The potential to make wonderful (low-cost) documentary films about urban nature, that tell compelling stories, that captivate, fascinate, and motivate, is great indeed.
At a recent film screening of our new documentary film Ocean Cities, about connecting cities and marine environments, the panel discussion and questions that followed demonstrated clearly the value of these kinds of films. Some of the comments reflected a sense of being inspired by what other cities were doing (“that’s a great idea, we can do that here also”), others seemed surprised that remarkable ideas had already taken hold locally (“I didn’t know we did that here in Baltimore”), and still for others the film ignited a host of questions about whether any of these cities were doing enough or committing enough to address the serious ocean conservation and climate adaptation work that we need to be doing. But whatever the sort of reaction it started conversations, it stimulated thinking, offered a measure of hope and direction, it spurred imagination and strengthened resolve to do more and to see (depending on the role of the viewer) how they might engage in some way in the changes that are needed. There are many venues and avenues to inform and engage: there are books and newspaper articles, op-ed and blog posts (like this one), power point presentations of many flavors, but there are few media that are able to engage in the ways that a film can.
This newest film, recently finished and now making its way to film festivals and screenings, is an hour-long documentary about the innovative ways in which coastal and port cities, mostly in the US, are managing the marine and aquatic habitats around them. The resulting film is at once informative and inspirational, telling some of the emerging stories of actions taken by local governments and NGOs to connect with marine nature, to understand it as an asset, but also to manage and prepare for the dangers associated with proximity to water. I often find myself speaking of the “dangers and delights” of coastal urban settings, and we’ve tried in this film to present the good work of cities to address both issues (two sides of the same coin really).
This is the second major film collaboration with Colorado filmmaker Chuck Davis. It began with an earlier film called The Nature of Cities (pre-dating and unrelated to the creation of the TNOC blog; the entirely of which can now we watched online here: https://vimeo.com/98080426). It was a serendipitous collaboration: we met by chance at a green building conference in Utah. Chuck was screening his latest film, Transforming Energy, and I was giving a talk about work around Green Urbanism. Chuck approached me after this talk and suggested we think about a film that would document and present in compelling visual ways the innovative green cities I was studying. With just a little funding, Chuck and I (and usually one camera man) travelled and filmed in a number of American and European cities, including San Diego, Austin, New York, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Freiburg, and Paris. It was a dizzying array of stories and voices and to Chuck’s credit he was able to brilliantly weave these strands together to produce an informative and entertaining film, one seen by PBS viewers around the country.
I highly recommend such collaborations, though in the Urban Planning world they seem unusual. It has been an especially potent joining of a filmmaker’s / director’s (Chuck) technical and creative skills with my professional and scholarly knowledge and contacts. It was an epiphany to me as mostly a researcher and academic to begin to understand the power of film in vividly showing what cities could be and what they were striving to accomplish. I had written (and continue to write) books about these leading cities, but have become convinced that telling their stories in this more sensorially rich way has tremendous value.
Our film shoots have been largely low-budget. Mostly it is the cost of travel that is required. At every point we have found creative ways to capture memorable scenes on a low budget. In Copenhagen we filmed on-bicycle interview with the head of the city’s bicycle planning efforts. It was a bit a coordination test for me, the interviewer, and creative equipment solution was found with the use of one of that city’s famous cargo bikes: the cameraman was crouched in the front, with the director frantically pedaling to keep up.
Ocean Cities is similar in strategy and format. Largely unscripted, with interactions on-site, designers, local official, and citizens talk about what we are seeing and share their opinions and perspectives. We’ve been able, I think, to capture the remarkable vitality and beauty of these waterfronts and to embed within specific cities compelling stories of what is possible. The film builds on my own earlier work around the concept of Blue Urbanism[i] (see also this.) The main premise is that we live on the blue planet (more than 70 percent of the surface of the Earth is water) and increasingly the urban planet—yet these two spheres seem rarely connected.
The Trailer for our 50 minute documentary film Ocean Cities. Click to Watch!
While we need to appreciate and plan for the danger, delight is everywhere in such ocean cities. We film opens with a walk along the beach at Carmel with J. Nichols, author of the book Blue Mind, talking about the psychological and stress-reducing benefits of water. The backdrop here makes the point wonderfully, a key premise of our filmmaking approach. This was true at many points in the filming: interviewing kids from an underserved neighborhood in Baltimore as they learned to kayak (and doing the interviews while sitting in a kayak); sampling sustainable seafood dishes and visiting a restaurant’s “white board”, where they keep track of what they are serving and where it comes from; or, following a group of fifth-graders with nets as they scoop up marine life from the bottom of the sea (more about that later). Capturing these kinds of active scenes, involving actual people actively learning, engaging, doing, we have found is a more effectively animates the story in way that a sit-down interview cannot (though we have our share of these kinds of interviews as well).
A key theme of the film is how we must begin to see the watery realms around us in cities in new ways. Too often our collective view is that these are empty or barren areas without nature—they are often depicted as grey or black or otherwise uninteresting and featureless in the conventional maps we prepare and use for city planning. This is changing, and we share the voices of people like landscape architect Kate Orff, who has been working on projects like the Living Breakwaters, along the southern shore of Staten Island, New York. It is an unusual example of civic ecology, creating natural reefs seeded with oysters that moderate flooding but that also engage the public in learning about and caring for the harbor ecosystem. She spoke eloquently about her own journey in re-discovering water, and her design work that increasingly involves “putting water at the center and the land at the edges”.[ii]
The City of Baltimore Parks Department sponsors programs like this one to expose inner city kids to what it’s like to be on a kayak on the Inner Harbor. Photo: Tim Beatley
The medium of film allows the telling of stories visually and also often in impressive real time. You hope for, but are never sure you will find, unplanned spontaneous stories, people, voices along the way. We filmed one day at a neighborhood of floating homes in the IJBurg district of Amsterdam. Walking along with the developer of these homes we encountered a new residents, having just moved in. What was it like to live in a home that was floating, we asked? We were able to capture the interplay and conversation between an appreciative homeowner and the developer (who he did not know or recognize) who made it possible.
While filming in Miami Beach, a city already experiencing the impacts of sea level rise, we had a similar encounter. Filming in Sunset Harbor we sought to capture a sense of how the city’s efforts at elevating roads and investing in new pumping stations looked and felt like in this very sea-vulnerable location. We just happened to encounter a worker at one of the restaurants most affected. It was a personal moment of sharing about the uncertainty of the future of the city, the need to more aggressively tackle climate change for the sake of his kids and family, all at the doorway of a business that was oddly two-feet below the street. It was a striking juxtaposition of the engineered and the human, and something we did not and probably could not have planned. It was another advantage of celebrating the unscripted and being on the lookout for serendipitous encounters that make the film ever more interesting and personal.
Some of the most interesting stories we tell in the film have to do with creative ways to make the often invisible marine world visible to those living in cities. With this in mind we filmed one evening in Gig Harbor, Washington (about an hour’s drive south of Seattle), where a nonprofit called Harbor WildWatch had been organizing a series of monthly events called “Pier Into the Night”. It was a clever, low-tech way to engage the community in appreciating and learning about the underwater life all around them. Volunteer divers are sent underwater with a GoPro camera and lights to see what marine life can be discovered. These images are then displayed in real time on a screen on the town’s public pier. It was a magical evening and impressive that families with small kids were willing to endure a cold evening to watch what the divers were finding (all interpreted in real time by a Harbor WildWatch naturalist). To those who have heard about this it is an “AHA” moment—with a few volunteers and some inexpensive equipment, the underwater world of Puget Sound can be delivered in a compelling way to those (most of us) more terrestrial-bound human beings. But then, disappointingly, none of this footage made it into final film, highlighting a difficult reality: often it is too dark or the images too shaky to use. This might be corrected through acquiring file footage, but many shoots end up this way.
Pier Into the Night in Gig Harbor, Washington: Families with kids watch in rapt fascination to what the volunteer divers are finding on in the nearby waters. Photo: Tim Beatley
Perhaps my favorite shoot occurred in Miami (one that does end up in the film!), with a similar theme of uncovering the wondrous marine world. Just a few weeks after we had visited Gig Harbor we found ourselves wading into the Atlantic Ocean, with a group of highly charged fifth-graders. These kids were participating in a popular program called Seagrass Adventure, organized through the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center.
Here the power of film shines especially. To see the rapt fascination of these young kids, most of whom though they lived only miles away, many from underserved neighborhoods, many had never experienced the ocean before. They tackled their assignment with ferocious courage, dipping and moving their nets along the bottom of the ocean and pulling to the surface a variety of marine organisms. The audible reactions at what they were seeing were remarkable. We came away from that day with the feeling that we had seen human transformation take place.
After about an hour in the water, and with each group’s floating bucket full of unusual and exotic (to us) creatures, the kids headed back to shore. There, the Center’s naturalists continued their work. The kids formed circles and the staff sent around in plastic containers some of what they had discovered. The kids learned more about the biology of these creatures and got an even closer longer look at what they had collected. These in-water activities are supplemented by extensive classroom talks and lab exercises, some of which we also filmed.
Kids participating in the Seagrass Adventure, at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center, near Miami, Florida. Photo: Tim Beatley
In our films we have also given a priority to voices of young people. In one of our New York City shoots we visited the Harbor School on Governors Island. We learned from several very enthusiastic students about the process for raising and growing young oysters, as they showed us around the aquaculture lab. The New York Harbor School–essentially a public high school specialized in developing maritime skills and careers–is a wonderful story itself, and its founder Murray Fisher spoke eloquently of its origins and value. As Fisher told us, New Yorkers are still “shockingly disconnected” from the harbor and the School has sought in some significant ways to address this. One of the most impressive is the Billion Oyster Project, which engages schools around the city in learning about, raising and deploying oysters in the Harbor. So far they have put a remarkable 20 million in the Harbor. There is a long way still to reach a billion, but progress have been great in engaging schools and others (including local restaurants in who donate badly needed oyster shells used in making new oyster beds).
Students at the Harbor School on Governors Island, explaining how the aquaculture lab works. Photo: Tim Beatley
One of the key themes in the film is rethinking our approach to seafood. It is easy to muster experts and sometimes overly dry statistics (we need them of course), but film can tell the story in a more concrete, contextualized way. To this end we spent the day with a small scale fisher, Calder Deyerley, based in Moss Landing, on the Monterey Bay. It was about the merits of fishing quotas, and new mechanisms such as Community Supported Fisheries or CSFs (we profiled one of these in the film, Real Good Fish, also based at Moss Landing, through which of his harvest is sold), and other ways to support more sustainable local fishing practices, but it was more than that.
We stood on his small boat and listened to him talk about the meaning of fishing, his commitment to place and community, his pride in fishing and hopes that his five year old son (who was also there when we filmed) will be able to follow in his footsteps. It was a compelling visual and a compelling (and hopeful) story of an alternative fishing future, one that you wanted to root for.
Calder Deyerley, a passionate sustainable fisher on his boat in Moss Harbor, California. Photo: Tim Beatley
These onsite shoots are also educational opportunities for me, and I have found that I learn much from seeing, experiencing and conversing directly with those in the trenches. I also sometimes discover things that would be difficult to grasp or absorb in any other way. That day in Moss Landing I had a reaction that surprised me a bit, and one that caused some pondering for days afterwards. Towards the end of the day we waited for Calder to return and to bring his day’s harvest into port. He arrived and after waiting his turn to offload the catch it appeared in several crates full of writhing fish.
Despite my strong feelings of support for what this principled fisher was doing I was still impacted by what I had not thought about before—the pain and suffering of these fish. Later I had the opportunity to speak by phone with Australia ethicist Peter Singer (for a column I was writing for Planning Magazine). With these reactions still percolating our conversation veered to the topic of ethics of food. Singer had been tracking for years the emerging research about the sentience and psychological complexity of fish (and thus their pain and suffering). There are clear ethical advantages, Singer says, to growing oysters and other bivalves (they lack, for instance, a central nervous system) as well as for kelp and seaweed harvesting (already on the rise). These are topics given scant attention in our film but that would be more prominent if we were to start over today (and perhaps will be included in the next film).[iii]
There are limitations to our particular style of filmmaking. to be sure. One is that we often sample so many stories and places that there is little room for in-depth or detailed treatment. Experiencing visually, and perhaps experiencing vicariously (through my eyes) a project such as the immense Maeslant Barrier in Rotterdam, an immense floodgate longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall, is a conscious trade off: A full discussion of the merits and operation of this flood gate would require an hour-long film, but to see it, to get a sense visually of its size and magnitude nevertheless has some power.
One of my own strategies has been to take the extensive taped interviews and to use them to, in part, produce parallel books. In the case of Ocean Cities, more detail about many of the people, projects and organizations highlighted in the film can be found in a 2018 book (called Blue Biophilic Cities, published by Palgrave MacMillian[iv]). In this case, it is a slim volume, but a demonstration of the idea that academics who dabble in filmmaking can often apply (some of) this material in more scholarly ways. There is an efficiency (and a synergy) between writing and documentary filmmaking that serve to extend the value of both.
There are other limitations of our method of filmmaking. One involves the choice of shoot locations. Ocean Cities has a heavy American orientation, and a decided Northern Hemisphere outlook about what is possible in response to sea level rise. It has been rightly observed that climate adaptation in the less-affluent cities of the Global South are more constrained and often raise more serious issues of equity and social justice (I especially recommend Lizzie Yarina’s insightful essay “Your Seawall WIll Not Save You”[v]).
And it is a legitimate question whether the experiences of Rotterdam, highly touted around the world, and given yet more visibility in our film, are relevant in other cities. Indeed there is a risk in generalizing such ideas such as “water plazas,” and failing to appreciate the important ways in which sea level rise adaptation ideas and strategies must be locally indigenous. Nevertheless, we are already seeing how the Rotterdam story stimulates thinking about what can be designed and built in other cities, with a necessary dose of local or regional adaptation.
Despite these limitations the potential to make wonderful (low-cost) documentary films, that tell compelling stories, and that captivate and fascinate, and hopefully to motivate, is great indeed. In the case of Ocean Cities we hope the film helps in a small way to shift our terrestrial biases, to see the watery nature around us in new and more appreciative ways. There is both delight and danger in coastal cities and we must continue to press for creative approaches (especially in city planning) that deftly navigate between these two realities.
[i] Timothy Beatley, Blue Urbanism: Exploring Connections Between Cities and Oceans, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014.
[ii] For more about the Living Breakwaters project see Orff’s excellent new book Toward an Urban Ecology, Monacelli Press , 2016; This book was recently reviewed in TNOC here:
[iii] Singer has done some writing on this topic, for instance: “Fish: the forgotten victims on our plate,” The Guardian, September 14, 2010, found at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/sep/14/fish-forgotten-victims
[iv] Timothy Beatley, Blue Biophilic Cities: Nature and Resilience Along the Urban Coast, Palgrave-MacMillian, 2018.
[v] Lizzie Yarina, “Your Seawall Will Not Save You, Places Journal, March, 2018, found at: https://placesjournal.org/article/your-sea-wall-wont-save-you/
The lives of street trees are emblematic of the multiple entanglements that characterise the nature-society dialectic animating the ever expanding urban in the global south—entanglements that knit together the past and present, the secular and sacred, and the global and local.
In rapidly growing Indian cities, change seems like the only constant. Heritage buildings are torn down, roads widened, lakes and wetlands drained, and parks erased to make way for urban growth. Nature is often the first casualty in a constant drive towards development. Yet the street tree stubbornly survives across Indian cities—beleaguered by gasoline fumes, besieged by construction, but still tenaciously gripping the sidewalk. These trees play an important role in the daily lives of Indian cities, a role that is often hidden from our awareness. They are fiercely valued and protected by urban residents, either because of their sacrality, or due to secular civic protests, or even their daily domestic value to street vendors and families alike. Yet the dystopic nature of urban growth poses a constant challenge to their presence. Where do street trees thrive, and where do they fail? In this photo-essay of Bangalore—India’s “High-Tech City” with an ecological history of human settlement that is at least 1200 years old —we examine the hidden lives of street trees.
Bangalore’s ecological history of growth can be roughly divided into three broad periods: pre-colonial (pre-1799), colonial (1799-1945), and post-colonial (after 1945). This historical signature determined the pattern of urban growth, and is still visible in the structure and species selection of trees in the 21st century city. The former British Cantonment was designed with trees forming an integral part of the colonial landscape. Large trees—Albizia saman (rain tree), Delonix regia (Gulmohar), Peltophorum pterocarpum (copper pod)—were brought in by British and German-trained horticulturalists from areas as far flung as Brazil, Madagascar, and South-east Asia.
These trees were prized according to a secular colonial aesthetic that favoured the ornamental over the fruiting, and the exotic over the native. Trees were thickly planted along streets, and in wooded campuses, but otherwise kept under strict control. Areas of the footpath were demarcated for plantation, an even spacing was maintained between trees, and the flowering colours of trees were selected in a careful mix, so that every part of the colonial city was bound to have some flowers in season at all times of the year. This colonial signature can be seen even today in the gentrified neighbourhoods near the heart of the Cantonment—in roads adjacent to Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bangalore’s premium commercial and shopping area—with wide footpaths, cordoned off from traffic.
These trees, largely exotic imports, are planted in an orderly, disciplined manner, and the trees stick to their allotted spaces, seeming to display a finely honed sense of decorum. These trees serve an important civic need. Despite the constant churn of old heritage buildings being torn down to make way for tall multi-story offices, these trees are much prized by residents and office goers, giving the colonial neighbourhood its integral character of a “Garden City”, as it is often termed.
At Mayo Hall (a heritage colonial building housing the City Civil Court), an irregular, sprawling Ficus elastica is contained within a cemented square, a bench placed neatly parallel to the square, and its hanging roots well-trimmed so as not to interfere with the asphalt. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamTrees planted at pre-determined spacing, and neatly confined to defined areas on a street near Mahatma Gandhi road in the Bangalore Cantonment. Photo: Suri Venkatachalam
Yet adjacent to this ornamental aesthetic, a very different pre-colonial aesthetic emerges—that of the sacred. The Maha Muniswara temple, on the same road as the well contained street trees in Photo 2, is built around a sprawling Ficus. Unfettered, the tree controls the urban landscape, not the other way round. Despite its location in an area surrounded by trees, owing their existence to a colonial landscape ethic, the sacred tree, and its associated temple intrude on the road, asserting their right by pre-existence to appropriate urban space, and reclaim the city for their own.
The Maha Muniswara temple, built around a Ficus tree. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamThe Maha Muniswara temple from above—surrounded by Ficus trees—the temple pagoda appears to be floating in a green sky. Photo: Suri Venkatachalam
In contrast to the central parts of the city Cantonment—areas of south Bangalore between the neighbourhoods of Basavanagudi and Jayanagar—display a different street tree aesthetic. These areas constitute a well-planned mix of commercial and residential neighbourhoods, distinguished from each other by the size of the roads. Designed by colonial architects, these urban plans did not just “accommodate” street trees—trees and parks were central to the design and layout of these spaces, giving them their quintessential character. For decades in this highly urban area, it was not buildings but street trees that dominated the skyline, dwarfing the shops and bungalows that lined the streets. Even now, traces of such a past can be seen on several streets.
Sprawling rain trees dwarf the skyline in a Basavanagudi shopping area. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamStreet trees still dominate the aerial view in many parts of southern Bangalore – although the buildings are now beginning to compete for height. Photo: Suri Venkatachalam
In other streets, single floor buildings have given way to multi-floor shops with homes above—yet the trees grow taller still.
Less gentrified than the Cantonment, these parts of the city are also commercial spaces bustling with activity, but of a different nature. For centuries, Bangalore has been known as a city of coconuts. Coconut trees can still be seen across the city, and are needed for everyday cooking. Tender coconut water is sold across Bangalore in the hot season, believed to be good for cooling the body and preventing heat strokes in the soaring summer sun. These fruits spoil when left out in the sun for too long. Coconut vendors nearly always seek out a convenient street tree to shade their produce. So do vegetable and fruit sellers, when they can. Fortunately these older parts of the city retain their tree cover, and permit seller and buyer alike to benefit from the shade that these large trees provide, especially during the scorching mid-day sun. Attempts have been made to regulate these trees, as in the Cantonment—planting them at well-spaced intervals. But these “Indian” parts of the city seem to have integrated street trees more seamlessly into local identities, placing flyers on them, using them to advertise roadside flat tyre repair stands, and for a variety of other innovative purposes. In a city where motorbike riders often ride on the pavement to avoid traffic jams, one seller of pirated DVDs said that following a recent accident he preferred to position himself next to a large tree – so that bikers, avoiding the tree, would avoid hitting him as well!
A tender coconut vendor takes advantage of a lull in sales to catch up on the daily news. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamA series of vegetable carts, covered with plastic, are lined up in the early morning hours below the large trees on the busy DV Gundappa road in Basavanagudi, awaiting the start of business. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamEven mango sellers seek out the shade of trees, to keep their mangoes from spoiling in the harsh overhead sun. The trees serve a dual purpose here: their trunks are plastered with flyers, aiming to entice eager job-seekers. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamRoadside snack sellers—in this case a chaat shop—conduct brisk business next to a street tree. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamA lone fruit vendor waits for the last customers of the day, located strategically under a tree. Photo: Suri Venkatachalam
Trees in these older parts of the city are not without threat, though. Old city plans incorporated trees into their fabric. New plans do the opposite—they avoid leaving space for trees on roads. Trees are considered unavoidable casualties in a time of focused infrastructure expansion. The push of a modernizing city for an overhead Metro led to hundreds of trees on some of these roads being marked for felling several years ago. Sustained campaigns by civic groups and local residents saved many of these trees. The concrete pillars of the Metro tower over the traffic, but the rows of trees flanking the Metro line on both sides, saved by civic protests, soften the visual look—and significantly reduce air pollution on these streets, making it easier for residents and travellers to breathe. Electricity transformers make their mark on the overhead canopy as well, crisscrossing above tree branches. Sometimes entire trees or large branches are felled to make way for a new transformer. At other times, trees grow across these alien intruders, dropping branches on them during occasional storms, and leading to long power cuts.
Long term residents, used to living with trees, may complain about these minor inconveniences, but are rather tolerant of them, preferring to live with the occasional pitfalls of having trees to the alternative. Even service personnel adapt to the daily presence of trees on the road. It is a fairly common sight to see telephone wires coiled around trees, stored in hollows, or hanging on branches—while workers and street vendors often hang their belongings or lunch bags on a convenient shaded branch, or tuck them into nooks between branches, to be retrieved at their convenience.
The Metro line in Jayanagar is flanked by trees on both ends. The IT city is gearing up for business, with advertisements promising 1 GBPS, but the trees still stand tall on these roads, giving it an air of timelessness. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamMeeting Bangalore’s growing needs for energy, an electricity transformer towers over the trees cape. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamTrees form an integral part of daily life in south Bangalore streets, used to store bags, and coiled telephone wires. Photo: Suri Venkatachalam
Residential areas within the same south Bangalore neighbourhood, with smaller roads, prefer a different kind of tree. It is more likely to find fruiting trees and those with sweet scented flowers, planted by residents who care for them personally. Trees form a characteristic component of these neighbourhoods. The canopies of trees often connect, forming a seamless canopy, teeming with biodiversity: birds, butterflies, ants, squirrels and monkeys. Cars—from the small to the expensive—are parked under the shade of roadside trees. Flower vendors sell their garlands in the morning, to be attractively wound around braided hair, or carried home or to the temple, for esteemed rituals of daily worship.
Trees of different species form a connected canopy of green above inner residential streets. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamBirds nest in overhead trees, safe from traffic and from ground predators. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamMany small homes lack space for a garage. Instead, cars are parked outside in a shady spot. Street trees are much valued in these neighborhoods. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamA larger car seeks out the shade of a giant tree. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamA resident takes a morning walk on a wooded street. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamCustomers conduct a close inspection of flower garlands under a neighbourhood tree. Photo: Suri Venkatachalam
Dystopia hits when you travel further out of the city, moving into its peri-urban fringes. The outer fringe of Bangalore is an agglomeration of villages, some of which can trace their past history as far back as far 1200 years. The trees found here are largely native, or naturalised through centuries of local presence. A mix of sacred Ficus species like the banyan and peepal, and large fruiting trees like the mango, jackfruit, and tamarind, whose produce is used locally. Yet as the city expands its presence into the hinterland, the fruiting trees are often the first casualties. Of 43 wooded groves of fruiting trees in the south-eastern periphery of Bangalore, we found only 3 that continued to be protected—the rest were either completely denuded of trees, or severely degraded—with several trees removed or felled. Sacred trees are often the last to be left standing. Even one of these sprawling keystone Ficus trees can provide refuge to a number of threatened urban fauna – bats, monkeys, even the endangered slender loris.
A wooded grove in the south-eastern periphery of Bangalore. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamAnother peri-urban road leading from Bangalore to the highway. All trees have been felled, except for a majestic Ficus benghalensis (banyan). Photo: Suri VenkatachalamFicus trees are important keystone species that support a variety of urban fauna, including the monkeys pictured here. Photo: Suri Venkatachalam
Yet even the sacred is not completely safe from the threat of urban expansion. The Maduramma temple of Huskur, at the south-eastern periphery of Bangalore, provides an example of the expansion of the built construction of the temple, at the expense of the grove of trees that once surrounded it and contributed to its sacred identity. A historical temple of great antiquity, the front of the temple is now largely concreted, whereas the areas to the back, more protected from visitors, are still green.
The front view of the Huskur Madurramma temple, largely devoid of trees. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamThe back of the same temple, still relatively green. Photo: Suri Venkatachalam
Dystopia lurks close by. As urban construction expands in the peri-urban, denudation continues at a frenzied pace. Urban planning in the periphery is not driven by planners. It is driven by a motley mix of real estate agents, large builders and land owners, each seeking to maximise the profit they can make from the tiniest patch of land. Land prices have skyrocketed more than 20-fold in the city periphery in 10 years.
