Environmental Education and Advancing Urbanization

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Cities—their design and how we live in them—will be key in our struggle for sustainability and, indeed, our future. As cities grow, as they are newly created, and as more and more people choose or require them as places to live, our decisions about urban design and city-building will determine the outcomes of long-term challenges related to resilience, sustainability, livability, and justice. Rather than being the essential cause of the global environmental dangers we face, cities will be central to success in overcoming these dangers. Such success will be based on science and policy, but also on widespread public engagement with and understanding of both the challenges and the potential solutions found in building cities. Environmental education can play a critical role in fostering public engagement, through clarifying and transmitting the challenges, values, actions, and methods of sustainable, resilient, livable, and just cities.

There is a key and essential role—advancing progressive urban environmental ideas in a global context—for an emerging urban environmental education.

What is urban?

At their core, urban spaces are human settlements of various sizes, densities, and physical arrangements. Megacities, cities, towns, and even organized collections of populated zones that comprise metropolitan regions are “urban”—that is, urban comprises a diversity and continuum of types of spaces, not one form. The dense and compact European city is one form, surrounded by rural land. Classic American cities and their sprawl is another model. Garden cities, clustered townships, and other urban forms all have characteristics in common.

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What are the unifying features of these diverse urban forms? People—and their communities—represent one unifying feature. Buildings, streets, and other grey infrastructure comprise another. And nature is a third. By including nature as a key characteristic of cities, we do not mean nature as an idealized or hoped-for feature. Nature is an attribute of every city, both within its borders and as a connection to a wider landscape, because while cities are social and infrastructural spaces, they are also ecological spaces. They are social-ecological spaces of functioning ecosystems of living things and physical spaces. In this sense, cities are essential human habitat.

Acknowledging that cities are ecosystems in and of themselves, that exist along gradients with surrounding peri-urban and rural areas, has deep implications for the nature of both global sustainability and the essential humanity and livability of the world’s urban zones. Urbanization is advancing throughout the world. Urbanization as a positive concept for the good of the Earth is also advancing around the world among thoughtful scholars, within progressive city leadership, and in the hands of people on the streets who are building better cities, block by block, through community gardens, street tree plantings, parks and embedded natural areas, and participatory decision-making. Telling the story of this advancement is an essential role for an emerging urban environmental education.

The growth of cities

The world is increasingly urban, interconnected, and changing. With current trends, by 2030 the global urban population is estimated to be 4.9 billion, nearly double that of 2000. During this period, the total urban area is expected to triple. That is, urban land area is expanding faster than urban populations (Elmqvist et al., 2013). This massive change in where humans live on the planet will have inevitable local and global ecological consequences.

Indeed, more than 60 percent of 2030’s projected urban area has yet to be built (Elmqvist et al., 2013). In three areas—sub-Saharan Africa, China, and India—the combined urban population is expected to grow by more than 1 billion people. By 2030, nearly one-third of the world’s urban inhabitants will live in China or India (Seto, Güneralp, and Hutyra, 2012). Africa will urbanize faster than any other continent: its urban population is expected to more than double, from 300 million in 2000 to 750 million in 2030. Around 75 percent of Africa’s total population growth is expected to occur in cities of less than 1 million. African cities are often settlements with weak governance structures, high levels of poverty, and low capacity in environmental science. Currently, more than 43 percent of Africa’s urban population lives below the poverty line, more than in any other continent, making socioeconomic development a priority. Generally weak state control, the presence of a feeble formal economic sector, and the scarcity of local professional skills will constrain responses to the complex environmental challenges posed by rapid urbanization. Even under current conditions, urban areas all over the planet are facing severe challenges, including shortages of natural resources; environmental degradation; climate change; demographic and social changes, such as increasing income inequality and poverty; and inconsistent management of sustainability transitions that would reduce ecological impacts.

Climate change, increased migration of people, and ecological degradation will severely test societies and urban regions. However, there are also opportunities in the urbanization process. That 60 percent of 2030s cities are yet to be built is a chance to avoid repeating the city-building mistakes of the past. The infrastructure we build in cities—where we put the roads and the buildings, and how we organize resource use—tends to be with us a long time. The immensity of new building now underway is a chance to get it right, for both people and nature.

Rocinha ("little farm", due to its agricultural vocation until the mid 20th century), located in the rich southern zone of Rio de Janeiro, is considered one of the most populous favelas in Brazil. Most of its 70,000 inhabitants live in houses made from concrete and brick and have access to basic sanitation, plumbing, and electricity. The neighborhood has a vibrant local economy. Source: Alamy.com
Rocinha, located in the rich southern zone of Rio de Janeiro, is one of the most populous favelas in Brazil. The neighborhood has a vibrant local economy. Source: Alamy.com

Values

What are the cities we want to create in the future, the cities in which we want to live, that work for both people and the Earth? What is their nature? A vision is needed for city-building, one that is fundamentally built upon goals and informed by values. Visions, goals, and values, along with facts that justify them, are the essence of education, including environmental education.

Certainly, the cities we need are sustainable, since we need our cities to balance consumption and resources so that they can last into the future. Certainly, they are resilient, so our cities are still in existence after the next “100-year storm”, now due every few years. As we build this vision, we know that cities must also be livable, because cities are now the places where most of us live. And justice must also be key to our urban environments. We have struggled with just cities for a long time; largely, we have come up short.

These are the key characteristics of the cities of our dreams: resilient, sustainable, livable, and just. What are the values that are foundations for these goals? They are, at a minimum, inclusiveness, equity, respect for people and knowledge, innovation, and conservation.

The United Nation’s Urban Sustainable Development Goals offer some guidance—a global consensus on what is important (United Nations, 2015). Among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, approved in 2015, there is one explicitly about cities, #11: “Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” The goal offers a roadmap to the operational values we should investigate, appropriate, and teach in the emerging urban world, including targets for abundant open space, sustainable environmental management, and access to nature and its myriad benefits and services. At the center of Sustainable Development Goal #11 and our general approach to cities, explicitly and implicitly, is nature, both as a literal feature of the cities we require for resilience, sustainability, livability, and justice, and as a metaphor for the kinds of cities we desire.

The richness of the urban environment

Why should we care about the impacts of urbanization on ecosystems? In addition to the intrinsic value of nature, urban ecosystems are essential for human well-being, and, ultimately, for urban resilience and sustainability. Because urban nature has explicit benefits, its availability to all people is a matter of justice.

The environmental consequences of the rapid growth of cities—especially poorly designed and operated ones—is starkly apparent. Urban expansion has degraded and destroyed natural habitats in and around cities worldwide, transforming forests, coastal mangroves, lakes, and wetlands into polluted travesties of their former ecological vigor, converting them into vast expanses of concrete.

Yet, cities are far from barren. Many contain rich, thriving pockets of biodiversity with high native and non-native (novel) species assemblages (Faeth, Bang and Saari, 2014). Such assemblages of urban species and habitats provide a range of important ecosystem services that are critical for the sustainability and for the life of cities. Wetlands clean water contaminated with industrial pollutants and sewage; trees may clean the air of pollutants. Urban ecosystems provide important habitats for insects, birds, bats, other pollinators and other urban wildlife, and constitute important centers for cultural and recreational activities. It is a rare city resident who prefers to exercise on a crowded city pavement than in an urban park or along an urban stream. Exposure to green spaces provides well-being and psychological relief from urban stress. Parks, lakes, and coastal beaches act as important nodes of congregation, strengthening social bonds between disparate urban residents.

Cities are often rich with biodiversity (Aronson et al., 2014). Because cities are commonly located near rivers and oceans, many are biodiversity hotspots in their own right. Cities can be key stopovers along migratory routes. Ecosystems often hold an important place in the cultural landscape of residents, and are sometimes considered sacred and worshipped in parts of the world such as Asia and Africa. Researchers in New York City find ample evidence of care, stewardship, and spiritual practice in the natural areas and parks of New York City, among immigrants and other residents (Svendsen, Campbell and McMillen, 2016). Urban ecosystems also provide resources for foraging in many cities, offering food and livelihood security for vulnerable communities through the provision of fish, food, fodder, fuelwood, and other resources. Many urban ecosystems historically functioned as urban commons, providing collective resources for entire communities in times of scarcity and need.

That cities have dire environmental and biodiversity challenges is certainly true. That they are ecologically dead, or are the causes of all the world’s environmental problems is false. Urban ecosystems encompass a diversity of types of spaces. In addition to big natural areas that we commonly discuss—city and national parks—urban green spaces encompass a wide continuum of micro to macro spaces, from wetlands and bioswales, to street trees, pocket parks, and community gardens, and even to biophilic workspaces. There is an equivalent diversity of people and communities working in and interacting with nature, from the informal (e.g., communities, civic groups, and activists) to the formal (e.g., state and corporate players) (Kazemi, Beecham and Gibbs, 2011; Beninde, Veith and Hochkirch, 2015).

Urban ecosystems play key social and ecological roles in shaping the quality of human lives, providing a buffer against local and global environmental factors such as pollution and climate change, increasing the economic and food security of the urban poor, and improving health and physical and psychological wellbeing. Green urban spaces are key to global sustainability, and need to be recognized as positive forces in shaping a better stewardship of the entire biosphere (Elmqvist et al., 2013).

Yet many cities are experiencing a crisis of green and open space, especially in the Global South. The lack of accessible green and open space contributes to desperately poor conditions for both people and nature (Wolch, Byrne and Newell, 2014). Thus, having sufficient access to good quality urban green space is an issue of ecological and social concern, impacting quality of life and social justice.

The author leading a field trip in an urban wetland. Photo by Hara Woltz.
Matt Palmer leading a field trip in an urban wetland in New York City. Photo by Hara Woltz.

Awareness fosters care

In a world of advancing urbanization, urban environmental education can play a key role. The story of cities as ecological spaces needs to be told, both in cities and outside them: to adults and to the many young people who increasingly populate the world’s growing cities; to our leaders in government, business,and civil society making decisions about the built and natural environment; and to each other in our daily lives. Such stories will have a critical impact on the willingness of the inhabitants of the cities of the future to protect and care for—and create—their urban environments.

Thought leaders and educators can communicate a clearer connection between the urban environment and human and global environmental health: that merely recording the presence of species in urban environments does not necessarily indicate their health; that actions such as the increased use of pesticides and the planting of new hybrids and exotic species may deprive native fauna of feeding and nesting habitats; that the persistence of many species in urban environments, such as macaques, langurs, and birds of prey in Indian cities, can be attributed to cultural traditions of good-will towards life; that local food production with diverse methods is central to local health; that all people, not just the rich, deserve access to ecosystem services; that consumption and transportation choices are key to global sustainability; and that there is a connection between green urban design and resilience, sustainability, livability, and justice.

Urban environmental education can play a pivotal role in telling these stories by teaching about urban biodiversity, ecosystem services, and nature, of which most urban residents are too little aware. Urban environmental education that is sensitive to its local cultural context and incorporates advanced scientific insights from urban social-ecology can make a significant difference, encouraging residents to care about their environment and giving them the knowledge on which to act.

The dire challenges of urban environmental pollution and degradation—and their relevance to resilience, sustainability, livability, and justice—can quickly lead to the trap of purely dismal narratives. This does not have to be the case. In addition to a narrative of ecological loss and the consequences for human well-being, we can develop and communicate positive messages of real change that simultaneously convey facts, challenges, and potential solutions. We must emphasize the importance of ecological and technical solutions, while also addressing the social challenges of equity, conflict, and exclusion (which are often much harder to deal with).

Thus, while focusing on the “what” questions relating to outcomes—such as ecological and environmental improvement—a philosophy of urban environmental education can equally focus on the “how” questions of process, helping people to understand the ways in which social change can be initiated and inclusively scaled up in their own cities and social-ecological contexts. In this regard, urban environmental education can elevate itself to play the key influential role that only it can fill: helping to creatively re-conceptualize, re-design, and re-develop existing and emerging cities by educating people about green infrastructure, influencing urban planning, and changing human environmental behavior.

Conclusion

Urban environmental education in an emerging urban world faces multiple challenges. Is there a uniquely urban version of environmental education? To a large extent, that is a subject for this book. We know that some established environmental assumptions must be adjusted in a modern urban context: that nature can only be found the wilderness; that cities are the enemy of sustainability; that cities are ecologically barren; that city people don’t engage with nature. All are largely false, or misleading.

How can we create a vision for advancing urbanism that serves people and our planet, a vision that is fundamentally imbued with values? Tell the story, far and wide, that cities are essential hotspots of nature that serve people and the Earth. There is nature in cities, and it needs to be seeded, grown, and nurtured as a commons. These are stories that must be told in our communities: to students, to teachers, to leaders, and to each other. This is the key and essential role—advancing progressive urban environmental ideas in a global context—for an emerging urban environmental education. Telling this critical story is the challenge to which environmental education is called in the urban 21st century.

David Maddox, New York
Harini Nagendra, Bangalore
Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm
Alex Russ, Ithaca

* * * * *

This essay will appear as a chapter in Urban Environmental Education Review, edited by Alex Russ and Marianne Krasny, to be published by Cornell University Press in 2017. To see more pre-release chapters from the book, click here.

This essay also appears at the North American Association of Environmental Educators site

References

  1. Aronson, M.F.J., La Sorte, F. A., Nilon, C.H. et al. (2014). A global analysis of the impacts of urbanization on bird and plant diversity reveals key anthropogenic drivers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 281.
  2. Beninde, J., Veith, M. and Hochkirch, A. (2015). Biodiversity in cities needs space: A meta‐analysis of factors determining intra‐urban biodiversity variation. Ecology Letters, 18(6), 581-592.
  3. Elmqvist, T., Fragkias, M., Goodness, J., Güneralp, B., et al. (2013). Stewardship of the biosphere in the urban era. In Elmqvist, Fragkias, M., Goodness, J., Güneralp, B., et al. (Eds). Urbanization, biodiversity and ecosystem services: Challenges and opportunities: A global assessment (pp. 719-746). Dordrecht: Springer.
  4. Faeth, S.H., Bang, C., and Saari, S. (2014). Urban biodiversity: Patterns and mechanisms. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1223: 69-81.
  5. Kazemi, F., Beecham, S., and Gibbs, J. (2011). Streetscape biodiversity and the role of bioretention swales in an Australian urban environment. Landscape and Urban Planning, 101(2), 139-148.
  6. Seto, K., Güneralp, B., and L.R. Hutyra (2012). Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 109(40), 16093-16088.
  7. Svendsen, E.S., Campbell, L.K., and McMillen, H. (2016, in press). Stories, shrines, and symbols: Recognizing psycho-social-spiritual benefits of urban parks and natural areas. Journal of Ethnobiology.
  8. United Nations. (2015). Sustainable development goals.
  9. Wolch, J.R., Byrne, J., and Newell, J.P. (2014). Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough.’ Landscape and Urban Planning, 125: 234-244.
Harini Nagendra

About the Writer:
Harini Nagendra

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.

Thomas Elmqvist

About the Writer:
Thomas Elmqvist

Thomas Elmqvist is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University and Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center. His research is on ecosystem services, land use change, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions.

Alex Russ

About the Writer:
Alex Russ

Alex Kudryavtsev (pen name: Alex Russ) is an online course instructor for EECapacity, an EPA-funded environment educator training project led by Cornell University and NAAEE.

Environmental Education Generates Urban Sustainability

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Can environmental education in cities foster urban sustainability? Yes—according to 90 scholars from six continents who contributed to a forthcoming book called Urban Environmental Education Review (Russ and Krasny, eds, 2017). Three themes—participation of urban residents in planning and environmental stewardship, exploring and reconstructing urban places, and forming partnerships among disciplines and organizations who care about the urban environment—emerged from the book chapters as critical to environmental education’s ability to promote sustainability, justice, livability, and resilience in cities.

Urban environmental education is driving progress in the wider field of environmental education by emphasizing participation, place, and partnership.

Although urban environmental education seems like a relatively new field, environmental education and related conservation education turned attention to cities a long time ago. For example, in 1942, Renner noted, “It is often assumed that the city is a much poorer place in which to teach conservation than in the country community. It is doubtful, however, whether the city actually is a less fertile field than the country” (p. 194). He argued that cities offer opportunities to connect with nature through learning about conservation in city parks and restoring urban riverbanks. In an earlier book about conservation education, Renner and Hartley (1940) suggested that children spend too much time in movies while only occasionally in parks and that children can participate in urban planning. Later, Swan (1969) provided one of the first definitions of urban environmental education, emphasizing its importance in students developing awareness of urban settings and improving their schoolyards. This early writing about environmental education in cities predated the formalization of the broader field of environmental education in the 1970s.

Fast forward to today: environmental education is not the only field that helps urban residents learn about sustainability. Urban planners, artists, celebrities, science educators, and community leaders, alongside government agencies and businesses, all help urban residents address urban sustainability issues. Further, urban environmental educational activities are no longer confined to classrooms, parks, or far-away residential camps—in fact, they take place in most urban settings, including community gardens, water-treatment plants, schoolyards, green buildings, and urban restoration sites. And instead of a narrow focus on individual pro-environmental behaviors, urban environmental educators seek to change social norms, foster environmental citizenship, and help people re-think how we should organize cities for sustainability outcomes. These recent developments justify and bring new meaning to the term “urban environmental education,” which emphasizes a diversity of pedagogical methods, settings, providers, audiences, and goals.

To bring these assorted goals, practices, and professionals together, and to provide a theoretical lens and empirical research to support their work, we decided to produce a textbook on urban environmental education. How has Urban Environmental Education Review moved the field of environmental education forward? In addition to the myriad practices described by the authors, we discuss three principles of urban environmental education that emerged from the chapters in the book: participation, place, and partnership.

Cover of the upcoming book Urban Environmental Education Review edited by Russ and Krasny (Cornell University Press, 2017).

Participation

Danish scholars Jeppe Laessoe and O.K. Pedersen identified four types of participatory practices in environmental education: participation as encounters with nature, as action, as social learning, and as deliberative dialogue (Læssøe and Krasny, 2013). These practices are often combined in real life. Children in Boulder, Colorado, spend time observing insects in city parks (encounters with nature), and help redesign Boulder’s public spaces (action). Action approaches range from the political to urban planning, such as when impoverished youth in the highlands above La Paz advocated for an aerial tramway that would give them access to the city. In Australia, South Africa, and parts of Europe, where environmental educators assume a more deliberative and critical stance, social learning is intended to radically disrupt unsustainable routines and vested powers and interests.

However, participation is not without its challenges. For example, when rising sea levels immediately threaten a city, government regulations, social marketing, and other more government-directed approaches may be necessary. Participatory approaches can also be critiqued for their tokenism, and for claims that youth are the principal decision makers when in fact adult guidance is needed and prominent behind the scenes.

Children in La Paz, Bolivia participate in community planning workshop. Photo credit: Karen Malone

Place

Students who steward community gardens, plan for public transportation, or otherwise help address urban sustainability issues are reconstructing urban places. In so doing, they may be forming new place meanings, as we found among youth engaged in civic ecology practice in the Bronx, New York City (Kudryavtsev, Krasny and Stedman, 2013). For these youth, spending time creating a bioswale garden along the Bronx River or removing invasive species from an urban garden led to redefining their local place meanings. They no longer saw the Bronx as devoid of nature, but instead as a place where one could experience nature and wildlife. Whether changing place meanings through reconstructing places in turn helps address other sustainability remains to be seen.

In the Bronx, New York, students and other community members remove invasive plants and come to view the city as an ecological place that has parks and rivers and supports biodiversity. Photo credit: Alex Russ.

Partnerships

Partnerships in urban environmental education cross disciplines, ethnic and cultural divides, and organizations or governance actors. All three types of partnerships are needed to address wicked problems.

At the Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee Wisconsin, a green building, a solar power station, public art, an urban wasteland being transformed into a park, riparian habitats, classrooms, and a climbing wall string together disciplines such as civil engineering, landscape architecture, and building design, alongside education. Restoration-based education in cities means heeding local values, traditions, and socioeconomic conditions alongside ecological considerations, as well being sensitive to diverse cultures and issues of power. If one fails to incorporate such diversity, misinterpretations, failure, and even environmental injustices can result. Organizational partnerships may start as more narrow efforts to bridge formal and non-formal educational institutions, but then expand to actors not directly engaged in education. One example comes from Singapore’s cross-sectoral 3-P (People, Public and Private) partnership, which focuses on recycling, energy, and water conservation in schools, and engages a network of advisors from government, NGOs, and the private sector. An author from South America sums up how critical partnerships are, saying: “Over the last two decades, Brazil has come to the realization that the current state of the environment is too dire for environmental education to be carried out as individual initiatives.”

Environmental education has often been seen as promoting environmental literacy, which encompasses knowledge, affect, and action that benefit the individual and the environment. In cities, this means partnering with organizations addressing public health, justice and equity, community and youth development, and urban planning, among others. In short, environmental education can be one actor among many in addressing sustainability issues.

In Favela Maré, Rio de Janeiro, university students, professors, local nongovernmental organizations, and residents collaborate to promote education about urban agriculture and hydroponics for children and families. Photo credit: Alex Russ.

Cities as leaders in environmental education

Just as cities serve as centers for sustainability and resilience innovations, environmental education in cities has the potential to push the field of environmental education toward innovative practices, including practices related to diversity. Whereas environmental educators often talk about ethnic and other types of diversity, our reasons—“why diversity?”—may not always be clear (e.g., diversity initiatives that seek to help marginalized peoples, to address past injustices, or to engage multiple perspectives in order to generate sustainability innovations).

Drawing on ideas from social networking and social innovation, authors included in our Urban Environmental Education Review demonstrate how professionals trained in the environmental and education disciplines have as much to learn from those trained in community and youth development as practitioners in those fields have to learn about the environment. These two types of expertise come together in an after-school program at a Catholic charity in the Bronx, or a family empowerment initiative in public housing in Anacostia. Such urban programs engage youth and families in outdoor activities, but their primary goal is to foster youth communication and academic skills and strengthen family ties, rather than foster environmentally responsible behaviors. Although the urban, low-income audiences for these efforts suggest a diversity goal of helping marginalized people, the programs also reveal a change in perspective about diversity, from expanding existing outreach programs to simply being more inclusive of non-traditional audiences, to recognizing and honoring each professional actor’s assets—what each brings to the table—and how, by bringing different actors together, social innovations linking the environment, learning, and youth and community development can emerge.

Perhaps most importantly, by exploring the diverse practices and diverse forms of participation, place-making, and partnerships in cities, the authors help to move the broader field of environmental education forward. For years, our discipline has been defined—and sometimes constrained—by a definition generated at a UN convention in Tbilisi, USSR in 1977: “Environmental education is a learning process that increases people’s knowledge and awareness about the environment and its associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address the challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitments to make informed decisions and take responsible action.” Perhaps inadvertently, this definition implied that if we could teach people knowledge and increase their awareness, they would change their behaviors—an assumption that the years since Tbilisi have critically called into question.

Further, environmental education’s historical focus on individual behaviors has been challenged as the necessity for collective action becomes increasingly evident. Today, the North American Association of Environmental Education definition of environmental education incorporates civic engagement—perhaps reflecting research on social capital and collective efficacy that implies the importance of civic ties and local initiative in generating collective action. Urban environmental education—through forming partnerships with youth development and health and planning professionals, through incorporating notions of governance and social innovation, and through demonstrating how learning can be embedded in collective stewardship, restoration, and planning practice rather than as a precursor to environmental behaviors—is playing an important role in transforming the way we think about the relationships between environmental education, learning, and action.

To explore these ideas in-depth, we invite you to read the forthcoming 30-chapter edited book Urban Environmental Education Review. Also, watch 30 free videos recorded by chapter authors (see link below). Finally, the Cornell University Civic Ecology Lab plans to offer an Urban Environmental Education online courses in summer 2017.

Alex Russ and Marianne Krasny
Ithaca

On The Nature of Cities

Links

References

Kudryavtsev, A., Krasny, M. E., & Stedman, R. C. (2012). The impact of environmental education on sense of place among urban youth. Ecosphere, 3(4), 29. doi:10.1890/ES11-00318.1

Læssøe, J., and Krasny, M. E. (2013). Participation in environmental education: Crossing boundaries within the big tent. In M. E. Krasny and J. Dillon (Eds.), Trading zones in environmental education: Creating transdisciplinary dialogue (pp. 11–44). New York: Peter Lang.

Renner, G.T. (1942). Conservation of natural resources: An educational approach to the problem. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Russ, A., and Krasny, M.E. (Eds.) (2017). Urban environmental education review. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Swan, J. (1969). The challenge of environmental education. Phi Delta Kappan, 51(1), 26-28.

Marianne Krasny

About the Writer:
Marianne Krasny

Marianne Krasny is professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Director of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University, and leader of EPA’s national environmental education training program (“EECapacity”).

Environmental education in cities focuses on youth and community development, restoring ecosystems, building green infrastructure, and more. But is urban environmental education really anything new? What should its goals and practices look like?

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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.
Janice Astbury
Urban environmental education is emerging as a distinctly different approach. It is about learners doing transformative things in their own habitats and learning through practice.
Chankook Kim
After rapid urbanization and industrialization of past decades, citizens in the urban areas of Korea became more interested in quality of life with green spaces since 1990s. Along with such demand for green spaces, there have been two seemingly different approaches in environmental education.
Marianne Krasny
By using environmental activities to realize youth and community goals, programs at places like Rocking the Boat, East New York Farms!, or township schools in South Africa simultaneously address community and environmental issues.
Alex Kudryavtsev
Cities are evolving ecosystems, and we still learn how to manage them for desired ecological and social outcomes. Urban environmental education, which can be viewed as part of the larger system of environmental governance, helps us perform this task.
Miguel Luna
Our local communities represent an opportunity to provide our youth with such learning experiences and nature portals that will create a shift in the way we perceive conservation and appreciate nature.
Pepe Marcos-Iga
Urban Environmental Education (EE) is nothing new. It’s been around since the beginning of the field. What’s new is this growing wave of community led efforts that in one way or another amount to urban EE, even if being called something else.
Candice Russell
Just as we know that kids need nature, we’re learning that in many ways nature needs them too.
Soul Shava
Urban environmental education should highlight and promote community driven environmental sustainability practices (such as urban gardening and small livestock rearing) taking into consideration their contribution to maintaining diverse local cultures.
Philip Silva
Urban EE, done right, listens before it leaps into action. It aims to grow a new generation or urban environment-oriented community activists.
Shubhalaxmi Vaylure
If you ask me whether urban environment education should be aimed at youth or children, I would say families. It’s important make environment study a family hobby so that the impact is greater.
Janice Astbury

About the Writer:
Janice Astbury

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.

Janice Astbury

I believe that urban environmental education is something new precisely because it involves all of the things mentioned in the question posed. Environmental education (EE) has traditionally focused on either nature education or sustainability education. The focus in the former has tended to be on nature ‘out there’ with which a distant or passive relationship is often presumed and sometimes prescribed (given that humans are seen as playing a primarily destructive role). Sustainability education, which has dominated EE in recent years, has combined information about global environmental challenges with encouragement of practices aimed at reducing our impact. While it is important to develop this sort of awareness and capacity, young people often describe feelings of fear and powerlessness leading to despair and denial. This seems to be a reaction to being asked to make seemingly shallow gestures in the face of planetary crisis.

Urban environmental education is emerging as a distinctly different approach. It is about learners doing transformative things in their own habitats and learning through practice. First hand experience has been shown to be particularly conducive to learning and this has led to a growing interest in place-based education. As more and more of us dwell in cities, our ‘place’ is increasingly urban, i.e. within human dominated ecosystems (which are more appropriately viewed as ‘social-ecological systems’). Many of these are characterized by ecological disturbance and face growing challenges in sustaining human livelihoods.

In this context, what we need to learn is how to restore ecosystem functioning in support of human health and wellbeing. This involves not so much conserving and protecting nature but rather collaborating with nature. Here humans play a role in cultivating ecosystem functions and services, thus contributing to development and maintenance of green infrastructure, which is good for people and nature. Given that our urban habitats are characterized by complexity and change, it is important that communities as a whole act and learn together, and that the role of young people is emphasized. The latter will be increasingly called upon to create new and adaptive livelihoods for themselves

The goal of urban environmental education should be to develop a systems perspective, adaptive capacity and social capital. This because in order to live well together on this planet, we need a deep understanding of the workings of the social-ecological systems of which we are a part; we need a broad range of skills and a willingness to continually learn and change our perspectives and approaches; and we need relationships with other members of our communities in order to support one another and to effect meaningful change. It is a form of education that is grounded in place, that occurs largely through the process of collective action, and that produces positive social-ecological transformations, which in turn empower participants, inspire hope and engage others.

One of the challenges that this sort of educational practice throws up is that it is completely at odds with the dominant narrative about what education looks like — it has no relation to classrooms or timetables or tests. It is not the sort of educating that most formal educators have been trained to do and it sets off health and safety alarm bells for institutions charged with educating young people. As a result, the pathway toward broad implementation of effective urban environmental education remains elusive. It probably involves some combination of teachers and schools with experimental tendencies, collaborative efforts involving a wide range of community organizations, and encouragement and support for citizen-led, including youth-led, initiatives.

I would be particularly interested in a discussion about the elements of an implementation strategy — and proposals for how to proceed!

Chankook Kim

About the Writer:
Chankook Kim

Chankook KIM is an assistant professor in the department of environmental education at Korea National University of Education.

Chankook Kim

In Korea, the term “urban” environmental education is not popularly used among either academic researchers or environmental educators, although there are many of environmental programs in urban areas. As the word ‘green’ has different meanings to those who live in urban areas and in rural areas, ‘urban’ may have special meaning to urbanites or environmental educators. If there are any features of urban environmental education in Korea, it is not because such practices of environmental education are implemented in geographically urban areas but because at least the practices have special meaning to those who are urban citizens in the context of their daily lives.

After rapid urbanization and industrialization of past decades, citizens in the urban areas of Korea became more interested in quality of life with green spaces since 1990s. Along with such demand for green spaces, there have been two seemingly different approaches in environmental education. From early 1990s, a group of Korean environmental educators have made their efforts to bring students to wilderness and provide learning opportunities in the nature. From late 1990s, the other group of environmental educators with different perspectives on the environment and environmental education started to focus on the context of daily lives of learners. They rather considered small patches of green spaces in urban areas and made efforts to restore such green spaces if possible.

As environmental educators, we could bring students to wilderness areas for watching migratory birds or to encourage young citizens in urban areas to monitor nests of Korean magpie, one of sedentary birds in their neighborhoods. The former approach is based on views of nature as a place apart from the environment where most urban citizens live, while the latter is environmental education based on views of environment as the place where we live, where we work, where we play, and where we learn.

As an example of the whole-school approach, the School Forest project is closely related to the desire to expand green spaces and ways of environmental education in urban areas. A school community in the project transforms barren school grounds into environmentally friendly forests or garden areas. With more than 700 schools participated as model schools since 1999, the project has started with a central question of how children living in cities enjoy nature and forests in their daily lives.

