The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) currently has 193 Parties. It is indeed a challenge for each of the Parties, as a nation, to implement their commitments to an international convention like the CBD. How can each Party know how successful it has been in fulfilling its obligations to the CBD? In April 2002 at 6th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP6) to the CBD, the Parties committed themselves to achieve a target of reducing significantly the rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level by 2010.
If we cannot measure quantitatively what biodiversity we have how can we manage and protect it? If we do not evaluate our biodiversity conservation efforts, how do we know that they are achieving what they were set to do? These were the questions that Singapore pondered over and we would like to share what we have done to help us meet our international commitments through local action.
The figures for environmental sustainability and performance looked grim for countries.
A landmark event occurred in 2008. UN-Habitat announced that the world’s demographic patterns indicated that currently more people lived in cities than in rural area. This trend has shown no sign of reversing or easing in pace. Hence, it is inevitable that cities must play a pivotal role in biodiversity conservation. Doing a similar search for indices that evaluated biodiversity conservation at the city level drew a blank despite observations that cities are pro-active in the intensification of biodiversity efforts. It became increasingly obvious that the success of biodiversity conservation lies in efforts carried out by cities, local authorities and sub-national governments.
Networking among cities occurred as early as 2006 when the Global Partnership on Local and Sub-national Action for Biodiversity was initiated at the ICLEI General Assembly in Capetown, South Africa. The former mayor of Bonn, Barbara Dieckmann, hosted a Mayoral Conference in Bonn in 2008 at the Bonn UN Biodiversity Summit which resulted in the Bonn Declaration. The Global Partnership of Cities and Biodiversity finally took place at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in October 2008 at Barcelona, Spain. At COP10 in Nagoya, for the first time in the history of the CBD, the role of subnational governments, local authorities and cities was recognized when the Parties to the CBD supported the Plan of Action on Subnational Governments, Cities and other Local Authorities for Biodiversity as reflected in Decision X/22. It is significant that the City and Subnational Biodiversity Summit or Cities for Life, was held for the first time at the same location as COP11, a signal of the integral part that subnational governments will be contributing to the implementation of the objectives of the CBD.
I would like to focus on Singapore’s contribution to the role that cities can play in biodiversity conservation.
Aerial view of part of Singapore. Photo by Wong Tuan Wah.
Singapore, as a city-state, has to cater to many land-uses, such as defense, national security, water supply, etc., that many cities do not have to allocate land resources for. The constraint of space is further exacerbated by its size: 710 square kilometres. As an island, it does not have a hinterland to expand to. By virtue of its location in the tropics, Singapore has rich natural heritage of native flora and fauna species that inhabit this island along with 5.3 million humans.
We are in a unique situation in that Singapore is both a city as well as a nation, hence, a Party to the CBD. So how does Singapore, as a nation and a city, address these challenges?
(1) The biodiversity resources of Singapore are our heritage and should be conserved for future generations.
(2) Considerations on biodiversity and ecosystems are factored into the national planning process.
(3) A balanced view is adopted among national priorities and international and regional obligations.
Freshwater swamp in Singapore. Photo by Cheryl Chia.
The goals mirror that of the CBD, i.e., conserve and enhance biodiversity at the genetic, species and ecosystem levels, ensure sustainable use of Singapore’s biodiversity resources, and ensure fair and equitable sharing of benefits that result from the use of our genetic resources. To implement the NBSAP, we have adopted 5 strategies.
(1) To safeguard our biodiversity.
(2) To consider biodiversity issues in policy and decision-making.
(3) To improve knowledge of our biodiversity and the natural environment.
(4) To enhance education and public awareness.
(5) To strengthen partnerships with all stakeholders and promote international collaboration.
Chek Jawa as a rich inter-tidal site with more than 5 ecosystems. Photo by Ria Tan.
The success of the implementation of the NBSAP depends on the comprehensive participation of the public, private and people sectors. Some of the implementation activities for the above strategies are described below.
Oriental Pied Hornbill. Photo by Wong Tuan Wah.
Safeguard our biodiversity
There is a hierarchy of conservation areas in Singapore including Nature Reserves, which are legally protected under the Parks and Trees Act, and Nature Areas, which are captured under the Special and Detailed Controls Plan administered by the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Several of our parks have native ecosystems and these act as conservation sites in addition to providing recreational ecosystem services.
Roads and park connectors form the major green backbone infrastructure. More and more of the roads and park connectors are planted with native species with multiple layers that emulate the tropical rainforest structure.
Consider biodiversity issues in policy and decision-making
In a city context, it is not possible to legally protect all the biodiversity areas. Hence, it is important that biodiversity considerations be incorporated into the development planning process. The implementation of an integrated coastal and marine environmental management plan is an example of how biodiversity can be mainstreamed and applied cross-sectorally.
Improve knowledge of our biodiversity and the natural environment
More than ten native ecosystems, both terrestrial and marine, can be found in Singapore. More than 52 native mammal species, 364 bird species, 60 orthopteran species, 301 butterfly species, etc. have been recorded in Singapore. The marine biodiversity is also interesting. Singapore has more than 50 species of intertidal anemone species, which is a number greater than the north-eastern Pacific coast from Victoria, British Columbia, to Santa Barbara, California. There are 255 species of hard coral species inhabiting Singapore’s waters, which amount to about 32% of the total hard coral species found worldwide, i.e., 800 species.
Dragonfly. Photo by Robin Ngiam.
Knowing what we have and where they are found helps us to make better-informed decisions and to better manage our biodiversity. NParks is in the midst of carrying a Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Survey in partnership with the National University of Singapore, several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and over 400 volunteers. We are still finding new species, new records and re-discoveries.
The biodiversity discovery journey never ends – not even in a city.
Enhance education and public awareness
The biodiversity conservation community in Singapore is as diverse as its biodiversity, comprising schools, NGOs, commercial companies, volunteers, government departments, etc. The Ministry of Education has incorporated biodiversity into its school curricula. When commercial companies donate to biodiversity conservation, their employees also participate as volunteers.
Strengthen partnerships with all stakeholders and promote international collaboration
Earlier on, I mentioned how NParks found a paucity of indices for biodiversity at the city level. To address this lack of an evaluation tool for biodiversity conservation efforts for cities, Singapore suggested the development of an assessment tool with the Secretariat of the CBD (SCBD) and proposed it at COP 9 in Bonn in 2008. An international partnership led by SCBD with the Global Partnership on Subnational Governments and Local Authorities on Biodiversity was formed to develop a self-assessment tool known as the City Biodiversity Index or Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity. The draft User’s Manual for the City Biodiversity can be found on the CBD website. The final version of the Index and the User’s Manual will be ready by 31 December 2012. To date, over 70 cities have applied the Singapore Index. It would be great if more cities join in this initiative and share their experiences.
Singapore as a City
Singapore embarked on its Garden City programme in June 1964. It formed the blue-print of the greening of Singapore. Singapore celebrates the 50th Garden City Anniversary next year. In the course of 50 years, Singapore has matured from a Garden City to a City in a Garden; where stepping out of any building should make one feel that you are in a garden. This is a story to be told another day.
We know what the challenges are and we can see the solutions. It is up to us to re-invent the rules. From Monopoly to Commonspoly, communities of redistribution, solidarity, and care are changing the game.
Playing games is a serious thing. Animals and humans learn how to relate with each other and with the world through games involving bodies and minds. Games provide a simplified way to understand complex issues, while at the same time broadening our perception of reality through multi-sensorial experiences. Playing games shapes our imagination and our ideas of what is possible. Games can help us to make sense of the world, to question it, and ― why not? ― to change it.
Conceived and popularized around the years of the Great Depression (1929-1939), Monopoly can be seen as the quintessential game of contemporary capitalist societies. Greed and cruelty are celebrated and rewarded, via the private accumulation of assets otherwise crucial for the collective wellbeing. Individuals playing the game are set to acquire as much residential space, basic infrastructure, and utilities as they can to the detriment of their opponents, charging them high rents and fees, and eventually pushing them into bankruptcy in order to win. Almost a century later, global reports of growing inequality reveal all the details about the richest 1% that make exponential profits (including during the COVID-19 pandemic) controlling almost every aspect of our lives and driving the planet into ecological collapse.
Awareness and demand are growing; it is high time to change the game. But how? Commonspoly (available for download under a Peer Production License) may hold some important answers in moving forward. Because rather than competing for critical resources and services, the goal is to collaborate to protect and enjoy them as common goods. Created in 2015, this board game was actually inspired by the original version of Monopoly, called by Elizabeth Magie, The Landlord’s Game (1904) and, in fact, intended to denounce the concentration of properties and abusive rents at the heart of socio-economic injustice. Instead of privatization, in Commonspoly players are encouraged to create and maintain public goods and common democratic management.
We all know that, in order to overcome the current multilayered crises and humanity’s existential challenges, we must put care for people and the planet at the core of narratives, practices, and policies. In the search for alternatives to exploitative patterns of production, distribution, and consumption, the commons and commoning practices are regaining momentum as a very-much-needed source of hope. A burgeoning, multidisciplinary academic field seems to be articulated with multi-sectorial and trans-scalar political experimentations in many places around the world.
Confronting invisibilization, fragmentation, and even criminalization, social movements, and civil society organizations, in alliance with progressive local and regional governments, are leading transformative actions. From housing cooperatives to the (re)municipalization of basic services, passing through collective land agreements, and shared management of natural and cultural goods, commoning practices are at the forefront of novel ways of democratic decision-making, while at the same time revaluing and giving a new meaning to traditional forms of organizing and sharing resources. At their core is a profound redistribution of material and symbolic power based on feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial principles and struggles.
Strongly connected with commoning, the right to the city and a renewed and strengthened municipalist agenda become now more crucial than ever. They represent at the same time a demand and a commitment to create more just, democratic, and sustainable places to live. The fulfillment of the social function of land and property; the defense of the commons (natural, urban, and cultural); the recognition and support of social and diverse economies; the radicalization of local democracy and the feminization of politics are some of the most prominent principles guiding a multitude of actions and advocacy efforts. Faced with the accelerated deterioration of the material conditions of life (human and more-than-human), growing social polarization, and (highly manipulated) loss of confidence in public institutions, the right to the city, the new municipalism, and the commons can crystallize the conditions of possibility for a new socio-spatial contract, radically renewed from the local sphere, based on proximity, and built on the rights and emancipatory dreams of its inhabitants.
What are the commons and why are they important?
Global public goods and the global commons are key components of the United Nations General Secretary vision and recommendations for the coming two critical decades. Under the framework of Our Common Agenda, national governments and the international community are called to protect and deliver on a wide range of natural and cultural domains, including the high seas, the atmosphere, and outer space, alongside health, economy, information, science, and peace. This so-called new global deal or new social contract is proposed to be anchored in human rights and focused on rebuilding trust, inclusion, and participation. It is presented as a “whole-of-society” effort, including individuals, civil society, state institutions, and the private sector. A renewed, “networked and effective” multilateralism recognizes an important role for cities.
However, from a right-to-the-city and municipalist approach, this agenda falls short. While it does acknowledge the need for recognizing the existence of common goods, it does not provide enough emphasis on the democratic arrangements under which those could be collectively managed in a coordinated way at local, national, and international levels. By such omission, this vision risks falling on an interpretation of the commons that will reproduce business as usual, without addressing power imbalances within and between these multi-stakeholder coalitions (i.e., international and national institutions vis à vis local governments; transnational corporations overriding public and social actors). Furthermore, the agenda’s understanding of the commons seems to be limited to global natural resources linked to ecosystem protection, without acknowledging the relevance and transformative character of multi-dimensional commoning practices in other fields and scales.
Key characteristics that define the commons. Global Platform for the Right to the City, 2022.
In the context of the multiple initiatives and debates that originated during the COVID-19 pandemic, local governments and civil society organizations identified commons, climate, care, and cooperation as outstanding priorities for a shared path ahead. As part of the preparatory process for the United Cities and Local Governments World Summit and Congress held in Daejeon, South Korea, in October 2022, these topics have been taken forward inside thematic Town Halls sessions and ad hoc policy papers collectively developed. The Global Platform for the Right to the City was in charge of facilitating the track on the commons[1], which came up with the following working definition: “The commons are material and immaterial goods, resources, services, and social practices considered fundamental for the reproduction of life, that therefore cannot be commodified but have to be taken care of and managed in a collective way, under democratic principles of direct participation, radical inclusion, and intersectional equity and justice, within a continuum of stewardship and commitment with past and future generations and all forms of life on Mother Earth” (GPR2C et al, Global Commons Policy Paper, UCLG Town Hall process, October 2022).
As a strategy, commoning provides a concrete tool for putting the social and environmental function over accumulation, privatization, and speculation, ensuring equal access and benefit to all, and prioritizing traditionally marginalized and discriminated against groups. At the same time, it represents a productive opportunity to experiment with new forms of public-community collaboration, given that the commons introduce not only a new approach to management and delivery of resources and services but also new models for collective governance that address power imbalances. Moreover, collective arrangements for the management of commons by public authorities and civil society are not only more equitable, since their underlying logic does not rely on profitability, but they also reinforce the ties and cooperation between public management and community spheres.
The paper incorporates references to concrete examples covering eight fundamental thematic areas: housing and land; food systems and agro-ecology; basic services (water and sanitation, energy, waste management, internet access); culture and education; knowledge, information, and digital rights; safe and accessible public spaces and livelihoods; natural resources and ecosystems. The selected cases show that ongoing efforts on the commons and commoning practices are present in cities and regions around the globe, including Brazil, Italy, Namibia, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Zimbabwe.
Strategic areas for development of the commons. Global Platform for the Right to the City, 2022.
Moving forward: What do the commons need to flourish?
As pointed out above, the local realm is particularly fertile for the flourishing of commoning practices. In this sense, local and regional governments play a fundamental role in creating the enabling conditions in making the commons possible. In particular, they can focus on three main kinds of actions: respect and trust; protection; and realization. The first one revolves around recognizing the autonomy and specific characteristics of commoning efforts being implemented by grassroots and civil society organizations. The second one refers to providing adequate guarantees and preventing discrimination and conflicts against the commoners. The third one implies that governments provide effective and sustained support to commoning initiatives addressing structural inequalities and are committed to building feminist, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and inter-generational alternatives. Indeed, it is key to remember that promoting social engagement and collective management practices does not imply that state authorities can withdraw from their human rights commitments and obligations.
In moving forward, two sets of specific strategies are identified in order to make commoning of goods and services possible: (re)municipalization and public-community partnerships, strongly related to practices of public procurement that prioritize social and solidarity economy actors and more democratic processes. Following Kishimoto, Steinfort & Petitjean, (re)municipalization is the term used to refer to both the creation of new public services (municipalisation) and reversals from the private sector to public ownership and management (re-municipalization). A compilation published by Transnational Institute identifies 1,400 cases implemented during the past two decades in 2,400 cities from 58 countries, with clear positive impacts such as lower costs and fees, better quality, and workers’ protection. The authors emphasize that these efforts are “fueled by the aspiration of communities and local governments to reclaim democratic control over public services and local resources, in order to pursue social and environmental goals and to foster local democracy and participation”. According to their analysis, ecological sustainability, social empowerment, and increased community wealth can be all considered as direct results of initiatives dealing with topics as diverse as water, energy, housing, food, transport, waste, telecommunications, health, and social services, to name but a few.
Certainly related, but differentiated, public-community partnerships are being promoted by grassroots organizations and governments at the local level as an effective way to strengthen the social fabric and guarantee just and democratic urban rehabilitation. Bologna and Barcelona are classic examples of institutional frameworks for regulating “civil collaboration for the urban commons”. Whether in city centers or former industrial peripheries, long-term contracts give neighborhood-based associations the responsibility and resources for the collective management of green spaces, public buildings, cooperative housing, and cultural facilities. Cities like Montevideo are also experiencing new models of co-management of public-community goods and services, while at the same time implementing the social function of land (by way of preventing speculation) and advancing gender equity and racial justice. Based on these and other learnings, a multi-disciplinary group in Amsterdam has recently been promoting the creation of a Chamber of Commons to foster debate, exchange, and experimentations that can bring about social change.
Recommendations to local and regional governments for fostering the commons. Global Platform for the Right to the City, 2022.
All this and more was part of the presentations and conversations held at the UCLG Commons Town Hall, where international civil society organizations and local and regional governments had the chance to further discuss the policy recommendations outlined in the paper and related next steps. These include both immediate and medium/long-term actions. Starting by identifying what already exists, the proposals focus on mobilizing available resources and capabilities, as well as building relationships and alliances. Among them are participatory mapping exercises and peer-to-peer learning; local dialogues and collaboration between municipal/regional authorities and grassroots groups; enabling regulatory frameworks; supportive public policies, programmes, and budgets; active public campaigning and engagement at international debates.
Recommendations to local and regional governments for fostering the commons. Global Platform for the Right to the City, 2022.
Such recommendations and the months-long collaborative effort that resulted in the policy paper have the objective to contribute to the ongoing diverse and lively debate and practices revolving around the commons, pointing towards leeways in which these can be enhanced and deepened under a stronger and sustained partnership with local authorities. As an inspiring, fun game with serious implications, Commonspoly appears to be a great tool to help create awareness and engagement from different actors and sectors, including children and youth, grassroots organizations, journalists, academics, and public officials.
By leveraging the potential of a municipalist alliance around commoning practices, the (trans)local level positions itself as a key ground place for spearheading the much-needed alternatives to respond to the ecological, socio-economic, and governance crises that define our times. We know it and we see it: it is up to us to re-invent the rules. From Monopoly to Commonspoly, communities of redistribution, solidarity, and care are changing the game.
Lorena Zárate and Sophia Torres
Ottawa and Barcelona
Sophia Torres is a member of the Global Platform for the Right to the City and the Habitat International Coalition General Secretariat teams, working on issues related to global advocacy on the right to the city and the right to adequate housing.
[1] Facilitated by the Global Platform for the Right to the City, the Commons Town Hall working group was formed by a broad range of organizations and networks, including: the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, Open Society Foundations, the African Center for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); as well as representatives from three (cross-cutting) Caucuses: youth (Children and Youth Major Group), feminism/women (the Huairou Commission) and accessibility (co-led by the General Assembly of Partners-Older Persons and Persons with Disabilities Partner Constituent Groups, World Blind Union, World Enabled). Participants at the multiple working sessions included: Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), FIAN International (FIAN), Habitat International Coalition, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), Observatori DESC (Barcelona, Spain), Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), Latin America Women and Habitat Network.
Long-term sustainability necessitates an inherent and essential capacity for resilience—the ability to recover from disturbance, to accommodate change, and to function in a state of health. In this sense, sustainability typically means the dynamic balance between social-cultural, economic, and ecological domains of human behavior necessary for humankind’s long-term surviving and thriving. As such, long-term sustainability sits squarely in the domain of human intention and activity—and, thus, design. This should not be confused with managing “the environment” as an object separate from human action, which is ultimately impossible. Instead, the challenge of sustainability is very much one for design, and specifically one of design for resilience.
Our approach to resilience has been reactive, with little continuing effort to engage long-term, proactive strategies for adaptation, let alone transformation.
A growing response to the increasing prevalence of major storm events has been the development of political rhetoric around the need for long-term sustainability, especially its prerequisite of resilience in the face of vulnerability. As an emerging policy concept, resilience refers generally to the ability of an ecosystem to withstand and absorb change to prevailing environmental conditions. In an empirical sense, resilience is the amount of change or disruption an ecosystem can absorb and, following these change events, return to a recognizable steady state in which the system retains most of its structures, functions, and feedbacks. In both contexts, resilience is a well-established concept in complex ecological systems research, with a history in resource management, governance, and strategic planning.
The d(NAP) is a proposed measure of sea-level for the Netherlands Delta Region that acknowledges dynamic water levels to accommodate changing hydrological regimes. Images: Kimberly Garza and Sarah Thomas, 2010
Yet, despite more than two decades of this research, the development of policy strategies and design applications related to resilience is relatively recent. While there was a significant political call for resilience strategies following New York’s Superstorm Sandy in 2011 and the ice storm of 2013 in Toronto and the northeastern U.S., this was effectively a reactive approach to crisis, rather than a proactive planning practice. In most instances, once the crisis has abated, there is little continuing effort to engage long-term, proactive strategies for adaptation, let alone transformation—both of which are necessary aspects of resilience, particularly in the context of climate change.
Overall, there is still a widespread lack of coordinated governance, established benchmarks, implemented policy applications, tangible design strategies, and few (if any) empirical measures of success related to climate change adaptation. There has been too little critical analysis and reflection on the need to understand and cultivate resilience beyond the reactive rhetoric and to develop specific and proactive tactics for design. Design for resilience demands proactive planning and an evidence-based approach that contributes to adaptive and ecologically-responsive design in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and vulnerability. Put simply: what does a resilient world look like, how does it behave, and how do we design for resilience?
The emergence of resilience rhetoric is tied not only to the emerging reality of climate change, but to an important and growing synergy between research and policy responses in the fields of ecology, landscape, and urbanism—a synergy that is powerfully influenced by several remarkable and coincidental shifts at the turn of the millennium. Most notable is the global shift in urbanism: our contemporary patterns of settlement are tending towards large-scale urbanization. The last century has been characterized by mass migration to ever-larger urban regions, resulting in the rise of the “mega-city” and its attendant forms of suburbia, exurbia, and associated phenomena of the modern metropolitan landscape. According to the World Health Organization, the percentage of people living in cities is expected to increase from less than 40 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2050, and the United Nations projects that in 2030, there will be 5 billion urbanites, with three-quarters of them in the world’s poorest countries. By contrast, in 1950, only New York and London had over 8 million residents. Today, there are more than 20 mega-cities, the majority of which are in Asia. Indeed, for most of the world’s population, the city is fast becoming the singular landscape experience.
Non-linear habitat management: Dynamic uses proposed for Massachusetts Military Reservation at various stages of ecological succession. Images: Geneva Wirth, 2008.Non-linear habitat management: dynamic uses proposed for Massachusetts Military Reservation at various stages of ecological succession. Images: Geneva Wirth, 2008
In North America, and the United States in particular, this shift in urbanism has come (paradoxically) with a widespread decline in the quality and performance of the physical infrastructure of the city. The roads, bridges, tunnels, and sewers that were built in the early part of the last century to service major urban centers are now aging (and crumbling), while the political will and the public funds to rebuild outdated but essential public infrastructure are disappearing. As these infrastructures continue to decay, they are increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic failure in the face of more frequent and severe storm events, which compound the cost of their loss and the extent of their loss’s impact.
Embracing dynamism
The emergence of a new paradigm in ecology represents another significant and concomitant shift with a change in urbanism and the reality of climate change. In the last 25 years, the field of ecology has moved from a concern with stability, certainty, predictability, and order in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of uncertainty, adaptability, and resilience. Increasingly, these concepts in ecological theory and complex systems thinking are found useful as frameworks for decision-making generally, and—with empirical evidence—for landscape design in particular. This offers a powerful new disciplinary and practical space, equally informed by ecological knowledge as an applied science and as a construct for managing change, and, within the context of sustainability, planning for and with change as a conceptual model of design.
With this new ecological paradigm has come another important shift in creating the synergy necessary for resilience-thinking: the renaissance of landscape as both discipline and praxis throughout the last 15 years and its (re)integration with planning and architecture in both academic and applied professional domains. Landscape scholars, such as Beth Meyer, James Corner, Julia Czerniak, and Charles Waldheim, among others, have identified the rise of urban post-industrial landscapes coupled with a focus on indeterminacy and ecological processes as catalysts for the reemergence of landscape theory and praxis. Understood today as an interdisciplinary field linking art, design, and the material science of ecology, landscape scholarship and application now includes a renewed professional field of practice in the space of the city—a phenomenon clearly represented in contemporary design projects.
These shifts in our collective understanding of urbanism, landscape, and ecology have created a powerful synergy for new planning and design approaches to the contemporary metropolitan region. This synergy has been an important catalyst for the emergence of resilience rhetoric, but there is much work to be done to move towards evidence-based implementation of strategies, plans, and designs for resilience. The scale and impact of North American mega-storms such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Superstorm Sandy in 2011 have been effective policy triggers—and design provocation— for a new breed of disaster preparedness planning, particularly for flood management plans.
Toronto’s Wet Weather Flow Master Plan, drawn in section to depict implications on landscape infrastructures. Image: T. Bishop et al., Students of Landscape Studio II, University of Toronto 2014
Recent coastal management policies and flood management plans following these major storm events abound in this language of resilience. The New Orleans Water Management Strategy, Louisiana’s Coastal Management Plan, New York’s Rebuild by Design programme, and Toronto’s Wet Weather Flow Master Plan are examples of notable responses to catalytic storm events and climate change. Yet, they remain predominantly speculative, untested, and unimplemented, relying on a general language of resilience that is conceptual rather than experiential, contextual, or scientifically-derived.
Resilience has origins across at least four disciplines of research and application: psychology, disaster relief and military defense, engineering, and ecology. A scan of resilience policies (see http://resilient-cities.iclei.org/) reveals that the concept is widely and generally defined with reference to several of the origin fields, and universally focuses on the psychological trait of being flexible and adaptable; having the capacity to deal with stress; the ability to “bounce back” to a known normal condition following periods of stress; to maintain well-being under stress; and to be adaptable when faced with change or challenges. However, the use of resilience in this generalised context begs important operational questions of how much change is tolerable, which state of “normal” is desirable and achievable, and under what conditions it is possible to return to a known “normal” state. In policies that hinge on these broadly defined, psycho-social aspects of resilience, there is little or no explicit recognition that adaptation and flexibility may in fact result in transformation—and thus, require the adaptive and transformative capacity that is ultimately necessary at some scale in the face of radical, large-scale and sudden systemic change.
Resilience visualized as a function of the adaptive cycle: Holling’s Modified Figure 8, reinterpreted by Thomas Folch, Chris Reed, and Nina-Marie E. Lister, reproduced from Reed, Chris, and Nina-Marie E. Lister, eds., Projective Ecologies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2014.
Using sea level as an example, if we accept that waters naturally rise and fall within a range of seasonal norms, we might be better off to embrace a gradient of acceptable “normal” conditions rather than a single static—and ultimately brittle state—that is unsustainable. A more critical and robust, systems-oriented exploration of resilience is necessary, such as the one being developed by Brian Walker, Carl Folke, and others at the trans-disciplinary Stockholm Resilience Centre. This more nuanced, emerging discourse of resilience is essential for confronting the question of how much a person, a community, or an ecosystem can change before it becomes something unrecognizable and functions as an altogether different entity.