This is no city for trees. Instead of wide tree lined avenues connected by parks, the aerial roads of the city periphery actively discourage trees. Municipal officials create informal restrictions discouraging the plantation of trees on sidewalks—ironically, in anticipation of future civic protests at the time of road widening, when these trees may need to be felled. Instead, saplings are squeezed into absurdly tiny spots in the central median, where they struggle to survive. Apartments and residences around these large roads jostle for space with shops and commercial buildings. Apart from an occasional ornamental, there are hardly any trees to be seen. These areas present a stark difference from the scenic green vistas of Cantonment and south Bangalore. The city periphery is dystopic indeed, with some of the highest levels of pollution, dust and breathing disorders—an obvious corollary to the absence of trees.
A section of Sarjapur road, at the city periphery, with saplings squeezed into small confines of space, too close to each other, at the median. The only large tree to be seen in the vicinity is a sacred tree to the right of the image, protected within the confines of a temple. Photo: Suri VenkatachalamA residential area adjacent to Sarjapur road, with a single ornamental tree interspersing the view of concrete rooftops. Photo: Suri Venkatachalam
Secular or sacred, domestic or dystopic, street trees play an important role in our daily lives. As urban residents, we only too obviously need trees for shade, pollution control, fruits, and flowers. But trees are also part of the daily lives of city residents, giving localities a sense of identity—characterising gentrified, commercial, residential and peri-urban neighbourhoods in very different ways. The importance of street trees in making a city liveable lies in plain sight, and is yet hidden from our eyes. The diversity of social and ecological spaces that trees inhabit characterise the lives of Indian cities. In some places they are sacred, in others disciplined, in still other spaces struggling to get a toehold for survival.
The lives of street trees are emblematic in many ways of the multiple entanglements that characterise the nature-society dialectic animating the ever expanding urban in the global south—entanglements that pull together the past and the present, the secular and the sacred, and the global and the local.
Understanding the role of street trees in our daily lives helps us to disentangle the multiple processes, drivers and mindsets that shape Bangalore, in the past and present. Such an understanding might help us generate valuable insights to build a more sustainable future for Nature in the City—insights that can then inform purposeful collective action to chart a course away from the dystopia lurking around the peri-urban corner in Bangalore. Fortunately, the vision of a city built around trees, developed by earlier planners and bureaucrats, does not lie too far in the past. Indeed, as interviews with officials such as Seturam Neginhal, instrumental in the plantation of 1.5 million trees in Bangalore 50 years ago, reveal: these officials were well aware of the importance of street trees in our daily lives. It is that reflective attention and awareness that we must seek to reclaim.
Harini Nagendra is a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. She uses social and ecological approaches to examine the factors shaping the sustainability of forests and cities in the south Asian context. Her books include “Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities” and "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities" (Penguin India, 2023) (with Seema Mundoli), and “The Bangalore Detectives Club” historical mystery series set in 1920s colonial India.
There are significant direct and indirect impacts of gradual, progressive climate change on our cities and the environment. Societies (and scientists) must not ignore them in favor of attention-grabbing nature of extreme weather events.
After decades of warnings and predictions, the effects of climate change are beginning to manifest themselves around us. On 27 May 2018, Ellicott City, Maryland experienced its second 1000-yr flood in two years after 8 inches of rain fell on the town in just two hours. This flooding is becoming more common due to climate change and it is costly—the 2016 flood resulted tens of millions of dollars in cleanup costs and lost revenue, a state of emergency was called and two people lost their lives—and avoiding future floods of this magnitude may cost $85M. One national guardsman lost his life in the 2018 flood. Climate change is manifesting itself through an increased frequency of extreme events such as the Ellicott City floods, Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017, and wildfires throughout the western USA.
Climate resilience is often framed as preparing and responding to extreme events. Because of the risks to human lives, economic and ecological stability, there has been a concerted focus on understanding and managing the risk from these extreme events. And rightly so—Harvey was the costliest storm on record—Maria was the third costliest, and left thousands dead in Puerto Rico.
Preservation Maryland. Wikimedia Commons
At the same time, climate change also manifests itself through gradual, progressive changes that also have an impact on our cities and environment. As an urban ecosystem ecologist, at University of Maryland College Park, we are studying the implementation of green infrastructure technologies such as rain gardens, bioswales, detention ponds, and urban forests for the mitigation of urban runoff and surface water pollution. When we simulated how current watershed implementation of stormwater green infrastructure (centralized detention ponds, and decentralized low-impact development approaches, such as, bioswales, infiltration trenches, and sand filters) may be resilient to predicted future changes in climate, we found that the recent climate record in Maryland had already started a shift towards the predicted increase in rain intensity. The baseline for our study’s present-day scenarios had shifted so much that the future scenarios were not as dramatic as we had expected (Giese et al. in review). So, while our cities and ecosystems have their resilience tested by extreme climate events, they are also constantly experiencing the impacts of gradual and progressive changes in climate, and the indirect effects this change has on ecosystems.
A grassed bioswale. Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/dep/
The extreme events that climate change brings can distract us (even scientists) from these persistent and progressive changes. But, we must not ignore the gradual, progressive shifts from climate change because they have a lot to tell us about the resilience of our cities, and also can generate feedback loops to help us combat climate change [or help promote the adoption of climate mitigation and adaptation].
To understand these gradual, progressive shifts from climate change, it is helpful to consider how ecologists think about change and disturbance. While the effects of extreme climate events are devastating and provide significant tests to the resilience of cities, extreme events are not the only ways that climate change will manifest itself and impact the resilience of cities. Climate change progresses by affecting both the climate means and extremes that ecosystems experience.
Ecology has distinguished the response of ecosystems to stress and disturbance events, and this distinction may be useful for managing the response of cities to climate change. Grime (1977) distinguishes between stress which, “consists of conditions that restrict production” and disturbance which “is associated with the partial or total destruction of the plant biomass”. Rykiel (1985) sought to distinguish causes and effects for ecological systems and defined a disturbance as a cause that results in an effect such as stress “a physiological or functional effect” or perturbations “the response of an ecological component or system” that is indicated by deviations of properties away from reference conditions.
Smith (2011) builds on this notion of cause and effect when specifically with regard to climate extremes, suggesting that ecologists distinguish between climate extremes and the extreme response that an ecological system may have to it. McPhillips et al., (2018) recently expand this further to consider extreme events, extreme impacts, and potential responses to these extremes, with a framework that provides space for integration of physical sciences, engineering, and management of a city’s response to extreme events.
When we apply these perspectives to the resilience of cities to climate change it is important to consider both the direct and indirect effects of climate change on cities (da Silva et al. 2012). Direct effects might be thought of as disturbances—flooding, sea level rise, increased storm strengths, prolonged drought. Indirect effects can be seen as stress responses—the effects on plant productivity and organismal physiology, impacts on infrastructure effectiveness, impacts on telecom networks, feedbacks to livelihoods and health.
Both kinds of change are important for understanding the resilience of cities to climate change. There is mounting evidence that green infrastructure bolsters the resilience of cities through the provision of ecosystem services, such as, mitigation of flooding, buffering storm surges, and providing shade during extreme heat. The resilience of these ecosystem services of green infrastructure is impacted by gradual, progressive shifts in climate and indirect ecosystem responses. Therefore, we need to better understand how climate change impacts urban ecosystems through stress and indirect effects. Distraction from these effects can have consequences for different types of players in cities. Scientists miss out on the ability to understand the potential weakening of ecological features that convey resilience. Importantly, there is then limited scientific understanding to guide practitioners and planners to deal with these effects.
Public attention to climate change is very responsive to extreme events—when tracking social media posts before, during, and after extreme weather events, for example—but this attention usually dissipates quickly after the event. Distraction from stress and indirect effects of climate change can lead to an unsustained and weakened approach to climate mitigation and adaptation. Ultimately, stress and indirect impacts may weaken the resilience of cities, putting them at greater risk when extreme events happen. From the perspective of resilience thinking, stress and indirect effects can also set cities up to cross thresholds into new states. The stress and indirect effects of climate change can be seen as slow variables that influence progressive changes in ecosystems over time, and as system characteristics change over time in response to climate change.
Species and ecosystems are already being impacted by the gradual shift in mean climate (see this overview from National Geographic). Species distributions have been observed for many species of plants and insects, and an indirect impact of climate on ecosystems. Some of the movement of species ranges is quite rapid. Importantly, pest and diseases have also shown range shifts, including malaria, mosquito vectors, and pest and pathogens of ornamental and commercial plants. Some of these climate effects on species are seen through changes in phenology—or the timing of events such as leaf-out, flowering, emergence from hibernation, reproduction, and leaf-fall.
As these gradual changes in mean climate progress, future climates will cause some cities to no longer be hospitable for some species of plants. This will impact the plant palates available for urban greening (Yang 2009). Because the urban forests of the future are being planted today, managers should already be considering the future climate windows of their cities for the trees that are planted now. An example of this is a revision of hardiness zone recommendations by the Arbor Day Foundation.
Credit: Arbor Day Foundation
Stress and indirect effects from climate change can impact the ecosystem services societies depend upon. For example, we investigated the climate resilience and adaptation of stormwater green infrastructure and asked how green infrastructure may be resilient to changes in climate and be able to convey climate adaptation strategies. We simulated 2 watersheds under 8 climate scenarios and found that green infrastructure will be able to buffer predicted changes in climate (Giese et al. in review). However, the models used for these purposes lack important climate change related feedbacks. In both modeling and empirical studies, transpiration is a critical driver of reductions in runoff in watersheds using green infrastructure. This imparts a benefit both hydrologically by reducing flows, but also can reduce sediment loading and improve water quality.
But we don’t yet have a good understanding of how plants will transpire in a future climate? What will the water balance look like in a future climate? What will it look like in 5 years? 10 years? 50? 100? If stormwater green infrastructure soils are designed to promote bioretention but the environment of the soil microbes are constantly changing, how will they retain nutrients in the watershed and protect surface waters? How will the response of green infrastructure to climate disturbance act as a feedback to set the system up to provide resilience for extreme events? Just as planning is beginning to account for these directional changes in climate mean trends—our research should as well. It should also explore the interaction and cross-scale TEMPORAL linkages between pulses and presses of climate change.
A soil-eye view from a rain garden. What will the response of soil microorganisms to persistent stress and indirect effects from climate change mean for urban resilience? Photo: Mitchell Pavao-ZuckermanGreen infrastructure and green space provide opportunities for observation and interpretation of local ecologies. Through time, these observations would reflect indirect, stress, and persistent climate change impacts. Could these observations develop a place-based ecology to combat shifting baselines and engage people to combat and adapt to climate change? Photo: Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman
A dramatic shift in behaviors to address the emission of greenhouse gasses that drive climate change, as well as mitigation and adaptation approaches, is needed to reduce the risk of climate change impacts. However, there is a challenge—climate change may be too big a problem for most of us to perceive. Thomashow (2001) argues that people can’t perceive climate change but they can track local trends because people are best suited to both observe and understand the world directly around them. Thomashow calls for a place-based perceptual ecology, where people can “observe, witness, and interpret the ecological pattern and place where they live”.
Urban greenspace and green infrastructure is a place where urban residents interact with nature intimately—it is the place where most “observe, witness, and interpret” their local ecology. It may be a place where people can observe the gradual and progressive stresses that climate change has on ecosystems. Green infrastructure would be something in the local environment that people could watch and steward and notice changes. This could be a strong feedback for building climate awareness in that awareness of the climate system and climate change by urban dwellers is a slow variable that may contribute to the overall resilience of the global urban system (Elmqvist 2013).
There has been concern expressed about the shifting baseline of climate change—that the slow progressive increase in temperature and shifts in ecological structure and function will make people complacent. Could the use of green space and green infrastructure as an educational tool to build a place-based perceptual ecology help combat the shifting baseline and engage people in combating and adapting to climate change? This would be a significant feedback loop to promote the adoption of climate mitigation and adaptation practices.
Echoing Berbés-Blázquez et al. (2018)—who argue that “societies need spaces for radical thinking to confront not only the climate-change challenges of the future but also the present-day conditions that create, reinforce, and reproduce vulnerability”—societies need to recognize that the gradual, progressive direct and indirect impacts of climate change also create these conditions that shape vulnerabilities.
Berbés-Blázquez, M., Iwaniac, D., Grimm, N., McPhearson, T. https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2018/04/21/positive-visions-sustainable-resilient-equitable-cities/
da Silva, J., Kernaghan, S., Luque, A. 2012. A systems approach to meeting the challenges of urban climate change. Int J Urban Sust Dev 4:125-145
Elmqvist, T. 2013. https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2013/03/27/urban-sustainability-and-resilience-why-we-need-to-focus-on-scales/
Giese, E., Shirmohammadi, A., Rockler, A., Pavao-Zuckerman, M.A. (in review) Assessment of stormwater green infrastructure for climate change resilience at the watershed scale. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Grime, J.P. 1977. Evidence for the existence of three primary strategies in plants and its relevance to ecological and evolutionary theory. The American Naturalist. 111: 1169-1194.
Rykiel, EJ. 1985 Towards a definition of ecological disturbance, Aust. J Ecol 10:361-365
Smith, M.D., 2011, An ecological perspective on extreme climatic events: a synthetic definition and framework to guide future research, J Ecol, 99:656-663
Thomashow, M. 2001. Bringing the biosphere home. MIT Press.
Yang, J. 2009. Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Urban Tree Species Selection: A Case Study in Philadelphia. J Forestry 107: 364-372.
Should planners maintain inefficiency so that they have the capacity to be efficient when they need to? When the “low-hanging fruit” conversation comes up: Does picking it actually move us in the right direction?
Anyone who has participated in processes of planning, community development, advocacy and societal change more generally has probably engaged in an inevitable conversation about “low-hanging fruit”. (Perhaps there are similar idioms in languages other than English.) In my experience, it goes like this: there is a broader, inspiring conversation about the ultimate vision and goals that the group wishes to achieve. This is followed by the identification of a series of steps to be taken to achieve that goal, some small, some large, most unattainable in the short term with existing resources. Then, to avoid facing what seems like the futility of it all, the conversation turns to identifying pieces of the plan that are achievable in the near term, with the resources available or easily obtainable. A frequent focus of this conversation is some form of assessment of barriers and opportunities to forward progress. The low-hanging fruit are the actions that can be taken toward the goal that are not blocked by barriers.
Problems with this approach include the assumption that the process of change is a linear one, that one step leads to the next until the final goal is achieved and that therefore low-hanging fruit are the same kind of fruit, and of equivalent quality, as the fruit growing higher up on the metaphorical tree. It also assumes that regardless of whether you ever manage to pick the rest of the fruit, the low-hanging fruit is worth picking, and is better than picking no fruit at all. If fruit picking is the goal, then it makes sense to start with the ones you can reach while someone goes and gets a ladder so you can get the rest a bit later. If, however, the lower fruit is not equivalent to the higher fruit, you might take up all the room you have in your baskets with the lower hanging fruit and never get to the higher fruit at all. Or maybe you conclude that if all you can get is the lower fruit, maybe you should choose another tree altogether, where you stand a better chance of success. (As a side commentary on this particular metaphor, and as someone who lives with fruit trees, I can also say that the fruit on the top of the tree ripens first, as it usually gets more sun, therefore picking the lower fruit first is not a good idea at all.) Over the years, I have spoken with many in the field of planning who feel frustration with the low-hanging fruit approach.
The author, ironically, picking low-hanging cherries from her well-watered back yard cherry tree.
Settling for the low-hanging fruit can actually lead you astray
Recently, I spent several days in a workshop as part of a team working on energy resilience in low-income neighborhoods in the city where I live. The team, when I joined it, appeared to me to be working on a typical low-hanging fruit problem: how to increase participation of low-income households in several programs designed to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy use. Efficiency and conservation are the classic low-hanging fruit of sustainability efforts: energy, water, fuel, recycling, these all fall into the general category of working within the existing system to make it less wasteful of precious resources. It’s hard to disagree with these arguments; I think we all intuitively approve of “efficiency” and disapprove of “waste”. But let’s take a look at what efficiency and waste might really mean within the context of the fruit-picking metaphor.
Ecologists are familiar with the concept of resource limitation in ecosystems. An ecological community of plants, microbes and animals will increase its primary production (the production of biomass) until it runs out of a resource it needs. The main limits on primary production globally tend to be sunlight, temperature, or water, however at local scales many ecosystems are limited by a particular nutrient such as nitrogen. Ecologists can detect resource limitation by experimentally adding more of the limiting resource to the system and seeing if production increases. Complex adaptive systems—such as ecosystems, economies, and cities—self-organize around constraints and limits, although they often respond to them in ways we don’t expect. For example, in the complex system that is a city, fundamental resources such as space and water may act as constraints on growth. Transportation planners can tell you what happens when you remove the constraint of road capacity by building more capacity: rather than just relieving congestion, expanding road capacity results in induced demand—more development that quickly brings the system back to a congested state. A few years ago, a graduate student of mine developed a system dynamics for Las Vegas’ water supply that indicated induced demand occurring with water as well. The city’s population growth plateaued until new water projects (the pipeline from Lake Mead, for example) came online, and explosive growth followed.
Here in Salt Lake City, we receive an average of 400mm of precipitation per year; we have some of the highest per capita levels of water use in the world and one of the fastest population growth rates in the US. The vast majority of our water use in the state goes to agriculture, but outdoor irrigation to maintain green grass and shade trees in yards, parks and gardens is the largest share of urban use. We run our sprinklers freely and pay very low rates for what we use. Many civic-minded residents perceive and abhor this “waste” and are converting their lawns to xeriscape. That is, they are imposing a voluntary constraint on themselves that the broader system does not impose. What does this picking of low-hanging fruit achieve within the broader system, then; in years of normal precipitation, what happens to the water that is not used by these residents? The residents, I presume, think that the water is either staying in the reservoirs (which is probably directly true in the short term), or contributing to maintaining ecological streamflows (which may also be true but only if the reservoirs are full). In the longer term, it may also be helping to postpone the construction of a planned water project on the Bear River to the north, thereby saving us all a lot of money and preventing the habitat destruction associated with a new dam. However, it is also probably fueling more development locally by relieving some of the water supply constraints on our local population growth.
I’ve spoken with regional water policy leaders and managers who recognize—off the record—that the “waste” of water in our agricultural and urban systems is actually serving as our emergency reserve. If a deep, multi-year drought hits, there are a lot of taps we can turn off and still have water for basic uses. This is a manifestation of the “flexibility” described by Gregory Bateson in his 1970 essay1. Bateson describes flexibility as “the uncommitted potentiality for change” (the current buzzword “resilience” is also getting at this). From Bateson’s perspective, the goal of all good planning must be to increase flexibility, despite the fact that the system has a “natural propensity to eat up all available flexibility”. How does the planner create flexibility while restraining the system from hungrily gobbling it up? In other words, how do you maintain inefficiency so that you have the capacity to be efficient when you need to? In the case of our wasteful water use, if we increase efficiency now, in good years, we will grow into our good year water supply levels, and have much less room to tighten our belts later.
So, should ecologically-minded citizens continue to water their thirsty lawns rather than try to cut back? What is the higher fruit we’re really interested in here? I think the vulnerability in the system is that nothing protects ecological “uses” for water such as maintaining natural hydrologic flows, aquatic and riparian habitats, etc. Another piece is that the legal framework for water allocation and management here in Utah is set up to be litigious and confrontational rather than collaborative. So the higher fruit is really a reorganization of our water management structure at state, regional and local levels and until we can manage that, in a way that prevents the hungry system from consuming all the slack, I think there’s a reason to stay on the fence with regard to household yard-watering.
Does this narrative apply to the energy efficiency project? Does helping a low-income household to reduce their energy use through, say, upgrading their appliances or insulating their home somehow promote increased energy use somewhere else in the system? Does it remove a constraint on unsustainable growth in the broader system? Certainly, some parallels between the energy and water cases are clear, primarily the desire to reduce “waste” and to save resources and money. However, energy turns out to be a different situation and the low-hanging fruit is more clearly worth picking, for at least three reasons. First, for households who are struggling, then it is a clear win. Constraints on upward mobility of disadvantaged groups are NOT constraints that we want to maintain. Second, energy supply is not a limiting factor in Salt Lake City currently, or in most cities, unless a legal requirement for renewable sources has been imposed. Because energy isn’t limiting here, the picking of the low-hanging efficiency fruit really isn’t going to hasten or impede our progress toward a more sustainable, renewable energy future. Third, our city electricity supply is generatedto meet demand. Energy that isn’t used is energy that isn’t generated, and that means that less fossil fuels are burned, our climate impact is reduced and the air we breathe is cleaner. Using energy more efficiently in this case probably just results in lower resource use and, using less means that we can postpone or avoid expensive investments in electricity generation capacity. The low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency is one of several fruits that will need to be gathered on the path to achieving a resilient, renewable and equitable energy system, and it is therefore worth picking.
One of the fundamental challenges of working in the field of planning, it has always seemed to me, is that planners are good at looking ahead, at perceiving future rough seas, but—to switch metaphors here—they have relatively few levers to pull. How do we plan for game-changers that are coming up fast, like driverless vehicles? Or for changes or catastrophes that we know are likely to hit, but we’re not sure when or how, and that require significant cost to prepare for? As Bateson says, ultimately we need to create a system that has the resilience/flexibility to deal with changes and challenges while still keeping an eye on the further horizon.
This goal is the high fruit, the sun-ripened, juicy-sweet premium fruit. What is the best strategy for choosing actions in the short term, to make sure we don’t run off course, to avoid wasting our efforts? I think we should ask ourselves these questions every time the low-hanging fruit conversation comes up: In picking this fruit, are we altering a constraint on the larger system? Is it a constraint we want to alter? Does picking it actually move us in the right direction, whether or not we ever reach the higher fruit? The answer will vary in different cases, but I propose that thinking about the factors that are limiting the system may help to more effectively target our fruit-picking efforts.
Improvements towards more sustainable urban management in developing countries may require breaking the resilience of the existing systems that resist long-term change and are structured to adhere to states of ineffectiveness and inefficiency.
Many practitioners and scholars have emphasized the importance of strengthening urban system resilience. However, a less explored area of work is the resilience that affects urban areas but in adverse ways. Weak governance, conflicts and lack of resources and capacity in many cities have detrimental environmental and human outcomes that have existed for long periods and are reinforced by the strong resilience of the urban system. Thus, breaking the resilience of urban systems in the first place is necessary to advance the agenda of sustainability and not return to their initial (unsustainable) state.
I argue that the use of resilience in urban systems can be controversial, particularly in the context of developing countries. In the developed and rich world, where the idea of resilience for socio-economic systems has found fertile intellectual ground, the positive meaning reflects the efforts to maintain the status quo of the socio-economic systems that have kept the localities developed and the high quality of life of their inhabitants. However, resilience is not a desirable feature for urban systems that result in unsustainable and unproductive outcomes. Management for resilience can emphasize short-term stability over long-term adaptive strategies. Thus, resilience does not have a straightforward positive meaning for socio-economic systems in the developing world that need a change in the first place. Many cities are stuck with low socio-economic-environmental indicators because of the resilience of their socio-economic systems, which tend to reflect a state of inefficiency, inequity, and ineffectiveness in the use of resources and prevent the improvements in the lives of the most vulnerable part of their populations. Indeed, the biggest challenge for cities in developing countries may be to break the resilient pattern of the socio-economic system in order to advance the development agenda in the first place. A radical transformation may be more desirable than the traditional meaning of resilience.
Penang cityscape. Photo: José Puppim
Case of solid waste in Malaysia
The municipalities held the responsibility for solid waste management (SWM) in Malaysia. This was in keeping with the Local Agenda 21 initiative and trends in other parts of the world. However, the urban SWM systems evolved irregularly across the country and municipalities strived to improve and increase the capacity of the waste disposal facilities. While some wealthier municipalities, such as Penang Island, developed reasonable systems for collection and final disposal of waste, others struggled to keep up even the basic responsibilities for collection. Waste management was funded by the assessment fee paid by each property, which also funds other growing needs of the urban centers. Overall, the disposal systems were completely inadequate. Controlled landfills were unheard of in Malaysia until 2000, recycling initiatives were almost all done informally and urban composting at large scales was not done.
Thus, the federal government decided to recentralize SWM at the end of the 2000s. For most of the municipalities and states, the centralization of SWM was a relief given the growing fiscal pressure in the local budgets. Municipalities struggled to keep up with the rising costs of SWM system and lacked the means to upgrade them. Thus, there was not much resistance to centralization. However, Penang State decided not to join the centralization process in waste management. The state kept its own SWM system managed by the municipalities, which was already working reasonably. This left the burden in the budget of Penang State’s municipalities but pushed them to be more effective and efficient, developing many innovative initiatives for recycling, composting and waste reduction.
Urban Farm Project, Penang. Photo: José Puppim
Breaking the resilience: lessons from Penang
A key factor in the high rates of recycling and composting in Penang is the decentralized SWM system. Having the municipal government in charge of paying for the SWM kept the pressure on the local budget, incentivizing the municipality to find creative ways to reduce the amount of waste going to the final destination and always improving the SWM system. The two municipalities in Penang State (Seberang Perai and Penang Island) work closely with the civil society organizations and the private sector to support their SWM initiatives, a situation that is unique to this area of Malaysia.
There is often a tremendous resilience in keeping the SWM system inefficient when the contracts are given to the private sector. In general, private contracts are paid according to the route of collection and/or amount of waste disposed of in the landfill, or just a lump-sum based on certain quality indicators. There are few incentives to reduce waste at the source, as this would reduce the final waste volume or eliminate collection routes for which the SWM companies are paid (consequently would reducing their revenues). In the case of lump-sum contracts, reduction in the waste stream would not affect results. In the case of Penang, because the municipality has to pay for the SWM services itself and has limited space for disposal, there is a growing pressure to reduce the total amount of waste.