If there are any other features of urban environmental education in Korea, they may be related to efforts to expand the borders of environmental education with resources of “cities” such as human capital and information technology. Recently a group of high school students in Korea have developed information boards on plants in a small-sized urban park for their project-based learning. The information boards were equipped with quick response codes or near field communication tags. Thus, any citizen who wants further information on the place can easily get it using their iPhone or smartphones. In Korea, there are many examples of environmental education which utilized well-developed IT systems in the country such as high speed internet systems and social networking systems to make the urban areas more desirable and greener.

In sum, the features of “urban” environmental education in Korea is closely related to such practices in environmental education to foster citizens who understand the context of their daily lives and who lead change in their lives utilizing and cultivating diverse resources. Urban environmental education needs to develop competencies of citizens while fostering positive functions of the urban environment.

ChankookKimKoreanPark

Marianne Krasny

About the Writer:
Marianne Krasny

Marianne Krasny is professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Director of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University, and leader of EPA’s national environmental education training program (“EECapacity”).

Marianne Krasny

Rocking the Boat, a non-profit organization in the Bronx (New York City), exemplifies urban environmental education. The organization has six goals — five of which have to do with youth and community development — things like helping young people feel respected and cared for, become aware of future opportunities, set and achieve goals, and make positive contributions to their community. The sixth goal is about the environment — “Introducing South Bronx community members of all ages to their local natural environment and providing opportunities to enjoy its waters aboard the organization’s fleet of student-built wooden boats and to actively contribute to its restoration and preservation.”

Like Rocking the Boat, other urban non-profits that the Cornell Civic Ecology Lab Education and Learning initiative has worked with often state their goal as youth and community development. The environmental activities — whether sampling water quality, restoring oyster populations, pruning street trees, or community gardening — are a means toward the youth and community development ends. Yet, as demonstrated by the research of Alex Kudryavtsev (also a contributor to this panel), participants in these programs do learn about the ecology of the place where they live and work — for example, they learn about egrets and beavers along the Bronx River, and about the very existence of the Bronx River itself.

By using environmental activities to realize youth and community goals, programs at places like Rocking the Boat, East New York Farms!, or township schools in South Africa simultaneously address community and environmental issues. How such programs achieve this near seamless integration of the social and ecological is one thing youth and community development and education professionals can learn from urban environmental education programs.

But there’s more. Urban environmental education often takes place in stressed communities — neighborhoods experiencing disinvestment, poverty, crime, contaminated soils and water, and lack of green space. Yet despite facing multiple stresses, programs such as Rocking the Boat see potential in small plots of land or stretches of water — so-called urban “sustainability fallows.” And by converting paved over lots into artificial wetlands, or transforming barren median strips into tree lined walkways, these programs realize “fallows” as assets. Importantly, professionals working in urban environmental education also help young people deal with loss — sometimes profound loss such as the death of a sibling or friend, or loss of a valued community green space. The ability to help people deal with loss, transform eyesores into assets, work in communities facing multiple stresses, and integrate community and environmental issues are all ways in which urban environmental education can contribute to the suite of non-profit, government, and private efforts needed to address ongoing issues of environmental degradation and disinvestment. Such capacity is also critical as we face larger issues of climate change.

Some folks may feel that programs that have youth and community development as their primary goal are not environmental education. Yet they truly contribute to environmental learning while simultaneously empowering youth and communities. In this way, urban environmental education reflects contemporary integrated social-ecological systems thinking of scholars and practitioners alike, and offers important lessons for the future of environmental education.

References and further reading 

http://www.rockingtheboat.org/ 

http://www.eastnewyorkfarms.org/ 

DELIA, J. E. 2013. Cultivating a Culture of Authentic Care in Urban Environmental Education: Narratives from Youth Interns at East New York Farms! MS, Cornell University.

KRASNY, M. E., LUNDHOLM, C., LEE, E., SHAVA, S. & KOBORI, H. 2013. Urban landscapes as learning arenas for sustainable management of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In: ELMQVIST, T., FRAGKIAS, M., GOODNESS, J., GÜNERALP, B., MARCOTULLIO, P. J., MCDONALD, R. I., PARNELL, S., SENDSTAD, M., SCHEWENIUS, M., SETO, K. C. & WILKINSON, C. (eds.) Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Challenges and Opportunities. New York City, NY, USA: Springer.

KUDRYAVTSEV, A. 2013. Urban Environmental Education and Sense of Place. PhD, Cornell University.

LIDDICOAT, K. R., SIMON, J. W., KRASNY, M. E. & TIDBALL, K. G. 2007. Sharing programs across cultures: Lessons learned from Garden Mosaics in South Africa. Children, Youth and Environments, 17. http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/17_4/index.htm

ODERMATT, A. & BRUNDIERS, K. 2007. Places of sustainability in cities: an outdoor-teaching approach. In: REINFRIED, S., SCHLEICHER, Y. & REMPFLER, A. (eds.) Geographical Views on Education for Sustainable Development. Lucerne, Switzerland: International Geographical Union Commission on Geographical Education.

Alex Russ

About the Writer:
Alex Russ

Alex Kudryavtsev (pen name: Alex Russ) is an online course instructor for EECapacity, an EPA-funded environment educator training project led by Cornell University and NAAEE.

Alex Kudryavtsev

Urban environmental education is a varied subfield of environmental education. Urban environmental education programs focus, for example, on community environmental leadership, positive youth development, preserving urban wilderness, urban environmental restoration, green infrastructure, sustainable urban planning, green jobs, environmental art, urban agriculture, and environmental justice. Despite the diversity of such programs, most of them contribute to both environmental integrity and human well-being in cities.

Cities are evolving ecosystems, and we still learn how to manage them for desired ecological and social outcomes. Urban environmental education, which can be viewed as part of the larger system of environmental governance, helps us perform this task. This task is tough because cities are incredibly complex: they are engines of innovations, producers of pollution, sources of prosperity, consumers of natural resources, and labs for solutions of environmental problems. Cities have to develop mechanisms for long-term sustainability, which depends on human creativity, communities’ adaptive capacity, our understanding of biophysical and social systems, human and social capital, and our participation in urban planning and environmental stewardship. These are some characteristics of cities that urban environmental education programs are trying to enhance through different educational approaches.

Last week, on my road trip around the United States, I have visited four different urban environmental education programs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For example, at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center educators use birds and outdoor play to promote environmental literacy and comfort in outdoor settings among youth children and families. In a community food systems organization called Growing Power, one of their programs involves high-school students in internships that provide experiences with green houses, aquaponics, beekeeping, urban livestock, rain catchment, and other features that educate students from underserved neighborhoods about food choices and production. The Urban Ecology Center at Riverside Park, Milwaukee, features a green building, solar power station, public art, urban wasteland being transformed into park, riparian habitats, classrooms and a climbing wall, all of which are intended to improve visitors’ environmental experiences, knowledge, and behavior. In a high school called Escuela Verde, educators work with urban students from diverse backgrounds using student-led and place-based education such as boatbuilding, environmental filmmaking, cultural preservation, promoting healthy commons, learning multiple perspectives, and developing a sense of place. Educators who I met in these programs have shared how they think their programs influence young kids, students, families, ecosystems, and neighborhoods.

These and other urban environmental education programs differ a lot in their educational approaches, audiences, settings, and specific outcomes they are trying to achieve. But we still can call them “urban environmental education” because these programs are trying to improve the urban environment, including people, communities, and ecosystems — often by collaborating with community members, families, urban planners, scientists, and environmental organizations.

Using the term “urban environmental education” also conveys our excitement about cities as potentially sustainable ecosystems, and opens up a conversation about different ways to contribute to improving cities through education for people and the environment.

Miguel Luna

About the Writer:
Miguel Luna

Miguel Luna is native of Colombia, an avid reader and longtime advocate of community playing an active role in city, state and nationwide policies. An urban resident of Los Angeles for 25 years, he’s been commuting mostly on bike and public transportation after giving up his car in 2005.

Miguel Luna

Words like watersheds, climate change, and sustainability are part of lessons and quizzes in our classrooms today. Some charter schools have even made the environment and sustainability the focus of their studies. The Law has even stepped in to ensure that all children in our state (California) have a chance at being exposed to environmental curricula. In 2003, a California legislator authored legislation that required the state to develop an environment-based Kindergarten through 12-grade curriculum to all California public schools, The Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) Curriculum. However, while some schools have had success in implementing this curriculum, many struggle to incorporate the lesson plans. Standardized testing under the No Child Left Behind Act, a system that determines how much federal funding a school gets based on test scores, makes high-score-testing the priority leaving very little time and incentive for teachers to supplement or add anything new to the norm established curriculum.

My respect goes out to those wonderful educators in the system that take on the challenge and find creative ways to incorporate environmental learning in the classroom. But nature lessons must also be approached from outside the school system, absent of objectives, standards, and a letter grade. These lessons must be advanced through life experiences. Our local communities represent an opportunity to provide our youth with such learning experiences and nature portals that will create a shift in the way we perceive conservation and appreciate nature.

City planning can play a very important role in exposing our children to nature. By addressing access to nature from a city planning lens, we can also make our communities the classroom. Our cities are transforming, and before us is an opportunity to shape the way our children see their city and interact with it. If a child grows up walking on a sidewalk that uses parkway swales to capture water when it rains rather than having to jump over flooded streets on their way to school, they grow up appreciating stormwater and not seeing it as a nuisance. A simple walk to the grocery store can become a learning experience by exposing a child to hummingbirds suckling on salvias and bees and butterflies interacting with CA poppy’s and coyotebush (plants native to our local region).

We can design our sidewalks to have destinations. Our front doors can lead us to local parks and these can link with each other via green routes. We can utilize our local parks as portals for children and their parents to be shuttled, as a family, from inner sections of the city to a national park for the day: “Green Routes to Nature”. There is a need for these routes. A recent article by High Country News “Parks for All?” points to a 2011 National Park survey reporting that Hispanics accounted for fewer than 10 percent of American visitors, African-Americans made up just seven percent, and Asian-Americans only three percent. During that same year, President Barack Obama announced the American Great Outdoors Initiative Report. The report outlined the combined efforts of 15 federals agencies that, amongst its six broad goals, would result in: “accessible parks or green space for our children and create a new generation of great urban parks and community spaces.”

If we seek to foster future generations that will not only care for nature but also vote for measures that protect natural spaces, then our children must visit these places and establish a connection. If we are to see a shift in culture around conservation and nature, then our environmental educational goals should expand beyond the school classroom, siloed from the communities they are surrounded by. Our practices must be geared by life experiences that encompass the child’s day-to-day activities and includes the family.

3-year old walking on Elmer Avenue, a green street pilot project in Sunland, CA
3-year old walking on Elmer Avenue, a green street pilot project in Sunland, CA
Pepe Marcos-Iga

About the Writer:
Pepe Marcos-Iga

Jose “Pepe” Marcos-Iga, PhD, is an environmental educator that helps other educators become more effective, by providing the networking and capacity building tools they need.

Pepe Marcos-Iga

No. Urban Environmental Education (EE) is nothing new. It’s been around since the beginning of the field. What’s new is this growing wave of community led efforts that in one way or another amount to urban EE, even if being called something else. Some of these efforts sparked from seeds planted a long time ago by larger organizations, others from the willingness of community members to make a difference in their neighborhoods. But what they all have in common is the need to create more resilience in these growing urban communities, as more and more rural populations move into urban areas around the world.

It is important to acknowledge the work done by organizations and individuals that build up to the current wave of urban EE, just like when doing science, we are building on the body of knowledge and moving an issue forward, the shape and form of today’s urban EE movement is the result of the combination of many factors. We must stop asking if urban EE is a new thing, it is not productive to measure the value of any practice by how innovative it is, we have to stop claiming it has been done before (or it’s never been done before).

Instead, let’s measure the value of an urban EE experience by asking questions such as:

•Is it relevant to the people who participate?

•Is it effective in generating resilient communities?

•Does it emerge from/with the needs and concerns of the communities it serves in mind?

•Are all the voices in the community being heard?

•Does it provide connections to the natural world within and without the urban area?

•Does it increase the environmental literacy, stewardship and civic engagement of the participants?

I could keep going. And you could probably generate a very different list.

In essence, urban EE is environmental education that takes place in an urban area. I state the obvious to make a point: What defines urban EE is the type of environment where it takes place. That’s it. Beyond that, any type of EE practice can qualify as urban EE. A zoo or museum program, a backyard habitat or edible community garden or one that takes place in an urban nature park. And yes, there is a tendency to associate urban EE with goals that address urban community issues, such as youth and community development or building green infrastructure, but this signals more to the needs and priorities of urban communities, and to the fact that effective EE has always incorporated the needs and priorities of the communities it serves, be it those of farming and fishing communities in a rural area or those of a violence stricken inner-city neighborhood.

So the type of urban EE described in this roundtable question does not describe a completely new version of EE, but simply a new manifestation of high quality EE (that reflects many of the standards set by the NAAEE’s Guidelines for Excellence). But there is a growing difference in the way many of these new practices are taking place. A certain humbleness in their approach, a certain willingness to collaborate, learn from others, establish new connections, step outside our comfort zone and acknowledge that we do not have all the answers and that the learning experience is not one that will be delivered by us the experts to you the learners, but one that will involve a more democratic approach to learning, were everyone is a learner and an educator. This is just one more manifestation of the field of EE evolving and continuing to be relevant to a constantly changing society.

Candice Russell

About the Writer:
Candice Russell

Candice Russell is a girl gone green & passionate EE practitioner in Los Angeles, managing environmental education programs for TreePeople & CREEC.

Candice Russell

Urban environmental education is growing in scope and complexity. Summer camps, scouts, nature centers, natural history museums, and other similar programs have introduced young people to the natural world for generations. These programs have created an opportunity to learn about the environment which resulted in wonderful immersive experiences that for many of us were a part of childhood, a rite-of-passage, and simply a pleasant way to spend our time. In this way, youth development through urban environmental education is not new at all.

While programs designed to expose youth to nature still exist, in the minds of many, teaching young people about the environment has evolved from an enriching experience to a necessary intervention. We know that children spend less time outside than they did in the past — by some accounts as much as 50% less than they did 20 years ago. From Nature Deficit Disorder as described in Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, to the well-documented American childhood obesity epidemic, it’s clear that our children need nature and environmental education to enrich and repair lives increasingly spent indoors.

But just as we know that kids need nature, we’re learning that in many ways nature needs them too. Educating students about issues of increasing environmental urgency such as climate change, and the desire to grow an environmentally literate society has escalated youth development through environmental education from wonderful opportunity to a critical emergency response.

TreePeople, an environmental non-profit in Los Angeles celebrating its 40th anniversary of planting and caring for trees and educating the students of Los Angeles in fact exists because an urban kid got out of the city and into nature. Our President and Founder Andy Lipkis was a 15 year old summer camper in the San Bernardino Mountains near Los Angeles when he was inspired to plant and care for trees, an action that later lead to him founding TreePeople as a teenager. Every time we plant a tree at TreePeople the Citizen Foresters and volunteers gather around and together say, “Trees need people, people need trees,” as part of the naming ceremony. This is because in cities trees face many threats, from high carbon emissions to flying soccer balls and need us to care for them until they are well established. Helping young people understand that their continued action is necessary for the survival of the trees they’ve planted is an important part of our work. The truth is that our youth can no longer afford to have a “Giving Tree” relationship with nature. They must recognize what they have to give as well. Our youth will be called upon to solve the critical environmental issues of our time, and will bear the burden if they can not and will not understand what’s at stake. It is the urgency surrounding the movement to couple traditional experiential education with a deeper understanding of environmental problems and solutions that is new. And it is necessary to help our students understand all that nature has to give, and all they will be asked to give in return. Trees need people, and people need trees.

Soul Shava

About the Writer:
Soul Shava

Dr Soul Shava is an environment and sustainability education specialist.

Soul Shava

Urban environments, as transformed landscapes, appear not be ideal contexts for environmental education. However, these possibilities have been explored by urban communities in their efforts to make such environment conducive for their livelihoods. I remember these efforts from growing up in the cities in Zimbabwe. because my father was a railway worker, we moved around cities and resided in several townships among other migrant workers from all over southern Africa, particularly from Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and from within Zimbabwe. As I recall from our stay in Victoria Falls and later in Bulawayo, we grew up experiencing a myriad of cultural activities, including initiation ceremonies, dance festivities, weddings and funerals of the Kalanga, Lozi, Lubale, Ndebele, Nyanja/Chewa, Quilimane, Shangaan, Shona, Sotho, Tonga and Venda peoples among whom we stayed.

Backyard gardening was a common practice among all cultures, where the emphasis was mainly on providing food to supplement the household incomes and to provide food plants that would not be normally found in the modern shops. As we grew up we sampled various traditional cuisines from the homes of friends and neighbours and grew to associate the food crops in people’s backyard gardens with their cultures, even though there was also much sharing of gardening plants and recipes. We sampled dishes of mufarinya (pounded cassava leaves) and fish from family friends and neighbours from central Africa (Malawi and Zambia), muboora (pumpkin leaves) and nhopi (made from pumpkin and peanut butter) from the Shona, madhumbe (yam — Calocasia esculenta) from the Manyika in Eastern Zimbabwe, umxanxa (butternut and sour milk) from the Ndebele. Other crops that people grew included sweet potatoes, round nuts (Voandzea subterranea), mealies (Zea mays), pumpkins, water melons, spiny cucumbers (Cucumis metutliferus), water melon (Cucumis melo),

Most community members also kept small livestock such as chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs for food. These were reared in backyard cages. As boys we used to go and collect grass and leaves for rabbits and guinea pigs from the wild veld of known plants that were edible to them and would not poison them.

The city was a place where people could lose their identity and origins and blend into the uniformity of modern consumer life. However, despite their urban location and constraints of city life, most of the indigenous communities were still able to sustain their traditional cultural practices in the city, maintain the link with their origins. This is form of urban Indigeneity that is seen to permeate urban spaces today, supported by gardening spaces created by local communities. The knowledge of gardening and livestock rearing was passed down the generations, sustaining these cultural practices.

Urban environmental education should highlight and promote community driven environmental sustainability practices (such as urban gardening and small livestock rearing) taking into consideration their contribution to maintaining diverse local cultures.

Philip Silva

About the Writer:
Philip Silva

Philip's work focuses on informal adult learning and participatory action research in social-ecological systems. He is dedicated to exploring nature in all of its urban expressions.

Phillip Silva

Is urban environmental education really anything new? 

This question only matters to people who get paid to put concepts in different boxes (researchers) and people who get paid for their purported prescience on “real world” issues (consultants). Is it old? Is it new? Did I name it first, or did you? I am both a researcher and a consultant—but I am also a teacher and a learner. This is a dead-end area of inquiry because it does little to advance actual teaching or learning and distracts us with quibbles over creation myths. Let’s move on.

What should its goals and practices look like?

The goal of any learning experience should be transformation. The Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire argued that teachers and students must share the power to define that change — to set goals for teaching and learning together in response to a specific issue of immediate concern. Urban EE, done right, listens before it leaps into action. It aims to grow a new generation of community gardeners in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn to change the local economics of food access. It aims to empower a constituency of voters savvy in the science of wetland restoration along the levees of New Orleans to prevent future floods.

If there is one single universal goal in urban EE, it should be this: avoiding, as much as possible, the imposition of universal goals. Keep the learning local.

Urban environmental educators need access to training opportunities, mentorships, and coaching. They need help thinking critically about their craft. They need to develop skills as facilitators, storytellers, and explorers. They need to practice a form of teaching that is more than just telling.

The urban EE world worked itself into a lather last year when Toys R Us aired an impish T.V. commercial based on the premise that underprivileged kids enjoy running amok through a toy store more than sitting through another ho-hum “can you guess what kind of tree this is?” field trip in a forest. The ad took an admittedly cynical view of environmental education, and shamey shame shame on Toys R Us for its antisocial hijinks. How very disappointing.

But now that we’ve all taken turns putting the Big Giraffe in a “time out,” maybe we can afford a little introspection. What was it about this ad, aside from its cynicism, that hit such a raw nerve? It isn’t all that difficult to imagine a real-life “Ranger Brad” struggling through a boring lesson built on the half-baked idea that kids should be able to name trees they’ve never heard of. I’ve personally seen this exact approach to environmental education happen more times than I care to remember. It’s bad pedagogy, and it comes from too little training for the legion of young educators working in underfunded non-profits throughout cities in the U.S.

Kids love toys. So do many adults. Toys are tools for imaginative storytelling. They give us tactile ways to knit narratives in real-time. They satisfy what Morse Peckham called humanity’s “rage for chaos” —for safe spaces to break rules and tinker with reality. Toys have always played into childhood explorations of nature, and archaeologists in the future will puzzle at the thousands of action figures and doll heads they discover buried in creek mud and encased in petrified logs.

Urban environmental educators need to set aside their Sand County Almanac and pick up books like Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude or Junot Diaz’s Drown to start finding compelling stories about toys and playtime in an actual urban environment. What other stories should we pull down from the shelf?

Shubhalaxmi Vaylure

Being an environmental educator at BNHS’s Conservation Education Centre all my life in Mumbai, urban biodiversity was my all time favourite topic. While many urban educators felt that environment education should be imparted to rural areas, I differed in believing rural India’s carbon footprint was much smaller than the urban India. Moreover I found rural people were still connected with their immediate environment unlike the city borne people who had severed their natural connection. However I always struggled to seek funds for programmes or projects that were linked with urban environment education, somehow it didn’t appeal the funders who probably wanted me to have the rural component. Nevertheless I kept my belief intact and worked on urban environmental educational modules targeting schools, colleges, families and corporations.

My first initiative

I initiated citizen science programmes under a catchy title — Be a Scientist for a Day. The programme encouraged participation of local people in the monthly biodiversity survey carried out at BNHS Nature Reserve. This programme largely attracted a wide range of audiences however participation by youth between 14-25 years was higher. The students benefitted by learning the research methodologies through hands on training and earned extra credits. The programme succeeded in infusing interest among amateurs for field research. The uniqueness of the programme could be one reason it was covered repeated in print media including cover stories.

My efforts were however strengthened when attended the Conference of Parties (COP 10) in 2012 wherein I presented the findings of Be a Scientist for Day programme in the Communication Education for Public Awareness (CEPA) section. The idea was well received as urban biodiversity was one of the core areas COP11 identified. Since then I started developing citizen science projects and programmes focussing urban ecosystems however it was difficult to get the funding.

My latest endeavour

In my latest attempt, I developed a concept of developing mobile apps based on Audubon eguides model for study of urban trees, birds and butterflies in four metros of India. With help of the mobile apps, a citizen science programme will be launched in 10 schools of each metro. The students will send data on local sightings using the mobile app. This will be part of their project work. The data collected across the metros will be used to compare population trends. This programme will address John Louv of ‘Last Child in the Woods’ concern that children prefer to spend time with their gadgets instead of going outdoors. This programme will make a better use of the smartphone and drive children outdoor to observe nature.

So if you ask me whether urban environment education should be aimed at youth or children, I would say families. It’s important make environment study a family hobby so that the impact is greater.

Urban environmental education in India

First of all urban environmental education as a term is still unheard in cities atleast in India, secondly awareness about urban biodiversity is still in its nascent state. Nevertheless environment education has been happening in formal or informal manner in cities, the term is new. After Hyderabad the first Indian city to develop City Biodiversity Index has inspired other cities to follow the trend. The State Biodiversity Boards have now made it mandatory to the city municipal councils to develop People’s Biodiversity Register (PBR). This ambitious initiative of government hasn’t seen the day light yet. This could be possible if citizen science approach is used wherein city people are involved in documentation of their own local flora and fauna.

Therefore the primary goal of urban environment education would be to create awareness about local environment. It is a common notion in my country that nature study is best done in forests and cities are just concrete jungle with no life. It is therefore important to glamourize local environment by highlighting the unique flora and fauna found therein. Then identifying the flagship species as well as the indicator species which could be represented as species of healthy environments. Such positioning always appeals city people who are exposed to constant commercial advertising. The target groups should include children, youth families and corporate employees. Educational resources need to be developed and disseminated. Corporate employees could also be engaged in study of their local environment as part of the Corporate Social Responsibility, this could be on medium of funding such local initiatives. Print and social media plays an important role as far as awareness is concerned, thus usage of newspaper articles,  blogs and posts on Facebook and tweets on Twitter will be best medium to bring communities together for a common cause. At the end, I would summarize that the best approach for urban environment education will be to use lifestyle technology of urbanites and influence them.

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ESG could contribute to and compliment other initiatives and efforts to ensure multi-stakeholders work together to achieve sustainable development while addressing historic social inequities and challenges in developed and developing countries.

Background to the Sustainable Financing Gap

Globally, challenges in making our cities resilient are multi-dimensional and are on the rise. According to the 2023 Sustainable Development Goals Report, over half of the global population currently resides in urban areas, a rate projected to reach 70% by 2050. Approximately 1.1 billion people currently live in slums or slum-like conditions in cities, with 2 billion more expected in the next 30 years. The rapid growth of cities—a result of rising populations and increasing migration—has led to a boom in mega-cities[i], especially in the developing world, and slums are becoming a more significant feature of urban life. Cities occupy just 3% of the Earth’s land but account for 60 to 80% of the energy consumption and at least 70% of carbon emissions.

With more than 80% of global GDP generated in cities, urbanisation can contribute to sustainable growth through increased productivity and innovation. However, the speed and scale of urbanisation bring challenges, such as meeting accelerated demand for affordable housing, and viable infrastructure including transport systems, basic services, and jobs, particularly for the nearly 1.1 billion urban poor who live in informal settlements to be near opportunities. Rising conflicts contribute to pressure on cities as more than 50% of forcibly displaced people live in urban areas[ii]. Making cities sustainable means creating career and business opportunities, safe and affordable housing, and building resilient societies and economies. It involves investment in public transport, creating green public spaces, and improving urban planning and management in participatory and inclusive ways[iii].

It is estimated by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), that roughly $2.6 trillion is required every year until 2030 to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and stay on course toward a net-zero society by 2050[iv]. Furthermore, recent estimates put the global annual municipal infrastructure funding gap at US$3.2 trillion. However, the global economic outlook remains fragile amid a convergence of crises that are threatening to further reverse progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. The United Nations World Economic Situation and Prospects 2023 projects that global growth will decelerate to 1.9 per cent in 2023. The 2023 Financing for Sustainable Development Report finds that SDG financing needs are growing, but development financing is not keeping pace. If left unaddressed, a “great finance divide” will translate into a lasting sustainable development divide.

The Mid-Term Review of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction concluded that despite increases in direct and indirect economic impacts of disasters, investments in disaster risk reduction and efforts to de-risk investment remain inadequate. In the past 20 years, climate-related disasters have almost doubled. Developing countries need an estimated $70 billion annually for adaptation. Disaster risk reduction-related Official Development Assistance (ODA) has, however, barely increased, with only 0.5 per cent from 2010 to 2019 dedicated to disaster risk reduction in the pre-disaster phase―a marginal improvement from the 0.4% of the 1990–2010 period. This financing gap is yet to be addressed.

This financing gap may appear huge but compared to annual global savings and other large financing markets, it is achievable. The availability of capital is large enough to solve global infrastructure needs.  Against the above background, at the international level, several UN-led, multi-stakeholder initiatives emerged to unlock significant capital flows to inclusive, sustainable urbanisation projects, e.g., the Cities Investment Facility (CIF). Concurrently, at the low to middle-income countries level, there is agreement that a paradigm shift from a granting model to a financing model is crucial in keeping up the pace towards attaining the SDGs. This essay examines one particular vehicle for channeling private investments and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) towards sustainable development, namely the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics, with particular emphasis on the social metrics. This is particularly important as a 2019 Morgan Stanley Asset Owners survey found that sustainable investing is gaining traction among asset owners, where 80% said that they actively integrated sustainable investing in 2019, up 10 percentage points from 2017.

A diagram of a sustainable development
ESG Investments within the Wider Context of Sustainable Development (Credit: Author)

ESG Metrics

The E in ESG considers a company’s energy use, and environmental impact as stewards of the planet and how a company uses resources across the board specifically scope one, two, and three emission sources[v]. Factors considered include energy efficiency, carbon emissions, biodiversity, air and water quality, deforestation, and waste management.

The S in ESG is the social criterion that examines how a company fosters its people and culture and how that has ripple effects on the broader community. Factors considered include inclusivity, gender, and racial diversity; employee engagement; customer satisfaction; data protection; privacy service to the community; human rights and labor standards.

The G in ESG is the governance criterion that considers a company’s internal system of controls, practices, and procedures and avoidance of violations. It aims to ensure transparency and industry best practices and includes dialogue with regulators. Factors considered are the company’s leadership, board composition, executive compensation, audit committee, structure, internal controls, shareholder rights, and political contributions.

Organizations that do not consider these environmental, social, and governance factors and risks may face unforeseen financial risks and investor scrutiny. Transparency is critical to the process, where transparent reporting enables stakeholders to gain a clear picture of a company’s direction and progression. Stakeholders need visibility on the progress as well as the goals.

The critical role of S and G in ESG

The year 2020 was the biggest year for ESG-investing yet. The events of 2020 have shown that social factors are as much on investors’ minds as are environmental or governance factors. But while the “E” is the easiest one to codify and is now mainstreamed, including in real estate investment firms, the “S” and “G” are often more implicit, yet critical.

The “S” and “G” can help address society’s toughest problems, such as economic opportunity and inequity. These are issues that, historically, investors exacerbated by not always considering the negative externalities or the long-term impacts of their investments on society at large. But investors are, increasingly, changing course. For example, BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager—has decided to focus on ESG because they recognize that rising income inequality poses long-term business risks. In fact, the 2020 World Economic Forum’s inaugural Social Mobility Report finds that increasing social mobility, a key driver of income equality, by 10% would not only benefit social cohesion but also boost economic growth by nearly 5% over the next decade. This has specific and significant implications for each economic sector including the real estate and the hotel sectors.

While developing countries have a considerable sustainable development financing gap, the potential for ESG to address this gap is significant. However, ESG investments are not yet sufficiently being adopted across the different sectors in developing countries. The next two sections review some of the best practices in the USA and Europe, as a way to showcase the potential for ESG impact investments throughout the world.

USA: The critical role of the real estate industry in the development of inclusive cities

Almost every major development project requires significant loans from banks or equity from third-party investors, who are increasingly willing to lend capital to real estate companies that are pursuing projects with real social impacts. Developers are recognizing that the traditional development process — which sets up community members and developers as opponents—needs to change. It is now recognised that Real estate, which historically played a significant role in perpetuating racial and class inequities, could play a significant role in offsetting them, too. Developers who decide to pursue more inclusive and equitable projects will be more likely to receive capital from investors. Elaborating on what this “S” in ESG means for real estate, should be a multi-stakeholder effort including affected communities, and should not be restricted to developers and investors. This is particularly true as it is not just developers that will benefit, but our cities will, too.

Indeed, it is everyone’s task to search, identify, and develop ideas that would make real estate development in cities more inclusive and equitable. This should include new ideas on ownership, wealth creation, social mobility, and economic opportunity approaches. The main question that should be addressed is how real estate can deliver better social outcomes for communities while transforming development into a powerful tool for creating more equitable, inclusive cities.