Current policies risk the potential power of resilience by emphasizing a misguided focus on “bouncing back” to a normal state that is ultimately impossible to sustain. But if resilience is to be a useful concept in informing design strategies, it must ultimately instruct how to change safely. This includes a need to plan proactively, and to adapt when necessary, with some culturally acceptable risk and loss, and with transformative capacity—rather than to resist change by relying on the illusion of a perpetual normal. Such a subtle but imperative shift in definition caries substantial if not profound implications for contemporary models of governance, in which perceived failure is rarely recognized let alone rewarded as an act of transformative learning. Despite the growth in and acceptance of ‘systems thinking’ in business and governance literature, and the associated rise of complexity science and transition design over the last several decades, there is still high risk and little reward for tangible learning through change. But there are emerging models for infrastructure development and delivery that show signs of promise: private-public procurement, interdisciplinary and collaborative research (via e.g. applied studios, industry partnerships with design) community experiments in design, and growth in rapid prototyping for small-scale projects (emphasizing safe-to-fail rather than fail-safe strategies). These are incremental and often technical steps that cumulatively may demonstrate ‘next best practices’ for more agile responses to changing conditions. Governments must now embrace the social-cultural dimensions of resilience that are essential to building transformative capacity. This is the challenge ahead for a new culture of sustainability and its associated practice of designing for resilience.
Barnett, Rod, 2013. Emergence in Landscape Architecture. London: Routledge.
Gunderson, Lance and C.S. Holling, eds. 2002. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Socio-Ecological Systems. Washington DC: Island Press.
Irwin, Terry, 2015. Transition design: a proposal for a new area of design practice, study, and research. Design and Culture, 7:2, 229-246, DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2015.1051829
Lister, Nina-Marie, 2016. Resilience beyond Rhetoric in Urban Landscape Planning and Design. In: George F. Thompson, Frederick R. Steiner and Armando Carbonell (eds) Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Mathur, Anuradha and Dilip da Cunha, 2014. Design in the Terrain of Water. New York: Applied Research & Design Publishers.
Reed, Chris and Nina-Marie Lister, eds. 2014. Projective Ecologies. New York: Harvard GSD and Actar.
Steiner, Frederick R. 2011. Design for a Vulnerable Planet. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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.
A review of Restoring Neighborhood Streams: Planning, Design, and Construction. By Ann L. Riley. 2016. Island Press, Washington, D.C. ISBN: 9781610917391. 288 pages. Buy the book.
The basic challenge of restoring urban streams that support diverse environmental, social, and ecological functions is that these functions are inextricably linked to the surrounding watershed. Development in urban watersheds changes vegetation cover, soils, flow paths, and the volume and frequency with which water, sediment, and pollutants are delivered to a stream. Consequently, urban stream restoration, which usually focuses on a relatively short homogenous section of stream (a stream reach), has limited ability to address causes of degradation related to watershed development.
Riley is most convincing when she emphasizes the role that urban stream restoration can have in transforming and empowering a community.
Research going back decades shows that streams in watersheds with as little as 10 percent impervious, or hard, surface (which is typical of suburban landscapes in the U.S.) exhibit signs of worse biotic health than streams in watersheds with less hard surface. When more than 30 percent of the land cover in a watershed has been developed, restoration goals for streams are usually, at best, aesthetic. In such stream systems, much research suggests you could not hope to restore ecological function; fughettaboutit, as one might say in Brooklyn, New York, where impervious cover is over 40 percent.
Anne Riley provides a rejoinder to this common tenet that urban streams cannot be restored beyond superficial appearances in her new book, Restoring Neighborhood Streams. Instead, she argues, urban stream restoration can be ecologically effective, affordable, and compatible with urban stormwater management and development constraints. She makes this claim in the face of the ample literature that paints a discouraging picture of the prospects for reestablishing ecological functions in streams through reach-level restoration projects in sub-urban, much less urban, watersheds. Riley does this by telling the story of gritty and inspiring local efforts to unearth and reconstruct urban streams. Her book is a summary of her 30-year experiment, as she calls it, to prove that urban stream restoration is possible. Anne Riley provides plenty of evidence that stream restoration projects are worthwhile. But she also makes clear that the degree of restoration that can actually be accomplished, how sustainable it is, how much work must be done in the watershed to truly effect it, and how feasible that is, are all extremely difficult questions with different answers for each stream, watershed, and urban context.
For those who already believe that efforts to restore ecological functions in urban systems are worthwhile, this book provides case studies that underscore the value of urban stream projects and some general principals of stream restoration design drawn from Riley’s own experience and others’. Practioners in the field of stream restoration will empathize with the missteps described at some sites, and the repeated lesson that trying to restore an urban stream means facing not only physical, but also economic, political, and social-cultural challenges.
However, for others, who believe urban stream restoration projects do not typically restore significant in-stream ecological functions—just as reach-level projects often do not achieve this effect, even in rural settings—this book does not present systematic indisputable ecological research to dispel that position. However, it does give varied examples of how urban stream restoration projects provide essential first steps towards ecological and other functions by establishing necessary physical and vegetative structures and processes previously absent, transforming a neighborhood, giving communities access to and understanding of heretofore hidden resources, and enabling people to better advocate for water quality protection.
In her first chapter, Riley acknowledges the huge challenges to achieving ecologically diverse, dynamic, and otherwise functioning streams in constrained urban environments, where it is usually cost prohibitive and infeasible to secure space for a functioning floodplain, or to reverse ongoing impacts from a degraded watershed. In addition to physical and financial challenges, she recognizes that public support for planning, investing in, and maintaining urban stream restoration efforts is critical. To introduce her argument, she points to a poster child for urban stream degradation, the Los Angeles River. There, local sections of the concrete trapezoid channel are “recovering” thanks to the disintegration of the concrete bed and accumulated sediments that allow this channel to exhibit forms and sediment transport processes typical of a naturally occurring channel. Federal and local support for system-wide planning has the potential for transforming miles of this engineered waterway. The rest of the stream restoration case studies Riley provides for her thesis are all located in California’s San Francisco East Bay region, but are much smaller than the Los Angeles River.
In her second chapter, Riley addresses the question of how to define restoration, particularly in the case of urban streams, where returning a river to its pre-development condition is impossible. After presenting the history of various definitions, she identifies a common theme. Restoration is the act of altering a site damaged in some way by human actions to try to achieve a certain condition (whether completely indigenous or historical, or not), with representative structures, functions, diversity, or dynamics. To engage in restoration is to identify key variables of a target or reference condition that form the guide for any plan or design. This definition of restoration suits the urban condition, where only some natural and pre-disturbance structures and processes can be re-established at any given site or in any given project. Consequently, in the “hierarchy of restoration”, urban stream projects can never reach the top tier of historic restoration.
But Riley contends we should not be satisfied with just the bottom tier in the restoration hierarchy, channel enhancement, where only surficial features are modified to create a natural aesthetic. Instead, urban streams projects should target the creation of channels that are dynamic enough to transport and store sediment, and to support riparian vegetation (functional restoration), and that can eventually even support biological communities and processes, such as those characterized by diverse benthic aquatic species (ecological restoration).
Riley refers to 15 critical functions that should be considered in developing target objectives for stream restoration. In urban watersheds, however, she points out that it is impossible to re-establish hydrologic and other processes that are needed to support all natural stream functions. Consequently, Riley proposes seven measures for success against which to evaluate urban streams. These include:
Create an ecologically dynamic environment;
Improve ecological conditions;
Increase resiliency;
Do no harm;
Do ecological assessments;
Create learning about Restoration Planning, Design and Construction for Future;
Create community benefits.
Along with this kind of general guidance to planning and design considerations (this is no how-to book), Riley provides an overview of approaches to restoration that she calls “schools of restoration.” The historical context she gives provides a useful, succinct overview, particularly for a reader new to this field of restoration.
Riley recounts numerous case studies in Chapter 3, sometimes with a level of anecdotal detail that may only appeal to a very narrow audience familiar with the East San Francisco Bay area, where Riley’s case studies occur. Still, the particulars, at least in a few examples, demonstrate just how appropriate the title is for this book. These neighborhood projects are often driven by particular advocates; community and government personalities; engineering and infrastructure conventions; site histories and funding opportunities; regulations and ordinances; and economic and development circumstances. Though it is possible to wade through these project stories and draw parallels to examples elsewhere (such as cases around the country), it may be more satisfying to skim through these examples; readers can go back to them later for more details, especially when these cases are called upon in later chapters as justification for Riley’s main arguments about the value of urban, reach-level stream restoration projects.
Practitioners reading the case studies to gain guidance on methods, approaches, and tools that apply universally to stream design approaches will not always have an easy time extracting instructive information/design lessons. Fortunately, in her last chapter, Riley explains more clearly how she invoked various schools of restoration in the approaches she describes being taken in the various stream cases. Several planning and design principles emerge here, including: finding a reference condition for empirical guidance; understanding historical ecological / hydrologic, and watershed conditions; maximizing natural floodplain availability and pursuing opportunities to make that happen (e.g. through acquisition); utilizing analytic approaches to help predict design performance; and developing an educated community’s support.
Riley’s book often reads like a memoir, as she recalls her personal history in the stream restoration field, and interactions with renowned experts and practitioners. Some of the stories she includes—such as recounting her failed effort to start a lasting stream restoration practicum in collaboration with her local university—seemed a bit like sour grapes. With the information she provides in that particular anecdote, it became easy to envision other perspectives that were not fully presented. Those kinds of small, personal failed experiments are out of place in a book aiming to build a convincing argument for urban stream restoration. Given the expansion of stream restoration projects, training programs, workshops, conferences, and academic programs over the decades, it would have been more helpful to hear of examples where efforts to integrate academia and practice in stream restoration are continuing.
Riley’s arguments for urban stream restoration are most convincing when they emphasize the role that these projects can have in transforming and empowering a community, both through physical change and education. Scientists and designers involved in urban stream projects need to be educators, and to guide expectations for what a stream will look like that tries to mimic natural form and processes. If that is successfully accomplished, and the community embraces a section of urban stream that displays nature-like stream forms and riparian structures, people become aware of what streams provide in general, and can make the connection to protecting them locally and, perhaps, regionally.
Communities can benefit from witnessing birds, fish, and animals, such as beaver, which are rarely seen in city environments. And they can actually better see what may get discharged into a stream, identify points of contamination or spills, and advocate for addressing those sources of pollution. Ultimately, the neighborhood has to value ecological structure and, ideally, function, enough to maintain these sites. To achieve that goal requires educating local communities not just during the design and construction process, but maintaining that understanding over time with new property owners, with the loss of original project champions, and with changes in community and local government priorities.
Greater access to nature and opportunities for education and engagement are outcomes of urban stream restoration that are not always valued or measured when assessing the functional success of a stream restoration project. Instead, standard ecological assessments, e.g., of stream benthic community health, are employed (sometimes, at least) to evaluate the success of a project. Riley argues that these measures of performance are not always adequate to determine effectiveness of habitat measures over time, because they do not help identify or account for impacts upstream that vary over time, whether from diffuse pollutant loads (e.g., pesticides) or other sources of contaminants, such as illicit outfalls or spills.
But it is exactly for those reasons that detractors of urban stream restoration have a case for arguing that functional ecological restoration is largely not possible in urban streams. Because urban stream restoration can be extremely expensive (often being much more costly than the examples given in this book), as well as highly visible, the question of what functions we should expect from these projects, and how effective and successful they can be, remains highly relevant. This book does not answer that question, but it provides a useful West Coast, U.S. perspective, as well as a thorough introduction to the challenges, successes, and messy realities of urban stream restoration projects at the neighborhood scale.
Riley is right to argue that we should be more ambitious in trying to achieve restoration of ecological function for two reasons. First, because this requires we take a more complex look at the factors causing degradation in a watershed, including how impervious area and the runoff it generates are connected to the stream network and how and where contaminants are entering the stream; that effort should be part of any stream restoration project. Second, because by striving for ecological restoration, Riley appropriately challenges practitioners, designers, and advocates to educate themselves as well as the community about the changes in landscape, policy, and practices that would truly be needed for our streams to deliver all the benefits they have to offer. Marit Larson
New York City
Winter is here in the north—not the slightest allusion here to any famous TV series or any recent election, of course. And in the wintertime, life goes underground in a literal sense: tubers and roots reign while most of the aboveground parts of plants are dormant; animals hibernate or at least seek shelter in holes and caves. But in the annual cycle, above- and underground are tightly linked; without underground reserves to provide for the winter and start the active cycle again in spring, you die. If there is no active life aboveground in summer and fall to make reserves underground for the next winter, you also perish.
Is it possible to live underground? Is it reasonable? Is it desirable? Is it feasible? Yes. But it needs thoughtful design. The key issues are water, sound, vegetation, and light.
The same goes for cities, although in different terms—above-the-ground and under-the-ground systems are also tightly linked. It is virtually impossible for any city to exist without buried power and information networks; underground water transmission, sewerage pipes, malls, basements, pedestrian tunnels, and motorways; sometimes a subway system, etc. Helsinki is even planning its expansion straight down with a strategic “Underground City Plan” that considers the underground as a part of the city itself, which the local authorities refer to as the “shadow city”. Helsinkians already enjoy access to a subterranean swimming complex, shopping area, and hockey rink. A data center has been built beneath a cathedral and uses cold seawater to cool its machines, drastically cutting energy consumption. The plan establishes the construction of a further 200 underground structures in forthcoming years, including apartments and public spaces.
Underground swimming complex in Helsinki. Photo: HKP
Thus, since it is winter (in the north), why not turn our eyes to the subterranean world and ask: is it possible to live underground? Is it reasonable? Is it desirable? Is it feasible?
Cities were once built with materials extracted from beneath the space they would eventually occupy, which left quarries of huge dimensions beneath urban feet; such abandoned galleries sometimes collapsed, causing disasters. The urban underground is also full of deserted shelters and bunkers—remnants of past wars, cold or warm—catacombs, and so on. Most of these networks are now empty, but they still exist. There is plenty of room down there. Why not use it?
I can almost hear you grumbling—yes, you who are reading this post: living underground like rats! Why the hell would we do that?
Well, to begin with, let’s recall that caverns and hollows are intrinsically linked to human history: they have been used as dwellings and for food storage since the Paleolithic, millions of years ago. More recently, what can be described as underground cities existed in China (Banpo), Turkey (Cappadocia), and Israel (Maresha) between two and three thousand years ago. Underground passages for emergency evacuation were an inherent part of many medieval cities. Nowadays, there are troglodyte villages in France (nearby Poitiers), Spain (Granada), and others, where thousands of people seem to live a good life.
More pragmatically, nearly 70 percent of the world population lives in urban areas, and according to the United Nations two billion more people will move into cities in the next 20 years. It is probable that the size of the city itself will grow still faster than its demographic growth rate: 276 percent vs. 66 percent, according to Shlomo Angel and Stephen Sheppard, 20 years from now. Such a decoupling is driven by a trend: urban population growth tends to go hand in hand with rising living standards, which requires more room (larger dwellings or offices, considerable infrastructure provision, etc.). From this perspective, cities are potentially going to be jam-packed with construction, especially considering that future city developments are supposed to be—and designed to be—sustainable. Better standards of living means that we are likely to encourage urban densification and to promote urban agriculture, for example, so that buildable areas are going to become scarce and, thus, more expensive.
There are but two ways to deal with this Gordian knot. The first one consists of untying the knot: allowing the mushrooming of high-rise buildings as an adaptation to the scarcity of available space—which may seem “sustainable” at first sight, but is not. This option doesn’t work: high-rise buildings are usually met with distaste by the people living nearby and, besides, high densities also generate environmental nuisances. The second method works: it doesn’t try to untie the knot, but cuts it altogether. Why not build downwards instead of upwards? This way, we could meet the demand for more urbanization without erecting skyscrapers everywhere.
Let there be no mistake here: living underground is also a huge environmental and economic issue. As I mentioned before, there are masses of unused underground infrastructure (ancient quarries, tunnels, shelters etc.). Their maintenance costs a lot of money and is essential, since derelict structures may cause building collapses at the surface. The point here is turning a problem into an opportunity. Or, to put it another way, turning an environmental bad into an environmental good, which is rather rare. We are speaking of significant available surfaces, plus the possibility to dig deeper and create new underground areas.
Building and living below the surface is an interesting and disruptive alternative, and a more sustainable one. As Nikolai Bobylev states in his seminal article, “Underground spaces are less susceptible to external influences, and their impact on the external environment is less than aboveground facilities.” Further, “Deep underground structures suffer significantly less damage during earthquakes than aboveground structures.”
Many cities in the world are beginning to take renewed interest in underground space. It is not only Helsinki, or the well-known underground city of Montréal—which, by the way, is not really a city but a gigantic mall—or subterranean Moscow. In Japan, China, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy, and France, people are undertaking underground development initiatives. In China, for example, a recent regulation act provides a legal basis for the development of urban underground spaces. The National Planning Agency of the Netherlands devotes special attention to the good use of underground capacity. And Singapore, which faces severe land constraints, has embarked on a comprehensive master plan for underground development.
For all of these reasons, investors and private operators’ interests, as well as mayors’ interests, converge to develop underground cities. Whether we like it or not, underground cities will boom in the coming decades. Thus, we’d better get ready to influence the making of these underground cities, in the sense of real sustainability. Otherwise, they may very well turn into a social and environmental nightmare, as in Fritz Lang’s cult film Metropolis, where class divides determine who lives at the surface (the rich) and who lives below ground (the workers). Have you ever been to Montréal’s Ville Souterraine—which (and as I mentioned above), despite what its name suggests, is actually a huge shopping mall, with constant harsh lighting and noise, with no place to halt and nothing to do if you’re not a consumer or a commuter—and felt the dizziness and discomfort this kind of place provokes?
Metropolis? No, just the undergrounds of La Défense, Paris. Photo: Sylvie Salles, 2015.Montréal (Ville souterraine), the lower floors of the Eaton Center—a not so nice confined environment. Photo: Wikimedia commons
Now is time to propose something different from these dystopic futures backed by hidden financial agendas. How to practically design desirable, livable, and sustainable underground cities—places people can take ownership of and can transform to fit their needs and their desires? To do so, collective perception and imagination will have to be stimulated. But, how do we do that?
What features exist at the surface and in natural underground spaces, such as caverns, that do not exist in the manmade underground structures mentioned above? Natural daylight, water, bedrock. Natural earth—ironic when we consider that we’re speaking of underground spaces—vegetation, and familiar forms of life are missing, and their absence generates an oppressive atmosphere. Couldn’t we say that, in the manmade structures, nature is missing?
Yes, I know “fake natures” are widespread in malls, subway stations, and underground plazas: basins, palm trees, tropical flowers and ferns, and sometimes moss. But these are nothing more than cheap exoticisms that eventually gather dust, decline, and wither due to their high maintenance costs and technical difficulties in the long run. Does anyone consider these stagings as expressions of Nature? A double mistake is made with such artificial installations. First, they are “artificial” in the sense of being incongruous: usually, there has never been a tropical forest where these malls, stations, and plazas are located—rather, there have been prairies, temperate woods, snow, and sometimes deserts. Second, the implicit intention of the designer is to create a replica of what is above the ground, to make people forget they are actually under the ground. And it doesn’t work: people are not fooled. Worse still, the disastrous subliminal message communicated by such installations is that life underground is “bad”, since everything is done to make any signs of being underground disappear.
Thus, if we want desirable, livable, and sustainable underground cities, we have to design undergrounds that look like what they really are, and that highlight the specific features of subterranean life. Contrary to what the Emerald Tablet states, we must embrace a philosophy of “as above, not so below”. This was the intent of a research project I ran, which ended in a conference last October: “Underground Cities — Living Below the Surface: Supporting Urban Transition to Sustainability.” To succeed, four key issues have to be addressed:
(1) Our first action must concern water. Let’s discard the traditional approach, which holds that water is a threat underground (flooding, molds, etc.). Make it a friend instead. Freshwater may very well become a golden thread that gives consistency to underground areas. Water can play a crucial part in well-being underground: while circulating, it can considerably enhance the sound landscape, and it facilitates orientation. To foster life and natural vegetation underground, it goes without saying that freshwater is needed. To do so, mapping the seepage and water pathways, then channeling them into small rivers and creeks, and finally orienting them and concentrating the flow in ponds and pools in a configuration as close as possible to the natural water circulation system, would make sense.
(2) As mentioned above, sound is crucial to comfort and orientation. Sound helps overcome the opaque and partitioned feelings that can be characteristic of underground areas. Sound makes it possible to imagine what exists on the other side of a wall or at the end of a hallway. A good “sound landscape” should include shades and fluctuations between intense and calm areas.
(3) Returning to the vegetation and water issue, common sense favors the introduction of plants involving minimal human intervention: namely, plants that already exist in cave ecosystems. Naturally, two specific conditions must be met to match with human activity: brighter lighting than in natural caves, and lower levels of moisture to remain in human beings’ comfort zone. Cave ecosystems from dry and warm lands with karstic subsoil should prove to be quite adaptable models for built underground spaces, as they are perfectly adjusted to significant variations in temperature and lighting, and have rather low humidity rates.
(4) Vegetation brings up the related issue of lighting, which I have already mentioned briefly. Intense intrusion of daylight is common in manmade undergrounds: subway entrances, patios, glass canopies. This is not good, since it results in a blinding contrast between deep shadow and harsh light on large surfaces, which causes discomfort. Functional indoor artificial lighting is also inappropriate; it causes people to lose their sense of time, as there is no difference between day and night, or between the daylight hours according to the seasons. Orientation is impacted, too—moving around in invariable lighting environments distorts human understanding of distances.
One solution could be to combine artificial lighting—the intensity of which would vary with the season and the time of the day, and in accordance with the characteristics of different places (pedestrian passageways, quiet areas, etc.)—and small-sized light shafts and light wells dotted across an underground space’s ceiling, which would unobtrusively connect the underground to the surface. These vertical “light pillars” would act as landmarks and make orientation easier.
Are there places in the world were these four principles are actually applied? Yes there are—and these undergrounds also host kitchen gardens. But that’s another story, which I will talk to you about in my next post. Meanwhile, wintertime is a wonderful moment to pause for a nice root and tuber soup. Want some? It comes from my own garden.
A review of Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal. By Joseph Alexiou. 2015. ISBN: 9781479892945. NYU Press. 2015. 398 pp. Buy the book.
Even a brief summer shower can cause fresh human waste to spill into the Gowanus Canal, as anyone who lives along one of America’s most polluted waterways can tell you from experience. Brooklyn’s old sewers, which combine pipes carrying waste from buildings and homes with pipes that collect rainwater from streets, are designed to overflow into local waterways when the weather gets too wet and a nearby sewage treatment plant can’t handle all that extra water. Two new rainwater retention tanks, courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency and the City of New York’s Department of Environmental Protection, will soon be installed to keep raw sewage out of the Gowanus Canal. But sewage may be the least toxic of all the pollutants plaguing the eponymous waterway of the Gowanus, a nearly two-mile zigzag of water that was once at the heart of Brooklyn’s industrial revolution.
Alexiou’s book is written with an attention to narrative detail that enlivens scenes from the Gowanus past.
Joseph Alexiou’s Gowanus presents a comprehensive history of the canal’s transformation from a sleepy stream in the middle of an uninhabitable wetland to an all-but-abandoned stretch of shipping infrastructure in a rapidly gentrifying patch of New York City. It is a story rooted in topography, economics, and urbanization, overlaid by Brooklyn social history that begins with 17th–century agricultural colonies and winds its way through four centuries of industrialization, postindustrial decay, and urban renewal, ending with the canal’s 2008 designation as a federal Superfund site—a bureaucratic honorific that allows EPA lawyers to sue historical polluters for the cost of a massive environmental clean-up. Alexiou argues that the story of the Gowanus is more than one of the canal: the waterway and its environs in fact serve as a microcosm of New York City and Brooklyn’s growth in relation to their physical geography.
For early settlers of the Gowanus, the area’s attracting force was rooted in its geography; the waterway facilitated agriculture, trade, and industry. But as the canal’s transportation of goods has dropped off in recent years, the Gowanus has retained its allure. Despite being a cesspool of disease and industrial contamination, the murky canal is drawing investment to its banks, with massive real estate and commercial projects proceeding steadily. This murkiness did not always define the canal, as Alexiou shows, and it is likely that its waters will be restored to a condition more amenable to biological life. Projects of urban environmental restoration from industrial damage are completed and underway throughout New York City (recent examples include Alley Creek Park and Freshkills Park), and the Gowanus Canal Conservancy has a similar vision of reclaiming the Gowanus from industrial pollution and creating environmentally-sound greenspace, as well as improved neighborhood resilience to the effects of climate change also wrought by those industrial processes.
The first published book that takes the Gowanus Canal as its main subject, Gowanus is a work of extensive historical research that showcases the fruits of dedicated archival digging. Full of Easter eggs for history buffs—like a cheeky description of Revolutionary War-era soldiers bathing in the millponds of the erstwhile Gowanus Creek—the book is written with an attention to narrative detail that enlivens scenes from the Gowanus past. The origin and inspiration of the book is the richness of life around the canal, as well as a personal “obsession” to which Alexiou readily admits. But this richness is also an obstacle to the book, with an overstuffed host of characters and plots that don’t clearly contribute to a central analytic stake in the material. Without a guiding thread beyond the microcosmic relationship of Gowanus’ history to that of the larger city, the fascinating stories Alexiou has culled from the archives remain just that—a collection of anecdotes that illuminate the history of the Gowanus but do not reveal precisely why people have been drawn to the area throughout recorded history, beyond the unspecified “magnetism” of the canal.
Gazing at canal waters is an urban pastime, a pleasurable, contemplative end in itself, and the stench and filth of the Gowanus Canal offers a peculiar perversion of such magnetism. Alexiou writes that his obsession with the canal is in fact shared by many of his contemporaries, an obsession fed by the feeling of discovery. This romantic notion has spurred the neighborhood’s ongoing gentrification. The valorization of a scrappy, creative culture rising out of industrial ruin infuses cultural value into the polluted landscape, a dangerous combination that developers are in turn converting into lucrative private investments with unknown public health risks. Today the “uniqueness” and cultural innovation of the Gowanus “define its potential”—as they do for postindustrial sites in other cities and neighborhoods of New York. Gowanus provides historical legitimization for the exceptional narrative of the area and in this way is not free of complicity in Brooklyn’s continuing crises of affordability.
The gaze at the Gowanus offered by the book has a built-in audience—the renters and, more importantly, the buyers of property in postindustrial Brooklyn seeking a connection to authentic urban life, however abstracted. When the Gowanus waters flow more clearly, will the feeling of discovery be flushed away for future visitors and reframe the obsessive affection of today?
Humankind took the carbon lodged in the darkness of the earth and expelled it into the sky, setting it alight in a great suffocation. Let there be profit.
In the end, Humankind reverse-engineered the heavens and the world.
And while there had been some semblance of order before, Humankind turned it all inside out, night became muddled with day, and day with night. Humankind took the carbon lodged in the darkness of the earth and expelled it into the sky, setting it alight in a great suffocation.
They said, “Let there be profit,” and by God there was! And though it boded no good, though they were well aware of the consequences, Humankind let it veil undivided over the earth.
And they called it Development, as they poured themselves whiskeys, admiring the sunset from their corner offices. Night fell, morning rose, a promising first business day.
And Humankind looked to the heavens and reflected upon how they might be exploited to the best advantage. They sent aircraft to carry them over the waters, spaceships to multiply their omniscience, a cacophony of communications to echo round the skies. And while all this was deemed definitely worth the damage that it might cause, admittedly much of it did not serve any useful purpose.
Humankind said, “Let us devise a way to raise capital to fructify future projects!” They called it the Stock Exchange, and so it came about.
