While the suburban mega city is largely the product of unbridled real estate speculation, their existence establishes a new starting point for urban design—hopefully one that produces cities by nature.
A Brief History of Climate Change
Issued in November of 2018 by a collection of 13 government agencies known as the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the environmental assessments of The Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) present a deeply disturbing forecast and polarizing confrontation to most anyone reading the report.
“Disturbing”, given the grave assessments and the magnitude and nature of the anticipated climate events and their impact to the human condition and natural life of the earth. “Polarizing”, in that the report confronts virtually every individual who reads the 500-some page document, especially those in design-related disciplines, and environmental fields, to make a fundamental choice. One, change how one personally lives, works and the content and expertise they advocate through their work. Or two, ignore the report and go on with one’s life and business.
The environmental forecast is dire.
Sea levels are already about a foot higher around US continental shores. Heat waves are increasing and more are predicted. Unusually long droughts are already happening and more of these are predicted and expected to unfold at accelerating rates. The same is forecasted for wildfires. The last three consecutive years have been the warmest years on the measurable record for the globe. The last five consecutive years have been the warmest ever recorded at the polar ice caps.
When first encountered by explorers in 1850, Glacier National Park had 150 distinct glaciers. Today, only 26 remain. Experts are already suggesting that Miami will become “unlivable in the future” not only because of low-level flooding, but also due to salt contamination of the Okeechobee fresh water lake where it draws water.
Dallas Trinity River in Flood
While I unfortunately can’t claim to possess fantastical abilities to tell the future or conjure a crystal ball for a topic that is unquestionably overwhelming and comprehensive, the following article offers a set of realistic proposals to embolden the work of landscape architects, architects, designers, policy-makers and environmentalists. In response to the ever-present question, “What can I do as an individual?” each topic was selected because of the potential it offers to individuals to make a difference.
Topic One: Vitamin N
Health should always be the number one priority and objective that guides city planning, building orientation and their design, to paraphrase the Roman architect Vitruvius in his multi-volume treatise on architecture, “De Architectura” written in the 1stcentury AD. It’s challenging, if not difficult to comprehend how advice taken from a 2,000-year-old document, could be relevant today, given the extraordinary advances in technology and human population. However, a simple diagram puts the challenge and issue of health into a new kind of perspective and unlocks a new awareness about health and the status quo.
The diagram above illustrates the 2.5 million years that encompass the evolution of humanity. The thin magenta line on the right is more than ample thickness to represent the entire amount of time where the physical backdrop to life that has shaped the human condition has been life spent living in organized settlements, villages and cities. The 150-year era of anthropogenic climate change would fit into an even thinner, microscopic slice of the same line.
It might seem like this diagram is a graphic trick to arouse alarm about the rapidity of climate change and how, if it persists to become a more measurable width on this diagram, it would probably mean the end of human civilization. However, the actual point of the diagram is to call attention to the time and the entire area to the left of the right edge, and a particular realization it unlocks about health and human development.
As the legendary biologist Dr. E.O Wilson of Harvard characterizes, for approximately two and half million years, “Humanity was a biological species living in a biological environment.” While most everyone loves the cold medicine and indoor plumbing of the modern world, thirty-some years of credible, peer-reviewed research by individuals such as Dr. Wilson and Dr. Ming ( Frances ) Kuo of the University of Illinois, along with other colleagues of a like-mind, are revealing that human contact with nature produces extraordinary health and human welfare benefits, as follows.
According to studies taken from the Chicago Police and Crime reports, individuals living in public housing projects, where the “housing projects” were cookie cut buildings, people living in the buildings that were surrounded by more trees and nature – “greener in other words” – produced fewer violent crimes and fights. In the greener buildings, when altercations and disputes arose they were less likely to be settled with violence.
Girl and Butterfly at Airfield Falls, Fort Worth
Further studies with children who suffer from ADHD and depression, revealed that, when in a controlled test group, children experienced a daily twenty minute walk in a park, another group a residential street with no trees, and a third group in an urban downtown, the children who experienced the park saw a reduction of their symptoms and a higher ability to concentrate than the other two groups whose symptoms were actually amplified by the nature-deficient environments.
Physical, biological and cardiovascular health is also measurably affected by contact with nature. Controlled studies of individuals who were instructed to take “a walk in the woods” developed a healthier cardiovascular blood profile than those who did not. Blood pressure lowered and, astonishingly, blood chemistry altered toward a healthier biochemistry. The health benefits continue.
Individuals who lived in greener neighborhoods also demonstrated a higher ability to survive a stroke, if one happens. As Dr. Kuo has come to summarize, “Nature appears to be a new kind of vitamin” that cultivates cardiovascular health and cardiovascular resilience in humans.
Even a basic question of how much “nature” does one need before measurable benefits appear, reveals that even shorter, periodic “doses of nature” during just a three day weekend trip to a natural area, elevates the production of antibodies and blood chemistry that is beneficial to fighting the advent of cancer cells, an astonishing 50 percent. One month after the three-day weekend with nature, blood tests of the same individuals reveal that blood chemistry is still 28% above where it was before the trip.
The old saying to “stop and smell the roses” portended that actually doing so can improve your health. Thirty-year long studies show that smelling roses (and other flowers that are fragrant to humans) reduces the release of stress and obesity-producing cortisol.
Le Corbusier designed the Villa Savoye between 1929 and 1931. ca. 2002 Poissy, France
Taken together, along with many other studies with similar results, that “green nature-focused neighborhoods” (and buildings by logical extension) reduce the number of preventable deaths from cardiovascular disease and diabetes, by one half.
Considering that cardiovascular disease cost the US Health Care System over
$500 billion dollars in 2016, and the costs of diabetes related to cardiovascular disease cost were $245 billion dollars, a new Health Imperative for architecture, landscape architecture and environmental design may be coming of age and toward a new purpose with unassailable and measurable results.
To extend the original axiom from Vitruvius, “health” can apply not only to buildings and arranging cities and a physical environment that is healthy to humans, but also how the cities and buildings we arrange reverberate health and healing to a planet that is groaning with the symptoms of Climate Change.
This leads to ReWILDING, which is the next topic.
Topic Two: REWILDING
ReWILDING is a process and an approach to landscape and environmental development that begins by constructing an inventory of the species and natural life that the landscape can shelter, that is also appropriate to the place. Architects, who typically design buildings that are tailored to a similar inventory of occupants, refer to this formative activity as “the program” of a building.
What is known as ReWILDing began some thirty years ago as environmental reconstruction that was intended to rebalance ecosystems through the re-introduction of species, largely alpha predators such as the grey wolf project in Yellowstone and also species that repopulated African preserves and the surrounding savannahs.
The idea that ReWILDING can apply to virtually any landscape project, at any scale as a new programmatic imperative for the landscape of any project or building program, is sweeping the world. The key to understanding the application of ReWILDING as a design activity, is to recognize that all projects and sites are not appropriate environments for all the possible species a region might offer for consideration.
For example, where the left-over landscape around a suburban motor bank isn’t possible to ReWILD for coyotes, red fox and the bobcats that freely roam the watershed corridors in Dallas Fort Worth, a small landscape project like this still can, successfully ReWILD for native bees, pollinators, migratory songbirds and, if storm detention is involved, aquatic plants and the amphibians and species they support.
Egrets in Dallas
With ReWILDING, almost every new project, site renovation or construction can, to some degree, also be an act of environmental recovery. Once the program of natural species is established, plant communities and arrangements take place accordingly.
The final step in the process is to reintroduce human activity into the ReWILDED landscape, carefully with design, so the two conditions can co-exist.
Topic Three: City by Nature
Cities that flourished in the mid to late twentieth century such as Phoenix, Dallas / Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and Atlanta, all materialized as thinly arrayed patterns that were enabled by the motor car, cheap energy and an environmentally unbridled and unconstrained culture. While pre-twentieth century cities largely formed around densely urban, colonial cores that generated cultural densities (between 30 persons per acre in San Francisco to over one hundred persons per acre in Manhattan), the endless landscape of the suburban megacities average around one person per acre.
An unintended effect of suburban megacities is the appearance of wildlife inside city limits that thrive in an abundant geography of open areas and the ribbons of trees and nature that exist along metropolitan creeks, rivers and ravines of a cities watershed network. While cities have always had “pests” such as rats, fleas, lice and other vermin, the appearance of coyotes, red foxes, turkey flocks, bobcats and nesting eagles are all species that are presently thriving within the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, where my private practice works and studies. DFW is a textbook demonstration of solutions and possibilities that can transfer and apply to cities with similar problems and opportunities.
Downtown Dallas Trinity River Corridor
Settled on the gently rolling topography of the North Texas Blackland Prairie, Dallas Fort Worth (DFW ) is traversed by a vast, web-like watershed network of small rivers, creeks, ravines, tree belts and man-made ponds and reservoirs, that some experts might refer to as the Green Infrastructure of the city. Areas such as the luxurious Turtle Creek corridor in Highland Park, Dallas and the historic White Rock Lake reservoir demonstrate how urban planning can leverage a cultural affinity for nature to form neighborhoods of exceptional economic and cultural value around the nature of these kind of resources.
The DFW Branch Waters Network is an emerging planning initiative to make the ad hoc process of development that is forming along the green corridors of the watershed network a more deliberate process with predictable results.
Vitruvian Park Drone View
Such an initiative is reinforced by the health benefits of nature, the cultural affinity for nature which attracts density patterns, the connectivity of the watershed nature for recreation and transportation and all the attendant economic benefits and value that could arise, that taken together, could compel suburban mega cities to restructure in potentially, the same number of decades it took to originally produce the unsustainable, endless and sprawling form.
While the suburban mega city is largely the product of unbridled real estate speculation, their existence establishes a new starting point for urban design.
Intersecting these needs with a cultural affinity for nature offers the potential to eventually produce cities by nature, that offer health for the human condition and the environment of the planet, delight and a new kind of prosperity that will not be at the expense of the earth and ourselves.
SUMMARY: Energy, The Common Denominator
According to the 2005 bestselling book “The Tree” by Colin Tudge, wood will be the building material of the future. Tudge’s assertion is not based on his affinity for wood, but rather, an assertion that is entirely based on energy. Wood requires the least amount of energy for its production, given that natural energy of the sun. Depending on how it will be harvested and milled, it is a material that has the lower latent energy that is possible. Finally, wood naturally recycles into the earth through biodegradation.
Spain Metropol Parasol
Imagine how the professional design awards would change if criteria principals weren’t only aesthetics, concepts and artistic conceits, but rather were based on a new set of criteria:
Energy use – what projects use the least amount of energy to construct, operate, and sustain and/or to eventually demolish.
Human health – the health benefits the building or project engenders in the inhabitants through contact with vitamin N – or nature.
Ecological conservation – the depth and magnitude of the non-human species a building or a new project site and landscape accommodates and the amount of domestic water use the project preserves.
Given the clear-eyed and disturbing picture painted by the recent The Fourth National Climate Assessment,the path forward demands that the look and style of something may not be as important as the impact it makes and the healing it offers to the environment and human condition.
Where popular culture has many issues and layers that perhaps separate individuals from truly comprehending the gravitas of the situation, landscape architects and the environmental sciences are on the front lines and ready to take action. We are in a unique position to make an immediate and measurable difference.
Art BioFarm
“Form follows performance” may replace the industrial preoccupation of the twentieth century and its priority for “function” that is damaging to the environment. It will take the effort of many, if not everyone’s, hands to get a grip on all the solutions that are needed. It is a purpose and priority on which all should agree.
The work of any and every landscape architect can contribute the next granular improvement to the environment, and that improvement will aggregate with the other granular good works of others to eventually accumulate results.
As one example, in Dallas Fort Worth, if one in every ten households installed a 5 x 5 ReWILDED pocket prairie in their back yard, 1,000 acres of the original Blackland Prairie could be recovered. Even for most commissions that stipulate a cultivated landscape design, edges and fringes always exist in most situations to introduce concentrations of native species that could give respites to migrating pollinators and songbirds.
Potentially of equal or greater importance, is for landscape architects to become advocates and explicators of the environment through writing, speaking and producing videos shorts. Landscape architects are one of the very few professional groups that exist, uniquely educated to understand, predict the consequences, and propose realistic solutions for the climate crisis.
Local newspapers, reeling under the impact of blogs and the Internet, are in need for volunteer writers and ideas and topics worth circulating. Reach out and ask to become a voice in your community newspapers and write for the environment. Community, school and church groups frequently struggle to convene interesting programs for their membership. Reach out and volunteer to give a lively and memorable presentation on the virtues of the landscape architecture you love and the profound ability it has, if redirected in purpose, to affect them individually and the climate crisis positively, and with beauty.
Moreover, landscape architects should learn and then be unhesitant about developing their skills in persuasion, of linking the good intentions of ReWILDING with the superior economic advantages that it often produces. While it’s desirable to bring a larger culture along to a more informed environmental position, in the day-to-day activities, gaining approval of a good idea, even if the basis for preference is cheaper cost and a better bottom line, is the real objective. The environment that needs the solutions and the wild life in search of habitat has little awareness for how their needs are met.
Activities and opportunities like this will often go uncompensated, although not unrecognized. Return on the effort and time it takes to prepare often materializes as another invitation for commissions that align with a landscape architects interest.
In imprecating artists to be leaders, the late sculptor Isamu Noguchi offered remarks that should embolden most landscape architects and planners to act. To paraphrase, “No one is going to pay you in the beginning. Instead, convince yourself and then go out and convince the world what it needs by leading with your unassailable and good intentions, and then, they will know how and why they need to hire you for what’s next.”
We have come to realize that a greener, safer and healthier world starts at a young age and that the schoolyard is the perfect place to provide urban nature for everyone, regardless of any children’s home situation. The movement for green schoolyards is on!
A Tiny Food Forest? As in, an edible forest? At school? Driven and designed by a bunch of 4thgraders? Absolutely. This project became a reality thanks to a dedicated team of enthusiastic individuals (children, teachers, directors, policymakers, nature educators, parents, neighbors, designers, and scientists) in the mid-sized town of Ede in the Netherlands: A green schoolyard for the entire school to enjoy, play in, explore, and wonder about. Children will harvest berries, cook up freshly picked herbs in the outdoor kitchen, and collect walnuts and hazelnuts. They’ll attend have class but also witness staff meetings in the open air amphitheater, monitor bees and other insects flying in and out of the homemade insect hotel, and see their self-planted tree grow over the years.
In my last blog, A Sense of Wonder: The Missing Ingredient to a Long-Term Value for Nature?, Bronwyn Cumbo and I questioned what types of childhood experiences instill a lifelong value for nature and promote stewardship behavior later in life. It turned out that children who experience a sense of wonder through direct contact with nature are more likely to develop a life-long respect and value for the existence of natural areas, the habitats they contain and the species they support. That in mind, you can imagine how happy I am to share the making of the first Tiny Food Forest in the Netherlands—at a primary school!
This story begins on a grey afternoon in January 2018. Twenty-six 9 and 10 year-olds were nervously wobbling on their chairs in their classroom on the 1st floor of a primary school in the town of Ede the Netherlands. The sound of low whispers and hushed giggles, heads curiously turning to the door. Were they expecting a visitor? Indeed, they were. Today, a real scientist would visit their class, as part of the Scientist in the Classroom program (see Box 1). The children were as excited as if Santa himself was about to walk in.
And that’s when I rocked up: Hardly five feet tall, wearing an orange jumper and a bright blue backpack. No lab coat, no looking glass—what kind of scientist was this? The children were told to bring a measuring cup, so surely something sciencey was going to happen. At this point, the children did not know about the sacks filled with sand, soil and pebbles that were awaiting them outside. But as in real science life, before we headed out to test and explore, we first asked ourselves some burning questions and started collecting all presently available knowledge on the topic. On we went.
A student proudly demonstrates his microscope at the start of the Scientist in the Classroom afternoon. Photo: Iris Meiler
Box 1: Scientist in the Classroom
Scientist in the Classroom is a program that stimulates “research-oriented learning” at primary schools, developed by several universities in the Netherlands. Scientists interested in engaging with a different audience, are trained in “research-oriented learning” and supported to shape their knowledge and expertise for education at primary school level. Based on their own research, scientists develop a class to teach to 10 to 12 year-olds which is offered via the Scientist in the Classroom website at the start of the school year. Primary school teachers pick their favorite class and are connected to the scientist to discuss about expectations and details, and if it is a match, pick a date. The class is evaluated, and if the scientist would like to, offered again the next year.
This is the third year I participate in the Scientist in the Classroom program, and I highly recommend it. It is not only a fun and rewarding way to interact on your research with a new audience; it is also a way to “test” your research and its societal relevance in particular. It made me think: Am I asking the right questions, am I evaluating the right solutions? Teaching in 3rd and 4th grade provided me insight on how children perceive changing weather patterns, what their worries are about urban heat and wet feet, and in which direction they search for solutions. And most importantly, it taught me the need to design spaces that are fun to use and that encourage interaction.
The topic I brought to class was “Climate and Wet Feet”. Upon asking about personal experiences with wet feet after heavy rains and hot and cool spots during last summer’s heat wave, about 26 out of 26 (OK, 52 actually…) hands were raised. Who says discussing climate change impacts should be left to the “experts”? Or that people do not notice, let alone care about, the consequences of changing weather patterns in their daily lives? From the stories that followed from my questions it turned out that all children in class had experienced and held a perception of urban heat and flooding. It became clear that they noticed how nature, from gardens to forests, plays a role in reducing the heat and wetting their feet. Of course, this was exactly what I was after: Talking about and experiencing how greenspace can help deal with heat and flooding in built-up areas. As one girl mentioned:
“The shady garden of my grandparents’ house in the countryside is so lovely in summer.”
—Grade 4 child of Panta Rhei Primary
A boy told us how he would jump puddles on his way to school after a heavy shower, which immediately got supported by his classmate who used to live on the same street. This in turn led to upheaval about their own schoolyard, and the children got up from their chairs to take me to the classroom window for a peek at their view: A large, square yard covered with concrete tiles and the odd play set. There were two tall trees breaking the scene, but they seemed somewhat out of place with their roots all covered in concrete. Unsurprisingly, the trees could not prevent the rainwater from building up at their feet and around the stormwater drain. The teacher was right when she told me, in preparation of this class, that an afternoon about green solutions for climate change impacts would be very welcome.
This was the moment to return to the theoretical part of my class on Climate and Wet Feet. Teaching the children about the consequences of changing weather patterns at the local scale, comparing their own experiences to those elsewhere in the world, they were quite impressed by the images of flooded neighborhoods in the UK and families carrying their belongings high above their heads in the streets of Indonesia. But also, the image of a man being rescued from his car in the Netherlands and a picture of a Dutch student in his swimming trunks moving through the street on an airbed got the children’s attention. This was not something that was far removed from their own personal lives.
To link these climate change impacts to the role of nature in our home environment, we watched a short animation titled “Tile out, plant in!”. In two minutes, the animation shows the negative effects of paved private gardens: rainwater cannot infiltrate the soil, leading to increased pressure on the sewage system. Biodiversity suffers as paved backyards do not offer much in terms of habitat for hedgehogs, birds, bees and butterflies, and the animation also illustrates how paved yards increase the urban heat island effect which effects people as much as animals, especially the young and elderly. Luckily the video did not leave us all sad and gloomy, instead we felt inspired and ready for action! It showed how easy it is to turn around this process of paving and start a process of planting, starting at our home environment. Hence the title: “Tile out, plant in!”.
A science class does not come without fieldwork, so off we went, into the schoolyard, to collect our data. I had prepared a water infiltration experiment in which the children would pour water into similar sized pots filled with soil, sand and/or pebbles and measure the time needed for the water to seep through as well as the difference in volume between the water poured in and the water that had seeped out. The children noted down their results on a scoring sheet, repeating the experiment with different types of fillings (soil, sand or pebbles). We took our data sheets back to the classroom and discussed the results. Soil turned out to be the winner, with most time needed for water to seep through and most water retained by the soil—meaning less water ended up on the pavement for release into the sewage system, and also that water is released more slowly which relieves pressure on the system (especially relevant for peakflow).
So, what’s next? How can we put our findings into practice? It was time to distill and formulate our recommendations. The children came up with numerous ideas to tackle their paved “Wet Feet” schoolyard and turn it into a green, friendly and explorative one, inspired by DIY solutions such as rainwater harvesting and green schoolyard designs of which I showed them examples in my presentation. Most important to the children, was to create a nicer space to play. Yes, they understood the benefits that a green schoolyard provides for stormwater drainage capacity, ambient temperature and biodiversity. But what mattered most to the children, rightly so, was to be able to play and explore together in a green and surprising environment with slopes, tunnels, sand hills and shaded seats of which the looks change with the season.
Green schoolyard designs by the children and the architect. Photos: Iris Meijer
To make sure we all actually experienced what it is like to play in a green schoolyard, the teacher and I planned a second meetup to take the class for a visit to a nearby school that already implemented a green schoolyard. It was much smaller than their own schoolyard but featured an insect hotel, kitchen garden, a tunnel made out of willows, a little stepping stone path with mosaic tiles and an outdoor kitchen. You should have seen the children go. Their play turned into one full of exploration and wonder, and also collaboration. Green schoolyards have been found to improve children’s physical, social and emotional well‐being, including less bullying and a greater feeling of safety (Kelz, Evans, and Röderer 2015; Bates, Bohnert, and Gerstein 2018; van Dijk-Wesselius et al. 2018). Back in the classroom, the children started making designs for their own schoolyard which they would finish in the following weeks.
“Look at these bugs! I want to take one home.”
—Grade 4 child of Panta Rhei Primary
The teacher and I were getting really excited to get this started, but knew we depended on the support of other’s, to push it forward. So, we got to work. The teacher attended a conference on green schoolgrounds and started to warm up her colleagues and school directors to the idea. I knew that local food production is high on the agenda for Ede municipality, so I asked a friend working with the municipality about their support programs for schools with a wish to become ‘greener’. She pointed out several options, from kitchen gardens to daily fruit deliveries. She also put me in touch with the local nature education organization Het Groene Wiel (The Green Wheel) for which the timing could not have been better: their national umbrella organization IVN (Nature Education Institute) had just received a donation to plant 100 Tiny Forests and 2 Tiny Food Forests and for the Tiny Food Forest they were urgently looking for a school. A Tiny Forest is a tennis court sized forest with trees planted closely together in order for them to grow rapidly, and quickly become an ecosystem that does not need any management. A Tiny Food Forest is a similar sized but less densely planted forest in which every plant is, or carries something edible: berry bushes, fruit trees, nut trees and herbs. This makes a Tiny Food Forest perfect for interaction, play and educational purposes.
From then on, things started to move fast. All school staff were gathered for a meeting to be introduced to the Tiny Food Forest concept and to discuss the options for their school, the board was approached, and Het Groene Wiel mobilized their Tiny Forest team. For Ede municipality, this was a perfect opportunity to further promote their image within the leading agri-food center of Europe: Foodvalley. With this team of enthusiasts, a new collaborative project was born. Children, parents, neighbors—everyone got involved. A designer was contracted to work out the plans and after summer break the first preparations took off. Materials were collected with the help of parents and staff and also residents of the school neighborhood came out to help clear the old schoolyard, removing concrete tiles for reuse in the new outdoor kitchen and the construction of a hilly herb garden. Physically, it all got done in a couple of days.
Official opening of Panta Rhei’s Tiny Food Forest “Het Bosplein”. Photos: Iris Meijer
The first Tiny Food Forest of the Netherlands! The festive official opening took place on a cold day in November. The designer, me and a team of Het Groene Wiel volunteers gathered early to plant the trees, bushes and herbs of many different species that would become the Tiny Food Forest. Children had the opportunity to name and plant a tree so they could follow the growth of “their” tree throughout the school years. The school director and my friend from the municipality came out to take a peek before everyone arrived for the official opening. It was a grand opening with tv cameras and photographers from the national youth news channel and local news. Children and parents were excited about everything that was happening around them, maybe even a little nervous? There was a speech from the municipality’s spatial planning councilor, the school director and two children recited a poem about their new green schoolyard. And of course, the Tiny Food Forest needed to be named! In the weeks before the official opening, the team had organized a schoolwide competition in which the children could propose a name for their new schoolyard, followed by a voting round. And today the winner was announced: Het Bosplein, which is Dutch for the forest (bos) yard (plein). The student who invented the name received a big round of applause and together with the 4thgrade teacher, officially opened the new schoolyard by revealing an information board showing facts and illustrations about the Tiny Food Forest.
Parents and neighbors help remove the schoolyard’s concrete tiles and reuse them to construct the new design. Photos: Iris Meijer
And what’s next? Hopefully the forest will grow tall and strong to become a place to explore, play in and enjoy—a real place of wonder for the children. It will certainly become a green addition to the neighborhood and a change of scene for staff and children alike. Teachers will find new ways to include outdoor schooling in their teaching, supported by Het Groene Wiel, and children will come home with new stories and adventures. Several of them will become junior rangers of their own food forest. In terms of biodiversity monitoring, Wageningen University started a monitoring project around Tiny Forests and will include the Bospleinin its inventory. Also, IVN, the national Nature Education Institute, will follow all that happens around the Tiny Forests and publish the Tiny Forest newsletter. For the town of Ede, it is great to have this as a national first and I was told they already increased their 2019 budget for greening schoolyards. Similar developments have taken place in cities across the country. We have come to realize that a greener, safer and healthier world starts at a young age and that the schoolyard is the perfect place to provide urban nature for everyone, regardless of any children’s home situation. The movement for green schoolyards is on!
Me planting rosemary bushes and other herbs for Panta Rhei’s Tiny Food Forest
References
Bates, Carolyn R, Amy M Bohnert, and Dana E Gerstein. 2018. “Green Schoolyards in Low-Income Urban Neighborhoods: Natural Spaces for Positive Youth Development Outcomes.” Frontiers in Psychology9: 805. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00805.
Dijk-Wesselius, J.E. van, J. Maas, D. Hovinga, M. van Vugt, and A.E. van den Berg. 2018. “The Impact of Greening Schoolyards on the Appreciation, and Physical, Cognitive and Social-Emotional Well-Being of Schoolchildren: A Prospective Intervention Study.” Landscape and Urban Planning180 (December): 15–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2018.08.003.
Kelz, Christina, Gary William Evans, and Kathrin Röderer. 2015. “The Restorative Effects of Redesigning the Schoolyard.” Environment and Behavior47 (2): 119–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916513510528.
Parks are not simply pleasant amenities, but serve as a foundation to the social, economic, environmental, and mental health of communities. By ensuring every resident of every city lives within a 10-minute walk of a park, we can fundamentally and positively impact the quality of life for hundreds of millions.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, parks have always been deeply intertwined in the modern identities of cities. In the U.S., Central Park is less a feature of New York than it is a key component of its essential character, much as Prospect Park once similarly defined the emerging city of Brooklyn, and Brooklyn Bridge Park defines the “new” Brooklyn; Boston Common remains a testament to Boston’s proud, revolutionary past as Balboa Park in San Diego and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco embody those cities’ forward-looking idealism and promise of opportunity. Small cities and towns too have their Central Parks, if not always in natural and architectural splendor, yet still in their importance to nurturing communities through the provision of a truly public space.
Brooklyn Bridge Park. Photo: Adrian BenepeLong Meadow, Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Photo: Sanden WolffDolores Park. Photo: Tim Bartel
It’s possible, however, that many planners and civic leaders continue to greatly undervalue parks as key pieces of a city’s ecological and social fabric. This is evidenced by how one in three Americans lack access to a park within a 10-minute walk, leaving more than 100 million people deprived of easily accessed green space, creating a cascade of impacts on mental and physical health, and even economic opportunities for these cities. This is why The Trust for Public Land (TPL), in partnership with the Urban Land Institute (ULI), and the National Recreation and Parks Association (NRPA), launched the 10-Minute Walk to a Park Campaign, a movement to ensure a great park within a half-mile of every person, in every neighborhood, in every city across America (see how the 14,000 American cities and towns fare here). The Trust for Public Land and its partners founded the campaign on the essential premise that parks and open space not only have vast inherent value in connecting urban dwellers to nature, they also have a multitude of other benefits that make them versatile and comprehensive solutions to the diverse array of challenges cities increasingly face, and will continue to face as the U.S. and all other nations continue to urbanize.
Parks foster social interaction and provide gathering spaces, they also improve the economies of surrounding neighborhoods, and, consequently, the encompassing city, through the appreciating value of nearby properties, growth in tourism revenue, and the provision of free and accessible recreation. The environmental value of parks is similarly significant, from their ability to soak up storm water runoff and keep it out of storm sewers to their ability to regulate temperatures in our urban “heat islands”, lowering temperatures by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit. As cities become forced to think increasingly about extreme weather events and heat due to climate change, parks and more open green space will provide efficient and sustainable alternatives to impervious, heat-trapping gray infrastructure.
Public health is also affected by the presence of parks. The built environment in which we live factors strongly in how our individual health is determined, particularly in how it can encourage or discourage active and healthy behaviors. Parks, in conjunction with a host of other factors, including employment, adequate transportation and housing, strong social ties and access to health care, can positively affect the health and wellbeing of a neighborhood, in turn reducing costs and addressing latent inequities.
Parks then are not simply pleasant amenities but serve as a foundation to the social, economic, environmental, and mental health of communities. By ensuring every resident of every city in the U.S. lives within a 10-minute walk of a park, we can fundamentally and positively impact the quality of life for hundreds of millions of Americans.
More city officials are now realizing the intrinsic and instrumental value of parks. This is reflected in the fact that, as of February 2019, more than 240 mayors have signed onto the campaign. Mayors from Anaheim, Topeka, Memphis, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Oakland, and Washington, D.C., among many others, are taking actionable steps towards realizing a 10-minute walk to park vision, adopting the principles and strategies laid out by the campaign, and working closely with experts from TPL, NRPA, and ULI to design new master plans that propose ways in which their citizens can all have easy access to green space.
Lewisville, Texas is one of those cities that has recently committed to this goal and has met words with action. A suburb of Dallas with a high concentration of immigrants and refugees, the city composed an updated parks and open space master plan with funding from our campaign’s planning grant, aiming to ensure 85 percent of the city’s residents live within a 10-minute walk to a park by 2025. Equity is a top consideration of Stacy Anaya, Director of Lewisville Parks and Recreation, who has called her city a testament to how “poor urban planning contributes to a systematic segregation of access to public spaces and services”. They’ve engaged community members and brought in partners such as Chin Community Ministries, the Youth Action Council, and Keep Lewisville Beautiful to ensure full participation in the creation and implementation of their roadmap to the 10-minute walk vision.
In Tukwila, Washington, a diverse and growing suburb of Seattle, city officials set out to engage their community in plans to reach 100% 10-minute walk park access. Another recipient of the technical assistance grant, Tukwila’s mayor, Allan Ekberg, announced, “Parks play a critical role in the health and well-being of our communities. In Tukwila, we are proud to engage with our diverse communities in connecting all our residents to quality local parks within a 10-minute walk from home.” Tukwila will, by 2020, have adopted a new Park, Recreation and Open Space plan.