Leveraging ESG is an important way to catalyze change in the development industry. Financial institutions can be drivers for change, as developers respond to what financial institutions demand. Developing socially-minded metrics is a key step towards helping the alignment of developers and investors to work in locations in the absence of social infrastructure, economic infrastructure, and/or housing and other physical infrastructure.

Metrics is one of the issues that must be agreed upon by different stakeholders within the industry, including the real estate side and the institutional investor side. In this context, it should be recognised that social metrics are more complex than environmental metrics, where developers generally measure monthly building emissions, carbon intensity materials, and/or how much renewable energy is being generated by solar panels.

Social metrics are more complex as they try to address and measure long-term, endemic challenges, to be measured over time. Most development projects track few social outcomes, such as the number of affordable housing units created, the number of construction jobs generated, and/or the number of community engagement hours undertaken. However, none of these are particularly long-term in nature.

Social mobility metrics

Some of these longer-term metrics include for example youth enrichment programs in partnership with universities that can positively impact high school graduation rates and university enrollment rates for children in underperforming schools. Social metrics that need to be measured go beyond providing jobs —like construction, maintenance, or retail jobs to community members. In this case, by helping people graduate high school and attend college, such youth enrichment programs fundamentally improved the likelihood of social and economic mobility of local youth.

Creating long-term social metrics is not enough to instigate more equitable and inclusive development. Creating “S” metrics in collaboration with community members has the potential to align communities’ needs with investors and developers. Hence, the engagement of community members is crucial. In this manner, equitable development is best understood and practiced as an ecosystem-based initiative of private, public, and community-based partners to enact solutions together. Recent trends show that investors are now adopting ESG-based investments, which are driving returns, with the top 10 ESG funds outperforming the market in 2022.

Wealth building opportunities and metrics

New metrics can incentivize new models that have equity at the core. For example Community Investment Trusts Model allows members in a predominantly immigrant and refugee community to share ownership of a commercial building while tracking parameters like the number of women investors, first-time investors, and the dividends earned as a measure of how well the project is giving people new access to wealth-building opportunities.

Another wealth-building model is the neighbourhood Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT), which aims to measure how much people who have been denied wealth-building opportunities can grow multi-generational wealth over time. These initiatives put the community in the driver’s seat to participate in real estate development, in a way that has usually been limited to wealthy ‘elite’ developers or landowners. Other measures that need metrics include i) how much decision-making power a community has in a project, ii) how much wealth community individuals will generate from a project’s success, and iii) how well a project responds to community needs. These parameters may be measured, year over year, in order to determine how successful a project truly is.

Social impact investing in Europe and the UK

In 2011, the European Commission launched the Social Business Initiative to support the development of social enterprises, social economies, and social innovation. It led to important developments, such as the formation of the Expert Group on Social Economy and Social Enterprises (GECES), which brings together representatives of private and civil sector organizations, associations, and networks to communicate with national governments and advise the European Commission on social economy policies. The public sector supports impact investing in Europe at regional and national levels, by helping build both the demand and supply of capital, catering to the needs of social enterprises as recipients of funding and to the needs of investors and intermediary organizations as funders. The EU taxonomy on sustainable finance helps investors clearly measure sustainability by considering the economic impact of climate change, but no other social or environmental issues, on financial performance.

In 2012, Britain established Big Society Capital, a wholesale investment institution focused on combined social and financial returns. Britain also established the Social Impact Investment Task Force (SITF) in 2013, which was accompanied by the creation of policies, investment funds, and specialized financial tools.

Development in Europe, and across different sectors, varies. The variability shows that investors and policymakers need to account for the field’s different levels of maturity in national, sub-national, sectoral, and municipal markets.

The threat of greenwashing

Sustainable Finance involves taking ESG considerations into account when making investment decisions in order to provide sustainability benefits for organizations, communities, and the world as a whole. However, sustainable investments are expected to make a financial return as well as deliver environmental and social benefits. On the other hand, in some instances, businesses and the investment community engage in greenwashing[vi] practices making false marketing claims. Greenwashing can occur at the entity level, at product level, or at service level, including advice and payment services.

Greenwashing consists of two clear components: misleading intentionally or misleading through negligence. The first category consists of knowingly misrepresenting the sustainability-related characteristics of a particular investment or product with the intention to mislead. The second refers to situations of gross negligence where claims are made without taking reasonable steps to ensure the veracity of the ‘sustainability’ claim. The fact that there is no common definition of sustainable investment in the context of a rapidly evolving legislative framework does not justify negligence.

Greenwashing again shows the importance of i) suitably chosen metrics that can measure impact; and ii) the importance of engagement of all stakeholders, including the impacted communities, in validating the reporting process.

The role of regulations

The E indicators and metrics have been sufficiently elaborated over the past few decades, which makes it easier for the service/product/entity to report on environmental sustainability, and it also makes it easier for the regulators to identify greenwashing. However, this is not yet the case for the S indicators, particularly the long-term S indicators related to social mobility, wealth creation, and poverty reduction for the most vulnerable. This makes it harder for service providers to report on social sustainability indicators and equally difficult for regulators to identify any “social-washing”.

A recent review of the main USA, EU, and UK[vii] ESG regulations shows a general focus on environmental and climate-related metrics. The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) provide more detailed, and distinct, Environmental, Social, and Governance Standards. It has four social standards i) ESRS S1 Own workforce; ii) ESRS S2 Workers in the value chain; iii) ESRS S3 Affected communities; iv) ESRS S4 Consumers and end-users. Notwithstanding the importance of the above, more effort should be directed at developing S metrics capable of effecting the required change of social mobility, asset ownership, wealth creation, and other economic opportunities.

ESG+R

Even when ESG investments are designed to effect long-term change in terms of environmental sustainability, governance, social mobility, and poverty reduction, they would still need to be resilient to natural hazards and to climate change in order to be truly long-term. This is the last letter that completes the picture, the need for resilient ESG or RESG.

Closure

ESG could contribute to and complement other initiatives and efforts to ensure multi-stakeholders work together to achieve sustainable development while addressing historic social inequities and challenges in developed and developing countries. It is possible to develop financially viable projects that help historically disinvested communities generate wealth, give regular people a seat at the table, and bring equitable growth and prosperity to neighbourhoods that have been left behind. For the future of all our cities, we must.

 

Fadi Hamdan
Athens

On The Nature of Cities

[i] Megacities are defined in this context as having a population of 10 million or more.

[ii] Urban Development Overview (worldbank.org)

[iii] 2023 Sustainable Development Goals Report

[iv] The 2023 Financing for Sustainable Development Report

[v] Scope 1 emissions are “direct emissions” from sources that are owned or controlled by the company. Scope 2 emissions are the emissions released into the atmosphere from the use of purchased energy. These are called “indirect emissions” because the actual emissions are generated at another facility such as a power station. Scope 3 emissions include all other indirect emissions that occur across the value chain and are outside of the organisation’s direct control.

[vi] The European union definition of green washing is the practice of gaining an unfair competitive Advantage by marketing a financial product as environmentally friendly when in fact it does not meet basic environmental standards.

[vii] USA Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures (Proposed Rule); EU: Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS); UK: The Companies (Strategic Report) (Climate-related Financial Disclosure) Regulations 2022; The Limited Liability Partnerships (Climate-related Financial Disclosure) Regulations 2022.

Equity in the Urban Commons

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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The Nature of Cities collective blog is now over a year old, during which time my friends, colleagues and co-authors have written many fascinating articles on various aspects of nature, and on people-nature interactions in urban environments. Today, in my blog, I’d like to step away from my previous two pieces—a discussion of tree diversity in Bangalore, and a tale of Bangalore’s lakes—to a more retrospective musing.

It all stems from Shakespeare (doesn’t everything?). My high school teacher, who had the unenviable task of teaching a bunch of bored teenagers The Merchant of Venice, highlighted how much his dramas taught us about human nature—and how little things had changed over time, really. Over time, although I began my urban research in Bangalore with a very ecology-centered view, it has become increasingly apparent just how important human behaviors are to this process. I don’t mean only issues such as people’s preferences for biodiversity—which, indeed, are very important. But equally important are how we perceive and deal with differences within us—differences in livelihood, in income, in lineage, but ultimately, differences in social status and in power. And, how our interface with these differences shapes the inclusion or exclusion of “others”, ultimately shaping the governance of the many ecological commons in our cities.

As in Bangalore,freshwater ecosystems including lakes, rivers, and wetlands are managed as common-pool resources in rural and urban areas in many parts of the world. Their inclusion into rapidly growing city boundaries is usually concomitant with a transfer of ownership and formal management rights to city municipalities. Yet—and especially in growing cities like Bangalore, Nairobi and Cape Town—urban commons are still accessed by local inhabitants practicing traditional livelihoods such as cattle rearing and fishing, although these now exist alongside recreational uses by city dwellers. Such contrasting and often conflicting users frequently engender heated debates about ownership and use rights, and bring up a whole host of complicated, thorny, yet very important equity issues.

Stories are always useful, to contextualize and explain abstract issues like context, culture and history to an audience unfamiliar with the place being discussed. So, I will provide two stories here. One is of an ecological commons, a lake being restored in today’s Bangalore. The other is a story of a British market being set up in Bangalore in 1811. Despite the considerable time difference of two centuries, the story these tell us of exclusion and inequity are unfortunately similar.

Let’s begin with the older tale first. On a recent visit to the Karnataka State Archives, I looked at one of their oldest documents: a file from 1811, filled with stylized, looped cursive handwriting that was extremely elegant to look at, but rather difficult to read. The story within was fascinating. The dusty file told the tale of the plan for creation of the Bangalore cantonment market, a plan originating from the officers of the Madras Presidency in Fort St. George, Chennai. A rather terse communication from the powers based in Chennai had apparently decided there was a real need for a market to serve the British troops based in the Bangalore Cantonment, which had been established just a few years before, in 1806. There was already a large and old market existing in a nearby part of the city, being used by the largely civilian population. Amongst the various factors cited as important reasons to establish a separate market for the troops was the need of a reliable place that could sell alcohol to them, clearly a need that separated the military from the civilians—along with problems of congestion in the civilian market.

The files note that the administrators in Madras realized there may be various challenges involved with summarily deciding to create and set up a large market in a populated area. Letters from Fort St. George thus request local British administrators to find out how many people lived in the area that was aimed to be transformed into the cantonment marketplace; how much compensation would be required to move them; and whether or not the king of Mysore would be much opposed to such a move. The letters exchanged thereafter, though rather brief, do not seem to record much possibility of opposition. Except for one rather disturbing piece of correspondence, what seems to be a sole surviving piece of opposition, that mentions that setting up of a Cantonment market would be challenging because there were forty to fifty thousand “souls” residing in that area. The correspondence in this file ends shortly thereafter, and we need to further trace what happened to this debate.

However, there was indeed an area set up as a marketplace for the Cantonment troops—whether this was in a location formerly occupied by the same forty to fifty thousand hapless souls described in the letter that I saw or not, we do not know. But we can speculate, probably with good reason, that there must have been some hapless souls inhabiting the areas where the British army expanded into, including those with livelihoods dependent on the commons such as grazers, fishers and agriculturists. What compensation would these souls, without well established private property rights, have received in return for handing over land for the provision of reliable alcohol sources for the British troops? Presumably little.

A lot can be read into this file, including tales of colonial power and hierarchy. Yet, tempting though it is to ascribe this tale of asymmetry solely to our former colonial past, my second story shows us that things have not changed that much over the past two hundred years. This, more recent tale is that of a lake in peri-urban Bangalore, within the city limits. The lake—let us call it lake X—was formerly encroached, polluted and drying, but is now well restored and maintained by a local lake trust, which takes great care to keep it in good condition. For instance, during a recent flooding event a few weeks ago at the beginning of the monsoon season, the members of the lake association acted quickly to divert the sewage contaminated water entering the lake into another direction, preventing it from contaminating the water within the lake.

The story so far seems excellent, right? However, as with the story of the Bangalore cantonment, the restoration of the lake has not been without collateral damage. A map of the lake from 1970 depicts the area around the lake—including a grazing commons (outlined in green) to the northeast of the lake.

 

A map of lake "X".
A map of lake “X”. Image: Harini Nagendra

The photograph below shows you the area as it exists today—fenced off from the local community, with a small children’s play area overgrown with grass and weeds, surrounded by apartments. The lake itself is certainly well used by the local apartments and other residents around the area as a site of urban recreation. Missing however are traditional uses of the lake such as fodder collection and grazing, as has been seen in many of the other restored lakes in Bangalore. This portrayal is by no means meant to denigrate the quite significant efforts of those who have worked long and hard to restore and protect this lake. Quite the contrary. Examples such as this are difficult to find in cities like Bangalore, where most lakes lie degraded and polluted, and it is easy to see where the impulse comes from, to protect the lake from consumptive use.

Yet, there are inevitable questions of fairness and of equity.

Photo: Harini Nagendra
Photo: Harini Nagendra

There are no easy answers to these challenges. Open access commons such as those presumably existing in the areas designated for conversion to the Cantonment market in 1811, and those that definitely existed around Lake X in the 1970s, are of no use to anyone. Indeed, as Garret Hardin postulated (though somewhat misleadingly, equating “commons” with “open access” areas)—open access commons are almost inevitably going to be subject to dangers of overuse and degradation.

Yet, well protected, gated commons, though more sustainable, also pose the question of “protected by whom, and against whom?” Cities, whether in Bangalore, Nigeria, Moscow or San Francisco, are hardly paradises of equity. Quite the converse, cities are some of the most unequal places within which to live.

Unless we find some truly equitable ways to solve the challenge of equity, the issue of sustainability will remain ecologically biased, and socially skewed.

Harini Nagendra
Bangalore

 

Establishing New Models of Human Rights: Creating Clean Places to Live

Bangkok to Barcelona on foot, Essay, People & Communities, Place & Design, , , ,
Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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A Burmese man surprises me with a question, an idea that will make my thoughts race for weeks.

“They talk about human rights abuses and political prisoners and all of these things. Yes, these things are important,” the man says, referring to the collective, unknown “they” who create the rules of the game to which we all are universally expected to conform.

Providing clean places to live requires thoughtful consideration of how a country’s development can justly incorporate nature and ecosystem diversity while creating prosperity and improving the quality of life of its citizens.
“But, I see people from my own country open their car windows and throw their trash onto the road, and I think how wrong that is,” he continues. “Isn’t it a basic human right to live in a clean place?”

It’s a rare moment when we encounter a thought so profound. Walking in Myanmar, also known as Myanmar/Burma, our conversations with locals often are limited by language barriers and usually center on answering two frequent questions: “Where do you go? and “What is your country?”

Now, by chance, we’re afforded an opportunity to explore, at least momentarily, a line of thought that is particularly interesting in this time and place.Trash in Myanmar

Photo Apr 17The country, long closed off and operated under military rule, is today filled with the promise, hope, and skepticism of what lies ahead. Recent elections and shifts in political power bring with them a laundry list of challenges, opportunities, priorities, and perspectives about how to move from “what was” to “what could be.”

The question hanging in the air gives me pause, and I find myself nodding in agreement. “Living in a clean place should be a basic human right,” I say, convinced that there is truth in the concept. “But how do you create that? How do you stop people from throwing trash out of the window?”

We mull it over for a while, and shrug our shoulders. The conversation becomes too hard and finding words we both understand too difficult.

The street view

Still, weeks go by and the question stays on my mind. We have walked about 900 kilometers from Myawaddy to Bagan, and have seen things normal travelers in cars and buses generally miss.Photo Mar 14Photo Mar 27

Photo Mar 02We have seen, for instance, signs of what many people would consider economic progress. Hundreds of kilometers of road widening projects, where, sadly, dozens and dozens (if not hundreds) of century-old or older trees are being chopped down so that an increasing number of trucks can deliver products to a new market of eager consumers.

In other areas, family-based sustenance farming appears to have been replaced with vast stretches of rubber tree plantations, commercial agriculture, and a growing number of stone-grinding, gravel-making businesses. Posters advertising a handful of cement makers appeal to individuals who have enough cash on hand to renovate their homes or build new ones from scratch. And, there is notable investment in irrigation canals and water management systems in some regions, especially where rice paddies stretch to the horizon.Photo Mar 31-2Photo Mar 27-2 Photo Feb 29-32016-03-07 14.09.01Photo Feb 29-2Photo Apr 17-2

Socially, too, there seems to be an air of unprecedented personal freedom waiting to take hold. Mobile phone shops selling smartphones, SIM cards, accessories, and Internet data plans occupy significant amounts of many cities’ retail space and promote the joys of 3G connectivity. People are falling in love with Facebook, and the selfie is all the rage. Although still a conservative culture steeped in Buddhist traditions, there is an obvious rebellion going on in Myanmar/Burma; you only have to look at the teenagers to find it. Spiky mullets of blue, blonde, red, and pink dyed hair and arms and backs painted with tattoos make me think of young people in London, San Francisco, and New York.

Photo Mar 11-2There is, too, the obvious trend for capitalist-fueled consumerism. Brands from the U.S., Japan, Korea, Thailand, and China are winning greater amounts of shelf space in local shops, and more well known companies are waiting for the green light to be here.

The downside of this upselling of stuff that people want, but may not need, comes in the shape of litter scattered almost everywhere. Plastic bags, styrofoam containers, cans, bottles, wrappers, and paper are tossed alongside roads, piled at the edge of towns, and float in waterways. We see people sweeping outside their front doors, but very few cities or towns have trash bins set up in clear view. Burning trash in the front yards appears to be the way to manage waste. Photo Mar 11Photo Mar 15Photo Apr 01

Creating a new standard

It’s heartbreaking to see so much trash in such a beautiful country filled with some of the nicest people we’ve met so far. The idea of living in a clean place and having that be part of the basic human rights we ought to hold dear keeps swirling around my head.

The man’s question, raised during a conversation between strangers who will never know each other’s names, appears to be simple on the surface. But when you scratch at it, it is a complex issue that gets to the root of economic, social, global, and urban development.

A clean place to live, whether in urban or rural areas, implies a certain level of social commitment to change behaviors, establish discipline among citizens, and work for the common good. It requires public and private investments for balancing consumption and waste management, and a progressive plan to control and reduce land, water, and air contamination. Providing clean places to live requires thoughtful consideration of how a country’s development can justly incorporate nature and ecosystem diversity while creating prosperity and improving the quality of life of its citizens, who are on the edge of embracing globalization.

Unfortunately, promoting clean places to live may rank low on the list of priorities of countries opening themselves up to new standards of approval in the world community. Developed nations and worldwide organizations will demand countries such as Myanmar/Burma to address the significant issues of human rights abuses, peacekeeping initiatives to stop ethnic fighting, gender equality, fair labor, and basic health and safety education. Countries that meet these gold-star standards win grants, humanitarian aid, trade deals and concessions, and an incredible amount of international support, making the stakes high for developing countries to meet these criteria.

Also, of course, those issues are important and need to be center-stage because of the sheer number of lives they affect.

However, there should be room somewhere on the agenda to tackle these other issues, currently low on the international agenda. Waste management, ecosystem diversity, and environmental awareness are actually not small issues. Having a clean place to live results from the formation of safe, sustainable, and resilient communities and feeds a cycle of well-being people will value—ideals that, arguably, many communities in the “developed” world have yet to attain.

Photo Mar 14-2Perhaps, as national governments of developing countries focus on the prescribed criteria for playing catch up in a globally-connected world, the notion of creating clean places to live and visualizing that as a basic human right must (and should) reside at the city level.

As more people everywhere cluster into cities, urban governments will see the problems stemming from weak waste management, ecosystem diversity, and environmental awareness escalate, and will have to adapt first-line approaches to dealing with them. Like it or not, the upsides and downsides of development and globalization will fall on the shoulders of city entities; thinking ahead and planning for that responsibility is worth doing proactively.

With that, I’m holding out hope that city leaders in Myanmar understand the important role they play in “what could be” during this pivotal point in the country’s development. From a traveler’s and walker’s point of view, cities show the different faces of a nation, and I like to picture myself strolling by, admiring clean streets, parks, and public places instead of stepping over cans people threw from their car windows.

Jenn Baljko

See more about the trip here.

Everyone Has Contact with Nature but that Nature Is Not the Same

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Lessons from a small city

Much of the urban ecology literature focuses on the world’s largest cities, and many of the Nature of Cities bloggers have written about these places. Blog posts have discussed the challenges of conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services in London and New York City, planning for greenspace and social justice issues in Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg and Cape Town. So what can be learned from a smaller city in the midwest United States — an average city?

Columbia, Missouri is very different from those places, but it is also a city shaped by a legacy of racial segregation that continues to influence its neighborhoods and it is a city that is faced with equally important planning and development questions. A focus on biodiversity associated with these day-to-day settings is useful in illustrating some of the challenges in making biodiversity meaningful and accessible to all urban residents.

Nearby nature

In the 1980’s Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan introduced the concept of nearby nature, the nature that is within 1 km of where people live and work. The Kaplan’s argued that these nearby places are where people encounter nature on a day-to-day basis, are places that are valued by urban residents, and have a strong influence on residents’ perceptions and values.

Nearby nature has become an important concept in landscape architecture and urban planning but the concept is often ignored by people who study biodiversity in cities. The common, the ordinary, and the everyday are often described as examples of degraded or homogenized biodiversity. existence.  My work as an urban wildlife ecologist considers the biodiversity associated with day-to-day environments, and the role focuses on these areas and in this blog I will describe some of the work that my students, colleagues, and I have done in these places in the city where I live and work, Columbia, Missouri.

Shaping nearby nature: race matters

Urban form and morphology shape patterns of nearby nature and form and morphology are shaped by laws, policies, and decision making. Columbia developed during a time when the civil rights of black Americans were limited by law and practice. Segregation was a social driver shaping the form of neighborhoods in central parts of Columbia, and to some extent shaping nearby nature. Before 1954 Columbia’s black residents attended a single school and lived in four neighborhoods in the center of the Flat Branch Creek Watershed. Residential segregation was not required under Missouri law but it Columbia it was enforced by custom and local planning policy. The 1935 City Plan for Columbia, Missouri states,

“The negroes are an important and useful element in the city’s life, and provision should be made for their welfare, including suitable locations for living and recreation.  It is not to the best interest of either race to encroach upon the other. Control by zoning, while instituted in certain southern cities, is not entirely satisfactory, and it is believed that mutual agreements between the races offer a better method of procedure. With little possibility of material increase in negro population, and with considerable vacant property within the principal sections now occupied by them, effort should be made to concentrate future population within these principal sections and avoid scattering into other sections of the city.”

Location of Jindrich Negro Neighborhoods Source: Jason Jindrich http://jindrichyanes.net/Jindrich_Thesis.pdf
Location of Jindrich Negro Neighborhoods Source: Jason Jindrich http://jindrichyanes.net/Jindrich_Thesis.pdf

Pictures of the “principal sections occupied by Negroes” show a mix of traditional streetscapes and small greenspaces along with unpaved streets and open sewers. In 1956 the city developed the Douglass School Urban Renewal Area to initiate a process that resulted in tearing down 222 houses, additional small business, and burying portions of Flat Branch Creek. The urban renewal project moved relocated much of Columbia’s black community to the west and northwest portions of the watershed, away from Flat Branch Creek.

Unpaved street in Columbia's “Negro District. Source: Columbia Housing Authority
Unpaved street in Columbia’s “Negro District. Source: Columbia Housing Authority
Urban renewal in Columbia's “Negro District.” Source: Vox Magazine / State Historical Society of Missouri http://www.voxmagazine.com/media/img/photos/2012/11/5.jpg
Urban renewal in Columbia’s “Negro District.” Source: Vox Magazine / State Historical Society of Missouri http://www.voxmagazine.com/media/img/photos/2012/11/5.jpg

Shaping nearby nature: planning policy matters

Columbia is a growing city with development focused on infill of greenspaces within older parts of the city and sprawl on the fringe of the city. I have mentioned the role of planning as part of a broader pattern of residential segregation in Columbia, but planning plays an additional role is shaping nearby nature in that it provides guidance on development.  Planning and zoning authority in the city does not address wildlife habitat. Environmental planning is limited to a floodplain overlay zone protecting streams and riparian areas in the city and a land protection ordinance protecting forested parcels in the city.

To support this ordinance the city has uses a natural resource inventory that maps contiguous forest and tree cover. This has led to a planning approach that focuses on protecting large blocks of open space and riparian corridors around the city, a process that often ignores nearby nature. This lack of focus has resulted in small-scale controversies over proposed developments throughout the city.

The look of nearby nature: big differences along the same street

Our work focuses on describing and assessing nearby nature in the city’s neighborhoods.  George Middendorf and I developed a crosstown walk as a teaching tool for a qualitative look at environmental changes along single streets that track a socioeconomic gradient.  We’ve used the crosstown walk to describe differences in nearby nature along a 1.8 km stretch of a Columbia street. Edgewood Ave., Aldeah Ave., and Alexander Street are a single street west of downtown Columbia. The southern end of the street (Edgewood Ave.) is part of one of the wealthiest and mostly white census tract block groups in the city with large houses, brick streets and mature street trees. The northern end of the street (Alexander Ave.) has a median family income almost $50,000 lower, a relative small number of white residents, has smaller houses and fewer trees on streets and in yards.

Two blocks on Edgewood / Aldeah / Alexander Avenue, January 2013. Left: more affluent, more white; Right:, 1 km north. less affluent, more mixed. Photos: Charles Nilon
Two blocks on Edgewood / Aldeah / Alexander Avenue, January 2013. Left: more affluent, more white; Right:, 1 km north. less affluent, more mixed. Photos: Charles Nilon

With support from USDA Forest Service’s Midwest Center for Urban and Community Forestry, we asked groups of residents from different Columbia neighborhoods to describe the places in their neighborhoods that were important to them and to explain why they were important. Representatives from the Westmount NA that includes the southern end of Edgewood / Aldeah / Alexander,  described the large street trees in their neighborhood, mentioning the beauty of the fall colors and the trees framed houses along the streets.  They also valued the wooded hillsides and small streams near some of the houses and these features provide a unique feel to the street. They voiced concern about the city’s management of street trees in their neighborhood.

Yards dominated by large trees and landscaping. Photo: Charles Nilon
Yards dominated by large trees and landscaping. Photo: Charles Nilon

Residents of the Smithon Valley Neighborhood Association, that included the central and northern blocks of Edgewood / Aldeah / Alexander, valued the deep 50 m lots behind their houses and the spontaneous vegetation associated with old fence rows that was growing up in the back of many of the lots. The residents also valued relative large patches of forest that were formed behind houses. They were concerned about the potential development of some of the larger patches, mentioning the recent purchase of some of these interior lots and proposed development for homes.

Woodland in interior of block prior, 2007. Source: GoogleEarth
Woodland in interior of block prior, 2007. Source: GoogleEarth
Woodland in interior of block following development in 2009. Source: Google Earth
Woodland in interior of block following development in 2009. Source: Google Earth

Biodiversity and nearby nature

Since 2008 we have worked on a project to document the animal species that occur that are associated with nearby nature. We’ve developed a biotope map for the city, a process that has identified more than 60 types of habitats associated with different land use types in Columbia. We have used this as a tool for looking at habitats and species associated with neighborhoods in the city. We have started to assess some of the places identified by our discussions with local residents. Places that form unique biotope types, such as the spontaneous vegetation associated with alleys in the city’s older neighborhoods.

Spontaneous vegetation along fence rows in central Columbia. Photo: Charles Nilon
Spontaneous vegetation along fence rows in central Columbia. Photo: Charles Nilon

Our studies of birds, small mammals, and butterflies are designed to document the species occurring in habitats in residential neighborhoods. For example, we are studying breeding and winter birds in one central Columbia neighborhood as a pilot study for a larger study looking at birds and management of habitats in residential neighborhoods.

By documenting the species associated with the nature that Columbia resident’s encounter near where they live we will be able provide information to residents and planners about the contributions these places make to local and regional biodiversity.

neighborhood biotpe map
Biotope map of neighborhood with bird census points. Photo: Christine Rega

Our emphasis on nearby nature points to the importance of understanding the local context that shapes biodiversity and ecosystem services in cities. The approach we use in Columbia is relevant to all cities because it combines understanding what residents see and value in the nature around them, and assessing and recognize the contributions of these important places.

Charles Nilon
Columbia, Missouri

On The Nature of Cities

 

References

A City Plan for Columbia, Missouri. 1935.   Report to the City Planning and Zoning Commission. Hare and Hare City Planners, Kansas City, Missouri.

Cady C. Finding Flat Brach. City of Columbia Department of Parks and Recreation.

Middendorf, G. and C. Nilon. 2005. A Crosstown Walk to Assess Environmental Changes Along an Urban Socioeconomic Gradient. Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology 3: Experiment #3 [online].

Pierce, R.A. II, C. Nilon, and H. Stelzer. 2013. Assessing wildlife habitats and natural resources in neighborhoods and urban environments. MP927 University of Missouri Extension.

Sullivan, J. 2003 Ridgeway neighbors oppose Habitat’s housing proposal. Columbia Daily Tribune

 

 

Expanding the Guest List at City Parks

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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The health benefits of the natural environment

One of the most important factors in promoting good health and preventing chronic disease is regular physical activity; ranked second only to tobacco control. With less than a third of Australians getting enough physical activity, this is leading to increased risks of chronic disease and mental ill health. The estimated cost to the Australian economy has been put at a total of $13.8 billion each year.

Public parks in Victoria, Australia, offer access to nature and it is widely accepted that time spend in nature improves wellbeing, reduces stress and promotes physical activity for all. Parks are now perhaps the main way of accessing nature in the daily lives of many city-dwellers, particularly in Victoria’s capital city of Melbourne. Melbourne is reported to have the largest area of parkland within a three-kilometre radius of the CBD of any major city in the world (Australian Institute of Urban Studies & City of Melbourne 2004, ‘Chapter 5: Open Space’, Environmental Indicators for Metropolitan Melbourne, no. 7, pp. 49-52).

View from an urban park with Melbourne in the background. Photo: Parks Victoria
View from an urban park with Melbourne in the background. Photo: Parks Victoria

In light of this it seems timely to acknowledge that natural environments with contemporary facilities may encourage diverse experiences that support our emotional, physical and spiritual health. The benefits of contact with nature for human health are become increasingly clear and it appears that such benefits hold true regardless of age, gender, race, ethnicity and health status (for examples see here).

Nature is now also beginning to be viewed as a commodity that should be readily available to everyone and not just to the lucky few living close to parks. Access to nature is a determinant of health for entire city-based populations and as such is becoming a social justice issue.

Finding lost wisdom

As the number of people in cities continues to rise, how will we meet the challenge of designing and maintaining healthy cities that engage and inspire residents to be healthy? I was pondering this challenge when I recently attended a Biodiversity and Health Forum in the Melbourne (Australia) suburb of Broadmeadows, hosted by the Local Government Biodiversity Planners Network.

One of many insights that I had on that day related to how the park and open space planners of the early 1900s in Melbourne were keenly aware of the health benefits of nature and planned urban development of Melbourne to take advantage of these.  A highly insightful quote from 1929 states that:

“…abundant evidence is available to substantiate the views of city planners, the medical profession and psychologists that proper outdoor recreation has a most beneficial effect on the health, morals and business efficiency of communities and consequentially on national life”. —1929 Melbourne Metropolitan Town Planning Commission

Health for all

By 2050, the number of people living in cities is expected to rise to 86% in the more developed and 67% in the less developed regions of the world.