The forces that helped to break the resilience in Penang were a combination factors, both internal and external to the system. Civil society organizations started the changes with urban innovations from the bottom (internal to the system), such as recycling initiatives, that were scaled up by external factors to the system (from the top), including state support for buying equipment or subsidized rent. Having the SWM system under the control of the state/local government delineated the boundaries of the system making possible for internal and external pressures (bottom-up and top-down efforts) to catalyze change. Budgetary restrictions on the local government improved resource efficiency and encouraged the development of innovations from the civil society and private sector to increase recycling and composting rates, and thus breaking the resilience of the SWM system.
What are the implications for policy? Improvements towards more sustainable urban management in developing countries may require breaking the resilience of the existing systems that resist long-term change and are structured to adhere to states of ineffectiveness and inefficiency. However, three lessons from Penang can provide an understanding of the changes in the system to break resilience and inform policy:
Build local capabilities to catalyze internal pressures for change. Firstly, efforts for breaking resilience from the bottom, or internal to the system, are needed. Capabilities in the local organizations, in government and civil society, to mobilize resources and knowledge to make urban innovations are fundamental to create change. For example, incentives for business and civil society, in the form of small grants or leases of government land, can encourage them to push for changes in the system to improve resource efficiency, such as the case of waste management in Penang Island (e.g., grants for composting initiatives and land lease for the Tzu Chi recycling center).
Bring in external pressures to break the resilience. Secondly, scale up the external factors that can change the system to break resilience or support internal change. External changes, such as a new regulatory framework, can create the conditions to spur innovations in the system if there is enough pressure from the bottom or resources from the top. In many cases, external efforts alone will not have any effect in the long-term or would become expensive to break the resilience solely from the top. For example, the centralization of SWM in most of Malaysia brought resources from the federal government improving the SWM system in many localities around the country. However, there are increasing costs to upgrading SWM systems and their resource efficiency, but recycling rates are not on par with the decentralized system such as in Penang.
Define the boundaries of the system. Thirdly, defining the right boundaries of the system can help the mix of external and internal forces to play out their combined roles and break the resilience. If the boundaries are too large, internal forces may not have the capacity to make the necessary changes or spread the urban innovation at such a large scale; alternatively, there may be no external forces great enough to press for resource efficiency, except international organizations or opposition parties, which can keep in check the groups in government. If the boundaries are too small, there may be difficulty achieving a critical mass of internal pressure to break the resilience. For example, civil society groups may be too small and lack the resources or civic mobilization to spur the internal changes. The case of Malaysia before SWM recentralization is an example. Many localities did not have enough mobilization capacity in the civil society or private sector to improve resource efficiency and develop urban innovations.
Thus, defining the right boundaries of the system to allow a combination of external and internal pressures over the system can help to break the resilience to improve resource efficiency.
José A. Puppim de Oliveira Rio de Janeiro
For more information:
This essay is based on the article: Puppim de Oliveira, Jose A. (2017). Breaking resilience in the urban system for improving resource efficiency: the case of the waste sector in Penang, Malaysia. International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development. 9(2): 170-183. DOI: 10.1080/19463138.2016.1236027 https://doi.org/10.1080/19463138.2016.1236027
Video: Urban Innovations: The Case of the Waste Sector in Penang Island, Malaysia
Though the Between Two Seas trail was set up to be a tangible example of how places evolve during different phases of urban development, there is something to be said about how walking opens the door to social changes and broadens perspectives.
I sit at a picnic table in a sliver of a park running alongside Istanbul Caddesi (street), not far from the Küçükçekmece Gölü, a natural lagoon on the Marmara Sea. It’s about noon on a Wednesday and, except for two ladies chatting on a bench a few meters away, I have the rest of the park to myself.
Across the street are rows of luxury, high-rise condos and villas of the elite, gated community known as Bosphorus City. A couple of decades ago, this was the site of one of Istanbul’s largest trash dumps, a factoid I read on the trail map I’m following. Like many parts of the city, and Turkey, in general, the land was reclaimed and sold for housing development initiatives most ordinary people can’t afford.
I spent two days walking parts of the Between Two Seas and Hiking Istanbul’s trails. The 30 or so kilometers I passed through will be greatly impacted if the proposed Canal Istanbul project comes to fruition.
Behind me is a working-class neighborhood with modest single-family homes and squat, square two and three-story apartment buildings. A textile factory has a ground-level shop selling samples of shirts and pants made on the upper floors. Kids, sporting jerseys of their favorite local football clubs, kick a ball around in the street. An old man with a cane makes his way uphill carrying a bag of tomatoes. A cat curls up on the corner, in no rush to be anywhere.
Map courtesy of Between Two Seas.
Suddenly, a rooster and a few hens jump through a hole in the park fence. One of the neighbors behind the park cut the metal spokes so his chickens can peck and find crumbs of left-behind picnic fare. This public space is their private farm.
In many ways, this scene, and others I have seen while walking parts of the Between Two Seas and Hiking Istanbul trails, sum up the push and pull Istanbul faces.
On one side, government officials search for ways to modernize infrastructure, stimulate economic growth through widespread construction projects and accommodate the estimated 15 million people that live in Istanbul. On the other side, beyond the day-to-day routine of getting by, there is an undercurrent of growing concern around the issues of preserving natural green spaces, providing just and equal access to social and economic opportunities, and controlling overdevelopment.
Footsteps through time and development
I’m back in Istanbul, a complete diversion from our Bangkok-to-Barcelona foot journey, because I want to see what soon may be lost.
Canal Istanbul project. Photo: Jenn Baljko
In autumn of 2017, while walking along the Black Sea, I had heard tidbits about the proposed shipping canal project that would create a massive, parallel, alternative route to the heavily-trafficked Bosphorus Canal. This spring, news of the construction of a third Istanbul airport reached my ears. Then, Instagram posts from the Culture Routes Society’s Between Two Seas hiking trail further piqued my curiosity about what is happening on the fringe of Istanbul.
From everything I could gather, Istanbul’s urban sprawl and the government’s plans to hit lofty economic targets before 2023’s 100th anniversary of the founding of the modern Turkish republic was on a crash course to swallow up the last of city’s natural green spaces. As a person walking parts of the planet, I felt an urgency to walk through these precious and endangered spaces.
The Between Two Seas route offers an invitation to do that.
It was set up as a four-day, 60-kilometer hike starting at the Black Sea in the north and ending in the Marmara Sea in the south. It unpeels layers of development, leading walkers from the outermost periphery of the city through rural areas, forests, water basins, vegetable farms, a Neolithic-era cave that marks the city’s oldest settlement, housing complexes, new construction sites, parks, marginalized neighborhoods, historical ruins and other places of cultural importance that define Istanbul’s past, present, and possible future.
“What can you do between two seas? This was the question. In post-modern life, people don’t walk from one sea to the other,” says Serkan Taycan, founder of the Between Two Seas trail who blends his background in civil engineering, urban planning, and photography to focus on urban and rural transformation. “There is a narrative behind the trail. The Between Two Seas trail goes from the rural villages to the water basins to the urban fringe to the gated communities to the new apartment blocks to the lagoon to sub-city centers. Layer by layer, step by step, you can observe the chronology of urbanization in Istanbul.”
Some of the four-day route—originally opened in 2013 before it was clear where the proposed canal could be located—has already been impacted. The northern-most section, once home to forests and fresh-water lakes used by hundreds of migratory birds, is mostly under the concrete of Istanbul’s third airport; the new airport is scheduled to open in late 2018 and will eventually replace Ataturk Airport about 50 kilometers south.
A new road leading to the third Bosphorus bridge, which will help Turkey establish another way to move goods east and west between continents, has also cut away at the city’s natural environment. If that wasn’t enough, there is an ever-present threat that the once-protected lands in the northern part of Istanbul will continue to disappear as recent legislative changes expand the possibility for further development, as reported by National Geographic in March 2018.
I take the advice of Taycan and Nick Hobbs, one of the founding members of Hiking Istanbul, which has created a 700-kilometer network of trails around Istanbul that are accessible via public transportation. I head out to do a two-day walk on the Between Two Sea’s southern 30 kilometers from Sazlıbosna and the Sazlıdere Reservoir to Menekşe Beach. The open spaces and towns along these sections of the trail would be most affected by the proposed Canal Istanbul project, which seems to be inching closer to reality.
“The construction of the airport and motorway are done, and those green spaces are already lost. We hope the canal won’t be built. It will be a tragedy if it is built,” says Hobbs, who is also an artist, concert organizer, and climber. “It will destroy what is left of Istanbul’s north-to-south green corridor and quicken the destruction of the city’s east and west green spaces.”
I start out early from my hotel near Ataturk Airport, thinking I would reach Sazlıbosna about 9 a.m. But getting out of Istanbul’s daily chaos poses its challenges. A bus that was supposed to start near a central metro line never shows up, and after an hour of waiting and the help of a local who speaks some English, I find out that I have to take another tram to the end of the line and get the bus there. The delay means I won’t start walking until noon, but I’m eager to leave the city’s noise and crowds for the silence of rural spaces.
It’s sad to see so much left-behind picnic trash in these open green spaces that call people to relax and soak in the area’s natural beauty. Photo: Jenn Baljko
It’s hot and humid in mid-May, but the breeze coming off the reservoir makes the flat walk comfortable. I watch storks and gulls skim the water’s glassy surface and block out the sound of squawking crows fighting over remnants of food. Green farmland and high-voltage towers string remote towns together with the necessities of food and electricity.
I walk the waterfront’s edge, disheartened to see trash piled up under almost every tree offering a shady spot for picnickers. In Turkey, like many other countries I have walked, I have seen the locals’ affinity to eat and relax in nature, but have made myself crazy trying to understand how they can spoil these beautiful places with plastic bags and bottles, styrofoam trays and soda cans. A herd of grazing cows restores my faith in nature’s survival, and I wave to the cow that has waded into the water to cool off.
The Between Two Seas trail unfolds a narrative about Istanbul’s urbanization, from rural villages to water basins to multi-story apartment buildings. Photo: Jenn Baljko
There are some red and white and blue and orange trail markings pointing the direction southward, but I end up losing the path or reinventing one so I can I have a better vantage point. I climb a small hill and walk a dirt trail pounded down by a tractor. A local warns me to be careful of snakes sunning themselves.
Sometimes I found trail markers, other times I deviated from the path to get a better view. Photo: Jenn BaljkoBetween Two Seas quarry. Photo: Jenn Baljko
I come to an old quarry, and the image of big white blocks submerged under floating algae conjures up an eerie, mystical stillness of time forgotten. A few curves later, a shepherd leads his sheep through scrub and the hazy views of big apartment buildings rise up on the horizon. The sweet scent of yellow flowers, which I recognize as ginesta from back home in Catalonia, reaches me. I close my eyes remembering this smell.
I cross into the small village of Şamlar. I see four things as I enter the town: the mosque’s minaret, a sign advertising Canal Istanbul land sales, a tea house, and a restaurant. It’s the sign I get stuck on. I wonder how many people are selling land that may have been in their families for generations, and I wonder who’s buying the land and at what price. I have seen plenty of real estate signs and development projects along the Black and Mediterranean seas, and it appears that the Canal Istanbul project is now ushering in speculative land buying and selling, something that certainly will give a short-term boost to Turkey’s real estate and construction industries, important GDP sectors.
I make a mental note to backtrack to see the old Ottoman dam just outside of town and make a beeline to the restaurant for a late lunch and a few minutes of reprieve from the heat.
A young man approaches me. He is eager to speak English. He insists on walking with me after lunch. “There are dogs. Maybe there are not nice people ahead”, he tells me. I don’t know whether or not to believe him. Lluís and I have encountered dogs in many places, and yes, it’s possible to meet shady characters anywhere, but, I find people’s fears to be slightly exaggerated. I see kindness in his eyes, and I agree to the escort, slightly regretting my decision not to see the Ottoman dam before my rest break.
Although I know from the Hiking Istanbul’s field notes Hobbs emailed me that I am supposed to follow the waterfront towards the new dam at the end of the reservoir basin, my companion believes the path is closed. It is closed to vehicles, but neither of us is sure if it now also closed to pedestrians. Chatting about Turkey, Europe, and life’s troubles and wishes, we divert ourselves to a hilly path through a thigh-high grassy field and end up on a dirt road wide enough for cars. At the top of the hill, without any dogs or seedy characters showing up, my companion says he must return to work and waves goodbye. “I’ll friend you on Facebook”, he says.
I follow the road downhill and rejoin the waterside trail on the other side of the dam. Signs of urban life become more evident. Apartments, some old and some new, line both sides of the narrow, canalized river. Calls to prayer echo from different directions. It’s about an hour before sunset, so I take the fork in the road and climb up to the two-lane road where cars and trucks whiz by, a little too close to the non-existent shoulder I insist should be there. I’ll end the day here, waiting for a minibus with a woman and her son.
The next morning, I set out for my starting point, Yarımburgaz Cave, the site of one of Turkey’s oldest human settlements.
Finding the bus to the Güvercintepe neighborhood is easier than yesterday’s public transportation adventure, and locals tell me where to get off. Unfortunately, I end up about 75 meters higher than the cave, and the small streets that connect to the two-lane road that connects to the cave are about one kilometer away in either direction. I have to go one kilometer out, and one kilometer back to arrive at the point almost directly below me. I don’t see a clear way to the cave from where I’m standing without slip-sliding downhill, so I let go of the idea of visiting the cave. Still, from this high point, I can imagine how important this area must have been millennia ago with its access to water, fertile land, and hilly protective surroundings.
Walking through this neighborhood, I’m struck once again by the various states of construction happening on every block. Empty plots, half-built apartments, fenced-in areas with active construction underway are recurring images.
Construction is a recurring image in many parts of Turkey, and is especially true in Istanbul which is experience rapid urban development. Photo: Jenn Baljko
Further on, I see parked trucks on one side of the narrow, canalized river, and on the other side, I watch a shepherd move his sheep to a nearby pasture. I don’t know which one looks more out of place, but in today’s Turkey, they both seem to belong there.
Canal, trucks and sheep. Photo: Jenn Baljko
I wind my way down to the main east-west motorway touching the north edge of Küçükçekmece Lake. From here, I can take Hiking Istanbul’s nature-centric route along the western waterfront and find Bathonea, a ruined Roman port probably used for lignite transportation. Or, I can follow the original Between Two Seas trail and enter denser urban areas. I want to see the urban sprawl, so I choose the eastern side.
I take an overpass over the well-used highway, and the sound of traffic haunts me. I have to avoid the rail lines, which are now in use. Looking at my digital map, I find my way to the park with the chickens.
With a few words of English, a few words of Turkish, my map zoomed into where I’m standing, and my Google translate app, I ask a man at a bus stop if he knows whether there are sidewalks ahead. I’m at a place where streets merge and become bigger streets. My walking experience tells me these intersections frequently lose their pedestrian passes.
He tells me there are sidewalks and asks me why I need them. “You can take a bus”, he says.
“No, thanks. I’m walking to the Marmara Sea”, I reply.
When he realizes that I am going to walk onwards, he invites himself along. I don’t want the company during this hot part of the day when I would rather not talk, but I do want to encourage people to walk their cities. I know he’s flirting with me, too, as silly as I look in my sun hat and walking outfit, but I know pretty soon his ambition will wane. I revert to a game I play when people say they want to walk with me, especially men who think they can outwalk me. I ask myself one question: How long will he last? Looking at his fresh-pressed shirt and pointy business shoes, I bet silently one kilometer. Certainly not the 10 kilometers I have left.
We chat a bit in the few common words of two languages we share and then fall into a silent rhythm drowned out by cars and buses. He asks me a couple more times if I want to take a bus, and I continue to say, “No. Really, I’m walking to the sea.”
Near the Halkali rail terminal, occupied with cranes and heavy equipment, I know the heat has gotten the best of my companion. He bows his head slightly and waves, saying he has to be somewhere soon and will take the bus. I’m surprised when I look later in the day at my map and calculate that he walked about 2.5 kilometers.
I had thought to dip my toes into the Küçükçekmece lagoon and the Marmara Sea, but the smell of them made me think otherwise. Photo: Jenn Baljko
I get off the main road, follow the smaller road to the customs area and then route myself to Küçükçekmece Lake and its waterfront park.
The lake is immediately disappointing. It looks like sludge and smells worse than sludge. At least I have a well-manicured park and easy walking ahead.
It’s a proper city park with a nice walking path lined with trees and benches. There are blooming flowers, playgrounds, cozy gazebos, cafes, restaurants, and trash bins. People, young and old, sit on the grass or stroll in the shade.
Again, apartment buildings, in various states of construction serving various classes of the population, line the city-side border of the park. Construction sites are as common as pigeons.
I cross a stone bridge, walk under a highway and reach Menekşe Beach. I ignore the black shipping yard building that first comes into view. It’s an eyesore in all ways.
I stroll towards the twisted trees growing out of the sand and watch men and boys play in the surf. I had thought to put my feet in the Marmara Sea, but the cargo container ships in the distance and the slimy stuff floating on the surface, change my idea.
Instead, I lay across a tire swing in the empty playground. A seagull lands on a light pole. We stare at each other for a while. I can’t help thinking about what will happen to him and this place he considers his home. I can’t help think about what will happen to this place where millions and millions and millions call home.
Walking awareness
People ask Lluís and me all the time why we walk. One of our usual answers is “Walking is the most intimate way to see our planet.”
To read more from the Bangkok to Barcelona series,click here.
Walking brings with it a sense of awareness and connects us to the space we walk in.
This idea is embedded in the Between Two Seas and Hiking Istanbul trails. They are invitations to explore and discover what’s happening in Istanbul and to appreciate the rich flora, fauna, and green hinterland that still exists here.
“I have walked about 2,300 to 2,400 kilometers around Istanbul. I know the land around this city probably better than anyone”, said Hobbs. “People who are not in contact with nature, I think are missing something from their lives. There is a strong benefit for the soul of the city to have a good relationship with its hinterland. And, here it is at your doorstep. You can take a bus to it.”
Though the Between Two Seas trail was set up to be a tangible example of how places evolve during different phases of urban development, there is something to be said about how walking opens the door to social changes and broadens perspectives.
“Walking is the most pacifist way to resist something and walking together has been an important type of resistance throughout history”, said Taycan, pointing to the large-scale walks that helped people in many nations win more civil and women’s rights. “As an artist and citizen of Istanbul, this is what I can do. I can continue to invite people to walk. We have to remind people about the importance of walking. If these kinds of projects remind people of walking’s importance, that is an achievement in itself.”
Other photos
The chickens and rooster don’t seem to mind their view of the luxury, gated community known as Bosphorus City. Photo: Jenn BaljkoCanal Istanbul sign. Photo: Jenn BaljkoRail construction. Photo: Jenn Baljko
Edges are transforming. They are shifting from historic barriers into areas of opportunity for creative architecture and urban design, where the new innovative digital economies that are creating a convergence between maker spaces and making cities.
When I look at cities, I always think about the edges.
Urban edges: the gaps, the voids, “messed up” sections, interstices, leftover pieces, polluted or forgotten areas; sites along waterfronts, highways, rail lines offer the greatest challenges in cities today. Edges also offer the greatest opportunity today—for innovative architectural and urban design and the on-going transformation of cities in the 21st century.
There is another gap in cities, often overlooked—the gap between uses.
Cities are by definition the places where different uses and people come together. The Integration of living, learning, working and playing, within concentrated communities is what defines urbanity. Integrating living and working space in cities is attracting interest today, but is not a new phenomenon, and edges are where these different uses are now coming together again.
Urban thinkers, as diverse as Jane Jacobs and Rem Koolhaas, focus on the fundamental needs and effects of combining uses.
Jacobs identified urban vitality in mixed use, stating “to generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets . . . a district must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two…” Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities
Koolhaas celebrated the exuberant and experimental vertical stacking of wildly divergent uses in New York, identifying “the vertical schism, which creates the freedom to stack such disparate activities directly on top of each other (is) without any concern for their symbolic compatibility” Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers regularly lived where they worked, producing and selling goods from ground floor work spaces. As industry dramatically expanded in scale in the 19th century (along with the cities they enabled), manufacturing created new dangers, emissions, and pollution that impacted communities. After millennia of city making, a modern urban invention, zoning, for the first time segregated uses from one another—for the health and safety of residents. Industry was relegated to the edges and the city retreated from its dangerous “working waterfront.” In New York City, which has 520 miles of waterfront, industry was developed, relocated, and isolated on wharves, canals, wetlands, bulkheads, and beaches, where storage and distribution were best supported and waste products most easily (often unfortunately) disposed.
As technology and industry led to the division between use in the modern city, the reinvention of technology in the digital era is now presenting the impetus to re-integrate uses within the contemporary city. Once again, we return to edges: underutilized waterfronts and edge communities are providing the central opportunity in both city making and maker spaces that are transforming the city in the 21st century.
Originally, tenants from creative new digital media sectors led the demand for new types of development, as those companies sought flexible, creative, and expandable new office spaces and talent. As usual, real estate professionals were among the first to identify and target the emerging market, struggling to come up with an imperfectly hip acronym to describe this opportunity; the best they could do was “TAMI” an awkward acronym for Technology, Advertising, Media, and Information. While the name was less creative than the tenants, TAMI tenants did significantly change the way the market thought about office space, as startups repurposed old buildings and created offices offering greater flexibility. A one-size-fits-all perspective no longer met the needs of creative sectors who often require blended office and studio spaces, as well as authentic environments. As Jane Jacobs also famously stated: “you need old buildings for new ideas”.
This was just the first wave. Today, New York City’s edges are again being re-invented and dramatically reindustrialized, but in different ways.
Within urban edges, small businesses that combine making and industry with digital technology are now emerging. New developments are mixing uses in original ways to combine maker space, digital fabrication, and just-in-time manufacturing with experiential retail, creative office, and hospitality. 3D Printers and CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) mills are creating a “maker” economy; digitally controlled machines and robots are becoming accessible to small businesses and consumers, starting at mere thousands of dollars, and are completely transforming industries with large-scale custom manufacturing opportunities.
Digital technologies are accelerating the new Maker Economy through innovative fabrication and are transforming small business operations and marketing. Today, the most traditional and historic small-scale businesses—breweries, distilleries, craft goods, furniture making, metalworking, jewelry, homewares—are coming back with a vengeance, as they use digital technologies to market innovative design, build brands through viral campaigns, and sell their wares through the internet directly to broader markets, connected by vast digital marketing platforms such as Amazon and Etsy.
Maker spaces are bringing the factory and the office back together—combining manufacturing and design, digital marketing and industrial making, and synthesizing them into new experiential retail spaces where people can buy, taste, experience, and understand the products. Today everyone is discussing how “Retail” is under pressure from the digital economy, but “Making” is on the rise: experiential “Maker Spaces” have transformed into the new experiential retail of the 21st century. This has huge impacts for cities—and returns us to the concept of the edge, as in “active edges”. How can we activate urban streets if retail companies become bankrupt and urban stores are shuttered as on-line retail explodes? How can we move beyond credit-driven national chains and support local retail?
And in some neighborhoods, new zoning experiments are coming back full circle: combining industry and residential development in ways that are re-inventing 19th century mixed use with 21st century innovation.
Architects are investigating how the maker economy affects the future of cities. Chas Peppers, principal at Woods Bagot collaborated with The Living, an open source space sponsored by Princeton University to research the future of construction with computation. They developed a study examining how TAMI industries are changing in a newer maker economy and developed a kind of tool kit of maker space potential, looking at space and equipment requirements at all scales. As the name “TAMI” no longer seemed sufficient to encompass the diverse combination of making, designing, and marketing, they came up with the new name “TIM” for Technology Innovation Manufacturing. If “TAMI” reminds you perhaps of your eccentric aunt who ventured into the creative economy in the 90’s, “TIM” is her millennial hip nephew who is branching out in the maker economy.
Although TAMI has led the demand for development across industry sectors, TIM is becoming a significant part of this new wave of mixed-use development. Manufacturing’s presence in urban centers is important due to the many types of jobs it creates, its ability to foster innovation, and to diversify local economies. The jobs it provides range from entry level workers, to creative designers, technology jobs, and top management professionals. Its equipment allows the creative class of a city to more easily transform ideas into marketable products. Its cleaner technology supports a city’s ability to maintain local production and have a diverse innovative economy (and co-exist with residential communities).
How can urbanists, government officials, architects, and entrepreneurs address this new potential and what it may mean for our cities?
Based on these conversations, and looking specifically at new developments happening in the “edges” and gaps of New York City, we found four very different typologies or case studies illustrating how TIM and the maker economy has the potential to transform our cities:
Organic Mixed-Use Neighborhoods – transforming existing communities that are naturally combining manufacturing, residential, and the maker economy.
Industrial Business Zones (IBZ’s) – protecting areas through zoning, allowing new and old kinds of modern manufacturing to co-exist.
Gated Industrial Campuses – subsidizing and supporting industrial uses though government-sponsored gated developments, such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard (detailed below).
Zoning & Planning Experiments—government and private initiatives exploring up-zoning opportunities that include manufacturing uses within new residential neighborhoods.
Each of these examples has different potential, challenges, and opportunities to help transform our cities. I have also included examples from my firm STUDIO V Architecture, and other firms’ current projects to illustrate the intersection of architecture and urban design with digital technologies and the creative maker economy.
1. Organic Mixed-Use Neighborhoods
Case Studies: Bushwick, Red Hook, & DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Brooklyn
Bushwick streetscape, combining manufacturing and residential buildings. Photo:
Around the edges of New York City, certain neighborhoods are emerging as centers combining maker space, residential communities, and creative industries. Diverse and often conflicting factors have influenced their organic evolution and growth, including historic use as older manufacturing, locations outside the core of the city, the original availability of less expensive housing options, the presence of former or underutilized industrial buildings, and the relative accessibility or inaccessibility of mass transit.
