe, which provides an example of a more focused, site scale interdisciplinary approach that focuses on urban ecological systems. With origins in certification of farms, vineyards, and parks, the system now provides opportunities for evaluation of campuses, urban projects, and infrastructure. Certified projects follow a set of standards, developed by designers and scientists including engineers, landscape architects, natural resource specialists, ecologists, and experts in integrated pest management. I worked on the team developing the urban standards, which has opened up a new realm by translating this ecological focus into strategies for dense, urban projects. The system has been embraced by Seattle Developer Vulcan Real Estate, who shares a commitment to the system for their projects. Multiple projects have been certified, as well as contractors accredited for their commitment to these principles.
Summary
The challenges are immense, but to truly expand the potential of projects we need to mediate the disconnect between science and design. To do this, we need to develop an understanding of new ways of crossing the divide, building on a number of positive strategies to be employed by ecologists and designers to increase collaboration and success. We need to create opportunities for building research into projects, and to expand the concept of “evidence-based design” aided by a greater understanding of urban science, to better inform flexible design solutions.
The solutions aren’t just generative, but could also be employed in post-occupancy evaluation to measure success and provide feedback loops for subsequent projects. We also need more opportunities to create teams that yield ecologically informed design strategies and expand the potential through use of habitat-focused certification such as Salmon Safe. The goal is to shape and expand the potential of biodiverse projects by developing shared language, and translating facts into ecological values and principles. Together, these strategies can reduce the impacts of urbanization on biodiversity and enhance urban wildlife through better collaboration.
We need to continue to gather stories of challenges and opportunities—and successes—in melding science and design. These stories need to be shared.
I have just returned from an exhilarating week spent in a workshop with a collection of UrBioNet members. UrBioNet is a network of researchers, practitioners, and students with an interest in urban ecology and biodiversity. It is broad in its remit: while it offers opportunities for discussion and sharing, it singles itself out in having a particular interest in forwarding empirical work in the fields of urban ecology and biodiversity via data-sharing, collaboration with a view to data generation, and developing teaching tools and curriculum interests related to urban biodiversity.
The illuminating part for any student taking a crosstown walk is exploring and seeing first-hand the socioeconomic and nature patterns…and realizing that we still have a lot to learn.
The recent meeting bought together a small group with two areas of interest, the first being urban ecologists working in Africa, the U.K., and the United States with social interests, and the second being social scientists working on environmental issues. I say “groups of interest” because these groups speak to two significant gaps in urban ecology: there is a notable paucity of work emerging from Africa, the fastest urbanizing continent on the planet, and while we have a growing amount of work emerging that connects social gradients to urban ecological gradients, the exact social mechanisms behind these patterns have yet to be clearly elucidated.
The workshop team in Pilanesberg, South Africa. From left to right: Mark Goddard, Pippin Anderson, Paige Warren, Marie du Toit, Myla Aronson, Dain Palmer, George Middendorf, Charlie Nilon, Sarel Ciliers, Jeremiah Asaka, Kumelachew Yeshitela, Stefan Siebert, Colin Polsky, Richelle Winkler.
The workshop, led by Paige Warren, Sarel Cilliers, Mark Goddard, Charlie Nilon, and Myla Aronson, was funded through a U.S. National Science Foundation grant secured by the American partners. They had used this opportunity to seek out a particular community of researchers who could link these two areas of interest. That community proved to be a stimulating combination.
In the week together, we grappled with three key themes. The first was an empirical exercise towards a meta-analysis that tackles the difficult terrain of unpacking the social elements that inform recorded urban biodiversity patterns. While we have patterns connecting social factors to biodiversity and ecological measures, these patterns are not always consistent, and we certainly don’t yet fully understand the mechanisms that drive the patterns. The second was brainstorming how we might improve our network engagements and expand the scope and breadth of the network, in particular to grow the number of African urban ecologists and practitioners.
The third focused on expanding the use of the ‘crosstown walk’ as a teaching tool, and it is this that I really want to report back on. In many respects, the “crosstown walk” speaks to both of the other two themes of the workshop in fun and interesting ways, and I will touch on both of these in relation to our deliberations over the crosstown walk.
The UrBioNet team at work in Pilanesberg.
The crosstown walk is the brainchild of Charlie Nilon and George Middendorf, and has been presented in a previous TNOC essay. Essentially, the crosstown walk is an urban ecology teaching tool where ecology students must walk a pre-determined socioeconomic gradient across their home city or town. The purpose of the exercise is two-fold. First, it makes students examine and question the environment they see. The students must determine what they think the dominant social and ecological patterns across the gradient are, or what the more subtle ones are. They are expected to observe, ponder, and hypothesize, all fundamental elements of any scientific endeavor.
Their second task is to collect data along the gradient to interrogate the relationships they believe they observe. Data gathered can really be anything, and this is the fun part. Students must apply their minds to the question of what readily-observable or collectable measures along a city street can be gathered that will serve to unpack the relationship between social, economic, and cultural aspects and environmental conditions. These could be building disrepair, types of cars parked in front of houses, yard size, the presence of large trees, lichen on trees, weeds in sidewalks, street lighting, birds, potted plants on porches, or anything else the students develop.