A newly developing suburb in Melbourne’s outer west. Photo Credit: Parks Victoria
A newly developing suburb in Melbourne’s outer west. Photo Credit: Parks Victoria

The inter-linkages between our health and where we live, work and play means that there are daily opportunities to improve our individual and community health. As we’re predominantly living in cities, let’s work with the decision-makers to maximise nature conservation, share benefits and support community wellbeing and prosperity.

Put simply, we need to broaden the guest list at city parks and do it urgently.

It’s empowering to realise that health promotion policies and actions that focus on combating our non-communicable diseases (NCDs) can achieve benefits for parks too. NCDs include heart attacks, strokes, cancers, various respiratory diseases and diabetes.

More than 36 million people die every year from NCDs and almost 80% of NCD deaths now occur in low- and middle-income countries. With the projected number of deaths per year expected to reach 44 million deaths per year by 2020, this is a global health epidemic. To reinforce this, the World Health Organization (WHO) will convene a formal meeting with Member States in November this year for a new interagency UN Task Force on NCDs, given that the global burden of NCDs “constitutes one of the major challenges for development in the 21st century”.

Current evidence suggests that NCDs can be greatly reduced by lifestyle decisions that are actually key risk factors: tobacco use, unhealthy diet and physical inactivity, and the harmful use of alcohol. In tackling these lifestyle issues, there are opportunities to also benefit and promote urban biodiversity.

Developing urban spaces that improve air quality, promoting public transport and physical activity, and facilitating local food security, for example, can improve our health, conserve biological diversity; and support healthy ecosystems in parks. We need to get more people, more active, more often in city parks.

Parks for preservative health

Parks Victoria has for more than a decade championed the Healthy Parks Healthy People (HPHP) philosophy and developed four principles, which are:

  • The wellbeing of all societies depends on healthy ecosystems
  • Parks conserve and nurture healthy ecosystems
  • Contact with nature is essential for improving emotional, physical and spiritual health and wellbeing
  • Parks are fundamental to economic growth and to vibrant and health communities

The HPHP principles make it quite clear that parks are of critical importance to the economy and to society and thus to our future health and prosperity. This is a much more holistic and collaborative interpretation of parks and conservation than perhaps just ten years ago.

Through the HPHP Active in Parks program, Parks Victoria and partners have involved approximately 15,000 people in 13 different types of activities in a variety of city parks and some national parks. This program adopts collaborative initiatives to encourage ‘at risk’ groups of people to be more active in parks. ‘At risk’ refers to groups who have been identified as having barriers to accessing parks and include: youth, the elderly, people living with a disability, culturally and linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities, among others.

Laughter Yoga with Council of the Aging. Photo: Parks Victoria
Laughter Yoga with Council of the Aging. Photo: Parks Victoria

Some examples of activities in the HPHP Active in Parks program include green gyms, art and cultural activities, volunteering opportunities, children and family activities, urban camping, guided walks and other facilitated activities and community exercise events.

The activities are designed to overcome barriers for increasing physical participation, as identified by VicHealth, Australia. These barriers were a lack of time; affordability; visitor knowledge; transport; inclusive facilities; self-confidence and support, as well as concerns about safety and injury.

Examples of Active in Parks activities. Photo: Parks Victoria
Examples of Active in Parks activities. Photo: Parks Victoria

HPHP Active in Parks emphasises the introduction of new visitors to Parks that may not otherwise understand the availability, safety, accessibility and additional health benefits of being active in nature. The program facilitates a connection with individuals through partnerships with community development organisations and provides them with information to assist with their confidence and knowledge so that they may pursue their own activities in nature in the future.

The activities and models continuing to be tested and adapted, but they demonstrate just some of the opportunities for city parks to support local residents and to contribute to community wellbeing. It is a practical example of park managers working closely with other sectors to engage new audiences in using urban parks.

Setting the future agenda—World Parks Congress 2014

The upcoming 6th IUCN World Parks Congress (WPC), which will be held in Sydney in November 2014, offers a once-in-a-decade opportunity to collaboratively define a new guest list for parks.

To give a little history, the IUCN World Parks Congress has been held every ten years since 1962, and sets the global parks agenda for the following decade. The 5th World Parks Congress was held in Durban South Africa in 2003. Its theme was ‘Benefits Beyond Boundaries’ and the Congress produced the Durban Accord and Action Plan and the ‘Message to Convention on Biological Diversity’ that led to the development and adoption of the Programme of Work on Protected Areas (http://www.cbd.int/protected/).

The 6th WPC in 2014 is expected to attract 3,000 delegates from about 160 countries. The ultimate aim of the Congress is to position parks and protected areas firmly within broader goals of economic and community wellbeing. The theme of the Congress is ‘Parks, People Planet: Inspiring Solutions’. The program is divided into 8 streams (see below) and will consist of plenary sessions, workshops, special events, side meetings and capacity building activities. A public festival will be held on Sunday 16 November 2014.

The eight streams at the WPC 2014 and their contribution to the goals of the IUCN Global Protected Areas Programme.
The eight streams at the WPC 2014 and their contribution to the goals of the IUCN Global Protected Areas Programme.

Improving global health and wellbeing 

The theme  ‘improving health and wellbeing’ at the WPC is highly complimentary to the approach of Healthy Parks Healthy People and offers an excellent opportunity for park managers and the health sector to further develop awareness of and commitment for healthy, prosperous societies being dependent on healthy natural environments.

The ultimate aim of the health and wellbeing stream is to enhance concerted global actions for parks and contribute to improved health of individuals and communities globally. This will be achieved by developing a stream programme that:

  • Creates awareness of the range of vital linkages between human health and parks (nature)
  • Develops a shared understanding between sectors responsible for human health and parks (nature)
  • Enables park agencies to develop new health sector partnerships and strengthen existing ones to deliver benefits for both human health and parks (nature)
  • Inspires the ‘influencers’ to deliver long-term, positive change to the policies, programmes and funding for both human health and parks (nature)

Our success will initially be measured during the WPC, but a more challenging assessment will be the collective ability of stream partners and participants to look long-term and work towards legacy outcomes for the health and parks after the energy and excitement of the Congress has left.

The following five ‘big ticket’ items are currently being discussed with partners (of course!) in a range of forums as potential long-term legacies of the health and wellbeing stream at WPC:

  • Inspire leaders to promote and utilize parks for their value in connecting individuals and communities to nature and as a means to improving health and wellbeing for all
  • Develop an innovative and diverse suite of policy, planning, program and funding models that connect the environment (parks) and health sectors in order to enhance the use of and support for nature-based health programmes
  • Imbed a range of human health objectives into park conservation targets with the outcome being a measure of the value of parks for human health
  • Contribute to achievement of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 and particularly the Aichi Biodiversity Targets 11 and 14 related to protected areas, ecosystem services and human health
  • Influence the development of the Sustainable Development Goals to recognize the co-dependence of human health and healthy ecosystems and to enhance concerted global actions for parks as a result of their significant contribution to human health and sustainable development

One specific and tangible way that knowledge will be shared on the linkages between healthy societies on healthy natural environments is through the development of a new IUCN Best Practise Guideline for Healthy Parks Healthy People in 2015. The process for development will take advantage of upcoming lead-in events including IUCN Asian Parks Congress (Japan, Nov. 2013) and the 2nd International HPHP Congress and Expo (USA, June 2014) as well as utilizing on-line collaborative development tools. The draft Guidelines will be ready for further consultation and workshopping during the health stream at the WPC 2014. City-based case studies can be contributed and will be considered during the drafting process. Please contact me ([email protected]) for further details.

Volunteer-led community walking in a city park, Melbourne. Photo: Parks Victoria
Volunteer-led community walking in a city park, Melbourne. Photo: Parks Victoria

Funding the future

Parks contribute to human health and nature conservation and nowhere is this more relevant than in cities, given the current and projected proportion of the global population living there. City-based parks boost urban liveability and offer low-cost preventative and remedial health opportunities for individuals and communities, among other benefits.

Park establishment and management demands resources, but their long-term benefits in controlling healthcare costs makes a case for combined budgeting and program development with health and environment sectors. There is also now increasing interest by both sectors to jointly quantify and communicate the values and benefits of parks for health; explore innovative partnerships that establish further clinical trials; and leverage funding for the expansion of nature-based health programs.

The future of city parks is inclusive and collaborative—parks are inspiring and accessible solutions for being healthy by nature.

Kathryn Campbell
Victoria, Australia

On The Nature of Cities

 

 

 

A picture of a map with the colors going from cooler to warmer as they get closer to the center

Explaining the Housing Crisis with the Theory of Constraints

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Canada is aiming to double its population within decades, but our largest cities are already congested by decades of car-centric infrastructure investment. Laying out a green belt around each is the first step to preventing more automobile dependency, followed by budding (as a plant buds) into that green belt with a new fully planned city.

How economic flows and bottlenecks affect urban growth

When we encounter a contradiction, it’s very likely that we are facing an unresolved “problem of organized complexity,” to paraphrase Jane Jacobs. Such is the situation with the crisis of urban home affordability and NIMBYism, where everyone agrees that the supply of homes is below the need, but none concede that it is their neighborhood’s growth constraints that must be lifted. We are currently trapped in a political deadlock where the energy invested in removing constraints is met with an equivalent increase in the energy applied at protecting these constraints.

In this essay, I intend to introduce the concept of flow, of linked processes of production, to help explain these contradictions in urban affordability. The key insight will be understanding the phenomena of flow bottlenecks, how they arise, and ultimately how cities must use the principles behind the Theory of Constraints to progress through the contradictions of urban growth and unblock the production of new homes and dwellings.

The concept of economic flow was discovered in the field of industrial organization and generalized later to non-industrial economic activities such as management and marketing. For this audience, I, however, first present flow from the perspective of abstract systems, then describe how those systems express themselves in factories, to then arrive at an accurate depiction of economic flow in urbanization. With such a depiction we can finally imagine a form of urban planning and governing that satisfies both the demand for new dwellings and the need of homeowners to protect their neighborhoods from new growth.

What is flow, and what makes it meaningful?

Hydrological flows are well understood by civil engineers and landscape architects, and traffic flows have also been studied for decades. But what of economic flows, in demand and supply? This flow represents the change of a supply of goods over time, and while in economics it is assumed to be either elastic or inelastic to price by the good’s intrinsic nature, in practical matters it is the result of very complicated processes of production that are susceptible to both deterioration and improvement.

In Eli Goldratt’s business novel “The Goal“, where the Theory of Constraints is introduced, a businessman is challenged with accelerating the time a customer’s order requires to be processed by his factory, against his intuition about efficiency and complicated by the opaqueness of the factory’s behavior. It seems that the dimension of time in production has escaped anyone’s control. His breakthrough insight occurs when observing a system of flow in a non-industrial setting: the behavior of a line of children hiking in the woods. Let’s begin our examination of flow starting from this simple model.

In order to complete the hike, the entire group must have arrived at their destination, which is to say that the group has completed the hike when the last member of the group has completed the hike. The surprising insight of flow theory is that the order in which the children walk the trail affects the arrival time of the whole group, and there is an optimal order to place them in.

Let us first imagine two (or more) children, one taller and stronger, and a second much younger, on a hike through a forest. Let’s imagine that the children carry equally weighted backpacks of supplies and walk in order from tallest to shortest. Along the way, children inevitably get distracted or hit obstacles that slow their movement, and because they walk in a single line those children that are walking behind immobile children are blocked from advancing. Slower children that are blocked from moving ahead by children in front of them will not be able to catch up after the faster children once those get moving again. They will also become tired much more quickly from carrying relatively more weight for their strength. The end result is that the whole group will only reach the goal (the whole group arriving at the destination) at the pace that the slowest child can keep, and that pace can be interrupted by any obstacle encountered by the children in front. The slowest child controls the flow of the group, and anything that speeds up the faster child will not help the situation. The slowest child is the bottleneck of the process.

Although it might increase the probability of adding a slower child, adding more children to the group makes no difference to this constraint, but it does make the cause of the slowness more opaque to the outside observer and more difficult to improve. This was the situation faced by industry when the Theory of Constraints was proposed.

An illustration of faces on a flow chart
A flow of equally-burdened children walking a trail, depicted as a temporal sequence line-by-line. As time advances from line T1 to T6, the smaller child gets delayed by the taller one and loses energy at a greater rate.

To remove this bottleneck to flow, Goldratt presents two improvements.

The first improvement is to put the slowest children at the front. As a result, whenever a distraction or obstacle creates distance in the line, the speed of the children at the back allows them to catch up and shrink the distance down again. The entire group of children arrives at the destination simultaneously, despite any blocking events during the hike. (Pacing the process of production to its slowest step was an incendiary proposition to industry when the idea was first proposed by flow theorists, but the statistical results were undeniable. Processes that can be delayed must have the ability to run faster than the rest of the system to ever catch up after a delay. It follows that the slowest steps are the ones where delays have the most long-term impacts, and where delays must be prevented.)

The second improvement is to take the load off the backpacks of the smaller and younger children and hand it to the strongest, such that energy levels remain even across the entire line and the fast children slow down, but never slower than the slowest children. This increases the velocity of the bottlenecked younger children in return for a reduction in the velocity of the stronger ones and allows the entire group to move faster.

An illustration of faces on a flow chart
An improved flow of children walking a trail makes stronger children carry more weight and slow down so that the younger ones can keep their best pace. The finish line is reached sooner by the group.

In Goldratt’s paradigm-defining story, the businessman discovers that one piece of equipment in his factory is the controlling bottleneck of the flow, and must reorganize his production line around keeping that piece always at maximum potential use by reducing the workloads at other steps in the production, against the expectations of accountants, other production managers and factory workers who must sacrifice their own individual productivity goals to improve the productivity of the constraint. The work of flow improvement is first a technical and analytical effort but ultimately becomes a political challenge as the protagonist must change the mindset of the organization to serve the needs of the constraint.

This is an unconventionally holistic view of production processes, and it was so unintuitive to industrial managers that a generation of consultants made good livings teaching and persuading factories to adopt these improvements.

If flow is a general phenomenon relevant both to economic processes and to recreational activities like hiking, could it be also relevant to urbanization, and how would it express itself?

How can we observe urban flow?

In a smoothly flowing urban growth process, we should see the delivery of new floors, new houses, new streets, and new amenities constrained solely by the physical limits of our technology. Improvements in constraining technology would result in the accelerating production of new dwellings and amenities, an increase in the available living space per citizen, and an improvement in amenities, in every city in the world that learns of this technology.

Microeconomics creates the illusion that these problems operate independently of external constraints and can solve themselves. This does not appear to be our intuition about the growth of cities, so what actually happens in the process of adding a floor to a building? A house to a block? A street to a neighborhood? A new neighborhood entirely? How does flow express itself for real-world cities? This is often more a matter of production scale than free markets. Much like a factory grows so large that its flow of production becomes opaque, as cities grow larger, their flow of production also becomes harder to perceive and are subject to deterioration unless carefully attended to.

As any complex system starts from something simple and iterates into complex relationships of many parts, understanding the behavior of urban flow must start from the embryonic state, meaning the smallest possible flow of production. Such a flow is typical of the pre-urban settlement, where no construction, development, or renovation has been taking place. Flow begins once one person or a group of people project to add an expansion to one of the dwellings ― either a new room or a floor to an existing building, even just a garden.

The delivery of this project proceeds through a sequence of steps, from first imagining the project, to acquiring the rights to the property, assembling the materials, organizing the building crew, erecting the structure, cleaning up the site, finishing the interior, etc. Each step in the sequence must wait for the preceding step to complete (with some flexibility in start-stop times) to be able to proceed and may delay the subsequent step if it is blocked. If, for instance, the building crew is otherwise occupied at farming, hunting, or throwing barbecue parties, then the flow is blocked or must wait until the crew becomes available, and accelerating the cleanup of the site is unlikely to deliver the product sooner.

An illustration of faces and buildings on a flow chart
The flow of an embryonic urban area is constrained only by resources. Acquiring and organizing them explains the bulk of the time cycle.

The significance of this law of processes increases as we progress in scale from the embryonic settlement into a recurring system of city building. Once expanding the city with new dwelling space becomes a frequent event, it becomes economically optimal to establish a permanent professional construction crew involved in building these projects. (After enough time has passed the community building crew disbands and focuses on barbecuing parties, slowly losing their skills at construction and the ability to “take weight off” this production step.)

While two projects being initiated concurrently is improbable in a small settlement, a professional crew makes economic sense when a queue of waiting projects has formed, and this professional crew must necessarily complete a project before starting work on another, potentially blocking the next projects in the “pipeline” from starting should any unusual event delay the construction schedule (and something unusual usually happens). Another source of delays would come from governance. In the embryonic city, a building right can be acquired from the community by a simple debate in the town forum. Once these debates start occupying all of the forum’s time, it starts to make sense to adopt a building code that automatically accepts projects that fall within some agreed-upon scopes and limitations, and employ specialist city planners to verify that the codes are respected and grant the approbations. If one project attempts to cheat, the planners are occupied by the project and the others must wait. At one production stage or another, one project has the potential to delay or block the others from progressing, in a pattern typical of the factory described by Goldratt.

An illustration of several faces and buildings on a flow chart
A flow of a scaled urban area, where the permitting process and construction process are always utilized and begin to professionalize. Being utilized implies the possibility of a queue of waiting projects forming if delays arise.

A step that is perpetually blocking others or forming a waiting queue is usually the bottleneck of a flow. Improvements at other steps will be absorbed by bottlenecks, resulting in even longer waiting queues. For example, there is no point in accelerating the acquisition of building materials if the building crew is too busy to start using new materials. More effort at this step will only produce more waiting, leading to the decay of these materials, more waste, and higher costs. (Eliminating this waste, generated by fruitless efforts to improve efficiency elsewhere but at the constraint, is how flow consultants earned their fees. Their mantra was reducing inventories and their holding costs, until arriving at a just-in-time flow.)

Constraints are involved even more extensively in city planning. Industrial theorists see constraints as obstacles to overcome or work around but, in city planning, we have used constraints to stabilize the structure of a city against the impacts of its growth. In a city, more production can result in worsening living conditions. Value is being created in one place but subtracted in another. (For instance, preserving views of the sea has been an objective of building codes in the Mediterranean since the Roman-Byzantine era, shaping many cities with the characteristic morphology of the Mediterranean as a result. https://www.intbau.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/besim-hakim-mediterranean-urban-and-building-codes.pdf)

Because of how successful constraints have been historically at stabilizing urbanization, inventing new constraints is the usual response from citizens, politicians, and urban planners to new forms of instability. Thus, in the past century, we invented zones, detached housing, floor-area ratios, parking minimums, and, at the most enormous scale, the green belt. Urban planners are deliberately blocking and obstructing flows of production in the expectation that these flows will divert themselves to less destabilizing paths, such as a building mass that does not obstruct the view over the sea of a neighboring building. Invisible to the stakeholders of these new constraints is the increased cost in flow imposed by the constraint, but some visualizations can help.

An illustration of faces and buildings on a flow chart with a red circle with a line through it
The flow of urban growth under stabilizing constraints creates interruptions in the delivery of new projects. Some of these can be absorbed or prevented, but only until the natural limits are reached.

The impacts of controlling constraints

Have these new constraints brought us the wanted stability? Have they instead introduced a new kind of instability where flows are dwindling everywhere and production capacity is decaying from lack of demand, while we simultaneously observe skyrocketing price increases in existing dwellings? This is the argument put forth by activists in favor of removing growth constraints, who propose that regional or national-level regulation must prohibit municipal codes from constraining certain forms of flows. (Essentially laws that make other laws unlawful, a bet that local authorities can be forced to accept growth. This practice has already escalated to fines on recalcitrant communities in Europe, with no end to the escalation or visible improvement in flow.)

There is a moral argument to be made both for and against these initiatives, but this is not the intent of this essay. What we explore here is whether an initiative to prohibit constraints would be effective in a complex and opaque system of constraints (human, technological, and political).

In North America, we have assumed that the bottleneck constraint to urban growth was financing. The belief was that anything would become possible if consumers could have more purchasing power to “access” homeownership. Thus, programs to insure mortgages and provide tax incentives on mortgage interest have expanded over the past three generations, along with the expanding scale of urban agglomerations.

The cost of dwellings has risen to match and made access to property ownership as difficult as it was at the beginning of those programs. Thus, we observe constraints absorbing other improvements in the flow of production. Any effort not applied at the constraint will be ineffective.

Let’s consider, once again, our embryonic simple project, but now in the context of a regulation promoting flow. This is what the groups championing accessory dwelling units in single-family detached house areas hope to realize ― more dwellings within a stabilizing pattern. How much additional flow could this deliver? There is a great difference between an accessory dwelling unit being constructed out of economic scarcity, and one constructed out of economic speculation. Cities in history grew slowly and incrementally because the resources activated by the building flow were scarce. Accumulating the capital to grow a building might take a family an entire generation, and the risks of production were covered by the entire community, which also formed the construction crew. The picturesque cities of Europe and North Africa are literally the product of millennia of growth.

In a modern metropolis of millions, where single-family detached housing dominates the landscape, professional construction crews outcompete homeowner-operated dwelling expansion. Taking on a construction project in the midst of the bureaucracy, financial instability and production risk of such a project is daunting for most middle-class property owners, for whom their home is their single largest and most at-risk financial asset. In fact, in countries such as France, entire consulting firms have formed to provide municipally-sponsored coaching and project management to homeowners. (Accessory dwelling units being legal countrywide has not prevented the flow of new projects from dwindling to nothing from larger constraining trends.)

It is tragic that energy is being invested by various activist groups in lifting very specific constraints without considering the whole flow of the urban economy. There is nothing that ensures that a larger constraint will not absorb these improvements and leave us experiencing a perpetually stalled flow. What if the competition for construction crews or the lengthy permitting process or the reluctance of insurance companies to guarantee loans prevents these flows from completing? What if homeowners are too exhausted by their lives to grab the financial incentive to rent out their properties? In order for a real improvement to be achieved in the supply of dwellings, we have to realize an improvement at every step of the delivery process, discovering the constraint along the way.

Only a holistic perspective on the production process can help us improve it, as Goldratt painstakingly elaborated in “The Goal” and throughout his career.

Natural Constraints

Considering flow from the largest of all stability constraints, the green belt or urban growth boundary, helps us tackle the issue holistically.

Urban growth processes, unlike industrial flows, are accretive. Each one increases the scale of the system and brings it one step closer to an inevitable failure. Urban planning was classically invented to handle this problem by means of the ordered, right-angled street grid. The hope was to prevent the congestion breakdown of improvised, cow-path city growth. Despite the solution being known from antiquity, and many Hellenistic and Roman cities of that period having been settled on grids, cities today are nevertheless still burdened by cow-path street plans (not to speak of congestion in general). This must not be a constraint of technology or know-how.

The problem of structural improvisation failing at scale is not unique to urban growth processes, it is also characteristic of software systems, and software engineering has developed a deliberate strategy to resolve it ― the refactoring. Software projects have no natural boundaries within which to organize themselves. While there are projects blessed with carefully laid out designs, technical architectures, and orienting requirements, it is quite common for software systems to be the result of a spontaneous improvisation by software analysts required to meet an urgent and immediate need. The software that results from improvisation is typically poorly legible and vulnerable to failure, but that in itself does not motivate an improvement to the structure of the software. A software program could function perfectly well for years, well beyond the duration of the memory of its human analysts before a change in its production context justifies its modification. This latent disorganization in the software is referred to as technical debt, a problem to be fixed in the future.

What typically happens to real-world systems is that, absent any force opposing it, the scale of the program grows as an accumulation of disorganized improvisations, and each improvisation confuses the impacts of the next one until the moment it becomes completely impossible for the human analysts to determine how the software can be enlarged and still function. When this crisis arrives, humans must face a politically tense reality ― that the only way for the system to meet today’s needs is to destroy and rebuild the parts that are disorganized. The stakeholders of the system must accept a painful teardown of features they had accepted as granted in exchange for the possibility of future improvements, on a schedule that the analysts have great difficulty predicting. The alternative choice is to allow the system to stagnate and the memory of its behavior to decay until some time that it is abandoned or replaced by an upstart design.

An illustration of a maze of arrows
A flow of improvisations generates technical debt in software.
An illustration of a maze of arrows with some line erased
A reverse flow of software development in a refactoring effort. The scale of the system has not increased, but it has gained the potential to increase.

Readers knowledgeable about the history of urban planning will immediately recognize the pattern involved. Cities grow in much the same flow of improvisations. Despite their best intentions at planning cities find themselves confronted with instability from improvisation at scale and suffer years of renovations to return to balance. Perhaps the most dramatic example was the renovation of Paris in the 19th century, and the operator of its refactoring into an industrial-scaled metropolis was Georges-Eugène Haussmann, prefect (mayor-governor) of the entire region encompassing the city.

Haussmann’s methods and plan remain controversial, and I will not take sides. For the purpose of this essay, I will summarize them as the deliberate demolition of dysfunctional neighborhood clusters to be replaced with structures that rearranged the scale of the city and defined new neighborhoods, using grand avenues and boulevards lined with apartment buildings designed uniformly by his municipal architecture staff. Those grand boulevards are today iconic for the city, and essential to its life, but one that happens at a larger scale than what the city could produce with its maze of medieval streets.[1]

Haussmann’s refactoring was not limited to circulation. He tasked the engineer Adolphe Alphand[2] with creating a new kind of amenity – the urban park – where woods had been preserved for military or hunting purposes at the edge of the city. Bois-de-Boulogne at the western edge and Bois-de-Vincennes at the eastern edge were redesigned for the deliberate enjoyment of the natural world and opened to the public. This event was a recognition that the city had grown so large that what was once taken for granted, that a city dweller could take a stroll out of the city and enjoy nature at will, was no longer realistically accessible to citizens of a city at the industrial scale.

The necessity of transforming cities to the scale they have reached is illustrated by the dramatic history of Paris’ renovation, and the necessity of limiting and constraining the growth in scale of cities is legitimized by the pains inflicted in conducting the renovation. Neighborhoods ceased to exist and social relations that had grown over centuries also ceased.

The lesson learned from the 19th century was to never allow cities to grow to the level of imbalance where they could stop functioning entirely. At the very local level, this meant density limits that ensured a single block of the city would not be overwhelmed with traffic beyond its designed potential. At the regional level, this meant limiting the removal of the natural world at a strict frontier by the declaration of a green belt beyond which urbanization is forbidden.

As the Theory of Constraints would show us, these political limits on growth eventually absorb any technical improvement in the flow of new dwellings. (Considering this flow is naturally accretive and pushes into those limits.) The supply of dwellings inevitably stops growing and only the increasing price can balance dwellings and citizens. The tension on price and crowding is yet another crisis brewing. We must accept that these constraints are temporary and find a technical resolution to the scale limit that has been reached.

An illustration of houses and a flow chart on a map
Natural or artificial growth constraints eventually impose an obstacle on the flow, beyond which the supply remains stagnant over time.

Haussmann’s renovation is a warning against the pains of urban imbalance, but I suggest we do not yet appreciate its more significant lesson about how a city is brought back into balance: by creating a flow of large-scale, regional structures. In order for the flow of new dwellings to remain stable, there must be corresponding flows in infrastructures and amenities that match the scale reached by the city. Only when all flows at all scales are in balance is the city itself in balance. New dwellings will not impact traffic conditions around existing dwellings if they are planned around new traffic structures. New neighborhoods will not remove access to the natural world of existing neighborhoods if they are planned around new regional parks and ecological preserves. An end to improvisation in urban growth is the necessary solution to growth limits such as congestion, housing density, and green belts.

Removing bottlenecks with larger scales of flow

The green belt aims to stop exurban planning authorities from increasing the scale of the city with new sprawl. That is only half of a solution. In an ideal scenario, a green belt area would be partially transformed into a completely new city at high density, avoiding the improvised urban sprawl characteristic of edge development. This new high-density city matches the scale of the existing city and refactors it around itself as a center of gravity. The new city would be equipped with mass transit, universities, hospitals, and forested ecosystems before being developed with new dwellings.

The design of regional structures must have the ambition of shifting the center of the city outwards, towards its edge, and this must begin by designing mass transit lines that bring residents of the center city to the services, amenities, and recreational areas at the edge. This is the inverse of the typical planning strategy for regional transportation, which aims to bring residents of the suburban edge to center-city employment and commercial areas, at the political service of both the center-city constituency and the suburban residents, but at the expense of a failure in the whole system. The traditional strategy makes the city center even more central, more congested, and more expensive.

An illustration of arrows all pointing to the right on top of a very simple map
Synchronized flows of large-scale structures and small-scale structures keep unbalanced states moving out into the future.

 

A picture of a map with the colors going from cooler to warmer as they get closer to the center
Space syntax theory has shown that city centers are determined by mathematical topology of their network. A new large-scale edge can shift the center entirely. Was Haussmann the first to understand this concept, and shape the city accordingly?

This brings to our attention the long-tolerated and still growing technical debt of cities, where for many generations capital was invested into exclusively suburban infrastructures such as roadways to the edge and beltways around those roadways. In such cities, there exists no way to bring center-city dwellers to the regional edge except by car, unless capital investments matching all the money ever spent on roads are now invested in railways, bikeways, and walkways. Before any improvement can be experienced, enormous capital investments must be made to catch up to the imbalances, with all the painful politics also experienced in software projects with technical debt ― massive expense, loss of features, and uncertain timelines.

Having understood how flow determines the sequence by which regional problems can and must be solved, we can then design the political structures that allow us to remove the bottlenecks. The Paris region attempted just such a solution to its imbalance of scale in the mid-20th century with five planned new towns of up to a million residents[3], but the plan failed when local communities organized to force the scale back down to suburban edge sprawl. This regional governing experiment is ongoing and evolving, decade-by-decade.

Innovative politics are the ultimate bottleneck of 21st-century city planning[4] ― all the technological solutions are known, but none can be employed to impact dwelling scarcity without political alignment. Metropolitan regions are constrained by amenities and infrastructure. When this is obvious, for instance by the need for an airport to service global travel, the regional powers are quick to align behind an expansion of the urban boundary that resolves the constraints of noise in the urban settlement and land conservation at the regional scale. When this is invisible, such as a deficit of pedestrian mobility and regional mass transit accumulating for many generations, the regional powers are unable to engage in a conversation about how to approach the problem.

Today, political constituencies attempt to combat flow by becoming an absorbing bottleneck in order to prevent their own situation from becoming worse. Improving these local situations comes from investing in physical improvements, such as better transit and mobility, more schools, or simply more pleasant physical spaces. These “infilled” amenities can then be exchanged for concessions on growth limits and political boundaries.

In most North American cities, enormous areas of commercial zones and office parks could be upgraded to dense urban neighborhoods without disturbance to existing residential areas. They first need a large-scale public investment in redesigned amenities and connectivity, which only a higher order of governance can afford, one that has a mandate to fix a problem of regional scale.