Boston is perhaps the ultimate example of a city that has taken its 10-minute walk commitment seriously. In October 2018, Mayor Marty Walsh and city officials announced that they reached 100% 10-minute walk to park access. To reach this milestone, Boston city leaders leveraged a data-driven approach to craft a master plan that pinpointed underserved neighborhoods and offered creative and comprehensive solutions to meet those needs. Joint-use agreements—those between the city and the education department, which allow schoolyards to be used as public parks outside of school hours—also helped create new forms of open space in communities that may have otherwise lacked it. Boston, however, continues to invest in its park system: the city recently allocated $230 million to parks through. Imagine Boston 2030, and their Resilient Boston Harbor initiative includes parks as a key of part of its effort to strengthen Boston’s climate resiliency.
Benita Hussain, Director of the 10-Minute Walk Campaign, with Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.Photo: Maddalena Polletta
For many cities, shared-use agreements between school districts and municipal governments offer perhaps the clearest path towards comprehensively realizing the 10-minute walk vision at scale, particularly in dense geographies. Often poorly equipped, locked after school hours, and consequently underutilized, schoolyards are places with vast potential, capable of being transformed into neighborhood parks that forge new relationships between nature—and the myriad of benefits that come with it—and communities. These new “green schoolyards” that double as water absorbent, green infrastructure are, as Children andNature define them, “multi-functional school grounds designed for and by the school community that [offer] places for students, teachers, parents and community members to play, learn, explore and grow.” In New York, TPL has led the transformation of over two-hundred asphalt lots into green schoolyards, serving 4.5 million people within a 10-minute walk. Other cities are beginning to implement this strategy, Boston being one of them. Since 2014, the city and schools of Philadelphia in partnership with TPL have created green schoolyards that provide 10-minute walk to a park access to 136,412 community members. A pilot program of five sites in Oakland will serve 34,000 people with 10-minute walk access. Green schoolyards can be the lynchpin of a city’s plan to provide more neighborhood park access to its residents.
The 10-minute walk to a park vision is spreading across the country, as it becomes accepted by more communities and embraced by a growing number of mayors and other civic leaders. And this vision, founded on the knowledge that parks are multi-benefit keystones of every neighborhood, is a major part of any solution to the mounting challenges cities face. Cities such as Boston are leading the way, while smaller communities including Tukwila and Lewisville are planning and spearheading their own, ambitious efforts. All share in a common belief: that access to green space creates more vibrant, inclusive cities for all.
Benita Hussain is a former advisor to Mike Bloomberg and late-Boston Mayor Tom Menino with corporate law degree and 15 years of experience in climate change, cities, and sustainable development. She currently leads Trust for Public Land’s national 10-Minute Walk Campaign to expand green spaces in cities.
Although there are some difficulties associated with growing trees and certain vegetation types on tall buildings, the success enjoyed by Hancock, Hundertwasser, and Boeri highlighted in this essay, shows that it is possible.
In 1883, a rooftop garden theatre opened in New York City. The idea was to escape the city summer heat, whilst enjoying some evening entertainment, without actually leaving NYC. A decade later, the New York Times announced that, “New York is fast becoming a city of roof gardens”. In 1935, the Welsh landscape architect Ralph Hancock, saw his Garden of the Nations open on the 11thfloor of the Rockefeller Centre in New York City. Two thousand trees and shrubs were lifted onto that roof. Hancock then repeated the feat with the smaller (6000 square metres) Derry and Toms Roof Garden, on a 7–storey department store in Kensington High Street in London (which was opened in 1938). It had a Tudor garden, a Spanish garden and a woodland garden complete with a pond. Although the gardens closed in 2018 when the tenant left, they will re-open in 2020. The gardens are subject to historic building protection and historic garden protection under the planning system. One hundred trees on the roof garden were given tree preservation orders in 1976. They are an important example of how forest trees can be established on a roof, some now more than 70 years old and growing in surprisingly shallow soil (about 500mm deep).
Kensington Roof garden
In the 1970s, the Austrian artist Hundertwasser began to promote the idea of forested roofs. He teamed up with the architect Krawina in 1979 determined to make his progressive ideas a reality, however he was disappointed by the architect’s initial insistence on level floors and straight lines (Hundertwasser liked neither level floors nor straight lines). By 1984 however, the Hundertwasser House was built, with undulating floors and 250 trees and bushes upon it. It has 53 apartments, 4 offices, 16 private terraces, 3 communal terraces and a café. Other vegetated buildings by Hundertwasser followed, including housing complexes, an incineration plant and finally, a toilet in New Zealand. His 12-storey Walspirale in Germany is topped by a beech, lime and maple forest. These projects are of special interest because the vegetation is often more akin to a lightly-managed natural forest than a conventional roof garden.
Hundertwasser House
Despite the success of some of these pioneering projects, the rise in popularity of lightweight green roofs in Europe and North America and the podium gardens of the high-rise cities of the Far East, the practice of establishing trees on taller buildings remains a curiosity and is still unusual. But that may be changing. The Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) of Milan, Italy is causing a stir in architectural circles and more and more property developers are asking if they can have trees on their buildings too. Bosco Verticale consists of two residential towers in the former industrial district of Porta Nuova, designed by Stefano Boeri with support from the horticulturalist Laura Gatti. One tower is 26 storeys high and the other 18, and between them they support more than 900 trees. The buildings were opened in 2014 and in 2015 and before long the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat selected the project as the overall Best Tall Building Worldwide.
What is remarkable about these buildings is that they are festooned with trees and shrubs. These are not buildings with conventional lightweight green roofs or green walls, but structures with substantial vegetation fully integrated into the building fabric. They have been designed with vegetation in mind from the beginning. Planting that was often said to be impossible or impractical a few years ago is now working. It is a delight for those fortunate enough to live in these leafy towers, with high-rise bird song and some extra relief from the summer heat, however it will be more important as a signpost to others, now free to imagine, plan, design and build other sylvan buildings. The real urban jungle is much more of a possibility.
The roof gardens of the late 19thand early 20thcentury were about entertainment and amusement, however the growing body of evidence that putting soil, vegetation and water on buildings provides so many benefits is now changing the way people think about the idea. A major problem with conventional buildings is that materials exposed to the sun, absorb heat and re-radiate it later. This is the main cause of the urban heat island effect, whereby the center of cities is several degrees hotter than the rural hinterland. Urban heat also exacerbates air pollution. Most people do not feel well during heatwaves and many vulnerable people, especially the young and very old, die. This problem is likely to get worse as carbon dioxide continues to build up atmosphere and the climate destabilises. More heatwaves and more severe heatwaves are predicted. Clothe buildings with soil and vegetation, and less heat is absorbed from the sun in the first place. Then, as moisture leaves , through the process of evapotranspiration, evaporative cooling occurs. This has a significant cooling effect on buildings. For example, external walls behind vegetation may be more than 10 degrees Centigrade cooler than adjacent unvegetated walls. This saves money that would otherwise be used to pay for air conditioning. In locations where people do not have access to electro-mechanical cooling, vegetation on buildings will save lives.
Rainwater intercepted by the growing medium of green roofs or rainwater harvested for irrigation does not go into the downspouts to flood streets or overwhelm drains. The Sponge City is the concept whereby water is held in the built environment. This reduces the likelihood of flooding and provides water for plants and evaporative cooling. Vegetating buildings, including tall buildings, has to be part of the whole for the Sponge City to work. Conventional open spaces are essential, however they aren’t enough on their own.
Nature-deficit disorder is not recognised by most medical professionals. It is the idea, promoted by Richard Louv, that a lack of contact with nature (which is now increasingly common with most people living in cities and staying indoors) causes stress and sadness. What is proven, however is that viewing vegetation reduces stress and lowers blood pressure (for example see this paper by Cox et al. in BioScience in 2017). Accessing nature and being immersed in nature in the style of forest bathing (Shinrin-Yoku) is preferable and ideal when available, however bringing vegetation, soil and water ever closer to where people live, on roofs, walls, balconies and indoors, will improve their mental health.
One of the issues which has bedevilled people trying to get vegetation on buildings is weight. This has driven some to develop and offer lightweight systems. Whilst this is sometimes useful, especially when retrofitting green roofs onto buildings that were not designed for that purpose, it has also meant that many green roofs, in particular, have growing media that are either absent, or that are so shallow that they do not support a very diverse community of plants, do not store very much rainwater and therefore provide relatively little evaporative cooling.
In my experience, once structural engineers understand that a roof or balcony needs to take the weight of a sufficient depth of growing medium to support the range of plants being proposed in a design, they are able and willing to do this. When the requirement for greening is considered at the early stages of design there are more options and the possibilities are much greater.
Another hurdle to be overcome when proposing building-integrated vegetation is that of maintenance. Who should be responsible, who should pay for maintenance and how much will it cost? It is important to note that all buildings require maintenance. Tall buildings are complicated and regular maintenance is always required in any case. Tall buildings have elevators and services which mean that maintenance charges for residential properties often exceed $70 per square meter per annum. The cost of maintaining vegetation will be modest in comparison. Charges for maintenance is usually passed on to leaseholders or tenants as a component of service changes. It is commonplace for communal ground-level landscapes to be created within commercial or residential developments. Apart from some extra provision and training to ensure safety, the maintenance of landscape on buildings is straightforward. Vegetation on buildings is often designed to be low-maintenance, which helps to keep down costs. There are costs, but as we have learnt, there are significant benefits.
It has been suggested that trees cannot grow on tall buildings. The reason usually cited is that the higher you go, the stronger the wind becomes. As friction with the ground is reduced and as the air thins with increasing altitude, wind speeds do increase. Wind at the ground floor of a typical multi-storey building around 100m tall, might be half the speed recorded aloft. Trees, however, grow naturally at high altitudes and can adapt to strong winds. On buildings, trees can be shielded by parapets and secured with anchors. The tree line (above which trees cannot survive) varies according to elevation and latitude and is largely determined by low temperatures and a lack of moisture. The tree line in central Europe is above 2000m and in the Rockies it is above 3000m, so tall buildings in most locations would not be above the natural tree line.
Although there are some difficulties associated with growing trees and certain vegetation types on tall buildings, the success enjoyed by Hancock, Hundertwasser and Boeri shows that it is possible. Although there are additional costs associated with both the initial planting and continuing maintenance, the many benefits, including improved comfort, better mental health and a boost in biodiversity, mean that the establishment of vegetation on tall buildings is here to stay.
A new “Nature-Culture Alliance” is being developed after the Convention on Biological Diversity COP 14 that took place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt last November, and it may have implications for people who have been working with the concept of “biocultural diversity”. What do these two terms mean, and what is the implication for future policy?
Since I was invited to start writing about biocultural diversity for The Nature of Cities in 2015, there have been a number of developments in both policymaking processes related to biocultural diversity and, recently, to the concept itself. Some of these developments have happened around the Fourteenth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 14) that took place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt in late 2018. With the end of COP, now seems a good time to take stock and update readers on what has been happening and what we can look forward to as we near the end of the UN Decade on Biodiversity 2011-2020, particularly as it relates to urban biodiversity.
For those readers who may be unclear about the term “biocultural diversity”—you’re not alone. For reasons that I will touch on in this essay, it is increasingly difficult to define the term and equally difficult to understand its implications for policymaking. Simply put, biocultural diversity refers to the links between biodiversity and cultural diversity. Biodiversity, according to the CBD, means “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part”. This definition is complicated by the fact that biodiversity itself is measurable in different ways depending on scale and other factors—whether it means total number of species in the world, species per hectare, or others; a complication that the CBD addresses by including all of these perspectives. Cultural diversity, for its part, can refer to a diversity of different cultures (for the purposes of this essay, I will refer to this understanding as “diversity-of-cultures”), or a diversity of elements within a single culture (“diversity-within-a-culture”; see previous parenthesis). Putting these two complex ideas together adds another degree of difficulty, with most, in my experience, choosing instead to gloss over the issue by referring to it obliquely through discussion of, for example, “the links between biological and cultural diversity” as adopted by the CBD and UNESCO when they were unable to land on a definition.
In any case, some research has shown that higher cultural diversity may be found in places where there is a higher level of biodiversity, borne out by findings that higher linguistic diversity exists in areas with higher biodiversity, indicating that more diverse nature and more diverse culture go together. In terms of policymaking, particularly in processes related to biodiversity such as the CBD, this comes with the implication that policies that encourage the conservation of elements of cultural diversity will enhance the conservation of biodiversity.
With this background, there has been movement in recent years towards incorporation of, or at least respect for, cultural diversity in the CBD’s ongoing policymaking processes. Much of this movement has been related to Article 8(j) of the Convention, which calls for Parties to respect innovations and practices of indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs), with the result that biocultural diversity under the CBD is closer to diversity-of-cultures, than diversity-within-a-culture. A major development was the establishment of the CBD Secretariat and UNESCO’s Joint Programme on the Links between Biological and Cultural Diversity. While the Joint Programme has been faced with a shortage of funding and institutional capacity, its proponents have been involved in all of the events and processes mentioned here either directly as organizers or participants.
Signing of the Ishikawa Declaration on Biocultural Diversity. Credit: UNU-IAS OUIK
The 1st Asian Conference on Biocultural Diversity was held 27 to 29 October 2016 in Kanazawa Prefecture, Japan, following-up on both the European Conference and the workshop in Ishikawa, and resulting in the adoption of the “Ishikawa Declaration on Biocultural Diversity”. The Declaration itself is fairly anodyne, with participants promising to further the cause of biocultural diversity in various ways, but includes an annex with recommendations that point towards the diversity-of-cultures model, such as recommendations to “learn from indigenous peoples, local and traditional communities living sustainable lifestyles” and to “use traditional and local calendars to reconnect with Nature and the seasons to promote understanding of cultural, cultivation and life-cycles”. Like the Florence Declaration, the Ishikawa Declaration was not produced at an event that was part of CBD processes, although the CBD Secretariat and others active in CBD processes were involved, and it was disseminated at CBD events.
The Múuch’tambal Summit was held 9 to 11 December 2016, the middle weekend during the two weeks of CBD COP 13in Cancun, Mexico. This event was more heavily focused on indigenous peoples and Article 8(j) issues under the CBD than the Florence and Ishikawa events, and resulted in another Declaration, the titled “Mainstreaming the contribution of Traditional Knowledge, Innovations and Practices across Agriculture, Fisheries, Forestry and Tourism Sectors for the conservation and sustainable use of Biodiversity for Well-being” which, like other Declarations produced by conferences, contains rather general statements and recommendations, in this case with a heavy IPLCs focus. It does, however, represent a kind of development in that it was produced from an event organized specifically in CBD processes, and was included by the COP as an information document in official policymaking processes. While it does not significantly affect the direction of the CBD, this shows a greater integration and appreciation for these developments in international policymaking.
Opening ceremony of the Múuch’tambal Summit. Credit: CBD Secretariat
On 21 and 22 April 2018 a meeting related to the Joint Programme, the “Action Group on Knowledge Systems and Indicators of Wellbeing”, was held by the Center for Biodiversity & Conservation of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This meeting was held during the weekend in between two weeks of the meeting of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and again prominently featured issues related to IPLCs. The Action Group is part of an effort to create action groups under the Joint Programme to explore various issues, although to my knowledge this is the only action group to hold a meeting to date. In any case, the outcomes of the meeting include the creation of an online directory of resources related to biocultural indicators of wellbeing, in addition to a report submitted to the CBD. While these are promising and useful contributions, it is not entirely clear to this author what the next steps for this action group will be. Readers are encouraged to consider any ways you might be able to get involved.
This brings us to the most recent major event in this series, the weekend summit held between the two weeks of CBD COP 14 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt from 22 to 24 November 2018. This time it was called the “Nature-Culture Summit”, seemingly removing the term “biocultural diversity” and anything like “links between biological and cultural diversity”. Again, the summit produced a Declaration, the “Sharm El-Sheikh Declaration on Nature and Culture”. This one again mostly reaffirms many of the elements from earlier declarations and meetings, but is significant for at least two reasons: first, as mentioned above, it marks what may be the beginning of a new chapter in which “biocultural diversity” or “links between biological and cultural diversity” are now “a rapprochement of Nature and Culture in the post-2020 era”; and second, it calls for the establishment of what is planned to be a “multi-partner International Nature-Culture Alliance” to be launched at CBD COP 15 in 2020 in China. In fact, the summit was conceived as a kind of scoping or preparatory event for the launch of this Alliance.
Participants of the Nature-Culture Summit. Credit: CBD Secretariat
So, what do these events, declarations, and related activities tell us about some of the directions that biocultural diversity has been moving in over the past few years, and what does this say about the state and future of biocultural diversity?
For one thing, and this may turn out to be the most important for the overall future of biocultural diversity, this last development indicates that the terminology may be changing from biocultural diversity to “Nature and Culture”. Not only is “biocultural” not presented as a single unitary concept, but actually the word “diversity” is gone, likely in part an attempt to reduce jargon that may not be commonly understood. This makes sense in that biocultural diversity is obscure enough that, as mentioned above, even those working directly with it have differing and sometimes-unclear ideas of what it actually refers to. It remains to be seen, though, if this represents a move towards Nature and Culture as two separate things that need an Alliance, and away from what had been an emerging concept of a single entity called biocultural diversity. There had been a sense that biocultural diversity was something somehow greater than the sum of biodiversity and cultural diversity, but would the same be true of a “rapprochement between Nature and Culture”? Biocultural diversity per seis not dead as a field of study, as a number of scholars have been working on the concept for years and will undoubtedly continue to do so, but if current trends prevail, it may not be a big factor in CBD circles. In any case, the work plan for the Nature-Culture Alliance is still being developed. It remains to be seen what, if any, effect it will have on policymaking post-2020.
Finally, and to finally get to the discourse on The Nature Of Cities, what all this means for urban diversity is also up in the air. The Ishikawa-Kanazawa model was proposed in 2016 as an idea for biocultural diversity related to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, but it is not clear where the process is going if anywhere, and its general conception of a diversity-within-a-culture and explicit grounding in “biocultural diversity” may need to be reconsidered in light of trends described here towards diversity-of-cultures and “Nature and Culture”.
The term “biodiversity”, at whatever scale it is being used, indicates a large number of species present, while “nature” implies plants, animals, ecosystems, etc. in some sort of natural state—as the Cambridge Dictionary puts it, “all the animals and plants in the world and all the features, forces, and processes that exist or happen independently of people” (emphasis mine). As has been discussed on TNOC many times in the past, cities can be hotbeds for a number of kinds of biodiversity—such as a gathering point for many, not necessarily native, species in gardens, parks, and homes, or for urban flora and fauna uniquely adapted to the urban environment—but it is less obvious whether we can consider these forms of urban biodiversity as “Nature” when they are not in a state where they exist or happen independently of people.
In any case, it is clear that the upcoming “Nature-Culture Alliance”—even assuming that it represents the future of biocultural diversity in CBD processes—is very much in the process of developing its future direction and activities, including how it may come to consider its core concepts like “Nature” and “Culture”. I am sure I don’t need to make a case for the importance of urban biodiversity to an audience of The Nature Of Cities readers, so let me just conclude by saying that those involved in, or interested in being involved in all of this are encouraged to take part and consider how such an alliance could be nudged toward a direction where urban biodiversity, perhaps urban biocultural diversity, could continue to gain greater recognition in this and other international policymaking processes.
Even in the aftermath of 9-11, Mr. Rogers maintained his fidelity to the principles that drove him: love your neighbor and love yourself. And, in invoking tikkun olam, he tied those principles to ecological restoration, restoration of the community as described by Aldo Leopold.
I recently watched the much acclaimed two-hour documentary on the life and accomplishments of Fred Rogers, the beloved host of the popular children’s TV show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. The film reflected on Rogers’ legacy of kindness and the profound and lasting effect his innovative approach to television had on millions of people, myself included (see the trailer here).
Among the many important and moving messages in the film, one stood out in particular to me as relevant to my current work. It came later in the film, during the passages depicting the return of Mr Rogers to television audiences after the tragedies of September 11th, 2001. In the passage, Mr. Rogers says:
“No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we all are called to be Tikkun Olam—repairers of creation. Thank you for whatever you do, wherever you are, to bring joy, and light, and hope, and faith, and pardon and love to your neighborhood and to yourself.”
For some reason, when I heard Mr. Rogers say those words, I thought of Aldo Leopold, who some would argue forever changed the way we view our ecological impact on the environment around us. In his essay “Thinking Like a Mountain”, Aldo Leopold wrote:
“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness … A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is what is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world.”
To think like a mountain means to have a complete appreciation for the profound interconnectedness of the elements in a system. Was Mr. Rogers thinking like a mountain after 9-11? I was struck with the connection of this Leopoldian thinking and the concept of tikkun olam, in the context of something as horrible as 9-11. With these thoughts swirling in my mind, I wanted to better understand what Mr. Rogers was thinking when he invoked that Hebrew concept, and what it might mean to me.
Mr. Rogers and X the Owl who lives in the oak tree at the center of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe
According to MJL, Tikkun Olam (תיקוןעולם, Hebrew for “world repair”) has come to connote social action and the pursuit of social justice. The phrase has origins in classical rabbinic literature and in Lurianic kabbalah, a major strand of Jewish mysticism originating with the work of the 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria. Tikkun olam has been reinterpreted since the 1950s to mean that humans are responsible for the perfection and maintenance of the world. Rabbi Lawrence Troster, of GreenFaith: Interfaith Partners for the Earth, believes that originally tikkun olam was a minor rabbinic concept of amending laws for the betterment of the world. It was altered by Lurianic Kabbalah into a mystical doctrine of salvation, the human repair of the breach in the universe left over by the process of Creation itself. Thus, according to Troster, it became an “eschatological practice actualized in meditation and prayer”.
In his excellent essay Tikkun Olam and Environmental Restoration: A Jewish Eco-Theology of Redemption, Troster further argues that the use of tikkun olamin modern Jewish social justice theology creates an eschatology that sees human freewill, not divine action, as the chief means by which the world will be perfected, and then Rabbi Troster asks … “what do Jewish environmentalists imply when they use tikkun olam? What kind of Jewish environmental perfection are we seeking?” These are important questions, because even though we may see the repair or perfection of the world as merely a symbolic and non-literal goal, “the concept of redemption we choose will shape the way we seek to achieve it … while Jewish environmental theology has, in part, dwelt on Creation theology, little has been done regarding what a Jewish environmental theology of redemption would look like”.
This resonates with me as a midwesterner in the United States with a Judeo-Christian upbringing, in that faith-based understandings of nature tended to be of the “hath dominion” variety rather than “resident of a neighborhood called nature”. The concept of redemption we choose will shape the way we seek to achieve it.
The author at Gazelle Valley(עמק הצבאים) in Jerusalem (2012), an example of redeeming or restoring an urban area to a more ecologically healthy state.
Today the environmental movement is rightly criticized for presenting almost exclusively apocalyptic views of possible future environmental disasters, and is accused of failing to present positive visions of a sustainable world. Arguably, an exception could be be found in the work of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University. Positive dependencies upon nature are rarely identified, and negative interactions are recycled and reified by news cycles and the internet. Yet, in Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture environmental historian Steven Pyne wrote:
“The real future of environmentalism is in rehabilitation and restoration. Environmentalists have told the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall from grace over and over again. But we haven’t yet told the story of redemption. Now we need to tell that story”.
Which brings me to one of the pillars supporting my own work. Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic” requires us to enlarge
“…the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, animals, or collectively: the land… In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such” — Aldo Leopold. A Sand County Almanac.
This land ethic, Troster notes, might contribute to a refinement or redefinition of tikkun olamas ecological restoration. Ecological restoration, as defined by Eric Higgs, is “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed” (Higgs, Eric. Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration, p. 110). Thus, ecological restoration must be a process, not simply an end product. It relies upon what Higgs calls a “genuine conversation” between restorationists and natural processes in order for it to function. This conversation ensures that the interests of both people and ecosystems are both deeply understood and appreciated; a social-ecological systems approach. This kind of conversation occurs when those people engaged in restoration take the time to fully understand the place as it is and “listen” to the ecosystem. As Higgs points out in the same book, “The loud, garrulous humans will always dominate unless specific attention is given to the soft-spoken ecosystem…”.
Thanks to Mr. Rogers and Rabbi Troster, I have a new way to think about my work to better understand how to amplify recruitment of citizen conservationists and resulting development and proliferation of a 21st century land ethic. As I have written often, this conservation ethic often emerges in places and time periods characterized by violence, conflict, disaster or war. So, my work often focuses on nature in “hot spots” or “red zones” such as both the time period and place of September 11th. Even in the aftermath of 9-11, Mr. Rogers maintained his fidelity to the principles that drove him: love your neighbor and love yourself. And, in invoking tikkun olam, he tied those principles to ecological restoration, restoration of the community as described by AldoLeopold. Holding Leopold’s notion of community in mind, how inspiring are the words of Mr. Rogers after September 11th:
“No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we all are called to be Tikkun Olam—repairers of creation. Thank you for whatever you do, wherever you are, to bring joy, and light, and hope, and faith, and pardon and love to your neighborhood (community, in the Leopoldian sense) and to yourself.”
Do larger trends associated with neoliberalism and xenophobia simply cancel out participatory efforts at urban planning? Are inclusive renewals inadvertently widening the gap between the haves and have-nots and contributing to local conflict?
In the last three decades, Copenhagen has shifted from an obscure Nordic capital to a leading global city. It is known for progressive environmental policies, an enviable public transportation and cycling network, and numerous public green spaces, earning it the European Green Capital Award in 2014. Moreover, Denmark is repeatedly pointed to as one of the happiest countries in the world by various indices. It is praised for having a robust social welfare system yielding comparatively high rates of equality.
On a meta-level these claims appear true, but what is often overlooked is the country’s slide into the same neoliberal order the rest of the world has faced. This entails tremendous pressure to grow, privatize, and become further entangled in the web of global finance capital. In Denmark, like other Nordic countries, this familiar move has begun to yank at the seams of the social welfare system, with a tendency towards a political shift to the right, replete with austerity policies and an increasingly xenophobic slant.
Evolving urban development practices and struggles for justice
While Folkets Park has seen managerial and aesthetic shifts over the years, it has endured as a battleground for environmental justice. During the 1970s and early 1980s in the traditionally working class neighborhood of Nørrebro, activists and residents demanding quality and affordable housing clashed with a technocratic, top-down municipality that aimed to renew what they deemed as a “disadvantaged” neighborhood. Inexpensive housing to accommodate a swelling population coupled with poor facilities had produced a dank, unhealthy environment. Allied with private development firms, the municipality instigated a sweeping demolition and reconstruction agenda. Residents, who preferred the renovation of existing buildings rich with local identity, resisted top-down development by squatting buildings. Moreover, residents wanted a greater say in how exactly their neighborhood would transform.
Aerial shot of Folkets Park taken between 1932-1967 displays the dense nature of the neighborhood before the renovation demolitions initiated in the 1970s. The rectangle displays where Folkets Park would be established. Photo by Nowico/Royal Danish Library as conservation institution.
In the midst of demolitions, residents were experiencing open spaces where they lived for the first time. They quickly laid claim to these sites, using demolition debris as well as trees and shrubs from local allotments to cultivate open, green spaces with their labor and new visions for the neighborhood.
While most plots were reclaimed and built up by developers, even despite violent resistance by activists, one small, half-hectare plot survived: Folkets Park. Yet it was not without a fight. Municipal authorities attempted to reclaim it several times, even sending in bulldozers in the middle of the night. But by 2004, the struggle for distributional justice of open, green spaces in the low-income neighborhood of Nørrebro succeeded, and Folkets Park was officially recognized by the municipality (KK 2004).
In the following years, the struggle for justice in and around Folkets Park continued to evolve. Following official recognition, the city determined the park needed a makeover. Several rounds of renewal ensued in the mid-2000s and again in 2012, alongside a notable rise in both local gang membership particularly among male youth of Middle Eastern descent, and the presence of homeless persons primarily of West African origin. The city pointed to these user groups as part of the justification for intervention, with the objective to establish greater security and a ‘space for all’. Early renewal attempts aimed at for local participation, following a global trend toward inclusive urban development but perhaps especially, in recognition of the legacy of contestation in the neighborhood. The early attempts at park renewal faced eventual criticism. Residents were frustrated with high costs, physical outcomes, and little meaningful change to the neighborhood’s persistent socio-economic challenges.
More inclusive processes were adopted in subsequent renewals—notably in a renovation that ran from 2012-2014—featuring intensive community interviews and eventually, physical park modifications that genuinely reflected the interests of marginalized users. Armless benches accommodated those sleeping outdoors. Track lighting left areas in shadow, providing some users with feelings of security (despite the municipality’s initial protests that more lighting was key to safety). That marginalized users’ needs were reflected in the park design showed promising signs of procedural justice taking hold in the area, reflecting an evolution in how city officials—or as in this case, private urban development consultants hired by the municipality—approached urban development.
Folkets Park today. Photo: Steve Johnson, courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. via Next City
Folkets Park and Copenhagen today
Copenhagen seems to have taken on a model of participatory planning as a reflection of its creativity, inclusiveness, and even reliance on residents to participate in urban development. In Nørrebro, diversity is celebrated (though some say commodified), with the official tourism agency labeling it as ‘colorful’ and ‘multicultural’. Its surge in popularity has led to dozens of new shops and cafes, garnering international press coverage and ranking in Vogue’s “Coolest Spots in Copenhagen”.
This, of course, has its consequences. Housing prices are skyrocketing. The country is embroiled in debates around the nature of “Danishness”, with divisive narratives being pushed by leading political parties against non-white Danes and legal non-white residents. New xenophobic housing policies like the “Ghetto law” aim to disenfranchise and expel certain residents. Meanwhile, city officials have launched a crackdown on homeless in Nørrebro, in an attempt to rid them from areas like Folkets Park that seem to increasingly cater to wealthier residents—thanks, in part, to its various makeovers.
A former housing rights activist tells the story of Folkets Park to University of Copenhagen students, 2017. Photo: Jens Friis Lund
This leads us to wonder, do larger trends associated with neoliberalism and xenophobia simply cancel out participatory efforts at urban planning? Are inclusive renewals inadvertently widening the gap between the haves and have-nots and contributing to local conflict? What happens after hard-fought battles for distributional and procedural justice are seemingly won?
Amidst these developments, there are lessons from analyzing four decades of struggles over Folkets Park. One: justice hangs perpetually in the balance and the struggle never ends. In the context of the neoliberal city, messy conflicts and local activists’ efforts to balance the scales in favor of social justice actually matters for securing rights to the city for marginalized and vulnerable groups. Without these efforts, urban managers would have long ago paved over much needed open spaces like Folkets Park and pursued top-down urban development agendas, irrespective of local residents’ needs or aspirations. Two: the resistance to top-down urban renewal, which appeared messy and unruly at one point in time, has come to be celebrated today in Copenhagen, and paradoxically contributed to changing norms around urban green spaces and urban development. Folkets Park thus continues to remind contemporary urban planners that their actions today will be judged, and celebrated or reviled, for generations to come.