One possible crosstown walk view. A woman walking along a street in the informal settlement, or so-called township, of Imizamo Yethu in the Cape Town suburb of Hout Bay.
The idea is to get the students to interrogate the kinds of measures they intend to capture and why they believe these might relate to each other. In our workshop, as I mentioned, one of our tasks was to grapple with the question of how the metrics used as proxies for socioeconomic status relate to observed patterns of urban biodiversity or other ecological elements. We spent a considerable part of our six days together grappling with the relationships that underpin urban biodiversity and ecological patterns.
This is interesting and valuable terrain, as we do not fully understand the social processes behind biodiversity outcomes and these seem to vary across the globe. While many studies show increased biodiversity with wealth, the actual mechanism behind this pattern has been speculated about, but is not always clearly demonstrated, and some studies show different relationships. Patterns seem to be underpinned by textured and complex factors such as environmental context, tenure, local histories, and cultural dimensions, and these all playing out in concert or in any myriad of combinations. Further, any patterns relating to social-ecological status may well have environmental justice implications, rendering them critical outcomes that should inform city planning.
Another possible view along a crosstown walk, of the streets at Walmer Estate.
The fun part here for any student taking a crosstown walk, gathering data towards exploring socioeconomic and nature relationships, is that while we have some inkling that patterns do exist, we have by no means buttoned up this relationship. Also, because data capture and sharing are main features of the UrBioNet group, we can readily attest that there is a chronic shortage of data from cities relating to urban ecological patterns and an array of socioeconomic factors, particularly in the developing regions of the globe. This is certainly true of Africa. Any student participating in a crosstown walk should know they are working in the realm of the un-resolved and potentially contributing data to a “data scarce” space.
Of course, not every crosstown walk is going to generate data of sufficient volume or quality to warrant its inclusion in any substantive study. But what if a number of students, or classes, across the globe were all collecting data and we set our sights on a larger, collective, data-gathering exercise? Now, this links to the second theme in our workshop, that of network expansion, particularly in Africa. I had been planning to get my urban ecology class to do a crosstown walk for a while, and in the workshop, Charlie and I hatched a plan to make this a global teaching exercise: we will get our students to do their crosstown walks at the same time of year and then get them to share experiences and data to allow for an even better learning experience. Students will be able to get a sense of how their own city varies, and then make comparisons to another city elsewhere in the world. We believe this will add significant value to the urban ecology learning experience, and could potentially generate datasets worthy of global comparison and reflection, in addition to growing a cross-cultural learning experience.
A possible crosstown walk view from the streets of Woodstock.
Charlie and I got so excited that before the end of the meeting, we had Sarel Cilliers of North-West University in South Africa on board to run a simultaneous crosstown walk with his class, too. We now have three crosstown walks planned for September 2016. The opportunity to compare across the globe will get students scratching their heads over the same sorts of gnarly challenges we were grappling with in comparing socioeconomic measures and ecological patterns emerging from different parts of the world in the peer-reviewed literature. The difference is, they will be operating in real time and will be able to put challenging questions to each other, sharing reflections, data, photographs, and opinions. I imagine, for example, that comparing data from a sprawling city where yard size is comparable across a socioeconomic gradient to one where yard size is significantly different between socioeconomic classes could allow for interesting comparisons and considerations for standard species-area relationships and how these are—or are not—affected by socioeconomic status. How, for example, might data compare across cities of different ages, or ones of varying history, or cities with different access to public open space? All these subtle factors should prove interesting material to ponder and would only be prompted by work in different cities, something that would be logistically impossible in a single university teaching curriculum. Personally, I am extremely excited about this project and look forward to reflecting both on the data that emerges and, more critically, on the learning experiences of the students.
All in all, it was an excellent workshop. Of course, what I have presented here is only a portion of what we deliberated on in our time together, but I think it captures the spirit of the meeting, during which we wrestled with methods and data capture, grew collegiate relationships and friendships, and generated innovative ideas for teaching and expanding our urban ecology networks and databases.
For more information on the crosstown walk, I suggest you read George and Charlie’s paper, which clearly outlines the teaching tool and process.
This UrBioNet workshop was funded through NSF RCN: DEB #1354676/1355151. For more information on UrBioNet, find us on Facebook and on Twitter @urbionet_RCN.
Whereas biophilia is a popular meme for urban and ecological design, rarely is biophobia addressed. Perhaps it’s easier to pretend the “undesirables” don’t exist, but that’s just not realistic. The “crows of Vancouver” posed a reality check on the consistency of my narrative.
One of Metro Vancouver’s greatest spectacles is its twice daily crow migration that occurs every dawn and dusk, 365 days a year. Whatever your view or choice of description—crow-maggedon, crow stampede, crow-pocalypse—it is an impressive sight. Clans (or murders) of crows from all sections of the coast trickle in, like tributaries in a watershed of families and groups all destined for the large consolidated roost at Still Creek. Sometimes the birds follow Grandview Highway, like an aerial version of the cars below, extending as far as the eye can see in endless procession.
Theoretical map of the crow watershed in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland.