Bushwick offers (although this is evolving) less expensive housing interspersed with manufacturing uses and industry. Razor wire fences encircle industrial lots next to small-scale residential buildings that are once served as neighborhood working-class housing, now attracting creative professionals drawn to lower rents and the neighborhood’s gritty authenticity. Bushwick’s funky character combines TAMI and TIM: traditional manufacturing, creative industries, fabrication shops, artisanal workshops, galleries, and an emerging restaurant and bar scene. The New York subway’s “L” line continues to push north and east as escalating rents drive urban pioneers further out, and inner stops become more valuable, mixing uses and gentrifying neighborhoods.
In contrast, Red Hook’s relative isolation, including its lack of mass transit, has somewhat protected it, even as its original 19th-century working waterfront character started to attract pioneering makers, artists, and creative professionals, taking over industrial buildings, and reinventing storefronts. But growth continues as new industrial projects build on the success of a new water taxi that now connects it to the rest of the City, jumping over lacking subway development: the waterfront edge is also becoming a new transit option.
The neighborhood of DUMBO is a more mature example of an organic neighborhood that evolved from a working waterfront to an industrial center, to an alternative incubator of maker space—and is now a mixture of residential space with creative and tech industries. An essential corner of Brooklyn’s “Tech Triangle”, DUMBO is the epicenter of creative and digitally driven industries in New York City. While surrounding warehouses have been developed as luxurious residential housing, the waterfront warehouses of Empire Stores (as in 19th-century ship’s “stores”) has been developed by the City of New York for creative and digitally driven industries that are playing a major new role in the city’s economy. Meanwhile, the rents from the Empire Stores go to supporting a state of the art new public waterfront park, as well as a new waterfront museum and a rooftop park overlooking the Manhattan skyline.
Empire Stores in Dumbo, Brooklyn combines maker space, creative office, and restaurants. Rents are used to support public programming for Brooklyn bridge park. Architecture by STUDIO V Architecture. Photo: Lester Ali
These qualities have made former “edge” communities into laboratories for mixing residential with creative and maker economies. They serve as a critical place to examine and promote how we might re-integrate housing with new kinds of manufacturing and making as it was in the traditional city.
But as organic developments, these communities are highly fragile: laboratories one day, gentrified neighborhoods the next. Affordable housing policies serve as a potential solution to displacement, while still allowing for rezoning that promotes mixed use developments in previously industrialized areas. In New York City, the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing Program (MIH), enacted in 2016, preserves and requires affordable housing in neighborhoods and new developments that have been rezoned to accommodate residential uses. This program attempts to negotiate between preserving affordable rents and encouraging the introduction of mixed use developments.
To further encourage the mixture of uses, governmental agencies and communities are exploring additional ideas and policy options, including zoning controls, to protect, expand, and promote manufacturing areas—such as Industrial Building Zones and Gated Industrial Campuses.
2. Industrial Business Zones (IBZs)
Case Studies: Industry City, Sunset Park, Brooklyn
A yoga class being held at Industry City. Masterplan by STUDIO V Architecture. Photo: Courtesy of Industry City.
New York City has created sixteen protected zoning areas called IBZs to expand industrial and manufacturing business services across the five boroughs. This designation fosters high-performing business districts by creating more competitive business opportunities within the five boroughs. IBZs are supported by tax credits for businesses that relocate within them, zone-specific planning efforts, and direct business assistance from industrial providers of NYC Business Solutions Industrial & Transportation. IBZs promote industrial sector growth and create real estate stability, and have resisted attempts for rezoning for residential uses.
The Sunset Park waterfront district is one of sixteen protected IBZs in NYC that once struggled to be a competitive industrial working waterfront. One significant project that has contributed to the regeneration of this working neighborhood is Industry City. Industry City, with about 6 million square feet of buildings, is the largest multi-tenant industrial complex in the United States. It was originally built as part of Bush Terminal, by utopian American industrialist and serial entrepreneur Irving T. Bush (his friend Thomas Edison wrote the introduction to his book, Working with the World) and he tried (unsuccessfully) to convert Leon Trotsky to capitalism.
Exterior rendering of Industry City. Masterplan by STUDIO V Architecture. Image: Courtesy of Industry City
Industry City lay mostly empty for nearly forty years after most of its manufacturers moved operations elsewhere. In 2013 Industry City was redeveloped to encourage a broader combination of traditional industry, maker spaces, and retail to focus on the “innovation economy”. Today, Industry City is home to local manufacturing and creative industries such as the revolutionary 3D printing company MakerBot, drone-maker Aerobo, Time Inc’s video production studios, and eyeglass, furniture, candle, vodka, apparel, and chocolate makers, among many others. Industry City is currently pursuing re-zoning to retain and promote this mixture of uses. More than half of the tenants are small workshops and businesses ranging from 500 to 2500 square feet. Industry City’s CEO, Andrew Kimball who is helping to guide the vision for the new innovative maker complex, originally worked to retain and expand industrial development in the Brooklyn Navy Yard—the next example of a government sponsored gated industrial campus, renewing the maker economy on the edge of the city.
3. Gated Industrial Campuses
Case Study: Brooklyn Navy Yard
Aerial view of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Photo: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard (BNY) is an example of a city owned and sponsored urban office park or campus model, based in an historic former naval yard dating back to the American Revolution. BNY offers affordable leases in a large protected area reserved for light manufacturers. Stable rents and lease agreements best accommodate start-up businesses at the Yard’s 300-acre campus. It is now home to over 330 businesses which employ more than 7,000 people and generate over $2B per year for NYC’s economy. These light manufacturers provide a crucial pathway to the middle class for many city residents.
The gating of part of the city is highly unusual, but the BNY’s intent is to create both a protected and a safer environment for industrial companies within the city. However, the Brooklyn Navy Yard is transforming. While its gated industrial campus offers greater security for manufacturing, its isolation has made it harder to attract creative tenants who require amenities such as co-working studio spaces, access to shared technology, flexible spaces for startups to expand, as well as amenities to attract workers, such as outdoor spaces and dining options.
Inside the New Lab at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Architecture by Marvel Architects. Photo: Courtesy of the New Lab
In response, BNY has begun experimenting with making portions of the campus public, adding communal and public amenities, and offering different types of working environments. This includes the New Lab, a massive building supporting businesses utilizing innovative technologies including robotics, artificial intelligence, connected devices, and nanotechnology. Companies include Honeybee Robotics, StrongArm Technologies, and Nanotronics. The Navy Yard is also working to create waterfront open spaces, a whiskey bar for its on-site distillery in the gatehouse, and rooftop beer gardens among its industrial and historic buildings within the protected campus. Despite pressure from developers, the protected campuses and IBZ’s are holding the line against integrating residential uses—but that potential is being explored through new zoning and planning experiments.
4. Zoning & Planning Experiments
Case Studies: Long Island City & Crown Heights
Rendering of 1010 Pacific in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, showcasing affordable and market rate housing over community arts/maker space. Image: Courtesy of STUDIO V Architecture.
Zoning and city policy are the next frontier of exploring how the maker economy can be combined with other uses, especially residential—using policy to control, counter, or guide the pressures that are transforming organic neighborhoods, and balance forces of economic development and gentrification. New residential development is one of the driving forces in the New York real estate economy—but pressures to redevelop former industrial edges into new residential markets is meeting conflict with the desire to support economic development, maintain manufacturing jobs, and prevent the erosion of the city’s industrial base. TIM and TAMI uses offer enticing opportunities to combine living and working that harken back to the traditional city’s mixture of uses.
Illustration showcasing new zoning and development in Long Island City, featuring maker space and residential development. Image: Courtesy of New York City Department of City Planning
Zoning experiments are being proposed in two ways: top down from government agencies and ground up though community organizations. In the Long Island City community, part of the New York City waterfront in the borough of Queens, the Department of City Planning is pursuing an unusual and much anticipated experiment in zoning. They are exploring allowing for additional zoning as part of the waterfront re-zoning if a portion of the area is zoned for light manufacturing uses combined with new residential developments. It would not only permit these uses—but would essentially require them to achieve the full density and development rights when the sites are rezoned.
Rendering of Silver Cup development combining creative office and maker space with residential. Current zoning predated this scheme. Image: Courtesy of STUDIO V Architecture
In a different manner, the edges of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights are filled with manufacturing districts that have gone underutilized for years. These areas were left out of the city’s recent rezoning efforts due to the difficulty and expense in including them in environmental studies. However, entrepreneurs are encouraging the conversion of these prior manufacturing districts to housing because of the great potential in the residential market. While local organizations, working with community boards, are encouraging the mixtures of manufacturing with residential development, developers sometimes struggle to find the middle ground between these groups. The maker and TIM economies may provide a middle ground, as innovative and digital manufacturing and residential uses are no longer seen as incompatible—but rather as complimentary.
* * *
Edges can be part of the solution for rapidly transforming cities, but edges also reveal challenges cities face. Residents of existing neighborhoods are being pushed out to new edges, while makers backfill residents until they too are pushed out. These four examples—organic evolution of neighborhoods, IBZs, protected campuses, and zoning experiments—are all seeking ways to address this conflict while still accommodating these rapidly changing technologies and promoting development. This conflict will continue to play out, and its resolution will be critical in the reinvention of the city.
Edges are transforming. They are shifting from historic barriers into areas of opportunity for creative architecture and urban design, redefining how we work, our public spaces, commercial innovation, job creation, affordable housing—and the new innovative digital economies that are creating a convergence between maker spaces and making cities.
It is time to see the change, make the change and realize the potential of multicultural inclusiveness in building resilient and just cities.
This article describes a new approach to graduate studies, that works at the dynamic intersection of environmental issues and social justice. The Master of Arts in Education with Urban Environmental Education program out of Antioch University in Seattle, has attracted a very diverse student body, who illuminate daily the challenges, struggles, and strategies unique to people of color striving to enter the environmental field. If cities are to be places where all thrive, unraveling inequity, exclusion, and discrimination is paramount. Diverse voices and experiences will build resilient cities.
I spent 2014 doing the market research for a new Master’s degree in Environmental Education for IslandWood, an environmental non-profit on Bainbridge Island. As part of the process, we convened several groups in Seattle and New York City that included community leaders, activists, and organizers in the design effort. The participants were asked one question: “What is the work that needs to be done in urban areas?” Maketa, a graphic facilitator, and I collected their thoughts and translated them into the graphic representation below. The shape of the program is new and refreshing. Traditional environmental education was turned on its head. Launching a program that would prepare a new and diverse cadre of environmental leaders emerged as the unanimous goal.
Capturing the imporant threads of the new program. Image: Maketa Wilborn, Graphic Facilitator, Seattle, WA (www.maketawilborn.com)
The graphic representation above, captured the important threads of the new program:
The world is changing: More live in cities, and they are increasingly diverse culturally and racially.
Cities matter as they represent the greatest hope for long term planetary survival, sustainability, and resilience.
Education has the power to transform the way that people live in cities.
Urban communities will only thrive if they are engaged collectively from the inside out or the ground up.
Urban solutions depend upon the preparation of a diverse cadre of environmental leaders.
The three strands described below shape the pedagogy, practice, and outcomes of the Urban Environmental Education program.
Use the City as a Learning Platform. Place-based and experiential approaches to urban environmental education are aimed at connecting people to the biosphere, to place, to intersecting natural and human-made systems, to change and impacts, to cultural perspectives, and to identifying power, voice, and agency as urban stewards.
“Empty lots are more than just ‘holes’ in the urban façade. They represent the character of a resilient ecosystem, a possibility for vibrant green space in the making. As educators, we help make these possibilities visible and highlight their importance to community strength, health, and resilience.” -Tiffany Adams, Alum of UEE Cohort 2
Focus on the complex socio-ecological dynamic of the urban environment, which includes the ecological, social, political, and economic forces that shape it. Urban environments are ecosystems in which human and ecological health is heavily interdependent.
“Classes are carried out in the city, on the streets, observing and investigating through the perspectives of those who live there. I’m learning to design educational strategies that prepare community members to recognize and act on the impacts of climate change, to identify impacts on environmental health, and employ sustainable practices that lead to the creation of equitable and just solutions.” -James King !!!, Alum of UEE Cohort 3
Develop cultural fluency among environmental educators. Urban areas are dense and increasingly diverse. We seek to engage all people as urban stewards, and its practitioners must represent the diversity of racial, cultural, and ethnic perspectives that live and work in cities. The full story of the urban landscape as a complex socio-ecological place means grappling first-hand with issues of inclusion, equity, and justice.
“Providing intentional voice to environmental justice means that I have personal work to do…studying my culpability, my entanglement. It means integrating issues of power, access, privilege, and fairness into thinking about how I educate others.” -Danielle Nicholas, Alum of UEE Cohort 3
This new approach to Urban Environmental Education intentionally integrates issues of environmental and social justice into the narrative of every academic course and practical experience. Students actively apply the dynamics of equity, privilege, and power as they wrestle with environmental issues. Students insist that they are ‘expanding’ the dominant paradigm of environmental education to include multiple racial, cultural, and ethnic perspectives and experiences.
“The dominant environmental narrative in the US is primarily constructed and informed by white, Western European or Euro-American voices. The black experience of nature always bumped up against social, economic, and historical processes that serve to remind them that their map of the world, while fluid, demands a particularly fine-tuned compass that allowed them to navigate a landscape that was not always hospitable. In the future, environmental programs must address the connections linking race, identity, representation, history, and the environment to awaken from our historical amnesia and create a more inclusive, expansive environmental movement devoid of denial and rich in possibility.” -Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
Place-based urban environmental mapping with students. Photo: IslandWood Communications and Marketing
We found that most urban communities are exhausted by universities who use them for their own ends. One of the most powerful parts of the program is the 40-week course in Participatory Action Research culminating in a Legacy Project. Students are hired by community organizations in a research capacity with the intention that their research serve the community directly. The research is defined through the ‘eyes’ and interests of the people who live there. The integrity of the research is guided by Paulo Freire‘s approach to community engagement and education. We embed our students in urban communities, to listen closely and without judgment to the everyday experiences, struggles, and solutions percolating among the people who live there.
The UEE program integrates a different set of elements to “nature interpretation”, which includes high-density residential and commercial infrastructure, transformed waterways, waste streams and paved surfaces, air and water quality, and access to healthy food, shelter, and green space. Understanding urban complexity and the interdependence of the natural and the built environment is key to our work. Cities are becoming places of “new nature”, a shifting perspective that is not always green. Understanding the nature of a city requires an intentional shift in environmental perception and educational practice. It requires a new conceptual and pedagogical frame for environmental education that influences the way theory and practice are conceived and delivered.
Historical Ecology in Pioneer Square in Seattle. Photo Khavin Debbs, UEE Cohort 3
“There is a serious disconnect between the changing demographics in our country and the lack of diverse leadership and staffing at organizations that protect our health and the environment.” -Mustafa Ali, Senior Vice President of Climate, Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization with the Hip Hop Caucus
As a learning group, we peel back the layers of the city by walking them, talking with residents and listening to those who live there. Urban ecology is a deep study of the ways that people and nature intersect, influence, and support each other. The students remain our best teachers. The majority are people of color from the guts of cities around the country.
Rasheena is from Chicago, Tiffany is from New York City, James is from Atlanta, Niesha is from Los Angeles, yet they find common ground in their experiences as people of color and as environmental leaders. Every day they, not so gently, open our minds to see a different reality that has actually been there all along. This new environmental lens is one that most of the students live every day, one that transforms the traditional white wilderness model of environmental education to include a parallel awareness of environmental racism, inequity, and exclusion. As one student exclaimed, “I’ve been here all along, you just haven’t and don’t see me.”
In our classes, the realities of race, equity, and environment are a constant theme, sparking hard conversations about power and privilege, barriers and misconceptions, assumptions and implicit bias. Students of color, for the most part, are for the first time in their lives the participating majority in classes. When invited to bring their ideas, feelings, perceptions, and experiences forward, they feel safe and supported. What we hear from them deserves a voice in the larger arena of the environmental field and yet, finding a foothold in environmental organizations continues to be difficult despite the multiple initiatives to create diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mission statements.
Excursion to Danny Woo Gardens in the International District, Cohort 1. Photo: IslandWood Communications and Marketing
The traditional white wilderness model bit the dust early on. Communing with pristine nature is replaced with finding the assets in neighborhoods where most people live including city parks and green spaces. The overwhelming message is that not all people have the means, the power or the voice to ensure the environmental vitality of a place. Social justice plays a big role in determining how people live and thrive in cities.
“As educators, long-term results rely on building trust among constituents, learners, and community members. First, we build relationships…authentic and real relationships. Relationships are key to the longevity of any environmental solutions. We need to step outside of our personal assumptions, our biases, our stereotypes and listen to the stories from inside a community. The real experiences of everyday people shine a light on the environmental issues they face. Embedded in those stories are the keys to building stewards of urban places”. -Jess Wallach, UEE alum Cohort 1
This new program design is cohort based. We live and learn by working through the layers of experience, multiple perspectives, disparate values, and visions of how cities might work better for everyone. The first three cohorts have drawn 60 percent diversity, bringing African American, Hispanic, Asian, and White educators together for 15 months of study and practice. The definition of environmental education has expanded. The traditional environmental education values and goals are consistently questioned and reformulated. Our work is to better understand the nature of cities (rather than nature in the city) from the perspectives of those who live deep in their communities.
“I continued on for years feeling like an outsider in search of environmentalism as a Black woman who grew up partly in inner city Chicago. That was until I realized that I was on the wrong journey. I realized that I hadn’t shown up late to the party, but I had unknowingly stumbled into and was asking to be let into the wrong party. The environmentalism of John Muir and Aldo Leopold was indeed not my environmentalism—not my Chicago community’s environmentalism and not my family’s environmentalism. To be a Black environmentalist means reconciliation with the land and reconstructing the perceptions of nature. It means embracing the toiling of my grandmother in her Chicago backyard urban garden, stepping beyond the nature documentary dreams of my grandfather, and embracing that we too have always been and are environmentalists who may not always fit ‘the mold’.” -Rasheena Fountain, Climate Conscious Collab April 21, 2018, UEE Alum Cohort 2
Group Portrait of Cohort 1. Photo: IslandWood Communications and Marketing
“Leadership will never be measured by what one person is able to accomplish as a result of his or her talents and abilities alone. It can’t be. The word itself implies the existence and participation of motivating and moving with others.” -CJ Goulding, UEE Alum Cohort 1
On an unrecognized and nearly invisible plane, there exists a parallel universe of environmentalists who add important perspectives, approaches, and styles of leadership to a notoriously white profession. It’s time to see the change, make the change and realize the potential of multicultural inclusiveness in building resilient and just cities.
Leading an urban nature hike in Seattle. Photo: IslandWood Communications and Marketing
The students want their stories to be accepted and as well known as Muir and Leopold. Following their lead, traditional approaches to EE are “unpacked” and reworked into a radical intersection of environmental leadership and social justice. Their thinking is fresh and drives educational practice to dance on a necessary edge. These newly recognized voices are rising and challenging us to consider new ways of thinking about old ways of being.
“I hope I am working to add to the plurality of perspectives and stories of relationships with the land. It’s a bridge that I and other environmentalists of color are working hard to build. For this reason, no matter how dissonant it feels, I will keep uttering the phrase ‘I am a Black environmentalist’, even if my dreams may be deferred.” -Rasheena Fountain, Climate Conscious Collab, April 21, 2018, UEE Alum Cohort 2
This winter holiday, I initiated, with some friends I grew up with, a local program called Legends of Sevenli. We created a platform to record the beautiful parts of our sense of place, and to inspire such a sense in other local people. 这个寒假，我和我的朋友们在家乡发起了一个名为‘七里传说’的项目，通过微信公众平台记录地方感之美，期以引起更多当地人共鸣。
Sometimes, as we strive to embrace our future, we are quick to abandon our past. In the process of changing and growing, do we let go of those elements that formed the foundation of who we are, the things that tether us to the place we came from, or do we reflect on them and see them in a new light?
Last April, I participated in a Cornell University online course called Urban Environmental Education, it was here that I first learned about a “sense of place”. This concept soon led me to ideas I have never thought about before.
The construct of a sense of place first reminded me of something interesting about my hometown, particularly about its name. I am from a place called Qinling, but I promise you will never find this place on a map of China except for the famous Qinling mountains, where my family and I definitely do not live. If you ask local people in my hometown where “Qilizhen” is, few of them could help you, because they probably have never been told they are, in fact, officially in Qilizhen. The first name, Qinling, is actually a convenient name, used by local people for more than sixty years, while the second name, Qilizhen, is the official name, yet not important to local life. I started to wonder if Qinling is derived from our sense of place. Are we calling our hometown by a name that reflects something about our forebears’ sense of place?
View of Qinling. 秦岭局部鸟瞰图 Photo: http://www.snxingping.gov.cn
First, Qilizhen extends beyond the border of Qinling. It not only includes Huaxing, which is next to and very similar to Qinling, but also includes the several villages surrounding the two districts. Qinling and Huaxing are not big—it takes no more than twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other, but both provide everything you need, so there is often no reason to go very far. To local people, Qinling and Huaxing are two different places. And similar to those in Qinling, most people in Huaxing have never heard of Qilizhen either. How were these place names created and how did they come down through generations?
Introduction of Qilizhen on Baidu Baike (China’s Wikipedia). 百度百科对七里镇的介绍.
The names Qinling and Huaxing came from the factories they were built around. In the 1950s, two factories were built on this land and workers from cities all over China came here for the jobs. Some workers migrated with their families; some came alone and formed their families here. Factory workers constituted most of the local community at that time, so when the people started using the names of the factories, Qinling and Huaxing, to identify where they worked and lived, the new names stuck. They built up the town from wastelands and farmlands to more closely resemble the cites to which they were accustomed. For example, local buildings were built in the same style as city buildings of the day; they set up hospitals, schools, bus stations and stores, which were rare in the towns before; and they divided residential areas according to a common urban style.
Fuxin building, which was once the center of Qinling. 福鑫楼，曾经的秦岭中心. Photo: Yueyang YuQinling Qiyuan Park. 秦岭憩园. Photo: Yueyang YuThere are many sculptures in Qinling Qiyuan, among them fairies, geese, deer, fish, and frogs. 憩园中随处可见的雕塑，有仙女、天鹅、鹿、鱼和青蛙等. Photo: Yueyang YuQinling Qiyuan Park was created in June,1990, next to Qinling factory. 憩园建设于1990年6月，位于秦岭厂旁边. Photo: Yueyang Yu
The new towns were built less for the workers themselves and more for their children. My mother’s generation grew up in local schools and most of her peers stayed in Qinling and Huaxing to work in the factories where their parents’ generation also worked. Her generation joined in building the town as well, so they were also builders. The two generations of builders often couldn’t speak the local Shaanxi dialect, but they could speak Mandarin or the dialects from where they grew up. For example, my grandfather speaks Mandarin and Shanghai dialect, but my mother can only speak Mandarin. Even today, those old and middle-aged migrants appear to have more common words with distant city people but share fewer common words with countryside people who are geographically closer to where they now live. Over the past 60 years, the urban community of migrants and their families have become very close but have not bonded with nearby farmers.
Soviet-style buildings built nearly 50 years ago. 50年前的苏联式建筑. Photo: Yueyang Yu
Although many families have moved to nearby bigger cities in recent years, such as Xianyang and Xi’an, Qinling and Huaxing remain a significant part of their life-long identity. My grandparents, parents, and their friends often talk about how fast changes are taking place, satisfied with their life today, but also speaking of the past fondly. There was no reason for them to leave, for Qinling/Huaxing provides everything they need to live, and also becomes something they own, something that can’t exist without them. This is especially true for my grandparents’ generation, who came here in 1950s. Qinling/Huaxing witnessed almost every moment of peace and chaos in their past collectivistic life, when each of them was highly bonded with the fate of the country, when their work was such a contribution to the country—a cause of honor. During specific periods in China, my grandparents and parents’ generations survived a series of ups and downs, as a result they developed strong place meanings and attachments as part of their values, and thus formed a deep-rooted sense of place.
However, since the 1980s, as my generation came of age (I was born in 1996), things began to change. For example, this period saw both the implementation of China’s one-child policy and the nation-wide administering of the National Higher Education Entrance Examination. As a result, our experiences are different than those of earlier generations. For example, we have no experience building a town, or even planting a tree as my uncle did, as a family’s only child should be protected. Nor are we expected to stay here, so we long for bigger cities, new identities, achievements, and seek new values. It hard for us to understand why our parents and grandparents stayed in these small places. Qinling and Huaxing became nothing more than two distant names for us.
The children’s trampoline, where we played twenty years, ago is still open for children. 儿童蹦蹦床，二十年前就在玩，现在还开放给孩子们. Photo: Yueyang YuThe “best-ever elephant” slide for local children. 大象滑梯，同样有超过二十年的历史. Photo: Yueyang Yu
Education is largely responsible for the shift. On the one hand, the information we receive through school education, from kindergarten, primary, to middle school, is often about how much better it is in the new, bigger outside world; on the other, the education itself also gets tougher as we grow up. We are thus strongly motivated by the contrast to “finish and harvest”, which is the success in college entrance examination.
Besides, as we value the individual benefits of modern education so much, we can’t help but blame our small-town origins for placing us on the downside of an unbalanced distribution of education resources too. Therefore, the contrast again undermines the positive aspects of the place and even disturbs its interpretation. The relatively unsatisfactory local conditions, once compared with cities, would be ever more obvious signs of backwardness and poverty to us. And an increasing number of migrants from rural areas are also perceived to be lowering our community quality. When such uncomfortable thoughts finally arrive at an intention of abandoning Qinling/Huaxing, making it even more real, our original care and love for the place seems worthless, and even the strong part of sense of place turns to a sense of shame. “This place is good for nothing. When will I be rid of this small poor place?”