Rebecca Leigh Rutt and Stephanie Loveless Copenhagen and Barcelona
Stephanie Loveless is a researcher at BCNUEJ focused on greening and urban renewal in European and North American Cities. She currently works as a PhD fellow on the GreenLULUs project at BCNUEJ as part of a team effort centered on investigating the relationship between urban sustainability planning and potential impacts on human health, well-being and environmental justice.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Pippin Anderson, Cape TownThe literature is full of tales of woe and warning when it comes to collaborative work, but until you jump in and try you will never know what those specific or particular stumbling blocks might be in your case, and similarly you will never know the pleasure of having your own views challenged.
Carmen Bouyer, ParisBecause cooking is very much an art and a practice that is profoundly connected to the land, our collaboration flowed very easily. As an environmental artist it opened new perspective on what art meant for me: I realized that it was simply the art of living together that moved me so much.
Lindsay Campbell, New YorkI would never have predicted that I would be chanting my own mele, “Oh, Stone!” in honor of the Petoskey Stone (state stone of Michigan, fossils from an ancient inland coral sea) and my Midwestern connections to it in front of 50 professionals.
Gillian Dick, GlasgowCollaboration is about real partnerships built on a trusting relationships where each contribution is valued equally.
Lonny Grafman, ArcataPractice, meet Whimsy. Whimsy, meet Practice. Both of you, meet Vision. And in meeting, create installations inspiring hundreds of thousands of visitors that could not have been created alone.
Eduardo Guerrero, BogotáIn Bogotá, we have a promising process in which there is not a single stakeholder leading the recovery and protection of our urban wetlands, but a synergistic arrangement of committed public, private and community participants.
Britt Gwinner, WashingtonWhat can seem like an obvious gain to an engineer may not be as clear to the family that has to pay for the technology, or to the lender that would finance its purchase.
Keitaro Ito, KyushuIn this project to create biodiverse schoolyards for engagement and play, we have done over 350 workshop together with children, teachers, and university students. They discussed their own ideas about ecology, target species, depth of water, domestic plants, and so on.
Madhusudan Katti, RaleighWe—ecologist and sociologist and anthropologist—ended up with a richly detailed socioecological picture of Fresno, depicting details of how people and birds behave in individual homes and yards, and how that fits into the larger patchwork quilt of green spaces and biodiversity across the city.
Jessica Kavonic, Cape TownAn emergent principle of the UNA learning spaces is special emphasis on the actual conversations and the areas of tension that occur between unfamiliar participants. It is often these areas of tension that can unlock opportunities for change.
Yvonne Lynch, San SebastianTwo elements of successful collaboration are key: acknowledgelment of joint effort, and starting the collaboration early in any process.
Mary Mattingly, New YorkPractice, meet Whimsy. Whimsy, meet Practice. Both of you, meet Vision. And in meeting, create installations inspiring hundreds of thousands of visitors that could not have been created alone.
Brian McGrath, New YorkI have become convinced of the need for new collaborative models around the shift in the cultural narrative for cites from the architecture to the ecology of cities. These models are multi-scalar and multi-actor, including the essential balancing of non-human and human actors.
Tischa Muñoz-Erikson, Río PiedrasThe greatest impact this collaboration had on me is that it made me confront the unconscious (and naïve) bias I had towards scientific knowledge as a superior form of knowledge.
Jean Palma, ManilaWhile there were many collaborations across disciplines and ways of knowing in our urban development programme, which were equally valuable to city and environmental planning, together they are an overview of the interphases in economic planning.
Diane Pataki, Salt Lake CityOne of the key ingredients that can make or break interdisciplinary collaborations is respect.
Bruce Roll, PortlandWhat I find most inspiring about this story is what we are able to achieve when we share a common set of values and inspiring language. This approach forced me and Clean Water Services to move from transactional to transformative partnerships.
Wilson Ramirez, BogotáI´ve decided to include an expert in the interface of science and policy into my regular team, in order to establish clearer connections and more relevant interpretations of environmental information for policy stakeholders.
David Simon, GothenburgThe partnership worked effectively because of key champions, but also because our team was able to generate synergies of interest among the participating partners that benefited all concerned.
Tomomi Sudo, KyushuIn this project to create biodiverse schoolyards for engagement and play, we have done over 350 workshop together with children, teachers, and university students. They discussed their own ideas about ecology, target species, depth of water, domestic plants, and so on.
Dimitra Xidous, DublinSomething I have always felt to be true of collaboration: it is an act of translation. And trust.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
Before I founded TNOC, I spent almost 15 years as a full-time theatre artist. It is sometimes said that theatre is the “most collaborative” of the arts. It is certainly an intensely collaborative form, and this aspect is what I love most (among many things) about theatre.
And even in theatre, collaboration can take on various forms. There is a well-known kind of serial collaboration, in which a play is written, a theatre decides to produce it and hires a director, the director works with designers (costumes, lights, set, sound) to create the world, the director selects actors, and all set about to make an experience and say something … maybe for an audience. Another form of theatrical collaboration goes back to Shakespeare and others (see, for example, the depiction in the movie Shakespeare in Love) in which the actors come first, or at least together at the outset with other contributors, and everyones dives into creation.
Both are joined by an idea: that together, we create something we could not have created by ourselves.
When I first encountered “urban ecology”, and urbanism generally, what attracted me was the essential collaborativeness of cities and their design—that cities are, or at least should be, collaborative creations. Indeed, this is the fundamental (and ideally fun) and foundational idea of TNOC: let’s put different types of people into the same space and see what emerges.
So, we asked a collection of TNOC contributors—scientists, artists, planners, designers, engineers, policy makers—about their own experience with collaboration. Specifically, we asked:
What is a specific experience you have had in your work with collaborating on a project with someone from a different discipline or “way of knowing” or “mode of action”? What was good about it? What was challenging? What did you learn or produce that could not have happened without this collaboration across difference?
It is a rich vein of response, and some threads stand out about the collaborative experience:
It challenges us to trust.
It is often surprising.
It is often difficult.
Sometimes there is tension.
It takes time.
It demands personal growth.
It requires acknowledgment of others.
It asks us to question our own points of view.
It thrives in the in-between spaces.
There is no one way.
It is an act of transformation.
I suppose collaborative work is not for everybody. But have a look here, and imagine where your ideas might go as you engage with difference.
Pippin Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, is an African urban ecologist who enjoys the untidiness of cities where society and nature must thrive together.
FULL BIO
Pippin Anderson
The literature is full of tales of woe and warning when it comes to collaborative work, but until you jump in and try you will never know what those specific or particular stumbling blocks might be in your case, and similarly you will never know the pleasure of having your own views challenged.
Reflections on an Urban Ecology CityLab
Between 2010 and 2012 I was mandated to run an Urban Ecology CityLab, as one of a suite of CityLabs run through the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town, South Africa. The idea was to broker greater engagement between academia and society on the understanding that the most pressing problems facing cities will be best attended to by drawing on the expertise sitting both within academia and society. The Urban Ecology CityLab took the form of a series of seminars around specific ecological themes or issues in the City of Cape Town, and included some meetings off campus and field trips. Invitations went out to a diversity of groups and people, via various mailing lists, with the hope that we would draw as diverse a crowd into the room as possible. The hope was to have a group of people in the room that could challenge the status quo, add new insights, and shed light on existing problems from entirely different angles.
Every time we met, I held my breath as there was always a chance that no one would show up. It never happened. Not once did I end up in a room alone. There was always a good enough crowd who came along and make for a meaningful discussion. But that said, in almost every instance the attendees were ecologists. And in almost every instance ecologists with an interest specific to the topic at hand. So, if we were planning to talk about urban rivers, the room would be full of riparian ecologists. If we were planning to talk about conservation areas in the City, the room would be full of plant ecologists. So, while the people who were there were undoubtedly from a different “way of practicing”, where they came from NGOs or were City officials or consultants, and shared a disciplinary understanding.
There were some definite lessons to be learnt in this process. If you really want to get a diversity of people in the room, how you go about posing the question is critical, and you need to be disrupting disciplines at that point already. To achieve sustained engagement and the development of a community in these new spaces presents a particular challenge. Ecologists are—well I believe anyway—inherently conservative and not inclined to step readily outside of their comfort zone. Meetings off campus, and in particular in the field, attracted a greater diversity of people. Evidentially where you meet is also very important, and a lot of people are put-off by academic spaces. We had lots of interesting conversations and in the end did some fun writing together, but I was not sure I ever really brokered the different communities as I had hoped to.
Probably the most significant positive outcome was my own personal and professional growth. The literature is full of tales of woe and warning when it comes to collaborative work, but until you jump in and try you will never know what those specific or particular stumbling blocks might be in your case, and similarly you will never know the pleasure of having your own views challenged.
Carmen Bouyer is a French environmental artist and designer based in Paris.
Carmen Bouyer
Because cooking is very much an art and a practice that is profoundly connected to the land, our collaboration flowed very easily. As an environmental artist it opened new perspective on what art meant for me: I realized that it was simply the art of living together that moved me so much.
Chef + Artist
It is a pleasure to talk about the so nurturing collaboration with the talented all organic chef Anne Apparu-Hall. We had been put in touch several years ago in Paris but had never met, when a new friend in New York connected us again. I remember meeting Anne for the first time at the Edgemere Farm weekly market, a lush half-acre urban farm that had bloomed on an empty lot in Far Rockaway, Queens (New York). It was a perfect place to meet such a woman! The stroller were her beautiful daughter was sitting was also full of locally grown organic vegetables, flowers, and herbs. After sharing a colorful meal at her house—just five minutes away from the farm —we realized how her work as a chef, educator and environmental activist, often working with art institutions, was closely related to mine as an environmental artist and designer. Our shared passion for bringing people together in a happy way and making organic food accessible in cities convinced us that we had to do something together.
Already, as a facilitator of the Red Hook Community Farm C.S.A (an other striving urban farm) at Pioneer Works art center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, I had noticed that we had weekly food leftovers from the shares. People who couldn’t come to take their food baskets that week and also an extra abondance at the farm that gave us very full crates of all kinds of delicious veggies. Along with Corey, the farmer, we wondered what to do with this food and came up with the idea of doing a weekly community lunch on the day after the weekly CSA deliveries.
All we needed was a chef interested in co-organizing a hyper local community lunch.
We soon started to imagine a shared meal with Anne, her husband Edward Hall, along with Pioneer Works team. We united through a common vision for environmental art practices,community events and convivial access to restorative grown food. It was a great success. With 30 to 40 guests a week, from July to November 2016, the community lunch at Pioneer Works was welcoming a large part of the staff, some neighbors, and visitors, for a cost of $8 (suggested donation). It became a weekly celebration of the passing seasons in sharing nourishing food from the land we inhabit and inspiring sustainable practices to our guests, from offering only vegetarian local food, to creating an “all compost”waste system, chemical-free, communal experience.The meal was a fruitful collaboration between environmental urban activists, from committed urban farmers to city parks foragers, as well as upstate grain and fruit growers and dairy farmers. We would add to the mix the beautiful food grown in Pioneer Works’s garden by permaculturist and ecologist Marisa Prefer.
Community Lunch in Pioneer Works’ entrance hall, Summer 2016
Working with Anne I learned that cooking was first of all a collaboration with many food producers, and often more, whose work would nurture and inspire you. Through these food lovers, we would learn about the local nature, what the weather had been, what was in bloom, what was in fruit. It was above all a collaboration with our immediate environment and its gorgeous fertility, even in the center of New York City!
This sense of abundance was enhanced by Anne’s ways of creating her copious shared meals. Always so creative and free. Because every week the available fruits, vegetables and herbs were a total surprise. Depending on what food would be leftover from the day before and what could be foraged that week, Anne had developed a graceful way to welcome those surprises into her meals. She would simply lay out all of the available ingredients on the kitchen table and look at them for a short while, taste them if needed, mixing colors and textures and then, very fast, in a sort of magical way, her intuition would tell her what the menu will be that day. I would write down that flow of inspiration, make a spontaneous drawing expressing the overall emotion it brought and send that invite to our mailing list. With Anne and her ability to celebrate being alive through preparing a community feast, I could experience the sacredness of food and its raw power to bring people together in a safe space for encounters and conversations to happen.
Because cooking is very much an art, and a practice that is profoundly connected to the land were food grows, the collaboration flowed very easily. As an environmental artist it opened new perspective on what art really meant for me, I realized that it was simply the art of living together that moved me so much. This refined art: in essence a conversation, a co-creation, a community meal of some sort, a place where each guests can feel nurtured and thrive.
And how best could we develop this life sustaining art but by collaborating with as many people as we possible can?
Lindsay K. Campbell is a research social scientist with the USDA Forest Service. Her current research explores the dynamics of urban politics, stewardship, and sustainability policymaking.
Lindsay Campbell
I would never have predicted that I would be chanting my own mele, “Oh, Stone!” in honor of the Petoskey Stone (state stone of Michigan, fossils from an ancient inland coral sea) and my Midwestern connections to it in front of 50 professionals.
A group of researchers, land managers, educators, and artists shared ideas, practices, and epistemologies for “Learning from Place” via a two-day workshop held in New York City during the fall of 2017. We exchanged knowledge between Hawaiʻi, New York City, and the many other global locales to which our participants were connected, to co-create this workshop with and for the “stewards of stewardship”.
We collaborated with Kekui Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, who is the kumu (master teacher) and catalytic force behind the Hālalu ʻŌhiʻa Hawaiian stewardship training. This training is immersed in a Native Hawaiian world view, using multiple modalities to get participants thinking and feeling in new ways.
Working with Kekuhi to plan the workshop was inspiring, humbling, and as my colleague Heather McMillen shared about her experience writing a chapter with Kekuhi, “like putting fireworks in a box”. I am very orderly in my notetaking, project management, and have an ever-present “to do” list. While that can lead to productivity, it can also be quite rigid. Every time we spoke with Kekuhi, our ideas for the structure and content of the workshop were transformed. I left refreshed, but also sometimes befuddled. I would have to trust, to leave some space and room for not only her wisdom and approach, but also for the collective, beautiful, crazy wisdom of the group that would emerge.
Workshop participants performing mele, listening, and laughing. Photo by Giles Ashford
Our workshop had no powerpoints, lectures, or panel discussions; instead, it included singing mele, dancing hula, making hei string forms, and building a kuahu (altar). From there, Kekuhi taught us to use the conceptual framework of kiʻi to analyze origin stories from all over the globe, and to write our own stories connected to our observations of place. We later wrote (and performed) our own mele to honor the plant, rock, and water people with whom we feel special connections.
I would never have predicted that I would be chanting my own mele, “Oh, Stone!” in honor of the Petoskey Stone (state stone of Michigan, fossils from an ancient inland coral sea) and my Midwestern connections to it in front of 50 professionals. Or that some of those colleagues would be wriggling like eels on the ground, making their journey from the Sargasso Sea. Or that others would be brought to tears in offering stories of childhood, of home, of family, of place. These memories are seared into brain as a shared experience where our guards came down, our hierarchies were shed, and our traditional roles as “agency representative” or “scientist” or “land manager” were transformed. We began to treat each other, as well as the nonhuman others in our surrounding landscape—a bit more like kin.
But how do we carry it forward? Where do we go from here?
Inspired by Learning from Place, we launched a series of monthly “Stewardship Salons” with a loose group of about 15-25 folks engaged with caring for New York City. We are a rotating community of teachers and learners—and we are operating without a master teacher, and without the scaffolding of any one particular worldview. But our diversity and flexibility is also our greatest strength. We have visited places and engaged topics ranging from examining the histories of Central Park and the displaced Seneca Village, to sharing a Tu B’Shevat seder and exploring Jewish environmentalism, to building a group conceptual model of stewardship in the city. So, I am learning not only from the content shared by all the other teacher-learners, but by the process of remaining radically open to where we might head, together.
Gillian is the Manager of Spatial Planning – Research & Development team within the Development Plan Group at Glasgow City Council.
Gillian Dick
Collaboration in a real world setting
Collaboration is about real partnerships built on a trusting relationships where each contribution is valued equally.
When you think about collaboration what is the first thing that comes to mind? It’s inclusive. It’s equitable. And it’s a meeting of like-minded people with a shared objective. This is the front facing view that folk participating in collaborative efforts want to project to the wider world. In reality, collaborative projects can be very different for local authorities. In the past Glasgow has had the academic community present us with proposals and asked us to sign on the dotted line. These statements are then presented back to funding bodies as evidence of collaboration. It feels very different to us. It feels like we are being “mined” for our own research and innovation (often described by academics as “grey” research, as in their view it’s not subjected to academic rigour or peer review), which is then repackaged to be validated by the academic world. The repetition of this process, with the view that there is limited value academically in the research that local authority practioners undertake, taints the process of collaboration between academics and practioners and impacts negatively on trust and understanding. It’s a breath of fresh air when you encounter a different form of collaboration between academics and local authorities. I have two examples to share of a different type of experience of collaboration.
My first positive experience was working with European geological surveys and local authorities within the COST Suburban . Sub-Urban is a European network of Geological Surveys, Cities and Research Partners working together to improve how we manage the ground beneath our cities. There was a realisation that the Geologists had a lot of interesting and useful GIS based data that urban planners within local authorities were either not aware of, or just not using. In some cases it was known knowns, but also known unknowns. The best analogy was that the Geologists were running a stall with lots of great products, but we as practioners were only interested in the one product we understood and knew. How could the geologists move us from risk averse to risk aware? It also felt like we were all talking different languages and explanations and understanding were getting lost in translation. Through the project we collaborated on developed a shared language that allowed the delivery of a toolkit that helped planners identify their information requirements in relation to the sub surface and linked them to the data that Geologists had available. We had shared ownership and understanding of the objectives and outcomes and a shared responsibility to deliver.
My second example is Connecting Nature, large research and policy project funded by the European Commission. Academics recognised that in order to impact actions on the ground with regard to their research into nature based solutions they had to recognise the large body of work that local authorities had already developed. They had to recognise that innovation could come from communities as well as the academic world and that they had to understand the needs of practioners and identify useable tools and methodologies that worked with the realities of local authority governance. There was a recognition that research aims can be served by working on real world problems that currently exist and not on “pilots” that have just been created to service an academic need. We’re only a year and a bit into Connecting Nature, but it feels like a real collaboration that has the potential to change how Local Authorities work with academics. It will also, hopefully show the wider academic community that local authority practioners do have a scientific rigour underpinning the work that they deliver, and that there is real value in social science in a real world setting. Collaboration is about real partnerships built on a trusting relationships where each contribution is valued equally.
Tischa A Muñoz-Erickson is a Research Social Scientist with the USDA Forest Service’s International Institute of Tropical Forestry (IITF) in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico.
Tischa Muñoz-Erickson
The greatest impact this collaboration had on me is that it made me confront the unconscious (and naïve) bias I had towards scientific knowledge as a superior form of knowledge.
As a sustainability scientist I’ve worked in many collaborative projects with people from different walks of life, including scientists from other disciplines, community members, representatives from government, non-governmental and grass roots organizations, and business owners. Yet no experience has been as challenging, and as rewarding, as when I collaborated with ranchers. When I was working on my Master’s degree in environmental science and policy I was in charge of developing an integrated knowledge system to monitor and evaluate the ecological and social health of ranchlands managed by the Diablo Trust in Northern Arizona. The Diablo Trust is a collaborative land management group formed in 1993 by two family ranches to address public concerns about the impact of cattle grazing on forestland and wildlife populations. For three years I met routinely with the ranchers and others in the collaborative group to decide on indicators, monitoring sites, data collection methods, and analysis protocols for this knowledge system that was to inform sustainable land management decisions.
The main challenge the ranchers and I had to overcome to work together on this knowledge system was one of trust because of the conflict that ranchers have had experienced with environmental activists in the past. My advisor at the time was a conservation biologist that had been working with the group for many years and that the ranchers now trusted. Yet, I couldn’t rely on his social capital alone, but I had to build my own rapport the ranchers as well. I visited the ranches many times to have coffee with them. I participated in campouts and other social activities that the Diablo Trust organized to encourage community cohesion. I walked the land with them, and I volunteered when they needed help to move the cattle herds or to put up fences. I even wore cowboy chaps one time (yes, you read right, this urbanite from a Caribbean island wore cowboy chaps!). I had to do all that so they would see that I respected their way of life and that, while sometimes we may disagree over specific management actions, caring for the land was a value we held in common and that it could be the basis of our professional relationship. Once they trusted that I was not trying to impose my environmental views on them, they were willing to listen to me and see the importance of studying and monitoring things that I also cared about (i.e. rare plant species) along with what they cared about (i.e. productive grasses for their cattle).
Thirteen years after I left the project, the knowledge system we developed together is still being used by the Diablo Trust. I am also still welcomed as a friend and colleague to their regular meetings. There is not better indication that our collaboration was a success as seeing them take ownership of the project and sustain it beyond my time there.
But the greatest impact this collaboration had on me is that it made me confront the unconscious (and naïve) bias I had towards scientific knowledge as a superior form of knowledge. All that time I spent building trust with the ranchers also allowed me to see and learn from the deep knowledge they had amassed from growing with and managing the land. The humility and appreciation I gained for other ways of knowing, and that now is the foundation from which I approach every collaboration, could not have happened if I hadn’t had experienced ranching and this different way of seeing and experiencing the world.
In short, the positive and productive collaboration I had with ranchers taught me that building relationships and inclusiveness across different worldviews and ways of knowing are crucial ingredients for a successful collaboration. The time and energy invested in these key ingredients will not only result in better project outcomes but, more importantly, the work and its impact (and the friendships!) will be more meaningful.
Eduardo Guerrero is a biologist with over 20 years of experience in projects and initiatives involving environmental and sustainable development issues in Colombia and other South American countries.
Eduardo Guerrero
Towards a multi-stakeholder approach to sustainable management of urban wetlands in Bogotá
In Bogotá, we have a promising process in which there is not a single stakeholder leading the recovery and protection of our urban wetlands, but a synergistic arrangement of committed public, private and community participants.
Unlike Bogota’s Cerros (east side mountains), a landscape icon visible from any point in the city, urban wetlands are Bogotá’s best kept natural secret. Fortunately, more and more citizens and visitors are discovering the wealth of life that characterizes Córdoba, La Conejera, Santa María del Lago, Juan Amarillo, Jaboque and Tibanica, just to mention a few.
These urban wetlands are the living memory of a great high Andean lake system that once characterized the indigenous Muisca territory, in what we now call Sabana de Bogotá.
Although fragmented relicts of large aquatic spaces, still today they offer us an amazing biodiversity in the middle of the big city. Their ecosystem services are essential, either as biological filters, water regulators, microclimatic regulators, carbon storage or as high-value natural spaces for citizen enjoyment.
During the last 25 years a synergistic process involving public and community stakeholders has been successful in halting an intense deterioration caused by irrational urban planning.
They have been legally declared as District Ecological Parks, which are fundamental elements of Bogota’s Main Ecological Structure and district water system. The rationale behind this declaration includes the understanding that the economy and competitivity of the city depends on its natural base of support.
Two people observing wildlife at Santa Maria del Lago urban wetland. Photo: Eduardo Guerrero.
Even amid divergent points of view and occasional lack of trust among authorities and citizens, a shared goal to protect these strategic urban ecological parks has gradually gained momentum.
An intense and necessary debate is part of the process. Should the urban wetlands be dedicated strictly to passive recreation? Considering they are natural areas located in the middle of the city, is it possible to reconcile the protection of their ecosystem attributes with land uses such as walking trails, bike paths, park furniture (benches, viewing platforms, fitness equipment) or even the nearby planning of avenues? What should be the distance between urban infrastructure and wetlands, and what is the type of protective barriers or urban design needed to preserve ecosystem functions? What activities should be allowed and under what criteria should the carrying capacity be managed in such a way that ecotourism and visitor access are compatible with conservation and sustainable use?
During recent years, my own experience with this intense process has comprised several roles. It has allowed me to experience personally a diversity of perspectives and interests regarding urban wetlands. Let me share some specific experiences I have had in my work in collaborating with stakeholders from different disciplines or “ways of knowing”.
As a citizen, I participated in a community-led initiative, in which neighbors collaborated to build a kind of “social mesh”, instead of a physical mesh, looking to protect a public wetland area through environmental education and citizen ownership.
As a manager in Bogota’s environmental authority, we enriched wetland park management by recruiting community leaders as environmental interpreters and guides for visitors.
And currently, as an advisor of the national policy on urban environmental management, I have organized a multi-stakeholder think tank devoted to promoting dialogue and exchange of good practices among interested parties in public, private, academic and community settings.
In all these experiences I encountered a genuine interest in joint action beyond disciplines and points of view. When you establish a common ground around a shared vision, as well as a “win-win” mood, interest, and actions tend to converge.
The Cordoba wetland, in Bogotá. Photo: Eduardo Guerrero.
Of course, there still are conflicts of interest, misunderstandings, and sectoral and political biases, but gradually and increasingly more and more stakeholders recognize urban wetlands as a patrimonial and strategic element of Bogota’s natural heritage.
Clearly, dealing with urban wetlands is not just an environmental issue. You must involve strategic sectors and stakeholders including habitat and urban planning, the construction industry, infrastructure, health, education, security and, of course, community organizations. It’s a complex challenge that requires integrated approaches as well as governance based on transparency and participation, the building of trust, and joint action.
In Bogota, we have a promising process in which there is not a single stakeholder leading the recovery and protection of our urban wetlands, but a synergistic arrangement of committed public, private and community participants. In the midst of agreements, disagreements, constructive debates, and conflicting interests, the social imaginary regarding urban wetlands is evolving towards a recognition of the multiple values and ecosystem services provided by them.
Few Latin American capitals have the quantity, biological diversity, and the extent of wetlands like Bogotá, both in the city and in rural areas. We should be proud to have a wetland system that represents a natural heritage, and that has become a major city project. And at the same time, we must be more and more committed to and co-responsible for their protection and coordination of a sustainable, inclusive and resilient development of our capital city.
Britt Gwinner works on affordable housing in developing markets. He has led investment and advisory programs for affordable housing finance for the past four years, with most experience in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.
Britt Gwinner
What can seem like an obvious gain to an engineer may not be as clear to the family that has to pay for the technology, or to the lender that would finance its purchase.
Affordable Green Housing—How to get Bankers to Communicate with Architects, Engineers, and Consumers?
As a banker, I’ve struggled to collaborate with my engineering and architectural colleagues to define and finance affordable, green, and disaster resilient housing. We have had some success, but it’s been an on-going discussion about how to pitch the value proposition to individuals, what is feasible in technical terms, and what is feasible in economic terms, especially for low-income families in developing countries.
Building efficient, resilient, affordable housing ought to be one of the easy ways to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve urban disaster resilience. Close to 20% of GHGs come from buildings, and in the urbanizing world, housing makes up 75% of new structures. In earthquakes and cyclones, housing usually suffers more than robust commercial structures.
But globally, most new housing is built in developing countries by low income households. Families start with pieces of land and build shelters incrementally, room by room. These families cannot afford to follow basic local building codes, much less global norms for energy efficiency. Up to 70% of the workforce of countries like Indonesia and Kenya work informally, without a regular paystub. Banks will not provide informal workers with mortgages to buy completed houses.
Financing is essential to any kind of real estate. Neither low income households nor wealthy investors pay cash for real estate. Formal real estate construction brings together teams of engineers and architects, who design the building, and teams of financial specialists, who figure out how to finance the building’s construction. Informally built housing brings together low-income households with often low-skilled artisans and a wide variety of materials and methods.
To an engineer or architect, the advantages of green technologies are obvious, based on climate change mitigation and future savings for the families. But these savings can be small in a temperate or tropical climate, where it is not necessary to heat a home. For commercial structures, communications among professionals are easy. Investors in a new warehouse are happy to reduce future operating costs with energy and water saving tech.
The struggle comes in affordable housing, where even a middle-class household that buys a flat in city like Jakarta may scrimp for years to save up a down payment. Any additional up-front cost is a serious challenge, even if it leads to lower electricity bills in the future.
Resilience to disasters can be even more difficult to sell to poor households. Installing plumbing in a house that lacks it is a sure gain in hygiene and health for a family. Depending on the location, reinforcing the structure against earthquakes is an uncertain gain against a distant, potential calamity.
To a low-income family or a financier, the cost benefit tradeoff of energy efficiency and resilience is not always obvious, because the calculation is made solely in terms of the direct costs to the owner. What is the technology package that is cheap enough for a low-income household in an informal neighborhood in Jakarta? How do we convince microfinance institutions to finance LED lights, solar water heaters or structural improvements? How does the microlender assess the capacity and willingness of the informally employed household to repay a loan for that technology package?
As a lender with social science background, I’ve been learning about the mix and match of different green technologies for different climates and countries. On the other hand, I’ve had to school my engineering colleagues on how banks and micro-lenders function.
We are having some success. In recent years, we’ve financed more and more green, resilient housing. The challenges are generally found in the institutions that build and finance housing, from authorities for building codes, materials producers and distributors, lenders, and the households themselves.
The construction business is conservative, as are consumers. Housing is an aspirational good. People identify with their homes. We’ve all had to learn what building materials are culturally acceptable in different countries, and how we might convince people to accept new technologies.
The shortfall in affordable and resilient green housing is a microcosm of the broader debate of thinking globally and acting locally. What can seem like an obvious gain to an engineer may not be as clear to the family that has to pay for the technology, or to the lender that would finance its purchase. But engineers and lenders at many lenders are working to express the value proposition more effectively.
(The opinions expressed In this post are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.)
Keitaro is a professor at Kyushu Institute of Technology and teaches landscape ecology and design. He has studied and worked in Japan, the U.K., Germany and Norway and has been designing urban parks, river banks, school gardens, and forest parks.
Keitaro Ito and Tomomi Sudo
In this project to create biodiverse schoolyards for engagement and play, we have done over 350 workshops together with children, teachers, and university students. They discussed their own ideas about ecology, target species, depth of water, domestic plants, and so on.
What we have learned from ecological landscape design in urban area in Japan.
What is urban ecology and biodiversity? What have we learned from collaborative ecological landscape design in urban area? We have been designing landscape even in urban areas, based on vernacular design (ecology, regional culture, and so on) for the past decade. The aim of our projects is to create an area for preserving biodiversity, children’s play, and ecological education that can simultaneously form part of an ecological network in an urban area. In these past 15 years, I have been designing to have interdisciplinary research and proposing to accommodate both children’s play and biodiversity in an urban area. I would like to discuss the problem and future issues through our projects, exotic species, children’s play, and managing urban nature from a landscape designer’s point of view.