Conclusion

Canada is aiming to double its population within decades. This implies at least a doubling of the scale of every city in the country, and greater than a doubling if some cities are bottlenecked and the flow of growth must be absorbed by the others. Our largest cities are already congested by decades of car-centric infrastructure investment. Laying out a green belt around each is the first step to preventing more automobile dependency, then budding (as a plant buds) into that green belt with a new fully planned city is the necessary way to welcome all these new citizens into the promised lifestyle.

The urban growth boundary is no more than a regional government embryo. It must be evolved into a true regional planning system. The green belt must be governed by the city it is a belt for, as an ecosystem preserve and ecological asset of that city. It must be governed at the scale of this city, such that its transformation into more dwellings does not worsen scale constraints.

Whether we succeed at our ambition to be the home for a new generation of immigrants while honoring our climate commitments will depend on our ability to break through our city planning bottlenecks and resolve the instabilities we have accumulated over decades of technical debt. The ambition of this project is tantamount to a national mobilization, especially for a country with one of the world’s heaviest carbon footprints and coldest climates. Despite this, it is a vision worth aspiring to as a model of growth.

 

Mathieu Hélie
Montreal

On The Nature of Cities

[1] A century later, Robert Moses would template his own career path on the same social bargain – displacement of some in return for a modernized metropolis. His choice of technology was unfortunately much more destructive.

[2] After Haussmann’s firing and the fall of the Second Empire, Alphand would be tasked with managing the totality of the remaining urban planning transformations that had been initiated.

[3]http://www.newtowninstitute.org/lectures/lectureGeopolitics11/ExcursionCergy2011/Rubenstein_The_French_New_Towns.pdf

[4] I proposed a new geography of governance in my previous essay. https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2020/01/23/a-fractal-solution-to-regional-complexity-and-governance/

Exploring Questions of Architecture and Identity from “The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria”

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Marwa al-Sabouni’s recent book on her experience as a young architect in Syria provides fascinating insights into the past, as well as current and future life in war-torn Syria. Although I have not been to Syria, the brave questions and reflections al-Sabouni poses resonate with me as they have resonated with others, both as a city planner and a concerned citizen of the Middle East and the world. In this article, I aim to summarise some of the key questions raised and explore how they relate to the wider region and the world. Similar to al-Sabouni, my focus will be not on the details of the political situation but on its overall context and drivers, and their implications for cities and, most importantly, the people within them.

How does the concept of “home” influence national and regional policy and planning? And are the cities we are building to house urban migrants providing shelters, or “homes”?

Is it too late to preserve the old?

In her second chapter, al-Sabouni provides a case study of Old Homs and the transformations it has seen, both before and during the war. She emphasizes the relationship between the built environment and the social fabric of the old city: “…mixed use, mixed origins, and mixed religions” (p.31), a description that holds true for many of the old cities of the Middle East. She describes the architecture of the old city—the courtyard homes, the distinctive building materials, the humble and harmonious proportions and scales even for important religious buildings, such as the Khalid Ibn Al-Walid Mosque and the Church of St. Mary of the Holy Belt (reportedly the oldest church ever built).

Al-Sabouni laments the lack of appreciation for the treasures of the old city and its way of life. Even as a fourth-year architectural student undertaking an urban planning assignment, she writes, she had no appreciation for the old city’s built environment; rather, she saw it as “unimpressive and disorganized” (p.38). Only later did she realize that she simply did not understand it at the time, and that was because no one had taught her any differently. Al-Sabouni and her classmates were asked to develop ideas to “impose a measure of order on the chaos” (p.38); their proposals focused on the use of stereotypical architectural elements (arches, mashrabiya, etc.) that reflected a shallow understanding of the relationships, identities, and intricacies of planning in the old city. What hope do we have of truly preserving the old in our cities, in form and spirit, if the best of our locally trained students are not taught to have a real appreciation of it?

Old Homs. Photo: Flickr / Freedom House

Al-Sabouni describes the sad condition of Old Homs even before the war broke out: crumbling old buildings adjacent to new concrete blocks and tall towers, dysfunctional streets and spaces, a complete lack of harmony and sense of place. This state of chaos was largely due to “upgrades” carried out in the last few decades. Not only did these “upgrades” degrade the physical environment, they caused the city’s communities to lose their sense of belonging and the social fabric that held them together, creating ripe ground for the division and animosity to come during the civil war. During the war, Old Homs was completely destroyed, inadvertently unearthing layers of ancient buildings and archeological treasures.

While it may be too late to rescue Old Homs, there are tens of cities around the region (virtually every city in the Levant, for example) which could benefit socially, culturally, and economically from a better understanding of “the old”, even if only as an essential step towards developing a grounded and functioning “new”. How can we better understand and inform current and future generations of the treasures within these old cities? I am referring here to the built environmental treasures, but also to the culture and harmonious social fabric which they foster. How can we preserve the best of these elements in a way that supports, rather than stifles, the development of each city’s future, including its own way of life and identity?

How can we integrate newcomers?

Looking beyond the old city, al-Sabouni tackles the global issue of migration from a local perspective. Both Homs and Damascus experienced a surge of newcomers in the past few decades leading to urban expansion; however, this impacted each city differently. Al-Sabouni explores why sectarian animosity is a far greater motivation for violence in the former compared to the latter. Her conclusions are relevant to cities around the world facing the challenge of integrating immigrants, be they local or international.

Despite its status as a major city, Homs was previously more of a large village with a closed community. Within that community, people of various religions, ethnicities, and socioeconomic classes lived harmoniously as one. In al-Sabouni’s words, they moved beyond “coexistence” to “one existence”. This was facilitated both by the “generous” built environment whereby the drinking water fountains, street benches, shading trees, and open houses of worship created a strong shared experience and sense of belonging. It was also facilitated by the city’s dominant economy: trade, which provided an opportunity for close social interaction and exchange of goods and ideas. Successfully running a shop in the city’s market required particular people skills and market ethics: ones which the “city’s sons” picked up naturally and the newcomers from farming villages had no chance of instantly grasping.

As such, internal migrants from nearby villages over the past 50 years tended to settle outside the city center, integrating neither into the built environment nor into the main economic cycle. Entire residential suburbs were carelessly built outside Homs for specific socioeconomic groups. This segregated urban existence left no room for a shared experience and instead cultivated an identity of difference. Damascus, conversely, being a capital city already accustomed to a larger diversity of residents and economic activities, did not witness the same level of community segregation.

What would have happened if the residential expansion within Homs had been planned differently, with the promotion of social harmony as a main objective? The influx of newcomers was at a previously unprecedented scale, and thus the “large village” could not organically adapt to them How many of our major cities around the world are in fact large villages, entirely unprepared for the scale and type of migration we face today? In such instances, what interventions can be put in place to strengthen both the social and moral fabric of the city, while providing the necessary infrastructure for the newcomers? Providing housing and job opportunities within the city for newcomers is the lesson learnt from Homs. Moreover, public spaces and civic facilities which encourage community interaction and foster a collective sense of identity can play a role in opening up “large villages”.

Old Homs. Photo: Flickr / Freedom House

How can one create “home”?

Moving into the personal scale, al-Sabouni explores the concept of “home” in modern Syrian culture. She describes home ownership as “the eternal dream of every Syrian before the war” and a “guarantee of existence” (p. 116). It is not an easily attainable dream, with many highly-educated professionals working away their lives in the hope of one day saving enough to buy a home. And it gets worse.—the homes that people are finally able to afford are likely to be small apartments in badly-built concrete towers in remote areas, with no infrastructure or sense of place, let alone sense of home or belonging. It is no wonder, then, that 23 percent of these units are vacant, despite 50 percent of the total population living in slums and informal housing (p.118).

These “social housing” projects are the fruit of a series of five-year government plans intended to meet the ever-increasing housing demand. Yet these plans lack a clear urban vision and are delivered through corrupt partnerships at every level of the supply chain. As an architect herself, al-Sabouni wonders how an architect can begin to influence such a situation. Moreover, how can an architect who has never experienced “home” create one?

The meaning of home has further evolved during the recent conflict to include “temporary” shelters, many of which have turned into permanent homes. Whether previously a school or a collection of unfinished concrete blocks, these shelters—largely unfit even for temporary purposes—have now become “home” for a new generation of Syrians. Al-Sabouni argues that in this long process of losing “home”, Syrians have also lost their accomplishments and identities.

Looking beyond Syria, how does the concept of “home” influence national and regional policy and planning? For instance, in measuring progress, should we be measuring the number of dwellings or homes, and what is the difference? How will the absence of “home” for millions of displaced people around the world influence the way they view themselves and interact with their societies and surroundings? Are the cities we are building to house the next influxes of urban migrants providing shelters (temporary or permanent), or homes? The first step in addressing these questions, in my view, is to move the focus from housing provision to community creation. Isolated and segregated housing projects are simply not fit-for-purpose in a globalized world, regardless of the population they are intended to house. Planning for generous and diverse cities is the way forward.

Huda Shaka
Dubai

On The Nature of Cities

A person crouched down on the ground looking at green vegetables at a market

Exploring the Diverse Contributions of Informality to Transformation in the Largest Cities of Africa

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The informal economy’s contribution to urban housing, as contentious as it is, is substantial, especially in offering rural-to-urban migrants and marginalised groups in the urban built environment the opportunity to experience urban existence.

In the dynamic landscape of Africa, a fascinating interplay unfolds between urban informality and the transformative promise of primate cities. Mark Jefferson defined a primate city in 1939 as the largest in its country, province, state, or region, and disproportionately larger than any others in the urban hierarchy: at least over twice the size and significance of the next largest city. These urban giants, atop the hierarchy, wield immense influence over their nations and control the flow of natural resources, aligning with the aspiration of their political leaders to modernise their cities to make them globally competitive and smart (Azunre et al., 2022).

To achieve the strategic goal of positioning Africa’s primate cities to drive the continent’s socio-economic transformation requires deliberate policies that create synergy and a durable balance between the formal and informal sectors of their national economies (Kleniewski, 2006). These efforts should aim at achieving global competitiveness and smart city aspirations without marginalising and antagonising the informal sector, where workers and economic units engage in a range of activities that formal arrangements, either legally or in practice, insufficiently cover (Azunre et al., 2022). The informal sectors within these bustling metropolises thrive, significantly contributing to shaping the growth, resilience, and character of their national economies.

Notably, cities such as Cairo, Lagos, and Johannesburg, irrespective of their historical challenges with urban distress, stand as unrivalled centres of economic, political, and cultural gravity. They draw people, resources, and aspirations, while their formal structures often coexist with vibrant and resilient informal economies. Nezar AlSayyad (2004) argues that “many features of the formal/informal dichotomy owe their origin to unresolved issues in sociologically historic processes” (Ibid., 25). Other sociological thoughts define informality as “the result of the ongoing process of globalisation and the application of neoliberal capitalist practices that exclude large segments of the population” (Davis, 2006; Shatkin, 2007).

Ananya Roy (2014), in this regard, argues that although “the urban growth of the 21st century is taking place in the developing world, many of the theories of how cities function remain rooted in the developed world”, hence the disconnect between theoretical insights and reality. While urban sociology provides a new epistemology for understanding urban informality, in the contemporary realm, it does so in a way that privileges social, economic, and political issues (Samper, 2014: 1). It does not shed much light on the role of the urban form in the process of creating the informal city, obscuring how these informal realms, from street markets to artisan workshops, harbour entrepreneurial spirit, adaptability, and resourcefulness that support national economies.

Africa, with its rich tapestry of urban experiences, grapples with both challenges and opportunities in advancing its megacity transformation projects. The continent’s urban landscape is defined by the rapid pace of urbanisation and the complexities of its informal economies (Kleniewski & Thomas, 2019). From the bustling alleys of Marrakech to the sprawling townships of Nairobi, informal activities shape the very fabric of these cities. The intricate dance between primate cities and urban informality across the continent gives meaning to the vibrant interactions of street vendors, day-to-day petty traders in satellite markets, artisans, and small-scale entrepreneurs, which contribute to the metamorphosis of these urban giants into global competitors.

A person crouched down on the ground looking at green vegetables at a market
Photo credit: Suleiman Mbatiah, Inter Press Service (IPS) 2022

Domestically, the contributions of the informal economy are huge; it employs those who cannot find jobs in the formal sector, provides a source of income for low- or unskilled workers, and serves as a safety net when unemployment is high (Elgin & Elveren, 2019). The sector increases workers’ skill levels, thereby increasing human capital accumulation in the overall economy. Thus, by providing job opportunities for low-income workers, the informal economy may, to some extent, improve income distribution (ibid.). It also acts as a subsidy for the cost of living of actors in the formal economies of primate cities (Portes & Sassen-Koob, 1987; Kleniewski, 2006: 164), while providing access to cheaper goods and services for the survival of its urban population.

On the global stage, these subsidies from the contributions of the informal economy have a marginal benefit that goes even further through export regimes and trade mechanisms to help multinational corporations lower their costs of doing business and the costs of producing goods and services for consumption in the global north (ibid.). It highlights the diverse significance and resilience of the informal economy domestically and within the international arena.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the data on the contributions of the informal economy to national growth and development is instructive. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), in 2015, the informal economy accounted for 60% of all economic activities in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in 2019, 80% of all employment in the region was in the informal sector (ILO, 2019; Nyamadzawo, 2020).

A person standing behind a table full of food
Photo Credit: https://www.wiego.org

The employment creation potential of the informal economy in Africa is equally broad. In 2018, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) affirmed that the informal sector employs 89.2% of the total labour force in both agriculture and non-agriculture sectors. The non-agriculture sector recorded a significant 76.8%. In central Africa, without agriculture, the sector’s share of employment is 78.8% and 91% with agriculture (ILO, 2018; Azunre et al., 2022). In East Africa, the contributions stood at 76.6% without agriculture and 91.6% with agriculture. The figures for southern and western Africa were 36.1% and 87% without agriculture, respectively, and 40.2% and 92.4% with agriculture included. In the year 2000, the sector contributed gross value additions to the total GDPs of Benin, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Togo, including agriculture, at 71.6%, 55.8%, 51.5%, and 72.5%, respectively (ibid.).

The informal economy’s contribution to urban housing, as contentious as it is, is substantial, especially in offering rural-to-urban migrants and marginalised groups in the urban built environment the opportunity to experience urban existence. The most notable form of informal housing, popularly called “slums,” provides not only accommodation but refuge to millions of urban dwellers, especially rural-to-urban migrants in the global south. Not oblivious to the contested use of the term ‘slum’ as referenced in development and urban discourse (Huchzermeyer, 2011), in this context, it describes manifestations of not only urban poverty but also physical expressions of urban inequality, based on location in cities, and how they are serviced—or not—and how legal they are considered to be (Khan et al., 2023: 88). Nigeria’s share of the urban population accommodated in slums as of 2015, according to United Nations (UN) data, was 50.2%. That of Ethiopia was 73.9%; Uganda’s 53.6%; and Tanzania’s 50.7%. Ghana and Rwanda’s stand at around 37.9% and 53.2%, respectively (UN, 2022, cited in Sultana et al., 2022).

These data speak to the utility of informal settlements in the urban built environment in Africa and partly account for the permanence of slums as a feature of primate cities in the global south, their contribution to animating the city, the sustenance of human life, and the existence of socio-cultural networks in cities. It is also suggestive of the fact that the conversation about the ideational influence of the framing of the problem of slums and informal settlements in cities will continue to uncover assumptions and biases that contribute to urban inequality, marginalization, and socio-spatial othering (Khan et al., 2023: 74) as inherent challenges that confront city development initiatives.

In essence, beyond the web of complex rationalities embedded in urban planning and development in Africa, primate cities on the continent remain dependable agents of sustainable development with the potency of their informal pulse to sustain their resilience, character, traditions, and innovative transformation potentials that reflect multiple aspirations and a defined focus on global and national development discourses.

Ibrahim Wallee
Accra

On The Nature of Cities

 

References:

AlSayyad, N. (2004). Urban informality as a ‘new’way of life. Urban informality: transnational perspectives from the middle east, Latin America, and South Asia, 7-30.

Azunre, G., Amponsah, O., Takyi, S., Mensah, H., & Braimah, I. (2022). Urban informalities in sub-Saharan Africa: A solution for or barrier against sustainable city development. World Development, 152. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105782.

Davis, M. (2006). Planet of Slums. London; New York: Verso.

Elgin, C., & Elveren , A. (2019, April). Informality, Inequality, and Feminization of Labor. Amherst, MA, USA.

Gutiérrez-Romero, R. (2021). Inequality, persistence of the informal economy, and club convergence. World Development, 139, 1-66.

Home, R. (2014). Shaping Cities of the Global South: Legal histories of planning and colonialism. In S. Parnell, & S. Oldfield, The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South (pp. 75-85). New York: Routledge.

Huchzermeyer, M. (2011). Cities with ‘Slums’: From informal settlements eradication to a right to the city in Africa. Cape Town: UCT Press.

Huchzermeyer, M. (2014). Troubling Continuities: Use and utility of the term ‘slum’. In S. Parnell, & S. Oldfield, The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South (pp. 86-97). New York: Routledge.

ILO. (2018). Formalizing Domestic Work. Geneva: International Labour Organization (ILO). Retrieved from http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_protect/—protrav/–travail/documents/publication/wcms_536998.pdf.

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Khan, S., Lintelo, D., & MacGregor, H. (2023). Framing ‘slums’: global policy discourses and urban inequalities. Journal of Environment and Urbanization, 35(1), 74-90. doi:10.1177/09562478221150210

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Exploring the Nature Pyramid

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I have long been a believer in E.O. Wilson’s idea of biophilia; that we are hard-wired from evolution to need and want contact with nature. To have a healthy life, emotionally and physically, requires this contact. The empirical evidence of this is overwhelming: exposure to nature lowers our blood pressure, lowers stress and alters mood in positive ways, enhances cognitive functioning, and in many ways makes us happy. Exposure to nature is one of the key foundations of a meaningful life.

How much exposure to nature and outdoor natural environments is necessary, though, to ensure healthy child development and a healthy adult life? We don’t know for sure but it might be that we need to start examining what is necessary. Are there such things as minimum daily requirements of nature? And what do we make of the different ways we experience nature and the different types of nature that we experience? Is there a good way to begin to think about this>

A Powerful Idea

Here at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA USA), my colleague Tanya Denckla-Cobb has had a marvelous and indeed brilliant idea. Why not employ a metaphor and tool similar to the nutrition pyramid that has for many years been touted by health professionals and nutritionists as a useful guide for the types and quantity of food we need to eat to be healthy. Call it, as Tanya does, the Nature Pyramid, and we have something at once novel and attention-getting, but potentially very useful in helping to shape discussion about biophilic design and planning. Towards the top end of that nutritional pyramid, as we know, are things that, while important to overall nutrition—meat, dairy sugar, salt—are less healthful in larger quantities and should be consumed in the smallest proportions. Moving down the pyramid are elements in the diet—fruits and vegetables—that should be consumed more frequently and in greater quantity, and then finally, grains that provide healthy nutrients and carbohydrates that are needed on a daily basis. The Nature Pyramid would work in a similar way. I have taken a stab at what the nature pyramid might look like, presented in the graphic below. It is a bit different than Tanya’s initial idea, but a version I am convinced will be highly useful as a way to begin to explore and discuss the amounts and types of natural experiences we need to live a healthy life.

A hypothetical depiction of The Nature Pyramid. Graphic by Tim Beatley.

The Nature Pyramid, then, challenges us to think about what the analogous quantities of nature are, and the types of nature exposures and experiences, needed to bring about a healthy life. Exposure to nature, direct personal contact with natural is not an optional thing, but rather is a necessary and important element of a healthy human life. So, like the nutritional pyramid, what specifically is required of us? What amounts of nature, different nature experiences, and exposure to different sorts of nature, together constitute a healthy existence? While we may lack the same degree of scientific certainly or confidence about the mix of requisite nature experiences necessary to ensure a healthy life (or healthy childhood), as exists with respect to dietary and nutrition (and of course there remains much disagreement even about this), the pyramid at least begins to ask the right questions. It starts an essential and important conversation that needs to occur given our modern earthly circumstances.

The Nature Pyramid helps us to begin to think about what will be necessary to counter what journalist Richard Louv calls “nature deficit disorder” in his important book Last Child in the Woods (Algonquin, 2005; and further explored in his more recent book The Nature Principle, Algonquin, 2012). It is helpful for several reasons. First and foremost perhaps is the important message that, like one’s diet, it is possible to act in ways that lead to a healthy mix and exposure to nature. This is subject to agency and behavior and responsible choice in the same way that the food pyramid guides eating. And, like the nutritional pyramid, the Nature Pyramid provides guidance to planners, designers and public decision makers. We have important choices about community design: what we choose or choose not to subsidize, what nature opportunities we want our children and adults to have available to them, and what steps might make a healthier biophilic life more feasible or possible.

Casual interaction with nature—in this case street trees in Madrid—should be experienced in daily doses. Photo by Tim Beatley.

What Should Make Up the Bulk of Our Nature Diet?

At the bottom of the pyramid are forms of nature and outside life that should form the bulk of our daily experiences. Here there are the many ways in which we might daily enjoy and experience nature, both suburban and urban. As adults, a healthy nature diet requires being outside at least part of each day, walking, strolling, sitting, though it need not be in a remote and untouched national park or otherwise more pristine natural environment. Brief experiences and brief episodes of respite and connection are valuable to be sure: watching birds, hearing the outside sounds of life, and feeling the sun or breeze on one’s arms are important natural experiences, though perhaps brief and fleeting. Some of these experiences are visual and we know that even views of nature from office or home windows provides value. For school aged kids spending the day in a school drenched in full spectrum nature daylight is important and we know the evidence is compelling about the emotional and pedagogical value of this. Every day kids should spend some time outside, sometime playing and running outside, in direct contact with nature, weather, and the elements.

A park — this one in Oslo, Norway — makes for a slightly more immersive nature experience. Photo by Tim Beatley.

Moving from the bottom to the top of the pyramid also corresponds to an important temporal dimension. We need and should want to visit larger more remote parks and natural areas, but for most of us the majority of these larger parks will not be within distance of a daily trip. At the top of the pyramid are places and nature experiences that are profoundly important and enriching, yet are more likely to happen less frequently, perhaps only several times a year. They are places of nature where immersion is possible, and where the intensity and duration of the nature experience are likely to be greater. And in between these temporal poles (from daily to yearly) lie many of the nature opportunities and experiences that happen often on weekends or holidays or every few weeks, and perhaps without the degree of regularity that daily neighborhood nature experiences provide.

Areas such as this park connector in Singapore provide more intense experience with nature higher on the pyramid. Photo by Tim Beatley.

Like the food items higher on the food pyramid, the sites of nature highest on the Nature Pyramid might best be thought of occasional treats in our nature diet—good for us in small and measured servings, but actually unhealthy if consumed too often or in too great a quantity. For many urbanites from the industrialized North, large amounts of money and effort are expended visiting remote eco-spots, from Patagonia, to the cloud forests of Costa Rica, to the Himalayas. It seems we relish and celebrate the ecologically remote and exotic. While they are deeply enjoyable nature experiences, to be sure, they come at a high planetary cost, as the energy and carbon footprint associated with jetting to these places is large indeed. No longer are such trips appreciated as unique and special “trips of a lifetime,” but fairly common and increasingly pedestrian jaunts to the affluent citizenry of the North. The Nature Pyramid sends a useful signal that travel to faraway nature may as glutinous and unhealthy as eating at the top of the food pyramid.

Torres del Paine National Park in southern Chile: an experience, at least for people from outside South America, that would be high on the Nature Pyramid. Photo by David Maddox.

Another message is that a diversity of nature experiences will yield a healthy life, in the same way that a diversity of foods and food groups leads to a healthy diet. The middle of the pyramid suggests the need for larger local and regional green spaces that provide more respite and deeper engagement than street trees or green rooftops might. They can be visited less frequently, but perhaps with greater duration and intensity, say on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The Nature Pyramid allows us to imagine lives lived mostly in urban (albeit green urban) environments but with some substantial amount of time spent in more classically natural environments around and outside cities. The pyramid lets us begin to imagine—as we imagine the combinations of food and types of food that go into our daily and weekly diets—the combination of different nature experiences essential to a healthy human life.

Overcoming the Nature-Urban Dichotomy

The Nature Pyramid encourages us to overcome the paralysis of the modern urban-nature split that many of us perceive. For example, the United States is an urban population, for the most part: more than 80% of Americans live in metropolitan areas. Cities and urbanized areas typically provide less direct contact with the kind of pristine nature we often think we need. There are good and important reasons we live in cities, and from the perspective of sustainability and sustainable living, cities are an essential aspect of effectively addressing global environmental problems. Yet, the types of nature found in cities are more fragmented, smaller and generally allow less and shorter kinds of immersion than, say, camping in a remote wilderness area or spending several days in a national park. But as the planet continues to become more urban the challenge of providing the essential minimum dosage of nature becomes an increasingly important challenge everywhere.

Many of the techniques currently used to green urban environments provide value—”nature nutrients” if you will—in the lower rungs of the pyramid. Green design features such as eco-rooftops, bioswales and rain gardens, community gardens, trees and tree-lined streets, and vegetation strips and urban landscaping, provide valuable ecological services (from retaining stormwater, to moderating the urban heat island problem, to sequestering carbon), but they also provide urban residents with exposure to nature, albeit in a human-altered context. The pyramid helps us see how the daily consumption of and exposure to the myriad green features of cities provide, like a balanced food diet, a healthy mix of nature experiences. I know in my own case I notice and enjoy the circling turkey vulture, the ant life and invertebrate antics below foot, the sounds and sights of the not insignificant green strips and edges that I walk by on my way to work and on walks through my neighborhood. I might be happier (and healthier?) if my nature experiences were deeper in time or quality, but these fleeting and fragmentary episodes of a green urban life are valuable and indeed make up the bulk of my daily nature experiences. The Pyramid helps us appreciate the valuable exposure to many smaller green features and nature episodes in the course of a day, and importantly, the need to include these features in urban design.

Portland, Oregon, USA. Photo by Mike Houck.

Thinking About “Servings” and “Nutrients”

There are many unknowns in this conceptual framework, of course, and many open questions. But the Nature Pyramid is valuable in identifying and framing these important questions. One interesting question is how we measure the “servings,” if you will, of nature exposure in this nature diet. What is the unit of measurement that we ought to speak of in terms of a nature experience; say a walk or other time outside that takes twenty minutes or a half an hour, or something qualitatively different, say a momentary sighting of a bird, or tree, or distinctive mushroom. Is a ten-second glance out the window at work onto a verdant courtyard adequate to compose a “serving”? Is the momentary wonder at the interaction of two birds, at the joyous sight of a circling hawk, the scolding chatter of a squirrel as you pass by that corner lot with the large trees a useful serving? And how, over the course of an hour, an afternoon, a day, do these servings add-up to or accumulate to form the nature nutrition we need?

Often our nature “servings” don’t nicely fit into any description of an event or episode, and are more continuous, less discrete: for instance the aural background of natural sounds, the katydids, tree frogs, crickets that compose the night soundscape that many of us find so replenishing and soothing. One’s day is, in fact, made up of unique and complex combinations of these nature experiences (or they should be), some fleeting and momentary, others of longer duration and intensity. The Nature Pyramid helps us, at least calls upon us, to develop some form of metric for understanding this richness and complexity and to understand how (or not) these different experiences add up over the course of a day, week, month or year to a healthy life in close and nurturing contact with the natural world.

And there are other important open questions highlighted by the Nature Pyramid. Is it possible to imagine more intensive, immersive nature experiences even in normal everyday urban environments; urban places and smaller urban environments that may deliver the restorative power of experiences higher on the pyramid? And can we design them in ways that intensify these experiences? A brief visit to a forested urban park, or botanic garden, could in theory permit an immersive experience equal to more distant forms of nature. Again, these are important questions that the framework of the Nature Pyramid helps us to identify and focus on.

The Nature Pyramid encourages us to look around at the actual communities and places where we live to see if they are delivering the nature nutrients and diet we need. Yale professor Stephen Kellert argues that we need to overcome the sense that nature is “out there, somewhere else,” probably a national park, and what we need today more than ever is “everyday nature,” the nature all around us in cities and suburbs. Much is there, of course, if we look, but we must also work to enhance, repair and creatively insert new elements of nature wherever we can, from sidewalks to courtyards, from alleyways to rooftops, from balconies to skygardens. Less frequent perhaps are the deeper and longer episodes—the visit to a regional park, the longer hike along a nature trail or through a regional trail or greenway system beyond one’s immediate neighborhood. These experiences might for some happen daily, but likely don’t. They are more infrequent, tending to occur more on a weekly than daily basis. There are several nature trails my family visits and hikes on weekends, and they form a part of our healthy nature diet.

We can quibble, certainly, about what the appropriate mix of nature experiences is or ought to be, to ensure health and well-being—how much of our day should be about experiencing nature through an outdoor walk on a trail or in a park, versus contemplating a beautiful view of a river or forest from an indoor room or balcony? But the pyramid most importantly helps us to see that for most individuals, living a healthy urban life in touch with nature is a function of the daily, weekly, and monthly (and even less frequent) nature experiences we have. Ensuring that we provide the minimum dosage or serving of nature should be a priority for all planners and designers.

A Rich Research Agenda

While the Nature Pyramid already provides us with important policy and planning insights and guidance, there are clearly many important open questions and a significant (and exciting) research agenda that flows directly from it. Addressing these questions will require the good work of researchers in a number of disciplines, including medicine and public health, psychology, and of course the design disciplines of landscape architecture and city planning, among many others. The research questions are not easy ones, as this essay has shown, but are in fact rather complex. There is a need to focus at once on the natural elements and processes of neighborhood urban nature (trees, birds, gardens), the different ways in which these elements are experienced or enjoyed (listening, seeing, digging in soil), and the many factors that may influence their emotional import and “nutritional value” (are they experienced alone or enjoyed with others, with friends and family, for example). And there is a need to better understand and describe more precisely the outcomes or benefits delivered, i.e. the ways in which exposure to nature makes us happier and healthier.

And there are complex behavioral cascades that will need to be better understood. If we feel happier when we see trees and vegetation in our neighborhoods, for instance, we are more inclined to spend time outside and engaged in walking, strolling, hiking and other physical activity, in turn delivering important physical health benefits. Some studies already confirm this. Equally true, trees and nature create context for socializing, thus in turn delivering important emotional benefits (and we already have considerable evidence about the many health benefits of friendships). So the research task becomes one of better understanding how and in what ways the nature in cities can set in motion other positive health outcomes (and again, which natural elements, experiences, features, or processes, and in which combinations, will trigger these valuable cascades).

One view of Singapore. Photo by Tim Beatley.

Some of this research is already underway through our Biophilic Cities Project, here at the University of Virginia, with funding from the Summit Foundation and the George Mitchell Foundation. Much of our work has focused on learning from emerging biophilic cities around the world, and the tools, techniques and ideas these exemplary cities are employing to deliver nature to their citizens, and to foster connections and contact with the nature. We have partnered with some exemplars of urban nature, including Singapore, Portland, San Francisco, and Oslo, among others. But soon we will also be attempting to tackle the question of the minimum daily dose of the natural world. We are planning to consult leading researchers in medicine, public health, and other fields about the question of minimum levels of nature, through the use of a Delphi process, and to explore whether there might emerge some areas of early consensus about what kinds and amounts of nature urbanites need.