Trash in the old residential area, where the poorest people of the town now live. 老街坊的垃圾堆，老街坊成了当地大多数经济困难人口的居住地. Photo: Yueyang Yu
I can’t say our sense of place is broken, or gone, or wrong, or whatever, but indeed the sense of place crisis is felt here. No one is making a voice for the place, so there is no one listening.
What if there were a reminder for local people, or a place to record memories and history, a platform to rediscover something about the place they live? Would it be an opportunity to increase people’s positive sense of the place? Thanks to my experience with Cornell University’s online Urban Environmental Education course, I learned of some promising approaches to address the crisis, such as digital story-telling and place-based education.
The logo card of Legends of Sevenli. 七里传说名片. Photo: Yueyang YuLandmarks blogging column showing local tales about important local spots. 七里地标栏目记录七里镇重要地点的故事. Photo: Yueyang Yu
I still remember that last summer when I brought home the questions about my sense of place, how the familiar landscape suddenly appeared so different before my eyes. I even felt myself energized to learn more about my place for the first time. I started to care about questions like what it was like before and why it had changed. I became curious about how the town was built half a century ago and felt proud of it for the first time. I also felt happy when I discovered that I felt angry to find that the land had not been well cared for, because I believed this was how my sense of place should work. Besides, the idea of having a sense of place has given me an adult perspective on my hometown: “What can I do for it, even if I will not live here for long, but I am still part of it, forever?”
Cuisines blogging column showing good foods and happy memories. 七里佳肴栏目讲述七里镇的美食记忆. Photo: Yueyang YuOld Home blogging column showing old life stories in a specific area. 七里老家栏目讲述在七里镇老街坊的生活故事. Photo: Yueyang YuChildhood blogging column showing memories of our early life in the town. 七里童话栏目讲述在七里镇的童年记忆. Photo: Yueyang Yu
This winter holiday, I initiated with some friends I grew up with, a local program called Legends of Sevenli (i.e., Qili). We created a WeChat public account (a popular blogging and social media platform in China) to record the beautiful parts of our sense of place, and to inspire such a sense in other local people. During the whole month of the winter holiday, we posted about 20 place-based articles to four special columns—Old Home, Landmarks, Childhood, and Cuisines. Old Home collects pieces of story cards from local people related to their old life in a certain area. Landmarks provides local tales about important local spots, such as statues. Childhood gathers memories of our early life in the town, happy or unhappy, excited or upset. Cuisines “re-cooks” those tasty foods, bringing readers back to good times in the town. Happily, some of the articles were very popular among local people, receiving a thousand hits, and were even subscribed to by local newspapers.
A comment made by my grandfather’s friend regarding an article on old 10th Street, very beautifully describing the summer and fall of the street fifty years ago. 姥爷的朋友在一篇讲述十街老街坊的文章下评论，怀念了五十年前那里的春夏之美. Photo: Yueyang Yu
My friends and I also successfully organized a three-day story map activity with local children and teenagers. Even though only a few joined in, we were happy because we were doing something for local people. Two teams collaborated to draw one map of an old residential area and collected stories for the map using self-reflection and interviews. As university students, we also taught the children what we have learned, such as how to draw a professional map, and how to interview family members and strangers.
At last, it became obvious that the organizers, once so determined to abandon the place, had rediscovered its beauty and began reconstructing a new sense of place, and are now ready to take more efforts to improve their hometown too.
However, the winter holiday was short, so the aforementioned is all we have done so far. Since returning to our schools for the new semester, it has been not easy for our group to meet again for new activities and articles. The public account of Legends of Sevenli has already been quiet for three months. We invited a middle school teacher to join us as local facilitator, to help collect articles from other teachers and students to keep the public account alive. Unfortunately he was unable to participate because of an unpredictable work load in the new semester. So, it comes to the question of program sustainability. How do we make the program sustainable? Or, is program sustainability even necessary?
We have had serious discussions about our individual time commitments, needs and career demands with regard to finding ways to sustain the program. Unfortunately, there is very little agreement among us, because none of us are in a position to take on the level of entrepreneurship a sustainable program requires. We don’t want to give up on the important idea that originally generated this project; reinforcing our sense of place. It is a worthy goal to continue to strive for; but continuing the program requires a creative spark that needs to be renewed.
However, we are all very sure that our program has had an impact, and that it will serve as a reminder to us and others about appreciating where we come from, and the importance of a sense place. We hope that someday organizations or institutions will create opportunities to support teams of students or concerned citizens like us to take meaningful actions back home to help nurture an appreciation for local history and foster a sense of place. After all, home is always the best place to “act locally, think globally”; it is the origin of our sense of place.
Today though, if there is any chance to tell others our story, we will take it; any chance we can continue the program, we will take it; any chance we meet others with similar ideas in mind, we will help them! Beyond continuing our program, sharing the message of the importance of creating a sense of place is the ultimate sustainability of the cause for the benefit of many others. Isn’t that exciting?
Marianne Krasny is professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Director of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University, and leader of EPA’s national environmental education training program (“EECapacity”).
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.
Water is ubiquitous in Georgetown. There is a drain outside every house, flowing towards a canal. Old photos show the beauty of the waterways that comprised the original drainage system for the city.
Guyana sits on what was once known as the “wild coast” of South America. The area was a dangerous swamp that struck terror in the hearts of European adventurers seeking the fabled city of El Dorado. Even Sir Walter Raleigh is rumoured to have come here in search of gold. The name “Guiana” is said to come from an Amerindian word meaning “land of many waters”. Like many myths, it is charming but unsupported by evidence. Water is, however, a dominant motif of Guyana and certainly of Georgetown, the capital city. Water is also likely to end Georgetown’s existence before the 21st century comes to a close.
You cannot get away from water in Georgetown. There is a drain outside every house. It feeds into a trench that at some point flows into a canal. Old photos show the beauty of the waterways that comprised the original drainage system for the city. Georgetown is still crisscrossed by the canals, drains, and gutters that take storm-water from the roads and gardens and sends it to the sea. When the tide is in, the kokers (sluices) are closed. When the tide is out, the kokers are opened, and the water rushes out.
That is the theory. In reality, this superbly designed drainage system is blocked by selfish residents and greedy irresponsible businesses who dump garbage indiscriminately. Very quickly the bottles, tins, Styrofoam boxes, plastic bags, and other debris end up in the canals and drains. Blocked waterways cannot do their job. In 2005 Georgetown suffered one of the worst floods ever, resulting in millions of dollars of damage. There have been other less destructive but still costly floods. In 2014, as the floodwaters entered my house, I disconsolately watched the fish swimming in my study. The charm of their appearance was more than outweighed by the loss of books.
A section of the sea-side near the Marriot and Pegasus hotels. Photo: Melinda Janki
The lesson has not been learned. The ever-increasing mounds of plastic bottles dumped around the city continue to surge out to join the hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste that are killing the oceans. The private sector, consumers, schools, churches, the Mayor and City Council mutter about garbage from time to time but continue to buy and dump the products that make up that same garbage—a sort of national cognitive dissonance.
In February 2017 the government introduced an environmental levy of $10 (US$5cents) on “every non-returnable unit of metal, plastic or glass container of any alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage or water, whether imported, locally manufactured or produced in Guyana.” One year later, this levy had produced G$1.2Bn (US$6M). That means 120,000,000 non-returnable bottles or approximately 160 per person in Guyana’s small population of 750,000. Sadly, the levy appears to be more of a revenue-raising exercise for the government rather than a mechanism to restore and protect the environment. The money is not spent on ending environmentally damaging waste and there is still no environmental plan for Georgetown.
The drain outside my house is concrete and connects at right angles with the larger drain in the alleyway.
Just in front of my house. Photo: Melinda Janki
These drains are full of treasures—tadpoles, frogs, fishes, snails, and strange mossy plants. One of the great joys of the afternoon is to watch the little water snakes chasing and eating fish. We pick them up and admire them, before putting them back to finish their dinner. They coil around the wrist like blue and yellow braided bracelets. I have no idea what species these snakes are or even if my memory of the colours is accurate. The fish are still here, but I have not seen the snakes for several months now. One of the hardest things to do is to stop Georgetown folk from killing snakes.
The fish in my drain are small—a few centimetres—although there is the occasional excitement of a big tilapia about 15 centimetres in length.
There are 2 tiny fish between the fallen palm branches in the drain outside my house. Photo: Melinda Janki
You see the odd person fishing in the canals and sometimes catching enough for a meal. Small boys sometimes swim in the cleaner parts of the trenches. On rare occasions, an eel might appear briefly. I once grabbed one and found out for myself why “as slippery as an eel” is so apt. The abundance of freshwater, even when choked with filth, somehow still supports a range of wild birds—snail kites, kingfishers, limpkins, and various herons that eat the snails and fish as well as the other 200 or so bird species that have to drink it.
The waterways are also places of extraordinary beauty and a good place to see the glorious lotus lily. The flower is a rich pink, and the scent is heady and overpowering if you can get close enough without tumbling in. Trench edges are notoriously treacherous.
Lotus flowers. Photo: Melinda Janki
Although the lotus does impede drainage, it can help to create a healthy environment by removing pollution such as heavy metals. The lotus also has cultural and religious significance. It is sacred to Hindus and Buddhists. Eating on lotus leaves is an old custom that was brought to Guyana by indentured Indians. At religious festivals vegetarian curry is served on these leaves and eaten by hand. There is a knack to it that stops everything from sliding into your lap. Times change and now more and more people are using plastic plates and Styrofoam boxes instead of the biodegradable leaves. It is supposed to be more ‘developed.’ Inevitably the plastic and Styrofoam end up in the drains and trenches and block the waterways and outfalls. More than twenty years I wrote the law which says that, “Any person who throws down, abandons, drops or otherwise deposits or leaves anything in any manner whatsoever in circumstances as to cause, or contribute to, or tend to lead to litter shall be guilty of an offence.” All that is needed is a little political commitment and enforcement by the police and Environmental Protection Agency.
To the north, the beauty of Georgetown stops abruptly at a concrete wall. Behind it is the mighty Atlantic Ocean. If you want to see the sea, you do not walk down to a beach; you climb up the sea-wall and look out. Georgetown lies about 6 feet below sea-level. The second surprise is the colour of the water—not the sparkling blue as in the Caribbean – but a rich brown thanks to the silt and soil from three great rivers, Brazil’s Amazon, Venezuela’s Orinoco and Guyana’s largest river, the Essequibo.
The steps leading from the road up to the Atlantic Ocean. Photo: Melinda Janki
The foreshore changes over time. Erosion takes away the beach. Accretion dumps coastal sediment and re-creates land. I remember as a child picking up shells on a sandy beach beyond the sea-wall and watching the crabs scuttling into their holes. There were little pools that smelled of the sea and small rubbery flowers. The beach used to have low bushes that provided natural protection against the force of the waves.
All of these have gone. The sea-defences at this point are just a hideous concrete structure devoid of wildlife. Now and then the four-eyed fish come in with the waves and peep about at the edge of the concrete. These extraordinary creatures have eyes that are divided so they can see above the water and in the water at the same time.
The monument to the Demerara Rebellion of 1823. Photo: Melinda Janki
The seawall has always been a place for Georgetown residents to come, sit and “take the breeze”. The air is salty and smells of the sea. Children run around. Couples court. The city feels small and self-important when you contemplate the vast stretch of ocean. Somewhere out there is Africa. The ships bringing enslaved Africans would come in near here. It is a terrible thought that so much of this city’s wealth was first created by men and women in chains. Enslaved Africans were subjected to the most brutal, life-denying conditions—flogging, mutilation and hanging for trivial offences—and yet they continued to resist. Quamina Street in the heart of the city is named after one of the leaders of the Demerara Rebellion of 1823. And by the sea-wall is a monument to this same rebellion. A dignified figure stands tall on the plinth and gazes into the distance.
Is he seeing his African homeland? I hope so. Below is an enslaved African woman emerging from the stone. History, culture, and water run together all over Georgetown.
Increasingly nature is seen as a bit of an embarrassment, a sort of old-fashioned thing. Bright lights nearby have destroyed the black and silver splendour of the night. The womb-like shushing of the Atlantic waves can no longer be heard. On Sunday nights big speakers pump out music that sounds like a dead monotonous beat accompanied by demented screaming. It is an assault on the senses and a destruction of Georgetown’s seawall tradition.
It is possible to walk westwards along the seawall passing the lovely old wrought iron bandstand, and the relatively new Marriot Hotel, an architectural monstrosity built with public money and imported Chinese labour. The city’s western border is of course water. Having successfully, for now at least, defied the Atlantic Ocean, Georgetown gives the illusion of slipping into the Demerara River with the golden pink sunset. The land ends abruptly. A groyne takes some of the force of the waves coming in from the Atlantic. It is a dangerous spot and people have drowned here.
The northwest point of the city; somewhere here the Atlantic and the Demerara river meet. This small groyne is all that protects the land from the force of the ocean. Photo: Melinda Janki
The Demerara is a much smaller river than the Essequibo, only about a mile wide. This is the country’s main port, and ships come in here, laden with imported consumer goods, including plastic bottles of water from Trinidad, which possibly end up back in Trinidad via ocean currents.
The riverside waterfront is taken up with docks and wharves for the shipping industry until the organic chaos that is the Stabroek Market—fish, fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, spices, medicine even gold—there is something for everybody in Stabroek Market. But it is dirty. The river side of the market is full of the inevitable plastic bottles and garbage. There is absolutely no respect for the river as an ecosystem. The scarlet ibis have wisely fled further south. The other large market—Bourda—is further east near the canals along Church street and North road. It is a favourite spot for this heron to fish.
Part of Bourda market in the centre of town; the original design was for a grass promenade with a vista to St George’s Cathedral, once the tallest wooden building in the world. The area has been ruined by the overspill from the market and a brightly coloured plastic playground for children.The heron up close. Photo: Melinda Janki
A little further along is perhaps the most beautiful waterway of all—the bit that meanders through the zoo and Botanic Gardens. Manatees have lived in this system of ponds for as long as I can remember. There are also small spectacled caiman. It is incredible to think that this kind of wildlife is relatively free to roam in a city. The rest of the manatees are in the National Park, not far from the seawall.
Georgetown cannot escape the sea. 120 miles out, Esso Exploration and Petroleum Guyana Ltd, a Bahamas subsidiary of ExxonMobil has announced a massive oil discovery of over 3 billion barrels of oil. Along with two other companies Hess Exploration Guyana Ltd, a Cayman Islands company, and CNOOC Nexen Guyana Production Ltd, registered in Barbados, Esso has a licence to extract oil. The oil deal is hugely controversial not least because of the favourable terms to the oil companies and the doubts about what Guyana will get.
There is also concern about oil pollution and for the environment in general as well as a legal challenge and international concern Guyana’s oil will contribute to climate change and therefore to rising sea levels. For a country whose capital city is below sea-level this seems a self-defeating course of action, especially as Georgetown is particularly vulnerable. At one time Guyana had the highest suicide rate in the world. Now, it almost seems as if the capital city is getting ready to commit slow suicide by drowning. But it doesn’t have to end like that. Other cities are fighting back. New York and San Francisco are suing the oil companies for harm from climate change. Arnold Schwarzenegger even wants to go after them for murder.
Georgetown’s Mayor and City Council and the central government appear to have little or no understanding of climate change (and other threats to humanity) despite the second warning to humanity from thousands of scientists. Georgetown is running out of time and desperately needs new visionary leadership and citizens who love their capital city. Perhaps the time has come for young people to take over, to enforce their constitutional right to inter-generational equity, to demand a fossil fuel free economy, to insist on an immediate and total ban on plastic and Styrofoam, and to work together to restore the city’s waterways and infrastructure, not just to hold back the sea but to create a healthy environment with a zero-carbon footprint.
Like London, Georgetown could even become a national park city. As Martin Carter, Guyana’s best loved poet wrote, “I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world.”
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.
By viewing Muir Woods and other urban forests as “museums for trees,” we create the possibility of reconciliatory healing through sharing multiple narratives of place.
At Muir Woods National Monument, an old-growth redwood forest a half hour’s drive north of San Francisco, more than a million people a year from around the world flock to visit ancient, giant trees.
These visitors largely believe they are coming to a beautiful, living example of a thriving and timeless forest, protected forever by benevolent figures from the United States’ early conservation history.
View from Mt. Tamalpais. Muir Woods sits in a valley in the foreground; the San Francisco skyline is visible in the distance. Photo: Laura Booth
After a year working as an informal educator for the National Park Service at Muir Woods, I prefer to liken it to a “museum for trees”: a stunning forest functioning and, in some vital ways, flourishing within its urban context—but not without modern human impacts that alter its character from the coast redwood forests of yore.
Like most cultural institutions, Muir Woods as a park has a complex, difficult history that—if we remember it and share it—increases the forest’s usefulness as a model for exploring contemporary questions that apply to fragmented natural areas in urban contexts worldwide. Who is nature for? How should we expect nature to look? What is beauty, and who deserves access to it? Why does a forest matter, no matter where you live?
What makes Muir Woods a museum for trees?
The first photo I took in awe of Muir Woods. Photo: Laura Booth
The first time I walked into Muir Woods as a weekend hiker, I recall snapping a photo on my phone and sending it to my father and my brother with an accompanying text: “There are real places on Earth that actually look like this.”
It’s not a dissimilar sensory experience to the one I felt on first entering the halls of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with a high school class, or my first solo journey to The American Museum of Natural History. In many (though not all) cultures, these institutions inspire a sense of reverence, and many social signals affirm the importance and fragility of the contents they enshrine: here, guarded around the clock and displayed beneath thoughtfully-calibrated lighting, is Art. Here, behind glass and accompanied by an explanatory placard, is Science.
Here, staffed by people in familiar uniforms and Smokey-the-Bear hats, peopled with other visitors (mostly) adhering to the trail and wearing brand-name hiking attire, is the Forest. It is rare, it is visually arresting, and although we destroyed the vast majority of it, some very smart men from the past have protected the important bits of it, so that you can see it and use it as your Instagram background, and perhaps learn about the ecosystem services you experience by virtue of its persistence today (I’ll counter this particular narrative later on).
This wayside offers a narrative about the “saving of Muir Woods.” But from whom did it need to be saved, and why? In this guided tour, I asked visitors to think about events that were missing from the timeline at the bottom of the panel. Photo: Laura Booth
As in other kinds of museums, at Muir Woods and in the surrounding public lands, visitor participation is typically restricted to certain forms—hiking on trails, viewing wildlife from safe distances, camping in designated locations. Generally speaking, visitors to Muir Woods are discouraged from touching plants in the forest out of concern for the possibility that they will unwittingly reach their hands into a patch of poison oak or stinging nettles. Visitors may look at the Art, or the Science, or the Forest, but not experience it in a tactile way unless the exhibit explicitly calls on them to do so.
In a museum for trees such as Muir Woods, we install distance between ourselves and the Forest. In the United States’ public land paradigm, we have devised rules and signs to protect the land from trampling, littering, and destruction of habitat, among other offenses (though these are notoriously disregarded, sometimes to the mortal danger of visitors). We may argue that regulating participation in this way is the necessary legacy of humans’ disconnection from how land works, which, in turn, is inexorably followed by an inability to respect that land.
I believe that “museums for trees” such as Muir Woods innately contain the possibility of beneficial outcomes for forests and people. They also have limiting outcomes that, if we aren’t thoughtful, can preclude us from seeing novel ways of being in relationship with the land.
Yet, certain outcomes emerge when we treat so-called natural spaces in this way—as places where visitors are often vaguely menacing, destructive consumers as opposed to potential co-creators.
Below, I’ll consider some of these outcomes, and how we can use the conceptual example of Muir Woods as a museum for trees to realize more beneficial outcomes, more often, and for more people in our urban public lands.
What we build and what we lose from a museum for trees
When we create “museums for trees” by designating urban forests or other sorts of natural features as parks with amenities, programs, services, and rules, we can increase accessibility to nature for diverse audiences that may have no connection or negative associations with such places—but we don’t always do so successfully.
For example, Muir Woods offers a length of trail accessible to wheelchair users and assistive listening devices for those who are hearing impaired. Folks who arrive directly from San Francisco can safely walk through the redwoods in flip-flops on the raised boardwalk if that is what makes them feel comfortable in the forest.
Providing such infrastructure is integral to making public land equally accessible to variously-abled people with a diversity of backgrounds and experiences. It is one way we can follow through on our capability to increase accessibility to nature. However, it is also low-hanging fruit in the world of increasing access to civic spaces.
While lack of a safely graded trail can be an initial deterrent, there are many other, subtler ways that natural spaces, similar to exhibits in art and natural history museums, have been made hostile to different communities. That hostility is often unspoken, or manifests through omissions in the way we tell the story of a site.
To illustrate, return to the photograph above, the one with the wayside titled “Saving Muir Woods.” Over a timeline that charts the history of the forest beginning in the early 1800s, the text of this exhibit tells readers that when William Kent and his wife, Elizabeth Thacher Kent, owners of Muir Woods in the early 1900s, were threatened with eminent domain (a local water utility wanted to log the old-growth grove, dam the creek running along the valley floor, and turn the forest into a reservoir for public water), William Kent was outraged. He used his stature as a well-to-do Progressive to gain an audience with President Teddy Roosevelt via Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service.
Kent was able to convince Roosevelt of the value of the forest for leisure and recreation, and shortly thereafter, Roosevelt used the power of executive order—as granted to the president by Congress in the Antiquities Act of 1906—to designate the redwood grove as a National Monument. Kent insisted that instead of naming the forest in honor of his donation of the land, Roosevelt should name it after John Muir, the beloved naturalist and writer who founded the Sierra Club.
This sounds like a happy, if simplified, story of Good, Genteel Nature Lovers triumphing over Bad, Greedy Loggers, right?
Just as I viscerally learned when I invited a friend to The American Museum of Natural History in New York and he responded, “The natural history museum makes me uncomfortable—the way it puts black and brown people behind glass like rhinos,” a little context substantially shifts the connotation of the “Saving Muir Woods” story in key ways.
Kent, the educated son of a merchant, moved to the Muir Woods area as a child; unlike the vast majority of people moving west during the Gold Rush Era (but similarly to most of the men responsible for crafting the tenets of the early American conservation movement), he associated nature with enjoyment and as an expression of moral values rather than as a source of livelihood.
When he went on to campaign for public office later in his life, Kent repeatedly ran on a fervent platform of Asian immigrant exclusion. In a 1920 speech in San Francisco, he said, “We who happen to be of English descent are proud and happy in the fact that the country from which we came was not overrun by successions of peoples yellow and black and indiscriminate in their breeding.”
In working to protect the redwood forest from logging, Kent was adhering to values that other “Progressive” white supremacists had cultivated, relating the ancient stature of the Coast Redwood species with preserving the purity of the white race. From Charles Goethe, who linked conservation of tracts of redwoods with his advocacy of eugenics, to Madison Grant, a zoologist and redwood protector whose 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, was lauded both by Adolf Hitler and Teddy Roosevelt, these men feared the loss or muddling of lineages, including that of the redwoods, that they considered superior.
What does this history lesson have to do with the opportunities presented by the forest as museum?
When we tell a more complete story of Muir Woods, it is suddenly ensnarled with the very foundations of identity-based controversies that are embroiling our national politics in 2018. The site becomes highly relevant to intersectional justice for all kinds of communities, urban and otherwise, that have historically been exploited or excluded in relation to nature and public land.
Perhaps even more so than in traditional monuments to art, history, or culture, our public lands offer in situ opportunities for reconciliatory healing when we interpret them fully, via a multitude of perspectives.
That we struggle to share these stories in the containers—the forests, city streets, prairies, oceans, urban rivers, statues, and parks—where they are most vivid is what Nina Simon, executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, might call a problem of relevance.
In her book, The Art of Relevance, Simon draws an elegant, elongated metaphor that equates a museum to a room. The vibrant content and community a museum can offer (if they are doing strong, effective programming) lives inside the room; those as yet unfamiliar with the value of that content are situated outside the room. The key to the door that separates the Inside and the Outside is Relevance.
People who feel comfortable inside the room are already acquainted with the value of its contents—in the case of Muir Woods, insiders might include avid hikers, local families, park volunteers, or park staff. Insiders are sometimes resistant to change—and when the content of the room is altered to be more inclusive, some of those insiders may object. But by sharing specific, challenging histories such as the one I’ve related above, we can invoke the deep relevance of the forest—or any other natural urban space—to those audiences on the outside, and increase the number of people who see their stake in nature without much altering the parameters we’ve put in place to guide them.
Examples of participatory programs in Muir Woods. Photos: Laura Booth
By viewing Muir Woods and other urban forests as “museums for trees,” we can apply Simon’s metaphor to these natural spaces. In doing so, a primary benefit of the analogy emerges: the possibility of creating reconciliatory healing through sharing multiple narratives of place.
I’m proud to note that Muir Woods has embarked on this work, as has the entire Interpretation and Education division within the National Park Service. Today, many parks are trying to take an “audience-centered” approach in their programming and, based on recognition of an exclusive past, seek to share untold histories with their audiences. As an entry-level interpretive ranger, I was encouraged to devise programs in this framework and to discuss difficult knowledge—from institutional racism to indigenous issues to climate change—wherever they applied to Muir Woods. Of course, there is plenty more of this healing work to do.
I’ve just made an argument in favor of thinking about a forest park as a museum for trees—but perhaps the earliest pop cultural reference to the idea, Joni Mitchell’s 1969 song Big Yellow Taxi, is more critical. The lyric is a familiar one:
“They took all the trees
Put ’em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see ’em”
There’s something distasteful to thinking of Muir Woods as a museum rather than as a forest—when I discussed the idea with visitors, they rejected it out of hand, expressing reluctance to think of the forest’s survival as being inextricably interwoven with humans’ activities.