University students talk about ecological matters with school children in an outdoor workshop. Photo: Keitaro Ito
The Multi-Functional Landscape Planning (MFLP, Ito et al. 2014, 2106) method has been used for the projects. MFLP approach will be effective to evaluate for the planning of a project such as urban park. According to this method, a space is divided into a number of layers (layers of vegetation, water, playground, and ecological learning), which overlap each other. Thus, during the creation of a multi-functional play area, children are able to engage in “various activities” as its different layers are added on top of each other. In addition, they will learn something new about its ecology when they are playing there. The ecological rich place is thought to be a more vivid location for play. The project drew on two planning processes. First, “process planning” was used in the planning and design phases of this project (Isozaki, 1970). This does not place emphasis on the finished object but allows changes to be made during the actual process and is thus a very flexible method of design. The children learned about the existence of various ecosystems through their participation in the various workshops (and then later when playing in the biotope). Children and teachers at the school, along with a number of local residents, actively participated in the development of an accessible environment (the biotope) and are active in proposing ideas for its future management. As such, their interest in the biotope continues. “Process Planning” would thus appear to be well suited for a long‐term project such as a school biotope.
The aim of these projects is to create an area for preserving biodiversity, children’s play and ecological education that can simultaneously form part of an ecological network in an urban area. Then we need to communicate ecological matters to children, parents, and teachers. In our school yard nature restoration project, the collaboration has been done with landscape designers, university students, school teachers, educators, ecologists, and psychologists. In this project, we have done over 350 workshop together with children, teacher and university students. They discussed their own ideas about ecology, target species, depth of water, domestic plants, and so on. University students especially have a very important role for connecting ecological knowledge between teachers and school children. For example, exotic species are sometimes difficult because, while some of the flowers are beautiful, they may need to be eliminated for native biodiversity conservation purposes. Students’ teaching skill is key. They need to learn and study basic and ecological matters.
Learning about ecology and maintenance methods in a school yard. Photo: Keitaro Ito
I think landscape designers should consider “landscape” as an “Omniscape” (Numata 1996; Arakawa, 1999; Ito et al. 2014, 2016) in which it is much more important to think of landscape design as a “learnscape”, embracing not only the joy of seeing, but stimulating a more holistic way of using body and senses for learning. So it is very important to see how children and teachers are using urban nature, then landscape designers can flexibly adapt the plan for the place according to their needs. Landscape designers and architects need the ssupport of biologists/ecologists for ecological design and planning.
References
ITO Keitaro, Tomomi Sudo and Ingunn Fjørtoft, Ecological design: collaborative landscape design with school children, Children, Nature, Cities, (Eds.) Ann Marie F. Murnaghan and Laura J. Shillington, Routledge, pp.195-209, 2016
ITO Keitaro, Ingunn Fjørtoft, Tohru Manabe and Mahito Kamada, Designing Low Carbon Societies in Landscapes, Landscape Design for Urban Biodiversity and Ecological Education in Japan: Approach from Process Planning and Multifunctional Landscape Planning, Springer, pp.73-86, 2014
Arakawa, S. Fujii, H. (1999) Seimei‐no‐kenchiku (Life architecture), Suiseisha, Tokyo.
Numata, M.(1996) Landscape Ecology, Asakura shoten, Tokyo
Isozaki, A.(1970) Kukan e (Toward the space), bijyutu shuppan, Tokyo (in Japanese)
Dr. Tomomi Sudo studies for developing sustainable cities which can provide essential nature experiences for people and children. She has been implementing ecological learning projects for children in urban natural environment. She is studying also Landscape Ecology and Design in Japan and Norway. Her interest is how to develop the materials for ecological education and apply that for ecological design. She studies at Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan.
Madhusudan is an evolutionary ecologist who discovered birds as an undergrad after growing up a nature-oblivious urban kid near Bombay, went chasing after vanishing wildernesses in the Himalaya and Western Ghats as a graduate student, and returned to study cities grown up as a reconciliation ecologist.
Madhusudan Katti
An ecologist walks into a suburban backyard… and finds common ground with a sociologist and an anthropologist
We—ecologist and sociologist and anthropologist—ended up with a richly detailed socioecological picture of Fresno, depicting details of how people and birds behave in individual homes and yards, and how that fits into the larger patchwork quilt of green spaces and biodiversity across the city.
An evolutionary ecologist by training, I entered the city with my lens focused on urban habitats for birds, in arid southwestern US landscapes where human impact was most obvious in how much water was available to plants and animals. Ecologists have found many interesting patterns in how plants and animals are distributed within cities, with a recurring theme being the so-called “luxury effect” on biodiversity—i.e., species diversity increases with neighborhood wealth. But we don’t quite understand how this pattern comes about: how do people channel their wealth into their yards and local landscapes in ways that attract or deter wildlife?
I chose to study wildlife biology in my youth because it was easier for me to wander through woods watching (and eventually catching and measuring) birds than to strike up conversations with strangers. I learned how to measure the plants, insects, and other resources birds need in the wild, drawing detailed pictures of their lives in the forests where I spent my Ph.D. years.
Diving into the city to study birds was therefore rather disconcerting for an introverted evolutionary ecologist! It soon became clear that urban bird behavior was shaped by what people do in and to their habitats. And measuring people as the biggest variable to explain bird behavior and distribution is a whole different ballgame than measuring plants or insects. People can be mercurial, and don’t always like being measured in ways I had been trained to do—and their behavior, how they shape their landscapes, is driven by even more complex influences, including cultural, social, institutional, governmental, and market forces that shape decisions in conscious or unconscious ways.
Therefore, when I moved to Fresno, California as a new professor, I first sought out local birding hotspots, and second, collaborators outside my biology department, and off-campus, to help me understand that city’s ecology. Universities don’t make it easy for faculty to reach across disciplinary silos, so one has to commit enough time to build productive collaborations. By the time a grant opportunity arose from the National Science Foundation and US Forest Service under President Obama’s economic stimulus package, I had a team in place to a study how Fresno’s environment would change with the installation of water meters.
While I was able to fill the larger canvas of the whole urban system in broad ecological strokes—where which plants and birds occurred, and how they layered atop patterns in the green-/blue-/grey-scapes of the city—a sociologist filled in important details about underlying socioeconomic gradients, and an anthropologist took us into backyards, talking to homeowners about how and why they chose to have a lawn or other plants, how much and how often they watered them, and what they felt about the birds.
We ended up with a richly detailed socioecological picture of Fresno, depicting details of how people and birds behave in individual homes and yards, and how that fits into the larger patchwork quilt of green spaces and biodiversity across the city. Without my sociologist and anthropologist friends, I wouldn’t have discovered that people wanted lush over-watered lawns in this dry region due to cultural inertia: it was what they knew from the dominant American model home from wetter parts of the country. And this culturally ingrained habit created a lush lawn landscape that kept out too many native bird species. Water metering and drought shifted perceptions enough that we could nudge people towards more waterwise landscaping choices, creating room for more of the local wildlife within the sprawling suburbs of Fresno.
Jess is part of ICLEI’s Cities Biodiversity Center as well as ICLEI Africa’s Resilience team. She has a background in atmospheric science with a more specialised knowledge of climate change and its relationship with a sustainable approach to development.
Jessica Kavonic
Mainstreaming nature into planning in urban Africa: the power of collaboration
An emergent principle of the Urban Natural Assets for Africa learning spaces is special emphasis on the actual conversations and the areas of tension that occur between unfamiliar participants. It is often these areas of tension that can unlock opportunities for change
News headlines in many African cities highlight the significant impacts of floods, droughts, heat waves and landslides. It is now widely acknowledged that there is a link between the scale of the impact of these events, and how depleted the natural assets are in the relevant area.
Given this, many African cities face a choice: to continue to merely reactto these events, or to address the systematic causes of the loss of natural assets, which counteract the negative effects of such events. Addressing these underlying causes requires scaled action, investment, and collaboration to connect often “siloed” departments and organisations.
Against this backdrop, the Urban Natural Assets for Africa (UNA) programme, among other activities, brings together a wide array of African city stakeholders from different sectors, institutions and organisations in a series of informal learning spaces, to co-explore how to best address these issues.
The benefits of bringing a diverse group of stakeholders together are clear. “Meeting and learning helps presents a complete encompassing picture which triggers action … helping us refocus where we are going and being an eye-opener so that we do not lose direction”, one UNA participant observed after a collaborative learning dialogue. Another participant mentioned that, “if nothing else, this collaborative process provided a great platform for information sharing and learning what others are actually doing. This is an ongoing challenge”.
Increased systems thinking, sharing of knowledge, as well as improved co-ordination and networking are common benefits for co-production. But it is apparent that collaboration also helps foster an improved sense of “togetherness” as it facilitates a greater understanding of others as individuals. One UNA participated said: “I have realised that to work together I need to change my views to be able to meet every [person]. I need to meet others where they are and not where I am … from conversation I see that we all equally contributing to both the solution and the problem. I am not alone”.
Collaboration also offers an opportunity for diverse actors to collectively reflect on and propose solutions to some of the most pressing challenges faced by their cities. One UNA stakeholder noted that, “…hardly do we stop and think about where we are going and if this is the best way to get there. Or that we can have thought of the things we don’t want to happen”.
The UNA learning spaces provide a place for co-exploration of nature-friendly urban planning and development issues with city stakeholders, co-creating the information needed to support policy and practice. However, a major emergent challenge to identifying solutions seems to be the limited ability in unpacking the actual steps needed to take these opportunities forward. Spaces that prioritise dialogue whereby stakeholders effectively unpack the actualmethods for taking discussion forward, analyse howthings can be done differently (especially linked to how certain decisions can be made differently), as well as provide the space for visioning, have proven extremely valuable in collectively overcoming systemic lock-ins.
An emergent principle of the UNA learning spaces is the special emphasis on the actual conversations, the need to follow effective processes, the areas of tension that arise in dialogue and the subtle learnings that occur between participants. It is often these areas of tension that can unlock opportunities for change.
For example, during visionary exercises in Malawi, participants co-developed impact stories for potential futures under plausible climate futures. A major point of tension was whether to include current policy reform and planned interventions in the stories. Participants from one sector were adamant that the future would change based on what they were currently planning to do, and therefore these activities should be included. Whereas other stakeholders were of a differing opinion with one participant mentioning “we are locked into bigger challenges that current interventions will not overcome”.This brought to the fore an important discussion in relation to how African city stakeholders can tackle systemic issues, which would have unlikely happened if an open and collaborative process was not followed. And more importantly, this would have unlikely emerged if there were no areas of tension or differing backgrounds between stakeholders.
As in the biodiversity discourse, which celebrates the role that diversity plays in coping and adapting to changes, so too does collaboration. Different ideas, backgrounds, vulnerabilities and power dynamics, if managed effectively can lead to improved collective action. However, as with any situation differences can result in challenges. One particular challenge that emerges across many ICLEI Africa projects and programmes, is terminology. The same word can mean multiple things depending on the background and perspective in which it is being used, and by whom. This challenge can be overcome, if effectively unpacked early on in the process, avoiding areas of tension that can arise from a misunderstanding of what stakeholders mean and how terms are viewed.
Through its experimentation in co-production, ICLEI Africa and the Cities Biodiversity Center, is effectively establishing new methodologies, tools and learnings for mainstreaming nature into local level planning and decision making processes. Interestingly, a major learninghas been that mainstreaming seems to be limited by confidence. City officials are often looking for the best methods for integration, planning, biodiversity management etc. Collaborative spaces are profound in helping improve confidence in all stakeholders so that they are comfortable that there is no one size fits all and confident in working with the context, resources and methods available to them. In addition, allowing time for diverse stakeholders to engage in a safe space on a mutually important topic is key to building trust and relationships, both of which benefit the longevity of interventions. These subtle and softer skills, which are key to mainstreaming nature into planning, cannot be developed without stakeholder collaboration.
Yvonne is an Urban Greening & Climate Resilience Strategist who works with Royal Commission for Riyadh City.
Yvonne Lynch
Two elements of successful collaboration are key: acknowledgement of joint effort, and starting the collaboration early in any process.
Engineers hold the keys to our cities. Of that I’m certain. Despite the politics that play out to determine directions and make decisions, ultimately engineers are the critical players when it comes to either maintaining the status quo or realising radical transformation for cities.
There are multiple disciplines of engineers from aeronautical and biomedical, from chemical to mechanical, and everything in between. In a career spanning almost two decades, I’ve worked with all of them, but most continuously with civil engineers. I’m a policy maker with a tertiary education in philosophy and communications, so I’m not exactly the first port of call for a municipal engineering department when they have a problem to solve. We speak different languages. We have different styles of working, different ways of knowing.
As a policy maker, I have always been committed to implementation. It is not enough to design and endorse cutting edge policies and strategies, you must actively drive implementation at every level, otherwise these documents are a waste of time and money. It didn’t take me long to realise that in a city government, you need to win the confidence of the engineers in order to implement sustainable, climate adapted, and ecologically healthy urban spaces.
What I have learned is that change takes time with engineers and that if at first you don’t succeed, then try again. When you come from different ways of knowing, collaboration is not instantaneous or easy. I recall the day I gathered several of my former engineering colleagues together to discuss extreme flooding and sea level rise. It was a hot sweltering summer day in year 13 of Melbourne’s Millennium Drought. I sat with my consultant team and demonstrated our flashy GIS-based flood model, illustrating critical flood scenarios. I was met with the response that we were in the midst of drought, this was not a priority matter. I tried to explain that our Climate Adaptation Strategy said we will experience drought and extreme flooding more frequently and simultaneously. By the end of our meeting, almost prophetically, the city had been unexpectedly flooded in the space of an hour. There were people swimming down Flinders Street.
Floods! Fabulous! What an endorsement for immediate action to progress this work, right?
Wrong. In fact, it took many more months and years to advance the municipal approach to climate-adapted flood management. And rightly so, because dealing with the big issues is rarely immediate. And changing the approach to municipal design, engineering and management is no overnight matter and nor is it something that can be driven by an evidence-based scenarios model or a single policy, plan or person!
Transformational city change takes time and requires the involvement of hundreds of municipal officers and many leaders. But when the engineers get involved, the innovation picks up pace and the magic begins to happen. I’ve seen first attempts at permeable paving quite literally sink in the ground, and I’ve seen engineers solve the problem. I’ve marvelled at largescale stormwater harvesting infrastructures and watched the engineers make them work when problems arose.
I’ve learned the key to collaboration with engineers is taking the time to fully explore the critical issues together. Its also about starting the work together from conception and not engaging them only at the point of implementation. The second time I developed a flood model, the engineers collaborated from the outset and owned the final product. And, probably the most important element of collaboration is acknowledgement. So often a lead work area in a city government can garner the attention for success, but the work always involves multiple parties. Highlighting those players and saying thank you is critical, and so is asking: what are we going to do next?
Mary Mattingly creates sculptural ecosystems in urban spaces. Mary Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, International Center of Photography, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, Storm King, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Palais de Tokyo.
Mary Mattingly and Lonny Grafman
Practice, meet Whimsy. Whimsy, meet Practice. Both of you, meet Vision. And in meeting, create installations inspiring hundreds of thousands of visitors that could not have been created alone.
Mary: In 2008, I was planning a public art and ecological project called Waterpod. Waterpodwas to become a fully self-sufficient ecosystem where five people would live, work, and host visitors on a floating barge in New York City’s harbor. I met Lonny Grafman that year through a mutual friend, Doug Cohen. Doug knew that I had a vision for the project, but did not have the practical skills necessary to build a self-sufficient ecosystem. Doug urged me to call his friend Lonny, a Resilient Technologies designer. I knew Lonny lived on the west coast and my instinct at the time was to find someone local with similar experiences and knowledge, but I took Doug’s advice and Lonny patiently listened to me explain what I was aiming to do. On our first call, I realized how much I had to learn about what he did. We talked for a few months before Lonny offered to have his engineering class work on specific projects that could be utilized and tested on the Waterpodby visitors and the crew who would live onboard. Since talking with Lonny on the phone in 2008, we’ve collaborated on numerous public projects, including Swale, Flock House, Wetland, lectures, workshops, writing, and more.
Project leaving South Street Seaport NYC, 2009. Photo: Mary Mattingly
Through being able to collaborate with Lonny, I’ve learned a number of practical skills, from plumbing a dry composting toilet, grease traps, and gutters to setting up solar systems. Every day, I utilize other skills I learned through working with Lonny, including modeling criteria for small and large projects and mapping team assets. Without having the formal background, I’ve been brought into his world and am now able to think more like an engineer, which has helped me immensely in other endeavors. Lonny has also taught me how to communicate more clearly, be more self-assured and therefore convincing. Most of all, Lonny has taught me that meeting new people and then finding common ground is a necessity.
Lonny: When I received that random late-night call in 2008, I was a little skeptical. The scale was epic, the need to inspire people regarding climate change was palpable, and the tone was a mixture of apocalyptic and whimsical. At the same time, this project seemed like one of those things that people talk about and never do.
Through my conversations with Mary, I quickly realized how serious she was and how definitively she was going to make this happen…so I jumped on board.
The projects I generally work on are more directly practical—e.g. safe drinking water, clean energy, local entrepreneurship, sustainable construction, etc. While these projects may have an artistic element, the main goals are more obvious. In these projects, it is easy for me to know what is a necessity and what can be changed. In an epic art project, it is much harder to know. Watching Mary articulate her grand vision and weave in multiple cocreators with their own visions was edifying. Yet, if I had to pick just one thing I learned deeply working with Mary, I would pick whimsy.
Whimsy. I am sure that is not how Mary would describe it, but it is how it seems to me. I have learned deeply how whimsy matters. The better engineered something is, the more visitors, users, and stakeholders will enjoy the more whimsical aspects. The fanciful, imaginative, and even the evanescent serve to inspire. I often think back to my early thinking on the Waterpod. I was attempting to calculate the embedded energy of every part of the barge in order to balance our impacts…and yet somehow, I forgot to calculate in the impacts on the visitors and what they would end up changing in their lives. We had 200,000 in person visitors. Anecdotally most left inspired. If even a small fraction of these visitors made change, the investment was more than worth it.
Waterpod Water System, 2009. Photo: Mary Mattingly
Lonny Grafman is an Instructor at Humboldt State University; the founder of the Practivistas summer abroad, full immersion, resilient community technology program; the project manager of the epi-apocalyptic city art project Swale; the Chief Product Officer of Nexi; the managing director of BlueTechValley North Coast; and the President of the Appropedia Foundation, sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.
Brian McGrath is Professor of Urban Design at Parsons School of Design at The New School and Associate Director of the Tishman Center for Environment and Design where he leads the Infrastructure, Design and Justice Lab. The focus of his work is the architecture of urban adaptation and change from social justice and ecological resilience perspectives.
Brian McGrath
I have become convinced of the need for new collaborative models around the shift in the cultural narrative for cites from the architecture to the ecology of cities. These models are multi-scalar and multi-actor, including the essential balancing of non-human and human actors.
I have had many collaborative experiences in urban discourse in general as well as on specific projects in a wide range of community, professional, and academic research contexts. In order to convey some lessons learned over the years, I can group these experiences under three broad umbrellas: architecture and urbanism as humanist disciplines; an early immersion in art and activism as a young professional; and my generations’ encounter with digital technology as a platform to engage within the very different collaborative frameworks of science. All these experiences have been arenas for personal and intellectual growth, but the extreme gap between humanist and scientific methods of collaboration remains a continuing challenge—they require shared metaphors that can bridge distinct ways of thinking.
I studied architecture as an undergraduate and graduate student within stand-alone professional schools within liberal arts universities. These schools awarded degrees that conform with national and state licensing structures, but emphasized architecture as an inherently cultural act that engages in the collaborative construction of cities according to collective social norms and aspirations. The best way to understand any culture is to visit its cities and to be enveloped in the life-worlds produced by architecture and building. Art, literature, and all forms of cultural production as well as the various forms of urban social life constitute a type of collaborative project with the design and building of the city as a collective artifact. During the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, architecture was placed at the center of this collaborative enterprise, and therefore served as both the common narrative and the arena for the exertion of power. This can be seen as a hierarchical collaborative model, where the discipline of architecture was created in order for a prince, religious leader, wealthy individual, or civic group to arrive at a physical structuring of both the city as a whole, and various institutions, public spaces, and private buildings within it. Cities are inexhaustible texts from which to read or decipher the power structure, ethics and values of a society, in other words, how they collaborate or not.
As a recent graduate undertaking a career as an architect in Lower Manhattan in the 1980s, the injustice of the hierarchical Eurocentric architectural model became clear. Recent struggles for civil rights, social equity, feminism, and queer theory are just a few of the social movements that provided more democratic and just models of collaboration. I lived within a milieu that was rich in collaborative experiments such as homesteading in vacant buildings, green gorillas seed bombing vacant lots, community gardeners, bicycle activists, independent art, poetry and performance groups, community land trusts, community housing organizations, and AIDS activism. Collaboration under this activist model questioned the older patriarchal and colonial models that the U.S. had always tried to import as forms of cultural legitimacy from European sources. Unfortunately these grass roots organizations were ill-equipped to counter the economic and political restructuring of New York City following its near fiscal default in the 1970s. As city officials became more invested in economic development rather than social welfare, architects were quick to provide a cultural veneer and narrative for displacement, gentrification and the commodification of the city. A corporate model of collaboration creates a professional hierarchy of a client, either public or private, a lead designer for a project, with various vertical tiers of consultants, depending on the scale and complexity of the project.
With each passing decade preceding and following the new millennium, new developments in digital technology. The development of modeling software, wide access to the internet, and hand held links to social media invited new models of collaboration and with the widening of access to the tools that created the possibility of a return to the more radical non-hierarchical collaborative models developed in the ‘60s and ‘70s, culminating in Occupy Wall Street in 2011. New technology formed the basis of multiple experiments in urban design collaboration that I undertook as a teacher and practitioner in urban design. One project, Manhattan Timeformations, celebrated the new millennium with an interactive on-line data base that allows viewers to understand the historical formation of New York’s two central business districts. The publicly funded project with the Skyscraper Museum involved multiple public forums in the creation of the digital model in order to provide an easy user interface. The project has had a wide internet audience and after it was published in WIRED magazine and I was approached by three principal investigators of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) who were experimenting in GIS software and time based mapping of longitudinal research. As one of two urban sites as part of the National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research program, the research project brings social and biophysical scientists together in collaborative research projects, driven by the accumulation of data over long time periods, This collaborative approach to research has significantly enriched the understand of the Baltimore region as an urban ecosystem. After 15 years with BES, I have become convinced of the need for new collaborative models around the shift in the cultural narrative for cites from the architecture to the ecology of cities. These models are multi-scalar and multi-actor, including the essential balancing of non-human and human actors. Important is that this new collaborative model is not about green space in the city, but a cultural metaphor for the ecology of and for the city.
Ragene Palma is a Filipino urbanist currently studying International Planning at the University of Westminster, London, as a Chevening scholar. Follow her work at littlemissurbanite.com.
Ragene Palma
While there were many collaborations across disciplines and ways of knowing in our urban development programme, which were equally valuable to city and environmental planning, together they are an overview of the interphases in economic planning.
Environmental planning in the Philippines is such a multi-disciplinary profession because of how it transects with so many other fields. In city and municipal governments, planning is central to all other departments, primarily because of the data and strategic and spatial directions. In private practice, planning is always conducted by a team of different experts. The profession is inclusive towards many specializations, ranging from the natural, environmental sciences to sociology and economies.
While I am fond of sharing many experiences on planning, let me write about my work under the UN HABITAT Philippines. In 2015, I became part of the team that worked on the Achieving Sustainable Urban Development (ASUD) Programme. As part of the strategy to approach planned city extensions holistically, the program used the model of enhancing governance, financing, and economic development to ensure how leadership, implementing ability of plans, and economic progress could move together.
I was tasked to work on the local economic development of select cities. In doing so, I had to work closely with all economic departments of the government and groups within civil society. The sectors involved included agriculture and fisheries, trade, entrepreneurship, and business development. In conducting primary research, I worked with farmers and fisherfolk, business owners, and entrepreneurs. In conducting secondary research, I worked with local government departments, including trade and tourism. I also conducted research with special sectors, including the youth, to understand issues on schooling courses, preferred industries, and access to employment; social welfare groups, to understand issues on migration in and out of the city; and people’s organizations that could provide perspectives on informal markets.
The knowledge of each of these sectors was vital to understanding the local economy. The assessments and strategy development spanned from defining the cities’ strengths and capacities (including skills, production, income) to aligning local economic growth to the planned city extension while sustaining the current economic activities.
Another key collaboration in the program was the close work of environmental planning and geography. In creating strategies for local economic development, the spatial component was of utmost importance, because of how it helped direct the workability of improved value chains and linkages within industries, and the viability of connecting the city extensions.
While there were many other collaborations across disciplines and ways of knowing in the ASUD Programme, which were equally valuable to city and environmental planning, what I shared could be an overview of the interphases in economic planning. Valuing specialized, local knowledge through collaboration enhances one’s work through added value, provides a change of perspective in a profession, and challenges viewpoints to become truly holistic.
Diane Pataki is a Professor of Biological Sciences, an Adjunct Professor of City & Metropolitan Planning, and Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Utah. She studies the role of urban landscaping and forestry in the socioecology of cities.]
Diane Pataki
One of the key ingredients that can make or break interdisciplinary collaborations is respect.
In this roundtable about collaboration, I’ve ironically decided to write this essay non-collaboratively. But I do so to take the opportunity to write a note of deep gratitude to my dear friend and closest collaborator, fellow TNOC contributor Stephanie Pincetl.
Stephanie and I have virtually nothing in common in terms of disciplinary background. I am a quantitative ecosystem scientist who has spent my career making physiological and physical measurements of the urban environment, placing probes in trees and soils, measuring isotopes of various elements, and applying statistical and computational models of plant-atmosphere interactions. Stephanie has a Ph.D. in urban planning and has worked in environmental justice, land use politics, and urban governance. But over the last 14 years or so, our collaborative work on the role of vegetation and greenspace in cities has resulted in many of my most exciting, gratifying, and simply fun projects.
We met years ago through a mutual colleague (the path-breaking soil scientist Susan Trumbore), who invited Stephanie to give a lecture on urban ecosystem services. Years ahead of her time, Stephanie presciently saw the many emerging challenges in feasibly designing, planning, and managing cities to accommodate nature in different ways. My research at the time, and still today, was focused on measuring ecosystem services, and so a collaboration was born. However, I’ve had many, many interdisciplinary collaborations over the years, and this one turned out to be special. This roundtable has given me the opportunity to ponder why
Interdisciplinary collaborations between ecologists and social scientists were popularized at least 20 years ago, when funding agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation incentivized the formation of research teams that could take on complex environmental challenges, such as Biocomplexity in the Environment. As part of one of those early teams, I met social scientists who specialized in studying interdisciplinary team dynamics. From them I learned that one of the key ingredients that can make or break interdisciplinary collaborations is respect. Teams that breakdown or fail to coalesce are often composed of one or more members who feel their expertise and contributions are not truly respected by their collaborators. Conversely, strong teams respect the value of each other’s disciplines, expertise, and accomplishments.
Although I had a pretty poor understanding of the qualitative social sciences when I began to collaborate with Stephanie, I immediately respectedher clear thinking, sharp assessments of environmental and social issues, and creative solutions to the persistent problems that plague modern cities. She also conveyed a deep understanding and appreciation for the uncertainties about the functioning of designed landscapes that characterize urban ecology. Together, we have now jointly unraveled many interesting findings about fundamental relationships between people and urban nature that will, we hope, help us better steward urban landscapes and human-non-human interactions in the future.
It’s impossible to know exactly what would have happened if this collaboration had not materialized, but I’m quite sure I would have learned far less about cities and their human and non-human inhabitants. Is it possible to really understand the ecology of urban plants without studying the reasons, the history, and the goals of the people that planted them? Can we adequately plan and manage urban greenspace without a deep knowledge of how people and nature interact? For me, the answer is clearly no.
Notably, it was Stephanie who introduced me to TNOC and its amazing community (you can read our first joint contributionhere). These days, our work is so intertwined that some people, amazingly, have asked me if we come from exactly the same discipline. Certainly we don’t, but I hope it’s true that in the end we played a part in developing the “transdiscipline” that studies the interface of people and urban nature. And that is probably the best collaborative outcome of all.
Many thanks to Stephanie and our other friends and colleagues. Onward!
Wilson Ramirez Hernandez Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher (Coordinator) in the Alexander von Humboldt Institute, is the coordinator of the territorial management program, he is Lead Author in the IPBES objective 3bi (land degradation and restoration), and he is working in urban restoration and urban sustainable indicators.
Wilson Ramirez
I´ve decided to include an expert in the interface of science and policy into my regular team, in order to establish clearer connections and more relevant interpretations of environmental information for policy stakeholders.
As a researcher in urban issues, I recently had the big challenge to work closely with a mayor and his team in a medium-sized city. The idea was to include some environmental variables and indicators into the landscape planning of the city and its surroundings.
At the beginning I felt a kind of short-circuit between the classical scientific language and the decision making and territorial management language used in the mayor´s team. The good point is after a couple of months, my team and I understood that we were discussing the same concerns, but with different words. After that experience, I´ve decided to include an expert in the interface of science and policy into my regular team, in order to establish clearer connections and more relevant interpretations of environmental information for policy stakeholders.
Recently, a new urban sustainability project has begun, and I feel confident about the new results. As a conclusion, I believe that if we want to be more impactful in our work as scientists, especially in urban contexts, the more diverse the team is, the better results you will have. This is a special conclusion mainly for science research institutes, where the natural way of working is among only a few colleagues who share the same expertise.
Bruce is the Director of Watershed Management for Clean Water Services (www.cleanwaterservices.org) and the nonprofit Clean Water Institute (CWI) in Hillsboro, Oregon.
Bruce Roll
What I find most inspiring about this story is what we are able to achieve when we share a common set of values and inspiring language. This approach forced me and CWS to move from transactional to transformative partnerships.
Having worked for public utilities and local governments for the better part of thirty years, I have been blessed with some interesting collaboration opportunities. A dozen plus years ago I was given a rare opportunity to work for Clean Water Services (CWS), a regional public wastewater and stormwater utility in northwestern Oregon.
Heron at Fernhill Wetlands.
In 2005, CWS received one of USA’s first discharge permits that allows for water quality trading in the Tualatin River Watershed. This permit allowed CWS to invest in riparian restoration instead of costly hard infrastructure, such as water chillers estimated to cost over 150 million dollars. At this time, local governments were witnessing two huge watershed stressors: climate change and prolific urbanization. Creating a resilient watershed able to survive these challenges would require a scale of action far beyond the wheel house of my utility, and demonstrated a need to find transformational partners capable of bringing additional resources to the table.