Metro Vancouver’s twice daily crow migration is a sight to behold. Check out this short video for the dynamism
Prior to human settlement, Northwestern crows (Corvus caurinus) in the Pacific North-West were mainly limited to coastlines where they enjoyed seafood, in particular whelks (Thais lamellosa). Their adaptable use of tools and high degree of intelligence was noted by a study that observed their feeding behaviour (selecting prey, then deciding how and where to drop the whelks to crack their shells), (Zach, 1978). Their talent of facial recognition is known by anyone who has purposefully disturbed a nest or a colony. In the meantime, the emotional and social intelligence of crows has been revealed through neuroscience conducted by the Marzluff lab at the University of Washington.
Further to the conditions of our cities, the ability of these birds to thrive in our cities is enhanced by their culture of social behaviour, generational learning, and cognitive sophistication. As with other species that are long-lived and congregate as flocks, and especially given their large brains relative to body size, crows are intelligent and adaptable because of their high behavioural variability. This faculty not only equips them for survival, but allows them to evolve within a single generation via social learning and the development of traditions to avoid random extinctions (Marzluff, 2014). This helps explain why crow roosts across urban North America have grown so large: they’re super smart and socially resilient!
Crow friend. Photo by Ifny Lachance (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Among the categorisations of urban bird responses as defined by Blair (1996), crows are exploiters. This means that they thrive in our presence. Like other classic exploiters (e.g., the “fab five” that live in nearly every city in the world: house sparrows, European starlings, mallards, Canada geese and rock pigeons), crows live around our homes, eat our waste, walk our streets, and are among our most familiar birds. Not surprisingly, then, the crow population has grown in concert with human activity. Urbanisation and agriculture transformed forested areas into open landscapes, which provide scrubby areas favoured for roosting and an abundance of food. While crows still like to spend their days foraging at the beach (who wouldn’t?), they sleep together in large roosts at inland sites with favourable microclimates.
In Vancouver and the surrounding region, i.e., the Lower Mainland, the Still Creek roost is the bedroom community for all crows. At its peak in the winter, when nesting and mating is but a glimmer in a bird’s eye, the congregation of crows at Still Creek includes adults and juveniles together. In winter 2019, it was estimated at 20,000 birds. Such a large and singular winter congregation is a relatively recent occurrence, apparently, and likely the product of different parameters, like large-scale habitat loss, predator protection, and urban food resources.
Impressions from the Still Creek roost, early March 2019. Credit: Christine Thuring
The scene
Motorists and fast-paced pedestrian urbanites may be oblivious to the endless river of boisterous black birds moving through the sky above, but when you find yourself in the middle of “crow hour” your senses are so overwhelmed that oblivion is a felt experience. In addition to the sensory overload, it is unsettling to be a minority life form surrounded by thousands of intelligent birds.
The setting in which I experience this phenomenon is on the main campus of the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), east of Vancouver in Burnaby, BC. After arriving from their respective day territories, but before bedding down at nearby Still Creek, thousands of crows descend onto BCIT campus in what can only be described as a party. The cacophony deafens the frequency of traffic and planes. Every surface is covered: roofs, parking lots, trees, power lines, lawns, tennis courts, playing fields, paths, etc. Awe overpowers all other emotions, and few can resist stopping and taking photos. This is crow time.
As an urban ecologist, researcher, designer and advocate of green roofs for biodiversity and ecological landscapes, I have been challenged by these birds since coming to BCIT. On the one hand, the crows have created excessive work for me, sometimes drawing tears of frustration. On the other hand, and more disturbingly, the crows have forced me to acknowledge mental states that do not align with my values – aversion, resentment and biophobia– while fundamentally challenging my philosophy of biophilic design. When I realised that most discussion about urban birds refers predominantly to desirable birds (which we want more of), and that most discussions about “nuisance” birds are relegated to commercial enterprises (specialised in keeping them at bay), I felt like I’d touched a nerve.
The challenge
Over two glorious days in November, a crew of volunteers helped to plant BCIT’s newest green roof experiment on the Elevated Lab. Following a pre-randomised experimental design, 4,800 plugs and bulbs were planted into designated spaces across 240 (1m2) plots. It was a lot of work to ensure that the plants were placed as specified by the design. We finished at dusk on the second day, and I was ecstatic and exhausted in equal parts. The autumn rains could begin!
Planting the experimental plots on the Elevated Lab was a huge effort, and much gratitude goes to the students and instructors from BCIT FNAM. Photo credit: Christine Thuring
My blissful state of accomplishment was soon replaced by despair and horror, however, as the crows systematically undid our work every day. For several hours each week, I was on the roof re-planting the damage. I had hoped for the best—that the crows would regard the planting with interest and move along—and now realised how meagre “hope” can be. In the months prior, I had in fact toyed with setting up some form of bird protection, but we hadn’t budgeted for this and I dislike bird netting (which seemed like the only option). The regret was tearful and exhausting. The sound and just the thought of crows issued a rush of anxiety in me. It felt unhealthy.
Typical crow damage on the Elevated Lab at BCIT Burnaby. Credit: Christine ThuringCrow presence as viewed from the Elevated Lab facing north. Credit: Christine Thuring
However wearisome the re-planting was, I was most challenged by the experience of coming up against the limit of my feel-good narrative about green roofs and urban ecology. On the one hand, I continued to sing the familiar mantra that “green roofs provide habitat for insects and birds” but now sensed the arising of an exclusion clause: “…except for crows”. I was confronted with a major flaw in my narrative, and one thatfelt hypocritical and skewed.