In the evening they flew to see a theatrical performance on the other side of the ocean. Night fell, morning rose, a satisfying second business day.
And Humankind extended their control over every last portion of the earth. The land was divided up into nations disjointed one from the other by frontiers; where necessary, walls and fortifications were built, for certain parts of Humankind were deemed better kept out. And nations were divided up into private properties locked behind fences so that everyone else might be kept out.
They called it the Rule of Law and said, “Let trespassers be prosecuted!” They saw how good it was, that every man who paid off his mortgage got to play king of his castle.
Then Humankind set aside areas to be amalgamated into plantations, they uprooted indigenous flora and replaced them with monocultures. They spread out fertilizer so as to be quicker to market, and sprayed pesticides to eradicate all unwelcome growth. And though the pollinating bees were poisoned, though most species were amputated of their numbers, judging whether it was good or bad was to be deemed beside the point.
And they said, “Let farmers be prohibited from conserving seed for future generations because they are covered by patent,” and so it came about.
Though some ate at banquets, others had to get by on junk food. Night fell, morning rose, a profitable third business day.
And then Humankind set about subjugating time, with the intent to sidestep the tripartite tango that binds earth to sun, moon to earth. And though they could never seriously counter the seesaw of night and day, nor the merry-go-round of the seasons, they could bundle them up in a straitjacket of timetables and calendars, programmes and agendas.
And they ordained that all people, all things, march in step, and those who could not obey, or did not care to, were shunted aside.
And to supplant natural light so unreliably cyclical, to impede the nightly darkness interrupting the conduct of affairs, they girdled the Earth with a power grid so that neither space nor time might elude illumination at the flick of a switch. And when the world became synchronised and global, when productivity was liberated from its temporal shackles, they saw that it was far better than just good!
And they said, “Let time be money,” and had everyone punching the clock. And so it came about that not an iota of work went to waste.
In the evening, they checked their smartphone health apps, and dreamed of hoodwinking time by outsmarting death. Night fell, morning rose, a productive fourth business day.
And whereas the seas had teemed with fish, and the depths had been filled with an abundance of life, Humankind sent out a fleet of ships and netted the oceans’ creatures, with no bother for their depletion or extinction. And even though they poisoned the waters with industrial waste and throttled all that lived with plastic, annual dividends had little difficulty convincing the shareholders that it was good.
Then Humankind selected poultry too aerially challenged to envisage escape into the sky, and penned them up in great promiscuity in vast enclosures, exiled from the sun and the rain, on ground purged of all growing things. And they were unnaturally selected to grow at a record rate, greased up with industrial feed and medicines, so as to minimise the time between incubation and being shipped off, shrink-wrapped.
And Humankind said, “Let their purpose be served by serving our consumption,” and so it came about.
Then they pulled out their credit cards and blessed the cornucopia overflowing from the supermarket shelves unto their trollies. Night fell, morning rose, a sated fifth business day.
And the fate of those land-bound, readily domesticated creatures was regulated according to the products they could provide: flesh for nourishment, skins, and wool for clothing, bones for tools, weapons, musical instruments, fertiliser, or glue. Whether it was good or not was moot, because it was certainly useful. Those creatures more fearsome, with poisonous fangs, daggered claws or powerful jaws had a fighting chance, until Humankind said, “Let us develop technologies that give us the upper hand.”
And then Humankind said, “Let us create God in our own image,” with the result that He was self-centered and vengeful, though nonetheless enterprising and wily. After which Humankind willfully surrendered their prerogatives into His authority, consenting that He dictate what they might or might not eat, whom they might or might not fuck, and whom they would be allowed to kill in His name.
Then Humankind multiplied and occupied, and organised the dominion that served to divide the privileged from the subaltern. Those with capital over those forced to provide labour. Those with male genitalia over those otherwise equipped. Those white-skinned over those with other complexions. Those colonising over those indigenous. Those technically savvy over those less well-armed to fight back.
And Humankind tightened the grip subduing the Earth in its entirety, over the lands and fields, the forests, the valleys, and mountains, over the rivers, the wetlands and the sea. They extracted ores from the ground, minerals, and metals, and transformed them beyond recognition, into cities and transport networks, weapons of mass destruction, and amusement parks. The Earth in its entirety lay at their disposition, and by God, could it be any other than good?
Humankind raised a glass and said, “Surely God blesses us for our industry and the comforts we have wrought.”
And turning a blind eye to the paradise in tatters that lay all around, they added, “Thank God it’s Friday!” Night fell, morning rose, a conclusive sixth business day.
On the seventh day, Humankind declared the job done, and jolly well done, at that.
And they blessed that day and sanctified it, to be devoted to leisure activities, or simply sitting back and letting themselves be entertained. And those were the most profitable businesses of all, and yes, it was very, very good indeed.
A review of the book Gentrifier (UTP Insights) by John Joe Schlichtmann, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill. 2017. 256 pages. ISBN-10: 1442650451 / ISBN-13: 978-1442650459. University of Toronto Press. $21.98 (Hardcover). Buy the book
“As city residents and students of the city ourselves, we have increasingly noticed an elephant sitting in the methodological corner: many progressive activists and academics against gentrification are actually gentrifiers themselves. Yet the same people tend to talk about gentrification from a veiled, objective distance. Why? It seems to us that ‘gentrifier’ has become a dirty word that indicts one’s very character, and thus many individuals assume that they cannot possibly be one.” Gentrifier (p. 4)
Gentrification is one of those words that is so ubiquitous that most of us think we know it when we see it. Rarely is it defined with any precision, however. As the authors of this new and important book argue, the term gentrification eludes an exact definition and has been so widely used and applied across different contexts that it has “overgrown its original boundaries” (p. 9) and “displaced so many other meaningful concepts that urbanists once had in their tool kits”. (p. 10) The term often obscures more than it illuminates and, importantly for them, fails to engage in a nuanced way the processes of gentrification at both the macro (structural) and micro (individual) level. Most progressives don’t see themselves as gentrifiers and this failure, the authors argue, makes it difficult to see how inextricably intertwined we each are in the larger structural forces that shape our individual agency and choices. More to the point, the authors want to illuminate the relationship between the macro and micro to open the true “black box” that “contains our most valuable tools for understanding gentrification.” (p. 16)
The book is a powerful reminder of the need for a new framework for urban development that re-imagines and re-situates the position of a variety of actors in the urban/suburban landscape.
Many of us associate gentrification with significant social and economic change and the accompanying displacement of long-standing residents in our cities and neighborhoods. Whether gentrification necessarily involves displacement has become somewhat contested. An oft-cited 2016 Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia study found “that gentrifying neighborhoods [in Philadelphia] do not lose residents at a substantially higher rate than other neighborhoods”. Nevertheless, the process of gentrification in most instances is palpable to longstanding residents and also quite visible to the casual observer. The term gentrification was coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe the “invasion” by the middle class of working class neighborhoods in London. The entrance of newcomers of a different race and/or class into previous ethnically or economically homogenous neighborhoods is a potent marker of gentrification. So too are the kinds of amenities and services—like Starbucks or Whole Foods—that often appear on the heels of a critical mass of newcomers.
Today, gentrification continues to be associated with the racial and economic transformation of low-income neighborhoods. The consequences of gentrification, as even the 2016 Federal Bank study concluded, too often result in patterns of concentrated advantage and disadvantage in cities and metropolitan regions. Given this, it is fair to suggest as the authors of Gentrifier do, that in order to figure out what to do about gentrification we have to understand at a more nuanced level what produces it. This nuance is possible by teasing apart the assumptions that we bring to the table when we conceptualize, theorize, name, and blame “gentrification” for the kinds of changes we see happening all around us. Additionally, we must learn to locate our own individual choice in these patterns and the way that our choices are shaped by larger structural forces.
The authors observe that we tend to analyze gentrification either in structural terms—blaming forces larger than ourselves, such as the capitalist market or neoliberal urban development—or by focusing on the role of individual agency and the consumption preferences or patterns of “gentrifiers”. They want to explore the interaction between these two camps and the nuances that such exploration can produce. The way they go about this exploration is to position themselves, their identities and behaviors in trying to understand gentrification and its processes. By “socially locating” themselves within their study of gentrification and offering a “multi-tool” analytical device that seeks to help us understand and examine our individual household’s residential decisions, they are able to help us to see how our decisions structure the process of gentrification. The multi-tool encompasses seven facets of a housing choice: monetary, practical, aesthetic, amenity, community, cultural authenticity, and flexibility. (pgs. 28-29) Using this toolkit, the authors recount each of their stories, or “dispatches,” of being gentrifiers in places as diverse as Philadelphia, New York, Providence, Chicago and San Diego.
The idea that “we are all gentrifiers” does indeed complicate and provide nuance to the locational decisions, motives, and choices at different facets of life. This individual agency alone, however, is only part of the story. Individual and familial choices about which neighborhood and location to “invade”, the authors note, are made against a backdrop of an “accumulation of previous decisions, actions, and policies that frame the current reality in the neighborhood”. (p. 88) Structural processes at almost every level—global, national, regional, local, and sub-local—invariably shape, constrain, and enable individual agency. These include capital mobility and competition, deregulation and privatization, deindustrialization, the securitization of the real estate industry, the rise of the service economy and changing consumption patterns, persistent patterns of racial segregation and discrimination, urban renewal policies, among others. These processes produce and shape gentrification, and not the other way around. As the authors put it, “[w]e have let gentrification become the explanatory factor in understanding urban change rather than interpreting gentrification within broader changes”. (p. 118)
Seen within its macro-context, an important move by the authors is to bring under critical view the “displacement thesis”—the idea that displacement is an inherent and defining component of gentrification. It suggests a clear causal relationship between displacement and gentrification, displacing a broader focus on a progressive urban agenda such as cross-class alliances. In other words, they argue, the displacement thesis suggests that the solution to gentrification is to stop the practice of gentrifying or invading neighborhoods. Managing gentrification becomes, as they say, akin to “managing weeds in a garden”. (p. 110) It avoids the more difficult tasks of identifying and undermining the various strategies employed by a capitalist economy—such as the “rent gap” by individuals, developers, and local governments. These strategies promote gentrification and often displacement. But not all displacement is due to gentrification. To equate the two, the authors suggest, is to displace the focus on processes that displace for reasons unrelated to gentrification and to ignore the kinds of slower, “bottom-up” gentrification that does not involve extensive displacement and where long-time residents (including renters) are able to stay and reap the positive results. (p. 124) This latter point is reminiscent of what Majora Carter calls “self-gentrification,” an emerging phenomenon in places like the South Bronx, New York.
The point, the authors are keen to stress, is that gentrification is produced within a larger economic and social context that often renders irrelevant the motives, manners, or behavior of individual gentrifiers. This is not to say that the way individuals go about making locational and household decisions are not problematic, nor that development policies and practices don’t normalize and naturalize the ways that these “invasions” occur and don’t help produce those who become “invaders”. (p. 128) Rather, appreciating the interaction between the structural and the individual, or macro and micro, levels entails privileging the forces and processes of late capitalism, growing inequality, and racial formation. In this way, all gentrifiers “serve as disruptive forces in the economic, social and cultural make-up of a neighborhood” and “are operating as Columbuses within their respective contexts: functioning as economic, social and cultural power brokers within a space in which they are less rooted and upon which they are less dependent than their neighbors”. (p. 171)
Having offered what is a very personal and conceptually rigorous analysis, the authors end up punting a bit too much on the implications of their arguments. They are right to point out that even their analysis begs the question “where do we go from here?” There are two takeaways that are useful even if incomplete and unsatisfactory. The first takeaway is to push back against a frame of gentrification as a “uniform causal mechanism of good or evil”, as it diverts efforts to work on the ground to improve the lives of residents in communities. In other words, “progressive gentrification theory has sometimes displaced the potential for progressive practice”. (p. 181) This is a profound insight and one that nods in the direction of the second takeaway that is quite hopeful. In trying to understand and situate the “gentrifier who is against gentrification”, the book attempts to hold out the promise for coalition building and movements, like the “right to the city”, that seek to intervene in the either/or politics of class to build an alliance or assembly. Such an alliance would demand both material goods for those deprived of them and a different future “by those discontent with life as they see it around them”. (p. 185)
In the final analysis, the reader could be forgiven for wanting more from the authors about what such demands would look likes substantively—i.e., what form they would take in policy terms. How might the substance of our policies and urban development processes change in response to their analysis? In the end, the prescriptions they offer are far more modest than their prognosis of the problem. They embrace as transformative inclusionary zoning policies, metropolitan regional collaboration, transit-oriented development, fair share housing policies and the like. They also embrace, to their great credit, community-led transformative solutions such as community benefit agreements and community land trusts, both of which have helped to fuse into progressive alliances and coalition some of the presumed disparate elements of those who live in gentrifying communities.
While all of these policies and practices have their merits and potential for transformation, they don’t match the scale of the structural forces that they argue drive gentrification. To what ends are or should these policies be a means? Even the “right to the city” can seem like the kind of vague and widely employed term that requires unpacking and specification before it is fully able to illuminate and drive transformative change. The book is a powerful reminder of the need for a new framework for urban development that re-imagines and re-situates the position of a variety of actors in the urban/suburban landscape. New policies and practices along the lines of the urban commons, for instance, imagine the potential for a framework and set of tools for inclusive and equitable forms of community building and city-making that resonate in different, alternative economic models. They do so by providing a bridge between the claim to the city, and its resources, and the need for more sustainable economies built on solidarity and circularity (versus extractive and speculative). Only this larger, more ambitious type of vision seems to match the scale of the impressive and trenchant analysis that this book offers.
George Barker forecast the need to recognise ecosystem services as a crucial part of urban planning and design. He will have been pleased to see that all the main elements of his original vision are mainstream policies of all whose mission is nature conservation.
George Barker, who died on 1 May 2018, will be remembered fondly by all who worked with him. He was a modest man, always full of fun, yet he was one of the most influential figures in the development of urban nature conservation in the UK and was held in high esteem in many other countries. He was a visionary who, in just a few years, managed to put urban nature conservation firmly on the map and ensured that it became established as a crucial element in the broader conservation agenda.
George (on the right) in a park in Poznan in 1987 with Polish ecologists Maciej Luniak and Tadeusz Mizera. Photographer unknown.
As a teenager in the 1950s, George was already an enthusiastic naturalist, studying the butterflies of his nearest National Nature Reserve (NNR) at Old Winchester Hill in the chalk downlands of southern England. It comes as no surprise that the Nature Conservancy, the British government agency responsible for nature conservation, appointed him as Warden Naturalist for the NNR some years later. By the early 1970s, he was promoted to Deputy Regional Officer of the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), working in the post-industrial landscapes of the English Midlands. It was here that he first came to prominence in the field of urban ecology. George was well aware of the potential value of post-industrial habitats but was severely constrained by official policy which gave little support to protecting areas of this kind. So when the new West Midlands Metropolitan Authority asked the NCC for advice on the nature conservation content of its forthcoming County Structure Plan, he was more than willing to challenge the accepted wisdom and leapt at the opportunity.
The Metropolitan Authority wanted to know which places ought to be protected and George was well aware that there was a dearth of information on post-industrial urban landscapes. Virtually nothing was known about the relative merits of these areas, which might be ecologically valuable. He realised there was a need for a thorough survey and was on the look-out for someone to do it. The timing was propitious. George was one of the participants at the first urban wildlife conference in the UK held in Manchester in 1974. There he met well-established urban naturalist T.G. (Bunny) Teagle. George soon realised he had found the right man for the job.
Teagle was commissioned to do a systematic survey of wildlife in the predominantly urban landscape of Birmingham and the adjoining Black Country. For some people, the idea that there could be any wildlife worth conserving in the heartland of the industrial revolution seemed ridiculous. Indeed, at one stage, George was instructed not to waste money on such a frivolous enterprise. But by then the survey was already underway. Teagle was finding hundreds of acres of derelict industrial land with a remarkable mixture of habitats and a great variety of species, some of which were rare or declining in the wider countryside.
The report, titled The Endless Village, published in September 1978, has a special place in the history of nature conservation. It was a crucially important document. It demonstrated beyond doubt the wealth of wildlife to be found in a surprising variety of artificial habitats from the formal landscapes of parks, gardens, cemeteries, and playing fields to the wilder areas of industrial dereliction. But it was not just the evidence provided about urban nature that made this report so important. The fact that the NCC commissioned it at all was crucial. It was a government document. George Barker used the report as a vehicle to promote a new approach to conserving urban nature. The proposals for future action provided a clear strategy for urban nature conservation. For the first time, it was recognised that there was a need to interest people in their local wildlife heritage, acknowledging that such an approach would have benefits for people and nature. The report not only destroyed the myth of the urban wildlife desert, which had persisted for so long in nature conservation circles but also laid the foundations for urban nature conservation in the UK. The Endless Village virtually changed the rules overnight.
Shortly after this George Barker was made responsible for providing advice on urban nature conservation throughout the UK, but he also made it his business to find out what was going on elsewhere. He developed strong links with Dr. Lowell Adams, then Director of the National Institute for Urban Wildlife in the USA; with key figures in Europe, including Professor Herbert Sukopp in Berlin and Dr. Maciej Luniak in Warsaw, Poland; with Dr. Debra Roberts in Durban, South Africa; and especially with Dr. John Celecia at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Lowell Adams tells me that he always had great respect for George. Many urban wildlife specialists in the United States and elsewhere shared that view.
For many years George was a one-man band, but he had a remarkable ability to carry conviction, and to influence people wherever he went. In 1987 his Urban Wildlife News, published by the NCC, was circulated to 38 countries. In his modest way, he observed that “It has inadvertently become very popular overseas”. He was an unofficial mentor for many people.
George instigated a string of research reports on many different aspects of urban wildlife conservation. The first of these was entitled People and Nature in Cities, still a hot topic today, which examined the social aspects of planning and managing natural parks in urban areas. Published as a series entitled Urban Wildlife Now, some of these reports documented the development of particular projects in this newly emerging field, whilst others provided prescriptive strategies. Someone like George was needed to make that happen. Even more impressive was the formation in 1987 of the UK Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Urban Forum linked to UNESCO, which was a direct result of his perseverance. George brought together all the key figures in the UK to provide a high-powered think-tank on urban nature. The Forum still exists, but sadly without the UNESCO link.
George was always ahead of his time. In 1997 he published a paper entitled “A framework for the future: green networks with multiple uses in and around towns and cities.” He suggested that a range of functions could be accommodated in green networks including river and wildlife corridors, together with local cycle and walking routes and extensive areas of amenity greenspace which could provide capacity for flood alleviation. Such networks might connect locally important wildlife sites and provide greater opportunities for people to have access to natural areas. He also saw the potential health benefits of urban green space as part of an integrated package. In effect, he was forecasting the need to recognise ecosystem services as a crucial part of urban planning and design. He will have been pleased to see that all the main elements of his original vision of 1978 have now become mainstream policies of both central and local government, and of the whole voluntary sector dealing with nature conservation.
What will I remember most about George? When he entered the stage at a conference, he invariably walked on laughing. One never knew quite what to expect. He was never openly subversive. It was always camoflaged by his quiet way of putting a finger on the key issues, and explaining what was needed in an eminently sensible way. And there was always his mischievous smile. I believe he always knew exactly what he wanted and he took people with him.
There was one famous occasion when something he said, “reduced a serious international workshop to weeping hysteria”. But that was George, a lovely man. We shall all miss him.
Georgetown, Guyana, is one of the world’s smallest capital cities, a mere six mi.2 according to its official boundaries. The Dutch laid out this city, perched on the northern Atlantic coast of South America, in the 18th century; the British expanded it in the 19th and 20th centuries. Tree-lined avenues, flowing canals, and stunning colonial gardens earned it a reputation as the “Garden City”. Today, it is home to over 285 species of birds—47.5 species per square mile. The Botanic Gardens, a small area (about 75 acres) within the city, has an astonishing 196 species, which are listed here.
To live with wild birds in the city is an immense joy. But in Georgetown, this remarkable diversity is threatened by ignorance, greed, and deliberate destruction.
Does this density of species make Georgetown the bird capital of the world? It certainly means that anybody with their eyes and ears open could be in for a glorious day of birding.
On the street where I live, a pair of macaws sometimes comes with the dawn, screaming and screeching, vivid blue, with flashes of gold like the sun god, Apollo, in his chariot. The blue-and-yellow macaw is impossible to ignore and is a joy to behold.
The pair often settles down in the branches of a coconut tree across the street and croon gently to each other. Into the sound gap arrives the true dawn chorus, a glorious medley of song and whistling, including the haunting melody of the Pale-breasted Thrushes. They have been recorded here on Youtube.
The resident blue-and-yellow macaw. Photo: Melinda Janki
The thrushes have taught me a fraction of their melody and, for a few minutes, we go back and forth, my childishly simple notes embarrassing in contrast to their trills. Several pairs of these Pale-breasted Thrushes have built their nests between the wooden beams and the columns that hold up my house.
I seem to be inadvertently running a baby Thrush factory. The nests are in constant use, except when repairs are necessary. The mother and father are marvellous models of good parenting, flitting back and forth with food, taking it in turns to sit on the nest and remaining ever-alert to danger. From dive-bombing me the first time I picked up one of their fallen babies and put it on a branch out of reach of predators, they have learned to trust me as an ally. On the day that the fledglings are due to leave the nest, the parents keep up a racket until we lock up our dogs. I have observed that on these days, the songbirds congregate in the trees. It seems they, too, are watching out for threats to these precious babies. Perhaps this is an interesting example of interspecies cooperation which contradicts the dominant ideology that life is all about competition and selfishness.
This nest is about 10 feet off the ground on a pillar holding up the house. The underside of the floor boards is directly above the bird. Photo: Melinda JankiThrush babies on the nest. Photo: Melinda Janki
A few weeks ago, the Thrushes’ full volume alarm call brought me rushing into the garden, which was full of highly agitated birds hopping from branch to ground, from fence to flowerpots, and all over the garden. Disaster! One baby Thrush had taken off too soon. Flat on the ground, nose to beak with the baby, was one of our large watchdogs. I grabbed the baby, dropped him in a large flower pot for safety, and put our beloved dog in a fenced-off section. Fifteen minutes later, the birds’ alarm call brought me hurtling back out. There they were again, nose to beak, gazing at each other, the fledgling having launched himself straight back at the watchdog. I have often wondered why the dog did not simply open his jaws and swallow what would have been a tasty morsel.
The dawn chorus marks the time to put out the food. The wire feeders so highly recommended in temperate zones are useless—the birds will not go near them. They prefer two-bird tables made from old tree branches and, best of all, the top of the gate-post, which presumably gives them a better view of predators.
Yellow oriole on the gate-post with his favourite food—rotting plantains. Photo: Melinda Janki
After much experimenting with bird seed and various fruits, I have found that my visitors’ favourite foods are over-ripe papaw and rotting yellow plantains. I am fortunate. There is a stall holder in Bourda, one of the local markets, who gives me yellow plantains for the birds and a fruit vendor who will help out now and then with fruit. The birds on the bird table feel less like visitors and more like residents. Some of them roost in the trees in the garden. Every day there are Yellow Orioles, Grayish Saltators, Blue-grey Tanagers, Palm Tanagers, and the lovely Silver-beaked Tanager. This tanager is very dark—almost black—but when the sun catches him, his throat feathers are a rusty red. The beak is matte silver—more paint than polish—and very striking.
The early morning is popular with people taking exercise and, more importantly to my mind, it is an ideal time to see birds. Thirty seconds’ walk from my house, a pair of Ringed Kingfishers catch fish in the main canal that flows through the city. They perch high on the telephone wires and are easy to miss unless you know to look out for them. They are large for kingfishers and have a distinctive rufous belly and ring around the neck. Truly handsome birds, but not musical, as they take off with their harsh, “Tchak-tchack” cry.
Ringed Kingfisher on a wire. Photo: Melinda Janki
The kites are also in evidence, searching the water for the snails that make up the staple item in their diet. They are visible during the day, but are most active in the morning and late afternoon.
Around the smaller ditches, you can also see Striated Herons, Little Blue Herons, and Snowy Egret catching fish. Occasionally, I have seen a Limpkin completely still at the water’s edge, its unmistakeable beak ready for snails. The egrets seem to be almost as common in the city as in the countryside, mainly because of a large colony in the Botanic Gardens. Sometimes, a Snowy Egret nestling falls out into the water below and is immediately snapped up by a small caiman. The breeding plumage of the snowy egret is stunning and was once worth more than gold.
By mid-morning, doves, woodcreepers, shrikes, flycatchers, finches, and a host of other little birds have been and gone. Once, and only once, a Black-crowned Night-Heron, came into my garden. He sat in a Flamboyant Tree for a few hours completely still and silent before going home to the Botanic Gardens. The hummingbirds ignore my humble offerings, heading straight for the hibiscus nectar. Later come the Great Kiskadees—noisy, boisterous, raucous birds who seem to eat almost anything, including flying insects and small frogs, and who have no qualms about raiding the dogs’ bowls. Great Kiskadees are fearless. It is not unusual to see them mobbing a Yellow-headed Caracara, tormenting one of those powerful raptors until it takes refuge in a tall tree, screaming magnificently. What is very unusual is to see a juvenile and an adult caracara together; I was lucky to see these two from my living room window.
Snail kite. Photo: Melinda JankiA juvenile and adult caracara captured on camera together. Photo: Melinda Janki
In the hot afternoon, the birds are scarce except for the ever-present thrushes raiding the compost heap for my precious earthworms, and the odd straggler coming in for water at the birdbath. By teatime, the air is still and heavy. The contented tap-tap-tap of the Lineated Woodpecker breaks the monotony. Sitting on the back step with my tea, I can admire this handsome visitor with his bright eyes and scarlet crest and feel privileged that, today, he has chosen my trees for his attention.
Late afternoon reveals tiny birds high up in the sky. These are the swifts and from where I stand on the road outside the house, I am too hopeless a birder to be able to tell which species they belong to. It is much easier to identify the magnificent frigate birds slowly ascending the thermals and heading out over the Atlantic. As the short dusk begins, the Scarlet Ibises fly over, also heading for the ocean. Night sets in. The Barn Owl, ghostly white as the light catches his feathers, gives a piercing screech before disappearing into the gloom. On the best nights of all, a solemn, drawn out “hoo” tells me the Great Horned Owl has come into my garden for a visit.
To live with wild birds is an immeasurable joy. One never knows for sure who is going to visit. Will the Red-shouldered Macaws come in this afternoon? Where are the Orange-winged Parrots? What a delight that the Blue-black Grassquit has suddenly chosen my fence from which to jump up and down, calling for a mate.
Lineated Woodpecker at teatime. Photo: Melinda Janki
But even as I write this rich avian narrative, bird life is being threatened by a combination of ignorance, greed, and deliberate destruction of the city. Georgetown’s magnificent trees, home to so many birds, are slowly disappearing, choked to death with bird vine, or left jagged and damaged by “tree-trimming” exercises authorised by the Mayor and City Council.
Georgetown businesses have knocked down trees and poured concrete over the grass verges to extend their premises or obtain parking. Even private gardens are being turned into concrete so that people can park the vast numbers of secondhand cars imported into Guyana.