Tualatin
As CWS began to implement its new riparian restoration program, it became clear that we would need to think outside the box, find new partners, and create a new language. A language that engaged and inspired. Utilities are very good at planning, modeling, and constructing hard infrastructure, but often struggle when designing projects for Mother Nature. If we had used the classic utility model, it would have meant paying for costly access easements, minimizing distractions like parks and trails, thinking of mitigation as a one-time transaction, and pursing the easiest compliance outcome. That approach would have also resulted in high project costs and, most likely, an inability to achieve landscape-scale results. Wanting to avoid this inefficient approach, I sought the support of parks and open space groups that had land but limited resources for restoration or maintenance.
I learned very quickly that words like mitigation, compliance, discharge permit, and trading were part of my utility jargon, but certainly did not inspire or engage parks and open space groups. They looked at me like I was a one-eyed monster from the sewage lagoon trying to pull a fast one. Luckily, I was able to step back, stand in their shoes, and reengage with a new vocabulary that talked about values like watershed resilience, biodiversity, stewardship, cultural heritage, sustainable economies, recreation and human health. It was truly amazing how quickly we went from “No” to “Go, Go, Go”. Now, 15 years later, we have found a home for 10 million native plants, and restored 150 river miles across 25,000 plus acres in the Tualatin River Watershed (www.jointreeforall.org). What started as a utility’s regulatory compliance opportunity is now a group of over 30 partners working together to create a healthy and resilient watershed.
What I find most inspiring about this story is what we are able to achieve when we share a common set of values and inspiring language. This approach forced me and CWS to move from transactional to transformative partnerships. In many cases it took years of hard work to create the transformative partnerships that were necessary to move to scale, but when I look at the 700 plus projects that we accomplished together, I see that it was all well worth it.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
David Simon
Social scientist and local authority official and consultant
The partnership worked effectively because of key champions, but also because our team was able to generate synergies of interest among the participating partners that benefited all concerned.
This experience represents one example of the transdisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary approach to tackling so-called “wicked” problems around transitions and transformations to urban sustainability that characterise the work of Mistra Urban Futures, which I lead.
Mistra Urban Futures is an international research centre on urban sustainability that experiments with various forms of transdisciplinary co-design/-creation or -production methodologies in formal transdisciplinary institutional partnerships. In this sense, transdisciplinarity refers to academic and various policy and practice stakeholders working together into research partnerships—as distinct from interdisciplinarity, which refers to people from different academic disciplines working together.
As a partner in the Campaign for an Urban Sustainable Development Goal from 2014, I realised the potential value of using the four cities where Mistra Urban Futures at that stage had transdisciplinary research platforms to test the draft targets and indicators for what became Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11, the urban goal). Despite the great diversity of skills and experience within the Campaign, debate and dialogue could only get us so far and to be able to provide feedback to the UN statistical team on the basis of real-world testing would be a huge advantage. With additional funding, we then undertook an intensive 3-month pilot project in early-mid-2015 to work with the local authorities in our four platforms (Gothenburg (Sweden), Greater Manchester (UK), Cape Town (South Africa), and Kisumu (Kenya))–and we added Bangalore (India), to provide an almost-megacity in Asia for even greater diversity of conditions and operational challenges.
The challenges of setting up and running the experiment were considerable, not least in terms of the short timeframe but also all the well-known differences of priorities, operational protocols and procedures, budgetary constraints and staff availability. The project was designed centrally but operationalised and implemented locally by each of our city platforms and the team in Bangalore at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. The example here focuses on Cape Town, but each city case study threw up specific challenges.
The immediate issue in Cape Town was that the formal partnership underpinning the research platform was between the academic host and partner, the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, and one particular department in the City of Cape Town (i.e. the municipality). For a combination of the above reasons, the head of that municipal department was not well disposed to participation in the project or even the idea of developing a new set of targets and indicators, because South African metropolitan authorities were at that time overwhelmed with performance and compliance demands from central government in the form of overlapping indicator sets.
Participation in the project depended on finding a different path. The leadership of the Cape Town platform used personal connections to discuss the proposal more widely in the municipality. Fortunately, the head of one integrative department saw the point of the exercise and also the value to the City of having a “dry run” of activities on which it would have to report annually from 2016-30 in any event. She became the crucial institutional “champion”, along with a former municipal employee and at that time a consultant working with the national Treasury (finance ministry) to harmonise reporting indicators for metropolitan authorities.
Not only did the partnership work effectively because of these champions but because our team was able to generate synergies of interest among the participating partners that benefited all concerned, as well as contributing to a successful project that helped refine the final targets and indicators of what became SDG 11. It enhanced the partnership’s existing relations of trust and has led to an extremely fruitful ongoing partnership implementing a longer term follow-up project on how the City is engaging with the SDGs and New Urban Agenda.
For further details, see the following Open Access papers:
D. Simon, H. Arfvidsson, G. Anand, A. Bazaaz, G. Fenna, K. Foster, G. Jain, S. Hansson, L. Marix Evans, N. Moodley, C. Nyambuga, M. Oloko, D. Chandi Ombara, Z. Patel, B. Perry, N. Primo, A. Revi, B. van Niekerk, A. Wharton and C. Wright (2016) ‘Developing and testing the Urban Sustainable Development Goal’s targets and indicators – a five-city study’, Environment and Urbanization28(1), pp. 49-63 (my contribution 30%), http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956247815619865.
Z. Patel, S. Greyling, D. Simon, H. Arfvidsson,N. Moodley, N. Primo and C. Wright, (2017) ‘Local responses to global sustainability agendas: learning from experimenting with the urban Sustainable Development Goal in Cape Town’, Sustainability Science 12(5), pp. 785-797 DOI 10.1007/s11625-017-0500-y.
Dimitra Xidous is a Research Fellow in TrinityHaus, a research centre
in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Engineering that focuses on co-creation and the intersection between the built environment, health, wellbeing inclusion, climate action and sustainability. She is an Executive Editor of SPROUT, an eco-urban poetry journal, run in partnership with The Nature of Cities.
Dimitra Xidous
Something I have always felt to be true of collaboration: it is an act of translation. And trust.
I am currently collaborating with printmaker and artist Ria Czerniak-LeBov on a text and visual project entitled “(M)other, M(other): In Which We Speak About Our Mothers”. Exploring the links between (m)otherhood(s), (m)other tongue(s), and (m)otherland(s), at its heart, “(M)other, M(other)” is an act of remembrance.Over the last two years, we have looked and we are looking back at our mothers in photographs, photographs of them in time (before us) and in place (in Greece, in Ireland, in Canada). The collaboration recalls the places our mothers once were, and using the mediums of poetry and copper plate etching, we are placing them at the centre of a re(membering). In and at the centre of this re(membering), we are re(visiting), re(inserting), and re(inventing) our mothers in fragments (of what we know, what we are being shown) re(collected) and re(called) in photographs of times and places, of our mothers before us—before they become our mothers.
The collaboration between myself and Ria has been slow, and incredibly fulfilling; to have taken our mothers as starting points from which to examine otherness, language, and absence (to list only a few of the themes floating up to the surface) was as much an ambitious as well as a loving endeavour. In between ambition (our creative drives) and love (for our mothers) lies the big challenge: how to ensure, via our chosen mediums, we meet the goals we have set out, both with respect to engaging across our disciplines (the process of collaboration), and the project itself, as a stand-alone art piece (the product of collaboration).
For me, the challenge manifested itself in two ways. Firstly, I discovered I could not “write” Ria’s mother (I don’t know her, will never know her). This not-knowing is a constraint I had not anticipated I would need to learn to work within; it has forced me to write differently. Poems which reference Ria’s mother are built from details Ria has told me about her; fragments of memories of when Ria was a little girl. In the beginning, I thought my writing for the project would be a root (act like one), something to keep me steady – a root to root me in time and in place. A foundation. A narrative. In some way, and because of this rootedness, I thought my poetic acts of re(membering) would pull the fragments to whole, again—for both her mother, and mine. Instead, I find myself writing poems that mirror the prints Ria is producing; this was not my original intention, and while there is a narrative emerging, it is not the one I had anticipated, or imagined, or wanted (don’t ask me to describe what I wanted; I don’t remember anymore). But: I am working with, not against, the constraint because it is showing me something I have (always) felt to be true of collaboration: it is an act of translation. We are speaking to each other, across poetry and print, and coming to (new) terms. This has been good.
Secondly, I would be remiss if I did not highlight a challenge, which, if I am being honest, is due more to subject matter, than the collaboration process itself (nevertheless, the latter has shed new light on the former): it was, in the beginning, difficult for me, to see my mother (as a little girl) re(membered) in Ria’s work. She seemed (mis)placed, not re(membered); (mis)represented, not re(invented); (mis)aligned, not re(inserted). I’ve since come around to it; I see now, my discomfort was due to having (mis)understood the medium of print: it is not reproduction or a copy. Print doesn’t work that way. Ria understands this, can trust the process. And so: I had to learn to see my mother through her eyes, her medium. I trust it too, now.
As we homogenise and sterilise our rural landscapes with intensive agriculture, and disconnect our populations from nature in shining metropolises, it is more pressing than ever to maximize the potential for urban areas to support wildlife.
With a new stream of studies adding to evidence revealing disturbing declines in global populations of insects (Hallmann et al. 2018, Lister & Garcia 2018, Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019) and reports of an ecological catastrophe on the scale of a sixth mass extinction, there is an urgent need to do more to conserve these species that underpin our ecosystems. Urban areas have the potential to provide a safe haven for many rare and declining species that have been extirpated from our rural landscapes by intensive agricultural practices (Benton et al. 2003). But only if we manage those safe havens appropriately!
In our last essay at TNOC we discussed the phenomenon of ecological gentrification—“blandscaping” that excludes substantial proportions of biodiversity that urban areas can potentially support. We proposed a mechanism to combat this effect; taking more inspiration from nature and natural systems through a locally contextualised approach to urban greenspace design. We included examples of innovations that are pushing the boundaries in terms of embedding ecological functionality into greenspace design. A year on, the innovation in this field continues to grow. It is inspiring to see more and more examples of an ecological approach to green infrastructure, with nature-based solution projects that put locally important biodiversity at the heart of the design of multifunctional greenspaces.
A recent research project has given us a timely reminder, however, that innovative urban greenspace design also needs innovative management if our nature-based solutions are to sustain diverse populations of biodiversity in urban areas:
This summer we were commissioned to survey one of our old favourite monitoring grounds. Our scope was to investigate how effective the design and management of the site was in supporting invertebrate biodiversity. As part of the original green infrastructure masterplan for the site, planning included preparation of a Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) that identified key species and habitats for the site, and set out targets for their conservation and enhancement. Monitoring progress towards these targets was also a key aim of the BAP. The outcome of this masterplan process was a multifunctional exemplar that unites the social, economic and environmental value of greenspace and marries it with design for wildlife.
We have previously been contracted to survey individual areas on the site, and each time we visit we record rare and interesting species, expanding understanding of the diversity of wildlife that can be supported in semi-formal landscaped urban areas. There can be no question that the design of this greenspace includes an innovative blend of social and ecological functionality, and that the result is an attractive space that meets many of the Biodiversity Action Plan’s objectives. You may have noticed though that up to this point our focus has been on design innovation. In contrast to previous years, this summer we expanded to monitor both ground-level biodiversity hotspots and green roofs. This gave us the opportunity to compare these two types of nature-based solutions on a single site. In so doing, it brought the impact of management of these respective areas into stark focus.
The ground level areas of the site we surveyed comprised a series of wildflower meadows, some combined with scrub and young woodland areas, others with a more open pasture-inspired design. These meadows were distributed across the site in a variety of situations, for instance bordering amenity grass areas and river corridors, and included different topographies and aspects. This created a mosaic of environmental niches for nature to exploit. The green roof we were also surveying had comparable habitat complexity in many ways. This included a variety of aspects (created by a high barrier dividing a central infrastructure area from the green roof), substrates, and structural diversity generated by different hydrology and shading regimes. Both the ground-level and roof-level habitats embodied some of the principles of ecomimicry that can be so valuable when designing for nature in cities.
The wildflower-rich areas at ground and roof level were the main target for our surveys. Whilst not directly comparable in terms of area and the sampling effort used across habitat patches, the same survey techniques were adopted on the different levels (direct observation/hand-searching, sweep net surveys and pitfall trapping). Repeated sampling methods were adopted, enabling comparison of patterns in each area across the survey period (early to late summer). It was also possible to compare the proportion of rare and scarce species in relation to the total catch size by calculating a Species Quality Index (SQI) for each area. Survey results were positive, with nationally rare and scarce species recorded in all areas surveyed, including 4 of the Park’s 7 Biodiversity Action Plan target invertebrate species. A diversity of more common species from groups such as butterflies, bumblebees, dragonflies and damselflies were also recorded, providing an oasis of nature for local communities to enjoy.
Despite these positive results for both roof and ground level habitats, when patterns of species abundance and the representation of scarce species were interrogated in more detail, it was apparent that not all areas were equal. During the early summer survey, there was a predominance of nationally rare and scare species at roof level compared to ground level habitats. This is perhaps counter-intuitive to what one would expect, due to the relatively greater range of habitats and niches associated with the ground level sites. By the second survey the comparatively greater value of the green roof for rare and scarce species had declined slightly. This decline appeared correlated with the effects of the very hot dry summer in London this year. By the time of this second survey, the green roof was clearly drought-stressed, with only a small proportion of plants managing to survive in moister habitat niches created by the roof’s novel habitat mosaic design. Whilst the ground-level meadows also suffered during the prolonged heatwave, their deeper substrates offered greater resilience to the drought. As such, they continued to flower longer, and thus improved comparatively to the green roof in terms of species abundance and total scarce species recorded.
At the time of the last survey in September however, a real lightbulb moment occurred. When we returned to the site for our final visit, two of the three ground level meadows had been strimmed to within an inch of their lives. Coinciding with this management, our survey results showed that the number of invertebrate species (and proportion of rare species) on these areas had plummeted. This pattern of late cutting, an appropriation of a management technique used in arable situations, is an all too familiar practice in both urban and rural areas in the UK. This approach perhaps stems from a clear conservation message that us ecologists have been promoting over the years. In the face of global declines in pollinators, there has been a strong driver to turn amenity grass areas into wildflower meadows, with an equally strong management message not to cut meadow areas when they are in flower, so that we don’t remove pollen and nectar resources for our valuable bees/pollinators.
A really positive outcome of this has been the creation of networks of pollinator meadows that now criss-cross our urban landscapes. Unfortunately, pressure to “tidy up” these pollinator havens is great, often driven by a desire to make urban greenspace look managed and neat. The consequence of this is that, as soon as the flowering season is coming to an end, the wildflower meadow is assumed to have no further value. The entire vegetation resource is then removed by a wholesale strim in late summer once flowering has diminished.
This is happening across our urban landscapes on a grand scale, and with almost choreographed timing. We see examples of it not just at this survey site, but as standard practice across the streets and parks where we live. Even on our university campus (where we have our own Biodiversity Action Plan and have restored nature to provide staff and students opportunities to experience wildlife), the landscape managers follow the same prescription: one day pocket meadows full of architectural stems and attractive seedheads, and the next, mechanised destruction that leaves nothing standing across almost the entire campus.
This blanket, almost generic, approach to urban grassland conservation management has an enormous impact on the ability of many species to persist in these areas. Countless species, including some pollinators, rely on resources provided by these meadows beyond just the pollen and nectar offered by flowers. Seeds provide food, thick grass swards are used for nesting, and seed heads and stems for overwintering. If these resources are removed, the species associated with these resources disappear too. And this was the pattern observed on our survey site. Despite the nature conservation objectives of the Biodiversity Action Plan, blanket removal of grassland areas following flowering prevents a broad diversity of species, including some of the rare and scarce target species, from being able to persist in the habitat that has been created for them.
The negative impact from this cutting management was demonstrated by the results of our surveys. We saw dramatic declines in the total number of species recorded on the cut areas, particularly for scarce conservation priority species. The SQI score for each survey area followed a similar pattern. Values for the areas managed using blanket cuts were substantially lower than for the green roof, also lower than the one meadow area that was left uncut. It would be expected that an opposite pattern would be seen with appropriate management, due to the greater habitat diversity on and around the ground-level meadow areas and their greater resilience to the summer drought. This finding highlighted to us the profound impact inappropriate management can have on innovatively designed urban greenspace.
This effect of blanket management on areas designed to be wildlife refuges is one we encounter frequently. Lessons on how these areas could be managed can be taken from some of the more industrial areas of our urban landscapes. As detailed in our previous essay, brownfield (post-industrial) sites can host some of the most rich and diverse populations of wildlife found in our urban areas (Gibson, 1998; Bodsworth et al., 2005). Whilst part of their biodiversity value is due to habitat heterogeneity created by the diversity of substrates, topography and contamination typical to these sites, another key aspect is their management or, more precisely, lack of it. Rather than regimented, intensive management, biodiversity-rich brownfield sites tend to have sporadic and localised disturbance. This enables wildflower resources, beyond just nectar and pollen, to persist, and therefore support the diverse array of wildlife that depend upon a continuity of resources.
Numerous species can only persist (and by persist we mean to successfully complete their life cycle) if the wildflower resources necessary for their entire life cycle are left intact over appropriate spatial scales. If habitat areas are subjected to blanket cuts, these species disappear. Lack of intensive management means that high quality brownfield sites have become a valuable reservoir for many of these species. Examples include:
The Diptera species Acinia corniculata (UK Red Data Book (RDB) 1 – Endangered species) that develops in the dry fruit heads of black knapweed (Centuarea nigra) only if they are left in-situ throughout the winter.
One of our survey site’s Biodiversity Action Plan targets, beetle Mordellistena neuwaldeggiana(RDBK), that uses dead stems in tall grassland for over-wintering and larval development.
Another Biodiversity Action Plan target beetle at the site, Olibrus flavicornis(RDBK), the larvae of which probably develop in the flower heads of Autumn Hawkbit (Scorzoneroides autumnali) (Harvey 2018).
The blue carpenter bee Ceratina cyanea(Red Data Book 3), which nests and overwinters in hollow twigs and stems (McGill 2017).
And it isn’t just invertebrates that suffer from this habitat loss. Many declining bird species such as linnets (Carduelis cannabina) and sparrows (Passer domesticus) are dependent upon the bountiful seed sources provided by uncut wildflowers and grasses during autumn and winter. Both species forage on fallen seed and standing seedheads and will feed on invertebrates overwintering in plant tissues. These important food sources that are crucial to keeping birds alive throughout winter are now generally confined to unmanaged brownfield sites in the urban landscape. Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) also suffer from this need to tidy (remove standing dead plant material) and simplify (cut everything in one go) our urban greenspaces. During the day and during winter hibernation, hedgehogs sleep in specially built nests. These are often hidden in long, overgrown vegetation and the nests themselves are constructed from dead plant material. Over-management of greenspace resulting in the loss of suitable nesting vegetation is a key threat to declining hedgehog populations in the UK.
Presumably, within the context of our survey, one of the key reasons the green roof performed so well for rare and scarce species (SQI 9.5–equivalent to national significance for nature conservation) was because it wasn’t subjected to this standardised management intervention (with summer drought-stress providing a natural process to suppress dominant species and maintain a diverse sward). As such, conditions on the roof mimic those on biodiversity-rich urban brownfield sites. The less frequently cut meadow area also scored similarly highly. If we want to avoid extirpating these species from our urban areas through ecological gentrification, then we must not only take a mosaic approach to how we design our greenspaces, but also to how we manage them. This means staggering the timing of cuts of wildflower areas to ensure that a continuity of resources is provided, and, most critically, leaving some areas uncut for longer durations.
There are examples of innovation in this approach to management too, whereby sections of meadow are cut at different times and patterns are cut in the sections to create interesting borders for areas left uncut. This has the double advantage of ensuring that the areas look managed (and therefore not abandoned) and are visually interesting. Such a management approach can also have the added advantage of being more cost effective as less cutting is needed annually!
As we homogenise and sterilise our rural landscapes with intensive agriculture, and disconnect our populations from nature in shining metropolises, it is more pressing than ever that the potential for urban areas to support wildlife is maximised. We must therefore strive for and share innovation in the design and management of urban greenspaces, so that ecological gentrification becomes a thing of the past and our declining species can flourish in our cities.
Bodsworth, E., Shepherd, P. & Plant, C. (2005) Exotic plant species on brownfield land: their value to invertebrates of nature conservation importance. English Nature Research Report No. 650. Peterborough: English Nature.
Gibson, C.W.D. (1998) Brownfield: red data – the values artificial habitats have for uncommon invertebrates. English Nature Research Report No. 273. Peterborough: English Nature.
Harvey, P. (2018) Anchor Field 2016 invertebrate survey report. In: Connop, S., Gardiner, T., George, B., Gibson, C., Harvey, P. and Knowles, A. (Eds) (In Press) The Essex Naturalist: Journal of the Essex Field Club, No 35 (New series), ISSN 0071-1489.
Lister, B.C. & Garcia, A (2018) Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (44) E10397-E10406.
McGill, J. (2017) Invertebrate survey at the Ripple Nature Reserve, Barking London. Report to Barking Riverside Limited.
WWF (2018) Living Planet Report – 2018: Aiming Higher. Grooten, M. and Almond, R.E.A.(Eds). WWF, Gland, Switzerland.
Caroline is a Research Assistant in the Sustainability Research Institute at University of East London, working primarily on biodiversity and urban green infrastructure design
Poor urban planning situations can often be attributed in large part to a lack of understanding of and/or interest in the history, heritage, and community attachments to urban green spaces by management authorities.
Urban public parks are under constant siege; and the issue is an increasingly global matter. Typically created as public recreation spaces and local community green spaces within cities and towns, urban parks are increasingly impacted by incremental changes to original designs brought on by, for example, overshadowing by tall buildings, the addition of new structures and billboards and, on occasion having green areas hard surfaced to satisfy increased demands for parking. Increased traffic noise, garish lighting, removal of original plantings and the loss of vistas and views are further diminishing the restful and tranquil character of these places.
The entrance to the Meilahti Park (Helsinki, Finland) is besieged by sandwich boards and disparate signage vying for the attention of visitors and impacting the simple aesthetic of the park entrance. The small wooden pavilion was designed by amateur architect Fabian Steinheil, a previous Governor of Finland (1810–1824). Photo: Eeva Ruoff
I am not suggesting that urban public parks should not change (replacing original trees with those better adapted to changing climate and reduced water availability, for example), but rather it is not unusual that actions are being implemented in ways that are not cognisant of the histories, community values or non-commercial purposes of these places. This poor urban planning situation can be attributed in large part to a lack of understanding of or interest in the history, heritage and community attachments to urban green spaces by management authorities.
A traditional garden bed is filled with plants that are commonly available from garden centres rather than with historically appropriate plantings in keeping with the character of the park. Photo: Eeva Ruoff
In this blog, I outline work by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to bring these issues to the fore and provide guidance concerning the care and safeguarding of historic urban public parks. (The blog is based on a forthcoming paper in Australia ICOMOS’s journal Historic Environment). ICOMOSis a global non-government organisation dedicated to promoting the application of theory, methodology, and management techniques to the conservation of all forms of heritage (such as buildings, historic cities, cultural / urban landscapes and archaeological remains). ICOMOS has over 10,000 individual members and 320 institutional members. One of the roles of the organisation is to develop, disseminate and implement “doctrinal texts” that advocate for good heritage policy and practice.
What are doctrinal texts?
Doctrinal texts comprise a position statement, a set of beliefs or actions, or good practice guidance advocated by a knowledgeable group (governments or non-government organisations, for example). With regard to the field of heritage, they can be issued in a range of forms; and for ICOMOS these comprise charters, principles, guidelines and documents. Indeed, ICOMOS was founded on a doctrinal text—International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites(The Venice Charter 1964).
In December 2017, ICOMOS adopted the ICOMOS-IFLA Document on Historic Urban Public Parksas a doctrinal text. Both ICOMOS and the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) have approved the Document. It was developed over a nine-year period (2008-2017) by the ICOMOS-IFLA International Scientific Committee on Cultural Landscapes (ISCCL), one of 28 technical advisory committees established within ICOMOS.
ICOMOS-IFLA Document on Historic Urban Public Parks
On 29 October 2013, the ISCCL Annual Meeting held in Canberra, Australia, adopted the ISCCL Canberra Declaration for Historic Urban Public Parks. The declaration, which was specific to the work of the ISCCL, had been a long time in the making. It had been proposed in 2008 with an initial draft document prepared by Eeva Ruoff (Finland), Stéphanie de Courtois (France) and Sonia Berjman (Argentina) presented to the ISCCL 2009 Annual Meeting (Tokyo, Japan). Subsequent revisions, coordinated by Eeva Ruoff, were presented to the ISCCL annual meetings in Istanbul, Turkey (2010), Paris, France (2011), and Hangzhou, China (2012).
A cyclist enjoys the informal park alongside West Basin, adjoining Lake Burley Griffin (Canberra, Australia). This public space has been targeted for high-rise unit development. The proposal will involve the infilling of the lake for 45 metres beyond the end of the jetty shown in the image. Photo: Juliet Ramsay
The purpose of the Declaration is to emphasise, and provide guidance on, the safeguarding of historic urban public parks—a sub-category of designed cultural landscapes in the World Heritage system—as heritage places created or adapted for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations. This concern arose because it was the experience of various ISCCL members (many of whom are landscape architects) that rapidly growing and changing urban landscapes were increasingly eroding the amenity of and access to public parks. In particular, the concern was with the impacts of incremental change on the heritage values of such places.
A key point of discussion in developing the Declaration was the concept of an “historic urban public park” and its cross-cultural meanings in a global context. That is, what is meant by “historic”, by “urban”, by “public” and by “park” and how are these terms relevant and applicable in different cultural contexts—including those of Indigenous nations? For the ISCCL representatives of non-European countries, and countries not previously colonised by European nations (China and Japan, for example), these terms are problematic and their framing Eurocentric. There was, I think, no satisfactory resolution to this matter, except to recognise the issue and to propose that ISCCL members using the Declaration define concepts in culturally relevant ways in footnotes to it. Nevertheless, the conversations were invaluable because they enabled different disciplinary, national and individual perspectives to be shared, scrutinised and discussed.
Installed as part of a temporary garden exhibition, the “boxes” overwhelm the tranquil views within the park (Nancy, France). The permanent lighting fixtures have the same detrimental effect. Photo: Eeva Ruoff
The journey from the Canberra Declaration to the ICOMOS-IFLA Document on Historic Urban Public Parks(the Document) began by using the text of the Declaration. The process of revising, progressing and finally adopting the Document by IFLA and ICOMOS involved the circulation of the draft text (in August 2015 and January 2016) to the 110 National Committees and 28 International Scientific Committees of ICOMOS (in order to reach over 10,000 individual members world-wide). Comments were received from seven National Committees (Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland and Spain), as well as from two individuals and were the basis for the final revisions to the text.
The final version of the document(available in English, French, Spanish and Chinese) is short (less than four pages) and is comprised of a Preamble and five sub-headings with a total of 21 articles. The sub-headings are: Historic Urban Public Parks – Definitions (articles 1-5); Historic Urban Public Parks – Values (article 7); Special Character-Defining Elements of Historic Urban Public Parks (articles 8-16); Historic Study, Preservation, and Management (articles 17-20); and Universally Accessible Design Adaptations (article 21).
It is fair to say that there was much discussion within the ISCCL on the value of focussing on the specific category of historic urban public parks rather than on designed landscapes more broadly. For some ISCCL members, designed landscapes could encompass a wide range of heritage places (private gardens, public parks, cemeteries, urban green spaces, etc.), many of which face the same issues and challenges encountered in historic urban public parks. However, for landscape architect Eeva Rouff, the initiator and force behind the document, the specific focus was essential because it was her experience that historic urban public parks in Europe and other regions (the Americas and Australia, for example) faced increasing pressures and threats to their original design intent and public amenity resulting from cumulative change. The point here is that passion and commitment—either via an individual (such as Eeva Ruoff) or a small group—can be a powerful force driving the multi-year and arduous administrative and consultative process of creating universal heritage doctrine. In the instance of the ICOMOS-IFLA Document on Historic Urban Public Parks, I applaud Eeva Ruoff for her dedication and persistence.
Conservatory plants were commonly used over the summer period in 19th century public parks in Europe. The plants were often displayed in their pots, but in such a way that the pots were not visible. Photo: Eeva Ruoff
A call for assistance
It is one thing to travel the arduous journey of creating and having adopted a doctrinal text, but it is not where the journey ends. Work now on the ICOMOS-IFLA Document on Historic Urban Public Parksrequires that it be disseminated (including via translation into different languages) and promoted to the heritage conservation community and to appropriate park management authorities. This latter work has been taken on by the ISCCL. I would urge all readers of this blog to take a look at the Document and to utilise it where relevant in their work; and also circulate it to relevant professionals, community groups and activists. The impact of the document will ultimately be measured by the changes and differences it makes on the ground.
Equally, the Document has a mechanism (based on the resolutions of adoption voted on by ICOMOS and IFLA) that requires it be revised in 2022. The intention here is to review, refine and revise the document based on its application in the field of heritage conservation practice. Feedback can be provided to the author of this blog and will in turn be provided to the appropriate organisations.
Although the Document is confined to historic urban public parks, incremental change that is detrimental to original design intent and historical context, as well as contemporary community use and amenity, is an issue for the diversity of urban green spaces more broadly. Consequently, vigilance by local and concerned communities is essential if the ambience of, feelings for and stories about local community spaces are to continue to be valued, respected, safeguarded and cared for. It is my view that all citizens have a role in this regard.
Over the years walking the greenway, I’ve been taken with how much the beaver sculpture is loved by passersby. And how it might connect people who are otherwise disconnected from nature and even their neighbors.
In a previous essay, Size Doesn’t Matter, Really, I made the case that even small scraps of urban green, such as Portland’s one-square-block Tanner Springs Nature Park can provide significant benefits to a community. Located in the city’s intensely developed Pearl District, Tanner Springs provides access to nature to thousands of nearby apartment dwellers and contributes to urban biodiversity as well. In some cases, these mini-greenspaces are the only access to nature local residents might have in their everyday lives.
I also highlighted Heron Pointe Wetlands, a small remnant of green on the Willamette Greenway close to downtown Portland. With few riverine habitats remaining within the city limits, its importance far outweighs its half-hectare size.
Heron Pointe Wetland. Photo: Mike Houck
Located along the Willamette River, this postage stamp sized wetland is home to mature black cottonwood, ash, willows, elderberry and red-osier dogwood. Since the 1980s, there has been an ongoing conflict with the condominium owner’s association over the trees and native shrubs. Some in the association have an aversion to “messy” cottonwood seeds that waft onto balconies and the greenway path. Even as I write this, condo owners have launched another assault on the wetland vegetation, using the rationale that the Himalayan blackberry is an invasive weed on the city’s no plant list, despite the fact that the city has environmental policies in place that recognize even invasive species provide critical habitat on this reach of the Willamette River. But, along with the blackberries, they’ve also ravaged native stands of red-osier dogwood, willows, and native wildflowers, hacking limbs from the cottonwoods and ash trees to improve views to the river.