What to do?
The outcome
After some reflection and discussion, the issue became clear. I don’t have anything against crows. Rather than anxiety and loathing, disempowerment and resentment, deep down I wanted to celebrate them with admiration, interest, and affection! With regards to the project, I needed the plants to establish successfully. Knowing their abilities of facial recognition, I definitely don’t want the crows to recognise me as an adversary. As it stands, they probably regard me as “crazy woman who waves arms at the sky begging for something called mercy”. I needed to figure out how to reconcile with the birds, at least for the establishment period, and definitely wanted to avoid becoming a dive-bomb target.I consulted with colleagues from BCITs Ecological Restoration program and from the green roof industry, and investigated more seriously into the range of available bird deterrent systems. Crows are highly intelligent and can figure out most scare tactics in a matter of days, which is why scarecrows or stationary owls don’t work.
It’s dusk at BCIT, and “crow hour” has moved onto the Elevated Lab, where our owl decoy doesn’t seem to evoke any response other than disregard. Credit: Christine Thuring
I decided to invest in anon-lethal,multi-sensory bird deterrent system,in order to discourage crows from loitering around the green roof. This integrated management program uses pyrotechnics and amplified recorded sound on a randomised program, and has been shown to successfully disperse crow roosts, and reduce the appeal of a location. Apparently birds have a strong aversion to lasers, and the type used is similar to the seasonal projection lights that were popular during the festive season. The amplified sound system features calls that make birds uneasy; these include the call of a predatory bird (peregrine falcon) and distress calls by ravens and crows. Taken together, this multi-sensory system should make this area of BCIT campus less attractive for birds, keeping them on edge. We set the timer for dawn and dusk, and a couple random times during the day.
Bird damage after installing the deterrent system was significantly reduced, but not entirely. Given the scale of the population, however, perhaps this is as good as it gets.
The bird conflict on the Elevated Lab was a test of co-existence and a poignant invitation to explore the tensions between love and respect for self and for “other”; that is, respect for the project and for my well-being, and respect for the birds. It was fascinating from a philosophical perspective, as it put me in touch with what feels like a fault or a crack in the bedrock between biophilia and biophobia. Whereas biophilia (“love of life”) is a popular meme for urban and ecological design, biophobia is rarely addressed. Perhaps it’s easier to pretend the ‘undesirables’ don’t exist, but that’s not realistic (and it would be a serious oversight for those who are designing for urban wildlife!).
This situation also got me thinking about how we humans tend to hate successful species that we consider unwanted or undesired. Whether we refer to them as weeds or volunteers, the duality of judgement remains. The irony, of course, is that when we try to eradicate species that we feel are problematic, we may end up creating even more and better conditions for them through the disturbance. The fact is that the urban species most familiar to us are reflecting us back to ourselves: their presence is a direct result of our presence. In this light, reactive hatred for “other” implies self-hatred, too, via our unaware subconscious.
As if to reinforce this hunch, I’ve since learned that cultural responses between people and crows are reciprocal. Marzluff (2014) suggests that we can play a meaningful role in such cyclical cultural phenomena, which means we have a choice in whether we want a human-crow culture that manifests expressions of conservation and care, or otherwise. For example, when birds like corvids are rare, humans either ignore or revere them; but when they become competitors, humans tend to view them as pests. Whether they are persecuted or revered, intelligent birds like crows and ravens will respond with behaviour that accords with the prevalent human attitude. The choice is ours.
My winter crow saga was beautifully closed off with the 8thannual Crow Roost Twilight Bike Ride, curated by the Still Moon Arts Society in East Vancouver. This group ride follows the evening migration along the Central Valley Greenway (parallel to Grandview Highway mentioned earlier), right to the heart of the Still Creek roost. The event attracted about 30 cyclists, and you could pick out the seasoned participants by their crow costumes and range of caws. The organisers introduced this year’s ride with emphasis on respect and acknowledgement for the crows, their culture and territory. This meant that when the ride arrived at the roost, all bike lights were turned off and a quiet respectful atmosphere was maintained. The birds did not fly off in agitation as they had the year before, and for those sensitive to perceive it, perhaps a culture of restoration had been established.
The annual Crow Roost Twilight Bike Ride stops at the Still Creek roost with quiet appreciation. Credit: Christine ThuringParticipants in the annual Crow Roost Twilight Bike. Credit: Ifny Lachance(CC BY-SA 4.0)Crow family conversation. Credit: Ifny Lachance (CC BY-SA 4.0)
My experience with Vancouver’s crows this winter issued a strong reality check on my narrative with regards to urban wildlife and green roof ecology. I’m grateful to the crows for showing me the middle path between the extremes of love and aversion, such that I can appreciate them for what they are, accept what they represent, and receive what they have to teach. In this era of biodiversity loss and the rising consequences of an over-engineered world our most common species represent an opportunity to reconnect with the dwindling wildness of the Anthropocene. I acknowledge that I have personal agency on viewing my world as alive and beautiful, just as it is, inhabited by the people and species who are my neighbours. As the crows start to nest down, I am now looking for my local corvid families to befriend.