Our “Garden City” is being replaced with vertical horrors of mirrored glass. The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to a billion birds die each year in the USA as a result of glass collisions. Yet, the private sector and the public authorities in Georgetown see nothing wrong with knocking down graceful, colonial wooden buildings that can accommodate birdlife, and replacing them with lethal glass buildings aping New York and Miami. Even the new Catholic church has horrible, mirrored windows which are a potential death trap for the city’s birds. A national “development” strategy focussed on economic growth, rather than on quality of life, has resulted in the Guyanese people adopting a frantic consumer lifestyle. Despite the recent heroic efforts of the government to clean up the city, people continue to throw junk food boxes and other garbage into the canals and ditches, choking the outlets and creating stagnant breeding grounds for mosquitos. The inevitable chemical spraying is harmful to wildlife and leaves me and everybody in our house choking from the fumes. The black night, lit by the stars of the ever-changing sky, has disappeared. Blazing security lights make sections of the city as bright as day. It is impossible to get a normal night’s sleep, and nocturnal birds are going away. The city appears to be sleepwalking towards a lifeless existence.
Georgetown’s residents have to act now. Do we not have a responsibility to ensure that the next generation can experience the wonder of nature?
My neighbour, my gardener, and I replant trees on the streets as a small act of resistance against the dead hand of “development”. Others can choose their own paths of resistance. The Guyana Amazon Tropical Birds Society has, for over a decade, been inspiring at-risk youth with a love for birds by creating checklists, carrying out research, and training their members to identify and care for birds. With appropriate funding, they could convert hearts and minds for birds and provide the technical advice to make Georgetown a bird friendly city once more. The public authorities have to work with us to re-create a city that is elegant, beautiful, and a joy to live in—to restore the Garden City and to keep alive what we like to call the capital city of the bird world.
“Get your blue mind on!” is a frequent expression and admonition of Wallace J. Nichols, known simply as “J” to most of us. J has been a leading thinker, researcher, and activist extraordinaire when it comes to all things related to water. The author of the recent bestselling book Blue Mind(July 2015), he isa passionate advocate for ocean and water environments and for the healing and recuperative powers of water in all its forms. A half decade ago, he began convening an eclectic group of like-minded academicians and others in an intensive one-day conference called “Blue Mind,” a collective exploration of the many different ways that the power of water might be studied and applied.
In late May of this year, J helped convene the fifth of these unusual meetings, Blue Mind 5. For this year’s event, the emphasis was to be on urban blue, and I was honored to have been asked to give the closing keynote for the meeting. In addition to discussing a bit of my own research and writing, a key charge given me was to listen throughout the day and to summarize and synthesize the main themes and overarching conclusions. This was a tough job, to be sure, but a fun one, and what follows here is a modest attempt to put down on paper some of what I learned that day. The meeting took place in the elegant digs of the Carnegie Institution of Science, in Washington, DC.
J Nichols.
It was (and is) a huge agenda, an agenda for a lifetime. How can we be healthier, saner, better human beings through connections with water, and how can we be better stewards of our ocean and water environments? While for many of the participants, the setting for their own research, practice, and activism, was oceans, this was not always the case, and sometimes it was the municipal pool, or the float tank, or the lake, or river. So from the beginning, there were some interesting and stimulating ambiguities, but water in every form imaginable became the subject of our appreciation and celebration that day.
Part of my task was to look for the urban manifestations and implications of the topics being covered so eloquently and insightfully. It was not a hard thing to do. We are an increasingly urban world, and increasingly call cities home; every topic discussed held special meaning and importance in understanding, and perhaps shifting, modern urban life. And many or even most cities are located near water.
The new urban stories of water
J Nichols has an uncanny knack for joining together sometimes disparate speakers, while always extracting synergy and logic emerging from the interactions. The day was largely structured around four main panels: The New Story of Water; Science of Solitude; Sleeping Deeper; and Submergence. I liked the look of the day— topics rarely thought about or considered much by urban planners, but clearly critical issues for us to think about in relation to cities.
The first panel of presentations wondered out loud about the importance and power of storytelling, and ways we frame the stories we create and tell. There was a strong sense that a new story about water was needed, and a helpful shift away from the tired, older story (or stories) we have been telling. The old story of water was a negative one, a pessimistic one. Addressing the immense water and ocean agenda we are collectively facing requires a new kind of story about effective change and a new sense of the appropriate messenger. Ocean advocate Danni Washington spoke eloquently about the need to “change our conversation, to flip the switch, because we’re not going to inspire anyone by telling them that they’re doing horrible things.” The story must increasingly be about the positive benefits and qualities of water, what we love about oceans and water.
M. Layne Kalbfleisch, a cognitive neuroscientist, studies talent and inspiration, and offered insights from her research about how color (blue specifically) enhances mental performance, and the need to better appreciate the ways in which the body’s resting state (its autonomic systems) creates the conditions for daydreaming and imagination. Becoming more in touch with our “endogenous heuristic” (our internal playbook), must be part of the new sensibility. The new story must include, she told us, a new understanding of “water as medicine” (more on this below) and that “water flows in one direction.” Flow in cities is a defining force and a way of fixing relationship and position: some are upstream, others down.
Kalbfleisch played some music for the audience from the group The Stray Birds, specifically a song called “I Dream in Blue,” and then asked us to identify the many references to water (Listen to the song here). It was a convincing point that music frequently contains deep connections and references to water, and also perhaps that we can and must tell these new stories of water in many different ways, including through music, drama, and poetry. Later in the day we heard the moving poetry of Jamie Reaser and saw the beautiful photographs of National Geographic Photographer, Anne Doubilet.
Just and equitable access to water, and its benefits, was yet another theme and another necessary element of the new story. Harvey Welch, of Carbondale, Illinois, described what it was like to be African American, growing up excluded from enjoying public pools. Later in life, he has lead the charge to build a new outdoor public pool, something that has proven harder than expected (and still is not accomplished). It was a reminder of the entrenched inequalities, but also the promise of water as a bridge, as an opportunity to heal past injustices and to create spaces and places for coming together.
Part of the charge in crafting a new story is to think more carefully about who we hold up as purveyors of change. We have relied heavily on a “hero model” of ocean conservation and protection, which was noted by several speakers. Stiv Wilson, with the Story of Stuff, made this point through a provocative self-assessment, pondering the imagery he has commonly used to present himself to the world (and to audiences like ours)—the image is of singular hero, saving the day (an image of him steering a ship during a storm, strong and in charge). The reality is that addressing ocean conservation problems today will require changes in how we buy and consume, as well as through legislation. But it is not to be found in singular herculean acts of saving the day, so much as in more pervasive, collective shifts in our behaviors and buying patterns, and in our political action. Wilson showed a new film about micro-beads and suggested that it might indeed represent, he feels, a more effective way of reaching average people and effecting deep change. Wilson was recently profiled in the New York Times (looking a lot like the hero, ironically), with good news that states continue to enact restrictions on micro-beads in response to consumer concerns (California appears headed for a ban on both synthetic and organic micro-beads). The prospect of state-level restrictions and bans seems enough to shift companies like Proctor and Gamble away from micro-beads in their body and facial scrubs.
I frankly did not know much about micro-beads before Wilson’s presentation, but the inability of conventional water treatment plants to filter them and the possibilities of working their way through and up the aquatic food chain is a scary prospect indeed. It was the first of a number of references that day to the ways in which humans consumption and lifestyle choices negatively impact the blue realm, and in turn our own human health. As is so often the case with water, optimism and pessimism blend together, though the former, thankfully, may be carrying the day. And the issue raises once again the many ways in which the transition to urban lives may induce a mental distance between action and impact (where do those micro-beads go when they slither down the drain?). Yet, the new emerging story is, and must be, that urbanites can be made to care and have more power to effect change than is perhaps commonly thought.
There was a consistent refrain throughout the day about the watery nature of our human biology and physiology, and this was/is another aspect of the re-writing of the new story of water. We are largely made up of water, of course—about 60 percent on average (though it varies by age, gender, and other factors). That we should connect with, and be so profoundly soothed by touching and having contact with water, is not surprising. For me, these repeated references to our watery selves conjure up the ideas of deep ecologythat many of us talked about and found compelling in the 1980s. The ideas of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess that we ought to seek to be at one with a larger “Self” (a “deep” ecology,” in contrast to the more superficial ways in which we adjust our relationship to earth and environment; e.g. Naess, 2010). If we are the water, if we are the river or the ocean, then aren’t we doing harm to ourselves, so the argument goes,when we pollute those water environments? And is there the chance that through seeing greater unity in the world, we will find a way to live less destructively? If our physiology is so inherently watery, does this not bode well for finding deeper caring and connection?
Solitude
The second panel of presenters addressed the subject of solitude, a quality that might seem, on the face of it, to be in short supply in cities. Again, it brought together a remarkable (and unusual) set of thinkers and doers. The sense from these presentations was often not of the potential or promise or benefit of solitude, but just what a difficult relationship we seem to have as a species with the idea. Tim Wilson, who teaches in the UVA Department of Psychology, reported on his fascinating research showing the difficulty subjects have with simply sitting and thinking. We have a difficult time, apparently, just being with our thoughts and through a series of different experiments WIlson has demonstrated just how hard this is for us. In one set of experiments, subjects were asked to sit quietly with their thoughts. They were, however, able to administer a mild but unpleasant electric shock (something demonstrated for them before the experiment began). Remarkably enough, a relatively high percentage of participants shocked themselves (67 percent of men, 25 percent of women), presumably out of boredom (e.g. Wilson 2014). Some shocked themselves repeatedly, rather than sit quietly with their thoughts (and one man shocked himself 190 times!). This result garnered lots of attention in the popular press (and headlines like this one in the Washington Post: “Most men would rather shock themselves than be alone with their thoughts” see Feltman, 2014: ).
A kayaker on the James River.
Cities in some ways are an antidote to boredom. They are rarely boring places, and often the problem is finding places and opportunities where quiet reflection is possible. I remain convinced that humans need the time to and places where they can sit, recharge, reflect, and ponder intensely or not at all. And these places must increasingly be in cities. Designing and planning these opportunities ought to be a major task of city planners, and for me it is the daily connections with nature—whether watching and hearing a bird or sitting in a small park or tending a garden—that can provide those moments of quiet solitude. Perhaps we are inclined to shock ourselves (especially men, it turns out) in part because of where we are: that we are stuck in a room, locked in a stifling interior space with little that is uplifting. In an era where many feel bored waiting for the traffic signal to change and reach for our iPhones, is such a response perhaps partly learned behavior?
Water in cities represents some of the best opportunities we have to create conditions and circumstances for solitude, squeezing these experiences (in both a spatial and temporal sense) into cities. Solitude must surely be partly about putting us in the present moment, enjoying the sound of our own breath and the heave of our lungs, quietly watching, listening, being mindful. And the watery realms in and around cities often offer the best chances for finding these experiences, whether floating on a kayak on the James River or sailing in Boston Harbor.
One of the best examples demonstrating the therapeutic power of water in a city is Paley Park, a remarkably small park (1/10th of an acre in size) located in highly-developed midtown Manhattan. Designed by landscape architect Robert Zion, it opened in 1967, and has been delighting residents ever since. It is small space providing a quiet respite and source of solitude. It has trees and potted plants and “vertical lawns” (Zion’s words for describing the ivy walls that flank the space), but it is the roaring 20-foot tall waterfall that is the park’s most impressive feature. Seeing and listening to this waterfall is what makes this park so enjoyable, providing an element of unusual solitude. Paley helped to usher in new thinking about the power and potential of small spaces—pocket parks, parklets—and perhaps the need to look for all possible ways to include one or more water features. The Project for Public Spaces (PPS) has declared Paley to be one of the best parks in the country and biophilic design expert Bill Browning frequently uses it as a prime example of the “presence of water,” a key biophilic design principle (Browning, 2014; see his terrific 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design here).
Solitude and adversity developed as another theme over the course of the day. Matt McFadyen told a gripping story of being trapped under a sailboat in the Southern Ocean, moments from death, and an equally harrowing journey to the North Pole. Water tests us in many ways, and some of these experience seem more to fall under the heading of solitude under duress. Other speakers over the course of the day described similar struggles; for instance, Blue Mind alum Bruckner Chase, a self-described “endurance waterman,” described his struggles competing as in ironman competitions. There is the suggestion that through struggle and endurance and, sometimes, even through failure and defeat, there is a closeness and affection for these challenging environments; such struggles provide the portal or platform for deeper connections and perhaps for a degree of humility that is helpful in interacting with the ocean world.
Matt McFadyen at the North Pole.
Jamie Reaser, artist and poet, re-framed the challenge as one of “bringing people into their inner wildness.” It may have been the first explicit reference of the day to wildness as a positive, desired attribute, but the wildness of oceans and water bodies was implicit in a number of presentations throughout the day. In the sense of vastness and in the largely uncontrollable power of nature are the possibilities of experiencing awe and wonder. I have often spoken of the need for “cities of awe,” that seek to maximize and facilitate these emotions, and water in and near cities is a major opportunity for this.
Reaser argued that we need solitude “to become fully human,” and made a critical distinction between solitude and isolation (a seeking of “apartness” and a more disconnected state). Solitude is as much about feelings of connectedness and relationship; to achieve this need does not require us to require us to escape to a distant place where there are no or few people. That is good for cities and the planet.
Sleeping deeper
The profound importance (emotional, health) of sleep is sometimes overlooked, and a fourth major panel addressed the question of Sleeping Deeper. Here there was the very personal and wrenching story of Bobby Lane, a marine veteran grappling with PTS and suicidal impulses. He told a meandering but compelling story of how he discovered surfing. Surfing saved him. After experiencing this, he tells of having his first night of real sleep in a long time. The power of water brought him back from the brink.
Sleep itself is an essential human need and so many things in cities have proven to be disruptive to sleep—artificial light, for example, and excessive noise from car traffic, landing aircrafts, and building construction, among others. There is growing recognition of the negative health impacts of bad sleep and the beneficial, health-enhancing effects of good sleep, so it makes great sense for planners and urbanites to give this topic more attention.
Bobby Lane is a living example of how spending time in, on, or near water can be part of the answer to good and healthful sleep. This is further support for the many ways that cities might nudge its residents to enjoy these forms of nearby nature and beneficial health outcomes that would result. Good sleep could result from other urban interventions, of course—real efforts at controlling both light and noise pollution would be a start—but I am convinced we often overlook the “blue gym,” to use the language of Michael DePledge, all around us as a partial antidote (e.g. DePledge, 2009).
Justin Feinstein, a neuroscientist with the Laureate Institute for Brain Research and co-founder of FLOAT, provided an interesting connection between water and good sleep in his presentation. His work has focused on the beneficial effects of spending time in float tanks. It was a fascinating look at the power of this technology in addressing and enhancing urban health more broadly. Spending time immersed in the quiet, dark, soundless environment of a float tank quiets many parts of the brain, and studies show it helps to reduce anxiety and stress and helps us to relax deeply. The studies are more numerous and extensive than I had imagined (27 studies at least; see floatboston.com, undated). These benefits have been shown to last for months. I came away convinced of the utility of a network of float tanks in cities, though I struggled a bit in understanding the planning and public policy implications of float tanks.
A float tank.
Feinstein’s presentation also made me ponder the value of floating in cities more generally and the opportunities to do so there. Perhaps less an opportunity for quieting the brain, events such as the Big Float in Portland, Oregon, do provide the chance to sit on and slowly move through the water spaces of a city.
More generally, the theme of water and shorelines as medicine re-emerged; it’s one of the most important take-aways. In urban planning and design, there has been a growing recognition of the ways that bad urban form (e.g. unwalkable, car-dependent sprawl) can make us sicker and can inflict a host of health problems. We have been less quick to recognize the inverse, that many urban landscapes (designed and natural) can be profoundly therapeutic and health-enhancing. Bluescapes seem especially to be potent forms of medicine.
Several recent studies by Michael DePledge and his team at the University of Exeter in the UK show the power of proximity to water. In one large study, self-reported health increased with proximity to the coast. In another series of studies, participants were shown and asked to react to a photographs, some containing water. “As predicted,” DePledges team concludes, “both natural and built scenes containing water were associated with higher preferences, greater positive affect and higher perceived restorativeness thanthose without water.”
And this recognition (or re-discovery, more accurately) has lead to new design directions in blue urbanism. Recent examples include the installation of the new Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital on Boston harbor, along its HarborWay trail. The building is designed to provide extensive views of the harbor through lowered windows in patient rooms, for instance, and from ground level rehabilitation spaces. It is remarkable, in a way, that we have not fully utilized the healing powers of water, so nearby and so often overlooked as potent therapy and medicine.
A Spaulding Rehab Hospital room in Boston.
Submergence in the city: partial and full
Finding ways to float in city, whether in an enclosed tank or as you’re drifting down a river, will deliver benefits. Submergence takes the relationship even further (though to float implies at least partial submergence) and opens up yet another set of ways to relate to water and the topic of the fourth panel. Again, it was a fascinating and eclectic group of presenters.
Bruce Becker, a physician from the University of Washington, reported on his research using water immersive therapies. His extensive body of research shows how valuable even shallow immersion—with water up to one’s shoulders—can be for the body (e.g, Becker, 2011). Most of his work and practice have been in pool settings. The physiological benefits are remarkable, as immersion significantly increases blood flow to the kidneys, for instance, and the relaxation benefits are equally great.
James Nestor, author of the best selling book DEEP, took us on an amazing story of water immersion of a deeper sort. He reports on the remarkable story of freedivers, who risk their lives to dive and swim to incredible depths (some up to 700 feet). One of the more fascinating aspects of the story is discovery of the ways in which the human body is able to adapt and protect itself at these incredible depths. The “master switch of life,” a set of protective reflexes that shifts blood flow to the body’s core and lowers heart beat to conserve oxygen, kicks in. This is more convincing evidence about the watery origins and deep connections we have to oceans and water, embedded in our basic biology.
So what about submergence in cities? How does this concept relate to modern urban planning and emerging ideas of blue urbanism? One is the possibility of swimmable waters in and near cities—harbors, ports, near-shore waters of various sorts. There certainly is a trend in cities aspiring to swimmable (and fishable) waters as an enhancement to quality of life and health. Cities such as Copenhagen have famously opened public swimming areas in the hearts of their former ports where, in the past, industrial water quality would have made swimming unhealthy. Other cities from Berlin to London have taken, or are taking, steps towards outdoor urban swimming. New York city has recently unveiled a plan for creating a river swimming area as a part of its Hudson River Park.
Swimming in Copenhagen harbor.
The Becker and Nestor presentations provide interesting contrasts in submergence—from shallow to very deep. The shallower opportunities seem more present in cities, but as we seek to better understand and connect to the amazing marine life and biodiversity in coastal and marine cities, opportunities for deeper submergence should perhaps also be a goal. Here I am reminded of Steve Journée, who dives nearly daily in the Wellington (New Zealand) harbor. Urban diving may be a logical counterpart to swimming, with different but complementary benefits. Journée recently published a fascinating book of photographs of the underwater life of that harbor (Journée, 2014). Cities can be, and often are, venues for such deeper forms of submergence, and this may be good for both people and cities.
Which brings me to the beautiful underwater photography of Anne Doubilet, who has for many years traveled the world, diving and photographing for National Geographic. Her photographs are wondrous and magical and provide a visual mechanism that might, we hope, provide emotional connections to organisms and worlds otherwise hard to experience directly. A major challenge today is how to foster that deeper connection and caring for marine worlds that are largely out of sight. Few of Doubilet’s remarkable photos are taken in urban environments (though she lives in Manhattan). But they could be and, like Journée’s, they might help to forge a new understanding of and curiosity about what lies below the surface in urban areas—what is just beyond the bulkhead or pier or roadway. Doubilet’s photographic skills are needed, desperately, to capture these underwater city wonders.
Papua New Guinea: Anne Doubilet with cameras underwater on reef.
Towards a blue-minded urbanism
Traveling back home at the end of this long day, I pondered why this event felt so different to me. It was in part that I gave it—and the presenters—my full attention. But it was more than that. It was a day devoted to examining—carefully, methodically examining, from many different perspectives and angles—something that is ubiquitous: water. And the methods and presentations came at the promise and value of water in so many different ways. There were academics and researchers, but there were also physicians, activists, artists, and water practitioners of various kinds. And often they wore multiple hats, viewed the world through multiple lenses. Rarely do you find these different people and perspectives on the same agenda, rubbing shoulders at a conference. It was an intentional mash-up in these ways and I am sure that J Nichols compiled his eclectic list of invitees and presenters with this clearly in mind.
It was an exceptional day for considering a full range of ideas that don’t necessarily find their way onto urban planning syllabi—solitude, submergence, deep sleep, the need to craft and tell new stories. These are ideas, bodies of research and thought, that have truly remarkable implications for health and happiness and meaning for the future design and planning of cities.
At the beginning of the day, J Nichols handed out small blue marbles to everyone and explained how we might use them to think about our blue planet. The marble represented the small, resilient, but fragile planet on which our existence depends. Something to think about but to act upon as well. He extolled us to pass the marble on to someone else—as an act of blue gratitude. It is a creative idea to raise awareness and model some behavior we want to see. The Blue Marble Project, which began in 2009, has now seen millions of blue marbles change hands and millions of thoughts of gratitude and hope pass from person to person. I have a vision of blue marbles turning up at city council meetings, mayoral campaign stops, and community meetings of various kinds. I know I will be handing some out.
DePledge, Michael, 2009. The Blue Gym: health and wellbeing from our coasts,” Mar Pollut Bull. 2009 Jul;58(7):947-8
Eriksen, Marcus et al, 2014. “Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing Over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea,” PLOS One, December 10, found at:
Nichols, J. Wallace. 2014. Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do, New York: Little, Brown and Company.
How do the benefits of urban green infrastructure stack up against the costs? We need to better understand the services and disservices generated by urban green infrastructure in order to build better decision support tools for improved planning and management of urban ecosystems that support human health and well-being.
Urban disturbances
In August 2009, a fierce rainstorm with high winds tore through New York City, toppling more than 100 trees in Central Park and damaging many others. Adrian Benepe, then Commissioner of New York City Parks & Recreation, said that “It created more damage than I’ve seen in 30 years of working in the parks”. Just eight months later in April 2010, after consecutive days of steady rain had saturated the ground across the region, a brief but heavy windstorm with hurricane-force winds blew through the metro area. The effects were so severe in some places that it looked as if a tornado had touched down. Officials of the local electric power company (ConEdison) reported that the storm damage was the worst in 30 years. Kevin Law, president of the Long Island Power Authority, was reported as saying that the storm was “among the top five or six weather events that have impacted Long Island in the last forty years”.
In the days following the April 2010 storm, the New York City Parks Department found that more than 1,100 street trees had fallen or split, and 25 city parks crews had to be dispatched to investigate reports of trees crashing into 117 homes. By the time the worst of the weekend storm was over, at least six people were killed, countless vehicles and homes were smashed, scores of roadways were left impassable and more than 500,000 homes had lost power, many of which stayed without power for weeks.
Recent projections from global climate models suggest that NYC will be in for more of these intense disturbances (Rozensweig et al, 2009) including more frequent and intense storms. One could reasonably predict that we are in for more built infrastructure damage and more destruction to the critical green infrastructure of the city (McPhearson, 2011). And yet, these storms pale in comparison to the destruction in the last two years caused by Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Clean-up costs from Sandy in one park alone, Gateway National Park, totaled US$178 million.
Clearly, nature is not always beneficial.
Ecosystem disservices
This blog space has often focused on the benefits of urban nature, described as “ecosystem services”. Ecosystem services include stormwater absorption, climate regulation, flood prevention, air pollution removal, food and water production, carbon sequestration and storage, recreation, aesthetics, sense of place, habitat for biodiversity and more. But whether mediated by intense storm events such as the series of storms that have hit New York over the last four years, or just a function of natural ecological processes, urban green infrastructure can provide both services and disservices to urban residents. When trees fall during storm events they turn from a service to the city to a disservice.
To date, there is little research on urban ecosystem disservices, yet without taking disservices into account in urban green infrastructure planning, policy and management, we may be inadvertently shifting the balance toward decreased net ecosystem services in the future. For example, tree planting is proceeding rapidly in cities around the world with expected benefits for human health driven, for example, by air pollution removal by urban trees. Yet new research is showing this expectation to be one sided. Trees do not only remove important pollutants from the air (which they do). Urban trees can also be a source of air pollution.
A recent study by researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and colleagues have shown correlation between the amount of urban tree canopy in New York City and incidence of asthmas, wheezing, Rhinitis, and allergic sensitization to tree pollen (Lovasi et al., 2013). The study used new high resolution land cover data and a study of residents in Northern Manhattan and The Bronx to map a 0.25 km circle around each home to examine the potential relationship between asthma and asthma precursors and tree canopy cover. We already know that trees produce pollen that many residents are sensitive to, causing allergic reactions in residents, and in some cases contributing to asthma. Lovasi et al. (2013) found that when there is more tree canopy, there is more sensitization to tree pollen.
Allergic sensitivity varies with tree canopy cover (canopy cover increases from Q1 to Q4). Credit: Lovasi et al., 2013Credit: Brett Silvers
The assumption in the study is that trees in the area around residents’ homes are producing pollen that causes allergies and also leads to asthma symptoms. For each standard deviation increase in canopy cover, researchers found an overall 43% increase in allergic sensitivity. Overall, respiratory health seems to be clearly negatively related to increasing amounts of tree canopy cover. In this case, leaving storms and natural disasters aside, urban green infrastructure can be a disservice.
I don’t want to oversell the results of the Lovasi et al. (2013) study, since it is a study of a single area within a single city, and there is not enough data to draw causality between specific NYC trees and asthma sufferers in The Bronx and Northern Manhattan. As the authors note, “Future research should examine spatial variation in tree species, pollen exposure, and air quality and their link to health across diverse populations and geographic settings.” However, we clearly need to think more about both ecosystem services and disservices and how to mange ecosystems for a net positive affect on human health.
Colleagues in the Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Project have started looking more closely at services and disservices of green infrastructure in urban landscapes. In a recent literature review on the topic, Gómez-Baggethun and Barton (2013) summarize a number of urban ecosystem disservices. Ecosystem disservices of urban trees alone can include emission of VOCs and pollen, habitat for insect pests, destruction to pavement and sidewalks, falling limbs, which can be a hazard for pedestrians, and expensive maintenance for city parks managers.
Examples of Ecosystem Disservices in Urban Areas. See citations at the end of the essay. Modified from Gómez-Baggethun and Barton, 2013
Full cost/benefit environmental accounting for urban planning and management
I don’t want to suggest that trees are terrible for cities. On the contrary, my hunch is that we’ll find that the benefits ultimately outweigh the costs, but we need more research. Urban ecosystems provide a long list of benefits. For more information start with the excellent literature review at Green Cities: Good Health on the benefits of urban green infrastructure for human biophysical and mental health, crime reduction, and more.