The Heron Pointe homeowners have cut both native and invasive species of shrubs and “pruned” trees as well. Photo: Mike HouckBefore “pruning”. Photo: Mike HouckLucy, Heron Pointe resident lecturing a group about the wetlands and her new beaver installation. Photo: Mike Houck
The ongoing conflict with the homeowners, more than three decades after having secured the wetland’s protection, is deeply frustrating. Often, however, when I’m at my lowest ebb, I get a shot of inspiration and a renewed passion for that miserable, scrappy little riverine preserve from an inanimate creature that occupies a place of honor along the greenway trail. A three-foot tall bronze beaver has captured my heart and apparently the hearts of passersby who cannot resist stopping to pat it on the head and leave small tokens of affection.
Ironically, the beaver was installed by a wizened, white-haired, wiry resident of the adjacent Heron Pointe Condominiums who was, by far, the most militant antagonist of the offensive, scruffy cottonwoods. Her name was Lucy. Lucy initially protested the trees blocked her riverine view. When that failed she insisted the air-borne, fluffy snow-like seeds were a nuisance. Her final gambit was to claim the trees exacerbated her asthma.
In one of my most memorable Lucy episodes, as I was being wired for an onsite television interview I told the cameraman and interviewer that it was highly likely she would appear to harangue me about the cottonwoods. Right on cue, camera and audio rolling, she appeared and proceeded to poke me in the chest, demanding we remove the offending trees. Looking over my shoulder I could see the TV crew doubled over In laughter. Alas, none of the footage was used. I’d give anything to have that footage for the archives. The point being, of course, that even though we’d managed to save this postage stamp sized wetland from development, so long as it was in private ownership its long-term fate was not assured.
While dogged and strident in her loathing of those cottonwoods, Lucy was also sweet as could be. In fact, tree averse as she was, she rallied her fellow condo owners to work with the city’s environmental services bureau to remove invasive plants and replant with native species a couple decades ago. Sadly, several years ago her husband died of complications of Alzheimer’s. To honor him she installed a cast bronze beaver, an animal abundant on nearby Ross Island and along banks of the Willamette River; and one especially fond of wetland’s native species. More recently Lucy herself moved to an assisted care facility. As testy as she was, I admit to missing her frequent harangues.
Another incident, with another condo resident drove home the fact that merely protecting a patch of ground, particularly if it’s privately owned, is insufficient in the long term. Ongoing public education and long-term monitoring are also needed. In this instance after installing a beautiful, information-packed interpretive sign were sitting on a nearby bench quaffing a couple magnums of champagne to celebrate three years navigating the city’s bureaucracy to get the sign installed.
A woman soon sidled up to the sign and expressed her love of nature and wildlife. Incredibly, she then asked us, “Is there anything you can do to help us cut these trees down?” I responded, “do you think the wildlife you see has anything to do with those trees?” She replied, “Oh, I never thought of that” and walked off. “What”, I responded to my colleagues, “Do we need to hire someone to sit here and quiz passersby If they get the connection?”
City of Portland staff, Linda Dobson, Steve Bricker, Jim Sjulin installing the interpretive sign on their day off as the wetland is privately owned and they were not allowed to do the installation on city time. The sign’s graphic designer was Martha Gannett, Martha Gannett Graphic Design, far right. Photo: Mike HouckThe Interpretive Sign. Photo: Mike HouckFall. Photo: Mike HouckSummer. Photo: Mike HouckChristmas. Photo: Mike HouckSpring. Photo: Mike HouckWinter photo. Photo: Mike HouckMardi Gras. Photo: Mike HouckNew Years 2014. Photo: Mike HouckFourth of July. Photo: Mike Houck
Over the years walking the greenway, I’ve noted how much Lucy’s beaver is loved by walker and cyclists many of whom are unable to resist giving the beaver a pat on the head or leaving small twigs, a flower, or some other token of their affection. One greenway habitue’ even took to décorating it with attired apropos of the upcoming holiday or passing of the season. While I always look forward to seeing the feisty Anna’s Hummingbird fiercely guarding his nearby perch on a red-osier dogwood, I am equally delighted to find some new trinket, beaver-chewed twig, or outfit has been festooned on the much-beloved wetland icon.
At the Interpretive sign. Photo: Mike HouckCyclists of three generations checking out the beaver. Photo: Mike Houck
After years of haggling over pruning, clear cutting non-native blackberry, and arguments over views versus trees, the fact remains that constant vigilance is necessary to truly protect this small riverside wetland. I’m hopeful that Lucy’s beaver will continue to prompt walkers, joggers and cyclists to pause a few moments, perhaps only because they are bemused by the sculpture’s accoutrements, or more hopefully to pause a few moments to enjoy the last little patch of green on this reach of the Willamette River. One thing is certain. Lucy would be amused had she known that a passing beaver stopped recently just long enough to climb the steep river bank and fell a cottonwood not fifty feet from her sculpture.
It is tempting and comforting to think that after each disaster, the tragic loss of life, the loss of livelihoods and the loss of productivity awakens the political class to do things differently. Sadly, it seems not to.
Throughout the world, cities are undergoing significant damage and destruction due to a combination of: (1) natural hazards increasing in severity, frequency and losses due to climate change (Figures 1); and (2) increased exposure, vulnerability and losses due to increasing population and economic concentration due to unplanned rapid urbanization (Figure 2); and (3) wars and conflicts that occur due to rising inequalities and marginalization in different regions of the world.
This destruction is obviously a tragic event, which usually leads to thousands of fatalities, injuries and displaced people, loss of income and livelihoods, loss and interruption of essential basic services (e.g. water, sanitation, electricity, food supply, transportation, telecommunication, internet, etc.)—all of which also culminating in significant losses to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, these disasters, by transforming the existing risk to reality, reduce this existing risk to zero (as the risk embedded in structures, infrastructure and livelihoods has materialized). Hence, these disasters present an “opportunity” to rebuild back better[i] cities, where the hard infrastructure and housing is resilient to disaster risk and where the root causes of disaster and conflict (including inequality, exclusion, unplanned urbanization, weak governance and environmental degradation) are mitigated or avoided rather than reintroduced into the reconstruction and rebuilding processes.
Figure 1. The development of the number of natural disasters over 115 years[ii]Figure 2. The economic and human impact of disasters 2005-2014[iii]The opportunity above should be contrasted against the reality on the ground in the wake of disasters, where the destruction is followed by very expensive recovery and reconstruction efforts to restore basic infrastructure and housing services, often financed through significant borrowing by the state, under strict austerity conditions, leading to an inability to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to a public debt that will have to be repaid by future generations [iv]. For example, around 80% of the most damaging disasters since 2000 have been tropical storms, over 90% of them have been in Small Island Developing States (SIDS), with over 60% being in the Caribbean. In a recent debt sustainability analyses for 21 impoverished SIDS, two are in default, 11 are at high risk of debt default, eight at medium risk and none are at low risk [v].
The post-disaster recovery and reconstruction process is often done in a rapid manner, without sufficient time for planning, and is often significantly influenced by the vested interests of local, national and international private sector actors and their partners in the public sector. In many global south countries, the repayment of public debt consumes a large percentage of the budget, thereby leaving limited funds for governments to invest in development initiatives much needed to mitigate conflict drivers including socio-economic exclusion, youth unemployment and rising inequality. In many of these countries, this situation is exacerbated by prevailing weak governance practices, which hinders the private sector from fulfilling its potential role in being an engine for economic growth and rising employment.
When unplanned, the recovery and reconstruction process reintroduces conflict risk drivers into future societies. In addition, even when the reconstruction and recovery process have accounted for natural hazards by building against earthquakes and flash floods for example, it often misses the opportunity to mitigate existing disaster risk drivers including poverty, environmental degradation, rapid unplanned urbanisation and weak risk governance.
On the other hand, a planned and transparent recovery and reconstruction process, based on inclusive principles, that aim to reach the most disadvantaged in society, can significantly mitigate disaster risk drivers especially when it is based on “build back better” principles. Learning from the mistakes of the past, and trying to mitigate disaster and conflict risk drivers; urban communities, affected people and practitioners call for the following good practices to be accounted for in the reconstruction and recovery processes [vi]:
Housing rehabilitation and reconstruction, based on build back better principles that account for natural hazards and green building considerations.
Housing land and property rights restitution and protection.
Urban livelihood recovery and the creation of decent jobs across society including for youth and women. This should also include training for unemployed and to new entrants to the job market to ensure that skills match market needs.
Protection of historic urban areas and cultural heritage areas, while balancing the needs fort the local population and the stresses of economic growth and development.
Restoration of basic services including water, waste water, energy and transportation while accounting for natural hazards and climate change considerations.
It is tempting and comforting to think that after each disaster, the tragic loss of life, the loss of livelihoods and the loss of productivity awakens the political class to do things differently, to mitigate conflict and disaster risk drivers, through some form of a “NEWer, Greener, More Inclusive Deal” that aims to leave no one behind, or at least not so many behind. However, in many parts of the world, both developing and developed, both rich and poor, the exact opposite is taking place: Disasters have become the opportunity to push for further rapid privatization of basic state services and further deregulation, with short term profits as the main incentive. An incentive that has shown once and again that it is the creator and feeder of conflict and disaster risk drivers.
These trends can also be seen at the international, developed country level, including for example meeting the commitments for financing climate change action as recommended by successive climate change conferences. Developed countries are still far from reaching the goal of mobilizing $100 billion to developing countries by 2020 [vii], to ensure that investments and financial flows worldwide are aligned with climate and development objectives. The climate action-financing gap exacerbates the existing situation where trillions of dollars of investments are directed at actions that ultimately damage our climate and contribute to conflict drivers and disaster risk drivers. Indeed, this is difficult to achieve when investment decisions are funded by agencies focused on shareholders’ short term profits.
The outcome, and the fate of our societies, will be determined by how much we can come together to demand and enforce more resilient, inclusive, greener and more humane reconstruction and recovery processes. In short, recovery and reconstruction processes affect us all, and as such are everybody’s business, and are too important to be left as the exclusive terrain for international finance and aid agencies!
[i] Build Back Better is defined by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN-ISDR) as “the use of the recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction phases after a disaster to increase the resilience of nations and communities through integrating disaster risk reduction measures into the restoration of physical infrastructure and societal systems, and into the revitalization of livelihoods, economies and the environment”.
[ii] The fiscal impact of natural disasters, Ian Koetsier, Utrecht University – school of economics, Discussion Paper Series nr: 17-17, 2017, https://www.uu.nl/en/organisation/utrecht-university-school-of-economics-use/research/working-papers/discussion-papers-2017.
[iii] UNISDR Disaster Statistics, https://www.unisdr.org/we/inform/disaster-statistics.
[iv] Unhealthy conditions-IMF loan conditionality and its impact on health financing, Gino Brunswijck, European Network on Debt and Development, 2018, https://eurodad.org/files/pdf/1546978.pdf.
[v] Don’t owe, shouldn’t pay, The impact of climate change on debt in vulnerable countries, Jubilee Debt Campaign, 2018, https://jubileedebt.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Dont-owe-shouldnt-pay_10.18.pdf.
[vi] E.g. The New Urban Agenda, United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, HABITAT III, QUITO 17-20 October, 2016, UNHABITAT, 2017, http://habitat3.org/wp-content/uploads/NUA-English.pdf.
[vii] At COP24 Paris Proved its Worth, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, WWF, 2018, https://medium.com/@WWF/at-cop24-paris-proved-its-worth-93846e8481de.
But it was all The Fear of Snow —Leonard Cohen, The Best
The power of the winter landscape has not escaped planners, and there have been several attempts to make the city more liveable and enjoyable in the winter.
The city in winter invokes diverse imaginaries—from romantic, beautiful, and magical to cold, dark, dirty, and hazardous. A quick Google search reproduces the first three imaginaries: romantic, beautiful, and magical (Figure 1).
Yet winter is often depicted as evil and threatening, especially in fantasy and folk tales. One only needs to look at Game of Thrones and the menacing “winter is coming” motto of the house of Starks (Figure 2).
Figure 1: From top left Ålesund, Norway;Helsinki, Finland; Quebec City, Canada[i]Inhabitants of cities that experience long, cold, dark winters, often dread the coming winter. Their everyday realities are closest to the last four imaginaries of winter in the city: cold, dark, dirty, and hazardous. In this article, I explore the winter ecologies of the city and the power those ecologies have in shaping the urban landscape.[iii]
The Urban winter landscape
Before I write any more, I should admit that I love winter. I love the first significant snow fall of the season and there is something exhilarating about stepping outside and breathing air so cold your eyelashes freeze. But I grew up in central Alberta where winter can sometimes start in late September and last until the end of May (with some breaks in between because of chinooks—warm winds that blow off the Rocky Mountains). As such, my perspective on winter is a bit more upbeat than that of many people. My childhood winters were also spent on a farm, and I did not fully experience an urban winter until I moved away to attend university in Ottawa. Since then, however, I have experienced winter in a variety of cities in North America and for the past seven years I have lived in Montréal, Québec. But, my understanding and experience of winter is limited to the northern hemisphere. While several cities at far southern latitudes also experience some snow and cold during winter, their winters are much milder because more of the surface area is water and there are fewer large land masses.[iv]This article focuses primarily on winters in cities at northern latitudes.
The romantic imaginary of the winter city is very visible in Montréal, with its many parks and winter activities. Montréal is an example of a good “Winter City”, which is a concept and movement that developed in the early 1980s to encourage northern cities to become more livable and enjoyable through the creation of socio-cultural activities (see box 1 for a short description of the Winter City concept and movement). Montréal has a long history of winter cultures: skating rinks can be found in almost every public park, snowtubing and sledding, urban ski and snowboard parks, as well as many other cultural activities throughout the winter (Figure 3).
But the urban landscape in winter is not always pretty and fun. The snow is not pristine white but rather brown, yellow, and grey. Sidewalks and roads are messy. The photos in Figure 4 show snowy streets in Montréal the day after a snowfall in early January (2019).
Figure 3: Examples of winter activities in Montréal. Top left photo is the refrigerated rink near Lac Castor in Mont Royal Park; top right ski/snowboard/tubing at Pente à Neige in Angrignon Park; bottom left Fête des Neiges, Parc Jean Drapeau; and Festival Montréal en Lumière.[v]Figure 4: Montréal streets and sidewalks covered in snow. The sidewalk has been cleared in the righthand photo.[vi]Along with being messy and dirty, streets in the winter are also difficult to navigate, especially if not cleared or have a layer of ice under any snow. Thaw and freezing throughout the winter can mean that sidewalks and streets can become skating rinks. Indeed, there are videos of people using ice skates on streets in Montréal and other northern cities. For many people, in particular elderly and disabled, the city becomes dangerous and impossible to travel around in the winter because of snow and ice. Making the city navigable and safe is a central aspect of socio-ecological management in northern cities (especially if cities want inhabitants to attend cultural events and engage in winter activities).
The City of Montréal, for example, has a website dedicated to snow removal with the slogan “Promoting mobility during the wintertime” (Figure 5). The website outlines snow removal policies, processes, and other information.
Figure 5: Ville de Montréal web site.[vii]Like many northern latitude cities, making Montréal accessible and liveable is complex and political. In the winter, the entire city seems to revolve around processes and ecologies that aim to reduce and eliminate snow and ice…in certain places.
Snow, ice, salt, and sand: managing the city in winter
Snow and ice for play in parks (and private yards) is desirable; snow and ice on sidewalks and roads is not. Snow and ice in desirable spaces can be understood as good winter natures while the snow and ice that get in the way of everyday routines are bad natures. Such bad nature is at the centre of urban management alongside other bad natures such as sewerage and grey water.
Snow removal
The snow removal process has made Montréal famous. Several years ago, the Boston Globe wrote an article entitled “Montréal Is Really Good at Snow Removal, Eh?”[viii] In the article, Sargent quotes a Globe and Mail journalist who argued that Montréal is
“…one of the snowiest major cities in the world, and its approach to snow is akin to the U.S. attitude toward Saddam Hussein—it’s an archenemy that should, ideally, be removed from the scene as fast as possible.”
Montréalers do indeed view snow as an object to eradicate (in certain places). The City of Montréal has a fascinating and relatively efficient system to eliminate snow, although many in the city would argue it is not efficient enough, but people outside the city seem to think otherwise, as the case with the Boston Globe article and the numerous videos on YouTube.
But removing snow and eliminating ice require the production of particular landscapes and ecologies in the city.
Spatial fix: snow dumps and chutes
The City of Montréal’s snow removal website outlines four stages of the snow removal process: salting, plowing, loading, and disposal. In many boroughs of the city, sidewalks (and sometimes bike paths) are cleared of snow before the roads (Figure 6). For sidewalks, salting and plowing are usually done at the same time, with tractors plowing the snow and spreading salt afterwards. The snow from the sidewalks is pushed to the ends of streets and becomes part of the street clearing process (Figure 7).
Figure 6: Right, cleared sidewalk, snowy street. Left, cleared bike path and snowy street.[ix]Figure 7: Snow at the end of a street awaiting removal.
Tractors (sometimes a parade of them) plow the snows from the streets, then the snow blown into waiting trucks (see Figure 8).Approximately 180 vehicles are used for roads and 190 for sidewalks in Montréal to clear the entire city.
According to the City of Montréal, more than 300,000 truckloads of snow are loaded every year (12 million cubic metres).
Once the streets, sidewalks and bike paths are cleared, the city’s inhabitants no longer have to think about the snow. Their everyday lives are more or less back to normal. But few think about where this 12 million cubic metres of snow is put?
Cleared snow either goes into sewer chutes or surface snow dump.
Figure 8: Typical snow removal process with tractors and trucks in Montréal.[xi]Figure 9: Map of snow dumps and chutes on the Island of Montréal.[xii]The largest snow dump site in Montréal is Saint-Michel, where approximately 3 million cubic metres of snow from six districts are deposited (Figure 10, left photo). At two other sites, Angrignon and d’Anjou, more than 1.8 million and 1.5 cubic metres respectively of snow is piled up.[xiii]
The creation of large snow dump sites can be understood as a spatial fix for a temporary accumulation problem. Rather than deal with the snow where it falls and accumulates, the unwanted ‘waste’ in urban life is removed to an out of sight location. The unwanted snow no longer concerns urban inhabitants once it is not visible and in their way. Such a spatial fix is similar to how we remove garbage and grey water from our houses.
Figure 10: Saint-Michel snow dump site in Montréal in winter (top) and summer (bottom).[xiv]The accumulation of snow in snow dumps can vary from year to year, but such sites are concentrations of salt, gravel, sand, oil and other road pollutants collected with the snow. While such pollutants may remain stable in the winter, come spring the meltwater becomes mobile. According to the City of Montréal, “meltwater from disposal sites is recovered and treated according to environmental standards”. This means that the water is pumped into the sewer networks and into the sewage treatment plant for treatment. But not all the salt and other waste will move with the water.
The ecology of sites like Saint-Michel is not well recorded. Snow can sometimes last well into the summer (and tends to blend in with the brown-grey colour of the cliffs because of the sand, gravel and other pollutants). During the spring and summer, the Saint-Michel dump also retains water (Figure 10, right photo). But the salt and other pollutants certainly have impacts on the ecology of site, as it does throughout winter cities.
Salt
Salt is still used in Montréal. Some cities have experimented with alternatives. Calgary, for example, recently began using beet juice to de-ice. Most cities, however, still use salt. Salt is spread with gravel and other abrasives (such as sand) on streets and sidewalks. In Montréal, an average of 140,000 tonnes of salt and abrasives are used each winter. But salt is also used by businesses, institutions such as hospitals and schools, apartment complexes, and homeowners. The aim of salting is to make it safer to move about the city. The use of salt is a touchy issue in cities such as Montréal. Icy sidewalks can be deadly for many elderly, children, and disabled, and not salting means that the city in inaccessible for them five months of the year. Many argue that salt is not necessary; that sand and gravel can be used alone. Indeed, there are a plethora of alternative products out there. However, if one looks at the porches of most houses and apartment buildings around Montréal, the usual bag of salt is visible. This is because salt is generally more effective and much cheaper
Yet while salt makes the winter city more accessible, it has numerous ecological impacts. Salt seeps into soils, runs off into sewer systems and waterways. In the case of Montréal, salt runoff into the St. Lawrence river is significant. The effect of road salt on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems is well known. Some of the effects include groundwater salinization, changes in soil structure, accumulates in aquatic ecosystems which then alters the composition of fish or aquatic invertebrate communities.[xv] Road salt can also pose a danger to urban wildlife such as birds and squirrels who may ingest too much either directly or through plants.[xvi]
The use of salt also damages human property. An recent article in the National Post outlines the many ways that salt is corroding urban infrastructure, including roadways, bridges, and buildings, not to mention boots, clothing, and harming pets.[xvii] (Salt on sidewalks was a large motivation for the development of winter dog boots). As geographers Roger Keil and Julie-Anne Boudreauargue “…road salt [is] a formidable issue in the yearly rhythm of socio-ecological management in a winter city”.[xviii]
Figure 12: Winter snow fence with protective felt.
Salt is an integral part of the winter city. But it is also a part of the city’s spring, summer and autumn ecologies. The sorts of vegetation that is planted in parks, besides streets, and in front yards is dictated by what can survive the onslaught of winter salt. Some people try desperately to protect plants by covering them, installing winter fencing, or just not planting anything at all (Figure 11). Indeed, the ecologies and landscapes of the winter city can be said to shape the city much more than those of other seasons.
The dreaded “winter is coming” might need to be rephrased as winter is always here, despite being out of sight visually and mostly mentally (many Montréalers seem to suffer amnesia in the summer—they forget about winter as soon as spring arrives.)
The power of the winter landscape has not escaped planners and, as the below box on “Winter City” design illustrates, there have been several attempts to make the city more liveable and enjoyable in the winter. Yet, rethinking the use of salt and where we move snow in northern cities to make the winter city more ecological has been difficult. Indeed, my own love of winter activities depends on being able to walk safety to the bus/metro in order to access the skating rinks, sledding hills and winter cultural activities. Salt is seen as a necessary evil to create the ideal winter city.
Figure 12: Comic using the Game of Thrones motto [xx]However, with climate change, and the increasing number of warmer days and thus freezing rain means that salt will need to be used more. In the week that I have revised this article, Montréal experienced a huge winter snow storm with record low temperature followed by a day of freezing rain, rain and temperatures above 0 Celsius. The streets and sidewalks are puddles of melted grey snow (with road salt and gravel, of course), which turn to ice in the evening. As I walk to work with crampons on my insulated rain boots, I wonder what might happen if we just left the snow, did not salt the ice and made the streets and sidewalks into ski paths and skating canals (I have seen people skating on the road a few times!). Of course, this would leave young children, the elderly and disabled isolated in their houses. The winter city is a complicated idea and phenomena for planners and urban inhabitants alike. So I find it is very exciting and inspiring to see cities like Edmonton embracing the idea of the “Winter City” and thinking more critically about all facets of city living in the winter—social, ecological, and political.
[viii]Sargent, H. (2015, February 3). “Montreal Is Really Good at Snow Removal, Eh?” Boston Globe. https://www.boston.com/weather/untagged/2015/02/03/montreal-is-really-good-at-snow-removal-eh
[xvi]Findlay, S. E., & Kelly, V. R. (2011). Emerging indirect and long‐term road salt effects on ecosystems. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1223(1), 58-68.
[xvii]Hopper, T. (2018, 22 Jan) How Canada’s addiction to road salt is ruining everything. The National Post. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/how-canadas-addiction-to-road-salt-is-ruining-everything
[xviii]Keil, R. & Boudreau, JA. (2006) Metropolitics and metabolics: Rolling out environmentalism in Toronto. In Heynen, N., Kaika, M. & Swyngedouw, E. (eds) In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, (pp. 56-77). London: Routledge.
Any exhibition that starts with an 18th century tree hugger has me on a hook.
If we learn anything from an exhibition such as “Masterpieces of French Landscape Paintings”, it might be that French landscape painters have a thing or two to teach us about urban nature over the centuries.
Despite their lush depictions of natural scenery, French landscape painters were primarily Parisian urban dwellers. Biophiles, the lot of them too. From Monet to Rousseau, these painters often went as deeply and as often as possible into nature to do their painting, but they mostly dwelled in built up areas of Paris.
This collection of paintings spans the 17th to 20th centuries, and highlights not only how and why these urban painters progressively left their studios in Paris to venture into nature, but also follows the drastic changes within the urban landscape over the centuries. Thoughtfully arranged by the museum’s curators, the exhibition takes us through this progression in a way that explores relationships between the artworks, cities, and nature.
French tree huggers
Our walk-through of the exhibition begins with The May Tree, which may very well include the original tree hugger. You see the guy in the middle of the painting? While all his friends are courting women, he’s there hugging a tree.
Any exhibition that starts with an 18th century tree hugger has me on a hook.
The May Tree, by Jean-Baptiste Pater, early 18th century / Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
The patrons of the museum seem equally infatuated—nearly every painting in the entire collection is mobbed with people. Mind you, we are here on a Wednesday afternoon.
I ask myself why these idyllic landscapes are so captivating. There is an obvious answer, which is simply that these bourgeois painters from the city brought to life landscapes that they connected deeply with, and people in turn connect with the resulting emotive works. There is something more than this though; a fiercely dedicated and evolving multi-generational cohort, these painters would often return to the same spaces in nature over their lives, to witness the infinite changes that take place through seasons and years. In doing so, they capture something peaceful and aesthetically pleasing, but perhaps more importantly, as urban dwellers, they capture the essence of something that they—and their fellow Parisians—were missing in their anthropocentric city.
If the mobs of Osaka urban dwellers standing around me at this exhibition are any indication, over centuries, some things never change.
Into the landscape of the city
The city itself is not left out of the “landscape” genre here either. Further along in this Pushkin show is a collection of urban landscape paintings. The works highlight the massive changes in urban structure in Paris at the time of Napoleon III.
Boulevard Saint-Michel, by Jean-François Raffaëlli, 1890 / Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
In the middle of the 19thcentury, Napoleon and Georges-Eugène Haussmann conducted one of the world’s most intensive—and massive—campaigns of urban renewal. Though it brought us one of the world’s favorite cities to be in, the urban reconstruction work is also sometimes likened to the largest gentrification project known to mankind. Indeed, thousands of poor citizens were unscrupulously booted to the fringes of Paris, their homes razed and replaced by broadways, statues, opera halls, and fancy apartments.
Curiously, in some ways the paintings here feel not dissimilar to contemporary billboards promoting some of the more garish urban renewal going on today; advertisements, idolizing a trendy, consumption-based high life.
The clothes have changed, but not much else has.
Without doubt, the works are alluring. In Paris at Night, a warm amber light filters through a slightly smoky air, in turn floating out to mingle with gray stone blocks, all of it set below the deep blue-orange gradients peeking out between sets of pitch-like clouds.
Paris at Night, by Edouard Leon Cortes, early 20th century / Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
The color combinations alone provide some kind of primal comfort; mountains reassembled in ashlar, campfires turned to gas lamps. Human time changes, yet the power of such paintings must maintain a slower trot through time than we.
Walking across the room from the comfortable color combinations of Paris at Night, we are hit in the face with a wide-screen drama. Smoke. Not a gentle aesthetic treatment of fog. Manmade smoke. Something resembling grime. Not a new place.
For as dull a color pallet as it is, Smoke on the Paris Circuit Line glitters fabulously with apparent honesty. Luigi Loir does a number on us, sidestepping his peers at the time.
Let’s get real, folks. Trains and smoke.
Smoke on the Paris Circuit Line by Luigi Loir, 1885/ Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
The rainy, gray, wintry deceptions of Paris are many here, and they tell us too, something of the lives and interests of these painters.
Though France’s urban-dwelling landscape painters typically spent much of the year outside the city—in places like Barbizon and Fontainebleau—when things got frigid, these nature-lovers crawled back into their Parisian studios. This is perhaps one reason why Paris seems so often to appear decidedly in winter attire in their paintings.
Artists as nature preservation advocates
One intensely dedicated exception to this rule seems to be Henri Rousseau, who was so in love with the forest that he rarely went back to Paris at all, save for the necessity of selling his paintings.
So much did Rousseau love these forests, that he made a direct appeal to Napoleon III to stop Fontainebleau from being razed. The appeal seems to have worked; in 1853 Napoleon personally established a nature preserve there, protecting the forest that continues to be celebrated by artists and citizens to this day.
Moving through the exhibition, we exit the room, and exit the city again. We’re forward in time now. The advent of train travel—the gray smoky kind we found in Loir’s work—enables our painters to more easily get further from the city. The countryside becomes a regular destination for city folk.
Here, Monet’s Luncheon on the Grass wows us. It’s one of the centerpieces of this show.
Sketch for Luncheon on the Grass, by Claude Monet, 1865 / Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
It’s also representative of your typical 19th century hipster party.
We’re treated to more Monet as we progress into this section of the exhibition. Indeed, Monet is well thought of for good reason. His works speak a truth that goes beyond representational realism.
“Try to forget what objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, ‘Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow’, and paint it just as it looks to you…”. Monet realized that concepts of truth and realism exists only in a personal connection to the place you are attempting to speak about in your work.
In other words, a perfect, technically rigid depiction of a scene is a lie, unless the painter fully believes in it and enacts their own truth into their brush strokes.
Even if we can’t make out the faces, or the blossoms, we still can’t walk past Monet’s “Lilac in the Sun” without connecting to it in a way that we swear we’ve been there, in some life, in some too quiet, too peaceful moment. In some ways, standing in front of this canvas full of squares, oblongs, and streaks, there is no doubt that we are still there.
On our way out of this section, Picasso finally gets a chance to meet with us. His House in the Garden is unmistakable. In its twisting of visual reality, the house in the garden seems more like a garden picking up a house. The house rides, cradled, hoisted by a tree, on a wave of green.
Does it not?
House in the Garden, by Pablo Picasso, 1908/ Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts
We sometimes talk of Picasso’s visual truth being distorted, but certainly this isn’t the way to encounter Picasso! For here, nothing here is distorted. For Picasso, everything is in order, and what a joy it is to consider his conceptual truths in this way.
Picasso’s way of depicting garden and house as something of an integrated tapestry seems to me a kind of foreshadowing of cities to come, an attempt to mend the holes in our urban landscapes, not with a forest apart from the city, but with one fluid, intertwined work.
Forest as city?
Oh, the gems that good paintersleave for us to ponder.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Isabelle Anguelovsky, BarcelonaJust Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification, Edited by Winifred Curran and Trina Hamilton
Marc Barra, ParisRé-ensauvageons la France : plaidoyer pour une nature sauvage et libre (Re-wilding France: A Plea for Wild and Free Nature), byGilbert Cochet and Stéphane Durand
Katie Coyne, AustinDrawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warmingby Paul Hawken
Samarth Das, MumbaiIndica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent, by Pranay Lal
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
There is a rich conversation to be found by exchanging ideas discovered in great writing.