Unfortunately, this reluctance is seated in the same premise that the men of the early conservation movement held about nature: a mythic idea that forests and other natural spaces without humans are perfect, rising and plateauing in a static, pinnacle state. So thought French Romanticist François-René de Chateaubriand, who wrote, “Forests precede civilizations; deserts follow them.” Likewise, Kent located value in Muir Woods because of his perception of it as “untouched.” In a 1907 letter to Gifford Pinchot, he wrote of the forest:
“It is an object of great scientific value in its wealth of primal tree life and the rare and delicate flowers and ferns found only in an untouched redwood forest.”
Historically, the Coast Miwok people used landscape-scale prescribed fire to manage redwood forests and surrounding ecosystems for edible plants. Ancient fire scars are still evident in the hollows at the redwoods’ bases. Today, the Coast Miwok live northeast of Muir Woods. Photo: Laura Booth.
The Muir Woods of Kent’s time was hardly untouched; prior to their being forced from their homeland and enslaved in the Spanish Mission system, the Coast Miwok people had influenced the forest through landscape-scale burning for thousands of years, shaping the appearance of the forest that Kent and other descendants of Western Civilization chose to see as “primeval.”
The reality of the forest as we find it today is also one of profound human influence, though that influence is largely damaging: the health of the Coast Redwoods’ understory community, the climate processes that determine its biological characteristics, and the persistence of its natural history strategy are threatened by the massive changes people have made within its range over the last 250 years, from rapid deforestation to industrial urbanization, to climate change.
By isolating an old-growth forest such as Muir Woods, we may cut off the stand from the community context that has typified the forest since the last Ice Age—for 10,000 years, more than 2 million acres of connected old-growth Coast Redwood forest blanketed the coast of California; post-logging, the area covered by old-growth stands is approximately 120,000 acres, a full 97 percent reduction from just a few human generations ago.
This loss sets the stage for a wrenching sense of grief that we might also associate with the redwood forest as museum—a place where we put on display trees that, through human actions, have been prevented from performing their evolved function in perpetuity.
Joan Naviyuk Kane, an indigenous poet who writes about her Iñupiaq heritage, illustrates the tragedy of this idea best. In an interview, she spoke about seeing a drum her grandfather had made in a museum’s collections:
“It got me really thinking. Is it still a drum if it is never to be used again and remains only in a museum’s collection? Are they objects or are they poems now?”
Reckoning with the past to create a novel future: lessons from redwoods
If we choose to pay attention, the relationship of indigenous Californians to the landscape offers a lesson for visioning urban forests, such as Muir Woods, both as forests and as the kinds of museums we want: participatory community centers that connect us to each other while instilling us with deep knowledge of the landscape, rather than as elite institutions that serve certain narratives over others.
For thousands of years, California Indians (like indigenous people across the Western Hemisphere prior to European contact) actively managed landscapes at a scale that was virtually impossible for Europeans to conceive at the time. Vast evidence for this management contradicts the premise discussed above—that in order to preserve its truest character, tracts of “wilderness” must be left utterly alone, as free as possible from human influence.
Muir Woods, both contemporary forest and museum. Photo: Laura Booth
In her book Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson writes, “Interestingly, contemporary Indians often use the word wilderness as a negative label for land that has not been taken care of by humans for a long time…When intimate interaction ceases, the continuity of knowledge, passed down through generations, is broken, and the land becomes ‘wilderness.'”
By thinking of Muir Woods as a museum for trees, we create an opportunity to hold a duality: that we need more people, not fewer, to interact and care actively for the landscape where it appears in their daily lives—whether in their local urban national park, community garden, wetland, or tidal marsh—and that, by providing extensive guidance (that sometimes takes the form of rules and limitations) in what activities are appropriate, we offer them a portal into the Inside of the urban nature room—where their stake in protecting the resilience of urban nature becomes self-evident, and they become the new ambassadors inviting Outsiders, in.
The manipulation of our hidden hydrology and the desire to connect back to these lost traces is a commonality we share distinct from culture, geography, and ecology. It is a story reflected in every city, and manifest in every old blue line on every old map.
Our cities are filled with hidden stories. Some of these tales are unlocked through conversations with long-time residents and oral histories, while others emerge through the written word, embedded in documents and biographies from the shapers and boosters that made our cities. Some hide in maps, a chronology of layers of changes over time, intimately spatial and tied to places, where you can stand and feel the resonance of what took place years, or centuries before. Historians and ecologists are my heroes for connecting these disparate layers and weaving the threads into compelling narratives aimed at connecting the past with present.
Hidden Hydrology, officially launched in 2016, has a goal of exploring lost rivers, buried creeks & disappeared streams. Connecting historic ecology + the modern metropolis. Site by Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
This was the inspiration for Hidden Hydrology (www.hiddenhydrology.org), my homage to these histories and a way to connect this to my work as a landscape architect and urbanist. The tagline is “Exploring lost rivers, buried creeks & disappeared streams. Connecting historic ecology + the modern metropolis.” A long-time passion for historical ecology, fired by pioneers like landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn and her work in Philadelphia and Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta, with its evocative maps of disappeared streams, and inquisitive essays of place by the likes of David James Duncan, led me to more formal research. Starting in late 2016, and through this recent work, I’ve been uncovering and sharing the projects and activities of many urban historians, hydrologists, artists, mapmakers, photographers, and others, including some that have made it to TNOC as well. All of these share a focus on celebrating the lost rivers, buried streams, and disappeared streams in their cities.
Map:
The hidden hydrology of cities manifests itself in unique ways. On a number of walks in Seattle last summer, I followed the routes of urban creeks and discovered that while hidden, the traces left behind reveal layers of meaning. One notable exploration was of an historic waterway known as Licton Springs Creek, in North Seattle. Licton Springs Creek is a short stem flowing north to south, and feeding Green Lake, which is the center point of a significant park in the inner north neighborhood of Seattle. The original General Land Office Cadastral Map from the 1850s revealed the creek.
The General Land Survey Cadastral Survey Maps provide key historical reference points in the US to streams and creeks, such as the maps of Seattle surveyed in the 1850s. Map: BLM Cadastral Survey
The more detailed 1894 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) topographic map shows the same forked creek along with some topography. The interesting take home message here is the absence of development, with only a few informal roads and a scattering of houses on the banks of the lake, just a bit over a hundred years ago.
USGS Topographic maps provided additional information on historic topography and hydrology, such as this 1894 survey of Seattle. Map: USGS Historical Topographic Map Explorer
The composite map, digitized into a Geographic Information System (GIS) and married with the database of information and aerial photos, provided the current context for the area including the existing open waterways. This became the blueprint for a route to explore. Although the map shows the creek as a shorter waterway, the current water route implies that the creek started further north, at Licton Springs Park.
A composite of historic stream alignments overlaid with a current aerial provides a blueprint for exploration. Map: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
Explore:
With maps in hand, the process of exploration is easy. Find a good starting point and try to follow the route as closely as possible heading downhill. For this particular site, there were some springs emerging in the neighborhood, and these all led to a significant portion of the original creek in Licton Spring Park. The map below shows areas of “open channel” that exist within the residential neighborhood.
Locations of historic streams winding through Licton Springs Park. Map: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
Walking a few feet off the sidewalk, you begin to hear the rush of water, and as it gets louder and louder, you find the inflow pipes feeding the creek. Three of these pipes drain other upland water bodies, feeding water to the existing daylighted portion of Licton Springs Creek, which weaves through the park, in both channel form and spreading into a larger wetland, with pathways and bridges crisscrossing at points.
Outfalls carrying drainage from springs and other waterways find daylight in Licton Springs Park. Photo: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
In the park itself is the namesake Licton Springs, a serene spring consisting of a simple basin with an outlet, which is striking from the reddish tint of the sediment, caused by red iron oxide. From the Licton Springs Neighborhood page, some history of the spring and its significance to native people:
“Aurora-Licton Springs was once heavily forested, filled with springs, bogs and marshes. The Duwamish Indians called the springs Liq’tid (LEEK-teed) or Licton. Liq’tid means “red-colored” or “painted” in the Puget Sound Salish language, referring to the red iron oxide that still bubbles up in the springs. The springs had spiritual significance to the Native Americans who camped and built sweat lodges nearby, using the reddish mud to make face paint.”
A significant site for the Duwamish tribes as well as early settlers, Licton Springs gets it’s coloration from iron oxide. Photo: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
The springs were a constant destination for native peoples as well as early settlers, including habitation in and around the location of the park, which provided recreation for inhabitants (see an interesting write-up on the site at Holy and Healing Wells). David Denny built a cabin on the site in 1870, and other habitation continued in the adjacent area for years. It is still used as a harvesting and recreation destination by the Duwamish. The pressure to develop this area led to the typical cycle, with concerns about the water quality.
Via Wikipedia: “The natural spring fed Green Lake before it was capped and drained to the Metro sewer system after it became contaminated by residential development (1920, 1931).” The typical “modernization” of city infrastructure in the early 1930s, the shift from destination to development and erasure, happened throughout the area.
“Throughout the years, settlers and city dwellers came to the springs to picnic, drink the mineral water and to ease the aching legs of draft animals by soaking them knee deep in the mineral mud. Until 1931, when Seattle diverted the spring’s water to storm drains, Licton Creek fed Green Lake. Eventually most of the springs and bogs in the area were filled to create buildable lands. The natural wetlands were further drained because they were thought to be a health hazard.”
The area of the current park was always a vision, although it took many years to come to fruition. A development in the 1930s proposed a park plan from the Olmsted Brothers on the site, which is captured in a summary from Historylink:
“The Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts, were retained by Calhoun, Denny & Ewing to draw up plans for a park. They proposed an organic layout with a park, rustic drives, paved streets, and home sites. The Olmsted plan, never fully realized, included rustic shelters over the two spring basins, bridges, paths, and clearing the reserve around the springs as well as preservation of the original, rustic Denny cabins. One remnant from the Olmsted plan for Licton Springs that exists today is a portion of the street network, where Woodlawn Avenue curves to connect with N 95th Street.”
The park plan wasn’t implemented, but the land was used for a spa operated by Edward A. Jensen, which “offered thermal baths that included 19 minerals. Jensen also bottled the water and sold it countrywide.” After his death, the land was slated to be developed as a sanitarium but escaped this fate by being purchased as park land by the city. The park was developed officially in the 1970s, and the connection to the streams was maintained. The outfall to the south is a garden entitled “Healing Hands” designed by landscape architect Peggy Gaynor. Gaynor created drama with ripples transitioning to the grand finale—a larger grated outfall creating a cacophony as it exits into the storm system. The area also includes a bridge crossing a rock-lined channel planted with a mix of streamside vegetation.
Licton Springs outfall garden “Healing Hands” by Seattle landscape architect Peggy Gaynor. Photo: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
Beyond the park, my thought was that there would be no remnants left of Licton Springs Creek as the remainder of the route is built-up residential neighborhoods. This is where exploration pays dividends, opening up layers of urban history that, if you wander, stop and look, tell unique ecological stories of our places. In this case, two hidden hydrological features emerged to complete the story of Licton Springs Creek.
A map of some of the hidden gems in the neighborhood, including a sanctuary for waterfowl and a neighborhood stream. Map: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
The first is a gem known as Pilling’s Pond, which is a discovery that opens up new understandings of place. As you near the site, it seems a little different, surrounded by a chain link fence behind which is a large spring-fed pond, teeming with unique residents—waterfowl. An interpretive sign on the site tells the story, with a short excerpt from the Licton Springs Neighborhood page:
“At around 1933, Chuck Pilling dammed the creek that runs through the property from Licton Springs. This enabled him to provide a habitat that still exists and sustains a broad assortment of waterfowl today. Chuck attracted worldwide attention as the first successful breeder of the hooded merganser, bufflehead and harlequin ducks. Chuck’s hobby has turned into a major community attraction. With people stopping to look at the unusual assortment of water birds, both tame and wild it is a truly unique treasure enjoyed by the entire community.”
Pilling’s Pond is the fed by the Licton Springs Creek, and served as a sanctuary for ducks and other waterfowl. Photo: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
A block south of the pond is what I call the Ashworth Neighborhood Stream, in which the historic Licton Springs Creek (albeit radically altered), is still present, channelized through the front yards of an entire residential block. The small channel slices through the front yards, with various types of bridges spanning the waterway, providing a hint of audible running water from the sidewalks, a rarity in a built up urban area.
The creek emerges in the front yards of a block along Ashworth Street, where residents build bridges over it to access their houses. Photo: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
Toward the end of the walk, you arrive at Green Lake. The old inflow to the lake is no longer visible, and the location is not the exact stream route of Licton Springs. However, there is an abstracted sequence of water features at the Green Lake Wading Pool that provide a hint of what used to be, including an inlet from the north cascading into a sinuous pool, which overflows under a simple bridge before entering Green Lake. It is a metaphorical connection at best, but one that at least ends the journey in a way somewhat more poetic than a pipe.
Long buried, now only metaphorical waterways make the final connection to Green Lake, here as a drainage from a splash pool. Photo: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
While this is a story about Seattle, it’s merely the story of one creek, which is sometimes visible, but much of which is obscured from our daily lives. It is also a story that is reflected in every city, and manifest in every old blue line on every old map. While pouring over maps, referencing old reports, and digitizing stream corridors into GIS is a nerdy and noble pursuit, and hours of fun, the most compelling advice I have to offer to engage in these places is to get out and walk them. Walking allows us to see our home places in new ways, as evidenced by a wide-ranging literature from amazing authors and explorers alike, such as Robert Macfarlane, Rebecca Solnit, and Lauren Elkin. Walking is a natural act but walking with purpose sometimes is a mystery. In this manner we are not following a trail, nor are we just aimlessly wandering. The act of tracing hidden streams, shorelines, and other waterbodies exists somewhere in between the two. In this regard, it is neither walking for exercise nor walking just for the sake of walking, but a sensory way to engage the body that connects the present and the historical.
If you don’t have a little mud on your boots, you aren’t doing it right. Photo: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
For these walks, I have few rules. I do minimal research before the fact, so I’m focused on the experience of the journey and not anticipating some known destination ahead. I follow as closely as possible the original route of the stream or waterway, honoring sensitive ecosystems where present, but sometimes engaging the creek in a uniquely physical manner, as noted by the muddy boots above. For many reasons, I avoid trespassing, even when every fiber of my being wants to walk into someone’s backyard because I know something good is there, hidden just out of site. I often record sounds and take photos. I take lots of notes, and mostly importantly, I take my time. Although I’m not averse to company, I usually like to do these walks alone, to feel fully immersed in the process of engaging all my senses. And every time, even when I’m convinced there will be nothing, a monotony of development for the miles I plan to follow, I’m always rewarded with hints, clues, and traces of the palimpsest of the hidden hydrology.
It’s something that is present to varying degrees in every city around the world. A common thread we can all connect with, is the burying of these lost waterways, which happens in every city, everywhere in the world. It’s a commonality we all share distinct from culture, geography, and ecology—that of the manipulation of our hidden hydrology and our desire to connect back to these lost traces.
So, find and print out an old map. Sketch a route on a new map that matches some stream, any one will do. Grab a comfortable pair of shoes, perhaps a camera and a sound recorder and you’re set. Drive, bike, or bus your way to that hidden endpoint on the map. Map and explore, and begin to truly see these hidden parts of your city for the first time.
Banner Image: Urban creeks and wetlands flow throughout Seattle, often hidden from view, including here at Licton Springs Park. Photo: Jason King, Hidden Hydrology
Round tables brought together participants from around the world to discuss how we can better integrate diversity and multiculturalism into research and practice in our urban forestry work.
Over the past four years in leading the Engagement and Research portfolio at Tree Canada, I have had the opportunity to watch the organization grow, contribute to designing programs that move beyond tree planting efforts, and to create a network of knowledge sharing for Canada’s urban forests. I am pleased to share that our progress has made a significant impact in urban forestry nationwide by fostering comprehensive and interdisciplinary dialogue, by engaging in innovative projects, sharing knowledge, and convening communities. Specific programs in this portfolio include the Canadian Urban Forest Network (CUFN), Strategy (CUFS) and Conference (CUFC).
In Canada, we typically see that the curation and maintenance of urban forests is the responsibility of municipalities. Communities often seek direction from peers as well as look to provincial and federal level support. Tree Canada offers opportunities for communities to get involved through tree planting events, urban greening initiatives and grants, networking, and engagement. The outcomes of initiatives conducted within the Engagement and Research pillar strengthen overall leadership in urban forestry at the national scale and bridge communication across communities to foster collaboration and encourage diversity.
First, with respect to the Canadian Urban Forest Network (CUFN), the list membership rose from 450 individuals (between 2004-2014) to 925 members (between 2015-2017), more than doubling within the past two years. The CUFN was created to bring people together to share their stories and ideas, ask questions and learn from one another, and in some cases contest the status quo and grow. In light of recent threats to urban trees, we have seen more activity on the list with individuals vocalizing their concerns and offering support by sharing successes to overcome challenges. To this end, several recent achievements of the CUFN program include:
Conducting the CUFN member survey to capture demographic profiles of list members and to better understand participant interests (Bardekjian & Chiriac, 2018). These survey results will help guide the CUFN Steering Committee’s efforts to engage the regions in the months to come.
Facilitating the development of urban forestry action plans for each of Canada’s five regions in collaboration with the CUFN Steering Committee regional representatives, including hosting local workshops (e.g., Pacific region: October 2017; Ontario region: October 2017; Atlantic region: November 2017; Prairies region: March 2018). The goal for the action plans is to strategically guide the regions according to their needs.
Sharing knowledge by coordinating and delivering webinars and e-lectures in partnership with the Canadian Institute of Forestry on a variety of topics (e.g., best practices, planning, resiliency) as well as organizing speaker series and panel discussions at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities conferences (June 2017; February 2018). Collectively, we had over 300 participants tuning in nationwide. In addition, the FCM allows us to profile urban forestry efforts and needs to a captive audience of decision makers.
Raising awareness about urban forestry issues at various conventions and events (in excess of 30 between 2014-2017) such as attending the Canadian Forest Service Science-Policy Workshop (September 2017) to discuss integrating urban forests into their 10-year Research Strategy, as well as attempting to set the Guinness World Record for the Longest Tree Hug on National Tree Day (September 2014). The outcomes of these various avenues of engagement have increased public interest in urban forestry as well membership in the CUFN.
Second, the Canadian Urban Forest Strategy (CUFS) offers guiding principles for urban forestry at the national level. In recent years, more and more Canadian municipalities have been developing urban forest management plans and tree protection policies. Feedback from stakeholders and members has evidenced the need for a national strategy supported by all levels of government; as the Secretariat for the CUFS, Tree Canada promotes its importance to municipal, provincial and federal levels. In collaboration with multiple and diverse partners, several recent achievements include:
Conducting the State of Canada’s Municipal Forests Survey (Bardekjian, Kenney, & Rosen, 2016). This study offers insights to municipal forestry practices, inventory systems, canopy cover, bylaws, budgets and social considerations.
Guiding a national-scale municipal research needs assessment in collaboration with Laval University (Larouche, 2017). From 192 responses across 167 municipalities of 5,000 inhabitants or more, this study offers insights into cities urban forest management structures, expectations and research needs in applied and social contexts;
Mapping Canada’s Urban Forestry Footprint in collaboration with the University of Toronto with support from Mitacs (Yung et al., 2018). This study profiles and maps the communities across Canada that have urban forestry departments, management plans, and tree protection bylaws;
Contributing to a labour market research project with the Career Foundation, International Society of Arboriculture Ontario Chapter, Ontario Commercial Arborists Association, and industry partners to identify the barriers and issues that prevent people from pursuing employment opportunities in the field of arboriculture (2017-2018). This study aims to increase recruitment;
Contributing to the development of an urban forestry carbon protocol supported by Environment Canada and multiple academic partners (2017-2018). This study generated the first national database of urban forest inventories from 181 municipalities across Canada and contends that a standardized national urban forest inventory and monitoring approach will support a better understanding of urban forest carbon dynamics and enable policy and management improvements;
Contributing to a literature review of peer-reviewed articles on the benefits of urban forests for public health led by Health Canada’s Climate Change and Innovation Bureau and the University of Washington (Wolf et al., 2018). This study is the first systematic review to focus on urban trees (rather than broader greenspaces, corridors and parks) as a beneficial source for human health and wellbeing;
Examining the needs of Indigenous communities with respect to urban greening projects in collaboration with the Canadian Forest Service by analyzing past Tree Canada grant recipients (Gosselin-Hebert et al., 2018). This study seeks more inclusive ways to better integrate Indigenous perspectives and knowledge into program practices;
Collaborating with various academic institutions to integrate and advance urban forestry education in higher learning. This includes contributing to the University of British Columbia’s Bachelor of Urban Forestry program and collaborating on an application to develop a professional training program with multiple academic partners led by l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) (2017-2018).
The CUFN Steering Committee, along with a secondary review committee consisting of provincial and federal government representatives, is currently in the process of updating the Canadian Urban Forest Strategy for the 2019-2024 term. This process began with public consultation workshops in autumn of 2015 in each region and has been ongoing for the past two years. The objective of the workshops was to ensure that regional voices were heard in the strategy’s redesign. The new version of the CUFS (2019-2024) will be presented at the 2018 International Urban Forestry Congressin October in Vancouver, BC. With respect to national efforts, there are three recent initiatives in the United States that are relevant and helpful to Canada’s efforts in urban forestry:
The Ten-Year Urban Forestry Action Plan (2016-2026) for the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council and the Community of Practice, offering goals, actions, and recommendations for cultivating urban forestry across the country.
The creation of “Vibrant Cities Lab” by the US Forest Service, American Forests, the National Association of Regional Councils, and others, to help city managers, policymakers, and advocates build prosperous urban forestry programs.
For a detailed overview of the above three programs, see Michelle Sutton’s article in the March/April 2018 issue of City Trees, a publication of the Society of Municipal Arborists.
Lastly, since 2014, in my role with Tree Canada, I have collaborated with several communities to coordinate three Canadian Urban Forest Conferences (City of Victoria, BC: 2014; City of Laval, QC, 2016; City of Vancouver, BC: 2018). The objective of the CUFC is to bring together the network of national and international urban forestry professionals, practitioners, researchers, students, and community groups to share knowledge and foster collaboration. In my experience working with communities on these events, the level of dedication and commitment shown by the individuals who work tirelessly to bring
participants together to create a learning commons inspires me. The next Canadian Urban Forest Conference will be held in conjunction with two other conferences that comprise the 2018 International Urban Forestry Congress. This event is being organized in collaboration with multiple partners: Tree Canada, City of Vancouver, Pacific Northwest Chapter of the ISA, City of Surrey, and the University of British Columbia. The theme of the conference is Diversity.
The Engagement and Research portfolio of programs moves beyond tree planting by recognizing, empowering and bringing together the people who work in urban forestry, and more broadly urban greening stewardship, across Canada. Moving forward in 2018, selected goals of this portfolio include:
Updating the Compendium of Best Management Practices for Canadian Urban Forests;
Building closer partnerships with academic institutions to encourage departments to include urban forestry within their curriculum; and
Contributing to the delivery of a successful International Urban Forestry Congress.
On a personal note, I recently took part in two activities that better informed my perspective on our collective urban forestry efforts in Canada—regarding how we share knowledge and foster cross-cultural collaboration.
Last summer I was invited by the US Forest Service International Programs to represent Canada in their inaugural International Urban Forestry Seminar, with 19 participants from 16 countries worldwide (Chicago & New York; June 4-17, 2017). The two-week seminar enhanced and expanded my views on international activities in urban forestry by sharing insights and learning with others. Our group dealt with a series of themes including youth engagement, collaborating with non-traditional partners, resiliency (both social and ecological) and food security (Bardekjian & Paqueo, 2018). The idea of collaborating with non-traditional partners with the specific objective to integrate diversity and multiculturalism into urban forestry practice is not as actively practiced in Canada. My main takeaway from this experience was to “look more closely, and think more deeply” (Bardekjian, 2017) about the way we do things and I have since integrated many of these lessons into my research and work with various organizations and initiatives.
The second experience I want to share that demonstrated collaborative learning was participating in the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies International Roundtable (October 23-25, 2017) called, “Do Rainbows Come in Green: Urban Forests and Multicultural Citizenship” organized by my mentor and academic supervisor, Dr. Cecil Konijnendijk van den Bosch, University of British Columbia. This three-day workshop explored the theme of diversity in urban forestry across disciplines from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The round table brought together participants from around the world to discuss how we can better integrate diversity and multiculturalism into research and practice in our urban forestry work. As part of this workshop, I had the opportunity to represent a Canadian perspective on a panel of international speakers with leading global experts from Finland, the UK, and the Netherlands, and co-curate a digital photo exhibit, titled, Human Faces, Forest Places (Nesbitt & Bardekjian, 2017), profiling the diversity in people and their experiences with urban trees. During this same week, the CUFN Pacific region held their fall workshop focusing on topics including climate change adaptation, shade tree management, and biodiversity strategies.
As a social scientist, and through my role with Tree Canada, and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the University of British Columbia examining gender equity in arboriculture and urban forestry, I am proud to be contributing to urban forestry interests in Canada, and I look forward to seeing how our field evolves in the coming years. There is more to be done on various scales and ample opportunity for growth and collaboration. I encourage readers to use the CUFN listserv as a tool for sharing stories, projects, successes, and challenges—ask questions and inspire others… and if you are not a member, consider joining the conversation – there is no cost. In the coming months, I will be working with the CUFN Steering Committee Representatives to share regional updates from across Canada.
Bardekjian, A. & Paqueo, L. (2018). Beyond Trees: Growing international stewards in non-traditional ways. In Green Readiness, Response, and Recovery: A Collaborative Synthesis. New York, NY: US Forest Service [in press]
Bardekjian, A. & Chiriac, G. (2018). Interests and expectations: Results of the Canadian Urban Forest Network member survey. Tree Canada: Ottawa, ON.