What I do want to suggest is that urban ecosystems provide us with both services and disservices, but the balance sheet is poorly calculated on both sides, perhaps more so on the disservices side. We need better environmental accounting to truly understand the costs and benefits of urban nature. This blog space has championed, and rightly so, the benefits of urban nature for human health and well-being (among other benefits), as I have in other places. The increasing articulation of urban nature benefits is in part to generally raise awareness of the urban nature we live amongst, and also to highlight the economic and non-economic value that urban ecosystems provide to our daily lives.
However, if we are planting millions of trees in our cities, or in the case of NYC, spending over US$1 billion dollars on green infrastructure improvements, we need to do this in ways that maximize the positive impacts on human health and well-being while minimizing negative impacts. This is fundamentally impossible to get right until we have a clearer, more robust view of the full landscape of ecosystem services and disservices.
For example, in the case of tree pollen and allergy sufferers, we could study which tree pollen sources cause the most allergic sensitivity to urban residents and plant fewer of these particular tree species. Or, we could manage tree planting so that trees that are most problematic are not planted in high population density areas or areas with the highest density of allergy or asthma sufferers.
Conversely, we also need more detailed knowledge on the benefits of urban green infrastructure. For example, not all urban residents have the same access to benefits of urban ecosystems and addressing this inequity is crucial. Big Data could go a long way toward provide greater transparency in the social and ecological relationships associated with urban green infrastructure, but municipal and state governments have to do a better job of opening the data vaults.
Valuing urban green infrastructure
Fundamentally, what is needed to improve urban policy, planning, and management in this area are models that can help us evaluate the value of urban ecosystems taking into account as much information on services and disservices as research can provide. One of our greatest challenges now is to take what we have learned from recent research and expand it, while developing predictive models that can help us forecast the services and disservices of ecosystems, since ecosystems are dynamic and change over time.
How will all this investment in urban green infrastructure ultimately affect urban residents?
Will we find that a narrow focus developing new urban green infrastructure designed to maximize stormwater absorption or heat island reduction through tree shading leads to increases in asthmas rates, or some other disservice?
Not if we can get out in front of the planning with better data and complete models on both services and disservices. We have a great opportunity, perhaps even urgency, to not only improve urban ecosystems by restoring and expanding them, but to do so in ways that maximize the services while minimizing the disservices.
Altieri, M.A., Companioni, N., Cañizares, K., Murphy, C., Rosset, P., Bourque, M., Nicholls, C.I., 1999. Greening of the ‘barrios’: urban agriculture for food security in Cuba. Agriculture and Human Values 16, 131–140.
Lyytimäki, J., Sipilä, M., 2009. Hopping on one leg—the challenge of ecosystem disser- vices for urban green management. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 8, 309–315.
Lyytimäki, J., Kjerulf Petersen, L., Normander, B., Bezák, P., 2008. Nature as nuisance? Ecosystem services and disservices to urban lifestyle. Environnmental Sciences 5, 161–172.
Bixler, R.D., Floyd, M.F., 1997. Nature is scary, disgusting, and uncomfortable. Environment and Behavior 29, 443–467.
D’Amato, G., 2000. Urban air pollution and plant-derived respiratory allergy. Clinical and Experimental Allergy 30, 628–636.
We cannot love what we do not know. Unless individuals understand the benefits of wildlife in our midst, they will not appreciate the importance of wildlife to human survival in urbanised areas, and their contribution to our quality of life.
Humans have been living with wildlife since time immemorial. But with the growth of cities, people have become so distant from nature and wildlife that many think there is no native flora and fauna left in urban jungles. This alienation raised such concern in the global community that the United Nations General Assembly has designated 3 March each year as World Wildlife Day, to celebrate and raise awareness of the world’s wild animals and plants.
Fortunately, despite the high rate of urbanisation in Singapore, we can still find rich native biodiversity here that we can appreciate, enjoy and be enchanted by.
Not many people realise that Singapore has around 392 native bird species; 324 butterfly species—compared to 59 native species found in the United Kingdom; and 122 dragonfly species—more than double the 57 species recorded in Britain.
With buildings ever encroaching into nature spaces, it is inevitable that people will encounter more wildlife in their backyards.
In many cases, though, just because people see animals such as long-tailed macaques and pangolins more often, their numbers may not have actually increased. Wildlife has simply become more visible. So we will have to re-learn how to live with wildlife in our midst.
Human-wildlife interactions cannot be pigeon-holed. Some people love wildlife and are thrilled at a chance encounter with a hornbill or pangolin; some shriek at the sight of a bat or curse at the noisy calls of the koel, a cuckoo commonly seen here. Yet foreign visitors envy us because we are lulled to sleep by the chirps of night-jars right in the heart of the city—a luxury they can experience only in remote areas back home.
In Austin, Texas, residents and tourists queue up to watch the 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats that reside in the underside of the city’s Congress Avenue Bridge during the summer. They are seen as a natural wonder to behold in a city. But in Singapore, some say that the free-roaming smooth-coated otters should be kept in zoos instead.
A long-tailed macaque, Macaca fascicularis, and hikers resting at the summit of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Singapore. Photo: Jayasri Lakshminarayanan
Contrary to the complaints by some members of the public here about monkeys being a nuisance and that there are too many around, the research findings of an internationally well-regarded primatologist, Professor Agustin Fuentes from the University of Notre Dame in the US, observed that “the macaques of Singapore are healthy, at a reasonable density and have a low impact in conflict with humans… In fact, the lowest of any place where this has been studied.”
He attributed the primary stimulus of the monkey-human conflict in Singapore to the easy access of human food, and residences built directly inside the monkey’s natural range.
In his recent book, Handbook of Biophilic Planning & Design, Professor Timothy Beatley observed that “coexistence with wildlife in cities has become an important goal and challenge in cities”.
It has never been more important to live peacefully with what’s left of our wildlife, as they are crucial for physical and psychological health.
Research studies in Japan have shown that an experimental group who went for walks in forests registered a lower pulse rate and lower blood pressure, compared to a group that walked in a city area. Wildlife is also a good indicator of the environment, as powerfully illustrated in Rachel Carson’s influential book Silent Spring.
How can Singapore achieve this?
A detailed plan is already in place. The National Parks Board (NParks) has intensified its biodiversity conservation efforts with a Nature Conservation Masterplan. This has four thrusts: conservation of key habitats; habitat enhancement, restoration and species recovery; applied research in conservation biology and planning; and community stewardship and outreach in nature.
Under NParks’ jurisdiction are four nature reserves, approximately 350 parks, 300 km of park connectors and more than 2,500 ha of roadside greenery. The agency also promotes skyrise greenery encompassing 72 ha of green roofs.
The Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Central Catchment Nature Reserve, Sungei Buloh Nature Reserve, Labrador Nature Reserve, and Pulau Ubin form the core biodiversity areas that are key gene pool repositories—which are buffered and supplemented by the nature parks (such as Dairy Farm, Springleaf, and the recently launched Chestnut) as well as parks (like Pasir Ris Park, Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park and Coney Island Park). Park connectors and streetscapes planted with the appropriate plants can increase foraging grounds for wildlife.
With habitat enhancement and restoration efforts in all the areas under NParks’ management, the quality and quantity of sites that can be used by wildlife for feeding, foraging and breeding have multiplied.
These initiatives might sound easy, but they have to be supported by reliable data rigorously collected through comprehensive biodiversity surveys, long-term quantitative monitoring of plant and wildlife populations, agent-based modelling and other studies, all based on sound science.
For instance, in natural ecosystems, a complex food web evolves with predators and prey controlling populations. The more humans impose change on such ecosystems, the more this natural balance will be disturbed. Then, others have to intervene to hopefully restore this equilibrium. In cities, the top predators have generally disappeared, and humans have to assume this role by proper management before the problem arises—guided by science. There are alternative methods to culling, such as reduction of food supply and sterilisation, for instance.
No matter how much effort is put in place to reduce human-wildlife conflict, human behaviour—like the feeding of wild animals that might be well-intentioned, or the provoking of wildlife, for instance—would negate any well-planned practices.
Hence, this journey requires everyone’s commitment and participation, including the public, private sector, schools, tertiary institutions, non-governmental organisations and government agencies.
We are all stakeholders. Community stewardship and outreach are crucial to the success of measures taken to conciliate human-wildlife interaction.
Prominent conservationist E. O. Wilson popularised the term biophilia to describe “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms”. When sustainability experts were looking for a city to film which represented this spirit, they chose Singapore, in recognition of its greening efforts as a Garden City evolving into a City In A Garden.
Keeping converts committed
Keen naturalists will always find ways to connect with nature. Conducting wildlife training workshops, bio blitz, nature watches and citizen science projects allows enthusiasts to add another dimension to their commitment.
Citizen science is the practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research, including data monitoring and collection. With these organised activities, they not only observe wildlife but also systematically document our native plants and animals as citizen scientists. They also carry out hands-on habitat enhancement and restoration projects, such as reforestation, weeding out invasive alien species and doing coastal cleanups that are beneficial to wildlife.
Armed with these rich experiences and knowledge, they are the best advocates to educate the unconvinced.
Nonetheless, there is a segment of population—the unconverted—who are uncomfortable with or even fear wildlife. The challenge is to educate and convince them of the benefits of wildlife. Neither should we neglect the converted, whose commitment must be sustained.
Winning over the unconverted
We cannot love what we do not know. Unless individuals understand the benefits of wildlife in our midst, they will not appreciate the importance of wildlife to human survival in urbanised areas, and their contribution to our quality of life.
People are fascinated by the presence of the smooth-coated otters in urban settings in Singapore. Photo: Jeffrey Teo
To convert the unconverted, we need to create opportunities for them to take part in public awareness events, especially when they are run by enthusiastic nature lovers. This is why the annual Festival of Biodiversity, organised by National Parks Board and the Biodiversity Roundtable to celebrate biodiversity, is always held in a popular mall.
We should instill the values of biodiversity conservation in young children and students. Incorporating biodiversity into the school and tertiary institution curricula opens them to the science and the art of biodiversity conservation in our formal education.
Conclusions
With forward planning, collaboration among the people, government agencies and the private sector, and a biophilic ethos supported by sound science, Singapore is heading in the direction of harmonious coexistence between people and wildlife. For our survival and quality of life, we have no other choice.
How to bring together nature, fitness, and public transportation.
A few weeks ago, my partner, Lluís, and I wanted to go for a two-day trek, to test some camping gear, to sleep outdoors, and to listen to birds while walking under the shade of pine trees.
But we didn’t want to make a big deal of it. This wasn’t meant to be a trip to a faraway place requiring lots of planning, expenses, or days off from work. It was a spur of the moment decision, a little escape from the city noise, traffic, and summer heat baking concrete buildings. We wanted a quick way to “get our nature on.”
Luckily, because we live in Barcelona, this turned out to be a pretty simple thing to do.
One early Friday morning at dawn, free of work commitments, we grabbed our backpacks (which now sit ready to go near our front door because we’re planning a multi-year walking trip and spontaneously head out for training hikes) and walked out the door.
We strolled 10 minutes to the city’s main train station, paid €2.15 for a 19-minute regional train ride, and found the red and white trail marks near the arrival train station. We climbed a flight of stairs, followed a paved path under a highway overpass, and, a few minutes later, we were all alone listening to our feet crunching dirt.
Now and again, a runner would zip by or a couple of cyclists would pass us. Occasionally, we would see the rooftops and terraces of the housing sub-divisions at the end of edge towns, cross a busy street to pick up the trail again, or hear dogs barking from behind fences. Even so, for long stretches of time, we were out in the woods by ourselves and lost in our thoughts along parts of the GR 92 trail that loops behind the densely populated towns circling Barcelona. We were never far away from home–and at some points we could see our neighborhood in the distance–but it certainly felt like we were.
These are the kind of things I have come to love about Catalonia and my adopted hometown of Barcelona. It seems like a little thing, something obvious and logical: Let’s design nature trails and outdoor fitness routes close to cities and accessible via public transportation. Unfortunately, I think it’s less common than it should be.
Walking trials loop around Barcelona city and throughout Catalonia, allowing locals to get their nature on within a few train stops. Photo: Jennifer Baljko
Shifting views of nature
I grew up in the United States, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Talk about life in the city. During my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, my idea of nature, green spaces, and parks was marked by images of sad-looking oak trees, broken swings, basketball hoops without nets, chain fences dividing concrete tennis courts lined with weeds, crushed beer cans, and the occasional used drug needle (Thankfully, urban revitalization initiatives and scores of Manhattan-based workers looking for affordable housing on the other side of the Hudson River have changed parts of Jersey City for the better. Today, there are more green spots with improved care and maintenance. With any luck, kids living there today will have better memories of playing in the parks than I did.)
For anything that looked like “real nature,” we had to load up the car and do a grand expedition to some place like the Delaware Water Gap a couple hours away. Those were rare events and logistically complicated ones because of my father’s work schedule and coordinating the whims of five kids. I admired nature from the backseat of the car as we moved along New Jersey’s highways and I remember staring out into the clumps of trees lining the road’s shoulder lanes, wondering what was behind them. In those younger years, though, it never occurred to me that I could go explore the woods or that there was an invitation on the table waiting for me to do that.
In the late 1990s, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and lived in and around the city for about 9 years. My idea of nature changed there and became forever linked to health and fitness. Being outdoors meant “doing something outdoors.” Nearly everyone I met was a marathon runner, a 100-mile cyclist, an Ironman triathlete, or did some other sport that involved being outdoors for hours at time. On the weekends, besides their regular exercise routines, people piled into their cars and headed out to Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, or along windy, coastal roads with breathtaking views and redwood forests. I fell into that rhythm, too. I would run several times a week in random parks in and close to San Francisco, and would be immensely grateful that I was there and for things my eyes were seeing. At some point, I realized I was stopping to smell the roses, literally, in Golden Gate’s rose garden or pausing to pay momentary homage to blooming calla lilies before trudging onwards. Even though my daily encounters with nature were confined to the local parks, the rest of the West Coast had many outdoorsy things to do, and hopping in my car to do them seemed normal.
Now that I have lived in Catalonia longer than I lived in the Bay Area, my appreciation for nature has shifted again, but in a subtle way that I have just started to more fully understand. Whether it’s because we have good weather most of the year or because we’re in Europe and life is just different than in the U.S., the idea of spending time outdoors shows up here in less assuming ways. For instance, Catalans will say, without any pretension, “vaig a fer muntanya.” This literally translates to “I do the mountain,” but what they mean by that is that they will go for a hike, rock climb, or walk somewhere out in the mountains. They’re not usually doing this as part of a competitive race to prove courage or to achieve lofty personal fitness goals. They would simply say that they want to be outside enjoying the mountains and breathing fresh air. The novelty of that struck me when I turned the phrase around in my native-English mind. “Oh, you can walk out in the woods and go do the mountain, just like that? You can walk for the sake of walking, and take in whatever you see?”
Although many locals drive to do the mountain and some parks can only be reached by auto, Lluís and I don’t own a car. It’s not practical for our everyday lives. So, getting our nature on depends on where our two feet and local trains and buses take us. And, surprisingly, we have no shortage of choices.
Caption: Common things in Barcelona: Buses and signs pointing the direction to a greenway where locals walk and cycle. Photo: Jennifer Baljko
Making nature accessible
In almost any direction from our Barcelona apartment, we’ll eventually hit some green patch sooner or later. A few blocks from home we have Montjuïc Park, a big open space that makes living in the city bearable. We call it our backyard, and that’s where we spend a lot of our time “doing something outdoors”: running, going for an evening promenade, or general de-stressing. For longer day walks close to the city, we trek through Barcelona’s streets and then up to Collserola Park, which boosts 8,000-hectares of natural goodness, has lots of well-marked trails, and can be reached by local trains. Or we can walk along the greenway linking Barcelona with neighboring towns and parks.
Fan out farther from the city, say a couple hours by bus or train, and you could be criss-crossing vineyards; smelling fennel, rosemary and thyme; or doing leg-crunching ups and downs in the foothills. There’s access to routes with views of the sea or snow-capped peaks or rolling hills of Mediterranean flora.
To their credit, the Catalan government and local municipalities have done a good job connecting the embedded cultural idea of “vaig a fer muntanya” with modern-day, health-oriented fitness programs and public transportation accessibility.
The Catalan government, for instance, has a census of the region’s sport and equipment availability. This particular statistic caught my eye: under the category of “sport activity areas,” there are 2,791 installations around Catalonia, including walking trails, protected rock climbing routes, greenways, and activity zones in urban, sea, or aerial areas. And there’s plenty of information online about combining train rides with mountaineering, hiking routes, walking guides and maps, and touring national parks. (While I focus on walking options, because that’s my primary way of being in nature, I would be remiss if I did not point to the multitude of other ways locals “get their nature on” that don’t involve walking; some alternatives options are found here).
Provincial and city tourism offices usually have brochures or maps with outdoor itineraries encouraging people to appreciate nature, engage in healthy exercise, and take in local sights or landmarks. Many of these experiences are waiting to be had within short distances of train or bus stations.
Many tourist offices around Catalonia have maps and brochures outlining local trails and providing information about the bio-diversity and landmarks you’ll find along the way. Photo: Jennifer Baljko
It’s hard for me to say if my relationship with nature has changed because I live in a place where nature is within closer reach to me, or if my growing need to have nature play a bigger role in my everyday life and how I choose to stay fit has increased my awareness of how much accessibility I now have to it. In the end, they feed each other’s motivation and leave me feeling grateful that I’m no longer admiring nature from the backseat of a car, but instead folding it seamlessly into my urban lifestyle.
Through teams of researchers and students working collaboratively with community arts we accentuated the connection between the university and the local community, galvanised mutual learning and the value of slow research.
Know the feeling when every project seems to require a huge amount of work in a short amount of time, for very little reward??
This seems to be the way of the world, whether you’re a practitioner, a researcher, or a community activist (or all three).
I was prompted to reflect on this when I (guiltily) turned down a request to collaborate on a project which involved working in an area I didn’t know, to produce desk research and broad community and stakeholder engagement including with “hard-to-reach” communities, and based on those two elements to deliver regeneration recommendations—all with minimally funded contact time.
The more I thought about this, the crazier it seemed and the less guilty I felt—an impossible task to do well, with huge responsibility invested in the output. How could I go into an unknown area, build relationships of trust with all of the businesses, communities, and hard-to-reach residents, understand the existing networks, relationships, assess the place, the physical and socio-economic realities, the scope of the proposed regeneration … and recommend how that regeneration should unfold over the course of a generation just by walking around for a few days, collecting some surveys and 30 minute interviews.
This made me reflect in a positive light on how my work has unfolded over several years in one of the most deprived parts of London, on its eastern edge: Thames Ward in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Alongside colleagues and partners from a range of backgrounds, University of East London Sustainability Research Institute has developed incremental projects and relationships that together build a more substantive contribution to our local communities and places over time. Situated to the east of the city, adjacent to the Thames, it is an area that has experienced industrial decline over a long period but is now one of the most dramatically changing areas of the city. We have been working in Thames Ward for almost 20 years, with businesses, regeneration agencies, the local authority and residents and community groups on a range of research projects, large and small.
Thames Ward is home to 1950s council estates as well as low-tech industry, and it has a network of neglected green and blue spaces as well as a 2.5 km stretch of the river Thames. It is also the site of one of Europe’s largest regeneration projects, Barking Riverside, with 10,800 homes and infrastructure being built over a 30-year period, adjacent to the existing communities. The development has been designed with Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems at its heart, giving a distinctive appearance to the new neighbourhood in terms of an inter-connected network of retention ponds, swales, green roofs and rain gardens.
Barking Riverside, Sustainability Research Institute, UEL. Photo: Lisa PeacheyBarking Riverside, Sustainability Research Institute, UEL. Photo: Lisa Peachey
When I started working there in 2013, I soon found that—although the area looked lovely to my eyes—most residents had no idea why their green spaces were so unusually designed, for example so that grass areas were not flat and mown to enable children to kick a football. Or why there was so much water around, breeding mosquitoes. One residents’ association member said the ponds should be drained and concreted over. Others thought that the fact the place looks nice did not make up for the fact there were no shops or community facilities, and public transport links were so poor. This was all rather salutary feedback to someone passionate about sustainable urban design and nature in cities!
My learning experiences have grown exponentially over the years as I get to know more residents and communities across Thames Ward, in the old and new housing areas. This learning has been fundamental in shaping the form and scope of our interventions. I have become much more aware of the need to co-create research and intervention design, and to be flexible to follow rather than lead the direction of research and practice if I want to truly “engage with” and have meaningful impact for residents. Perhaps the most important lesson has been to listen and observe—and that we often learn much more when we do that rather than when we conduct surveys. (Aside: we’ve also learnt that residents get fed up of endless surveys!)
What have been the results of this “listening and following” research and practice? We’ve learnt that local residents do not know about their local environment, even that they are close to the River Thames, but they would like to know more. We’ve learnt that people in both the older and newer communities each think the other area has “all the good stuff”—and indeed at the start of our engagement that these two distinct communities did not consider themselves part of a coherent place, and—despite the regeneration “pitch” that existing neighbourhoods would benefit—there appeared to be little attention for the older estates. This led to us playing a more pro-active role in partnering with others to help shape the social development and local associations with nature.
For example, we mobilised student power to develop two projects with Thames View Infants school—increasing the landscape value and interest for part of the playing fields and designing and building an outdoor shelter for the pupils. You can read more about that project here.
As part of the NHS England Healthy New Town programme, we worked on a cycling project and a Blue Spaces project in Thames Ward. The latter involved developing a map of the whole of Thames Ward, showing the green and blue spaces, community assets and social infrastructure and walking routes and times, in partnership with Living Streets, a walking charity. We used the map as a process for engaging with residents and stakeholders: a series of led walks, taking the map to various community groups and community events, and we had drop in sessions to share the evolving map and get feedback for the final version over the course of several months.
During this work, I met Susie Miller Oduniyi, a community arts practitioner and this led to further in-depth work in the area, we became involved in a new piece of work, the making of a local film by ‘New View Arts’. We were able to support this community-led project, which utilised a blend of local history, ecology and art. It enabled us to mobilise interdisciplinary teams and students to become actively involved in community development, recognising the value of building community relationships through a slow and consistent community engagement process.
I’ll pass the story over to Susie now, who will explain how we slotted in our expertise and student-power to their community arts projects.
Susie Miller Oduniyi—New View Arts
As an artist, I have been creating arts-led engagement projects on Thames View Estate for many years, building opportunities for local people to tell their stories. The initial idea to create an arts project that engaged local young people and children came from residents and members of the local tenants association, many of whom have been residents of the Thames View Estate for over 50 years. They were concerned about the lack of activities for local teenagers, residents Joyce Cracknell and Pam Dumbleton named the project New View Arts and actively supported and encouraged my Arts Council Application. I wanted to create a film that captured the unique local history of past Creekmouth Villagers while providing volunteering opportunities for young people who were not engaging with education or training, developing their skills while providing much needed arts provision for local children. New View Arts aims to inspire local residents to connect to their history through the arts, in a an area that has a constantly evolving demographic and where levels of arts engagement are low, only 25% of people in Barking and Dagenham spend time doing a creative, artistic, theatrical, or music activity or a craft according to The Active Lives Survey 2015-2017.
In March 2019 two artists carried out street-based engagement in Thames Ward to advertise the project to children and parents and engage young people who were not in education and training. We engaged 10 of these young people; four volunteered consistently throughout the project and six were involved in a lesser capacity, attending screenings and other community events throughout the project.
We ran six Saturday workshops from March to April with the four young volunteers (14-24 years old) and 28 local children (8-13 years old). The volunteers took on administrative and monitoring responsibilities, filming and photography, leading activities/games and facilitating exercises with the children. We invited members of The Creekmouth Preservation Society (CPS) to the sessions to be interviewed by the children and young people and share stories of living in Creekmouth Village, which was washed away in the great flood of 1953.
In April the four young volunteers took part in an intergenerational Ecology Course ran by the Sustainability Research Institute, University of East London (UEL). The course ran for 2.5 days and included classroom-based workshops, exploring the history of London’s water systems, walking in Thames Ward blue spaces and local wildlife and a day out to Walthamstow Wetlands. The volunteers supported the workshops and developed their camera and sound skills. Each of the young volunteers received a certificate from University of East London for completing the course.
In August we held a summer programme of six workshops for 8 children, supported by the four volunteers, this included trips to Creekmouth Open Space to photograph, explore and film the area. We worked with Andrew Brown a photographer involved in documenting the local area as part of his MA in Photography, the children and young volunteers had the use of cameras to take their own photographs.
We held our first screening on the 31 October 2019 at the Sue Bramley Centre; we also held a screening for the CPS and their family and friends. Our final screening was held at The Sue Bramley Centre/ Thames View Library in December and was part of a wider Christmas celebration and included an exhibition by Andrew Brown of photographs of the project including ones taken by the children and young people. You can watch the 11-minute film on YouTube here:
Through our evaluation process with the young people, they cited that they felt that they had the opportunity to lead the project and gain experience and skills in an environment that they felt safe.Underpinning my engagement process is the principle of “Starting where people are at”, this ensures that the work highlights where the participants are starting from, in terms of their personal experience and skills and therefore produces a process that is engaging and relevant.
Building trust with the young people through consistent contact was important to keeping the young people engaged, finding opportunities and events that that artists and young people could attend together created contact time outside the workshops. This gave the young people the opportunity to meet local residents and other organisations, professionals working locally.
Through the creative workshop, the filming and making process allowed the children to immerse themselves into the narrative and really bring local history to life and build genuine intergenerational relationships with the members of Creekmouth Preservation Society. The film has also ensured that local older residents and past residents of Creekmouth Village have preserved their story on film, which we are continuing to share locally and wider afield.
A linked project we have developed is called Shed Life. The project began in October 2018 initiated by local resident Pam Dumbleton and myself (Susie); we initially received £5k from Healthy New Towns (Barking Riverside) to deliver Phase 1 of the project (October2018-March 2019), which included the engagement of local men and the community within a regular weekly drop-in workshop to form a Steering Group. There is a real opportunity for local residents to be central to the development of our estate and small grass roots projects like ours really can make a difference to people who are at risk of being left behind.
According to Public Health England Barking and Dagenham has the lowest life expectancy rate for men in the London Region, we want to provide local health related activities for men to make positive changes to their own health. A local space for men to find friendship, will support their physical and mental health and directly improve men’s lives and opportunities and contribute to our fantastic community here on the Thames View Estate.
We want to make a community space for men to connect, converse, and create. Providing activities chosen by the men to enjoy together. The purpose is to help reduce loneliness and isolation, to utilise the skills and talents that men can share with each other and create a project that is ultimately led by local men themselves. We have integrated the project with the four young people who volunteered on the New View Arts Project. The young volunteers are involved in developing the Shed with the men and are part of the steering group. We envisage that once the “shed” has been created the Shed Life Steering Group will manage the space with support from the TTRA and the Sue Bramley Centre, the local community hub.