What did you read in 2018 that moved, inspired, or otherwise excited you? That was our prompt to 17 diverse contributors to TNOC. It didn’t have to be published in 2018; only that they read it in 2018.
My own bookshelf right now.
As would be expected from a diverse, world-wide group with many interests, the reading list covers vast territory. From climate change, modern economics, and how urban planning promoted segregation in America to ecological perception and futurist fiction.
Perhaps you read something amazing in 2018. If you did, share it here as a comment. There is a rich conversation to be had in simple exchanging ideas discovered in great writing.
Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.
Isabelle Anguelovski, Barcelona
Just Green Enough:
Urban Development and
Environmental Gentrification Edited by Winifred Curran and Trina Hamilton Routledge, 2017 Buy the book.
This is an essential book demonstrating the need for a new ecological, political, and social imagination to place interactional, reparative, distributional, and participative justice at the center of green city planning.
Only through transformative green planning and creative lasting alliances will green interventions be public goods rather than environmental privileges.
Marc Barra is an ecologist at the Regional Agency for Biodiversity in Paris Region in France, within the Institute of Planning and Urban Development of the Île-de-France. He is particularly interested in urban ecology and solutions to integrate biodiversity at the city, district and building scales.
Marc Barra, Paris
Ré-ensauvageons la France : plaidoyer pour une nature sauvage et libre
Re-wilding France : A Plea for Wild and Free Nature Gilbert Cochet and Stéphane Durand
Acte Sud Editions, 2018
(In French) Buy the book.
The book takes an optimistic look at the state of wilderness in France, showing that despite the biodiversity crisis, nature resists and even returns. The authors explain that it is coming back in every environments—from mountain to sea—and offers a range of simple solutions to create a place for plants and animals.
Nature has all the resources to repair its wounds … if only it is given the opportunity. Forests have doubled in size in less than two centuries. Most large animals have returned. Their numbers are still modest, but they are growing year by year. By applying the few tips in these pages, the authors want to convince all those who dream of African savannahs or Alaska that such natural spectacles are possible in France!
Katie co-leads the Urban Ecology Studio at Asakura Robinson where she is a passionate advocate for design informed by studying the overlap between social and ecological systems.
Katie Coyne, Austin
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
by Paul Hawken
Penguin, 2018 Buy the book.
Drawdown is unique in that I feel like I’ve been reading books, reviewing data, and listening to people talk about climate and am consistently left lacking hope. Drawdown resonates with me because it carefully outlines 100 (rigorously evaluated!) succinct ideas about acting on climate change.
It categorizes solutions across a wide range of topics and meets my expectations for the holistic and ecofeminist path to action I know we need. Finally, a majority of the solutions are happening on the ground right now. We need more books that break down the big issues into bites you can sink your teeth into but that still feel substantive enough to matter.
Samarth Das is an Urban Designer and Architect based in Mumbai. Having practiced professionally in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and subsequently in New York City, his work focuses on engaging actively in both public as well as private sectors—to design articulate shared spaces within cities that promote participation and interaction amongst people.
Samarth Das, Mumbai
Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent by Pranay Lal
Penguin / Allen Lane, 2016 Buy the book.
Through Indica, a book that draws a number of parallels from Eric Sanderson’s masterpiece Manahatta: A Natural History of New York City, Lal has managed to condense thousands of years of the earth’s evolution into tangible and legible segments across a range of issues that have contributed to the intense biodiversity found in our country today.
It has moved me immensely because the book constantly puts into perspective the incredibly small amount of time we (humans) have been around compared to the history of the planet. Even so, the intense and irreversible shifts we have effected on the planet that is home to thousands of other living creatures and ecosystems that have existed far before we arrived, and those that may not be around for much longer, helps lend perspective to the way we need to approach development within our cities as well as rural areas in the future.
Marcelo Lopes de Souza is a professor of socio-spatial development and urban studies at the Department of Geography of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.He has published ten books and more than 100 papers and book chapters in 6 languages
Marcelo Lopes de Souza, Rio de Janeiro
Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity
by David Hulme
Cambridge University Press, 2009 Buy the book.
The most interesting book I read this year is, Why we Disagree About Climate Change, by David Hulme. Being himself a climate change expert—and by no means a climate change denier!—Hulme nevertheless challenges or relativises some pictures we (the “enlightened” and scientifically well-informed ones) have cultivated: as he stresses, climate change is not (only) a scientific fact, but a physical phenomenon which is experienced in different ways and at various levels by different people at different places. It is a problem, yes, but this problem is to some extent relative. Moreover, in spite of all the real or potential dangers, it is important to understand that fear can be consciously or inadvertently manipulated (and not only by politicians: science and scientists are never neutral).
Architect, researcher, and practitioner in the field of urban planning and design and author of the book “Big Plans in the Hands of Citizens”. He is the curator of the educational :WCENTRUM project. Assistant Professor at the Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture.
Artur Jerzy Filip, Warsaw
Chaos Warszawa
by Joanna Kusiak
Bęc Zmiana, 2018
(In Polish) Buy the book.
“Chaotic” is one of the most common adjectives being used to describe spatial and functional disorders of modern cities. In the book Chaos Warsaw, Joanna Kusiak renders brilliantly economic mechanisms that lead to so called “chaos” while not being “chaotic” themselves.
After reading the book, then urban chaos doesn’t seem that much chaotic any more.
Claudia's poems and visual works are inspired by the nearby nature (forest and desert). Recent works deal with the relationship between people and water, and the interaction of the social, ethical, and spiritual.
Claudia Fuentes, Saltillo
Tao Te Ching
By Laoi Tzu
Translated into English by Stephen Mitchell Buy the book.
The English version of Stephen Mitchell on the Tao Te Ching, originally written by Lao Tzu, is supreme.
From there, the Castilian version was made. And for the first time, it allowed me to feel connected with his wisdom, accompanied by Taoist illustrations.
It allows me to order vital creative efforts, revealing substantial nutritious interconnections.
Russell Galt works for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) where he serves as Head of the Urban Alliance - a broad coalition of IUCN Members concertedly striving to bring cities into balance with nature.
Russell Galt, Glasgow
The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science
by Andrea Wulf
John Murray, 2018 Buy the book.
An enthralling account of Alexander von Humboldt’s extraordinary life and his many prescient observations. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, he established a global “brotherhood of scientists” that transcended politics and war.
One can only wonder, what would he have thought of today’s sprawling megacities? How would they feature in his famous Naturgemälde diagram?
Ursula Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures; science fiction; and narrative theory.
Ursula Heise, Los Angeles
Folding Beijing
by Hao Jingfang
Uncanny Magazine, Issue 2, 2015 Buy this work.
My favorite read in 2018 was Hao Jingfang’s short story “Folding Beijing”. This science fiction story was first published online in 2012, translated into English in 2015, and won the Hugo Award for best novelette in 2016.
It imagines a future Beijing of 80 million inhabitants that flips upside once every 24 hours: on one side, 5 million people live in luxury with ample green spaces, which they can enjoy for 24 hours; on the other side, two sets buildings take turns for the 25 million inhabitants of Space Two, which is active for 14 hours, and the 50 million of the seedy Space Three, who are only given 8 hours of waking time. When their spaces are not active, the inhabitants rest sedated in sleeping capsules. Hao’s description of this revolving, folding and unfolding megacity delivers a mind-boggling, surrealist portrait of urban inequality, depressing and exhilarating at the same time.
Her protagonist, a trash worker who inhabits Space Three but travels illegally to Spaces Two and One to make money on the side, achieves his modest goals in spite of being crushed by socio-economic forces whose true nature he only comes to understand in the course of his journey.
Toby Kent is metropolitan Melbourne’s Chief Resilience Officer. In this role he works with many stakeholders to create the first metropolitan-wide, local government-led strategy for Melbourne.
Toby Kent, Melbourne
The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster
by Robert Colvile
Bloomsbury, 2018 Buy the book.
In a world in which it seems that fewer people have time to think deeply, a book on how the world is accelerating and how better to manage it, was appealing. The challenge thrown up by the book is that humans seem to crave speed, however unwittingly, and perhaps conversely to what some may assume, the stresses of constant information and an accelerating world seem to correlate not just with greater productivity, but also satisfaction.
An interesting point of contemplation at this busy (and ever busier….!) time of year.
Patrick M. Lydon is an American ecological writer and artist based in Korea whose seeks to re-connect cities and their inhabitants with nature. He is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
Patrick Lydon, Osaka
“The Skill of Ecological Perception”
an essay by Laura Sewall in the book Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth/Healing the Mind Counterpoint, 1995 Buy the book.
Link to standalone essay, here.
When a neuropsychologist blends science and art, I’m intrigued; when she suggests how to use imagination and perception as tools for building beautiful, environmentally-sane cultures (and cities), I’m elated.
This short essay is one to be read many times, as is the larger collection in which it is printed.
Pascal Mittermaier is the Global Managing Director for Cities at The Nature Conservancy. He leads a team at the Conservancy focused on transforming how the world’s growing cities harness nature’s power to build resilient, livable, thriving communities for millions of people.
Pascal Mittermaier, Boston
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
by Stephen Greenblatt
W.W. Norton, 2018 Buy the book.
This year I read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning historical detective thriller, Greenblatt describes how, early in the 15th Century, dedicated monks obsessively explored libraries all over Europe in search of ancient Greek and Roman texts neglected and suppressed for hundreds of years.
The ideas they rediscovered in these lost documents literally contributed to kick-starting the Renaissance and the modern age. It’s a tale of determination in the face of resistance from those in power and ultimately the rediscovery of thinking that sparked a swerve from the dark ages into modern times. We need a similar swerve movement to align our human civilization to the challenges of sustainability and climate change!
Steward Pickett is a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. His research focuses on the ecological structure of urban areas and the temporal dynamics of vegetation.
Steward Pickett, Poughkeepsie
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein
Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017 Buy the book.
Rothstein documents that the ubiquitous racial segregation of American cities reflects more than individual choices. It is the result of a long history of racist government policies.
This conclusion resonates with my experience growing up under segregation, but it also encourages my research into how the segregation of cities affects their ecology.
Huda's experience and training combine urban planning, sustainable development and public health. She is a chartered town planner (MRTPI) and a chartered environmentalist (CEnv) with over 15 years' experience focused on visionary master plans and city plans across the Arabian Gulf. She is passionate about influencing Arab cities towards sustainable development.
Huda Shaka, Dubai
Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist by Kate Raworth
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017 Buy the book.
I found Raworth’s book to be a compelling case for overturning the way we learn, teach, think about, and discuss economics. It provides a holistic and vivid explanation of why we need a different approach and what that could mean for the world.
It has propelled the discussion squarely into the mainstream and has given me the confidence to push the conversation further with anyone, including with my colleagues and clients.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
David Simon
The Experimental City
edited by James Evans, Andrew Karvonen and Rob Raven
Routledge, London & New York, 2016 (paperback, 2018 Buy the book.
Since cities all differ, with each being unique, recipe books of what to do are almost by definition useless; however, learning how to do things better and sustainably is crucial. The central message of this stimulating edited collection is that, as key agents of change, cities are sites of experimentation for urban sustainability, which has to be locally appropriate and globally literate.
The 17 chapters fall into 3 sections, respectively addressing logics of experimentation, experimenting in cities, and experimental cities. They provide diverse approaches to experimentation of different kinds, drawing on case studies from around the world, thereby avoiding the classic Northerncentric trap of so much urban sustainability literature.
Mr. Valgora brings together an extraordinary range of disciplines at all scales: architecture, waterfront master planning, urban design, and interiors. He founded STUDIO V to create work that is connected to function, history and context.
Jay Valgora, New York
The Georgics
by Virgil
37 to 30 BCE (written during the Roman Civil War)
translated by David Ferry, 2006 Buy the book.
Struggling with writing a book about utopia, I searched for a source to illuminate the conflicts of our relationship to nature, the city, to one another?
The most hopeful narratives emerge from times of greatest turmoil: a farmer’s almanac, an instruction manual of artifice and nature, immersed in an epic poem of infinite human potential and frailty.
Chantal van Ham is a senior expert on biodiversity and nature-based solutions and provides advice on the development of nature positive strategies, investment and partnerships for action to make nature part of corporate and public decision making processes. She enjoys communicating the value of nature in her professional and personal life, and is inspired by cooperation with people from different professional and cultural backgrounds, which she considers an excellent starting point for sustainable change.
Many cities in the world are losing trees and lack budget to maintain their green spaces. City Forest Credits generates funding for city tree canopies from private companies and individuals that wish to offset their carbon emissions by buying credits for tree planting or maintenance.
This can in my view be a game changer for mobilising investment to create carbon neutral cities which improve air and water quality, reduce energy costs, and improve health and wellbeing for their citizens.
Regenerative urban agriculture is like a lab that fosters the development of a multitude of knowledge sets, not only in the field of sciences and technologies for sustainability, but also in environmental education for ecosystems and biodiversity conservation.
The destruction of Cerrado (Brazilian Savannah), the second largest biome in Brazil after Amazonia, has become the main concern of urban collectives focused on reintroducing elements of this important ecosystem in city landscapes and in the imaginations of city dwellers. In this essay, we look at urban farming for Cerradoregeneration from the perspective of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2001, 2015), that provides a systemic and prospective approach to human practices, particularly useful to foster collaborative learning processes by collectively identifying and handling evolving tensions and contradictions and building consensus on goals, principles and procedures.
Urban agriculture for Cerrado regeneration and conservation
In Brazil, the conversion of native habitats to large scale-farming has caused, among other environmental impacts, deforestation and fragmentation of natural systems along with a considerable loss in biodiversity (Klink and Machado, 2005; Pearce, 2011; Schiesari et al., 2013).
If, on the one hand, the rate of deforestation of Amazonia has declined since 2005, thanks to control programs sponsored by the Brazilian government—then on the other hand, efforts so far are insufficient to restrain the destruction of Cerrado. On the list of the world’s 35 hotspots, it is estimated that in just 20 years, the area ofCerradohas been reduced by 26 million hectares or 260,000 km2, equivalent to twice the area of England. Today Cerrado’snative vegetation occupies 47 percent of its original area and the area preserved by conservation units only corresponds to 6.6 – 8 percent, if we consider reserves which afford higher levels of protection (Beuchle et al., 2015).
Urbanization is one of the factors responsible for the destruction of the Cerradobiome. Cities account for only 0.25% of the total area of the country (Miranda et al., 2005), thus they have a smaller direct impact on natural landscapes compared to agriculture, but the urban population in Brazil is expected to reach 90% of the total population by 2030. Such increasing concentration will exert a great deal of pressure on natural habitats, if not in terms of space (Bogaert et al., 2014) surely in ecological footprint (Rees, 1996).
It is true that natural environments are protected under Brazilian law, but recently laws have been loosened by federal and local administrations in order to meet the demands of urban developers. Remnants of this strikingly beautiful wooded grassland have been pushed to the fringes of urban spaces and designated as empty space that has been abandoned or used for dumping garbage. Stigmatized as inhospitable and inhabitable areas, most Brazilian cities now see the Cerradoas no more than vacant land, reserved for urban housing, road networks of industrial buildings sprawling from the city, both formally and informally. There is little consideration for how the original landscape will be changed irreversibly, with effects on soil fertility and productivity, local and global climates (e.g. urban heat islands and emission of greenhouse gases), water resources, and finally habitat and biodiversity (Tratalos et al., 2007).
Given the prospect of extinction of one of the richest biomes on the planet and the consequences this would have on the quality of human life and wildlife, local and international NGOs and research institutions, among other actors, have been undertaking initiatives aimed at Cerrado conservation and regeneration. With access to very diverse resources and tools, they compose a heterogeneous and comprehensive movement with different motivations, specific contents and local expressions.
The production of seedlings and the cultivation of arboreal native species for commercial purposes is one of these initiatives. The seedlings grown in commercial nurseries are intended for reforestation of “legal reserve areas”—although in most nurseries where Cerrado plants are reproduced, shrub and herbaceous flora (which in natural settings tend to predominate over the trees) areoften neglected.
Indigenous people, who have a deep understanding of Cerrado’s ecology have been an important part of this movement. They have cultivated and lived in tune with the region’s biodiversity since time immemorial. It remains an essential resource for subsistence, and is a knowledge set that is mobilized through practice and handed down from generation to generation. In fact, Brazil is a country whose socio-ecological traits and dynamics reflect its great biocultural diversity and in which societies driven by globalized leading technologies coexist (sometimes side by side, as in the case of the metropolis of São Paulo), though not necessarily peacefully, with societies whose existence is inextricably linked to the features and resources of local landscapes and indigenous practices, knowledge and skills developed in the management of soils and biodiversity of fields and forests (Posey, 1985; Hecht, 2009).
In urban settings, where people tend to value domesticated, orderly and even aseptic sceneries, biodiversity is generally seen as an inconvenience. Not even people who live near the remnants of native forests are aware and acknowledge ecological services such as plants and fruits which are edible and provide therapeutic properties (Maroni et al., 2006; Dias and Laureano, 2009). According to McKinney (2002) this lack of ecological culture in highly urbanized societies hinders the many conservation opportunities commonly created by an informed and proactive public
In this essay, urban farming and ecological restoration are considered as intermingled practices aimed precisely at creating a culture which promotes biodiversity by arousing sensitivities and attitudes of care and belonging to a community which comprehend all living beings and the landscape we shape together (Kudryavtsev et al., 2012; Tidball and Krasny, 2010; McCann, 2011; Krasny et al., 2013). Ecological restoration focuses mainly on revitalizing natural ecosystems, but local perspectives eventually seek to realign it beyond its initial rewilding purposes toward other interests like food and with a focus on growing edible herbs (McCann and Schusler, 2016).
Urban agriculture for restoration delves deeper by cultivating resilience and enhancing biological diversity and ecosystem services, such as pollination, soil enrichment and natural weed and pest control. Such a complex and challenging task both demands and generates knowledge and learning. In this way, regenerative urban agriculture is like a lab that fosters the development of a multitude of knowledge sets, not only in the field of sciences and technologies for sustainability, but also in environmental education for ecosystems and biodiversity conservation. It embodies the idea of community of practice, as participants—volunteers and collaborators (technicians, scientists etc.) learn by doing and interacting, and through the collaborative mobilization of information and resources to overcome problems and contradictions inherent to the activity.
Cultivating Cerrado in urban settings as wildfire activity
Of all the organizations for Cerrado conservation mapped in 2017 by the Institute for Population and Nature Society (ISPN) in partnership with Conservation International (CI), few of them have been focused on cultivating seedlings of native species for the recovery of degraded areas in rural environments, and none of them operate in urban settings.
However, the ISPN report doesn’t do justice to a more recent phenomenon that acquired some visibility thanks to social networks involved in interventions to repopulate urban public areas with native vegetation from Cerrado. Individuals and groups engaged in this activity are not numerous, but strongly motivated, as their performance is characterized by tenacity in the face of all sorts of constrains. After all, public space, especially on the periphery of capitalism, is characterized as a place of conflict among contradictory interests, uses and practices (Wisnik, 2018).
In one way, the activities of these urban groups acts as a counter movement and is a protest in and of itself in its resistance against the predominant model of urbanization—which is heavily predatory of local biodiversity and natural resources. Their conception of green areas design goes beyond arbitrary aesthetics—which do not contemplate the ecological and ornamental value of native species—and recognizes the propaedeutic importance of utilizing Cerrado vegetation as a prerequisite for its conservation (Siqueira, 2016).
In the book Guia de campo dos Campos de Piratininga(Field guide to Piratininga Fields)—where Piratininga Fields used to be the “landscape prior to colonization, having been extinguished after São Paulo urban development” (2016, p. 13)—visual artist Daniel Caballero describes a collective experience of recomposing a Cerrado landscape in a public square in São Paulo, by “looking for wild landscapes in the ditch and collecting memories of a discarded and residual nature, of no value” (p.31), in order to compose a “collage of varied territories represented by plants and the harvested soil itself … as a practice of subversive relational art, mobilizing people with the intention of creating a decolonizing territory within the city” (p.61).
Another active group in Cerrado restoration (in the city of Brasília) is headed by landscape architect Mariana Siqueira. Her office develops projects and experiences in partnership with the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio / MMA) and the University of Brasilia (UnB), whose researchers subsidize through technical knowledge the creation of a conceptual and methodological framework for “a landscape that expresses the Brazilian savannah”. The purpose of this collective is to bridge the gap in the theory, teaching and practice of landscape architecture by utilizing Cerrados pecies in gardens aimed at reconnecting users to territory from an affective point of view and recreating habitat for wildlife.
Finally, the collective Pomar do Cerrado (Cerrado Orchard) was created as a branch of a movement for the conservation of a natural area within the campus of the Federal University of São Carlos (SP) threatened by the ruling master plan, which has transformed the previous landscape into a predictable mosaic of buildings, parking lots and vast lawns. The immediate purpose of the orchard’s mentors was to make beauty and worthiness of native species apparent to local people, especially the academic community. But the deeper motivation of their activity consisted in reintroducing Brazilian Savannah into collective consciousness through a process of ecological place meaning (Russ et al., 2015), and ultimately in persuading the institution to develop an effective nature conservation program.
The three collectives above are born from the passion and obstinateness of their founders. Over time, actors and collaborators joined the activity oriented toward a common object—which consists in keeping the Cerrado alive in both, urban physical and mental landscapes—with enough drawing power and motivational force to stimulate the search for sustainability and expansion in spite of a number of adversities and constraints, such as little monetary rewards or institutional support and excessive expenditures of time and energy. Engeström (2009) conceptualizes these social production activities as wildfire activities, since they follow a pattern of development characterized by expansive swarming, sideways transitions and boundary-crossing.
This type of activity differs from traditional craft activities and from mass production (although they may seek symbioses with the vertical and linear structures of the latter) in part because they are use-value oriented and resistant to thorough commercialization or assimilation by institutional dynamics. They also differ from peer production, mainly because they develop outside of the sphere of digital virtuality. This doesn’t mean that actors renounce the adoption and use of information and communication technologies, but they put little emphasis and dependency on them. For example, their presence in social networks responds to the need to give visibility and attractiveness to an activity that is seen as a solution to the problem of erosion of Cerrado‘s biodiversity, but a timeline or a blog are only tools among many others and not the object of the activity. Other initiatives such as creating electronic herbarium catalogs have been effective because they make the private collection more accessible to professionals and other people, but also serve as a record of the results and learning achieved through a vast repertoire of actions, such as the collection of seeds and the planting of seedlings in specific contexts: a public square, a school, a botanical garden or a university campus
Wildfire activities are also characterized by high mobility. One of the main actions of participants is “plant hunting”, which entails walking through the city or preserved natural areas to collect specimens, fruits and seeds. But the physical movement of the actors is just one dimension of mobility, since both the material terrain where the garden or orchard is located and the virtual terrain of the activity are continually intersected by the entanglement of information and other things . As Pink (2012) puts it, although the garden asa materiality is visible as a locality, the garden project is not a bounded entity, its edge being opened to plants, humans and other living beings, services (i.e. water), material inputs and tools that move between these virtual borders, as well as are affected by local changes, such as the weather. For example, in the case of Cerrado restoration, gardens and orchards especially are meant to provide awareness and inspiration, experiences of sensory aesthetic, new socialities and nurturing relationships alongside learning opportunities about those gardens in particular and the making of them. In their turn, all these experiencial aspects are constituted in relation to discourses, intentionalities, agencies and agendas which also transcend the garden as a locality, thus emphasizing its character of “a site where agency can be exercised in the face of global culture” (Pink, 2012, p.89).
By moving around in an unexplored territory, that is both material and experiential, people make, therefore, cognitive trails which lead to a progressively more stable conceptualization of that territory and of the way of moving in it. Thus, for instance, when walking through a natural or even degraded area of Cerradoin search of fruits and seeds, or just of evidences of its vegetation, that which may appear to the beginner as an indistinct green mass reveals to a more attentive look its diversity of shapes and textures, its seasonality and mutability—this change in perception is well described in the interview with Mariana Siqueira by Cerrado Infinito: “As I learn to know each type of plant, my sight opens to this type of vegetation and I distance myself from the everyday landscape. What used to be a uniform green mass gains countless textures and volumes, as if I were cured of a type of myopia”.
Our perception—which corresponds to active engagement with the things that matter to usthrough our sensing and sensed carnal bodies—is a privileged source of awareness and knowledge of the landscape, its elements and transformations. In the sphere of activity which has as its general object the “scratching” of a tract of urban landscape in order to transform it into something that evokes (and invokes) the native landscape, the making of a Cerrado garden or orchard can be understood as a process of sensorial and embodied engagements (collecting and saving seeds, producing seedlings, digging planting holes, gardening and also observing the transformations the garden goes through…) as well as other imaginative and practical actions (planning, applying for funding or support, recruiting volunteers, researching, recording and publicizing the results… ) “designed to change the way that the garden might be experienced/known” (Pink, 2012, p.94).
Through this repertoire of actions and operations that configure the routine of the collectives, trails both across the territory and as cognitive objects leave marks in experience and in the environment—a garden, an orchard, a particular scenery, but also their representations, like a book, an electronic catalogue, an exhibition, among other narratives. Particularly the marks in the environment tend to persist and allow the enhancement of the ability to navigate through certain feature-domain (Engeström, 2009) a well as to fit each one’s purpose in the activity.
In fact, people gain their membership by virtue of contributing something to the collective, and once engaged in the activity, they work symbiotically, on the basis of a spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions—this is another feature of wildfire activities which also suits the specific practice of planting and cultivating Cerrado in urban settings. Actually, this activity is carried on by heterogeneous and floating collectives composed by agents coming from different cultural backgrounds (academics, artists, landscape architects, environmentalist…) who join the groups drawn by particular interests, but are still involved in the transformation or redefinition of a shared challenging object. “Encounters” (as defined by Engeström are interactions between actors in the effort to construct a temporary yet effectively collaborative knot) also include agents of institutions with vested power, as is the case with the project Cerrado Orchard. At a certain moment of its existence, this collective sought opportunities for dialogue and support from the university which served to ensure continuity and the activities expansion on university grounds and created permanent material infrastructure.
Encounters between agents in their various trajectories generate questions, deliberations, negotiations and decisions that reflect a sort of balance between understandings, intentions and valuations that are often contradictory. This non-conflict free process shapes the activity in its organization and dynamics. It affects, for example, the adoption of technologies and tools or the drafting of procedures and rules etc.
Encounters multiple learning opportunities, by opening new terrain to be dwelled in and explored, and by constructing collective concepts that serve as platforms for expansive learning and restructuring of the activity along an open path which bridges fields of knowledge and sectorial practices—in this specific case, activism and social learning, academic research and landscape design
Photo: Arca do Cerrado https://www.facebook.com/PomardoCerrado/
The case of Cerrado Orchard (São Carlos, SP, Brazil)
I have been part of the Cerrado Orchard collective for the past three years. Therefore, the following account is based on my own experience as a volunteer, and informed by my academic background in environmental education. More specifically, my description of the Cerrado Orchard activity is inspired by the principles of CHAT, that is, it brings into focus the activity organization and its change caused by a process of expansive learning throughout which the collective has constructed its own conceptual platform and infrastructure.
The collective owes its existence to a ten year dispute over the use of a natural area of 50 Hectares on the campus of the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar): where the campus administrators see an undifferentiated piece of land intended to expand infrastructure, the collective—that strives for the preservation of the biotic community which inhabits that fragment of Cerrado—sees a tract of an ecological corridor (whose disruption could cause an irreversible loss of local biodiversity), but also an opportunity of coexistence with other living beings in urban environment.
Along such local dispute—which typify the deeper contradiction between conflicting exchange and use values resulting from the commodification of urban land—it became evident that the planning office was neglecting native vegetation and was unwilling and unprepared to incorporate it into the design of green areas on campus. So, in a first moment Cerrado Orchard presents itself as an initiative of guerrilla gardening – which consists of the unauthorized cultivation of native plants on one of the grass surfaces that occupy much of the territory of the university—in protest against invisibility of Cerrado to those responsible for administrating the campus territory and infrastructure.
Although still weakly coordinated, the efforts of a collective inexperienced in cultivation practices, which is only dedicated to this activity in their free time, sought to mark a trail aimed at linking the Cerrado fragment threatened by the campus master plan to the daily life of the university community and campus users in general. Participants concentrated on performing basic operations such as preparing the soil, planting seedlings, keeping them alive during the dry season, protecting them from wind and invasive plants.
Volunteers engaged in actions related to Cerrado Orchard activity. Photos: Arca do Cerrado (https://www.facebook.com/PomardoCerrado/)
Volunteers ignored the scientific denomination of most plants, known through fancy names assigned ad hoc to evoke morphological or sensorial characteristics (such as perfume and texture), which made possible to associate the collected seeds to the mother plants in the forest. However, this system of identification limited the search for information, both in botanical collections or scientific publications. The need to ascribe the plants of the orchard to the web of ecological relations they participate in the local context, and to appreciate not only the plants of the orchard itself, but also the habitat they come from, caused the group to start a virtual catalog of the orchard’s species, as well as a database of scientific publications about Cerrado in the territory of the university.
From dazzling to botanical identification and seedlings growing (Temnadenia violacea) Photos: Arca do Cerrado (https://www.facebook.com/PomardoCerrado/)
Another contradiction identified by the collective stems from the current configuration of the orchard, far below expectations of stimulating the aesthetic fruition of the orchard through its design. To overcome this contradiction, the collective has invested in isolated and amateurish interventions such as the placement of plaques that identify the plants, the creation of paths and supports for climbing plants. However, the design of a garden demands expert skills and knowledge, the learning of which should become a priority in view of the orchard expansion.
The most important effect of publicizing the collective’s results in social networks and of seeking a dialog with people which share the same interests was aggregation of collaborators, specialized knowledge, tools and techniques that contributed to improve the object of the activity—consisting in growing the Cerrado in urban landscape as well as the actions needed to materialize it. On the other hand, more recent demands (i.e. a database) drove the collective closer to scientific community.
Indeed, the volunteers who created and care for the orchard have been working on a trial and error basis, using their own resources and with restricted access to academic and technical knowledge. This has clearly limited the results of their efforts, both in substantive terms (e.g. orchard’s extent and configuration) and in terms of learning opportunities, which could be provided by research together with hands-on activities. The need to overcome such limitations, related to contradictions between the Cerrado Orchard collective and the academic administration, caused the practice to move along a path of expansive learning and development. As a result, an outreach program was created—The Cerrado Ark: Gardening for Cerrado Valuation and Restoration—through which the collective has sought the collaboration and resources of the academic institution with the purpose of consolidating its own infrastructure and social impact.