We are also beginning to work with our colleagues in psychology to better understand the comparative emotional and restorative value of different combinations of urban nature. But this work is just a beginning, and we will need many colleagues, in many allied disciplines, to join with us in this important work. While we know much, there is so much more to do, and so much exciting research to at least begin in the next few years. The Nature Pyramid, rather than being an answer or a complete and fully-developed model, is but the beginning point, a provocation to explore and innovate and better understand the important ways in which everyday, neighborhood nature can help deliver the essentials of a happy, healthy and meaningful urban life.

Tim Beatley
Charlottesville, VA
USA

Experiencing nature. Photo by Tim Beatley

Exploring the Park Edge from a Worm’s Eye View

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In the science of natural resource management and planning, we often think about land from a “bird’s-eye” view: parcels on a map that delineate parks, residential properties, and the city streets—for example. Understanding these sites from a “worm’s-eye” view presents a different, more grounded experience of space and place.

The edge is an interstitial space between public and private realms that can draw us toward or away from our parks and natural areas.

In particular, boundary lines clearly delineated on parcel maps may become blurrier when viewed in person. The edge often serves as a porous space of interface and exchange, but it also can be a site of exclusion or division. The ebbs and flows of people moving through these boundaries become visible; the mimicry in forms across land uses and ownership can be observed; and we can detect signs of stewardship, attachment, and expressions of identity. Qualitative methods in social science can open up this grounded experience of place to provide insights about the uses and meanings of urban parkland, which in turn can inform our design and management strategies.

Figure 1. Distinct and clearly marked edges of Canarsie Park in Brooklyn (top) and Spuyten Duyvil Shorefront Park in Brooklyn (bottom) demarcate space and affect pedestrian flows.

Social assessment of park use

Since 2013, an interdisciplinary team of scientists and natural resource managers at the New York City Urban Field Station and the Natural Areas Conservancy have been undertaking a study to investigate the social dimensions and value of public green space in New York City. This study, a Citywide Social Assessment of New York City Parks and Natural Areas, explored approximately 9,000 acres of New York City parks in an effort to better understand the social meaning of these green spaces. Adrian Benepe previously reflected upon the findings of the 2013 social assessment in a May 2015 TNOC post.

With this portion of the study, we sought to understand: what are the spatial patterns of human park use? We paid particular attention to boundary dynamics at the edge interface between the park and the community, developing a different methodology and protocol for treating the edge. We defined the edge as the area directly adjacent to, but outside, the park boundary. The protocol guided qualitative observation through field notes and photo-documentation of the streetscape and properties adjacent to parks. Unlike the rest of the social assessment, research crews did not conduct interviews on the edge, but took detailed notes of all encounters with individuals who voluntarily approached them to speak.

Figure 2. Less clearly marked edges of (above) Brookville Park in Queens and (below) Conference House Park in Staten Island

Porosity: visual and physical access and openness

 Across different parks and within each park, we observed large variations in park edges in terms of their porosity: some edges were very clearly marked, with fences or other physical barriers distinguishing between the park and the surrounding neighborhood (Figure 1) while other edges were less distinct (2). Along one of the fenceless edges of Conference House Park in Staten Island, we also observed signs of a bench in the shade of a tree creating an intentional viewshed from a private lawn to the public park (Figure 2).

Blurred boundaries: overlapping territories

Occasionally, it was difficult to distinguish between the park and the surrounding neighborhood. For example, in Clove Lakes Park in Staten Island, we saw a small informal garden (Figure 3a) on what appeared to be NYC Parks’ property according to our maps, but also happened to be on the other side of a house at the end of the dead end road. Near Conference House Park, we saw a very large deck that appeared to extend to the edge of NYC Parks’ property, if not onto the park itself (Figure 3b). The deck was around 3 to 4 car lengths, so both its size and its location were unusual.

Figure 3. Edges of (a) Clove Lakes Park with a garden on the park edge, (b) Conference House Park with a private deck at the park edge, (c) Clove Lakes Park with an intentional gap in shrubbery on private land, (d) Brookville Park, with vegetable gardens along a chain link fence

Many parks are also directly adjacent to private backyards, and we observed different ways that residents had made the park an extension of their backyards. For example, at Clove Lakes Park, we saw a backyard with a row of shrubs planted to distinguish between private property and NYC Parks property, but there was an intentional mowed and unplanted gap between the backyard and the park, allowing for physical access between the spaces (Figure 3c). At Brookville Park in Queens, we saw informal vegetable and herb gardens along chain-linked fences that separated an owner’s property from the park (Figure 3d). We observed that these were likely maintained by a resident or multiple residents, as there was an open gate in the chain-linked fence, and there was often a pile of gardening supplies near that gate.

In simple terms, these overlapping territories can be seen as positive (engagement, stewardship, ownership, and attachment) or negative (encroachment, privatization of public space). Instances of blurred boundaries between park and home should be further investigated in order to understand how urban residents form attachment and meaning to parks and natural areas. At the same time, what may appear as encroachment or privatization may actually stem from the need to create a safe and viable space, suggesting that these types of activities are a form of stewardship and civic engagement.

Figure 4. Landscaping on the parks side (top) that mirrored the neighborhood side (bottom) near Forest Park

Mimicry: shared sense of ownership and identity

At Forest Park in Queens, we saw signs of landscaping on the park edge that mirrored the neighborhood side directly across the street and was not found in any other part of the park or other parks (Figure 4). It was unclear whether this landscaping was performed by NYC Parks workers or the community; nonetheless, it is notable that time and effort was invested into creating a sign that linked the park to the neighborhood. We see these acts of mimicry as subtle signs of shared ownership and identity through care and design.

Exclusion: boundary marking and contested meanings

While some signs showed integration between the neighborhood and the park, we also observed signs of a desire to erect clear boundaries between the neighborhood and the park. At the edges of Brant Point Wildlife Sanctuary and Dubos Point Wildlife Sanctuary, residents installed fences along with “Private Property: No Trespassing” signs to clearly mark the border between public and private land (Figure 5). Similar signs were also posted near Alley Pond Park in Queens and Wolfe’s Pond Park in Staten Island (Figure 6).

Figure 5. Top to bottom: Edges of Brant Point Wildlife Sanctuary in Queens and Dubos Point Wildlife Sanctuary in Queens demarcate private property

Portions of Brookville/Idlewild Park in Queens are very wet and marshy. Numerous residential street- ends adjacent to the park occasionally flood in heavy rains. We interviewed one neighbor who told us about her work in stewarding this edge of the park. Her family had collected money to remove storm debris after Hurricane Sandy, out of concerns over aesthetics and the potential for mosquitoes to breed, which could be vectors for West Nile virus. She had made requests to her NYC Parks Borough Forester related to nuisance trees. At the same time, she was maintaining a small, manicured garden, directly on the edge of the park, saying, “This is mine, I claim it!” Clearly, these neighbors feel a strong attachment to this edge garden, though they do not venture into the wetlands beyond the edge.

Figure 6. Top to bottom: Edges of Alley Pond Park and Wolfe’s Pond Park demarcate private property

Overall, park edges can convey information about the surrounding neighborhood’s attitudes towards their own private property in relation to the park. While some residents appear to welcome the blurry boundaries between the park and the neighborhood, other residents feel the desire to make those boundaries explicit and marked, through signage and through stewardship practices.

Re-designing the edge: Parks Without Borders

In policy and planning circles, there has been a recent acknowledgement of the importance of the park edge. The City of New York launched a new program in 2015 titled Parks Without Borders to improve the entrances, accessibility, site lines, and edges of New York City parks (NYC Parks 2016). Drawing upon extensive community input and voting, NYC Parks selected eight showcase parks across the five boroughs of New York City to receive a new design treatment of their edges that will create a more seamless public realm between the park, the sidewalk, and the street. This effort is informed by NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver’s background as an urban planner and as a former president of the American Planning Association. Silver presents this initiative as good planning and design put into practice.

Parks Without Borders: Before (top) and after (bottom). Images: Courtesy of NYC Parks

In a dense city of 8.5 million people, the square footage to be gained from a redesign of the park edge and its interface with the public right of way is not an insignificant amount of open space. While the eight showcase parks will receive the most extensive design treatment, NYC Parks is already implementing these design strategies into new capital investments whenever possible.

One underexplored area to investigate and consider is how the edge of natural areas—woods, meadows, and wetlands—can be designed to invite use, exploration, and stewardship while still providing valuable habitat to many species, including rare and sensitive ones. Certainly, different strategies will be required for natural areas abutting recreational parkland, open water, private property, and public streets—but all of these present opportunities for thoughtful trail design, wayfinding, entrance points, public art, and interpretation.

The worm’s eye view is the view of the park user, of the street ethnographer, and of the section drawing in an urban design. It is crucial to bear in mind as we make decisions about how to design, manage, and program our edges and interiors. The edge is an interstitial space between public and private realms that can draw us toward or away from our parks and natural areas.

Lindsay Campbell, Novem Auyeung, Michelle Johnson, Erika Svendsen
New York City

On The Nature of Cities

Novem Auyeung

About the Writer:
Novem Auyeung

Novem Auyeung is a Senior Scientist, Division of Forestry Horticulture & Natural Resources, NYC Parks. Novem guides conservation, research, and monitoring priorities for the Division.

Michelle Johnson

About the Writer:
Michelle Johnson

Michelle Johnson is a research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service at the NYC Urban Field Station.

Erika Svendsen

About the Writer:
Erika Svendsen

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.

Extinction Debt: Is Urban Nature Conservation in Peril?

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We tend to think that what we see is what we get, and also what we’ll get in the future. Nature will always be there—it can just grow back. But it depends on what we want to grow back. In fact, urban ecological communities may be accumulating a large amount of “extinction debt”—a debt that will eventually be paid in species lost from the urban landscape.

Looking behind the scenes of contemporary landscapes reveals cities that are potentially carrying large extinction debts.

Despite the obvious oversimplification of this opening statement, research has unequivocally indicated that there is trouble in paradise. Seemingly healthy and lush fragmented natural areas in urban environments may be slowly or quickly dying, not to mention those cleared in the name of development. However, there is also a poetic justice to our opening salvo: we all see the resource exploitation, unplanned cities, corrupt governments, slums, to name but a few; and as a result, we really are seeing what we get when we don’t responsibly manage the earth.

Incidentally, thinking about the opening statement, one can also look at it this way:

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. When we turn our eyes to the sky, it is in most cases merely to see whether it is likely to rain. In the same field, the farmer will notice the crop, geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportsmen the cover for game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not at all follow that we should see them.”

—Sir John Lubbock from “The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In”

Though we may all live in cities, we see things differently. Nature conservationists despair for the loss of green space and native species together with the increase in exotic species; developers and economist see urban expansion opportunities in open land; and some people merely appreciate any green, whilst others see firewood, medicinal plants, or saleable natural resources they can use to survive.

Moreover, in the words of Don Miguel Ruiz, “We only see what we want to see; we only hear what we want to hear. Our belief system is just like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.” This statement is poignantly reflected by politicians and activists of our day. Putting all these in context with urban environments, we realize that things that are obvious to some people will not be perceived as obvious by others.

This brings us to a paradox for contemporary urban nature conservation: should we be fighting for the preservation of any and all green as valuable green infrastructure, or should we be prioritizing native species in natural remnants and restoration of native plant communities, which is often costly and disapproved of by local residents?

If we opt to prioritize native species conservation, our research (du Toit et al 2016) and that of others (Hahs et al 2009; Dullinger et al 2013), has shown that traditional management practices that do not incorporate potential legacy effects—“the impacts that previous conditions have on current processes or properties” (Monger et al 2015)—is not enough. In other words, what we see now is NOT what we will always have.

McDonnell and Hahs stated that in “creating biodiversity-friendly cities”, two ideologies are in play; namely, managing for the conservation of indigenous species and managing to benefit people. The authors feel both should be considered and maintained in balance to ensure that people and biodiversity benefit. This balance can be delicate, as illustrated by a comment by Donovan Gillman on Divya Gopal’s post, “The Myth of Alien Species: an Alternate Perspective on Wild”. Gillman wrote that, in relation to the removal of exotic pine forests in Cape Town, “the position that many of us have is that it is preferable to have the large exotic trees and shrubs in the urban environment for their social, aesthetic and habitat benefits for urban birds and other wildlife, than to revert to the natural vegetation of the place…that cannot be recreated in a viable dimension within the fragmented urban fabric…”

Chris Ives asked an important and related question: “how can we navigate the differences between the perceived conservation importance of [threatened] species compared to the often-indifferent perspective of the general public and stakeholders?” He emphasized that the global importance of species protection should be made relevant at the local level and that citizens should be actively engaged in conservation actions. Moreover, in pondering the reason why we should protect indigenous species in our cities, he said that we should explore “the ethical principles that ought to govern cities”, which provide parameters in response to the question, “what kind of actions are consistent with a respectful relationship towards nature?”

Cities potentially carry large “extinction debts” (Hahs et al 2009; Dullinger et al 2013; du Toit et al 2016; see also McDonnell and Hahs). The premise behind the studies is that plants and animals exhibit time lags (delayed reactions) in their response to disturbances. If disturbances such as fragmentation are severe enough, species face local extinction—but only after an interval of time, thus producing an extinction debt.

In our research in Potchefstroom, South Africa, we studied urban remnant natural grassland dynamics. We returned to sites in 2012 that were surveyed in 1995-1996 in woody and open grassland communities (Fig 1). The woody communities are found on small hills and ridges in the area and are dominated by trees and shrubs. We correlated the vegetation patterns of the two sampling periods with six landscape measures to test for time lags and to find out which of the measures are relevant in explaining the observed vegetation patterns. The landscape measures (Table 1) were calculated for several periods digitized from aerial photographs and satellite images of the area.

Fig. 1 Samples of open grassland sites (top row) and woody communities (bottom row) in the study area. Photos: Marié du Toit

We found that open grassland and woody grassland communities reacted differently to anthropogenic disturbances. The indigenous species richness of the woody communities showed average time lags of 21 years (i.e. the observed patterns correlated best to landscape measures representing landscapes of 21 years earlier), whereas the open grassland indigenous species patterns were best predicted by contemporary landscapes (interpreted as 1 year or no time lags between the disturbance event and potential community changes). Additionally, we tested for “disturbance species’” richness patterns to see if they showed different responses. The species we termed “disturbance species” are those that flourish in conditions of trampling and overgrazing, bush encroachers, pioneer species, weeds, and invaders identified from the literature of the area. The disturbance species had consistently longer time lags than the indigenous species in each of the habitats; therefore, they could act as warning signs to indicate that potentially significant changes have already occurred. Moreover, despite major intensification of urbanization between the sampling periods, the time lags of all the vegetation patterns remained relatively constant. Therefore, it seems that species do not react faster when disturbances intensify.

Regarding the measures, we found that the statistical significance and, for one measure, the relationships (positive or negative), changed between the different periods. For instance, in 1995, the “percentage natural areas” metric was important in explaining the variance in the generalized linear model (or GLM), but in the 2012 model, it was not (Table 1). This has thought provoking implications for studies which only test the relevance of measures for a single period. For instance, in a study “percentage natural area” might not have been important at the time the study was conducted, but might be important again if the study was repeated at a later stage as indicated in our study. Therefore, this must also be considered when choosing measures for a new study based on the findings of others. Moreover, in our study, we also found that relationships between measures and species richness that seemed intuitively “wrong” could be explained by site-specific factors, which emphasizes the importance of explicitly considering such factors in interpreting data.

Our analysis of the vegetation composition indicated that the species with the highest declines were indigenous herbaceous species (Fig 2). Therefore, these species are most at risk. The 24 species lost between the two sampling periods and not recorded again or in any other recent study were all rare species in 1995, indicating potential local extinction. Moreover, the proportion of species recorded that were “rare”, meaning they occurred in only one site and/or habitat, increased from 20 percent in 1995 to 24 percent in open grasslands and 22 percent in woody grasslands in 2012, which can be regarded as another extinction debt signature (Hanski and Ovaskainen 2002).

Fig. 2 Graphs indicating the total species richness (a) and percentage contribution of species to the composition of open and woody grasslands (b) in 1995 and 2012.

Why are these results important? Helm et al 2006 remind us that “conservation agencies must take the extinction debt seriously in their planning”. We cannot simply preserve remnant vegetation patches; some sites may already require active management approaches such as habitat restoration or facilitation of seed dispersal (Helm et al 2006; Gustavsson et al 2007). McDonnell and Hahs also suggest specific urban management actions to preserve native species. Site-specific drivers of vegetation change that are influenced by the history of the landscape need to be identified and managed (Pimm et al 2006, Hahs et al 2009) to avoid mitigations that target the wrong drivers (Dullinger et al 2013). Pressures on urban environments will only be intensified by climate change realities, so “the key message is that urgency to take action now is even greater than one might expect based on even the most up-to-date red data books” (Helm et al 2006).

Local surveys are essential and should be performed repeatedly to monitor vegetation change. Quantification of time lags in the response of vegetation to disturbances will allow researchers to determine the period between cause and effect—this knowledge will allow the opportunity to save extant species (Helm et al 2006, Hahs et al 2009). Moreover, this implies that current conservation efforts need to be intensified (Dullinger et al 2013) and potentially shift towards restoration actions. Conservationists must make sure that they account not only for new drivers of population declines but also for historic ones (Dullinger et al 2013).

However, much of our perceptions of nature are linked to the “extinction of experience” as eloquently discussed by Marianne Krasny. Have we forgotten what nature “ought to look like” and are our new “baselines” enough? In our efforts to conserve nature, should we opt to save “one that celebrates human’s caring for nature and communities” or, in an effort to preserve the remnants of what is still left of the “the other half that we need to keep alive”, ensure that the experiences of future generations can still be enriched by preserved pockets of remnant nature? Eric Sanderson takes an optimistic view on the role of people in the future preservation of nature by also seeing them as assets to the conservation cause. He believes that to engender change we need to put our efforts into something that can really make a difference—people. He argues that we can’t appeal to nature itself, but we can convince people to act in the best interests of nature and us all:

“I became an urban nature conservationist because I eventually realized that it is self-defeating for conservation to say that only nature far away and remote from view is valuable…When we say that only wild places matter, we limit our audience to the people that already believe…For conservation to sweep society…we have to say that nature everywhere matters and that every action in the human enterprise matters to nature.”

Sanderson’s point parallels Ted Trysna’s case for urban protected areas, in which he argues that “conservation depends on support from urban voters, urban donors, and urban communicators. In a rapidly urbanizing world, people tend to have less and less contact with nature. People will value nature only if they care about nature where they live.” After all, as illustrated by Glenn Stewart in New Zealand, “urban areas are as intrinsically interesting and diverse and worthy of conservation as the mountainous National Parks” and, as Jon Sullivan says, “our challenge now is to find ways to celebrate and care for, and use, the original biodiversity present in our cities (and farmland) rather than shunt it to the corners.”

Is urban nature conservation in peril? Looking behind the scenes of contemporary landscapes reveals cities that are potentially carrying large extinction debts, such that “future species loss may be expected even if the present landscape is maintained” (Lindborg and Eriksson 2004). However, really “seeing” contemporary landscapes also reveals the people that live in them and their opinions and perceptions. We, as citizens, will need to decide which future to strive for and which type of green space will demand our time, money, and admiration.

Marié du Toit and Sarel Cilliers
Potchefstroom, South Africa

On The Nature of Cities

Sarel Cilliers

About the Writer:
Sarel Cilliers

Sarel Cilliers is professor in Plant Ecology at the North-West University. His research focuses mainly on small urban and rural settlements.

Extinction of Experience: Does it Matter?

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Right after I graduated from Cornell, I took off for the North Cascades wilderness. First as a student and later an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School, I spent summers in Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, ice climbing out of crevasses, backpacking through Pacific Northwest old growth forests, and scaling ancient volcanoes. For me, this was true wilderness.

The author rappelling into a crevasse in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area. Courtesy of Marianne Krasny.
The author rappelling into a crevasse in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area. Courtesy of Marianne Krasny.

In my early 30s, I moved back to Ithaca, NY. Initially, I did not appreciate the rural upstate NY landscape—compared to the North Cascades, the wild spaces were tame and pockmarked with ugly houses. Years later, I have come to find solace in nearby nature. This time of year, I gaze up at ice-veiled waterfalls and ski along frozen creeks. Still, compared to the North Cascades, these are but slivers of nature among neighborhoods. At night, they are bathed in city light. Have I become victim to “extinction of experience?”

The lepidopterist Robert Pyle first introduced the term “extinction of experience” in 1975, writing:

“As cities and metastasizing suburbs forsake their natural diversity, and their citizens grow more removed from personal contact with nature, awareness and appreciation retreat. This breeds apathy toward environmental concerns and, inevitably, further degradation of the common habitat….So it goes, on and on, the extinction of experience sucking the life from the land, the intimacy from our connections… people who don’t know don’t care. What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?”

Ecopsychologist Peter Kahn describes a similar phenomenon, which he calls “environmental generational amnesia.” As each generation’s experience of “wildness” is diminished—as areas of intact wilderness are carved into smaller patches and eventually yards, and as children no longer gaze at stars in the night sky—humanity’s wildness “baseline” shifts. Although Kahn recognizes vacant lots as places to experience “wildness” in cities, he, similar to Tim Beatley in describing the nature pyramid, argues:

“Domestic, everyday, local nature… is … only half of what we need to flourish, as individuals and as a species. The other half that we need to keep alive—in our experiences and in our language—is the importance of wildness, of places that are large in scope, self-organizing, and unbounded, and autonomous and self-regulating systems, and of interactions that can be grand and awe inspiring and also frightening and difficult.”

For many living in cities, Kahn’s wildness—“the other half that we need to keep alive”—is unattainable. Are city dwellers simply out of luck—not able to flourish?

For me, the opportunity to traverse glaciers, summit peaks, and hear the trilling of the Swainson’s thrush reverberate amongst towering old-growth, was a peak experience—it enabled me to flourish. But 20 years after I left the Pacific Northwest to come back east, I had another experience that has also enabled me to flourish—this time in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Gallery 5 Refugee community garden Sacramento Whitmore
A Hmong community gardener brings her planting and cultural traditions to a city in the US. Photo: Mark Whitmore

Like my North Cascades experience, my Lower East Side experience was a nature experience—but it was embedded in human culture. It was my first visit to a community garden. There I saw older Bangladeshi immigrants who had transplanted their intercropping traditions—amaranth, pigeon peas, flowering coriander and marigolds—to raised beds in New York City. For me, the cultural aspects of this experience were more powerful than—yet still connected to—nature. The immigrants were creating a sense of community through connecting to nature—creating civic ecology practices to support people and nature. A community garden is not Tim Beatley’s idea of recreating unplanned ecological spaces in cities. Rather, community gardens represent the emergence of unplanned cultural spaces that connect to nature—in ways that enable the spirit to flourish.

Here is my dilemma. I know that even if my children were to go on a mountaineering expedition in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, their experience of wildness would be different than mine. They would experience human impacts—glaciers retreating, species invading—of which I was unaware. Although some may claim that my children’s experience would simply be different, to me, it would be diminished. But does this matter?

If our concern with extinction of experience is related to health, as Beatley’s nature pyramid suggests, then I am less worried. I believe that urban places, perhaps especially the chaotic, self-organized places represented by community gardens and civic ecology practices more broadly, create new experiences that enable us to flourish.

But if our concern, like Pyle’s, is about what we will want to conserve, then we may need to embrace an urban reality. People in the future may work passionately to save a different kind of nature in cities—one that celebrates human’s caring for nature and communities. And whose acts of caring offer their own richness of experience.

Marianne Krasny
Ithaca

On The Nature of Cities

Family Tree

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I kneeled in the moisture of life giving birth to more life, still insecure of my newly won freedom to roam after Covid lockdown. I thought of a friend’s phrase from years ago: “The soul is a plant”. Yes, and maybe the plant is a soul, too.
Linden

In early summer, after the crest of the first wave of the pandemics had broken and kids resumed to go to school and street cafés had opened again, I spent days alone writing on the balcony of a flat in a somewhat sketchy Berlin neighbourhood. Down in the street, two storeys below, groups of young guys drove their BMWs on extra broad tires in search for a place to park, sending bass heavy music pulsing through the stone valley between the old city blocks. Elderly women chatted underneath, ambulances howled past on the main street, and the occasional drunk yelled out in front of the house.

This essay is a companion to the virtual art show by Emilio Fantin. See the show here.
I was sitting suspended amid the noises and the lifelines they connected to one another. And at the same time I was galaxies away, englobed by the green light of the linden tree which grows in front of the house. The stem rises up directly opposite of the balcony, so that in summer it becomes a tree house sunk into the moist twilight of the canopy. Writing, I only needed to stretch out my hands in order to touch the fresh twigs, the leaves and the fine fur on their surface. And the blossoms.

Join Emilio Fantin, Andreas Weber, and Martine Murray for a webinar conversation on  3 September.
Oh yes, it was the linden blossoms which made my home for these days of writing in the city summer. Tens of thousands of tiny yellow-greenish petals had unfolded and opened the gates of scent, of that sweet honey-scent which has become my instinctive idea of summer in the city. Linden trees are a rare paradox, as they are strong as an oak, and sweet as a rose. Botanically, they belong into the family of the mallows.

The tall tree which at the same time is a flower provides a glimpse into the depths of the ongoing creation of the world. We see—we smell—that in these depths tenderness and power, endurance, and fragility are not separated. This understanding is provided by the linden’s scent. I can’t help but understand when I am in the linden’s proximity, although I might never be able to consciously express the full scope of this understanding. I am sucked into it; I am called to partake in it; I am fed by it.

So, I passed the early summer writing, and being part of the tree. I was part of what it breathed out, sweet scent, and provided what it breathed in, carbon dioxide from my lungs, and, ultimately, my flesh. I was part of the bees’ hum, and the bugs’ flicker, and the wind’s dance in the branches, which, when I allowed my gaze to lose itself among the ten thousand gazes of the open blossoms, unveiled itself as a huge body breathing, and breathing myself with it.

Trees and their irresistible ways of expressing their lives and what is important to them are not only providing evidence that the plant kingdom is full of feeling like ours. They are not only supporting the intuition that the world in its inner core is sensible and experiencing: A huge consciousness-in-the-flesh. Trees are the proof that the world’s consciousness is accessible to us. They are the embodiment of us accessing it all the time, of us being in the midst of it, through every breath we take, which in truth is an act of sharing our being with the plants, giving them the substance of our bodies (the CO2 we exhale) and drawing in theirs (the oxygen they provide).

It is the most simple and most mystical process imaginable, because it describes how the total of the world, split up into individuals who yearn for life, meets and becomes whole again through the exchange of bodies, through the exchange of breath – being knotted together in an inseparable something which the cultural ecologist David Abram has referred to as the “Commonwealth of Breath”. The breath we create all together, we breathe out together, which nourishes us because of our togetherness.

Sitting in the dim globe of the linden tree, breathing its breath and realizing that its breath is fragrance, and becoming fragrance myself, I understood that there is no “nature” there, with trees and bugs and snails and water and mountains, and humans here, but that there is only mutual transformation in the desire to exist.

Trees are our mirror neurons by which we can probe into the vast world of this mutuality, which ultimately is the labyrinth of our own body, the root of our own psyche wandering through the soil of the world in the same way the root hairs of the linden tree incessantly move about, in the dark soil beneath the Berlin city street, under the growl of broad tires, sheltered from the sun and the nightly light of the stars, sending water and food up to the innumerable tiny blossoms gazing into space, breathing out the perfume of life.

Aspen. Photo: Andreas Weber.

Aspen

When the aspen’s life ends, another one is just beginning. It is a life not of whispering leaves in a southern summer breeze, but rather as massive white bones blocking the course of the mountain stream. When you scramble down into the river valley, you don’t immediately recognize the uprooted trees among the round stones bleached by the sun. The white waters of winter have peeled away the bark and washed the timber clean, so that it shines like a bone, a huge remnant of lived life, white as the sun at noon. The logs are twisted and bent, flashes of negative images of their eager growth along the stony banks of the Appenine stream.

The splintered trees in the river bed echo the wind that once rushed through their twigs and bent their stems. Now they don’t stand anymore. They lie down. The river water splashes over them, after a strong rain has filled the empty gravel bed with restless power. The logs are pulled away by the water, crash into boulders, are pushed on, then become stuck again, heaping up mounds of stones along their white bones. The pebbles rattle and rush, slash and gush. They make the air brim with the echo of fluttering leaves.

Among the stones of the river bed, the aspens answer the sun’s gift of power with their contorted bodies reaching towards the sky. They have become toys of the water. When the waves rip away parts of the dry earth of the shores, the huge trees are pulled down and away. They become the water’s instruments, its willing helpers. As long as they are rooted in the soil, they serve the sun, are a condensed form of its energy and feed it to the other beings. Now the stems have become crystallized water. They trace its forces, become their dancing partners, become crest of the wave and thundering liquid. The wood is reborn as bleached wave and rounded pebble. First it was light, then it becomes liquid, until it finds its last shape as mineral.

The splintered, withered trunks lie still in the hot riverbed, crackling in the sun, half buried by stones. Every aspen tree follows the trajectory of the universe being born from light and then condensing into the patient sleep of matter. It starts as radiation, builds itself up as organism, and ends as body which glistens in the sun, which itself becomes a source of light. “I am river from river”, says the water in a poem by the Italian poet Mario Luzi. “I am light from light”, says the bleached wood on its course. “I am self from self”, say I.

Alder. Photo: Alessandra Weber

Alder

There is a tiny hollow on the western slope of the Italian Appenine mountains I often return to. It is just a small depression in the hills between steep walls formed from boulders, moss and stones. On its floor a silent creek runs over pebbles and rocks. Every twenty feet or so there is a gentle cascade, a big block stopping the straight flow of the brook, broadening it into a little pond. On its bottom the water is clear, freckled by the sun which shines through the leaves overhead and throws bright spots on the sandy ground. It lightens up the occasional tadpole and glistens in the quick movements of water skeeters. These insects glide over the current, unmoved by the water’s force and by my playful attempts to catch them.

The boulders at the sides of the brook are held in place by alder trees. The alder fruits from last year lie at the bottom of the water—little dark cylinders with deep, regular clefts. The skeeters cast fleeting shadows over them, when they pass without noise overhead. The little hollow is silent, sheltered against the rumour of the outside world, remote even from the benign chatter of the Italian summer.

I hear the low gurgle of the water on the stones and the slight rustling of the alder leaves. They expand their waxy surfaces above the creek and protect it from the sun. The leaves grow from slender stems, flecked by spots of white and grey lichens, a sign of the clean air in these hills, of time causing no pain.

Whenever I can, I return to this quiet place, this magical well of silence springing forth among the boulders and the alders. There is an old folktale it reminds me of, a tale about a spring in the woods with alders around it. I remember that the hero of this tale listened to their whisper and learned something important.