We have a regular group of 10 local men (aged 37 – 75) and the four New View Arts volunteers and other local residents pop in as it is a regular point of contact each week to share information or just have a cup of tea. We have had a very positive response from local people and organisations to the idea of a “shed” and the men have enjoyed meeting new people especially the young people, who they have formed very strong bonds with. The group provides regular peer support for the men, young people and families. This has become an important local support network where the group feels safe to bring issues and get support. The majority of the men and young people have complex health and social issues including: mental health (depression and schizophrenia), learning needs, long-term sickness, mobility issues, bullying, domestic violence and isolation. The men have enjoyed being at the centre of the community and finding a space where they can share their problems and get safe advice and support. We have a robust Safeguarding policy and experienced project leaders and we link in with the staff at the Sue Bramley Centre who supports us with referrals to other agencies.
The group have discussed their ideas for the shed and were very keen that they wanted to create a space for the whole community to use, they have enjoyed being at the heart of the community and came up with a list of project aspirations and drew sketches of their ideas and named the project “Shed Life” The majority of the men have a number of health & mobility issues so the core activities they have identified at this stage are “soft”, including photography, model making, gardening and bird watching. This has all fed into the Stage 1 designs by the architect Sarah Bland, Studio Wic.
In March we held an event to celebrate the end of Phase 1 of the project, with a film screening of “A Northern Soul” with a Q&A with the Director Sean McAlister. The event included an exhibition of portraits of the group by photographer Andrew Brown and was well attended, allowing us to publicise the project further to local people and galvanise support. In April the men with the New View Arts young volunteers enjoyed taking part in the Blue Spaces course ran by the UEL Sustainability Research Institute exploring the local ecology and waterways. The course was funded by Healthy New Towns and allowed us to offer enriching activities to learn about our local environment and discuss our plans for “Shed Life” moving forward.
The group have been collaborating with the architecture department masters students at the University of East London (UEL) to design the shed guided by Alan Chandler Head of Architecture and we have gathered some amazing support from local companies who are providing pro bono support with surveying the land and laying the concrete foundations. Thanks to Sarah McCready, Barking Riverside London, we have made links with amazing companies working locally in Thames Ward. Thanks to Chris Dransfield and Johanna Ahlstrom at Barking Riverside Extension project (Morgan Sindall VolkerFitzpatrick Joint Venture)and Keith Brennan and Denis Cormican, PLS Civil Engineering, we have had a site survey, which has contributed to our planning application for the Shed. We were also lucky to have the Master Architecture students from University of East London help us with the planning application process as part of their course, supported and advised – again pro bono – by Ed Hanson at Barton Willmore.
We have successfully raised some funds from the National Lottery for materials to build the shed, which the men will do with support from volunteers, and we generated extra funding for decking and ramps to make sure the shed is wheelchair accessible through a crowd-funding campaign. We are now planning for the shed to be constructed in Spring 2020. I am now fundraising to deliver training with the steering group to develop their leadership skills to manage the space for local people.
Back to Paula …
Through the Sustainability Research Institute team of researchers and students working collaboratively with New View Arts and Shed Life we accentuated the connection between the university and the local community, galvanised mutual learning and the value of slow research. We have built a mutual respect and opened many opportunities for further community development and most importantly demystified further education for local young people.
Susie Miller Oduniyi is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Humourisk, a Community Interest Company that create performance and art that redefines perceptions, co-creating work with communities and artists through creative exchange. Shed Life and New View Arts are current projects that have been co-created with the communities of Thames View Estate in Barking.
White Elephant: 2. figurative. A burdensome or costly objective, enterprise, or possession, esp. one that appears magnificent; a financial liability.
With reference to the story that the kings of Siam (now Thailand)
would make a present of a white elephant to courtiers who had displeased them,
in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance.[i]
I.
Often when I write or speak about Baltimore, I begin by contextualizing the city as divided. I refer to Dr. Lawrence Brown’s conceptualization of the “White L and the Black Butterfly” to describe the deep racial segregation that has been meticulously crafted for decades.[ii] In other cases, I use a 1.32 mile stretch of abandoned interstate that bisects west Baltimore as an example of the many deliberate steps made by the city and federal government to fracture black neighborhoods.[iii] Indeed, Donald Trump’s 2019 summertime screed riffed on this familiar narrative when he declared the city filthy, rat infested, and dangerous.[iv]
The history of green infrastructure implementation in Baltimore shows that what communities care about and care for has been co-opted into practices of maintenance for others. The current state of many facilities demonstrates this approach is not effective. It is time to experiment with a new way forward.
Even in a city that prides itself on its rough-around-the-edges-charm, the tweet resurfaced an uncomfortable truth. Division and violence appear as natural facts attached to the city. Those of us who call Baltimore home are simultaneously victims of, and complicit in, the continued maintenance of its bifurcation. This experience is not evenly felt. The injustices of redlining, public schools scaffolded by lead lined pipes, and racist policing practices disproportionately cause harm to residents who are black, poor, or otherwise pushed to the margins.
Yet, the lived experience of trauma and civic disregard are a near universal for all of Baltimore’s residents. To live in the city and pretend that its ills are concentrated in specific geographies, cultures, and people, demonstrates a willful choice to disregard the moral obligations of civic participation. This choice also makes the social and material systems of division durable, ensuring that the spatial racism of segregation continues to define the environment.[v] Thus, it seems necessary to work towards a different narrative of a divided Baltimore. This alternative telling will refuse to naturalize deliberate practices of exclusion and racism as a matter of fact, and instead considers the perpetuation of these systems as matters of maintenance—that is, they are actively maintained by governance practices.[vi]
II.
When I arrived in Baltimore two years ago as a postdoctoral researcher assigned to study residential perceptions of green infrastructure, I was repeatedly told that the problem with these technologies was a lack of regular maintenance. The story goes something like this: For the past 15 years, the city of Baltimore and a variety of environmentally focused non-profit organizations have built landscaped facilities, such as bio-swales or raingardens, to counter the environmental impacts of urban stormwater runoff.
When it rains, water flows over impervious surfaces before reaching a storm sewer. In a separated sewer system like Baltimore’s where runoff remains separate from household wastewater and effluent, the discharge flows directly into receiving water bodies. Impervious surfaces, such as roads, sidewalks, and buildings, house a number of nutrients—nitrogen and phosphorus- as well as other chemicals, oils, and microscopic refuse. When it rains, those pollutants travel into the storm sewer where these particles eventually find a home, past the outfall pipes to our lakes, rivers, and bays.
A project that was intended to be a park with stormwater management features, but which was never opened to the public. Photo: Amanda K. Phillips de Lucas.
Green stormwater infrastructure slows or stops the quick conveyance of nutrients during rain events and helps to achieve larger environmental regulatory goals. To this day, Maryland stands at forefront of enacting strong, statewide, environmental regulations. Popularly, this history traces back to the state’s reliance on the Chesapeake Bay for both commerce and recreation. The state was an original signatory of the landmark 1987 Chesapeake Bay Agreement, which set actionable benchmarks to restore the ecological function of the watershed.[vii]
Maryland’s first regulations addressing stormwater quality came in the mid 1980s. This led to the widespread adoption of stormwater ponds, broadly referred to as “best management practices” or BMP’s. These installations might be considered the first generation of green infrastructure. Generally, a grass swale or pond would be built to retain or detain stormwater. Facilities were often quite large but required minimal maintenance through mowing and clearing of drains.[viii]
Subsequent regulations moved away from the large-scale management practices and instead mandated environmental site design, or smaller, discrete installations that mimic the natural, pre-development characteristics of a site. Environmental site design came with new maintenance burdens including plant and filter media replacement, cleaning of inlets, and regular trash removal.
If one constant persistently emerges in the history of stormwater infrastructure, as John William Knapp dryly put it in his 1965 report “Economic Study of Urban and Highway Drainage Systems”, it is that storm sewers are not “self-liquidating”. Knapp, ever the engineer, used this phrase to signify that storm sewers will never produce value or provide any direct return on investment.[ix] Indeed, the outcry in Maryland around the passage of a “stormwater management fee”, publicly rebranded the “rain tax”, demonstrates the durability of Knapp’s words. Not only is the value of stormwater management only vaguely perceptible or indirectly valuable, paying for the function provokes widespread public outrage.[x]
So, on one side, we might isolate the problem of green infrastructure in a general trend of neglect, disinvestment, or at the very, least minimal investment, associated with the long-term maintenance of the storm sewer system. On the other side, the State of Maryland requires all municipalities to comply with environmental regulations to improve water quality through the mitigation of nonpoint source runoff. The admixture of these two factors means that environmental solutions to urban stormwater runoff are both mandatory and financially challenged from the start.
III.
Complicating matters further in the city of Baltimore is that a number of non-profit organizations regularly construct and implement green infrastructure in collaboration with community groups, churches, or neighborhood associations. These projects are often done with the overall well-meaning impulse and justification of restoring environmental and neighborhood health through community greening.
The multitude of implementers has produced a secondary problem of illegibility. No single agency or institution knows where all of the facilities in the city are located. This is a nightmare for those looking to meet regulatory requirements, as well as those hoping to track the beneficial impacts of a facility within a neighborhood.
While some of Baltimore’s green stormwater infrastructure currently sits in good condition, other sites are functionally abandoned. The reasons given for this bifurcation of technological failure are plentiful. The Department of Public Works struggles to train workers to tend to the plantings.[xi] Non-profit organizations who build facilities rely on community maintenance agreements that lack binding enforcement mechanisms.[xii] Residents complain to 311 (the government’s complaint line) that facilities are unkempt and suddenly a site is mowed down overnight.[xiii]
Despite the multitude of breakdowns, engineers, project managers, landscape architects, and city planners all remark that once the problems of maintenance are solved, the number of facilities will expand, providing residents with a variety of loosely defined ecosystem services. The technology is inevitable, or at the very least desirable. Some stakeholders express that more robust and resilient social systems are needed. These systems might look like incentives or disincentives to encourage regular upkeep, or they might take the form of work force development geared at training workers for the green jobs economy.
I’ve come to understand through my conversations and interviews with residents, city officials, and other stakeholders that the problem of facility maintenance serves as a red herring. A lack of maintenance, the trash littered swales, and the browning vegetation signal a more devastating absence. Focusing so narrowly on technological function has neglected the system, or more appropriately, systems, at work within urban space.
The failure to care for facilities and make them persist into the future is in itself a form of systemic maintenance that perpetuates environmental segregation into the future. By failing to develop a system to adequately keep track of, monitor, and maintain green infrastructure as a public asset, the green visionaries of years past demonstrated that project completion mattered more than future durability. In the process of trying to create a more sustainable city, institutional stakeholders effectively created an unsustainable system.
My critique should be countered with the recognition that structural hurdles stand in the way of planning for maintenance. For instance, The Chesapeake Bay Trust, who gives money for green infrastructure projects does not provide funding for maintenance because they cannot commit project “funding in perpetuity”.[xiv] Still, millions of dollars from the state and federal government have been paid out to support these projects with the promise that residents and community groups will take care of facility maintenance.[xv]
I need to highlight the absurdity of this logic for a moment. The obligation to maintain some public assets falls not on hired work crews or trained professionals, but on residents who supposedly have the time to pick up trash, remove weeds, and clear sediment. What makes this irony even more perverse is the near constant mention of “planning for equity” in relation to green infrastructure projects. How can city greening be equitable when the ability to devote time and bodily labor is itself a marker of relative privilege and physical capacity?
Recognizing this, I became interested in how residents understand their civic obligation to care for and maintain urban space when the state has a history of neglect and private capital steps back once the ribbon cutting concludes. Specifically, how do residents describe their experience of providing maintenance to public spaces and facilities in the face of these obstacles?
IV.
During process of interviewing residents about their perceptions of green infrastructure, I learned about their relationship to the urban environment in Baltimore. Those I interviewed for this project have predominantly been women, many of whom profess to possessing a strong “environmental ethic”. In addition to these similarities many, although not all, participants live in neighborhoods in the upper categories of the City’s housing market typology.[xvi] These neighborhoods are generally well established, relatively affluent, and have fewer vacant properties. I draw attention to this to mark that the experiences I am about to discuss are not representative of the city at-large, but do point to the emergence of shared challenges that residents face when implementing green infrastructure projects.
A small neighborhood in East Baltimore occupies three squared city blocks. Within these blocks are three rain gardens. Each facility is primarily maintained by Dana (all names in this essay are changed), a long-time neighborhood resident. When she talks about her experience with the rain gardens she emphasizes how proud she is of her work and how she feels that the gardens are “an advantage to the neighborhood”.[xvii] For Dana, her investment in the maintenance and care of the rain gardens is an extension of what she calls her “personal ethos”. She told me, “I believe… that it’s my responsibility to make the city the best that it can be, it’s my responsibility to make our neighborhood the best that it can be.”
Still, she harbors frustration about the lack of support she receives from the city to continue the upkeep. To keep a rain garden functional, plants need to be replaced, trash disposed of, blockages cleared, and weeds removed. All of these activities produce yard waste. Dana has called the city to try and arrange a bulk trash pick-up to no avail. Instead, she carts the waste in a wheelbarrow to her house and hopes she doesn’t exceed her weekly allotment for trash pick-up.
In other interviews, respondents tended to view the work of the environmental non-profits as generally positive, with a few reservations. Some described how organizations became very hands off once a project was over, making communication about continuing maintenance challenging. Still, in face of these challenges, respondents placed blame on the city, rather than the implementing organization, for failing to adequately respond to instances of curb breakage or filter-material failure.
Others mentioned the “whiteness” of environmental nonprofits and a broader failure, I quote, “to engage people of color, despite their best and most sincere efforts.” Additionally, it is difficult for community members to obtain information for why a project might be canceled or failed to materialize. At least two people mentioned a citywide project to repave alleyways with permeable surfaces. Despite community interest, the project never got off the ground, leading residents to speculate as to the reasons for the cancellation.
These multiple perspectives from respondents describe how the institutions operating in Baltimore have failed to consider the systems needed to keep green infrastructure functional. The problem is not as simple as an organization coming into a neighborhood, building a facility, and leaving the community to continue its upkeep. Instead, once built, green infrastructure occupies a public space and intersects with other urban systems and struggles including trash pick-up, community and individual capacity, and ill-defined institutional roles. Figuring out how to bring these systems, experiences, and institutions in line with one another needs to be discussed at the genesis of green infrastructure projects; not haphazardly arranged once the project is already in the ground, enthusiasm has waned, and the project leaders have moved on.
V.
While the responses above generally emerge from respondents who live in upper categories of the housing market typology, Jenna, a community leader, resides in a neighborhood firmly in the middle of this classification. Over the course of our conversation, she described her involvement in her community as catalyzed by neighborhood change. When Baltimore City closed the recreation center, long-time residents sold their homes, and many properties transitioned into rentals or low income units. The change provoked by this shift led to Jenna’s increasing engagement in the neighborhood—she regularly organizes with community members to pick up trash, clear clogged storm drains, and mentor young residents.
At the conclusion of my interviews, I ask all respondents to describe how they care for and maintain their community, and whether they feel they have a responsibility to engage in these efforts. Jenna’s answer began with a story:
Every August we repaint our crosswalks, so that kids can safely go back to school. We do this because we care about the children, we care about our community looking nice, and honestly, we have a good time. We buy tarmac paint, we have a couple glasses of wine, and we get out there with giant paint rollers. We paint crosswalks because we care about the community.
She then continued on to say:
If we rephrased that and say; “This is a maintenance job that was requested five years ago, it should be paid for by our tax dollars and it should be handled by someone on city payroll,” I think that we would begin to see the balance shift between neighbors coming together to care for their community and individuals feeling as if they are being burdened with the responsibility to maintain their community. I think that we have been very intentionally making our actions come from a position of compassion and caring even though the actual actions that we do in many instances are those of maintaining a community.
I quote Jenna at length to capture a tension worth dwelling on. Providing maintenance to a neighborhood or a public space signals an absence or larger pattern of neglect. Maintenance evokes a quantifiable and necessary labor to keep a given space functional as designed. Caring, as an act of compassion, as a civic virtue, captures an action both personally satisfying and collectively fulfilling. To care does not require the perpetuation of a specific function, nor does it seek to sustain the environment as it is currently arranged. Care in this configuration acts as a radical intervention that produces changes outside of technological, administrative, or governmental legibility.
The divide Jenna signals between care and maintenance was not shared by all participants. Another woman, when asked about the relationship between maintenance and care, saw the two as the same. She used the metaphor of taking care of a baby to illustrate the similarity—you care for a baby, but that care requires repetitive tasks so that the child can remain healthy and happy. She told me, “Maintenance is an expression of caring.
Another, a recent city resident who does not consider herself particularly involved or well versed on local environmental issues, demarcated care as a public activity and maintenance as an activity she conducts in her home. Plant watering in the house was described as activity of maintenance, while the choices she makes through her work in social justice spaces comes from a place of care.
The wide variation of personal definitions and understandings of “care” and “maintenance” cut to the core of what I believe to be a significant, if not the most significant issue related to green infrastructure adoption, acceptance, and perpetuation in Baltimore City. Practices of care have been co-opted into public maintenance regimes. By relying on the assumption that residents are able and willing to provide care to the local environment, the deployment of green infrastructure has neglected to develop system-spanning governance practices to support facilities into the future.
Thus, when I suggested earlier to conceptualize the problem of green infrastructure as a matter of maintenance, I aimed to move beyond the focus on cultivating individual efforts or obligations. Instead, green infrastructure needs to be designed to rely less on the individual ability of community members and more on the supportive capacity of existing institutions within those spaces. Let community members continue to care, to provide care, and choose where that care is placed. Resist the temptation to rely on such care as the primary source of functional maintenance.
Vacant lot planting, beautification, and Rain Garden in the McElderry Park. Photo: Joanna Solins and Logan Brissette.
VI.
What has surprised me most in conducting interviews is how strongly some residents describe a moral obligation to care for their neighborhoods, and the ways that maintaining green infrastructure allows them to act as stewards of urban space. Despite the systemic entanglements, and occasional failures, many describe a feeling as if they are working towards achieving a common good. But, cities cannot rely on the labor and passion of a few as justification for a system that affects many.
The failure to plan for the contingencies of green infrastructure presents a small, but meaningful example of how divisions are maintained. Institutional actors assume green infrastructure will be beneficial for all, without considering the intersecting and uneven challenges residents may face when welcoming a project to their neighborhood.
Often in academic literature, green infrastructure is understood as a universal good that provides a suite of apparent benefits including lessening the effects of urban heat island, reducing crime, producing better mental health outcomes, and achieving pollution reduction.[xviii] As it was recently described in a public meeting, “green infrastructure is the answer to many, many questions”.[xix] In Baltimore, it appears that this universal good comes to mean that residents should care universally.
The deterministic good of green infrastructure quickly falls apart upon examination. The health and social benefits cited by supporters are often far more qualified when traced back to the originating source. For instance, a 2007 review article on health and green infrastructure states that “Green areas in one’s living environment may ameliorate air pollution, and the urban heat island effect”.[xx] This statement points to an article that concludes that indicators of ecological performance improve in proportion to green space and tree cover.[xxi] To put it another way, areas with more tree cover and more green space have a higher ecological function than spaces with less tree cover and less green space.
This observation has practical consequences for planning decisions that can target canopy increase or green space expansion, but the cited article does not explicitly make the case that green areas, let alone green infrastructure, ameliorates environmental harm. Harm is not the absence of a function, it is the product of the intertwined social, ecological, technical, and political systems that perpetuate the function as normal.
Adding green infrastructure to a neighborhood will not magically act as a salve. Indeed, the current logic of green infrastructure construction is deeply intertwined in the continued perpetuation of harm by a refusal to recognize that greening is not always, and in all contexts, a benefit.
To be clear, I am not arguing against urban greening or efforts that promote environmental change. Nor am I calling into question the validity of the sciences that demonstrate ecological function within urban environments. What I am saying is that a troubling logic of technological and environmental determinism underlies the drive for green infrastructure development. This focus universalizes the effects of targeted environmental change with little attention to how shifts within public space are actually experienced individually and collectively.
To overcome the fractures in Baltimore, the first step must be a sustained commitment to evaluate the many systems that maintain segregation of all forms. It must be recognized that green infrastructure cannot stand outside of these forces. But perhaps we can design, implement, and plan these facilities in a way that changes the course of how we choose to maintain the fabric of urban life.
VII.
This essay’s title refers to the idea of a “White Elephant”. Some may be familiar with that term from the popular holiday game where the gift received is left up to chance, and in some cases thievery. The term’s origins are more literal, pronouncing an actual white elephant as a burdensome and financially ruining gift.
To play devil’s advocate momentarily, the white elephant might not be equally burdensome to all. Suppose the recipient owns an elephant sanctuary or otherwise possesses the existing infrastructure to embrace the gift. The recipient would probably need to acquire other elephants just to make sure the animal is happy in his new environment. And, I’m speculating here, but there also might be some need to invest in industrial strength sunblock to protect the delicate skin of the pale creature. From my perspective, this seems like a lot of work. But for someone, the burden of labor, cost, and care, might be perceived as a benefit. Whether the white elephant is burdensome or not depends on the context into which it is placed. The same is true for green infrastructure.
The past era of infrastructural construction led to the perception of systems within the built environment as invisible and functionally homogenous.[xxii] Sewers carried away refuse and electrical lines delivered energy. Yet, in the contemporary era we’ve witnessed a fracturing of infrastructural function, often along clear sociodemographic lines. Lead pipes still remain in Flint, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey and vacancy rates increase in neighborhoods previously redlined. Simply, infrastructure provision and improvement has never been equitable, and in many cases this has actively produced harm.
But, a history of harm does not portend a future of the same. What I have called attention to in this essay are the multiple institutions and individuals who are ostensibly working to better the city, to create a healthier space to live, and to improve the environmental condition of the larger region. These are noble and necessary pursuits and should be treated as such.
Funds need to be dedicated to creating collaborative governing institutions that can address this issue. This suggestion is not even remotely novel. Multi-jurisdictional agencies, such as Maryland’s Regional Planning Council have been at the forefront of developing collaborative environmental remediation projects since the 1970s. What needs to change is who is included and recognition of the capacities of participants involved.
I’m thinking here of Sandra Harding’s concept of “strong objectivity” where voices from below, such as women and marginalized populations, “demand[s] interrogation of just which cultural commitments can advance growth of the kinds of knowledge a particular community desires”.[xxiii] Harding is speaking here specifically about objectivity in scientific research, but there is overlap to technological adoption. For green infrastructure to not be burdensome, projects must begin with community desire, which can be served and made material by trained experts.
This inversion of power in public projects will undoubtedly challenge and change institutional structures. Struggles over meeting regulatory requirements, achieving larger restoration goals, and ensuring that systems are adequately and properly maintained are components of this shift, but not entirely constitutive of the governing effort. By using community desire as a guide, cities can refocus civic relationships to better embrace the capacity that communities possess in bounds, a public ethic of care.
The history of green infrastructure implementation in Baltimore shows that what communities care about and care for has been co-opted into requirements of maintenance that can become burdens for those same communities. The current state of many facilities demonstrates this approach is not effective. It is time to experiment with a new way forward.
iii — Phillips de Lucas, Amanda. ‘Producing the Highway to Nowhere: Social Understandings of Space in Baltimore 1944-1974.’ [In Review].
iv — @realDonaldTrump. “….As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.” Twitter, 29 July 2019, 7:14 a.m. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1155073965880172544?s=20
v — My thinking in this essay is indebted to Steward Pickett’s observations that racial segregation is a near universal in the landscape, that segregation is spatialized racism, and that segregation is in itself a system that impacts the environment. These observations suggest that ecologists and environmental scientists need to work to both theorize and study the ‘ecology of segregation’. Pickett’s work, along with substantive contributions from J. Morgan Grove, Billy Hall, Dexter Locke, Laura Ogden and others are beginning to the establish the empirical and historical insights overlooked by this disciplinary omission.
vi — This turn of phrase comes from Bruno Latour’s mea culpa, Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. To quote Latour, “The mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible (231). His intervention here, referencing Donna Haraway, advocates for a form of radical constructivism oriented toward the laudable goal of care. I need to emphasize, that the reference to Latour does not mean that I am advocating for a similar turn. Indeed, this article takes critique as its primary mode of address to reveal how facts are constructed within different modes of professional expertise and personal experience. Turning to the question of what I am calling matters of maintenance begins to address how systems of neglect are made to persist into the future, into different spaces, and laden with diverse meanings.
vii —“The Chesapeake Bay is a national treasure and a resource of worldwide significance. It’s ecological, economic, and cultural importance are felt far beyond its waters and the communities that line its shores. Man’s use and abuse of its bounty, however, together with the continued growth and development of population in its watershed have taken a toll on the bay system.” https://www.chesapeakebay.net/content/publications/cbp_12510.pdf
viii — Interview with Tom Schueler, Center for Watershed Protection, 2018.
ix — “No ready market exists in which to establish the value of these savings, and the beneficiaries, who receive the benefits without voluntary purchase, are only vaguely aware of the values involved”. Knapp, John William. ‘An Economic Study of Urban and Highway Drainage Systems.’ June 1965. Progress Report of the Storm Drainage Project. Johns Hopkins University, Department of Sanitary Engineering and Water Resources. Johns Hopkins Libraries. TD7 .J6 no.1 c.1.
xviii — Center for Neighborhood Technology. “The Value of Green Infrastructure: A Guide to Recognizing Its Economic, Environmental and Social Benefits.” Proceedings of the Water Environment Federation, 2010, 1–76. https://doi.org/10.2175/193864711802639741.
[xix] Author Fieldnotes
[xx] Tzoulas, Konstantinos, Kalevi Korpela, Stephen Venn, Vesa Yli-Pelkonen, Aleksandra Kaźmierczak, Jari Niemela, and Philip James. “Promoting Ecosystem and Human Health in Urban Areas Using Green Infrastructure: A Literature Review.” Landscape and Urban Planning 81, no. 3 (2007): 167–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2007.02.001.
[xxi] Whitford, V., A. R. Ennos, and J. F. Handley. “‘City Form and Natural Process’ – Indicators for the Ecological Performance of Urban Areas and Their Application to Merseyside, UK.” Landscape and Urban Planning 57, no. 2 (2001): 91–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-2046(01)00192-X.
xxii — Star, S. L. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (November 1, 1999): 377–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326.
[xxiii] Harding, Sandra. Objectivity and Diversity. University of Chicago Press. 36.
A review of “Clyde Reflections,” an art film by Stephen Hurrel and Ruth Brennan, on exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland.
The west coast of Scotland has been known to enchant, with its rough coastal edges, intricately carved islands, charming towns, and an aquatic landscape that is as often tranquil as it is a testament to the brute force of the natural elements. The Firth of Clyde, located on Scotland’s west coast, is one of the UK’s deepest bodies of coastal waters and encapsulates layers of geologic, natural, and social histories. Trailing off as a spindly leg of the firth, the River Clyde flows through to Glasgow and has been an essential waterway for Scotland’s industries and cultural heritage.
Geographically, distinctions between the Firth of Clyde and the River Clyde remain vague; understandably, the tidal nature of these bodies of water leads to a constant ebb and flow, inextricably linking city to sea. On cue, any Glaswegian will recite “Glasgow made the Clyde and the Clyde made Glasgow”, not only referring to the visual prominence of the waterway and the importance of the river to the city’s many industries, but also to the clear influence of industrialization on the tributary.