Gosselin-Hebert, A., Bardekjian, A., Quann, S., & Crossman, V. (2018). Urban forestry in Indigenous communities across Canada: Exploring the impact of greening initiatives. [forthcoming]
Larouche, J. (2017). Research needs in urban forestry in Canada. Unpublished master’s thesis, Laval University, Quebec, QC.
Nesbitt, L. & Bardekjian, A. (2017, October 23). Human Faces, Forest Places. Photography exhibit curated and presented at the Peter Wall Institute for Advance Studies Round Table: Do Rainbows Come in Green? Urban Forests and Multicultural Citizenship. Vancouver, BC.
Sutton, M. (2018). Zooming Out and In on Urban Forestry in the U.S. City Trees: Journal of the Society of Municipal Arborists. March/April issue. Champaign, IL.
Wolf, K., Lam, S., McKeen, J., Richardson, G., van den Bosch, M., & Bardekjian, A. (2018). City Trees & Public Health: Diverse Benefits, Diverse Beneficiaries. [forthcoming]
Yung, Y., Puric-Mladenovic, D., Bardekjian, A., & Wynnyczuk, P. (2018). Canada’s Urban Forestry Footprint: Mapping the extent and intensity of urban forestry activities. (2018). Available at: http://forestry.utoronto.ca/canadas-urban-forestry-footprint/
The juxtaposition of built urban areas and natural life has an artistic wonder about it.
The escalator that stretches from Victoria Harbour in central Hong Kong to the high-priced mid-levels neighborhood accommodates approximately 70,000 commuters daily. Surrounded by tall buildings, you would not at first glance expect to find much in the way of life other than never-ending humanity. However, even on this congested pathway on any given day you are likely to see red-whiskered bulbuls flying through under the rain shelter and over your head, geometrid moths resting upon the walls, sparkling green and black Graphium butterflies zooming between commuters, and of course everyone’s favorite rock pigeons who walk along blissfully on the ground at your feet (be careful not to trip over them).
A Graphium sarpedon stops to drink on a city street in Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong. Photo: Timothy Bonebrake
This wealth of biodiversity presents an exciting opportunity when you have so many people in one place and so many species in that same place. Unlike a remote tropical forest where there are plenty of species but not many people to observe those species, the mobilization of the populace through citizen science in urban areas allows for the possibility of accurate and relatively comprehensive species and biodiversity monitoring.
There are now a diversity of platforms for recording such observations, one of the most common being iNaturalist, the app that I most frequently use. Unlike the days of old when you would record in a book what you might see on a given day, where somebody maybe someday might use that record, now you can record your observation, upload your photo, instantly have that observation verified by an expert, and make that record readily available for scientists or amateur naturalists alike. These citizen science approaches can scale up our biodiversity monitoring efforts spectacularly, and few ecosystems are better suited for it than urban landscapes by virtue of the numbers of potential recorders. For example, even if only 1 percent of the people who travel up the Hong Kong central escalator every day made a single observation, we would still have 700 daily biodiversity observations of species in that spot.
The community aspect of citizen science and the connecting of different stakeholders is of significant value. My colleague and moth expert, Dr. Roger Kendrick, set up the Hong Kong Moths iNaturalist project which has to date involved over 400 people in the recording of 1400 species and over 20,000 records. But importantly, anyone can upload their Hong Kong moth photo to the project page and Dr. Kendrick, the moth expert, can assist in the identification of the photo. And then I can (and have) use that data to understand possible changes in moth distributions in Hong Kong over time. And all the while there is an open dialogue and communication between scientists, naturalists, and even casual observers.
These social media efforts can be supplemented and powered by BioBlitzes and other biodiversity games or competitions. Racing to find as many species as you can in a day for a BioBlitz creates a teamwork like effort to achieve a goal. The recently held City Nature Challenge is a good example of a global scale competition where multiple cities compete for the trophy of most biodiverse city. Not only do people get into it and contribute lots of great species records, but there is a city pride that develops in such competitions. And this may encourage a sense of responsibility for monitoring, understanding, and conserving urban nature. Over 400,000 observations were made in the four days of the 2018 City Nature Challenge. More than 17000 people contributed and counted more than 18,000 species.
There are of course biases in such datasets. The more people there are in a city the more you will observe. My personal favorite example of this comes from Italy. It turns out, the number of ground beetle species observed by province correlates strongly with human population density—but this is largely driven record number, i.e., when the number of records is accounted for there is no such relationship (Barbosa et al. 2010). Thus for all urban biodiversity data, we must recognize the number of species seen in a city will be cumulative of both the sampling effort (number of citizen scientists) and the number of species. If you have many citizen scientists in a city of a few species, you will still only record those few species.
Red-shouldered hawk observed by the author on July 29, 2012, at the corner of Hyperion and Rowena (while the author was at the laundromat there), navigating through power lines, as recorded in iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/107482). Photo: Timothy Bonebrake
Citizen science will naturally tend towards taxa to which people are attracted. Birds, butterflies, and plants are all great in this respect. Microbes may not work so well (but maybe in the future?). And secretive or nocturnal species will be underreported as well.
Such biases in biodiversity data reflecting patterns associated with numbers of people may be a good thing concerning ecosystem services. To understand how urban species provide value to people you want data that is necessarily tied to the people observing it. So, for example, one could use citizen science-collected data to evaluate how much people enjoy butterflies in urban parks or even the extent to which people even notice the diversity of butterflies in parks. Well, such data would be biased in that urban parks not visited much by people would have few records… but one could still address the question of the value of urban butterflies to park visitors.
There is now a growing literature and framework for utilizing citizen data in urban biodiversity assessments (e.g., Wei et al. 2016, Aronson et al. 2017). BioBlitzes and iNaturalist, in particular, have been particularly useful; for example, in documenting the persistence of rare plant populations in Southern California (Parker et al. 2018). Understanding climate change impacts on biodiversity will certainly require better integration of citizen science records to understand both changes in species distributions or patterns and how people view those changes (Bonebrake et al. 2018).
Naturalists have for some time collected specimens and sent them off to a museum for prosperity. When Dan Cooper and I studied the butterflies of Griffith Park in Los Angeles (home to the Hollywood sign!), we used extensive collections from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles to document the historical butterfly community and compare it to the present (Bonebrake and Cooper 2014). These collections are invaluable, and we were able to document the extirpation of ten butterfly species from the park over the past century. When I surveyed the contemporary butterfly community, I didn’t collect any specimens because I prefer not to kill butterflies. But many of my observations are on iNaturalist so future ecologists can review these records if they wish. Of course, such online records can never replace specimens or museum records. You can’t do genetic tests on photos after all. And for how long records online will last is hard to say… just ask my friends on Friendster!
I often wonder what the future of these efforts will look like. How will technology continue to advance and support biodiversity monitoring and cities? I see drones all over Hong Kong these days. Could these potentially provide information about phenology or seasonal changes in vegetation, or even the diversity of species based on images taken from high above? As DNA sequencing becomes cheaper and available to the public, will this be the next step in advanced citizen science? In this case, maybe microbes could be monitored by citizen scientists. Or will it take a completely different shape? It’s hard to predict what these efforts will look like. When I joined iNaturalist six years ago, it was hard to imagine seeing over 8 million observations of over 150 thousand species by over 200 thousand citizen scientists. And yet here we are today!
There is a sublime beauty of a black kite casually soaring and careening through high rises and tall urban mazes. The juxtaposition of built urban areas and natural life has an artistic wonder about it. But more and more we are finding a practical use for such sights by meeting the challenge of biodiversity monitoring through technology and the use of citizen science.
Aronson, M. F., et al. (2017) Biodiversity in the city: key challenges for urban green space management. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.1480
Barbosa, A. M., Fontaneto, D., Marini, L., & Pautasso, M. (2010) Is the human population a large‐scale indicator of the species richness of ground beetles? Animal Conservation, 13, 432-441.
Bonebrake, T. C., & Cooper, D. S. (2014) A Hollywood drama of butterfly extirpation and persistence over a century of urbanization. Journal of Insect Conservation, 18, 683-692.
Bonebrake, T. C., et al. (2018) Managing consequences of climate‐driven species redistribution requires integration of ecology, conservation and social science. Biological Reviews, 93, 284-305.
Parker, S. S., et al. (2018) Adapting the bioblitz to meet conservation needs. Conservation Biology https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13103
Wei, J. W., Lee, B. P. Y., & Wen, L. B. (2016) Citizen science and the urban ecology of birds and butterflies—a systematic review. PloS one, 11, e0156425.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Will Allen, Chapel HillAs a disciple of Ian McHarg, I believe ecology is an essential element of the planning process through the intrinsic suitability of the land driving decision making on land use and design.
Juan Azcárate, BogotaBy taking a socio-ecological approach to child learning and education, ecologists and planners may find common ground and an opportunity to jointly shape more sustainable cities.
Amy Chomowitz, PortlandWhen they work together, planners and ecologists learn about each other and how to build on each other’s strengths, and they can help us all gain a more complex understanding of the world we inhabit.
Katie Coyne, AustinCould urban ecology be the glue that holds everything together? Yes. Atlanta is working on a City-wide Urban Ecology Framework that makes great strides to connect the dots.
Georgina Cullman, New York CityComprehensive inter-agency initiatives provide the opportunity for “ecology” to play a central role in creating a shared infrastructure.
PK Das, MumbaiLets begin our discussion admitting that the failure to achieve sustainable ecology is a challenge to our collective capacity, capability and knowledge sharing ability across multi-sectorial concerns. And not just these two groups, but everyone.
David Goode, BathI can see a time when city planning will be based on ecological principles. Understanding the metabolism of a city, how materials and energy move through the system, is no different from the natural world. Ecologists are well versed in this kind of approach.
Mark Hostetler, GainesvilleThere is a growing body of evidence that one’s psychological and physical well-being is rooted in one’s connection to nature.
Elsa Limasset, OrléansSoils are the foundation for maintaining or integrating nature in cities.
Ragene Palma, ManilaAn ecological perspective towards planning has (or could) improve our approach to tourism and pave the way for the Philippines to integrate climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction in environmental planning.
Diane Pataki, Salt Lake CityIf planners are willing to embrace uncertainty and negative results, and ecologists are willing to put science to the challenge of envisioning and testing bold new configurations of nature, maybe we can make a joint effort work.
Gil Penha-Lopez, LisbonIntegrating nature-based design into urban planning can be a regenerative pathway to solve something that was done previously, without any good planning, often times done the wrong way and in the wrong place.
Lauren Smalls-Mantey, New York CityComprehensive inter-agency initiatives provide the opportunity for “ecology” to play a central role in creating a shared infrastructure.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
Urban planning (and the city plans that express it) is typically focused on coherently organizing city systems, flows of people and resources, where things are and should be. While parks, green and open spaces are usually part of urban plans (but there are exceptions), ecology and process are on the sidelines.
Much of the writing at TNOC addresses the essential ecological and social values that flow from ecosystem services, green spaces, and biodiversity.
So, should not a greater ecological sophistication be embedded within urban planning?
Should there not be ecologists at the center of urban planning teams in cities?
Of course this requires that ecologists get involved, learn about planning and its methods, and invest in the tradeoffs that are inevitably involved in planning something as complicated as a city.
Where are the examples ecology embedded in urban planning? How can it be done?
Will is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Giving & Conservation Services at The Conservation Fund in Chapel Hill, NC. At The Conservation Fund since 1994, he formerly served as the Fund’s director strategic conservation planning and enterprise geospatial services and as an instructor for green infrastructure and conservation GIS training courses.
Will Allen
As a disciple of Ian McHarg, I believe ecology is an essential element of the planning process through the intrinsic suitability of the land driving decision making on land use and design.
It is particularly amusing to me to talk about this idea of whether ecology “could” play a bigger role in planning, since that was the primary motivation for me wanting to attend the City and Regional Planning program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill back in the 1990s in the first place!
My graduate school application essay focused on the concept of sustainable development, and I argued that expanding the use of ecological science into city planning was an essential element in that journey towards sustainability. In undergraduate school at Stanford University, the Urban Studies program exposed me to Ian McHarg’s iconic 1967 book Design with Nature. The book and Ian were the primary reasons that I went into the city and regional planning profession. The book seemed like the fundamental manifestation of what I thought land use and ecological planning should be, where the intrinsic suitability of the land drives the land use tradeoffs between ecology and the built environment.
My graduate studies and professional work at The Conservation Fund have focused on ecological planning with an emphasis on environmental design and sustainable development, in urban and rural environments, and at multiple scales. Inspired by McHarg’s layer cake, I have applied spatial planning using geographic information systems as my fundamental toolbox for thinking about how to protect a city’s green infrastructure and implement a strategic conservation planning approach to our work.
But, I still have a bit of lingering frustration with this topic of ecology and planning. Ian’s book is from 1967. I went to graduate school in the 1990s. It is now 2018. How far have we really come? My short answer is far, but not far enough.
I was reminded of how far we have come, and not come, when I was asked to do a review of the 2016 book entitled Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning by Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, Armando Carbonell (eds.) from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The book focuses on the role of landscape architecture and its “ever-expanding role in improving urban settings at every human scale.”
Given the topic, I knew that McHarg would be front and center in many of the essays. Little did I realize, however, that some of the chapters would become a referendum of sorts on the McHargian philosophy. In Richard Weller’s essay entitled: “The City Is Not an Egg: Western Urbanization in Relation to Changing Conceptions of Nature”, Weller identifies what I would call the “McHargian Paradox”—that is, any attempt to apply a prescriptive method to designing with nature in cities is virtually impossible given the complexity of natural systems, functions, and processes that make aspects of nature “unknowable”. In a nutshell, while McHarg focused on biophysical data, landscape urbanists utilized a diversity of data from sciences and liberal arts. This chapter captured the essence of the ongoing tension between urban spatial planning through geographic information systems and the landscape architecture profession. Here I am, a McHarg disciple, but thanks to my primarily practitioner-based career, I did not realize the fierce debate in the academic world over his legacy.
So as I continue to think about ecology and planning with my drink in hand at this very nice bar with nine other planners and urban ecologists, I wonder how the rest of the group now feels about the words “ecology” and “planning” and wonder whether, and how much, they now incorporate concepts of green infrastructure, resiliency, adaptation, biophilia, and system approaches into their thinking, and how that might redefine how they “label” or portray themselves. Time for another round, I suppose!
Juan Azcárate is a research at the Humboldt Institute, Colombia, where he works with biodiversity in urban-regional environments. He is an environmental planner with a PhD degree in Land and Water Resources Engineering, and his main interest is to use strategic approaches to enhance decision making and promote pathways towards sustainability.
Juan Azcárate
By taking a socio-ecological approach to child learning and education, ecologists and planners may find common ground and an opportunity to jointly shape more sustainable cities.
Many may agree that the base for a great life is a great childhood. And, when talking about urban planning, many may also agree that cities that cater to the needs of children in their planning processes necessarily become, in the long run, livable, attractive and sustainable cities. However, in practice and despite the enormous efforts that have been invested to address the needs of children in urban planning, that is planning for and investing in accessible social infrastructure such as daycares, schools, libraries, museums, hospitals and recreational centers, various gaps and challenges remain to be tackled in this respect.
One such gap, which directly impacts the needs of children in cities, is the failure to include urban green areas and their associated ecosystem services in urban planning processes. A possible reason for this gap is that green areas and the services they provide city inhabitants, in particular children, are often undervalued in city planning processes. It’s here that urban ecology has focused its efforts, aiming to inform planning by designing tools and scientific publications that explore and explain how nature can be environmentally, socially, and economically beneficial for urban well-being and for child development. However, much of the information on the benefits of nature for urban well-being come, in general, from more developed, politically stable, and equitable societies. The relevance and application of this information in developing, more biodiverse, politically unstable and unequitable contexts, such as those typical of Latin America, can be questioned and encounter difficulties.
In this respect, ecology could contribute to urban planning by working to speak a common language and by providing context-specific solutions. This requires that ecologists be prepared to work across disciplines and in different sectors of society. Additionally, it means that they are ready to undertake the promotion and defense of urban biodiversity not only in the social and political realms, but also in the educational realm, where the focus is on developing the capacities and skills of children. Viewed in this respect, addressing cities and education becomes an excellent opportunity and common ground for planners and ecologists to speak the same language and work together to simultaneously plan for greener cities and cities that serve child education.
If this opportunity is made tangible, especially in developing countries where urban environments usually bring together a wide variety of informal capacities, values and human, natural and economic resources, these informal assets can be well planned and managed and cities turned into spaces for innovation, development, research, and education, where ideas and solutions are generated to address different challenges at different scales.
Moreover, in these contexts, it is important that cities complement the formal education that takes place in classrooms. For instance, cities offering an ample provision of urban green areas, such as parks, trees, hills, rivers, and wetlands where activities such as citizen science (e.g. bird observation and monitoring), ecological walks, urban gardening, and ecological restoration can take place, will allow children to come in direct contact with nature and reach a more relevant learning, one that is contextualized and integrated with the realities of their environments and communities.
As spaces of education and innovation, cities should also strive to contain museums of natural history, zoos, botanical gardens and other educational spaces that allow a large number of children to get in touch with and learn from urban nature. With these spaces in place and through the activities that can be developed in them, cities can act as learning rooms, bringing children closer to nature, in this way creating awareness of its importance and at the same time awareness that they are part of urban nature.
Well planned greener cities promote the construction of knowledge and learning in children through the interaction of their socio-cultural and their natural environments, complementing what they have learned passively in classrooms. This to say that cities may favor a socio-ecological learning in children that is fundamental for environmental education and sustainable development.
Despite these potential benefits of cities, the implementation of socio-ecological learning initiatives has been limited to a very local scale, lacking strategic nature, which means that it has not reached change on a scale of political incidence.
It is here where urban ecologists can make a difference in planning, by linking to networks and associations that, for example, carry out these local activities, as well as with universities and local governments who can share these experiences at other scales and with other actors at national and international levels.
In summary then, by taking a socio-ecological approach to child learning and education ecologists and planners may find common ground and an opportunity to jointly contribute to shape more sustainable cities.
Amy Chomowicz is a board member of the Green Roof information Think-tank (GRiT). GRiT is a Portland non-profit that provides education and outreach to support the use of green roofs.
Amy Chomowicz
When they work together, planners and ecologists learn about each other and how to build on each other’s strengths, and they can help us all gain a more complex understanding of the world we inhabit.
Planning is, at its core, a human-based and human-focused exercise. Protecting the environment is a priority in urban plans only if people either make the connection between the environment and human health or if people decide “nature” is intrinsically important to them in and of itself. Ecologists can play a critical role in establishing the importance of the environment and in setting a scientific foundation for environmental protection in urban plans.
Mural at New Seasons Market in Portland, Oregon.
An ecological framework for planning
The Portland Plan, adopted in 2012, provides a good example of using a policy framework as a building block for a citywide plan. The Portland Plan is a wide sweeping strategy that guides Portland in achieving prosperity, education, health, and equity goals. A group of equity advocates successfully argued for including an equity framework in the Plan. The result is that equity isn’t a stand-alone chapter tacked on at the end of the plan. Equity is infused throughout the entire plan, and it is reflected in the plan’s goals, objectives, and actions. We need the ecological equivalent of the equity framework for all urban plans.
An ecological framework would embed technical information about the environment and ecological processes in an urban plan. An ecological framework would identify the root causes of environmental problems, and it would establish a foundation for planning policies and goals that restore urban ecological systems. By working with ecologists, planners gain the technical understanding of the sources and causes of environmental problems, and they can use this knowledge to develop plans that improve the city’s watersheds, transportation, neighborhoods, and economy.
Another example that addresses the environment and economy comes from the Central City 2035 Plan. The City of Portland is poised to adopt a requirement for green roofs on new construction in the central city. It is doubtful that such a requirement would have made it this far without data and information that assured planners and decision-makers that adding a green roof to new construction is not cost prohibitive.
Role of ecologists
Ecologists play many roles in urban planning. In terms of developing the scientific foundation of urban plans, ecologists play two critical and active roles. First, they assemble and translate data into information that can be readily understood by planners and the general public. Planners can use this information to establish the environment as a priority in urban planning. Data by itself is not very useful to planners, but the story the data tells is critical.
Ecologists also help planners and community members understand the connections between ecological processes and human health. For example, stream hydraulics may affect flooding, property values, and human health and safety. Trees and vegetation affect urban heat island and air quality, two processes that can severely impact human health. The presence of trees is associated with improved student performance on tests and improved birth weights for newborns. Ecologists can provide the data and information that show how these ecological processes benefit or harm human health.
Role of planners
Planners are the unifying tie that brings everyone together. They can draw ecologists into the planning process and provide an avenue for them to share their data and information. Using the ecologists’ story, planners can foster an urgency to prioritize environmental health and they help embed ecological information in urban planning policies and goals.
While urban plans set a course for the future, they must also address restoring damage done by past actions. Looming environmental threats such as climate change, the arrival of invasive plant and insect species, and water scarcity threaten our quality of life. Urban planning plays an ever-increasing role in restoring our cities, and ecologists are essential to establishing the scientific foundation for urban plans.
At the outset, any planning process should establish ecology as a foundational principle on which to base the plan. Planners and ecologists can work together to form the ecological foundation for setting planning policies and goals. When they work together, planners and ecologists learn about each other and how to build on each other’s strengths, and they can help us all gain a more complex understanding of the world we inhabit. In doing so, planners and ecologists together can generate urban plans that move our communities toward greater resiliency that protects the environment and human health.
Katie co-leads the Urban Ecology Studio at Asakura Robinson where she is a passionate advocate for design informed by studying the overlap between social and ecological systems.
Katie Coyne
Could urban ecology be the glue that holds everything together? Yes. Atlanta is working on a City-wide Urban Ecology Framework that makes great strides to connect the dots.
In order to better integrate ecology into planning we need better synergy of the plans and initiatives related to the many different systems at play in a city. The consistent disconnect between existing plans and initiatives in our cities and regions both thematically and across temporal scales is one of the primary barriers to resilience. Without clearly connecting plans to each other, we miss opportunities to maximize collective impact across different systems and are less likely to find ways to integrate ecology in a meaningful and holistic way.
Right now Austin, Texas is in the midst of an extremely contentious land use code rewrite that does not substantively take into account previous plans. Simultaneously, a number of planning processes are underway that have a direct impact on the City’s land use code and/or future fabric of our City, but there is no clear path to making sure there is synergy among all of those efforts. Because of these disconnects, the City’s Environmental Commission recently passed a resolution that recommended City staff work to align and clearly demonstrate connections and synergies between plans, initiatives, and programs across departments to maximize the collective impact of City initiatives; and, work to align and clearly demonstrate connections and synergies between the above plans and tools and the final draft of the land development code.
The following recent or ongoing planning projects and tools are at various stages of development, each shepherded by a different department or entity:
Austin Water Forward Master Plan—Austin Water Utility
Integrated Green Infrastructure Plan—City of Austin Watershed Protection Department
Functional Green Program—a proposed pilot program housed in the City’s Development Services Department
Climate Resilience Action Plan—the City’s Office of Sustainability
Long Range Plan for Land, Facilities and Programs (Long Range Parks Plan)—the City’s Parks and Recreation Department
Equity Tool—the City’s Equity Office
Project Connect—CAPMETRO
Strategic Mobility Plan—the City’s Transportation Department
Austin Strategic Housing Blueprint—the City’s Neighborhood Housing and Community Development Department
Earlier in 2017, I was a proponent for a resolution adopted by the Austin City Council that directed the Watershed Protection Department to come up with a “plan to plan”, outlining the key items necessary to create the aforementioned Integrated Green Infrastructure Plan (IGIP) – the first of its kind in the state of Texas. At the time I was hopeful that this plan could, in the very least, begin to tie together the mess of plans listed above with existing plans like the City’s Urban Forest Plan. I have been repeatedly assured that this plan will be holistic. However, at a recent meeting a well-meaning individual referred to the IGIP as “watershed’s plan”, only affirming my fears that this will likely become too narrow in focus.
There is no formal structure or incentive in place in the City of Austin to promote inter-departmental coordination and collaboration for plans and programs. Not to say this does not happen at all—many staff members at all levels of various departments recognize this need and do what they can to work together. However, the silos that exist and have been solidified over time and result in plans that are “owned” by single departments. Differential budgets, and the resulting surplus/deficit dynamics between different departments make it even more difficult to ask departments to collaborate more. Some departments are (relatively) flush with funds that allow them to be innovative and take risks on novel projects while the for instance, the Parks and Recreation Department’s line item in the City budget does not even cover deferred maintenance of the City’s parks. There are innovative minds, teams, and leaders in PARD but when out-of-the-box ideas come up (or really, anything that does not fit into the status quo of operations) a common reaction is fear and pessimism about the result—which I can only assume is directly tied to budget anxiety. This has a direct impact on the ecological benefits we could garner from our parks system through thoughtful and innovative urban ecological design and planning.
Two questions to end with:
Is ecology able to be meaningfully integrated into cities without synergy among plans and departments? Yes. But it takes a lot more folks who know and understand ecology spread across multiple departments to do so and the impact will never be as great compared to a collective effort.
Could urban ecology be the glue that holds everything together? Yes. Atlanta is working on a City-wide Urban Ecology Framework that makes great strides to connect the dots. In my opinion, short of reimagining the practice of how we manage our City from the top down, an Austin Urban Ecology Framework could be part of the solution if it entailed a combination of Urban Forest, Resilience, Water Supply, Watershed Management, and Green Infrastructure Plans; and meaningfully took into account housing, transit, and equity.
So, what is the next step for planners in Austin, Texas if they are concerned with integrating ecology into planning? Speak up when you see missed opportunities for collaboration. Most of all, in this community, we need to get out of our departmental silos and find the best opportunities for collective impact where we overlap.
Georgina Cullman, Ph.D. is an Ecologist for New York City's Department of Parks & Recreation. As part of NYC Parks Natural Resources Group, Dr. Cullman conducts research and provides advisement to protect and enhance the city's natural areas and biodiversity.