I feel called by this little hollow, sheltered by the alders. Their leaves mutter something to me my mind does not decipher, but my body still understands, by the same magic as the hero in the folk tale understands the nonhuman creatures. I feel drawn to this place, and I have started to think that this pull is its love for me. I am welcomed by it. It is calling me.

Deep down I know that my need to return to this place is my own way of understanding the trees. It is my manner of heeding their call to be a conscious part of the huge exchange of bodies and breath which creates what our scientifically informed minds have come to call the “biosphere”.

The alders’ call pulls me with a force which we have learned to view as the experience of “beauty”. But beauty is not a viewpoint, it is a power. I do not look at the alders, they look at me. I do not listen to them, but am addressed by their whisper. The encounter with an “aesthetic object” (or the “creation of it” through our culturally informed, language-based mind)—in truth is the experience to be welcomed into the family of life.

I have no real language for this, and indeed not even an experiential concept. Our culture doesn’t. I only know that the alders draw me towards them, and that the world feels right in their dim light, under the speckles their whispering leaves cast on the movements of the clear, nourishing water. The alders whisper to me, as they whispered in the folktale with the magical spring.

Their message now is as simple as it was in the tale. It says: “You have the power. You have the life. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be stingy. You don’t need to. You are provided all you need. You’re welcomed. You are here. You are.”

Olive. Photo: Vanni Savazzi

Olive

When I went to Italy this year to spend my summer in the coastal Appenine mountains, my mother-in-law refused to meet us at close distance. She was still shocked by the tens of thousands of deaths in the Lombardy region where she and her husband live. When we arrived at her place, halfway to the mountains, she had prepared the flat in the other house for us. It was the place her father had built in the 1960s and where he had lived all his life. Now we used it when we paused on our way into the mountains with their wild streams and growling pebbles and stranded logs. Normally there was a big family dinner every time we arrived. This time it was only us, me and my wife, in the other house.

My mother-in-law’s father had worked the garden and provided the family with food all his life: tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, aubergines, beans, potatoes, onions, carrots. There was a sense of bounty in the house which did not go away with his death. After we had arrived this evening we sat alone in the grandpa’s kitchen. The table was set with wine and fruit, with parmesan and salami, fish and cake. And the refrigerator held more. When we had just started eating, the old interphone to the inlaws’ adjacent house rang. “Is there really enough food for you?” my mother-in-law anxiously asked.

When her father had died, she planted an olive tree. She did not grow vegetables anymore. So, the garden was empty until they sat the olive tree in its middle. I went to see it the next morning, in the rose-coloured early light, in the soft air of the summer of the Italian plain. The first cicadas had already started to shrill. The pale underside of the olive leaves glittered slowly in a faint breeze. I touched them. Their surface, leathery, elastic, strong, seemed to me like muscular tissue, well trained to relentlessly work in the heat, ready to harvest sunlight, to make a generous home from the gift of the sun.

Touching the leaves, I felt a sort of consolation, the promise of always being part of a generous family. The bark on the stem, still youthfully smooth, started to become coarse, and mature, and timeless. I looked south and could see the Appenines as a blue veil over the horizon, behind the straight rows of poplars, softly swaying on the neighbour’s land. The olive tree just stood there, its muscular leaves harvesting light, its swelling fruits concentrating the sun into golden liquid, the stem promising that rather time would stand still than generosity end.

Almond. Photo: Andreas Weber

Almond

The sun is setting above the western slope of the hill. Its last rays infuse the landscape with warmth, add orange and gold to the predominantly yellow and red colors of the dry August evening. The long grass is mostly thin and yellow. The tired blades are interspersed with white umbrellas, the blossoms of wild carrots on slender stalks. No peasant has made hay here for the last decade.

The hill is becoming a prairie again. In another ten years, it will be a young forest. The thick yellow grass covers the edges of the old terraces and blurs their contours. This slope has been shaped by generations of peasants. They have leveled the terrain, sorted out the stones and heaped them up in order to strengthen the walls that hold the terraces.

The peasants also planted the fruit trees. A handful of them stand still in the midday heat. They are not much taller than ten feet, skinny and old, thirsty, with many yellow leaves among the green ones. Dead twigs form nest-like bundles in the canopy. I count two plum-trees, three apricots, and an almond tree. On each of them, only a few fruits are dangling in the heat, echoing the sun’s late fire with yellow, orange and red hues.

The almond carries but one fruit. The green layer around it has already dried and given way to the hard shell with its lines and crevasses. When I touch the almond fruit slightly, it falls into my hand. I weigh it on my palm, put my nose to it and sniff. The fruit smells slightly bitter and sweet, although the edible kernel is still protected by the tight case.

I watch the pattern on the shell. I sink my gaze into it, into the little oval-shaped cosmos with the seed of life inside, a little universe in itself. I watch the lines on the shell-like frozen trajectories of long lost stars. I think: The lines in the almond shell are traces the developing fruit has left in matter. The lights of the celestial bodies are traces the developing universe has carved into space.

I think: We can witness the Big Bang everywhere. Indeed, we can understand that everything we encounter actually is the Big Bang, which is still diversifying into innumerable lifelines and encounters. It explodes through the fine traces which the long grass blades at the foot of the Almond tree leave on the bare skin of my legs as I pass. It unfolds with the flickering routes of the fireflies when the evening settles over barren trees on the terraces of these hills. It expands with raindrops rolling through the dust, leaving fragile trails. It unfolds in the minute tubing within the almond leaves, desperately sucking up water from the dry ground. It is there in the microscopic tunnels the root hairs are digging through the gravelly soil in search for liquid.

I think: The world is born in every moment. What we perceive of it are the traces of this birth, traces of force meeting force and igniting stars on its way, of desire meeting desire and letting flesh growing forth. We look at a cracked rock in the riverbed, the black lines on its neat halves flying through the white flesh of its inside, and we realize that the birth inside of it has been happening for billions of years. We inhale the air around us and within an eyelid’s flutter are we amidst the Big Bang. We are birthing being all the time. This is what is going on here, this is what we are about.

The almond looked at me, an eye full of knowledge that I had always known. The setting sun above the horizon was about to melt into the hilltop. From this act of fusion it would bring back a fresh new day.

Oak. Photo: Andreas Weber

Oak

It was a bright and dry early autumn evening, and I decided that I would set out into the forest and offer the little oak some water. It had been a long and exceedingly dry summer, and the forest floor was burned yellow. All flowers and most of the undergrowth had withered away, leaving only discolored straw  under the pines, oaks, lindens, and maples. Also, some of the younger trees had given up the struggle. They had turned pale overnight, like somebody suddenly loosening the grip of his hand keeping him above an abyss.

The little oak had survived because I had constantly watered it. I had visited it nearly every evening. I had come to celebrate these short journeys into the forests as meditative time-outs, as attempts to become somebody who was not only taking from the forest (the experience of beauty, the experience of being welcomed), but who tried to give something back.

I had dug a little pit around the thumb-thick stem of the oak where I poured the water I brought in bottles and canisters. Sometimes I carried more than ten gallons into the forest and spend an hour in the company of the tree baby, waiting until the water had sunk into the dry and dusty ground sparsely covered with faded St. John’s Wort, and then pouring more, pouring life into the oak.

Lost Oak. Photo: Andreas Weber

This afternoon, when I arrived on the clearing where we had planted the sapling, at first I could not find it. My wife had given it to me for my birthday shortly after we met, and it had sat a while on her balcony, until we planted it into the forest one rainy day in March, illegally adding our little oak to the other oak trees, carrying owls to Athens. It had grown astonishingly for two years. I remember the happy disbelief when the little oak pushed out its first leaves that spring two years ago.

The year after planting our tree baby into the forest soil, in the high summer of last year, we had celebrated our wedding on the clearing, with a few chosen friends, and bound ourselves to one another, and to the earth. I had thrown a water canister on the trolley a friend pulled through the forest to the ceremony site, heaped with crushed ice and champagne. We had closed the ritual by watering the little oak.

Now it seemed to be gone. Nothing of its about five foot-high foliage, grey-green and leathery, was to be seen. I slowly realized that it had been broken at the stem, ten inches above the soil. Only a stub, obliquely fractured, rose forth from the earth, helplessly pointing to the sky. I blinked and hoped the image would fade and the living tree would appear again. I sat down with a weak feeling. Then I began to pour my gallon of water around the stub. I had no idea who had broken it, or what, and why.

Oaks are very tough trees which can thrive with little water, weather storms, survive lighting and moulds, and grow really old. But they are not good at pushing out a mass of new green after being cut. They are not as regenerative as linden trees, or olives, or alders, or aspens. They break, and then aristocratically die.

The little oak did not stir for the rest of the year. Then autumn came, and rain, and winter, and more rains, and cold temperatures. The oak did not move. On a wet day in March, just before lockdown struck, I noticed that the colour of the stem had changed. It had taken on a distinctively green hue, as if under the thin bark the tree prepared to act.

Goethe was the first to observe, in his “Metamorphosis of the Plant”, that all plant parts are functionally equal, that the blossom is a transformation of the stem, or rather of the stems potential to split and morph into leaves. So it seemed to be here. A tree, a young one at least, was able to behave as one giant leaf. I left the clearing in the wet and barren forest with my heart pounding.

And then corona came, and we all stayed indoors as much as we could, and I didn’t travel to our secret forest spot for weeks. I only went back in May. Two transparent leaves had unfolded, like light green bat wings, from a spot that had broken open in the stem. I realized that more of these spots had started to swell. The bark, which protected the tree as a wall and closed it onto itself, had started to do the opposite. It became a door, through which life could unfold into the world.

I kneeled there in the moisture of life giving birth to more life, still a bit insecure of my newly won freedom to roam after lockdown had been lifted. I thought of a phrase a friend had told me many years ago. “The soul is a plant”, it went. Yes, I thought, and maybe the plant is a soul, too.

Andreas Weber
Berlin

On The Nature of Cities

Farmers From the City

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I find myself thinking about what kind of connection I want to have with nature after we finish this 2.5 year walk—whether or not strolling through my favorite park in Barcelona will offer me enough of the nature I now crave.

It’s a hot June day in rural Greece. We stop in a run-down gas station on a small secondary road cutting through wheat fields on both sides. We wipe the sweat from our brows.

The gas station attendant opens the refrigerator and pulls out a crate of cherries.  “Take what you want,” he says, placing the crate in front of us. “I picked these this morning.”

“Thank you. How many cherry trees do you have?” I ask, expecting him to say he has a handful in his backyard in the village I see on the horizon.

“I have 5,000 cherry trees. I’m a cherry farmer. I work here  [at the gas station] for extra money,” he replies in well-spoken English.

“5,000. Five, zero, zero, zero?” I say in disbelief, confirming that I heard right.

The gas station attendant, a tall guy in his early thirties, nods, “Yes, five, zero, zero, zero.”

To read more in this series, click here.
It turns out that he grew up in Athens, went to university, played basketball there, got a degree, had a job in the city, and then left it all behind. He  didn’t want to deal with the noise, traffic and crowds, he was tired of always being tired, he tells us. He wanted a simpler life, a life where he saw more trees and open spaces, so he returned to his grandparents’ village outside Komotini. He runs the cherry orchard, works a few hours a week at the gas station and coaches his son’s basketball team at the village school.

“It’s not easy, but it’s a better life,” he adds, shrugging his shoulders. “I was out picking cherries at 5am with my wife, and then came here for the afternoon-overnight shift.”

It’s a story I have heard several times on this Asia-to-Europe walking journey. It’s the story of college-educated young and middle-age people giving up urban living in big cities, returning to their rural ancestral roots, taking work that usually pays less, and finding ways to connect with the natural world far from streets filled with asphalt and concrete. They are setting up a new life in the small towns and villages their parents and grandparents left decades ago for better paying jobs in cities such as Athens, Thessaloniki, Istanbul, Antalya, and Tehran.

The cherry farmer-gas station attendant’s change-of-life story reminds me of similar conversations I had several months ago in Iran and Turkey.

In Iran, we met a couple in their forties who left their hometown of Tehran for the same reasons. The capital city was becoming too stressful. The husband accepted a water conservation engineering job in a less-urban area near the Caspian Sea, and he and his wife now spend most of their free time taking care of their several dozen peach, nectarine, cherry and orange trees and rose bushes. Their smiling faces and the affection they openly give to their trees and the fruit they pick makes me think they made a good decision.

A walking companion I met on one of Turkey’s long-distance trails told me about his university friend who earned a degree in Japanese. After graduation, the friend took a job with an international company in Istanbul where his Japanese language skills came in handy. But, a few years into the demanding routine that comes with working for a company that has a follow-the-sun schedule, the friend decided to quit his good-paying city job, return to his grandparents’ village and work in their olive grove. He is now using his Japanese and business skills to start exporting olives and olive oil to Japan, my walking companion told me.

Then there was the man who left Antalya, Turkey, spent five years restoring his grandfather’s abandoned, nearly ruined property in an isolated area far from any city, and converted it into a completely self-sufficient house and guesthouse, where he relies on rain water and solar energy to grow his own food and live a quiet life. We spoke for some time about the world’s political and economic situation, the importance of self-sustainability within an interdependent global community, and the joy of being and living in open, green spaces. His intellect may be missed in a corporate, urban setting, but his determination to be connected to the land struck me as meaningful work.

Gravitating towards the green spaces

The city-turned-farm people I am meeting along the way aren’t the only ones gravitating towards green spaces out-of-city boundaries.

Although,  statistically speaking, more people globally are flocking to cities all over the world for greater economic opportunities and quality of life improvements, there are reports of people trading in the city life for the farm land. I’m wondering if soon I will be one of them.

A November 2017 article in Washington Post, for instance, speaks to the trend of some people leaving their desk jobs in cities to have a tangible, immediate impact on society by producing organic food and helping to create small, sustainable farms.

The new generation of farmers I am meeting along our way has me considering my own relationship with cities and the land I long to touch.

While I have lived in cities all of my 46 years and we have chosen a walking route that links us to cities for the practical purpose of restocking food and water supplies, an unexpected result of walking and being outdoors for the better part of 2.5 years is my shifting perspective of cities and the quality of life they foster. For the first time, I feel myself cringe when I see a distant skyline of tall buildings and notice the increased traffic as we approach city limits. Instead of the excitement I used to have for being part of the bustle of urban hubs, lately, I want to hurry through the crowded streets and get back to the smaller roads where there are more tractors than cars.

Walking on roads where we see more tractors than cars is changing the way we think about cities and how we interact with nature. Photo: Jenn Baljko
Some people we have met along the way have chosen to leave behind the cities they grew up in and returned to their grandparents’ villages to work the land. We are wondering if we may someday do the same. Photo: Jenn Baljko

Having stepped through mountain forests and besides wheat fields, rice paddies and kilometers of hazelnut trees and tasted the goodness of eggs laid by free-range hens, home-grown, pesticide-free tomatoes and juicy fruit picked moments ago from trees tended to with much love, I find myself thinking about what kind of connection I want to have with nature after we finish this walk.

I think about whether or not strolling through my favorite park in Barcelona will offer me enough of the nature I now crave. I don’t know if I want to readjust my ears to the noise of honking cars, garbage trucks and people having a late-night gathering on the benches below my bedroom window. I have come to enjoy too much the symphony of birds, crickets and frogs, sounds noticeably missing from in the urban spaces I have previously called home. I doubt I will have the patience to be a new-generation farmer, committed to toiling the land day in and day out, but the idea of getting my hands in the dirt and growing my own food has already taken seed inside my heart.

As the road continues to rise up before us, the question of whether we, too, will leave behind our city, Barcelona, for a life with easier access to nature, green spaces and land we can use to feed ourselves comes up with increasing frequency. Could  we find a life we love away from cities in the villages where my or Lluís’ grandparents’ once lived? It’s a talking point for us during the long rural stretches where we only hear our own earth-crunching footsteps. And, like all of our walk, it’s a mystery revealing more of ourselves with each kilometer we pass.

Jenn Baljko
Bangkok to Barcelona

On The Nature of Cities

 

 

 

 

Farmers, Chefs, and Lawyers: Building an Ecology of One

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We live in an ecology of separation.

Our human-built ecology is today so far separated from the earth’s ecology that it is impossible for sustainability—let alone environmental and social well-being—to be achieved within it.

Producers working within an Ecology of One are building new vehicles for commerce, economics, social actions and interactions.
This is where we are as a society, but we don’t have to be stuck here.

In stark contrast to this human-built “ecology of separation,” the wider natural world operates in what might be called an “Ecology of One,” an ecology with parts so closely intertwined and interdependent that sustainability and environmental well-being are integral to its functioning.

Disgeotic: City infrastructure, Central Tokyo, Japan (photo: P.M. Lydon)
Disgeotic: City infrastructure, Central Tokyo, Japan. Photo: Patrick Lydon

Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence & Ecologist, puts the distinction between these two ways of thinking this way:

“We can look at the world and see it whole and perceive it as a network of relationships, or we can perceive the world as a collection of fragmented and disconnected opposites fighting each other.”

It is clear that much of our social business and political world tends to follow the latter of these perceptions of reality; it chooses to live in an ecology of separation.

Yet, it is also clear that some of our culture’s most deep wisdom about ourselves and nature—both in the form of contemporary science and mathematics, as well as nearly every native or religious tradition—sees the world not as fragmented and disconnected opposites (an ecology of separation), but as a network of interrelationships (an Ecology of One). This kind of wisdom seeks to bring us together instead of pushing us apart. It seeks to unite and collaborate instead of to separate and compete.

“Despite humanity’s great diversity and historical differences, when the world’s wisdom traditions penetrate into the experiential depths of existence, a common understanding emerges that is in accord with insights from science … we live in a living universe that arises, moment by moment, as a unified whole.”
—Duane Elgin, The Living Universe

It is good to know that science and religion have such wisdom in their view.

Even so, an Ecology of One is not about science or religion any more than it’s about politics or economics; it is about knowing the connections between ourselves and nature by cultivating deeper, more empathic relationships in every corner of our lives and in every interaction—from the way we buy food to the way we operate our businesses—and allowing these relationships to inform how we go about living our lives.

An Ecology of One is based on relationships. From farmers to urban designers to politicians, the individuals who work with an Ecology of One mindset work to cultivate personal, empathic relationships with the environment and the people in their profession and life.

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Natural Farmer Yoshikazu Kawaguchi at his Akame Farm in Nara, Japan. Image: Patrick Lydon

The case of Natural Farming gives perhaps one of the best examples of this mindset in practice. Originating in Japan in the early 1950s with plant biologist Masanobu Fukuoka, and spreading worldwide after the publication of his seminal book “One Straw Revolution” in English, this way of growing food is not about method, but about a way of thinking of ourselves and our relationship to nature. Natural Farming is based largely on a farmer’s personal knowledge of and relationship with the land, allowing most any given ecosystem to thrive on its own without the need for external inputs like fertilizers and pesticides. Today, a new generation of Natural Farmers in Japan and elsewhere not only understand that they live and grow food and sell food within a web of relationships, but also makes explicit efforts to bring empathy to each of these relationships—with the soil, the food, the weeds, and even with the bugs that we often call “pests”.

An Ecology of One mindset has guided many of these real world farmers to move everything to hand-and-human power, no oil power, no chemicals of any kind, no fertilizers, no tilling of the soil, and most strikingly, an embracing of weeds and bugs with empathy instead of as enemies.

As you can imagine, for such a mindset to work, both the farmers and their customers need to be flexible enough to restructure the systems within which they produce, sell, and consume. Yet once they have done so, the results are nothing short of astounding: beautiful fields thriving with life, enriched ecosystems, sustainable local economies, and surprisingly bountiful harvests.

Is that harvest bountiful enough to feed a future population of 10-11 billion people?

Not only are small-scale, biodiverse farming methods enough to feed our expected peak population, but leading sustainability research and practice conducted over the past three-plus decades indicates that it is likely the only way to feed the world while maintaining a sustainable environmental balance.

In painting a picture of the current industrial system, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization gives us 60 years before industrial farming renders most land un-farmable, and The United Nations agrees with the small-scale, biodiverse, non-chemical model as a way to remedy this. In America, decades of research by the Rodale Institute argues for small-scale, “regenerative,” organic methods as the a way to feed the world and cut our CO2 emissions to within recommended levels; and again, out in the field, millions of Regenerative Farmers, Natural Farmers, and Permaculturists are putting an Ecology of One mindset into real world practice, working today to feed much of the world in this way.

As Charles Eisenstein writes, the myth that we need industrial agriculture has been debunked, and the only ones who are holding firmly onto this myth are the industry giants who helped create it.

From this, we can take away a fact that seems astounding, but that is actually a simple ecological reality: we have the ability to grow food and feed the earth’s peak population with non-chemical, non-industrial, small-scale, regenerative methods of farming while also enriching the land and people around us.

We also have the ability to bring this mindset to other industries.

In a sense, the producers who work within an Ecology of One are able to do what so many prominent academics and economists and social theorists have so far been incapable of doing. These people are building new vehicles for commerce, new vehicles for economics, for social actions and interactions, and, of course, a new way of working all of these into a connected ecology of well-being for people and the environment.

They are re-defining how to live harmoniously by looking at everything we engage with—economics or politics or plants or social structure—as a part of an Ecology of One, and approaching everything in this Ecology of One with empathy. And they are necessarily getting their customers and the general public on board with this mindset too.

On the food side of this equation, results of the Ecology of One mindset have produced everything from community supported agriculture (or “CSA”) networks; to local co-operatives and farmers markets; to small, one-person restaurant outfits; to direct buying by customers through farm visits. The end result is that the producers, consumers, and ecosystems surrounding them have all benefited in some way.

The know-how is already there, and there aren’t many technical hurdles we don’t already know how to jump in order to ensure well-being for 11 billion people while also securing sustainability. The need that we must address now is in changing how we as consumers think and act, just as we change how we go about producing food, housing, transportation, and the goods we consume.

For this, we need to learn how to apply an Ecology of One mindset to other systems of production, to economics, and to society in general.

What on earth does this look like?

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A butterfly in the winter rye just before rice planting at a Natural Farm. Image: Patrick Lydon

“Even if you only care about humans, in order to care for humans, you need to take care of the system (the environment) that you live in…”
—Nathan Sheriff, Design Chair, California College of the Arts

Applying the lessons

To imagine what such a way of life might look like, and how we might start to build our social and economic systems around an Ecology of One, it is helpful to bring into view the recurrent outcomes of the people who are using this mindset.

How do our processes and aims change when we are working within an Ecology of One? There are many positive results, but for the sake of focus, there are three key outcomes that, in our studies and interactions, seem to be omnipresent in the pursuits of those with an Ecology of One mindset. They are 1) smallness of scale, 2) (bio)diversity, and 3) regeneration. These elements are functional foundations within the natural farming practice, yet they also happen to apply, likewise, as valuable aims for nearly any economic or social activity we might undertake.

Let’s take a look at a few brief examples to see firstly how each of these three concepts applies in natural farming, and then further expand this, to see how they apply within another industry.

Small scale

The natural farm should be small enough in scale that the farmer can have a relationship with the living things in the field. An entire economic view—known as Small is Beautiful—was built by the late economist E.F. Schumacher on this kind of concept, and for good reason. The mantras of “bigger is better” and “competition” tend to force an ecology of separation, setting the stage for exploitation of both people and environment.

On the other hand, keeping scale relatively small requires relationships to be built and nourished at every stage, from production to consumption. Having inherently nourishing relationships built into the act of producing and consuming gives us a fertile ground for growing well-being, both for people and the environments in which they live.

But how can we bring our economic world into a way of working that encourages small-scale, relationship-based transactions?

One way is to engage in a personal relationship with our resources: the farmer knowing the soil on an intimate level; the woodworker having a kinship with the trees he uses; the consumer knowing the land where their food comes from.

Then, there are the inter-personal relationships: a farmer engaging directly with their customers and vice versa.

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Natural farmer Seonghyun Choi brings visitors on a tour of his rice farm in Hongcheon, South Korea. Image: Patrick Lydon

Ryoseok Hong, a Natural Farmer with whom we meet frequently in South Korea, takes the concept of relationship-making seriously. He never sells the vegetables or rice he grows to anyone who has not personally come to see his farm. Hong wants customers not only to meet him, but to meet his field, so they might better understand the beauty of what he does..Due to his naturally limited ability to produce—and his unwillingness to expand at the expense of breaking the careful relationships he has cultivated—there’s a long waiting list of customers who want to take part in this relationship.

In an urban context, friend and chef GaYoung gives us a good look at the concept of small scale and Ecology of One in the largest metropolitan area on earth—Seoul, South Korea.

Several years ago, GaYoung had just migrated back to Seoul, after studying culinary arts and working at upscale restaurants in New York City. She landed a job at a French restaurant perched on the side of a hill overlooking Seoul. By all means, the job was the dream of most of her colleagues. But she was troubled by many aspects of the way the restaurant—not this one in particular, but the industry as a whole—operated, including an intense misuse of the terms “natural,” “sustainable,” and “local” in the food that the restaurant acquired.

More troubling for GaYoung however, was the distance between her and her customers. She wanted to know the people she cooked for, to have some kind of direct feedback loop from them, and she also felt a need to know the people who grew the food she cooked.

After experiencing working with a Natural Farm in the area, GaYoung made a firm decision to quit working at a restaurant that she didn’t believe in fully. She started out blindly, and without the money to open a proper restaurant, she ended up selling rice balls from the back of her bicycle. Not the perfect situation, but it was an instant gratification for her; she tells us the she finally saw the faces of the people, and the effect the food she was making had on them. “People took the rice balls, went and ate them somewhere, and then came back the next day, and the next, and the next for more … I knew I was doing the right thing.” After saving her earnings from the popular bicycle shop, she opened a tiny twelve-seat restaurant in the Mangwon district of Seoul, swapping the rice balls in favor of cooking a single daily entree, and posting the day’s dish to her blog each morning. This way of working allowed her to use her creativity each day to make a new dish based on what was fresh and in season at the local market.

The restaurant became extremely popular, extremely quickly. On most days, GaYoung sold out very early, having to turn away dozens of customers. Yet, on principal of maintaining smallness in order to maintain quality and her own well-being, she never increased the size of the restaurant. Twelve seats remained twelve seats. She refused offers to expand, and also refused any kind of media attention or interviews, with the exception of an interview given to us at SocieCity, on account of our being very close with GaYoung during her transformation.

We see in GaYoung very clearly that the recipe for being successful at a small scale is not to do what will sell, but to do what you love, to do it well, and to engage in good relationships with those you do it for and with.

The act of maintaining smallness, and of physically inviting customers into the process of what you do, builds an Ecology of One by itself, allowing personal relationships to be established between consumer, farmer, chef, food, field. It’s also an act that is certainly not limited to the venue of growing, cooking, and consuming food.

What are your stories of how smallness is working in your city or neighborhood?

(Bio)diversity

Another theme of the natural farm is that many different life forms are encouraged to live together. As mentioned earlier, rather than seeing bugs and weeds as enemies, a natural farmer sees them as part of a balanced and diverse ecology. Diversity—not just of food plants, but of all living things in a field—builds a strong, resilient community of plant and animal life that can better withstand harsh conditions when they arise, and will thrive under normal conditions.

“Diversity is important … having many varieties of species in small amounts creates a stronger possibility for survival than having a large amount of only one specie. This is especially true in this changing environment.”
—Kenji Murakami, Natural Farmer, Itoshima, Japan

It goes against conventional farming wisdom, yet the idea of biodiverse agriculture has been creating thriving small farms around Japan, Korea, India, the United States, and other areas around the world for decades, having first been researched within western science by Richard Root, a Cornell University professor, in the 1960s. Even centuries beforehand, biodiversity was a key component in the agricultural undertakings of many native peoples, notably in North America, as explained in U.C. Davis Professor, M. Kat Anderson’s, recent book Tending the Wild, published by University of California Press.

“This collective storehouse of knowledge about the natural world is called traditional ecological knowledge and it has helped sustain tremendous biological diversity for more than a hundred centuries.”
—Kat Anderson, Lessons in Native American Plant Gathering

Through an economic and social lens, biodiversity is simply called diversity.

Diversity is often strangely interpreted by today’s economy, so it’s important not to dwell on the conventional definition; true diversity is not a matter of mechanically assigning categories and ticking boxes, but of truly knowing the inherent abilities of individual people, then appreciating those abilities in a way that allows them to flourish.

This kind of true diversity can be extended to our relationship with the environment, knowing the qualities of the environment and what it offers us, and appreciating these qualities similarly to how we would our own.

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Natural Farmer Kristyn Leach shows a young girl around her field in San Francisco, USA. Image: Suhee Kang

The natural farmer Kenji Murakmai, who is quoted above, told us that he cherishes the act of knowing what the people around him are doing in their jobs—firstly because it builds community, opening up new possibilities for supporting each other, and secondly because, in his words, it “helps everyone work with a grateful heart.”

Kenji works in an area of Japan called Itoshima, and it is one of the great examples of diversity in an Ecology of One. In this town, there are many people working at multiple small and specialized jobs, yet they make efforts to understand, interact, and work across their disciplines as well. Socially and economically, they see themselves in an Ecology of One.

Kenji sells his vegetables to a part time chef who has a restaurant open “when people ask.” We asked, and it was delicious, intimate, supported local talent and ecological well-being, and was even less expensive than eating out at a normal chain restaurant. Across town, there is a small bakery that uses locally sourced ingredients built into one of the rooms of an old house. Kenji explained that they are only open a few times a week and only in the morning because the baker has other jobs around the town. This is just one of her passions. Again, knowing your abilities and passions, and letting these drive what you do—before economic considerations, because who on earth would open a bakery a few days a week explicitly for economic gain—inherently leads to diversity.

There are multiple levels of diversity at work here: one is to literally do multiple jobs at different times in different areas. This way of working is alive, well, and easy to see in small communities nearly everywhere in the world. In the best cases, one job flows into the next, as one season flows into another, or as one ingredient flows into another product. As this thinking goes, even if you aren’t physically involved in all parts of the flow, it is important to know and appreciate all parts of it so that you have a view of where your process fits and how it functions within the whole.

There are also slightly larger, full-time operations in Itoshima that operate on a similar passion. Yoshinori san, a local soy sauce maker nearby, recently took over the business from his father and transformed it, going back to a more traditional and slow process that is integrated with the ecology and social scene. Again, a theme here is that this man has a passion for the biological process of fermenting. I don’t know many people who have this passion, but Yoshinori does, and it came through as he was giving us a tour of his small factory. He makes the soy sauce starter by hand from ingredients that he personally chooses from small producers, at a time when most other small-scale makers are buying theirs in bulk from a national supplier. He truly wants to build relationships, to know the farmers, and to know the customers and how they use and enjoy his product. His work supports true diversity.

On a personal level, real diversity means knowing your own abilities and passions and employing them in ways that are useful and good for the people and places around you. If we can encourage the use of abilities in ourselves, and learn to see and appreciate the abilities of those around us, we can naturally create the same kind of strength and resilience that we see in naturally bio-diverse fields, forests, or farmland.

In this way, both economy and society can become an inter-woven fabric of mutually supportive threads that can withstand harsh conditions, and will absolutely thrive in normal conditions.