An underwater still from Clyde Reflections. Underwater footage by Howard Wood, courtesy Stephen Hurrel and Ruth Brennan
Once abundant with herring, cod, ling, and turbot, the Firth of Clyde is now an aquatic desert. When considered alongside the historic fishing heritage that can be traced back many generations, the current state of the Firth of Clyde is a complex and nuanced case for the conservation and regeneration of the ecologies in this area.
Clyde Reflections is a 33-minute film, the product of a collaboration between artist Stephen Hurrel and social ecologist Ruth Brennan. Hurrel and Brennan began their partnership after an art-science expedition with Cape Farewell to the Outer Hebrides; during this trip, it became clear to the pair that they shared a similar way of working and an interest in the natural environment. Publications and cultural maps were some of their first collaborative outputs, with the idea for the film following shortly after.
By sharing multiple narratives of those who live or work within the Firth of Clyde, Clyde Reflections encompasses the many perspectives that continue to shape the discussion surrounding this body of water and, implicitly, the voice of the Firth itself. The film premiered at Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow in September 2014 and was most recently shown as an immersive installation at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow from May 29th to July 5th 2015 as part of the gallery’s Moving Image Season.
Commissioned by Imagining Natural Scotland and Creative Scotland, the film frames responses to what is considered ‘natural’ and ‘not natural’ in this region, defying notions of untouched tranquility that the surface appearance of the firth may convey in its current state. Delving below the surface, both symbolically and metaphorically, the film exposes a more complex story of heritage, the human relationship to the water, and uncertainty about the future of the Firth. Clyde Reflections includes a mix of underwater and above-water footage and is equally meditative in both instances. The rhythm of voice-overs and music provides further content for viewers to dwell on, with more layers revealing themselves on multiple viewings.
Clyde Reflections on exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow. Credit: Stephen Hurrel and Ruth Brennan
With enchanting visuals reminiscent of a Jacques Cousteau film, Clyde Reflections reminds us just how unfamiliar and somewhat extraterrestrial the underwater marine environment remains to our everyday lives. The humble and realistic tone provided by the interview clips prevents the film from becoming too idealistic—many of the interviewees are willing to admit the lack of certainty that they have in response to questions of conservation, ecological balance, and the human impact on this body of water. This realness offers viewers the chance to form their own thoughts or accept their own hesitations, rather than forcing a singular or superficial solution, as is often the effect imposed through the ‘do-gooder’ tone used in many conservationist films and projects.
Ruth Brennan describes her perspective in approaching this project as such: people and nature are an intertwined system, and we too often have removed ourselves from what we consider to be ‘natural’. This is a concept that is reiterated within the patterns and perceptions of urban settlement suggested in the film—we’ve built a separation, physically, between nature and ourselves by aiming to construct commercially dense cities that are frequently devoid of biodiverse green spaces or accessible connections to existing environmental systems. This is also reflected in the connotations of ‘Nature’ as being located elsewhere, far away from the urban existence. However, as provoked in Clyde Reflections, this paradigm is shifting and increasingly being called into question. Despite the uncertainty that is instigated when considering ourselves as part of a natural ecological system, beginning to dissolve this barrier between human and nature will play an increasingly important role in the future of conservation, urban ecology, and the application of environmental theory.
Clyde Reflections aims to embody the complexities of human-nature relationships; its screening within the urban context of GoMA provides a much-needed interjection of a meditative space that challenges preconceptions of the human-nature relationship into the normal patterns of city life. The presence of the River Clyde within the everyday lives of many Glasgow residents has sometimes been forgotten, as the waterway has frequently been identified solely as a means of economic growth and industrialization. However, interest in the river has seen a recent reemergence, partially due to the work of artists and creatives who are searching for a deeper connection to place and context within the city. This new energy marks a turning point towards a more holistic systems-thinking approach to our immediate ecologies and the human role within them.
A still from Clyde Reflections. Credit: Stephen Hurrel and Ruth Brennan
While Clyde Reflections does not provide an immediate solution to address issues of natural resource degradation, it does provide a significant and potent opportunity for viewers to reflect on their own part in a puzzle that continues to grow exponentially in its complexity and connectivity. There is crucial importance in bringing this experience to an urban city center; in exploring the relationship between humans and nature, we must question how conservationist and ecological concepts affect the places where critical masses of humans reside. The viewer is reminded of this interconnectivity multiple times within the film through references to industry and a brief anecdote addressing the horror of microplastic particles within the firth. Industrial production and its effects on hydrological environments are a global chain in which we are all connected, and the space, pace, and nearly hypnotic nature of Clyde Reflections reminds us of this.
Clyde Reflections remains loyal to the idea of complexity and connectivity, never offering a single narrative in revealing this contested and sensitive marine environment. The window to marine ecology provided by this film engenders mindfulness towards the effects of human actions and habits instigated within the city. For this reason, the urban audience becomes an integral part of this project, providing wider engagement with the human-nature relationship expressed within the film. This engagement is critical for starting a more complete conversation about the degradation of the Firth of Clyde, and ultimately the cause-effect relationship between the human commodification of nature and the resulting deterioration of ecologies. In the case of the Clyde, only when we recognize the importance of embedding ourselves, as humans, within nature, will we truly understand the importance of balance and collaboration for the healthy coexistence of the human and natural ecologies.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Pauline Bullen, HarareFor many who want to surround themselves with art that makes them feel good, the work of the graffiti artist may be too bold or too provocative.
Paul Downton, AdelaideGRAFFITI! = Meaningless & Important. Worthless & Valuable. Commodity & Philosophy. Smokescreen & Poetry of Revolution!
Emilio Fantin, MilanThe struggle against the principle of property is directly associated with the expression of freedom.
Ganzeer, Los AngelesUncurated and unsupervised spaces of visual expression are vital for the emergence of socially conscious artwork.
Sidd Joag, New York CityThe destruction of graffiti sends a message to the young people and communities (of color) where graffiti originated—that their creative expression is not wanted, is of no value, and is therefore expendable.
Patrick Lydon, San Jose & Seoul
Graffiti can be a tool to bring community and economy together, reversing the global trend of pushing them further apart.
Patrice Milillo, Los AngelesGlorifying or demonizing “graffiti” is a simplification that diminishes its complexity.
Laura Shillington, Managua & MontrealGrafiteras: the women that create graffiti face more challenging situations; thus, their art can be more significant to urban spaces.
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.
Graffiti and street art can be controversial. But it can also be a medium for voices of social change, protest, or expressions of community desire. What, how, and where are examples of graffiti as a positive force in communities?
In many cities, graffiti is associated with decay, with communities out of control, and so it is outlawed. In some cities, it is legal, within limits, and valued as a form of social expression. “Street art”, graffiti’s more formal cousin, which is often commissioned and sanctioned, has a firmer place in communities, but can still be an important form of “outsider” expression.
Interest in these art forms as social expression is broad, and the work itself takes many shapes—from simple tags of identity, to scrawled expressions of protest and politics, to complex and beautiful scenes that virtually everyone would say are “art”, despite their sometimes rough locations. What are examples of graffiti as beneficial influences in communities, as propellants of expression and dialog? Where are they? How can they be nurtured? Can they be nurtured without undermining their essentially outsider qualities?
This roundtable is a co-production of The Nature of Cities and the new website Arts Everywhere, where these responses are also published. Also check out The Nature of Graffiti, a gallery that illustrates some of these ideas from an environmental perspective.
Pauline E. Bullen, PhD, currently teaches in the Sociology and Women and Gender Development Studies Department at the Women’s University in Africa, Harare, Zimbabwe.
In Zimbabwe, graffiti images often appear in stark contrast to abject poverty or gross excess and may surface unexpectedly on the side of government buildings; on university campuses; and on walls along parks, highways, dilapidated houses, or dead-end streets. The more entrepreneurial may put graffiti images on clothing, bags, and decorative boxes that speak to an alternative and uniquely creative youth culture. For many who want to surround themselves with art that makes them feel good, the work of the graffiti artist may be too bold or too provocative. The work may also be seen as too stark, too crude, and unfinished in its attempt to bridge the gap between that which may be viewed as “less than” and the broader society; yet, it is precisely these elements that make the work dynamic and “real”.
The moral imagination and critical capacity of Zimbabwean graffiti artists challenges a market-driven docility.
Zimbabwe’s history of colonization informs what appears on the walls ‘tagged’ by young artists. The remains of early humans, dating back 500,000 years, have been discovered in present-day Zimbabwe and it has been possible to speculate about these people’s everyday lives and traditions from their hieroglyphic “tags” on walls in and on the outside of caves in various parts of the countryside. These early “stencil” drawings provide some insight into the lives of the people who lived outside the city and those who dominated the pre-colonial countryside—the Bantu, Shona, Nguni, Zulu, and Ndebele. Today, in a somewhat more “integrated” manner, Zimbabwean graffiti artists portray the oppressive conditions in the concrete jungle of high density areas, the conspicuous consumption and opulence of the more affluent sectors of Zimbabwean society, which is segregated still according to colour and class, though less overtly and with less of the racist economic divide that ruled Rhodesia.
Unemployed and sporadically employed “youth” in their teens and thirties may find inspiration in a spray can, a wall on a deserted street, a few yards of material, an empty carton transformed into a curio box, a bag, or even a pair of old shoes. The surface potential appears vast, particularly since the tools required for the craft are more accessible and cheaper than those needed for charcoal drawings or works produced on canvas. Sanctions imposed on the country have made many of the tools needed for other art forms luxury items that few could procure or afford. However, erasers, markers—especially concentrated but fluid watercolours to fill backgrounds and letters—are more accessible and easy to use on cheap canvases such as city walls.
A set of speakers decorated with graffiti in Zimbabwe.
Inks, inexpensive household paint, paint brushes, paper towels, makeup sponges, pieces of fabric, fingers—all are great blending tools that may be used to create larger-than-life tags, bubble letters, arrows, crowns, 3-D shapes in black and white and full colour, exclamation marks, boldly defined lines, and various other symbols of an enlarged, politicized, moral imagination and critical capacity. This moral imagination and critical capacity challenges what may be viewed as a technically trained, warped, market-determined political agenda that feeds a market-driven docility.
There is a certain sense of ownership and belonging that may be gained from being able to place one’s ‘tag’, unsolicited or solicited, on a wall or on personal items in ways that force others to acknowledge and recognize your existence. There may even be a greater sense of satisfaction in having ones graffiti viewed as an authentic art form through which it is possible to gain economic independence and “legitimacy”—an art form that allows for the demonstration of a unique sensibility and, according to one Zimbabwean artist who embraces the Jamaican Rastafari religion and language, an “overstanding” of their cultural reality. However, as a rebellious act, a tool of resistance, and ammunition against corporate greed and political perversion, economic gain through independence and freedom of expression remains difficult for the graffiti artist to attain.
Writer, architect, urban evolutionary, founding convener of Urban Ecology Australia and a recognised ‘ecocity pioneer’. Paul has championed ecological cities for years but has become disenchanted with how such a beautiful concept can be perverted and misinterpreted – ‘Neom' anyone? Paul is nevertheless working on an artistic/publishing project with the working title ‘The Wild Cities’ coming soon to a crowd-funding site near you!
Graffiti is ephemeral, but can resonate long after being cleaned from the streets.
Graffiti that is sanctioned by authority loses its outlaw power to disturb and challenge.
At the celebrations for the new millennium, Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up with the word “Eternity”—all because of graffiti chalked in yellow on the streets of Sydney by one lone graffitist. Starting in 1932, by 1967 Arthur Stace had chalked out his one-word message half a million times and entered the realm of legend. “Eternity” was here to stay.
Arthur Stace. Photograph credit unkown. Listen to ‘Mr Eternity’ interviewed in 1964 here.
“Worthless” graffiti can become a commodity, its value transformed by a simple shift in view.
Graffiti highlights one of society’s contradictions when protest is transmuted into product and neutered. Che Guevara tee-shirts, anyone? Capitalism’s ability to assimilate ideas that threaten it is unsurpassed. “Buying off” trouble is less disruptive than opposing it. Graffiti that is sanctioned by authority loses its outlaw power to disturb and challenge. When a city provides graffiti walls for its citizens, isn’t it simply extending its hegemony?
When I found stencilled graffiti in my neighbourhood and discovered that it was disguised corporate advertising, I dismissed it as worthless. If the same stencil had been about an idea rather than a product, I would have thought differently.
‘If graffiti changed anything it would be illegal,’ Banksy. Photo: Street Art London
Banksy practices “protest graffiti” as high art. His work can carry multi-thousand dollar price tags. In 2007, his canvas, “Bombing Middle England”, fetched £102,000 at Sotheby’s. He trades on his anonymity and notoriety, and the commodification of his work, even its placement in galleries, legitimises it within the society that he is criticising—but as provocation or product, it’s hard to gainsay its power.
Graffitist Peter Drew is certain that street art will maintain its authenticity “because there’s always going to be an illegal aspect to it…It’s a conflict between two great principles of Western democracy—the sanctity of private property and freedom of expression”. But these principles are not universal.
In the street, claims Drew, art acquires “an anti-institutional sense”. But institutions also love it, and Drew, like Banksy, has been exhibited in galleries.
Part of a series of illegally posted street art by Peter Drew, sanctioned by Adelaide City Council, post facto. Photograph: Paul Downton
Street art that is sanctioned as a way to ameliorate dull façades is effectively assimilated as city property; it can no longer be about the conflict of ownership. It may critique the city’s aesthetics, but the city becomes as much the critic as the artist. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s about moving on, changing the guard.
Adelaide’s previous Lord Mayor, Stephen Yarwood, saw street art as a game-changer for the 21st century city, consigning blank walls to the past. He assisted approvals and helped legalise the work of Drew and others, saying “Art isn’t just for art galleries… Cities are the best art galleries you could possibly have”.
But when the system tries these sorts of changes, the momentum of the past crashes into the present. When six street artists legitimately painted large murals on the sidewalk of Adelaide’s busiest cultural hotspots “after months of negotiations, application forms and a day’s painting, the artists had their murals destroyed less than 12 hours after they were completed by the same council that had approved and paid for them. Why? Because the council simply failed to tell the workers who clean the streets that the murals weren’t graffiti”.
There was no such confusion in 1968, when the poetry of “Sous les pavés, la plage” exhorted the citizens of Paris to embrace revolution…
Iconic graffiti from Paris, May 1968. Photograph credit unknown.
And in the Paris of 2016, the unsolicited application of paint has new ways to extend its reach.
Detail of graffiti by Banksy. Photograph credit presumed to be Banksy. Photo: banksy.co.uk
Emilio Fantin is an artist working in Italy on multidisciplinary research.
He teaches at the Politecnico, Architecture, University of Milan, and acts as coordinator of the “Osservatorio Public Art”.
I am interested in the ambiguity of the concept of property. “Street-writers” or graffiti artists seem to want to abolish the idea of property (symbolized by buildings) by using buildings as tools of expression. The struggle against the principle of property is directly associated with the expression of freedom, especially for those graffiti works or phrases that denounce abuses of power and discrimination.
I thought that this art—graffiti art—could be considered as a form of collective expression, a form of meta-art.
However, we should make a distinction between graffiti works that have political, philosophical, and poetical meanings and those which are themselves quite simply the manifestation of an abuse of power. Frustration and alienation can be transformed into an instrument of social and political demands or into aggressiveness for its own sake. The latter is a paradoxical form of property, through which abuse of free will can harm others—not only the owner of the building, but the entire community, because something coercive and ugly becomes a part of the landscape and compromises aesthetic sense.
However, we ask: Who decides on the true and right aesthetic sense? In order to judge this, I believe, one must consider the ethical principle, Aesthetics↔Ethics. In other words, quoting Heraclitus: Invisible Harmony is Better Than Visible. This “harmony” comes from understanding and accepting both forms of love: young people claim their need of truth through their aesthetic expressions, adults care about urban qualities which nourish communities’ ritual forms (or, more rarely, vice versa).
I investigated these and other topics by practicing the technique of “Strappo”. “Strappo” is a fresco restoration technique consisting of gluing canvas to the surface of the fresco and then, by pulling, removing a thin layer of the plaster with the image. It is a restoration technique adopted to save frescoes from deterioration due to mildew and water infiltrations into the wall. Years ago, I learned how to perform “Strappo”, using the technique not for fresco restoration, but for my own artistic work. At that time, graffiti and street-art were quite different from today. Sentences or phrases on the walls focused on local political problems rather than great universal issues, such as the environment, nature, pollution, or immigration. Street writers were still far away from the idea of “tags”, and the street art community was at its very beginning. Their desire to claim a space for expression within an urban context was compelling, but their gathering through an esoteric language came later.
“Strappo” from Dolomites, Italy. 1988. Image: Emilio Fantin
At the end of the 1980s, I travelled in Italy and around Europe looking for walls. During my trips, I found sentences about politics, love, and sport, small colored drawings and political symbols. I collected many examples of “mural art expressions” from public and private walls, including the Berlin Wall, the University of Bologna, refuges or mountain lodges, and abandoned buildings. I thought that this art could be considered as a form of collective expression, a form of meta-art. The aesthetic is determined not only by the people who produce the work (who are, by the way, anonymous), but also by other causes (even atmospheric), time, and chance. As an artist, I need to highlight this aspect and show how meaningful collective thinking and the idea of a meta-aesthetics can be.
There are various aspects that we might tackle by talking about “Strappo” work in the urban context. If it is true that one appropriates something that somebody else made, it is also true that one preserves something that sooner or later will be erased—not one of those painted walls from which I made a small “strappo” still exists. Of course, we can photograph and document various forms of artistic mural expressions, but the fact of presenting a portion of wall in its material consistency was a provocation made in order to debate the principles of individual creation, property, collective practices, and social thinking.
Ganzeer is the pseudonym of an Egyptian artist who has been operating mainly between graphic design and contemporary art since 2007. He refers to his practice as Concept Pop.
I saw firsthand in Egypt how street-art played a direct role in some of the political changes between the years of 2011-2013. There was street-art that criticized Egypt’s military apparatus so poignantly that people went out and actively chanted against the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. This was simply unheard of. I also saw a wall of murals commemorating fallen protesters turn into a shrine, where people would come place flowers and look at portraits of their friends and loved ones. I saw murals that were even the cause of huge clashes. Egyptian artists really knew how to utilize the power of street-art, which is precisely why the Egyptian government introduced and heavily enforced anti-vandalism laws akin to the ones established in America.
If unsupervised spaces were widely available—even in Western countries—some very beautiful and socially conscious artwork would emerge out of them.
Street-art festivals, the method through which cities offer a legal venue for artistic expression are great, but I find that they seldom result in genuine social expression rather than works that are, for the most part, decorative. There are a few exceptions to the rule, such as the works of Blu, and recently Herakut, and sometimes Os Gemeos, but for the most part, artists tend to treat these festivals as an opportunity to showcase their signature styles or to try out new techniques rather than an opportunity to say something relevant.
While I wouldn’t necessarily blame this on the festivals themselves, and it has a lot more to do with the individual artists involved, the truth is that organizers of these sort of festivals are primarily interested in a particular street-art culture that celebrates style more than anything else. Uncurated and unsupervised spaces of visual expression are vital for the emergence of socially conscious artwork outside of the rather closed off subculture of street-art.
Salute to the Martyrs – Cairo, Egypt, 2012. Photo: Ganzeer
Graffiti as a symptom or cause of urban decay is a very Western phenomenon due to the art form’s early associations with gang culture. For the rest of the world—which is actually the vast majority—both graffiti and street-art tend to be utilized as modes of social expression. Seldom will you find practitioners obsessed with their tags or with drawing cool looking images that don’t necessarily mean anything. As opposed to what is common in the U.S., a person’s drive to go and write or draw something on a wall has very little to do with ego or self gain, and far more to do with the need to go out and express a social concern or a political criticism. Of course, this does not take away from the controversy associated with graffiti and street-art, but adds to it.
Foundations Mural – Adliya, Bahrain, 2014. Photo: Eva Frapiccini
Having said that, I still think that if unsupervised spaces were widely available—even in Western countries—some very beautiful and socially conscious artwork would emerge out of them. It would, without a doubt, start off with haphazardly done tags and whatnot, but I imagine it would slowly evolve over time. Someone would come and write something, then someone else would come and draw something in response to that, and then perhaps someone would come and build on top of that drawing, and so on. Rather than a sacred piece of artwork, framed and hung inside a museum upon completion, this would be an ever-evolving kind of street-art. Very alive and always changing as per the whims and conditions of its surrounding inhabitants. Artwork that is as much alive as the cities that host them. That’s the kind of street-art I’m really looking forward to seeing.
Germán Eliecer Gomez is a sociologist with expertise in communication and on issues related to urban cultural practices, especially of young people in expressions such as graffiti, football and bars.
The Mayor of Bogotá, by order of a judge of the Republic of Colombia, regulated graffiti through a legal act, Decree 75, which established places where graffiti was prohibited or allowed by law. On this basis, the Mayor took actions to promote graffiti and provide the general public with information about graffiti and the decree.
In Bogotá, graffiti—of young people following football clubs, writing of hip hop culture, art murals, political graffiti—has many stories to tell.
In fact, the practice of graffiti in Bogotá has grown considerably, regardless of its regulation. It can be seen on the walls of houses, on the doors of commercial establishments, on the great walls of entire buildings, in parks, bus stops, on buses, and generally in almost any area of the city. Such graffiti—including street art, graffiti of young people following football clubs, writing of hip hop culture, art murals, political graffiti—has many stories to tell, including signatures or tags.
Decree 75 of 2013 regulates the legality of graffiti, regardless of its aesthetic quality, emphasizing the process that defines the permissions of the owners of the places where graffiti is made. That is, no matter how ugly or beautiful, it is critical to have the permission of the owner of the property before graffiti is created. The decree has generated some public acceptance of certain types of graffiti while others remain less popular. For example, street art and murals are “accepted” as “beautifying” the city. Other graffiti is less accepted, such as football related graffiti, political messages, and, especially, tagging. There are several surveys indicating improving public opinion of graffiti. An opinion poll, conducted by the City of Bogotá in 2014, found that only 38 percent of the population recognized the value of artistic graffiti in improving the city. But in 2015, a poll by the Bienal de Culturas found that 67 percent believed that artistic graffiti improves the city.
The patterns and their difficulty, the techniques, the explosion of colors and tones in the image, for example, are all components of graffiti writing. The way in which images and messages are drawn and encrypted are not easily understood and may transcend the general concept of “ugly”. In turn, a large and composite “image” composed of many tags—for example, Caracas Avenue, with hundreds of tags in one block—mixed with outdoor advertising, is an aesthetic delight from a contemporary perspective. Writing on the walls of the city generates phenomena of interpretation, not only in the field of semiotics, but also in simple enjoyment and aesthetic interpretation. However, some associate graffiti with perceptions of insecurity, invoking theories such as “broken windows” and justifying cleaning graffiti, which, from such perspectives, is “ugly”.
The debate is, therefore, open. Of course there are interest groups for or against graffiti in Bogotá that are associated with major economic groups. However, practitioners of graffiti are clear about something: with permission or without, graffiti will continue to exist in Bogotá.
During the late hours of November 18, 2013, property developer Jerry Wolkoff, of G&M Realty, whitewashed the Institute of Higher Burning, also known as 5Pointz, in Long Island City, Queens. This, just 3 days after a rally to protect the beloved international landmark from demolition, and mass outrage at the plan to build a condominium complex on site. A year later, all that was left in the wake of its destruction was flattened rubble, construction scaffolds, and cranes. And, a deep socio-cultural scar on residents of the city and the international graffiti community.
Graffiti is arguably the most relevant art form of our time, yet it is attacked, destroyed, and routinely commodifed in the service of gentrification.
For over 20 years, 5Pointz was a most powerful force of positive change in New York City, particularly for its youth. I was 15 when I first visited 5Pointz, then known as the Phun Phactory. I was a fledgling graffiti writer, only rarely mustering the courage to get up outside of my blackbook. But I was deeply infatuated with the form and determined to get better. The more I painted, the more I met other writers.
My foray into graffiti was the first time I truly felt part of a community. 5Pointz was a magnet that drew us together. Graffiti gave us a stake in our city and connected us to the world at the same time. We didn’t have to risk arrest and we could take our time, honing skills and sharing ideas. The massive structures covered in hundreds of shades and layers of paint were a revelation. The fact that nobodies like us could paint next to legends was exciting (and terrifying), and motivated us to paint harder.
It was thrilling to see your own piece from the 7 train, knowing that thousands of other people were seeing it too.
Given all of the destructive activities we’d likely have engaged in, graffiti offered a compelling alternative: creative expression and the respect that came along with doing it in style. Yet, the medium itself and those who practice it are routinely criminalized.
Graffiti is arguably the most relevant art form of our time. Yet, it is attacked and destroyed where it is most accessible and where it is most at home. At the same time, it is routinely commodifed in the service of gentrification.
In New York City, its birthplace, graffiti has been under constant attack since the late 1980s. First, as a target of quality of life policing and the “buff”, and, more recently, as a casualty of gentrification. It’s important to note that the tactic of recklessly painting over graffiti, which is generally uneven and mismatched in color, is more symbolic than practical. It sends a message to writers in general, and the young people and communities (of color) where graffiti originated—that their creative expression is not wanted, is of no value, and is therefore expendable.
Long Island City is one of the most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City due to its proximity to Manhattan. But it is artists, like those that popularized 5Pointz, who, in part, brought the neighborhood attention and raised its value. Once they had served their purpose, they were disposed of in favor of condos for the rich.
I’ve had many arguments about this. People point to Williamsburg and Bushwick as new “meccas” for graffiti, without recognizing that in these neighborhoods, graffiti, murals and other public art have played, and continue to play, a key role in the displacement of locals, in favor of young outsiders who can afford higher rents. They, in turn, attract rich property developers, who, when they take over, will permit graffiti within certain parameters that serve their interests. Like Jerry Wolkoff, who has promised to maintain significant wall space in his new development—built over 5Pointz—for graffiti writers. How much space, exactly? Who will be allowed to paint? What will be the criteria? These are all questions that fall on deaf ears, as we are reminded that we are lucky to be getting any space at all. Fuck that.
There is no shortage of evidence that spaces like 5Pointz are invaluable safe spaces for the young people of New York City. They provide access to the arts and culture as alternatives to high-risk behaviors and delinquency. They expose our youth to the world and all the possibilities that exist within it. Yet, they are directly, or indirectly, under attack. What can we as artists, appreciators, New Yorkers, and global citizens do to fill the abysses left by the destruction of OUR venues for creative expression?
Patrick M. Lydon is an American ecological writer and artist based in Korea whose seeks to re-connect cities and their inhabitants with nature. He writes The Possible City series, is co-founder of City as Nature (Daejeon). He is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
Looking from behind the stacks of legal cases brought against graffiti artists over the past several decades, it’s easy to see these individuals as graffiti “vandals”. On the other hand, walk into any of the number of tragically hip galleries and museums who showcase graffiti artists today, and these individuals are posed as “visionaries”, instead.
There isn’t such a wide divide between the actions and intents of the graffiti “artist” and those of the graffiti “vandal”.