Crossing boundaries, expanding learning and opening new trails to foster biodiversity in cities
In a recent article in The New York Times entitled The Global Solution to Extinction, Edward O. Wilson defends that “The only way to save upward of 90 percent of the rest of life is to vastly increase the area of refuges, from their current 15 percent of the land and 3 percent of the sea to half of the land and half of the sea”. According to him, such amount “can be put together from large and small fragments around the world to remain relatively natural, without removing people living there or changing property rights” and he describes our sustained coexistence with the rest of life both a practical challenge and a moral decision.
This essay presents aspects related to the structure and development of the activity of urban collectives which took very seriously the challenge launched by Wilson. Indeed, they engaged in learning processes aimed at reintroducing Cerrado’s endangered biotic community not only in urban landscapes, but also in the collective imagery, through a process of production and ecological significance of places.
This practice, with local variations, has the characteristics of a wildfire activity (Engeström, 2009), a model of human and organizational activity that pursues innovation and expansion along with efficiency and sustainability according to a pattern of development which take multiple learning directions and crosses the boundaries of academic disciplines, fields of knowledge and ways of knowing and learning. Particularly the activity addressed in this article has ecological sustainability as its central object; in a historic context in which government organizations as well as research institutions have shown serious limitations in fostering attitudes and policies needed to reverse the destruction of natural ecosystems, the collectives mentioned in this paper took on the task of criticizing and provoking the transformation of current cultural practices that place at risk not only the survival of wildlife, but the very basis of natural resources on which all human societies depend, regardless of their socioeconomic formations.
In the opening of physical and conceptual trails with the purpose of consolidating their own infrastructure, the collectives intersected other historical trails; in fact, as Engeström reminds us, the physical, cultural and symbolic landscape on which the collectives learn to move and leave the marks of their agency, “never is an empty space to begin with; it has dominant trails and boundaries made by others, often with heavy histories and power invested in them. When new dwellers enter the zone, they eventually have critical encounters with existing trails” (p.14). Thus, the Cerrado planters’ journey is unlikely to be free of obstacles and contradictions imposed by dominant cultural practices of urban land use. But precisely the overcoming of these obstacles and contradictions constitutes the main motivation and motor of development and self renewal of wildfire activities, as they trigger processes of transformative learning, whereby participants gain awareness and control on the activity, greater efficiency in the use of resources and opportunities, sustainability and social impact.
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Walking though the Bosnia and Herzegovina and the cities of Trebinje, Mostar, Livno and Bihac stirs up unexpected emotions. These cities reveal glimmers of how a country torn apart by war more than 23 years ago is rebuilding and where it is planting seeds of economic and social hope.
There is a sadness in Bosnia and Herzegovina that will follow me for a long time. Of all the wonders and troubles we have witnessed during our walk through Asia and Europe, the visible signs of this country’s post-war hardships break my heart the most in this multi-year journey.
Our route takes us along mostly rural border areas wrapping around the south and west of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It’s hard for me to process the disparate things I see each day. Beautiful mountains with thick pine forests. Warning signs about land mines nailed to trees. Wide open grasslands and lakeside wildlife reserves. Newly constructed houses decorated with flowerpots spilling over with colorful blooms. Facades riddled with bullet holes and houses destroyed by grenades. Villages abandoned by families fleeing war, and memorial stones remembering those who died fighting. Young and old people looking for a way forward.
A road we walked with mountains and grasslands. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot
The bigger cities of Trebinje, Mostar, Livno and Bihac help soothe the emotional unrest and physical discomfort that overwhelms me during humid summer days and rainy evenings. They offer some perspective that, perhaps, can only be appreciated slowly at three kilometers an hour. These cities reveal glimmers of how a country torn apart by war more than 23 years ago is rebuilding and where it is planting seeds of economic and social hope.
A long awaited arrival
We finally reach the Balkans during the summer of 2018, and walk into Bosnia and Herzegovina on a hot day in August. It’s a milestone I simultaneously wished for and worried about since we set out from Thailand in January 2016.
Being in BiH means we are even closer to Barcelona, and closer to home, a concept that feels more significant after 2.5 years of journeying by foot. But, more than this tangible sense of nearing the end of a goal, BiH, in my mind, has for generations been a place where a reckoning with the ghosts of human tragedies and the need for great healing must one day intersect. I’m anxious about what our footsteps will lead us to see.
Along the banks of the Trebišnjica River in Trebinje. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on FootA stroll in the park along the Una River in Bihac. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on FootMaking our way through Livno. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot
With absolute certainty, I can say our arrival to Bosnia and Herzegovina hits me on a deeply personal level, with Balkan blood shaping some strands of my DNA. I am half Croatian, and since the 1990s when images of war griping former Yugoslav regions flashed on my American television screen, I wanted to know BiH and its people loosely connected to me through veins of history, culture, traditions and distant family memories. Since antiquity, the roads of so many different lives and lifestyles have met in this East-Central European country, this land between worlds, and it made sense to us as we mapped our route that these same roads would gradually link our Asian and European footsteps.
What I didn’t expect, however, was the weight of walking through recovering war zones where we can feel the ethnic, religious and economic discontent simmering below the surface. It also had not occurred to me how it would feel to follow similar roads today’s masses of Asian, Middle East and African immigrants and refugees use to reach England, Germany, or other European Union countries. The impact of these various dynamics made BiH one of the most difficult countries for us to walk.
To lessen the sadness we still have a hard time describing, we meander through some of the country’s bigger southern cities, Trebinje, Mostar, Livno and Bihac, searching for solace in the day-to-day comforts of parks, riverside promenades, markets and coffee shops.
Turning to tourism
Perhaps not surprisingly after months of walking in open spaces and quiet, rural areas with few people, we are a bit deflated to see the throngs of tourists visiting Trebinje and Mostar during August’s peak vacation weeks.
The cities are clearly capitalizing on their proximity to the hyper-tourist seaside city of Dubrovnik across the border in Croatia.
The famous Mostar bridge. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot
Trebinje serves as base camp for vacationers who want cheaper accommodations than what they would find along the Adriatic coast 30 kilometers away, says a young man who helps his parents sell carpets and manage a holiday apartment while waiting for a call back to his better-paying seaman work.
In its own right, the small city, located in Republika Srpska one of BiH’s two legal entities, has enough things to keep visitors busy for a few days. There’s a pretty historic stone bridge, Serbian-Orthodox churches, and its main square has a market and is filled with restaurants, cafes and bars—essentials for hungry travelers. The dry, yellowed hills circling the city provide a dose of nature and panoramic views. I, however, live the city in a different way. I watch the sun set over the river while I fold our clean laundry, admiring the way the light shimmers on the water and not yet willing to immerse myself into urban distractions.
Walking with many mountain views. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on FootWhile tourists crowd on Mostar’s famous bridge, we sit near the Neretva River and watch the birds. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot
About eighty kilometers northwest from Trebinje, Mostar, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity’s economic and cultural hub with approximately 106,000 people and BiH’s fifth largest city, buzzes with day-trippers and bus groups. They crowd onto the reconstructed Ottoman-era “Stari Most” (Old Bridge) that was destroyed in 1993 by Croat military forces during the Croat-Bosniak war. They watch locals dive into the Neretva River and buy kitsch souvenirs that look more Turkish than Balkan from the dozens of shops squeezed on either side of the bridge. We stroll around the old city, and note the number of churches, monasteries, mosques, synagogues and religious-based cemeteries pointing to the historical ideological overlap that has shaped and continues to mold the city. It’s clear, though, that the city’s future heavily depends on tourism; the sheer number of hotels, hostels and apartments available for rent suggests that anyone who has a little bit of money is converting any space they have into rooms for sightseers making rounds from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo, BiH’s capital city further north.
We ponder Trebinje and Mostar’s development models on the strip of beach below the Stari Most, discussing the short and long-term pros and cons of such dependency. We eventually fall silent watching water birds hold their ground as the fast-moving river sweeps around them. How nature fits into cities under construction is far more interesting to us than scouring shelves for Turkish coffee pots and war paraphernalia.
The scars of war
Livno is the next notable town we wander through.
The city is in the Croatian Catholic zone of BiH. We know this because people throughout our BiH walk identify themselves and the cities they live in with both ethnic and religious distinctions. It’s one of the strangest naming encounters we have experienced thus far, but our conversations with various people of different backgrounds and residencies confirm that this dual label appears to be a new normal here. Post-war prejudices divide people into groups, we notice: Serb/Herzegovin Orthodox, Bosniak Muslims and Croatian Catholics. Livno is one of the cities that seems to reinforce the separation.
“The Croatian Catholics have rebuilt their houses. They are starting over, and want to leave memories of the war behind them,” a Croatian Catholic man in his 60s tells us while we wait out a storm. He grew up in a small village not far from Livno and travels from Zadar, Croatia, where he now lives, to take care of a house and garden his family own on the BiH side of the boundary line. “You’ll see this as you walk. About 20-30 kilometers after Livno, you’ll be in the Orthodox area. They haven’t rebuilt their homes yet. There are still bullet holes in their walls.”
We don’t know what to make of this kind of bigotry. It’s narrow-minded, dismissive, and shocking. But, we find ourselves in a state of astonishment as we walk and see first-hand what this man meant.
For a couple days of walking before Livno, we notice the houses and gardens. They are new, nicely painted, two or three-story single-family houses with porches, manicured gardens and fruit trees. There are nicer cars parked in the driveways, and better quality farm equipment.
This superficial affluence, a slightly different variety than we have observed elsewhere, takes on some airs as we enter the city. We see several local joggers and cyclists out exercising along the river, something we haven’t seen very of much of since we entered the Balkans. Women leisurely stroll the pedestrian street during the late morning and men at cafes hurry through their coffees. Kids walk by wearing soccer shirts brandishing the Croatian flag and names of Croatian players.
On the heals of Trebinje and Mostar, our couple hours in Livno give us a sense that BiH has turned a corner and is sort of patching itself together, at least from a rebuilding standpoint.
A few days later that image is erased with big strokes.
As the Zadar man predicted, we start seeing the signs of another reality further up the road. Villages are mostly empty, abandoned and forgotten. Houses are in a precarious state, their rooftops blown away and walls overgrown with vines. Pitted façades tell the story of rounds of bullets fired and forever lodged in the memories of those who still call these buildings homes.
“That’s from the Croat soldiers,” says an old Serb Orthodox woman, pointing towards the gaping hole in the wall near her second floor window. “We don’t have enough money to fix it.” She heads off to gather up her chickens for the night, a brief moment of resignation and frustration shades her smile as she leaves us to sip the Turkish coffee she prepared for us.
A few days further on, we see what hoped we wouldn’t see: Warnings about land mines hidden in the forest and roped off areas near deserted hamlets where teams are meticulously trying to find and detonate them. The lump in our throat that we first had when we saw a similar scene near one of the mountain passes in the Pamir region of Tajikistan returns. We do everything we can to not cry on the side of the road.
For many walking days, I wonder how people can stay in this country and why those who now have lives aboard would come back. I think about the unfairness of it all, and question what will become of BiH and what will happen to the cities and towns and the people who tell us of the limited opportunities and resources they have here. What is the just way to recreate BiH cities and villages, and how will they and the people who live in them conjure up enough resilience, social cohesion and financial support to reach a new plain of equality and livability? I have no answers, and tread forward in an uneasy silence for long stretches of time.
Winter is coming
The heaviness associated with the tragedy of war, human displacement and seeing people struggling to create a viable future sticks with me until Bihac.
Bihac, a predominately Bosniak Muslim city on the banks of the Una River, encapsulates the dilemma many European cities now face. Because of its proximity to Croatia (which is part of the European Union) and, thus, the shortest land route across Croatia to Slovenia (another EU country leading the way towards Austria, Germany and Italy), Bihac has become a holding place for thousands of transitory Asian, African and Middle East immigrants and refugees. People we met along the way and several newspaper reports estimate that anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 migrants are currently living in grim, makeshift camps and occupying dilapidated, abandoned buildings in and around the city. No one really knows how many migrants are there, but concerns about how they will make it through the cold winter months are mounting. Locals themselves have a hard enough time getting through the winter. The care needed for this amount of homelessness is exponential.
“I’m living in a damp abandoned building. The guys at the hotel let me take a shower in one of the rooms that had to be cleaned,” an Algerian man tells us, coughing sporadically, while slowly sipping the soda we bought him at the hotel’s restaurant. We notice the two uniformed policemen who sit at the table behind us, watching us as they wait for their lunch. “I crossed into Croatia, but the police caught me, ripped up the documents the Bosnian police gave me and smashed my phone. Do you happen to have an extra phone you don’t need? But I know you could also get in trouble for helping me.”
If I did have a phone I could afford to part with, I would give it to him. I offer him a meal instead. He politely declines. We shake hands as we say our farewells, bidding each other safe passage on our respective onward journeys. He fades into the crowd of the many other migrants lingering at cafes, shopping at the supermarket and hanging out in the park near the river.
I feel the injustice, and it shakes me to my core. Lluís and I walk out in the open, on roads where everyone can see us, with passports us that give us the privilege to go almost wherever we want. This Algerian man and people like him, on the run from who knows what they left behind, use their phone’s GPS to track a route through mountains and forests that are home to land mines, wolves and bears. They hide in hope.
We pass over the river. Like in Trebinje, I watch the sun start to drop over the city. I watch the water flow, unaware of the human sadness hugging its banks.
I don’t know exactly where my footsteps will take me next. But, I, too, hold hope. I hope the cities of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the people who live in them will create a way forward that opens doors for all of them.
Free from the constraints of water scarcity and the harsh climate, major cities have been developing in high-risk arid environments across the world during the last century, cities such as Phoenix (US), Antofagasta (Chile), and Kuwait City (Kuwait).
Arid cities around the world
Over two years ago, my colleagues and I at Arup began a research project focused on the topic of planning and designing cities in arid environments. We were initially interested in exploring the most relevant practices and innovations for cities in the Middle East, but soon realised that many other cities and regions around the world share similar climatic conditions and challenges. As a matter of fact, approximately one-third of our planet’s land area can be classified as arid, receiving less than 800 ml (~ 50 cubic feet) of rain per year.
Arid environments have only recently been able to support large populations, thanks to inventions such as air conditioning, desalination plants, and the automobile. These technologies helped create habitable conditions in the hostile environment by supplying water through alternative methods (desalination, dams) and providing comfort, at least indoors (air conditioning). Free from the constraints of water scarcity and the harsh climate, major cities started developing in arid environments across the world during the last century, cities such as Phoenix (US), Antofagasta (Chile), and Kuwait City (Kuwait). Not only was their growth reliant on energy-intensive technologies and oblivious to local climate conditions, it was based on an imported, land-intensive development model which encouraged sprawl and further reduced the sustainability of these cities from an environmental and social perspective.
In the 21stcentury, the above development trajectory poses two significant and related challenges for arid cities. First, how can these cities become more sustainable, weaning themselves off the energy and land intensive development models which were central to their creation? Second, how can these cities become more resilient and adapt to global climate change, which is likely to render their climate even less hospitable? By reaching out to our professional network of colleagues and partners from across the world, my colleagues and I were able to identify key learnings and best practices which can help address these questions for existing and developing arid cities. I would like to highlight three areas identified in our work which I believe are particularly important especially for cities in the Arabian Gulf: sustainable urban drainage, the provision of public spaces, and walkability.
Storm water drainage is often an after-thought when planning cities in the Arabian Gulf. With sunny weather for most months of the year, it can be easy to forget that rain events do occur, and they are often intense. Rain water capture is typically not financially viable due to the limited frequency of the rain. This generally leaves the “hard engineering” approach of designing a drainage network to channel storm water as quickly and efficiently as possible to the sea, complying with planning requirements which typically only address up to 1-in-5-year storms.
There is usually no consideration for sustainable urban drainage and filtration systems (e.g. bioswales, porous pavements), nor for designing public spaces to function as part of the storm water management network during intense rain events. Storm water infrastructure is thus capital-intensive and provides no broader amenity or value to the city. Moreover, no scenario planning is undertaken to ensure that vital city assets (e.g. schools, clinics, business districts) remain functional and accessible during larger storm events. Finally, and perhaps most critically, despite infrastructure assets being planned and designed for the next 50 – 100 years, I have yet to see an example where the changing climate conditions (e.g. changing rainfall frequency) are sufficiently taken into consideration to ensure the adaptability of the system for the future.
Storm water management is recognised as vital only in the immediate aftermath of a storm, when cities seize to function after a few minutes of intense rain. At that point, quick-fix, reactive measures are sometimes announced (e.g. increasing number of drainage vehicles, cleaning clogged drains). However, the momentum is not sustained long enough to allow for meaningful and proactive change in planning and design requirements and practices.
Well-used public space in Dubai (UAE). Partially shaded but still water-intensive.
Shifting paradigm, changing pathways
A paradigm shift is needed whereby the complexity and importance of storm water management in arid cities is recognised, understood, and addressed. There are lessons to be learnt from other cities which are planning their storm water infrastructure and sea defenses more thoughtfully, incorporating green and blue infrastructure and utilising the investment to provide more people-focused amenities. The same engineering and design skills need to be employed in arid cities, and this will also require the protection and rehabilitation of local natural systems (e.g. valleys, wetlands) which have and can play a role in resilient storm water management.
Linked to the above topic is the wider discussion around the provision of quality public spaces. This area has been receiving growing interest in the cities of the Arabian Gulf, with critiques around the quality, accessibility and equity of existing public spaces. Interestingly, there have also been valid critiques around the pre-conceptions of public space in the Gulf—why can’t malls be considered a valuable public space if they serve a similar social function as a park?
As cities in the Arabian Gulf (Riyadh, Doha, Dubai) mature, we are seeing the interest in “iconic architecture” develop to recognise the importance of the public realm in the functioning of the city, the wellbeing of its residents, the value of its assets and ultimately the ability of a city to attract future investors and residents. To provide the quantity and diversity of public space needed, arid cities will need to bravely and carefully consider optimising the design and use of outdoor spaces. It is encouraging that this is in line with recent trends, with outdoor spaces being developed successfully in Riyadh, and to a more commercial extent in Dubai (although the question of their ‘public’ nature remains in Dubai).
Designing spaces to be comfortable for considerable parts of the year despite the often hot, dry, and dusty weather will be key. Most of the answer lies in designing spaces to adapt to, and not overpower, the climate. Shade must be provided in a water-efficient and cost-efficient way, which means employing clever passive design techniques wherever possible. A series of small parks and plazas may be more suited to arid climates than large open spaces, as the former are generally easier to shade and more accessible by foot, two critical considerations in arid climates. Providing accessible, comfortable and functional public spaces which encourage social interaction will be key to maintaining the attractiveness and vibrancy of arid cities in the long term.
The restored Wadi Hanifah in Riyadh (KSA) providing alternative public spaces and water management strategies. Source: Moriyami & Teshima
Diseases such as obesity and diabetics are prevalent in the Arabian Gulf due to the sedentary lifestyle promoted by the planning model catering for life in air-conditioned spaces and vehicles. Re-integrating walking into the lives of arid city residents will require a fundamental rethink of land use planning practices, just like in most other cities. The added dimension is planning to allow for comfortable walking conditions for most of the year, which takes us back to good passive design practices. It is simply too dangerous to accept the idea that “it is too hot to walk” in arid cities. In addition to the health risks associated with the lack of physical activity, relying on vehicles jeopardizes the resilience of these cities as it reduces the mobility options available.
Arid cities have become a reality in the 20thcentury due to the technological innovations allowing them to overcome the challenges of their harsh environment. They now face the challenge of adapting to the 21stcentury, with its limitations on resource use and the more extreme and less certain climate. To have a chance at addressing these challenges, planners and designers must learn from best practices in other arid cities and environments and develop locally-responsive urban models and solutions.
Local transition initiatives are giving rise to place-based sustainable solutions as a counter movement to globalizing uniformity. The accumulation of small actions can add up to systemic change.
How can cities accelerate transitions to sustainability? That was the central question in the collaborative EU-funded research project called ARTS, in which researchers, policy makers, citizens, artists, and entrepreneurs co-reflected on pathways to fast-forward urban sustainability. Upon the request of many urban changemakers, we translated the academic findings into an accessible book for urban change-makers, called Change the World, City by City. The book illustrates 5 mechanisms for acceleration, 25 pioneering urban transition initiatives and concludes with 10 things to know and do to fast forward sustainable change in cities. Below we would like to share a few key messages from the book.
Photo: (c) cargonomia
#1. The next big thing will be a lot of small things
If you think small-scale, local transformative initiatives are just fiddling about, think again. A quick mapping exercise in the five city regions under study (Budapest, Brighton, Dresden, Genk and Stockholm) revealed about five hundred transition initiatives that aim to advance urban sustainability by changing the way we think, act and organise. We defined a transition initiative as an local initiative initiated by public, civic or business actors that in one way or another focused on achieving environmental sustainability. Examples include cargonomia, a cargo bike center in Budapest that offers a climate friendly transportation mode, the waste house in Brighton which has been constructed from waste materials, the transition town initiative Dresden im Wandel to promote low carbon living, the municipal organic food initiative Södertälje in Stockholm that serves only locally grown and organic food in public institutions and the eco communal gardens in Genk that regenerated discarded plots of land. At first glance, their transformative capacity might be tiny in a world dominated by large corporations and powerful vested interests. They are however not alone: the collective impact they bring about is not negligible. We see that transformation is spreading organically, in multiplicity, everywhere, and that small transformative initiatives replicate amazingly fast around the globe.
IBikeBudapest Critical Mass Bike ride. Photo: (c) Bertalan Soos
In just a decade transition town initiatives spread virally to 48 countries, involving hundreds of thousands of households in creating low carbon, resilient and environmentally friendly communities. The same holds true for permaculture and eco-village initiatives that quickly developed into a movement engaging millions of citizens worldwide that are changing the ways we produce and consume. In just a couple of years, the first repair café initiative, organised in the Netherlands in 2009, grew to approximately 750 initiatives that spread to Japan, US, Canada, Australia and many more countries. Urban gardening initiatives are back in popular demand and energy co-ops, re-use centres and renaturing city initiatives are replicating at a high pace across the globe. The inherent power of transition initiatives lies in their numbers. Instead of the dominant “too big to fail” growth paradigm of the corporate world, their progression is about “being too many to ignore”.
Our research shows that well-organised initiatives, despite their relatively small size, can influence the wider system beyond city boundaries through positive spillover effects, outward replication or by reshaping ideas of local governance into more open for business-beyond-the-usual. What is more, urban changemakers are not only multiplying change, they are diversifying change by tailoring alternative ways of thinking, doing and organising to fit their place. Viewed from a transition’s perspective, local transition initiatives are giving rise to place-based sustainable solutions as a counter movement to globalizing uniformity. Many tiny transformations will aggregate into big change. The next big thing will be a lot of small things.
Photo (c): cargonomia
#2. The city of the future is designed for life (not cars)
Many of the initiatives in the five cities under study aim to bring nature back into the city or reclaim space and acknowledgement for the living world. From the Green Wedge collaboration in Stockholm, urban beekeeping in Genk, urban gardening in Budapest, community-supported agriculture in Dresden to the Biosphere Partnership in Brighton, these initiatives all aim to either renature urban environments or safeguard natural environments from human development. The fact that people want to bring nature back into the city is not surprising. We have largely designed our urban habitats as concrete deserts. Most space in cities is dead space – space for driving and parking cars and storing goods. Such space is not life-friendly – neither for humans nor for other forms of life. It leaves citizens craving for healthy air, better liveability, quiet refuges and spiritual, recreational and aesthetic landscape values. Many change makers thus devote their time to bringing nature back into the city.
Redesigning cities for life requires a shift from technical to living systems design. This can only be achieved if humans acknowledge their interconnection and interdependency with all other living things and anchor “life-friendly” and “life-enhancing” principles as central qualities in urban planning processes. This means that renaturing cities is much more encompassing than the development of engineering solutions for green infrastructure such as green walls or roofs. Designing cities for life requires a whole new set of (re-)design principles and a complete shift from reductive thinking to relational, pattern and systems thinking as well as shifting from degenerative to regenerative value logics. Only when we accomplish to make this shift, we can start to develop cities that support life over the long haul.
Photo (c): Joke Quintens
#3. Human – nature – human nature reconnecting is key
In line with the previous insight, many of the identified initiatives are also explicitly working towards reconnecting citizens to nature, to each other and to human nature. By doing this they fill a void left by the incumbent institutions that mainly promote discourses of eco-efficiency and technological fixes. While technology is important, it is only part of the solution. As Albert Einstein pointedly stated: “You cannot solve the problems of today by using the same thinking that created them.” This is exactly where technological solutions run short. Neither eco-efficiency nor technological fixes get to the root of the problem: the illusion that there is a separation between humans and nature. Nature is not just what is out there – we are nature too. We will not be able to resolve problems of unsustainability as long as our mental models promote anthropocentrism – humans on top of the pyramid, instead of biocentrism – humans as part of the web of life.
The fact that so many urban initiatives focus on the reconnection of humans with nature, implies that change makers are (consciously or unconsciously) aware of how this disconnect reinforces unsustainable ways of thinking, doing and organising. In a response, local change makers have developed a wide variety of initiatives to mobilize, affect and re-establish the connection between citizens and nature. They use diverse ways of bringing nature closer to citizens, often establishing experiential learning initiatives wherein schools and communities can explore and learn about various plant species through schoolyard and communal gardening plots; they involve citizens in immersion and conservation activities, they experiment with growing food harmoniously and sustainably, they organise compost schools and train nature guides and so much more.
We are not only disconnected from nature, we have also lost connection to our own nature. While the current dominant value logic drives consumerism, individualism and competition, we are a social species and therefore need each other to succeed. Our research showed that many urban initiatives are driven by a desire to promote social inclusion and cohesion. Initiatives such as the Brighton & Hove Food Partnership, the Eco Communal Gardens in Genk or the transition town initiatives from Stockholm, Dresden and Budapest explicitly adopt, develop and improve community building approaches to reconnect citizens in new ways. Renaturing human nature is about building capacity for evolution, growing ourselves as human beings so that we can again become in sync with the rest of life on our unique planet. Or, in the words of Evolutionary Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris: “The best life insurance for any species in an ecosystem is to contribute usefully to sustaining the lives of other species, a lesson we are only beginning to learn as humans”.
Children Psychiatic Center in Genk. Photo: (c) KPG
There is only one way forward and that is to reinvent ourselves as human beingsOur findings show that change to fast forward urban sustainability is happening organically, everywhere, all the time. The innovators are you and me – by evolving our ways of thinking, our ways of being and our ways of relating to the world we are transforming our responses on a personal and a collective level. Our insights demonstrate that creating the city of the future is most of all a developmental process. It is about re-thinking, re-connecting, re-purposing, re-naturing, re-skilling, re-distributing and re-organising. Accelerating urban sustainability is therefore also about slowing down. Slowing down to reconnect with our inner and outer nature. Slowing down to recognize our interdependence with the wider community of life. Taking time-out of everyday busy-ness to ask deeper questions: How can we change the role of humans so that we become good for the planet? Sustainability is much more than devising solutions to problems. At its core, sustainability is about making beneficial contributions to the future of life on the planet. It is about making meaningful contributions to our community and our environment. It is about evolving our capacity for co-evolution.
And while many of the world’s largest private and public institutions fail to move beyond “management of unsustainability”, devising eco-efficiency discourses focusing on doing less bad (using less energy or producing less waste), treating the symptom rather than the causes, urban transition initiatives do the exact opposite. They get to the root of the problems and work to transform the mindsets that kept the unsustainable system in place in the first place. Many of them are redesigning the way they work and live to generate a positive impact, to regenerate communities and ecosystems. Urban transition initiatives are reinventing the way cities inhabit this planet by fuelling processes to rethink what we value, what is of value and how citizens can shift from value extracting to value adding roles. Our research also shows that upscaling value adding roles depends on new ways of collaboration. This inevitably entails reinventing ourselves as human beings: what kind of human do we need to be so that we can co-create the conditions for beneficial change? How can we become more mindful and build capacity for evolution into our design, organisation and decision-making processes? Building the city of the future is about a whole lot of little things that are locally attuned, meaningful and regenerative. Most of all, it is about renaturing human nature. Because our nature shapes the nature of cities.
The book is the result of a collaborative effort of VITO, Studio Transitio and the core research team. It can be ordered hereand all revenue raised will be donated to Kom Op Tegen Kanker, a Belgian non-governmental organisation that supports cancer patients and strives for a healthy environment.
Los Angeles harbors many urban savvy coyotes who find hiding spaces in parks and other vegetated places.
My husband went on his bicycle to get our Christmas standing rib roast (an extravagance of every few years) at the local artisanal butcher. The butcher is in the legendary Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles, corner of 3rdand Fairfax. It remains relatively authentic despite the immense Disneyesque mall just adjacent to it: “The Grove”, a fantastically successful enterprise by Rick Caruso. People come from far and wide to enjoy its artificial family-oriented atmosphere, replete with canned music, fountains, fabulous bouquets in the parking garage (as well as a nicely appointed lounge), polite uniformed service people all over.
The place is very well policed.
Coyotes in Los Angeles. Photo: Stuart Palley (National Park Service
Farmer’s Market is a bit less glitzy, it has lots of small food venues from the ersatz French restaurant to the Mexican, Polynesian, American restaurants, ice cream makers and vendors, spice mart and vegetable purveyors. There are two superb butchers and fowl vendors too. So, back to the standing rib roast.
He puts it in his functional bicycle basket—the packaging is slightly leaky, some drips of bloody water ooze out. Negotiating the way back, avoiding the narrow spot on 3rd that parallels Pan Pacific Park, he takes the windy path that dips through Pan Pacific at the far southern end, a place where the homeless have found relatively safe shelter.
As he pedals up the last little incline, out of the bushes appear coyotes…Los Angeles harbors many urban savvy coyotes who find hiding spaces in parks and other vegetated places. Smelling the meat, the small pack of four start to trail him, sniffing and emitting soft yelps of probability for food. He gets to the first street he needs to cross to use the much safer alleyway behind the convenience store and local hotel. He stops to check for cars.
So do the coyotes. They know about traffic and getting hit by cars. He zips across, quickly followed by the animals on the hunt. Getting closer one dares a quick try at a heel nip. My husband speeds up, there is no one around in the alley. He pedals strongly. Coyotes still a bit unsure, hover trotting beside him, vocalizing softly (they are conscious of being in a city).
The next street comes, much busier. The coyotes are unsure. Should they continue the pursuit? They are visible, very visible, and there is still a lot of day light. Gradually they drop back, disappointed, and fade into the neighborhood bushes.
The roast makes its way home safely. No one is hurt.
The diagram above illustrates the 2.5 million years that encompass the evolution of humanity. The thin magenta line on the right is more than ample thickness to represent the entire amount of time where the physical backdrop to life that has shaped the human condition has been life spent living in organized settlements, villages and cities. The 150-year era of anthropogenic climate change would fit into an even thinner, microscopic slice of the same line.
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