Regeneration

Natural farming, when practiced as described earlier, is an inherently regenerative practice: it builds the health and ecological capacity of the land, as well as the health and capacity of the people who come into contact with this land, whether farmer or consumer. The “regenerative” natural farm stands in extreme contrast to our conventional ways of growing food, most of which are decidedly exploitative of oil, mineral, soil, and all else, taking from the environment far more than they give back. The multiple long-term studies that were covered earlier in this writing show very clearly that in agriculture and, frankly speaking, in all areas of production, the need to shift our conventional industrial ways of production towards regenerative practices is deadly serious.

For agriculture to be regenerative, it needs to be based on the regenerative cycle of life and death on the earth, and importantly, on sunlight as a primary energy source. Our biosphere’s ability to capture and transfer this amazingly powerful “free” energy from sun to earth through plant life is a key to its ability for regeneration, and to why we have lush rainforests, thriving meadows, natural farms, and any other life on this planet. Natural farms follow such natural processes of regeneration, never attempting to pressure a given ecosystem to grow more than the it will naturally support by its own cycle of solar energy conversion and life and death in the field.

For society to be regenerative, we need to ask what the primary energy source for this regeneration is. What can society—like the sun—give to itself as a “free” source of energy to allow it to grow naturally, and to bolster its own well-being? Taking a page from some of the greatest social well-being activists, from Jesus and Buddha to Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King, Jr., it should be clear that only compassion and empathy can and do create an ecology of social well-being.

Compassion and empathy are the sunlight of our society, and when put into use by the humans within that society, they allow us to regenerate and grow an ever-more bountiful culture and planet.

Looking at this problem in the context of society and the Ecology of One idea, we can see another clear parallel; our economic system is very clearly not a regenerative one; it is based not on the power of compassion and empathy, but on competition and exploitation of natural resources, of labor, and of (trade) relationships, for starters. Both culturally and ecologically speaking, there is no way for this to continue; a truly resilient economic system must, again, be firmly the opposite of exploitative.

Working in an urban sense, we recently met a lawyer, Janelle Orsi, director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (or SELC) in California, who is fighting for such regenerative practices in the business and legal world.

From a law and regulation standpoint, Orsi sees a deep need to draw the distinction between “generative” entities—such as cooperatives—which are designed to “nourish and protect” communities and the environment, and “extractive” entities—and I will unabashedly call out most multinational corporations here—which are often designed to draw out wealth and resources from communities and the environment.

The SELC has already greatly influenced regulatory laws in California in ways that make regenerative business officially recognized and easier to facilitate, and which help legalize the cooperation of citizens to support and grow each other. Their efforts include helping to write and pass the California Cooperative Worker Act (AB 816), and a second bill that facilitates development of cooperative housing (AB 569).

The aim of these bills is regenerative. They are examples of efforts to recognize an Ecology of One in social, governmental, and economic senses, realizing the need for all of these areas to begin supporting the well-being of each other at their roots, and the need for compassion and empathy not just to re-enter our vocabulary, but to move themselves into the foundations of what we do.

Like Orsi, if we shift our actions towards a regenerative mindset, our business focus can also begin providing labor that regenerates, that increases the well-being of those who engage in it, that builds mutually beneficial trade relationships, and that generates economic well-being across all areas of a community.

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The author, continuing his yearly tradition of rice planting at a friend’s natural farm in South Korea. Image: Suhee Kang

Effecting an Ecology of One

It might sound like a tall task to rebuild our entire economic and social reality to be small scale, diverse, and regenerative. This need not be the case. Like the farmer who creates relationships by bringing the community to his farm; like the chef who allows her creative skills to flourish on an explicitly small scale; like the baker and soy sauce maker who work with their passions and abilities and support a diverse network of others who are doing the same; like the lawyer who works within her community and state to help regeneration become a reality for citizens, we each have such roles, and they must be uncovered individually, revealed and engaged in despite the swift social or market forces that try to sway us otherwise.

You’ll see that even just taking the first few steps as an individual on this path towards an Ecology of One can provide us with infinite possibilities. When we start becoming partners again with the earth in all that we do, so can each of us, too, make a socially and ecologically just economic system a reality for ourselves and those around us. This can come from looking at our own actions each day and asking ourselves if these actions are fostering an Ecology of One, or an ecology of separation; are they bringing us into a closer relationship with this earth and those around us, or are they pushing us still further away, into this spiral of disconnection and dissonance?

“It is a man’s sympathy with all creatures that truly makes him a man. Until he extends his circle of compassion to all living things, man himself will not find peace.”
—Albert Schweitzer, Philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

It matters not what discipline we are functioning in; as professionals and as human beings, we can all be in the business of reconnecting into an Ecology of One, of planting our roots with empathy into the reality of this living earth and seeing our role within it. In this way, our work can and will naturally bring itself into the interrelated, living network of small, diverse, and regenerative beings who are working for the health and wellness of ourselves and the places we live.

We can make that choice today. We can accept and continue a life within an ecology of separation, or we can move, with each action we take, towards life in an Ecology of One.

Patrick Lydon
San Jose & Seoul

On The Nature of Cities

A tree on the side of a road

Fight Fire With Fire … and Standards With Standards ― Building blocks for nature

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Making nature metric helps to test all the other standards we put into a project, and question them on necessity next to one another.

A biking lane should measure 4.20 meters at minimum in the city of Utrecht. Sidewalks need to be 1.20 meters wide to make sure pedestrians and a person in a wheelchair can pass each other. For each house we build we add 0.78 parking spaces in the public domain. In the Netherlands, we have a lot of standards and guidelines for our public space. In a project, this usually means that the ‘left-over project area’ is used for green. And in a densifying city, this often amounts to little substantial green. With even less room for elements that add to the nature-quality of the space.

So, in Utrecht, we challenge the standards with norms for nature.

A tree on the side of a road
Suzan saved this tree in the newly developed district of Leidsche Rijn. The biking lane is deviated from the 4,20 meters width. (Photo by Gitty Korsuize)

Setting a standard for nature

Of course, every project wants to add nature to their development. But once all Dutch standards and guidelines used in projects are added up, not much room is left for green. So, at the end of a project, adding effective green or nature adds up to more costs than anticipated in the beginning. And the high ambitions, which were formulated at the beginning of the project, are reduced to low-quality green of marginalized nature. By making it metric by listing a specific standard, we raise the bar on nature ambitions in projects and we measure the impact the project has on a certain species. Real impact. Not ‘nature-washing’ but a quantifiable nature-positive impact.

Building blocks for nature

In Utrecht, we developed “building blocks for nature” for five species. We made the habitat required in development plans conform to a quantitative minimum, or a metric. The easiest of the five was a wild bee species (Chelostoma rapunculi), which depends on bellflowers for its pollen. The most challenging target the Smooth Newt (Lissotriton vulgaris), which needs ponds with aquatic plants for breeding and bushes or rocks for hibernation. By defining the metrics of required habitat, we give landscape architects more specific guidelines which they need to incorporate in their design. It also helps in the evaluation of a project design. For example, does the plan meet the required targets set for one or more of the five species?

Nature made easy

To build a well-functioning habitat for the bellflower wild bee the project needs to include 50m2 of nesting grounds (per hectare) with dead wood and brambles; 100m2 of feeding area (per hectare) with a minimum of 2125 bellflowers and four other flowering species such as Common Mallow and Purple Loosestrife. Another requirement is the distance between the nesting area and the flower area; these should be within 100 meters of each other. This habitat should be easily feasible within every project and reflects the minimum of our standard. By making it metric you do not need to be an ecologist to incorporate this wild bee species in your plan. An ecologist is just needed to check the design of the required areas and if all the habitats are incorporated.

A purple flower with a bee in the center of it
Wild bee (Chelostoma rapunculi) sleeping in a blue bell flower. (Photo by Gitty Korsuize)

No “nature-washing”

The house sparrow (Passer domesticus) is a more difficult-to-reach target. Especially when we make this a target species for urban development with a high building density: the Merwede Kanaalzone (https://merwede.nl). In this project development, the aim is to build 250 houses per hectare. According to our nature-standard, the house sparrow requires at least 30 nesting boxes (per ha) 100 m2 (per hectare) of vertical green (shrubs or green wall vegetation) for shelter; 500 m2 (per ha) of feeding grounds such as (rooftop) gardens or parks and at least 10 solitary trees. Shelter should be available at 5 meters distance of the nesting boxes, the feeding areas should be found within 100 meters of the nesting boxes and planted with indigenous species. With these standards, we make nature targets quantifiable. Ecologists, landscape architects, and the project developer all know what is needed at the beginning of the project to achieve a nature-positive development. At the end of the project, it is possible to make the targets reached quantifiable. Whether nature (or the targeted species) agrees is a question of time. And a nice incentive for monitoring the project with future residents.

A diagram of a city and where house sparrows live within a city
House Sparrow

A nature-positive development

Of course, nature is more than a checklist. An ecologist is still needed in the project to collect information on patches of green and blue that need to be spared so species can colonize the new area from these “safe spots”. The ecologist also needs to make sure connections to surrounding green are made and identify other chances for adding nature to the project. On top of making sure the above-mentioned requirements are met and executed in the ecologically right way. Making nature metric helps to test all the other standards we put into a project and question them on necessity next to one another.

I look forward to hearing from other cities how they claim room for nature in high-density urban developments.

Gitty Korsuize
Utrecht

On The Nature of Cities

 

Further reading:

https://merwede.nl/

https://www.gebiedsontwikkeling.nu/artikelen/merwedekanaalzone-van-no-go-area-tot-proeftuin-voor-de-gezonde-stad/

https://waarneming.nl/species/24463/

https://waarneming.nl/species/448/

Financer des villes plus vertes pour l’avenir que nous voulons
Financing Greener Cities for the Future We Want

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(Read this in English.)

À l’occasion de la Journée internationale de la biodiversité, le Centre pour la biodiversité des villes de l’ICLEI, le projet de soutien de l’UE au Cadre pour la biodiversité post 2020 et The Nature Of Cities (TNOC) mettent en lumière la nécessité de faire de la nature une partie de la solution pour des villes plus vertes.
Pour des infrastructures respectueuses de la nature

Le monde s’urbanise rapidement, exposant nos ressources naturelles à une pression croissante pour répondre aux demandes en infrastructures, terres, eau, nourriture et autres besoins vitaux. Selon le département des affaires économiques et sociales des Nations unies (UN DESA), 55 % de la population mondiale vivait dans des zones urbaines en 2018 et cette proportion devrait atteindre 68 % en 2050. Le Rapport Planète Vivante 2020 du WWF indique que l’urbanisation est une des principales causes de destruction et dégradation de la nature et que le monde surexploite actuellement les ressources naturelles à un rythme sans précédent. L’indice Planète vivante 2020 indiqueune chute moyenne de 68 % des populations surveillées de mammifères, d’oiseaux, d’amphibiens, de reptiles et de poissons entre 1970 et 2016. Ces tendances démographiques des espèces constituent un indicateur important de mesure de la santé globale des écosystèmes.

Read this essay in English.
Les infrastructures sont essentielles à la réalisation des Objectifs du Développement Durable (ODD). A l’échelle mondiale, nous construisons l’équivalent “d’un Paris par semaine” (Anderson, 2020) en nouvelles structures pour répondre à notre demande d’infrastructures. Répondre à ce besoin d’infrastructures a des conséquences considérables sur les ressources naturelles. Il nous faut doncintégrer la nature dans la conception des infrastructures afin de minimiser leur impact négatif et les rendre bénéfiques pour la nature. Répondre à ces demandes croissantes tout en protégeant la biodiversité, met à rude épreuve les ressources financières, tant au niveau national que local.

Infographic created by The Natue of Cities using source data.
Infographie créée par The Nature of Cities à partir de données sources.
Cet essai fait partie du projet francophone du TNOC.
Le rapport de l’étude intitulée “The Cost of Policy Inaction — the case of not meeting the 2010 biodiversity target” (Le coût de l’inaction politique — Le cas de la non-réalisation de l’objectif de 2010 en matière de biodiversité), commandée par la Commission européenne au cours de la dernière décennie, s’est penché sur la valeur monétaire de la perte de biodiversité dans le monde causé par la non-réalisation de l’objectif 2010 en matière de biodiversité. Il a prudemment estimé que la perte de services écosystémiques et de biodiversité s’évalueà environ 740 milliards USD par an et que si la perte de biodiversité se poursuit au rythme prévu, le coût cumulé des services écosystémiques perdus depuis 2000 pourrait atteindre 20 000 milliards USD en 2050. Le manque de financement est l’un des plus grands défis auxquels nous sommes confrontés pour lutter contre la perte de biodiversité et la dégradation de la nature. Nous devons repenser fondamentalement notre relation avec la nature et transformer nos modèles économiques et nos systèmes de marché.

L’initiative de financement de la biodiversité (PNUD BIOFIN) estime que plus de 400 milliards de dollars US sont nécessaires chaque année pour protéger la biodiversité.  Mais seule une fraction de cette somme est actuellement levée. Au niveau des gouvernements locaux, en particulier, les ressources financières sont principalement obtenues par des transferts de fonds intergouvernementaux, des subventions et des taxes. Or nombre d’entre eux ne sont pas viables à long terme. Le financement de la biodiversité a été encore davantage mis à l’épreuve par la pandémie mondiale COVID-19 en cours (OCDE, 2020). Le rapport sur les risques 2021 du Forum économique mondial (WEF) classe la perte de biodiversité, les maladies infectieuses et l’échec de l’action climatique parmi les quatre principaux risques en termes d’impact dans le paysage mouvant des risques. La pandémie en cours a des répercussions humaines, sociales et économiques indéniables et a démontré la vulnérabilité et les inégalités inhérentes à nos systèmes socio-économiques. Une enquête menée conjointement par l’OCDE et le Comité européen des régions (CdR) dans 24 pays de l’Union européenne indique que la plupart des administrations municipales s’attendent à ce que la crise socio-économique liée au COVID-19 ait un impact négatif sur leurs finances, avec un dangereux “effet ciseaux” de hausse des dépenses et de baisse des recettes. Cet “effet ciseaux” est vécu de manière encore plus aiguë dans les pays en développement.

Le WEF admet que “si le COVID-19 et la nature sont liés, la reprise devrait l’être aussi”. Selon le rapport “Future of Nature and Business” du Forum économique mondial, des développements favorables à la nature dans le domaine des infrastructures et dubâti pourrait créer plus de 3 000 milliards de dollars d’opportunités commerciales et 117 millions d’emplois d’ici 2030. La cinquième édition du Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO) a identifié les villes et les infrastructures durables comme l’une des huit voies de transition permettant de vivre en harmonie avec la nature et de réaliser la Vision pour la Biodiversité à l’horizon 2050 définie par la Convention pour la Diversité Biologique des Nations-Unies.

Infographie créée par The Natue of Cities à partir de données WEF.

Plus récemment, le Dasgupta Review of the Economics of Biodiversity, publié en février de cette année, a souligné que nos économies, nos moyens de subsistance et notre bien-être dépendent tous de notre bien le plus précieux : la nature. “La nature est plus qu’un bien économique : elle a aussi une valeur intrinsèque. La biodiversité permet à la nature d’être productive, résiliente et adaptable.” affirme la publication. Selon cette revue, les estimations de notre impact global sur la Nature suggèrent que nous aurions besoin de 1,6 Terre pour maintenir le niveau de vie actuel du monde. Il estime ensuiteque “pour protéger 30% des terres et des océans de la planète et gérer efficacement ces zones d’ici 2030, il faudrait un investissement moyen de 140 milliards de dollars par an.”

Amener la conversation au Festival TNOC

Alors que nous nous engageons sur la voie de la relance et de la re-conception des villes, il est crucial de le faire en reconnaissant les limites planétaires, en envisageant  la nature comme  partie intégrante de la solution et en abordant les questions d’inégalité et d’injustice. Il est donc de plus en plus nécessaire de mobiliser des ressources, tant pour répondre aux demandes urbaines, sociales et économiques, que pour garantir une gestion durable des écosystèmes et des ressources naturelles dont dépendent bon nombre de ces demandes. Il est communément admis que la mobilisation des ressources fait partie intégrante de la réalisation de nombreux objectifs mondiaux actuels, tels que le Cadre mondial pour la biodiversité post-2020, les objectifs de développement durable (ODD) et bien d’autres.

Le Global City Biodiversity Center (CBC) d’ICLEI a plaidé pour une mobilisation accrue des ressources et des investissements dans les infrastructures vertes et bleues, ainsi que pour la restauration des services écosystémiques, à l’échelle de la ville et de la région, dans le cadre de sa feuille de route pour la défense de la biodiversité en vue de la 15e Conférence des parties à la Convention sur la diversité biologique. L’initiative Cities with Nature s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une collaboration entre ICLEI (au nom de la Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments), le Comité européen des régions, Regions for Sustainable Development, le Comité consultatif des gouvernements infranationaux (coordonné par Regions4 Sustainable Development et le gouvernement du Québec), le Group of Leading Subnational Governments toward Aichi Biodiversity Targets et le gouvernement écossais.

Pour élargir le débat sur l’investissement dans un réaménagement des villes intégrant mieuxla nature et sanspréjudice net pour la biodiversité, ICLEI a organisé et accueilli une session virtuelle au TNOC Festival 2021. Le thème de cette session, “Financer des villes plus vertes pour l’avenir que nous voulons”, était particulièrement pertinent au regard des conclusions de l’étude Dasgupta sur l’économie de la biodiversité publiée en février 2021. Il est de plus en plus urgent d’engager les investisseurs et les administrateurs des villes sur le sujet de l’investissement, car les administrations municipales sont confrontées à des pressions croissantes pour faire face à la triple crise de la biodiversité, du climat et de la santé, alors que leurs sources de revenus diminuent de manière alarmante en raison des effets d’entraînement de la pandémie en cours sur l’économie et le tissu social à l’échelle urbaine et nationale.

La session “Financer des villes plus vertes pour l’avenir que nous voulons” a pris la forme d’une table ronde, qui a réuni des experts financiers, des investisseurs et des représentants des villes pour échanger des idées sur les approches, produits et solutions de financement innovants auxquels les villes pourraient avoir accès pour accélérer l’investissement et la transition vers des infrastructures vertes et bleues, une relance verte et des processus d’achat verts, afin de restaurer les écosystèmes et leur contribution aux personnes et de protéger la biodiversité. La session a donné l’occasion à certaines villes du Sud, Campinas au Brésil et Kochi en Inde, de présenter un concept de projet de leur ville respective au panel d’experts et d’explorer les possibilités de financement de la biodiversité, l’assistance technique et les solutions innovantes.

La session a été modérée par Mme Kimberley Pope, chef de projet et de communauté, Nature Action Agenda, au Forum économique mondial, et le panel d’experts était composé de Frédéric Audras, chef du département Développement urbain, planification et logement à l’Agence française de développement (AFD) ; Alexander Wiese, directeur général, co-responsable de l’Europe chez Bankers without Boundaries (BWB) ; et Aloke Barnwal, spécialiste principal du changement climatique, unité des programmes et coordinateur du Sustainable Cities Impact Program (SCIP) du Fonds pour l’environnement mondial (FEM). Les présentations des villes ont été faites par Gabriel Dias Mangolini Neves, ingénieur en environnement au Secrétariat de l’environnement et du développement durable de la ville de Campinas, et par le Dr C. Rajan, directeur du Centre pour le patrimoine, l’environnement et le développement (C-HED) de la municipalité de Kochi.

Ville écologique, l’une des nombreuses conceptions imaginatives de cet architecte parisien. Image : Vincent Callibaut

Le panel a abordé les questions suivantes : les facteurs clésque les institutions de financement et les investisseurs recherchent lorsqu’ils examinent des projets. Les experts ont partagé leurs idées et  conseils sur les changements qui pourraient être nécessaires pour rendre l’offre des deux villes plus attrayantes du point de vue des investissements et du financement. Les experts ont également échangé des informations sur les mécanismes et les options de financement et d’investissement disponibles qui seraient les mieux adaptés aux projets des deux villes. Une discussion a aussi eu lieu sur les facteurs clés de succès et les mécanismes de gestion des risques qui doivent être en place pour que les investisseurs envisagent d’investir dans les projets. Enfin, les panélistes et les experts des villes ont discuté des moyens dont les villes ont besoin pour accéder au financement et concevoir des solutions innovantes en matière de durabilité. Ils ont également identifié certains des mécanismes et options disponibles pour aider les villes à renforcer leurs capacités.

En conclusion, construire des villes plus vertes pour un avenir plus durable est possible, mais nécessite une action et une réorientation des investissements des secteurs public et privé. Les villes, en particulier, bénéficieront d’un environnement d’investissement favorable qui facilite l’accès aux mécanismes de financement et d’investissement et fournit des solutions de financement efficaces à tous les niveaux. La mobilisation des ressources est une question politique clé dans les consultations et les négociations en cours sur le cadre mondial pour la biodiversité (GBF) post-2020. Elle faitpartie intégrante de la garantie de sa mise en œuvre efficace. Un groupe d’experts a été nommé en vertu de la décision 14/22 de la 14e Conférence des Parties (COP) à la Convention sur la diversité biologique (CDB), afin d’explorer, d’examiner et de faire des recommandations sur divers aspects de la mobilisation des ressources à inclure dans le GBF post-2020.

Les rapports et recommandations du panel d’experts seront délibérés lors des sessions informelles et formelles de l’Organe Subsidiaire pour laMise en œuvre (SBI). Les ambitions des villes et des régions concernant la mobilisation des ressources sont reflétées dans la Déclaration d’Édimbourg sur le GBF post-2020. Si nous pouvons mobiliser les ressources financières nécessaires pour soutenir la transition vers un avenir plus vert qui favorise le développement de la nature dans les villes, nous créerons non seulement de nouvelles opportunités pour les entreprises et des emplois pour tous, mais nous renforcerons également le lien des villes avec la nature pour une planète plus durable, et pour l’avenir que nous voulons.

Ingrid Coetzee et Elizabeth Chouraki 
Cape Town et Paris

On The Nature of Cities

 

 

 

 

 

[1] “Mobilizing Investors to Protect Climate, Land and Biodiversity – Summary of Three Key Events on Natural Capital Investing November 2019, and outlook 2020”

[2] OECD, 2020, The territorial impact of COVID-19: Managing the crisis across levels of government

* * *

Financing Greener Cities for the Future We Want

 

For the International Biodiversity Day, ICLEI Cities Biodiversity Center, the Post 2020 Biodiversity Framework – EU support project and The Nature Of Cities shine a light on the need to make nature part of the solution with greener cities.
Building nature-positive infrastructure

The world is rapidly urbanizing, putting our natural resources under increasing pressure to meet demands for infrastructure, land, water, food, and other crucial needs. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) 55% of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 2018, and it predicted that this proportion would increase to 68% by 2050. The WWF 2020 Living Planet Report recorded that the urbanisation is one of the underlying trends driving the destruction and degradation of nature; and pointed out that the world is currently overusing natural resources at an unprecedented rate. The 2020 global Living Planet Index shows “an average 68% fall in monitored populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016. Species’ population trends are important because they are a measure of overall ecosystem health”.

Infrastructure is central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and globally we build the equivalent of “one Paris per week” (Anderson, 2020) in new structures to meet our demand for infrastructure. The natural resource implications of meeting this need for infrastructure is vast. We need to integrate nature into the design of infrastructure to minimize the negative impact of this infrastructure and make it nature positive. Meeting these increasing demands, while protecting biodiversity, places significant strain on financial resources at both national and local government levels.

Lis cet essai en français.
The report on the study of “The Cost of Policy Inaction — the case of not meeting the 2010 biodiversity target”, which was commissioned by the European Commission in the past decade, looked at the monetary value of biodiversity loss worldwide due to not meeting the 2010 biodiversity target. It conservatively estimated that the loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity is valued at around USD 740 billion per annum and if biodiversity continues to be lost at the projected rate, the accumulated cost of ecosystem services lost since 2000 could grow to US$20 trillion in the year 2050.

Infographic created by The Natue of Cities using source data.
This essay is part of the TNOC Francophone project.
The lack of finance is one of the greatest challenges we face to address the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of nature. We must fundamentally rethink our relationship with nature and transform our economic models and market systems.

The Biodiversity Finance Initiative (UNDP BIOFIN) estimates that over US$400 billion is needed annually to protect biodiversity.[1] However, only a fraction of this is currently being mobilized. At the local government level, in particular, financial resources are predominantly obtained through intergovernmental transfer payments, grants, subsidies and taxes. Many of which are unsustainable over the long term. Funding for biodiversity has been further stressed under the current global COVID-19 pandemic (OECD, 2020). The World Economic Forum (WEF) 2021 Risk Report ranks biodiversity loss, infectious disease, and climate action failure among the top 4 risks by impact in the evolving risk landscape. The unfolding pandemic is having undeniable human, social and economic impacts, and has demonstrated the inherent vulnerability and inequalities of our socio-economic systems. A survey jointly conducted by the OECD and the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) in 24 European Union countries, indicates that most city governments expect the socio-economic crisis linked to COVID-19 to have a negative impact on their finances, with a dangerous “scissors effect” of rising expenditure and falling revenues.[2] This “scissors effect” is felt even more acutely in developing nations.

The WEF recognizes that, “COVID-19 and nature are linked, so should be the recovery”. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Nature and Business Report, a nature-positive pathway in the infrastructure and built environment could create over $3 trillion in business opportunities and create 117 million jobs by 2030. And the 5th Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO) identified sustainable cities and infrastructure as one of 8 transition pathways to living in harmony with nature and to achieving the 2050 Biodiversity Vision.

Infographic created by The Natue of Cities using WEF data.

More recently, the Dasgupta Review of the Economics of Biodiversity, released in February this year, emphasized that our economies, livelihoods and well-being all depend on our most precious asset: Nature. “Nature is more than an economic good: it has intrinsic worth too. Biodiversity enables Nature to be productive, resilient and adaptable.” According to this Review, estimates of our total impact on Nature suggest that we would require 1.6 Earths to maintain the world’s current living standards. And further that it estimated that “to protect 30% of the world’s land and ocean and manage these areas effectively by 2030 would require an average investment of $140 billion annually.”

Taking the conversation to TNOC Festival 2021

As we contemplate the path to recovery and redesign of cities, it is crucial that we consider this from a lens that recognizes planetary boundaries, where nature is part of the solution, and issues of inequality and injustice are addressed. There is thus an increasing need for resource mobilization, not only to meet many urban, social and economic demands, but importantly to ensure that the ecosystems and natural resources on which many of these demands depend, are managed sustainably. It is widely recognized that resource mobilization plays an integral part in achieving many of the current global objectives, such as the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, Sustainable Development Goals and many others.

ICLEI’s Global City Biodiversity Center (CBC) has advocated for increased resource mobilisation and investment in green and blue infrastructure, and the restoration of ecosystem services, at the city and regional scale as part of its ongoing biodiversity advocacy roadmap towards the 15th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Cities with Nature initiative forms part of a collaborative action between ICLEI (on behalf of the Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments), the European Committee of the Regions, Regions for Sustainable Development, Advisory Committee for Subnational Governments (coordinated by Regions4 Sustainable Development and the Government of Quebec), the Group of Leading Subnational Governments toward Aichi Biodiversity Targets, and the Scottish Government.

To take the conversation about investment for redesigning cities where nature is part of the solution and results in no net harm to biodiversity, to a wider audience, ICLEI organized and hosted a virtual seed session at TNOC Festival 2021. The topic of this session, “Financing greener cities for the future we want”, was particularly relevant given the findings of the Dasgupta Review on The Economics of Biodiversity released in February 2021. The need for engaging investors and city administrators on the topic of investment is increasingly urgent, as city governments are facing mounting pressures to address the triple biodiversity, climate and health crises, while their revenue sources are decreasing alarmingly due to the knock-on effects of the ongoing pandemic on the economy and social fabric at both urban and national scales.

The “Financing greener cities for the future we want” session took the form of a round table discussion, which finance experts, investors and city representatives together to engage and share insights on innovative finance approaches, products and solutions that cities could access to accelerate investment and transition in green and blue infrastructure, a green recovery, and green procurement, in order to restore ecosystems and their contribution to people and protect biodiversity. It provided the opportunity for selected Global South cities, Campinas in Brazil, Kochi in India, to pitch a project concept from their respective cities, to the panel of experts and explore potential biodiversity finance avenues, technical assistance and innovative solutions.

The session was moderated by Ms Kimberley Pope, Project and Community Lead, Nature Action Agenda, at the World Economic Forum and the panel of experts were Frédéric Audras, Head of the Urban Development, Planning and Housing Department at the Agence Française de Dévelopement (AFD); Alexander Wiese, Managing Director, Co-Head Europe at Bankers without Boundaries (BWB); and Aloke Barnwal, Senior Climate Change Specialist, Programs Unit and Coordinator of the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) Sustainable Cities Impact Program (SCIP). The city pitches were presented by Gabriel Dias Mangolini Neves, Environmental Engineer at in the Green, Environment and Sustainable Development Secretariat of the City of Campinas; and Dr C Rajan, Director: Centre for Heritage, Environment and Development (C-HED), at Kochi Municipal Corporation.

Ecological City, one of many imaginative designs by this Paris architect. Image: Vincent Callibaut

The panel touched on the following issues: the most important factors that financing institutions and investors look for when considering projects and the experts shared their insights and advice on what changes could be needed to make the two cities’ pitch more attractive from an investment/financing perspective. The panelists also shared information on financing and investment mechanisms and options that are available and would be best suited to the two city pitches. There was also discussion on the key success factors and risk management mechanisms that need to be in place for investors to consider investing in projects. Finally, the panelists and city experts discussed the capacities that cities need to access finance and design innovative sustainability solutions; and identified some of the available mechanisms and options that support cities in building these capacities.

To conclude, building greener cities for a more sustainable future is possible, but requires action and redirecting investment by both the public and private sectors. Cities, in particular, will benefit from an enabling investment environment that facilitates access to financing and investment mechanisms and provides effective financing solutions at all levels. Resource mobilization is a key policy issue in the consultations and negotiations on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF), and is viewed as integral to ensuring its effective implementation. A panel of experts was appointed under Decision 14/22 of the 14th Conference of Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), to explore, consider and make recommendations on various aspects of resource mobilization for inclusion in the post-2020 GBF. The reports and recommendation of the panel of experts will be deliberated during the informal and formal sessions of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI). Cities and regions’ ambitions concerning resource mobilisation are reflected in the Edinburgh Declaration on the post-2020 GBF. If we can mobilize the financial resources needed to support the transition to a greener future that promotes nature positive development in cities, we will not only create new opportunities for business and new jobs for all, but also strengthen cities’ connection to nature for a more sustainable planet, and for the future we want.

Ingrid Coetzee and Elizabeth Chouraki 
Cape Town and Paris

On The Nature of Cities

Elisabeth Chouraki

About the Writer:
Elisabeth Chouraki

Elisabeth Chouraki coordinates the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework - EU support project implemented by Expertise France and funded by the European Union.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] “Mobilizing Investors to Protect Climate, Land and Biodiversity – Summary of Three Key Events on Natural Capital Investing November 2019, and outlook 2020”

[2] OECD, 2020, The territorial impact of COVID-19: Managing the crisis across levels of government