From this mindset, we arrive at what are two dominant “conventional” views of graffiti:
1) The graffiti “artist” is a sanctioned professional who creates socially challenging work that museums and patrons spend money to buy and support. Seen as a “productive” use of capital, we judge graffiti artists as beneficial.
2) The graffiti “vandal” creates socially challenging work that defaces public and private property, and which we spend public money to cover up. This being an “unproductive” use of capital, we judge graffiti vandals as burdensome.
These two popular views should tell us quite a bit about the obtuse condition of our social, legal, and economic systems, because in reality there isn’t such a wide divide between the actions and intents of the graffiti “artist” and those of the graffiti “vandal”, save for the one which these systems create.
The force that motivates many graffiti artists is, in fact, identical to that of many so-called “legitimate” artists. The major difference? The “legitimate” artists have found—or were given by status, privilege, or luck—a way to fit their work into the economic system.
This points to something most of us reading this already know well: lack of opportunity—or even perceived lack of opportunity—is a cause not only of graffiti, but of violence and crime and economic inequality. The solution, plainly put, is that our cities need more opportunities for young persons to contribute their creative hands and minds to their communities in ways that are socially productive.
City administrators tell us this is easier in theory than in practice, yet it becomes easier in practice if we let much of that theory come from the mouths of those who are primarily affected.
A few years ago, I teamed up with Mary Cheung, a photography teacher at Gunderson High School in San Jose, California. We asked a group of her students to use photography and written word to address issues that were impacting their lives. The works they handed in tackled surprisingly deep issues, from drugs to discrimination to sexual orientation.
Out of fifteen students, five wrote about graffiti.
A Graffiti piece by Girraffe in San Jose, California. Photo: Ryan Tran for SocieCity Youth on Assignment
Why not listen to the youth? Their insights are vivid…
“It is better for artists to be squeezing down on [spray] can caps than gun triggers”, was the conclusion that students Ryan Tran, Eric Gonzalez, and Adrian Morales came to.
How often does law enforcement take this view? Perhaps not often enough. One can’t help but think how many lives would be saved or changed if they did.
Two other students, Nick Melchor and Jeilah Evaristo, wrote that “…people only point out the negatives, not seeing the untapped talent the city has to offer”.
Nick and Jeilah went on to give an insight that surprised me because of how truly it rang in my mind; these two students wrote that graffiti “may be seen as a negative, but it gives off color to a plain and hurt city”.
A plain city.
A hurt city.
Two 15-year-olds see a hurt city, and they see graffiti as the color and expression, if not necessarily to show that hurt, then to provide an alternative to it. They also see, in themselves and their friends, an untapped talent; a talent with no logical outlet in their world other than on freeway overpasses and walls.
Colorful bandages applied to a hurt city. It’s not just poetic. It’s reality. It’s theory from the street.
There are few examples—Rio di Janeiro, Seoul, Bogotá, and others that will doubtless come up in this forum—where governments have realized the same reality that these two young people have.
The positive examples show governments using honesty and compassion, involving disenfranchised youth in the direction of cities and neighborhoods instead of locking them behind bars; they show neighborhoods not just coming alive with color, but disenfranchised youth coming alive to believe in themselves, to discover and use their unique skills and passions to make their corner of the world better, regardless of whether they go on to be professional artists, business leaders, local politicians, or homeless recyclable collectors.
The positive examples bring notions of community and economy closer together, instead of continuing a dangerous global trend of pushing the two farther apart. In doing so, they create viable opportunities for individuals to build and join a community-focused economy.
When governments and citizens begin to see the world from the eyes of disenfranchised graffiti artists, when our theory comes from the streets, we’ll begin to see more positive examples and indicators, and more cities where the human impulse to be creatively employed is embraced, encouraged, and championed, even if this impulse presents challenges to our status quo.
At Art is Power, Patrice focuses his energies full-time on working with and documenting visionary Arts initiatives from around the globe. Previously, he worked as a public school teacher in San Jose, California.
What can it be: a critical look at the complexities of “graffiti”
As I strolled through the cobblestone streets of Prague admiring cathedrals, statues, and horse-drawn carriages that transported tourists through what resembled a renaissance painting, I felt a real sense of tranquility. However, this feeling was instantly disrupted by the sight of a van that was completely covered with spray painted scrawls. The contrast of the van against the beautiful backdrop of antique Prague was similar to a pile of burning tires in the middle of a pristine rain forest. No one could ever convince me that this is a form of art.
Any movement a city is willing to spend $300 million to eradicate deserves careful examination.
Is it boredom, anger, or a complete disregard for public and private property that compels a person to do this? Is it a response to certain stresses, a cry for help, an intrinsic human need to be acknowledged, or something else? Regardless of where the compulsion arises, some forms of “graffiti” are nothing more than obnoxious acts by selfish individuals who feel entitled to claim space that isn’t theirs.
Many are confused by the term “graffiti”. It is ambiguous, confusing, and controversial because it encompasses everything from turf markings and vandalism to murals and advertising, which is why a historical account is necessary. The recognized incubation zone for what is referred to as modern “graffiti” is New York City, and it did not start as art, but tagging: scribbling one’s name in as many places as possible. On July 21,1971, the New York Times published an article titled, “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals”, which featured a 17 year-old writer by the name of Taki 183, who literally made a name for himself by tagging his nickname across all five boroughs of New York City. To answer the question of who was behind these acts, the article quotes a New York Transit Authority patrolman, Floyd Holoway, who explained that he had “caught teen-agers from all parts of the city, all races and religions and economic classes”.
Perhaps the popularity of tagging was a response to boredom, frustration, or just the excitement of getting away with using subway cars and city walls as one’s personal billboard. Whatever it was, the article inspired multitudes to join in the competition. Though the act of scribbling one’s name on a wall may not be revolutionary, the fact that it resonated with so many and crossed racial and socioeconomic barriers was. From this starting point, participants set themselves apart by developing their monikers into increasingly sophisticated forms. This ushered in a new generation of artists like Lee Quinones, Seen, Dondi, Zephyr, and many others who painted high art on the sides of subway cars and buildings around the city.
On a recent Art is Power tour of Europe, I interviewed prominent graffiti and street artists to discuss this development. I had the honor of meeting with Mode2, a first generation European graffiti pioneer who has stayed dedicated to graffiti art and Hip Hop culture for over 30 years. In describing the ethos of “graffiti” art, Mode2 explained,
“People had to somehow be original and interpret an aspect of themselves. To be original, you have to draw from your own background, your own culture, your own personality, what you’ve lived through.”
No matter where a person may be from, personal and cultural validation and the need to be acknowledged are universal human desires, and graffiti provided the framework. By 1982, when New York sent its best ambassadors of Hip Hop on a global tour called The International Hip Hop Concert Tour, “graffiti” had evolved into high art, which made it extremely appealing.
As in New York, European youth from all backgrounds had a democratic outlet that provided a sense of purpose, community, and fun. Some became artists and others scribbled their names, but for the ones who took it to the next level, “graffiti art” was empowering.
Mode 2.
Medellín, Colombia boasts a similar story. Due to the unbridled cocaine trade of the 1990s, violence, fear, and drug addiction ravaged many communities. In the ashes of this difficult time, Henry Arteaga, a founding member of the world famous Crew Pelegrosos, 4 Elements school of Hip Hop, explained: “There were no cultural offerings, and the state left its youth abandoned.”
To make matters worse, since countless youths had been swept up by the drug cartels, there was a huge generational rift. In response, Henry and his friends took up “graffiti” and the other elements of Hip Hop. As in New York City and Berlin, youths in Medellín began interpreting aspects of themselves and their environment through “graffiti”, which empowered them to reclaim their communities. According to prominent sociologist and activist, Dr. Charles Derber:
Most social movements rely on art as a powerful vehicle for expressing dissent and resistance as well as helping articulate new visions of society.
The beautifully executed artwork adorning the walls of the Hip-hop school and the surrounding neighborhoods illustrate the power of “graffiti” to, as Dr. Derber put it, “articulate new visions of society.” “Graffiti” was an effective implement for restoring humanity in a shattered community. Arteaga enthusiastically explained that today, the older generation, who were once terrified by the youth, no longer fear them.
Crew Pelegrosos.
Such examples illustrate the role of the arts in creating opportunities in bleak circumstances. They also illuminate “graffiti’s” subversive character, since the audacious act of appropriating public space for personal expression is a form of dissent, scary to people in power. In a 2013 Lecture at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Professor Noam Chomsky (45:44) explained:
“When people in power believe something firmly, it’s worth paying attention to them. And I think they believe firmly that you should not have revolutionary popular art in which people participate. Actually, that’s one of the reasons, I think, for destroying the graffiti on the New York subways.”
Again, calling “graffiti” revolutionary may seems exaggerated; however, consider that it integrated a whole generation, taught them to, as writer and social critic Adam Mansbach states, “negotiate the urban sub-terrain of the New York subway system,” dominate public discourse, and then spread to virtually every country on the planet. It is also telling that from 1972 to 1989, New York City spent over three hundred million dollars on a “war on graffiti”. Any movement a city is willing to spend that kind of money to eradicate deserves careful examination.
In cases like New York, Medellín, and Berlin, individuals have employed the democratic, creative, and subversive attributes of “graffiti” to re-imagine, redefine, and recreate their realities. In other cases, individuals feed their egos by selfishly tagging their names on any surface that catches their attention. This clearly illustrates that “graffiti”, like any powerful medium, can be constructive or destructive depending on the individual doing it. Glorifying or demonizing “graffiti” is a simplification that diminishes its complexity.
Laura Shillington is faculty in the Department of Geoscience and the Social Science Methods Programme at John Abbott College (Montréal). She is also a Research Associate at the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre, Concordia University (Montréal).
Graffiti art disrupts urban space in multiple ways. It interrupts the seemingly planned nature of cities, in particular in the hyper-planned city spaces of the global north. But the act of producing graffiti also interrupts normative ways of being and living in the city. To create graffiti is to do something illegal (in some cities), out of the ordinary, and in the margins of the city. Graffiti can be used to mark territory—as is the case with gangs in Los Angeles or Rio de Janeiro. It is can be used as a ‘public’ voice of marginalised populations. However, in many cities across the globe, graffiti is produced predominantly by men. In this sense, graffiti—both the art and act—are generally perceived as masculine. Why?
Putting themselves at risk to produce art (much of it political) is a claim to women’s right to the city: a demand to be safe and to be able to engage in producing urban space.
To create graffiti requires placing one’s body in risky places at precarious hours (e.g. at night). Women in most cities are still far more vulnerable that men, especially in certain places and at night. Women graffiti artists experience street harassment by men, including sexual harassment by police officers. Indeed, the women that create graffiti face more challenging situations, making their graffiti more significant to urban spaces. Moreover, the images and texts that many of these female artists create have an important social message. Putting themselves at risk to produce art (much of it political) is a claim to the right to the city: a demand to be safe and to be able to engage in producing urban space.
Yet, there are many great female graffiti artists, and the number is growing. In 2010, several women from Nicaragua and Costa Rica formed to create Las Destructoras (or Ladies Destroying Crew). These grafiteras have painted graffiti in Managua, San José, and several other cities. Most of their work has comprised tagging words, such as mujeres libres, fuertes, bellas (free, strong, beautiful women) and female figures, along with their tag names. For women, making graffiti—being in public (usually in groups)—is a rebellious act that disrupts the usual perception of young men transforming city spaces. It provides a sense of power over the city, their bodies, and the public (in relaying messages). In Nicaragua, the group has given workshops on graffiti to women in Managua and other cities.
That grafitti art in many cities is dominated by men means that even within marginalised (non-formal) productions of urban space, women’s art and voices remain side-lined and out of the public view. In this regard, the growing number of women graffiti artists is a positive force within communities. These women are helping make urban space (especially public and street spaces) safer by making their own presence visible—not only by puttng their bodies physically in these spaces when they create the art, but also through the female images and messages they leave behind. Such messages may help to generate discussions about street safety, harassment, and women’s roles in (public) art. Allowing young women to engage in graffiti may also help build confidence. The workshops that Ladies Destroying Crew have given on graffiti is one way to cultivate a culture of women and graffiti. Perhaps there are other ways that communities, organisations, and cities can use graffiti as a way to bring about more gender equity in urban spaces?
To meet the Ladies Destroying Crew, see their Facebook page (with an introductory video):
http://madc.tv (website of German graffiti artist Claudia Walde a.k.a. MadC)
Great article on Brazilian graffiti artist Panmela Casto:
Brown, G. (2012) Street Smarts: The Gender Justice of Graffiti Artist Panmela Castro. Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, Fall, Issue 56, p42-45.
The nature of cities is inextricably tied to the nature of public space and this blog is about just a small part of that ‘nature’. It was inspired by what appeared to be graffiti on a public footpath that runs along the street where I live, in sunny Semaphore, South Australia.
Sidewalk spam in Semaphore. Photo: Paul Downton
Now I appreciate intelligent, well-executed graffiti. I like the stuff that possesses some style and carries a positive, or simply necessary message. The best graffiti rescues blighted spaces from greyness and orthographic rigour with dynamic swathes and patterns of colour that maybe should have been there in the first place, and graffiti has a proud place in the annals of urban ecology. Some nature-oriented graffiti in Cape Town was discussed in this blog space by Pippin Anderson.
Different people know different natures. Graffiti from Cape Town. Photo: Jaques de SatageDifferent people know different natures. Graffiti from Cape Town. Photo: Jaques de SatageUrban Ecology member Nancy Lieblich stenciling storm drains in Berkeley in 1989. Photo courtesy of Richard Register
In the late 1980s, activists from the Urban Ecology group in Berkeley used graffiti to draw attention to the collectively forgotten creeks of the city that had been turned into stormwater drains. Ecocity pioneer Richard Register made stencils and got a crew together of some three dozen people and identified nearly nine hundred places where the creeks of Berkeley went under curbs. There were twelve different stencils for all the named creeks in Berkeley, including branches of one of the five full creek watersheds. An Urban Ecology board member working for the county led to the idea being picked up as a “don’t dump, drains to bay” campaign by the counties of Berkeley and Oakland with a standardized stencil image and billboard campaign. Urban Ecology’s original campaign contributed to realisation of the restoration of Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek. During the First International Ecocity Conference convened by Urban Ecology in Berkeley in 1990, banners with the ‘creek critter’ designs flew over downtown streets. (Personal communication 8 March 2014)
Register’s original ‘creek critter’ stencilled graffiti was permitted by the city council, and thus was a meme released for stencilling and painting graffiti around street drain inlets that has since become a respectable way to celebrate a vital part of urban nature.
Illegal guerilla poster posting by Peter Drew, Adelaide CBD. Image is of a series old photograph of Adelaidians from the past that Peter unearther for the project. Photo: Paul Downton
In California, a bunch of activists defaced public footpaths with neat paint work in order to present messages about the nature of their city and it made a positive difference that helped real change take place in the Berkeley environment. ‘Visual pollution’ became respectable in the process and stencilled and graffitied creek markers are now recognised as street art and sanctified by city authorities, as august as the state of Pennsylvania, but graffiti possesses its own kind of authority, and even when it has been assimilated by the mainstream, as happened with the street art of Peter Drew in Adelaide, South Australia, where his guerrilla poster campaign portraying historical figures in Adelaide’s downtown led to council endorsement.
Despite this kind of assimilation Drew is certain that street art will maintain its authenticity as a political statement “because there’s always going to be an illegal aspect to it…It’s a conflict between two great principles of western democracy — the sanctity of private property and freedom of expression. Those two principles clash in street art, and they will always be at odds in some way.” Peter Drew advocates street art as an unmediated medium for dissent; adamant that it needs to be treated as a legitimate form of expression, not as a problem. According to Drew, the street art graffiti community are respectful of each other’s work and of personal property — they graffiti decaying old buildings and rail yards, not garage doors on private property.
Creek critter flags fly during the First International Ecocity Conference, convened by Urban Ecology in Berkeley 1990. Photo courtesy of Richard Register
But “Late capitalism absorbs all forms of resistance and dissent.” (Sebastian Moody, ‘The Hand that Feeds — Graffiti and authenticity in contemporary brand culture’, Artlink vol 34 #1 Adelaide 2014) and graffiti is now a marketing tool, though it may be just as illegal as the tags of dispossessed youth. The stencilled graffiti that promised to let me “know the truth about Semaphore” turned out to be advertising for the real estate department of a major bank. Just another example of the 1% toying with novelty, sucking up and massaging ‘street cred’ from the language and media of the dispossessed and creating, as a consequence, visual pollution in publicly owned space.
The public realm is supposed to be something separate from the commercial realm — unless you buy the argument that nothing should be exempt from being measured and traded by commerce. Buy the argument? Isn’t that what commercial interests do — purchasing the best lines and pithiest sound bites to convince us of whatever it is they wish us to be convinced of? Done by government it’s called propaganda; done through commerce it’s simply advertising. Either way it’s about getting in the way of the eyes and minds of our daily lives. The traditional view and understanding of art is as “an authentic and sublime antidote to the overbearing rationality of commerce”. There are cultural critics who protest that ‘authentic identity’ should not be thought of and defined by its non-commercial nature. They suggest that history shows that continuing to do so is a fallacious ‘binary’ proposition in which individuals ‘continue to invest in the notion that authentic spaces’ of the self, creativity and spirituality exist as a kind of opposition to mercantile culture — if it makes money it can’t be real art. In the same way one could argue for the idea that public space is only ‘real’ public space if it isn’t part of mercantile space.
It boils down to the issue of ownership and control. In a shopping mall all activity is mediated by mercantile interests and entry is controlled so that there is no ’social’ activity outside of retail hours. In a ‘model’ traditional street, mercantile interests are clearly important, but any number of social activities and interaction can take place in the street at any time without being mediated by commercial transaction. It is in the nature of cities that they require other kinds of public space in addition to streets, and it is increasingly the case that that space must embrace living systems and support non-human species.
But what if living systems and non-human species were themselves conscripted into the armies of the advertisers?
Dull grey boring wall transformed by ‘commissioned’ graffiti for The People’s Market <facebook.com/wlspeoplesmarket> at West Lakes Shore, South Australia. Photo: Paul Downton
Conscripting selfish genes
Humans are alarmingly attracted to novelty. If you think visual pollution is already a problem, consider a future in which every item and organism in the public environment is considered fair game as a potential billboard. Not content with ordinary trees and for some reason perturbed by the ordinariness of street lights, there are clever people actively working to breed trees and flowers that glow in the dark. According to the report in the New York Times, one organisation “has already obtained a letter from the department saying that it will not need approval to release its glowing plants because they are not plant pests, and are not made using plant pests.”
An example of stencilled graffiti that DOES tell the truth! On the wall of the Central Market in Adelaide. Photo: Paul Downton
Whether or not to allow genetically-modified glowing trees to dominate public space by taking the place of street lights is not only a question about the ethics of genetics, it’s about the purpose and meaning of public space.
What is ‘real’ public space all about? What is its meaning or purpose? Does it need to be differentiated from privately owned space? It’s generally taken for granted by the general public and ostensibly, it’s inviolable. But in reality it’s a bit like the idea of ‘freedom’ — it means different things to different people, is interpreted differently by different cultures, and is most noticeable when it’s absent. Historically, public space has been that place, or places, where the community can gather to dance, sing, march or stroll along together, where major events in the life of a community can be celebrated or debated — in public.
Great public space is where people can escape from the boxes and buildings that mostly contain their lives and risk collective and individual dissent, face to face with others, in real space and time. It can be in the form of grand spaces, modest parks and gardens, or the footways of daily loitering and travel. But it is expressly not a corporate or privately owned domain. Owned by everyone and nobody in particular, public space offers the kind of socially mediated freedom that helps citizens work through their differences and define their commonalities. It can provide the fulcrum for social revolution or the anvil of repression. It is fundamentally about shared ownership and consequently has always been under threat from market forces.
Permanently ephemeral
All manufacturers, retailers and other businesses are as ephemeral as their products. Within a few short years, or even months, the information they contain and impart is redundant. Would a wise society embed that ephemera in the DNA of living organisms? We’re beginning to refine the idea that our cities need to be connected with the cycles of nature and that living systems are fundamental to the health of urban systems, but does glowing vegetation have a legitimate or defensible part of that vision? Historically, the great innovation represented by the provision of living nature as public open space was that it provided a place of rest, recuperation and recreation. We attribute or find meaning embedded in the natural world, as we do in human constructed space, and our urban constructs meld them into this thing we call civilisation; do we really want the nature in our cities to be represented by massively manipulated environments? Is the future now doomed to be irredeemably synthetic? Letting every pretty idea loose might have some merit, but I think it also compares with letting small kids have their way with crayons and markers in the living room.
But compare streets with shopping malls — where the only messages allowed are for commercial purposes, approved by commercial interests, solely for the purpose of selling something. Shopping malls demonstrate how the commodification of daily life looks and feels. And you can only enter between certain fixed times. This is public space in a sharply abbreviated form. It exists only at the behest or indulgence of private owners. It is not owned or controlled by the public, it is place where the public are allowed only for the purpose of fulfilling their obligations as consumers. Buy nothing, and you are barely tolerated. A shopping mall is not the public space that enables towns and cities to work. If there are no aspirations beyond those that are commodified and commercialised, then there can be no true civics.
Public space should have a timeless sense. It should be that part of the urban environment which provides the spatial armature for the rest of the city or town. Streets need to be part of their neighbourhood in a way that is, in a sense, non-partisan, a place that is not taking sides in commercial slanging matches nor telling me to be, do, say or buy anything. The street is a place where I want to be a citizen, free to use commercial services as a consumer if I wish, but not be defined by them, or made to feel unwelcome if I’m not responding to mercantile interests as I stroll along.
I, for one, don’t have any desire to walk into the public realm and be treated to yet more itsy-bitsy pieces of commercial spin.
All change
Change is normal, but change is no longer creeping, it’s galloping. Accelerated anthropogenic climate change changes the weather and landscape so that what is now ‘normal’ isn’t what was normal less than a generation ago. Everything seems to have a shifting baseline, even in the realms that used to appear stable. The children and grandchildren of people in my generation are living with a suite of ‘normal’ behaviours that were almost unthinkable when we were their age. The context of their communication is different. They are beginning to speak the language of consumers almost exclusively, a language in which everything is a product, where there are no commons and the role of civics has already atrophied into irrelevance. They are mostly passive spectators in the society of the spectacle. If they grow up thinking it’s normal to have commercial interests invading every space, can we really hope to ever again have a sane discussion about shared, common, public space?
There is one massive public space, or series of public spaces, where it is has become normal to be assaulted by histrionic commercial pleading at every turn. It’s called the internet, and it is changing our perceptions and expectations of the world at a rate that no-one really anticipated. Both the internet and public street provide a commons where people can be exposed to art and new ideas. Much more so than on the street, in this new public realm spectators can readily turn into players, seeking applause by advertising their private lives on Facebook and uploading personal movies on YouTube. Perhaps more than the street, the internet provides public domains of open access and experimentation where ideas adaptively and rapidly reproduce with what Drew calls ‘virality’ and memes spread with ease — whether or not they’re about authentic reality.
So when I stumble across a stencilled graffiti on a public footpath telling me that the truth lies in a website, and yet I know it’s not true, I’m really experiencing a kind of spam in the physical world to match what’s on-line. It’s a kind of meeting of realms where the boundaries of public and private domains are deliberately obscured and the key questions are no longer about meaning or purpose, but about who’s paying and who’s making money out of it. It’s a place in which it seems to be harder than ever to be sure what it means to be ‘authentic’ or know when the truth lies.
Afterword
I contacted my local council about the “know the truth” graffiti and they immediately sent out a graffiti-removal crew. And the council followed up my enquiry about the legality of the bank’s graffiti. I was told that the council never gives approval to activities that deface its assets. I have to conclude that the bank’s defacement of my local piece of public realm was neither legal nor was it permitted by the publicly owned-entity representing the citizens’ interest. It didn’t stop them though, and in that lovely ironic way capitalism works, this blog is itself infected by the ‘virality’ of their illegal stencils and has become an adjunct to their advertising campaign. Where does their truth lie? Everywhere!
For those who already believe that efforts to restore ecological functions in urban systems are worthwhile, this book provides case studies that underscore the value of urban stream projects and some general principals of stream restoration design drawn from Riley’s own experience and others’. Practioners in the field of stream restoration will empathize with the missteps described at some sites, and the repeated lesson that trying to restore an urban stream means facing not only physical, but also economic, political, and social-cultural challenges.
The first published book that takes the Gowanus Canal as its main subject, Gowanus is a work of extensive historical research that showcases the fruits of dedicated archival digging. Full of Easter eggs for history buffs—like a cheeky description of Revolutionary War-era soldiers bathing in the millponds of the erstwhile Gowanus Creek—the book is written with an attention to narrative detail that enlivens scenes from the Gowanus past. The origin and inspiration of the book is the richness of life around the canal, as well as a personal “obsession” to which Alexiou readily admits. But this richness is also an obstacle to the book, with an overstuffed host of characters and plots that don’t clearly contribute to a central analytic stake in the material. Without a guiding thread beyond the microcosmic relationship of Gowanus’ history to that of the larger city, the fascinating stories Alexiou has culled from the archives remain just that—a collection of anecdotes that illuminate the history of the Gowanus but do not reveal precisely why people have been drawn to the area throughout recorded history, beyond the unspecified “magnetism” of the canal.
Gentrification is one of those words that is so ubiquitous that most of us think we know it when we see it. Rarely is it defined with any precision, however. As the authors of this new and important book argue, the term gentrification eludes an exact definition and has been so widely used and applied across different contexts that it has “overgrown its original boundaries” (p. 9) and “displaced so many other meaningful concepts that urbanists once had in their tool kits”. (p. 10) The term often obscures more than it illuminates and, importantly for them, fails to engage in a nuanced way the processes of gentrification at both the macro (structural) and micro (individual) level. Most progressives don’t see themselves as gentrifiers and this failure, the authors argue, makes it difficult to see how inextricably intertwined we each are in the larger structural forces that shape our individual agency and choices. More to the point, the authors want to illuminate the relationship between the macro and micro to open the true “black box” that “contains our most valuable tools for understanding gentrification.” (p. 16)
Many are confused by the term “graffiti”. It is ambiguous, confusing, and controversial because it encompasses everything from turf markings and vandalism to murals and advertising, which is why a historical account is necessary. The recognized incubation zone for what is referred to as modern “graffiti” is New York City, and it did not start as art, but tagging: scribbling one’s name in as many places as possible. On July 21,1971, the New York Times published an article titled, “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals”, which featured a 17 year-old writer by the name of Taki 183, who literally made a name for himself by tagging his nickname across all five boroughs of New York City. To answer the question of who was behind these acts, the article quotes a New York Transit Authority patrolman, Floyd Holoway, who explained that he had “caught teen-agers from all parts of the city, all races and religions and economic classes”.
No matter where a person may be from, personal and cultural validation and the need to be acknowledged are universal human desires, and graffiti provided the framework. By 1982, when New York sent its best ambassadors of Hip Hop on a global tour called 
Again, calling “graffiti” revolutionary may seems exaggerated; however, consider that it integrated a whole generation, taught them to, as writer and social critic 
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