Blair, RB. 1996. Land use and avian species diversity along an urban gradient. Ecological Applications 6:506-519.
Marzluff, JM. 2014. Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing our neighbourhoods with wrens, robins, woodpeckers, and other wildlife. Yale University Press. New Haven.
Marzluff, JM and KN Swift. 2017. Connecting animal and human cognition to conservation. Behavioural Sciences. 16:87-92.
We need research that demonstrates what are the “cues” in a landscape design and how far can yards be pushed down the ecological continuum. This would result in more targeted solutions, with higher levels of acceptance of ecological design in yards.
As an urban ecologist interested in biodiversity conservation, I often work with homeowners, developers, landscape architects, planners and other design professionals. With goal of improving urban biodiversity, I attempt to bring more vegetative complexity and native plants into urban landscapes. I will not outline it here, but it is important to design and manage urban areas for biodiversity. (See these blogs: forest fragments, conservation developments, and planning tools ).
My focus for this blog is to explore whether we can change homeowners from installing conventional landscapes to installing more environmentally friendly landscapes that provide wildlife habitat and reduce natural resource consumption. I am trying to get away from industrial landscapes that are dominated by carpet-like lawns, trimmed ornamentals, and showy exotics. I am trying to steer homeowners towards structurally diverse yards, with lots of native vegetation from the ground up to the canopy. For the purposes here, I call this an eco-friendly yard.
A conventional yard in Gainesville, Florida. It is dominated by lawn and ornamental bushes. Photo: Mark HostetlerA relatively new Gainesville, Florida home with more natural landscaping. It has no lawn and does not require mowing. It conserved trees in the front yard and has native plants that were installed by landscaper. Photo: Mark HostetlerAnother conventional yard in Gainesville, Florida. It is dominated by lawn and ornamental bushes. Photo: Mark HostetlerAnother Gainesville, Florida home with more natural landscaping. It has a small patch of lawn, a natural landscaped rain garden, conserved trees, and permeable paved driveway. Photo: Mark Hostetler
When talking about eco-friendly yards, design professionals, homeowners, and other built environment professionals often say, “Well, it cannot be too messy!” My immediate thought is: What is too messy? Aesthetic preferences are in the eye of the beholder and are shaped by experiences, culture, societal norms, and values. A continuum exists between highly manicured landscapes that contain mainly mowed exotic turfgrass and exotic plants to totally wild yards that contain mainly native plants. Now to me, as an ecologist, I see the beauty of a wild, structurally diverse, native plant yard. Nevertheless, from my experiences, I am the outlier. I understand that we cannot ignore cultural and societal norms because an ecological landscape design may be rejected by most homeowners. Even politics may have a say here as some city ordinances may outlaw non-industrial yards (e.g., everyone must have a mowed lawn). The best-intentioned ecologist may not get anything implemented because of all these challenges.
Enter Cues to Care theory. The term ‘”cues to care” was coined by Joan Nassauer in a paper titled Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames (Nassauer, 1995) and is a phrase used to describe actions undertaken by humans that indicate a landscape is well cared for and meets cultural expectations for maintenance. According to this theory, there is a common expectation in societies that landscapes will be looked after, managed, and maintained to acceptable standards. This assumption can be summed up, as Nassauer suggests, with the question “Does it look like they’re taking care of it?” This “cues to care” theory is used in the context of creating eco-friendly yards. If we can figure out how much minimum “cues” are needed to make a landscape acceptable, we can incorporate more native structure into yards. But how many cues are needed? And what types of cues? For example, are one trimmed hedge and 20% mowed lawn the expected ingredients?
Thus, what is needed is research that demonstrates what are the “cues” in a landscape design and how far can front and back yards be pushed down the ecological continuum before a homeowner revolts. When I looked through the literature, it turns out that there are very few studies on this and most (as I will argue below) have not been conducted properly to determine which cues and at what levels are needed to help more eco-friendly yards to be accepted.
From my review of previous studies (mainly conducted by Nassauer and others), they concentrated on a small subset of homes in a given city. In two representative studies by Nassauer (1993) and Visscher et al. (2012), Minneapolis-St. Paul and Detroit homeowners were surveyed to ascertain their landscaping preferences. Essentially, they were shown yards with varying degrees of vegetation structure, from mainly mowed to more “wild”. They were then asked their preferences. The take home message from these studies was that homeowners perceived the more native landscapes as messy and unattractive and some degree of a “cues to care” was required. In fact, in one study (Nassauer, 1993), the author states that in order to garnish homeowner acceptance, “As a general guideline, these mown areas should cover at least half the front yard.”
Several problems are associated with the design and interpretation of these studies, and they contain one or more of the following issues:
First, it was a nonrandom sample in one study. People were invited to group events and no effort was made to make the study a random sample. We cannot know if the surveyed group is a fair representation of all homeowners in that area of the city.
Second, there was no attempt to address non-response bias. If the response to the survey was low (as it was in one study), what are the opinions of those that refused the survey? Again, we cannot know if the surveyed group a fair representation all homeowners in that area.
Third, survey results only reflect the opinions of people in these particular neighborhoods in each particular city. It cannot be extrapolated to represent an average across the U.S. (which is sometimes being done by design professionals).
Fourth, the sample of homeowners were drawn from neighborhoods with landscapes that had highly manicured lawns; therefore, the subjective norm is biased towards this particular type of landscape. Results may be very different if homeowners were surveyed from neighborhoods that had very little lawn, for example.
I do applaud the idea behind “cues to care”. We need to recognize, measure, and address aesthetic preferences if we are going to incorporate more native plants into yards. Overall, it makes intuitive sense. We have all driven through or lived in neighborhoods and our eyes make assessments of “messy” and “attractive” landscapes. Of course, the acceptability of a landscape in cities is dependent on each persons’ experiences, values, and subjective norms.
The danger of course is that built environment professionals take these results (to date) and apply them to urban landscapes throughout the United States. From my experience, many landscape design professionals (academics and practitioners) refer to these studies as an “average” viewpoint by people across the United States. Practitioners may believe that homeowners would only accept a more ecological landscape design with levels of care that were presented in these studies.
My main point here is that we do not really know the level of cues that are needed when installing eco-friendly landscapes. Therefore, it is important to know which cues to care are needed and in what quantity for ecologically-designed landscapes to be accepted by the public. More research is needed to ascertain homeowner landscape expectations across different neighborhoods, cultures, and cities. I wager that acceptance would vary if respondents grew up near older residential yards with very little mowed lawns versus newer residential neighborhoods that have lots of lawn.
In particular, we do not know how malleable these preferences are. For example, if homeowners were presented with the environmental and economic costs of a manicured yard versus an alternative yard, perhaps they would be more willing to adopt a more eco-friendly yard. In particular, if an entire neighborhood, from the beginning, was designed with very little turfgrass and had lots of native plants, would not the homeowners in these neighborhoods have a different acceptance level? A new subjective norm? I bet so.
Take home message? We cannot rely on research to date and must explore what are the boundaries of landscape preferences. Research should be conducted to determine not only how variable cues to care are from one context to the next, but to better understand how subjective norms could be changed from raising neighborhood awareness and creating working models ecological friendly yards. Such studies would result in more targeted solutions that allow for higher levels of acceptance of and even preference for ecological design in yards.
Ultimately, the goal is to have both attractive and ecologically functioning human-dominated landscapes. Residential landscapes have typically been dominated by ornamentals species and manicured lawns. The challenge of shifting landscape preferences remains but the use of cues to care theory remains a potent and viable possibility for allowing more native plants and structurally diverse structure to be incorporated into yards. Imagine in your mind’s eye, patches of natural landscaping, with complex vertical height structure, that are bordered with landscaping rocks, trimmed hedges, etc. (i.e., cues to care). These bordering features would indicate human intent while simultaneously providing a more chaotic, natural landscape in the yard itself. Perhaps even educational signage is required to raise levels of awareness (see neighborhood signs). Exploring peoples’ preferences when incorporating more natural landscaping needs to be researched and maverick developers/homeowners need to try out new designs. Such studies and local examples will lead to the reduction of environmental impacts and create landscapes that are better for wildlife and human kind alike.
Nassauer, J.I. 1993. Ecological Function and the Perception of Suburban Residential Landscapes, IN P. H. Gobster, (ed.), Managing Urban and High Use Recreation Settings, General Technical Report (St. Paul, MN: USDA Forest Service North Central Forest Exp. Station
Visscher, R.S., J.I. Nassauer and L.L Marshall. 2012. Homeowner Preferences for Wooded Front Yards and Backyards: Implications for Carbon Storage, Landscape and Urban Planning 146, 1-10.
Cities have long been seen as the antithesis – or, at least, the absence – of nature. Yet in recent years, environmentalists started rethinking their long-held prejudices against urban areas. The rise of neighborhood-based environmental justice movements, beginning in the 1980’s, forced us to confront the human side of pollution and its relationship to urban poverty. The evolution of green building standards and advances in sustainable design helped us imagine an environmentally enlightened future for our offices and homes. The growing number of city-dwellers across the planet may have played the biggest role in our shifting perceptions of cities and nature. Moving “back to the land” and “living off the grid” could never be a tenable option for three and a half billion people. The result would end up closer to an explosion in suburban sprawl than a no-impact return to simpler times. Like it or not, we’ve realized that cities will have to figure into our schemes for a sustainable planet.
Despite this growing acceptance of cities within environmental circles, we haven’t completely let go of all our negative associations and assumptions. Old habits die hard. Images of polar bears and pine forests still grace the homepages of large environmental organizations. Intellectually, we’ve grown more comfortable seeing the nature in cities and, at the same time, understanding cities as unique manifestations of nature in and of themselves. Yet emotionally, it still doesn’t click. In New York City, Central Park seems categorically different from Grand Central Terminal.
How might we start to intuitively feel what our minds have started to know? Matthew Gandy, the prolific British geographer, makes a compelling case for seeing cities as cyborgs – “beings with both biological and artificial parts” according to Wikipedia’s definition of this concept from the space age. Looking back, you might say that cities have always been cyborgs, even if we didn’t see them that way. Even the earliest cities – both old world and new – were defined by the blended infrastructures and ecosystems that made their perpetuation possible. The Aztecs built Tenochitilan atop Lake Texcoco and created canals and aqueducts to manipulate the region’s hydrology. You’ll still find Mexico City there today.
Gandy suggests that the cyborg metaphor helps “fire the imagination” as we struggle to describe the complex interplay between urban infrastructure and ecology. The recent TNOC post, “Cities of Nature” by Eric Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society, explores the difficulties we face in getting across what we mean, exactly, when we start talking about the “nature of cities.” Are we talking about parks and green spaces? Or are we talking about the whole city as an ecosystem all its own? Seeing cities as cyborgs may help us find ways to get on the same page.
The cyborg metaphor may also help us avoid spinning that same old “cities versus nature” yarn. Cities undeniably transform landscapes – both near and far away. But any permanent human settlement is bound to change things. A zero impact city – a city without the artificial stuff – is a city that never comes into existence. To that end, if we still value cities for all of the many reasons humans have valued cities for millennia, we need to stop trying to make them more “like nature.” As James Howard Kunstler reminds us, there’s little good that comes from trying to solve urban problems with “nature Band-Aids.” The cyborg city doesn’t need to be made “more natural.” Nor, for that matter, does it need to be made “more artificial” (the tacit goal of the Modernist City with its own legacy of failure). Instead, the cyborg needs to be made more resilient. It needs to work better.
We can spend a lifetime debating what, exactly, it means for a city to work better in light of all our different goals for ongoing human existence on this planet. Yet for many grassroots environmentalists, there’s no time to waste. They’re happy to shoot from the hip and just get started, growing gardens and tending street trees and sowing oyster reefs to clean polluted waters. Others are going one step further. They’re working to program the cyborg city to make it smarter – to make it talk back at us and tell us how our efforts are progressing. One of these cyborg ventriloquists is Leif Percifield, a recent graduate of the M.F.A. program in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School For Design in New York City. A self avowed “creative technologist,” Percifield’s DontFlush.Me project aims to help us interact more intelligently with one of the cyborg city’s metabolic systems – its sewers.
Leif Percifield attaches a water quality monitor to the bulkhead outside of a Combined Sewage Outfall in NYC. Photo Credit: Leif Percifield
Percifield’s goal with DontFlush.Me is straightforward. “I want you to know exactly when your sewer pipe is connected to the river instead of a sewage treatment plant,” he says. Deploying a network of D.I.Y. sensors and rooftop weather stations across the city, he believes he can do just that.
Like most older industrial American cities, New York is built on top of a combined sewage system – “Basically just a storm sewer and a sanitary sewer meeting in the same pipe,” Percifield explains. “The pipe where you flush your toilet and the pipe that collects the stormwater from the street all go to the same place.” Throughout most of the city’s history, sewage from this combined system poured directly into the rivers, canals, and bays that make up New York harbor, polluting its waters and silting up its shipping channels with human waste.
“In most places, [the Harbor’s bottom] is covered with a blanket of sludge that is composed of silt, sewage, industrial wastes, and clotted oil. The sludge is thickest in the slips along the Hudson, in the flats on the Jersey side of the Upper Bay, and in backwaters such as Newtown Creek, Wallabout Bay, and the Gowanus Canal. In such areas, where it isn’t exposed to the full sweep of the tides, it accumulates rapidly.”
The city’s first sewage treatment plants, built in the 1890’s to improve water quality along popular beaches in Brooklyn, were quickly overwhelmed by New York’s booming population. More treatment plants were added throughout the early twentieth century, but the city’s desultory investments in infrastructure were no match for the volume of waste flowing from apartments, offices, and industry. By the time Mitchell started reporting on the harbor, the city’s waters had mostly been left for dead.
Large-scale efforts to treat raw sewage would only arrive with the federal Clean Water Act of 1972, mandating widespread improvements in municipal water quality. During the next three decades, the city would build new treatment plants and expand capacity at facilities that were, in some instances, already operating for nearly a century. Water quality gradually improved, but sewage still makes its way into New York Harbor in the 21st Century – approximately 27 billion gallons per year, according to Percifield.
“When it rains, the volume of water quickly causes the combined system to be overloaded,” he explains. “Currently, combined sewers are the number one source of pollution in New York harbor.”
Through the city’s fourteen treatment plants are designed to handle 1.3 billion gallons of sewage each day, even a small rainstorm can overwhelm the system with excess water. The rising slurry of human waste and street runoff bypasses the treatment plants and flows to the nearest “combined sewage outfall” – an engineer’s euphemism for open pipes that dump into the harbor. Right now, nearly 500 combined sewage outfalls are scattered across New York City, each pouring untreated sewage from the Bronx River to Jamaica Bay and everywhere in between.
The reasoning behind DontFlush.Me is elegantly simple: if New Yorkers knew exactly when an overflow was underway, they’d think twice about loading the dishwasher, taking a long shower, or, even, flushing the toilet. Its the old “let it mellow” logic, with a twist. Once the overflow is over, city dwellers will get the “all clear” to flush once again. There’s just one catch. Right now, the only way to know whether an overflow is happening is to witness it, first hand, at the tail end of a pipe.
“The most important thing is understanding when these overflows occur,” according to Percifield. Yet it’s unlikely that most New Yorkers will be standing around an overflow pipe in the middle of a downpour waiting to find out whether it is safe to flush the toilet back home. The cyborg city needs a better way of sensing itself.
Leif Percifield explores some of NYC’s sewers with Steve Duncan. Photo Credit: Steve Duncan
Percifield’s solution is a mix of off-the-shelf gadgets and a good deal of hacking, tinkering, and tactical appropriation of the city’s existing sewer infrastructure. Percifield has asked the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (the “DEP”) for permission to install water quality sensors at a handful of sewage outfalls, and this spring he worked with a team of like-minded technologists to test the equipment at an outfall on the notoriously nasty Gowanus Canal. The sensors broadcast information about water quality and create a stream of data that can warn New Yorkers when an overflow is taking place.
“These alerts can encourage people to do point-source conservation,” Percifield claims, drawing inspiration from voluntary electricity conservation programs that kick into gear during heatwaves. “Con Edison [the local utility] can contact commercial customers that have signed up and say, ‘We need you to reduce your power for a period of time.’”
Though the DontFlush.Me sensors have yet to be installed, the alert system is already up and running. Percifield designed this first iteration of the system to tap into publicly available weather data and make a best-guess at the likelihood of an overflow in each of New York City’s five boroughs. Real-time updates are available as emails and text-messages, and you can follow DontFlush.Me on Twitter.
As part of his graduate thesis at Parsons, Percifield designed a colored LED light bulb with a direct connection to the Internet – and, of course, the DontFlush.Me datastream. Plug the light bulb into any electrical socket and the color of its glow tells you whether or not it’s O.K. to flush. “I think it’s the beginning of a future where things will provide you with feedback about their impact,” Percifield says. “It’s a piece of infrastructure that can engage people more actively in their daily lives.”
Floating up to a Combined Sewage Outfall chamber in New York City. Photo Credit: Leif Percifield
Percifield admits that DontFlush.Me is just one part of a comprehensive strategy to clean up New York’s waterways, making them safer for swimming and fishing – and, potentially, for any creature that would thrive in cleaner waters. DEP is making significant investments in bricks-and-mortar infrastructure to upgrade the sewage system. At the same time, community groups are planting trees, rain gardens, and green roofs to trap stormwater and prevent it from overwhelming the city’s treatment plants. In the process, they are creating habitat and transforming urban ecosystems. Both halves of the cyborg are being tweaked here and there to better work together as a whole system.
Our knowledge of what works in managing rural places doesn’t always port over to the living systems we’re fostering in the city. Robert Sullivan tells of ecologists at the NYC Parks Department discovering that roofing material and plywood – illegally dumped in the city’s out-of-the-way open spaces – make great habitat for snakes. So, sometimes, they leave it alone. If the snakes like it, maybe it isn’t such a big deal. Time will tell. “Smart city” projects like Percifield’s can help us practice a sort of minute-by-minute adaptive management in these cases. New data streams can tell us whether or not we’re doing more harm than good as we muddle through with our environmental initiatives. They may also welcome every city dweller to participate in that adaptive management process, tweaking day-to-day interactions with urban ecosystems and immediately getting feedback on the results. DontFlush.Me may be connected to the sewers, but ultimately its about the relationship between New Yorkers and the harbor estuary that surrounds their city.
Since starting his project in early 2011, Percifield has only been down inside New York City’s sewers twice. Once, he ventured down a manhole with Steve Duncan, an urban explorer with a penchant for wandering into the forgotten nooks of NYC infrastructure. Early in the development of DontFlush.Me, Percifield planned to install sensors directly in the underground pipes to monitor water volume (the idea was later nixed by engineers at the DEP). Though anyone can tour the sewers of Paris, New York’s subterranean waterways are off-limits to the general public, and Percifield has yet to pop another manhole cover.
Another expedition took Percifield straight into the mouth of a large sewage outfall in Brooklyn. Rowing in a tiny boat, he floated under the bulkhead and into a cavernous concrete chamber. “In some places it’s about 18 feet across and five or six feet high,” he recalled. “You’re talking about a space the size of a two car garage.” On a rainy day, these massive outfalls create a frothy Niagara of sewage and street litter. It’s a sight that few New Yorkers would willingly witness for themselves. Soon they won’t have to. The cyborg is learning to speak, and it’s telling us how to help it work better.
There is a difference between equality and equity. Equality says that everybody can participate in our success and equity says we need to make sure that everybody actually does participate in our success and in our growth. A just city is a city free from both inequity and inequality.
Colombia, an “underdeveloped emerging” country, shares this statistic. It is estimated that by 2020, 80% of Colombia’s population, to be around 48 million at that moment, will live in urban centers, which in our case occupy about 2.5% of the national territory.
We must generate and consolidate in the society a new approach to the management of biodiversity and ESS in rural urban environments. This requires not only changing the paradigms of “environmental management” but also of planning, design and urban culture. It requires that we:
While there are still barriers, a number of efforts provide guidance to moving forward with better collaboration between designers and scientists. Firms such as 
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