Georgina Cullman and Lauren Smalls-Mantey
Comprehensive inter-agency initiatives provide the opportunity for “ecology” to play a central role in creating a shared infrastructure.
To meet critical social and environmental goals, ecology must play a bigger role in urban planning. First, better integrating “ecology” in planning fulfills our obligation to protect urban biodiversity and minimize impacts on our cities’ nonhuman inhabitants. Second, incorporating ecology into planning can provide “green” solutions to common urban design challenges, including mitigating negative human health impacts from urbanization. Finally, incorporating ecology in city planning can enable city dwellers to connect to the natural world and ensure a constituency for the environment in a majority-urban world. Because ecology is about how living things connect to one another, incorporating ecology into planning necessitates coordination between different agencies. When well instituted, these approaches create robust co-benefits.
In New York City, zoning regulation is a way to conserve biodiversity through urban planning. Four Special Districts in Staten Island and the Bronx have been designated because of their unique geological and biological features. For instance, Staten Island is home to some of the largest and most-vibrant ecosystems in the city, such as the unique serpentine barrens. Currently the Department of City Planning is working with the Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks) and others to revise zoning regulations for these Special Districts. The goal is to conserve existing habitat on private lands, increase connectivity, and enhance buffering of public protected areas. These regulations are still being revised, but will include minimum planting requirements, lot design rules to optimize habitat conservation, and maximum levels of impervious surface. Staten Island in particular is under increasing development pressure. These zoning regulations will be critical to conserving biodiversity on private lands.
Green infrastructure is a major component of New York City’s strategy for managing common urban problems such as stormwater management and the urban heat island effect. For stormwater management, one challenge is the city’s existing infrastructure, approximately 60 percent of which is a combined sewer and stormwater system. On rainy days, New York City’s system is often overwhelmed from the influx of stormwater. Storms release a mix of untreated stormwater and wastewater into the city’s waterways. This negatively impacts water quality and recreational opportunities. In response, New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, in partnership with NYC Parks, has installed right-of-way rain gardens to help manage stormwater in areas prone to excessive flooding.
The urban heat island effect is an urban challenge exacerbated by climate change that acutely impacts vulnerable populations. In urban centers, increased impervious surfaces and reduced vegetated areas decrease evapotranspiration, a mechanism that leads to cooling. The reintroduction of vegetation through green infrastructure mitigates this effect by increasing the rate of evapotranspiration, increasing the permeable surface area of the city, and providing shade. The Cool Neighborhoods Initiative—a multi-agency heat mitigation plan for New York City—incorporates some of these strategies.
Finally, NYC Parks works to increase access to high-quality green spaces for all New Yorkers. Through the Community Parks Initiative, NYC Parks identified 35 neighborhood parks for targeted investment to meet the needs of a growing population and rectify past under-investment. If successfully implemented, 200,000 residences will be within a ten-minute walk of an improved green-space.
NYC Parks seeks to increase neighborhoods’ environmental stewardship through public programming. The Urban Park Rangers for example, create tailored nature experiences for school groups, families, and adults in their local parks. To encourage stewardship and advocacy at a citywide level and trigger greater investment in natural areas conservation, the Natural Areas Conservancy (NAC) launched NYC Nature Goals 2050. This initiative brought together over 60 organizations and identified 25 measurable and actionable targets under five main goals. The Parks Stewardship team engages New Yorkers through restoration events and trainings while NYC’s Partnerships for Parks provides workshops, grants, and other resources to neighborhood park groups. NYC Parks’ investment in individual volunteers, community groups, and coalition building is a strategy to enlist New Yorkers as advocates for their parks.
Multiple co-benefits flow from integrating ecology into planning. For instance, the revision of Special District zoning regulations will protect biodiversity, reduce stormwater management problems, and retain neighborhood character in the face of development. These comprehensive inter-agency initiatives provide the opportunity for “ecology” to play a central role in creating a shared infrastructure. This meets the needs of the people and biodiversity while enhancing resilience in the face of climate change.
Lauren Smalls-Mantey, Ph.D is an Environmental Engineer working at the New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation. As a part of the Division of Forestry, Horticulture, and Natural Resources, Dr. Smalls-Mantey serves as the Urban Heat Resilience Project Coordinator for the Cool Neighborhoods Initiative.
P.K. Das is popularly known as an Architect-Activist. With an extremely strong emphasis on participatory planning, he hopes to integrate architecture and democracy to bring about desired social changes in the country.
PK Das
Evolving a collective identity
Lets begin our discussion admitting that the failure to achieve sustainable ecology is a challenge to our collective capacity, capability and knowledge sharing ability across multi-sectorial concerns. And not just these two groups, but everyone.
As we have now settled down with drinks to begin our dialogue. May I suggest switching roles, the planners speaking as ecologists and the ecologists as planners? Would you agree that such an approach in our dialogue would strengthen our respect for each other and enable a robust collaborative understanding and endeavor for the achievement of a sustainable future?
Isn’t it strange, though not surprising, as to how we specialists are categorized and divided, as much as people and places are constantly divided in the neo-liberalized and privatized world. Planners and ecologists too are assumed to be two separate and independent groups with a skewed assumption that matters relating to nature and environment rest exclusively in ecologists domain and planners are outside that. Shouldn’t planning include and reflect matters relating to environment and ecology? Shouldn’t ecologists engage actively with planning ideas and practices? Haven’t we come to a stage when unification of knowledge and exclusive domains ought to be intertwined producing a paradigm shift in the way we think and understand and classify various matters pertaining to the sustainability question?
That only select individuals and groups have colonised or been trained to colonise the ecologist’s identity is a matter of concern. Similarly the planners, besides lip service, have stood far away from dealing with critical ecological and environmental concerns. The fact is that nature in all its manifestations coupled with human development needs and aspirations ought to be referred to as ecology. This ought to be our worldview and must form the basis for the constitution of a collective identity. For such de-colonisation and comprehension would contribute significantly to the success of a sustainable ecology mission. Also, such de-colonisation would help in breaking the multiple barriers between people and the dominant mindset of segregation between development demands and nature, thereby enabling the democratization of ideas, plans and actions in wider environmental interest.
So lets begin our discussion admitting that the failure to achieve sustainable ecology is a challenge to our collective capacity, capability and knowledge sharing ability across multi-sectorial concerns.
The question that then comes up before us is why just us two select groups? Why aren’t we talking to other diverse people and contributing to wider public engagement and participation, undertaking active public campaign and dialogue? How can public action be mobilized, knowing that is what deeply influences decisions that governments take? How can the idea of sustainable ecology be popular knowledge, going far beyond the short-term daily life needs and demands however important they may be? Our real challenge rests in our ability to break these multiple barriers that we have over time consistently built that have severed the intricate and intimate relationships at all levels that existed.
De-colonisation of knowledge and exclusive domains is the single most difficult task for us, the various segregated “experts” or “specialists”. It would destabilize us in many different ways—settled positions, complacence and our professional arrogance. Similarly, it is the larger phenomenon of constant division and fragmentation of towns and cities that worry us, for that too influences the expert’s individualism. It is the individualism and self-gratification that stand in the way of integration and unification of people and places. We have realized how free-markets and privatization thrust under neo-liberalization and globalization have systematically promoted individualism and self-gratification, thus compelling us to intervene in the current political trend.
Therefore, It is crucial to consider and elaborate the ideas of sustainable ecology as fundamentally being a part of social and political construct. This is to go beyond the stereotypical understanding of many governments and experts in territorializing and barricading natural elements and areas for their protection and conservation. Ecology as a complex cocktail of natural and built environments and a way forward for their integration and unification are indeed our collective priority.
Natural elements and areas have been constantly abused, attacked, damaged, and totally destroyed across vast areas. Land and environment have been damaged to an extent that they have lost their regenerative capacity. As a result, human habitat is under critical threat. Living in towns and cities are increasingly becoming unsustainable, posing a threat to health and wellbeing.
The world over, across nations, we have attempted to confront and tame nature and natural forces, exhibiting our arrogance and power, sadly to miserable defeat every time. Yet we continue with similar effort while pursuing various projects under the guise of development. Governments and the ruling classes continue to plan and implement environmentally disastrous works, be they indiscriminate landfilling, destruction of mangroves, diversion of rivers and landfilling natural river beds, depleting forests, and so on. Build more syndromes led by real estate short-term interest is aggressively pursued with active government support, in spite of those projects in no way fulfilling the larger public interest.
Our challenge is to rebuild with nature and stop defying it. This would mean to re-envision our towns and cities and a paradigm shift in the way various works or projects are conceived and implemented. This would mean that many sections of our cities and towns would have to be done away with or remodeled from their established forms and locations to new ones. We have to together work towards gradually turning around our cities. Let us as a motley group of ecologists in this bar begin our work together by undertaking the task of preparing maps of our towns and cities for a sustainable future. This along with repairing, restoring, reclaiming, conserving, and nourishing all natural areas, elements, and conditions would have to be the immediate action plan.
Natural areas along with the necessary buffer have to be collaboratively mapped and open data relating to ecological relationships, including those that existed, would have to be registered. Development works have to be planned and implemented in response to all of these natural conditions. Re-establishing the ecological networks and relationships, including new ones, would form the basis of land use planning and development works. Carefully scheduled phased implementation based in such a new imagination has to be evolved and aggressively pursued with wider public consultation. There is no alternative but the ecologists together steering a campaign towards the democratization and achievement of this objective.
David Goode has over 40 years experience working in both central and local government in the UK and an international reputation for environmental projects, ranging from wetland conservation to urban sustainability.
David Goode
From black hole to city metabolism: collaboration is crucial
I can see a time when city planning will be based on ecological principles. Understanding the metabolism of a city, how materials and energy move through the system, is no different from the natural world. Ecologists are well versed in this kind of approach.
Oh no not again! We have been through this so many times during the past fifty years. In the 1970s the UK Government led an investigation into the relationship between ecology and planning which concluded that there was a black hole between the two. The two disciplines have developed from very different roots. One is essentially a science, devoted to understanding how the natural world operates. The other is a process, aimed to fulfil people’s needs in the most effective way. In the 1970s they didn’t talk to each other very much. Planners complained that they didn’t understand ecologists because their reports were full of Latin names, with little explanation of context or significance. In fact, they each have their own language and philosophical standpoint. Ecologists found it equally difficult to know what kind of advice planners really needed. We needed to talk together far more.
In 1982 I found myself in a more productive situation when I was appointed as senior ecologist in the Greater London Council’s strategic planning team. It was my job to produce a set of ecological policies, which would form a crucial part of a revised development plan for the capital. Working with planners to produce policies that would then be implemented was very satisfying. One of the policies relating to flood alleviation stated that “…the Council will define the floodplains of the Thames and its tributaries to be safeguarded from development and London borough councils must accordingly further the protection of these areas through their local plans and in development control.” Another stated that, “there will be a presumption against development within Sites of Special Scientific Interest, statutory Local Nature Reserves and other ecologically sensitive areas.” This was at a time when there was no mention of either ecology or nature conservation in the existing London development plan.
The ecological policies needed to be defined unambiguously as a basis for strategic planning, and they needed to have strong political support. We certainly had that support and alongside it we had the benefit of a groundswell of public support for ecological issues. But I was always conscious that those of us practising as ecologists tended to be regarded as rather second rate in comparison with other land management professions. We didn’t have a Professional Institute of Ecology. Yes the UK had the first Ecological Society in the World, but that was principally an academic body for the study of ecological science. We needed an Institute equivalent to those of planners, architects and surveyors. So a few of the leading practitioners in ecology promoted the idea in the late eighties with the result that the Institute of Ecology and Environmental management was launched in 1991. It has recently gained a Royal Charter which gives practising ecologists similar standing to that of other professions.
There are still antagonisms. Many planners and developers faced with protected species on a high value development site can only see ecology as presenting problems in terms of time-scale and cost. Sadly the benefits of nature are not the first thing they see. But there are some splendid examples where a local planning department has seen an opportunity to cater for nature, rather than see it as a problem. South Cambridgeshire District Council won the best practice award from the Institute of Ecology in 2011 for a village project called Saving the Fulbourne Swifts. All they did was to require nesting boxes for swifts to be built into a large number of newly built houses. Local residents loved the result. The developers are responding too. I am told that one house builder has been so impressed by the positive effect of new natural landscapes, in terms of the public response and possibly also the increased value of the properties, that they now intend to create such landscapes for all their housing schemes.
I believe that the increased stature of ecology and ecologists through having a Royal Charter has had a very positive effect on our ability to promote ecological solutions to deal with some of the key issues facing us today. Planners can no longer be unaware of global climate change. The past twenty years has seen the production of numerous action plans to reduce the impact of climate change on big cities, especially coastal cities. Adaptation options have been considered in considerable detail and it is becoming normal practice for this to be done on a multidisciplinary basis. Ecologists, planners, economists, insurers, and climate scientists work together to find the best possible solutions, based on current scenarios. Ideas that were first promoted by ecologists during the early 1990s, and quite often ridiculed at that time, are now being applied as mainstream solutions by a new breed of ecologist, very often working in collaboration with urban designers, architects, and planners. Green roofs, vertical water gardens, and sustainable drainage schemes are all part of this new urban landscape.
The recognition that natural landscapes within towns and cities provide valuable ecosystem services has already brought ecological knowledge to the forefront in urban design, confirming the need for collaborative approaches. The benefits of natural landscapes are not restricted to ameliorating physical factors, such as ambient temperature, humidity, and flooding. The health benefits of biodiversity to city people are becoming well established, affecting both physical and mental health. The ecology of a city is becoming recognised as crucially important.
But I can also see a time when city planning as a whole will be based on ecological principles. Understanding the metabolism of a city, how materials and energy move through the system, is no different from the natural world. Ecologists are well versed in this kind of approach. It is only a small step from understanding city metabolism to utilising that knowledge in designing a truly smart city. I believe ecologists will have a major role to play in creating our future cities. The ecologists may well replace today’s planners.
Conservation ecology is often translated into conserving plant and animal communities and the synergistic benefits are not often conveyed. Planners may not be aware that incorporating “ecology” into planning has multiple benefits for citizens.
As an ecologist, I would discuss how incorporating ecology into planning does have many synergies with other planning initiatives such as efficient transportation, energy, water, and improved livability and human health. Often, conservation ecology is translated into conserving plant and animal communities and the synergistic benefits are not often conveyed. Planners may not be aware that incorporating “ecology” into planning has multiple benefits for citizens. With this in mind, I will highlight a few synergies below[1].
Conserving Trees and Services: Urban trees can provide many valuable services beyond just wildlife habitat. For example, trees reduce stormwater flow by intercepting a portion of the rain when it hits leaves, branches, and trunks. This can be a significant savings; for example, in the metropolitan Washington DC region, the existing 46 percent tree canopy reduces the need for stormwater retention structures by 949 million cubic feet, valued at $4.7 billion per 20-year construction cycle (based on a $5/cubic foot construction cost)[2]. Trees also benefit air quality as they remove many pollutants from the atmosphere, including nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), ozone (O2), and carbon monoxide (CO). Tree cover reduces energy costs significantly; American Forests found that tree cover in the Atlanta area saved residents approximately $2.8 million annually in reduced energy costs[3].
Natural areas provide shared green space for humans to interact and recreate. Creating green infrastructure, in terms of pocket and natural parks, creates a strong sense of place for residents by incorporating green space and walkability into their designs. This allows residents an opportunity to socialize and watch wildlife in its natural setting. A study found that a sense of place, attachment, and satisfaction were affected by not only social constructions but also the landscape attributes of the natural environment[4]. Many feel that the conventional designs, without walkable neighborhoods or green space, are counterproductive to an individual’s need to experience community[5] and urban residents really desire a sense of community[6]. Nearby natural areas are often used to educate people about their environment and human history. A recent study found that unstructured natural areas helped children, later in life; they had more positive perceptions of natural environments and outdoor recreation activities[7].
Preserved natural areas can increase property values. Most homeowners view healthy natural communities within close proximity to homes as aesthetically pleasing. This translates to an economic value of green space[8]:
“The home-buyer, speaking…through the marketplace, appears to have demonstrated a greater desire for a home with access…to permanently protected land, than for one located on a bigger lot, but without the open-space amenity.”
“Top rank of open space/parks/recreation among factors used by small businesses in choosing a new business location.”
“Percentage of Denver residents who in 1980 said they would pay more to live near a greenbelt or park: 16 percent. Percentage who said so in 1990: 48 percent.”
Preserving natural habitats can decrease irrigation costs. Native plants have adapted to an area’s annual cycling of wet and dry seasons. By reducing the amount of formal landscaping and preserving natural areas, cities can reduce or eliminate the need for supplemental irrigation. This saves money for cities.
Interaction with natural areas promotes better human health. There is a growing body of evidence that one’s psychological and physical well-being is rooted in one’s connection to nature. Conversations about “biophilia” and “deep ecology” discuss the intricate link between nature and humans.[9] Even though many people live in urban environments, and most of their lives are spent in cars, homes, and other buildings, their emotional well-being and health depends on their ability to experience nature. The ways in which cities are built and maintained have direct and indirect consequences for natural environments and human health. People recover from stress more quickly when exposed to natural vegetation instead of urban settings[10]. It is especially important that children play outside. A 2003 Environment and Behavior article found that access to natural areas protects children from the impact of life stress[11]. Stress levels were reduced as kids spent more time playing outside, and this protective buffering intensifies with increasing stress levels within children. Furthermore, the amount of time spent in contact with nature affects a variety of human health factors, such as the level of cognitive functioning[12], the number of physical ailments[13], and the speed of recovery from illness[14].
In summary, planning goals that address healthy, livable cities naturally should include ecology and the conservation of plant and animal communities. I would wager that the diversity of plants and animals is highly correlated to the health and well-being of people within cities.
Notes: [1] Hostetler, M. 2012. The Green Leap: A Primer for Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA [2] Source http://www.americanforests.org/resources/urbanforests/naturevalue.php [3] Source http://www.americanforests.org/resources/urbanforests/naturevalue.php [4] Stedman, R. C. 2003. Is it really just a social construction? The contribution of the physical environment to sense of place. Society & Natural Resources 16: 671-685. [5] Benfield, K. F., Raimi, M. D., & Chen, D. D. (1999). Once there were greenfields: How urban sprawl is undermining America’s environment, economy, and social fabric. Natural Resource Defense Council. [6] Brown, B. B., Burton, J. R., & Sweaney, A. L. (1998). Neighbors, households and front porches: New Urbanist community tool or mere nostalgia? Environment and Behavior, 30, 579-601 [7] Bixler, R.D., Floyd, M.F., and W.E. Hammitt. 2002. Environmental socialization – Quantitative tests of the childhood play hypothesis. Environment and Behavior 34(6): 795-818. [8] Source – Trust for Public Land – https://www.tpl.org/economic-benefits-parks-and-open-space-1999#sm.000q846xjt0ucuv108o2l4few03yr [9] Wilson, E.O., and S.R. Kellert. 1995. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. [10] Ulrich, R.S., R.F. Simons, B.D. Losito, E. Fiorito, M.A. Miles, and M. Zelson. “Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environments.”Journal of Environmental Psychology 11(3): 201–230. [11] Wells, N.M., and G.W. Evans. 2003. “Nearby nature: A buffer of life stress among rural children.” Environment and Behavior 35:311–330. [12] Kaplan, R., and S. Kaplan. 1989. The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective.New York: Cambridge University Press. [13] Moore, E.O. 1981. “A prison environment’s effect on health care service demands.” Journal of Environmental Systems 11:17–34. [14] Ulrich, R.S. 1984. “View through a window may influence recovery from surgery.” Science 224:420–421.
Elsa Limasset is an environmental engineer at the French national Geological survey (BRGM), based in Orléans in France. She works within the contaminated land team in the department of Environment and Ecotechnology.
Elsa Limasset
Soils are the foundation for maintaining or integrating nature in cities.
Let’s not forget about «urban soils» in urban ecology
Bringing nature into urban planning, hoping to bring more benefits for people, biodiversity, or even the economy, first requires that cities make a place for nature. Indeed, to make that possible, ecologists and ecology must have a bigger role in urban planning and land use regeneration, especially in assisting in a routine assessment of these benefits.
There are already some cities that have integrated the importance of assessing the ecological and social values that come with nature-based solutions. In France, for example, the regeneration of a former military site in Anger city into a combined residential and green innovative landscape has been assessed on such grounds (Ilot Desjardins area). The city has made an effort to evaluate the new developments looking at, for example, its functionality, its accessibility, its capacity for environmental regulation (e.g., ground infiltration capacity), and ecological continuity. Some of the assessed criteria such as aesthetic and effective use were based on the appreciation of local people. Despite more and more French cities demonstrating an interest in the concept of ecosystem services and their evaluation, such considerations are not systematic and no common national framework is yet ready to be proposed. Also, one difficulty in this, is that, conflicts may appear among stakeholders, if expecting different services from the same “system”.
Another specialist that should come and support the urban ecologist is the “soil scientist”. One may forget, but cities and especially nature, or landscaped areas rely on soils. Because their genesis is a very slow process, soils are an unrenewable resource at the time scale of Human being. They are both a supporting element and an inherent component of urban sites and landscape in general. They are fully part of the environment and must be considered when trying to maintain or implant nature in cities. Indeed, soil is also the support for biodiversity, trees, and the fauna that inhabit it. However, if ecology is an afterthought, it can be difficult to create durable co-habitation. One should also have in mind that the long-term soil productivity for a specific plant can decrease with time due the progressive acidification and leaching by rainfall. This is a naturally occurring process, which oblige for example, French farmers to lime regularly the top horizon of their soils to maintain pH near neutral value. Then, soils should be considered as dynamic systems with functions that can change overtime.
Karlen et al. (1997) defined the quality of a soil as “the capacity of a specific kind of soil to function, within natural or managed ecosystem boundaries, to sustain plant and animal productivity, maintain or enhance water and air quality, and support human health and habitation.” It is only in recent years that soil scientists have been taking an interest in the (multi)functionalities of soils in urban areas (in contrast to the importance of agricultural soils that have had more attention), their quality their diversity and the use society is making from them.
Of course, soil has a fundamental role in city planning processes and “expected services” in general. Indeed, planners rely on some major soil functions such as “sealed soils” for roads, “engineering soil properties” for supporting buildings, or simply “constructed soils” for green infrastructures, such as parks, street trees…However other soil functions are becoming of interest, such as “fertility” for urban agriculture that is becoming more and more popular. Also, soil is a fundamental component of continental water cycles. It could contribute to sustainable urban drainage management by encouraging rainwater to infiltrate and recharge groundwater resources (by limiting impermeable surfaces), but also to the regulation of surface water by limiting flooding. Some cities have been rethinking water infiltration and recharge of groundwater, removing existing impermeable surfaces for the benefit of sand, gravel or grass in some areas. Another function of interest for city planners in the context of urban redevelopment, is that soils can have the capacity to retain or degrade some contaminants depending on its chemical and biological composition. Finally, soils are also a sink or a source of calories and can be used as heat exchanger, cooling or heating surrounding buildings.
Therefore, soil functions other than as a support for buildings are the foundation for maintaining or implanting nature or sustaining other services in cities. Soil scientists, urban hydrologists, geo-microbiologists, and ecologists should be definitely involved with planners to enhance soil use, and service provision by understanding, which soil functions, would be mobilised, preserved or reconstructed when feasible. This new way of co-working is fundamental and will make its way forward in cities with the understanding that soil is not a finite resource, and the need to protect its multi-functionality. In France, some cities would be really keen to integrate “soil ecosystem” services into their planning strategies, and rely on R&D to find solutions.
Of course, among all indicators that scientists and planners should define together, i.e. to help showing benefits associated with soil ecosystem services, financial cost is a major one. Also, recent Legislation (Loi ALUR 2014) is pushing for regenerating the cities and limiting urban sprawl. This steers to rethink the cities, and by doing so, to make planners, developers finally aware that if trying to get nature back in town in a sustainable way – as this is a growing demand – , they definitely need to understand and integrate soil in the picture. Efforts ought to be done for example to better quantify the gain that could be made with soil “re-functionalisation”, especially if it helps bringing back the nature in some degraded areas. Last but not least—we could go even further, hoping that in the near future urban areas would have to adapt to nature rather than nature to cities!
Suggesting readings:
2014 Plante&Cité et Val’Hor les bienfaits du vegetal en ville –etude des travaux scientifiques et méthode d’analyse.
2017 M.J. Levin, K.H.J Kim, J.L. Morel, W. Burghardt, P. Charzynksi, R.K. Shaw, IUSS Working group SUITMA Soils within cities – global approaches to their sustainable management SUITMA
Ragene Palma is a Filipino urbanist currently studying International Planning at the University of Westminster, London, as a Chevening scholar. Follow her work at littlemissurbanite.com.
Ragene Palma
Paradise and wasteland: The importance of ecology in island planning
An ecological perspective towards planning has (or could) improve our approach to tourism and pave the way for the Philippines to integrate climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction in environmental planning.
Understanding ecology and ecosystems in planning is vital to islands and cities with scarce resources. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
In an archipelago such as the Philippines, there can be no real planning without involving ecology. Let’s take an example of an island, which involves the issues of tourism, carrying capacity, waste management, and socio-economic implications: Boracay Island.
The case of Boracay
Boracay used to be one of the Philippines’ most pristine islands. Its powder white sand and clear blue waters made it a paradise to the island locals and the rest of the world. Since the island’s boom in the 1970s, Boracay rapidly drew tourists and steadily urbanized to cater to the international market.
Urbanization coupled with a lack of planning and management, especially in the case of an island with limited land and resources, leads to inevitable ecological consequences. In 1997, a glaring drop of tourist arrivals due to findings of coliform bacteria in Boracay pressured the government and private sector to establish a sewage treatment plant, a solid waste disposal system, and a potable water supply system. In the same year, Ecoplan International, Inc. provided an assessment on the island’s carrying capacity, concluding how in that year, carrying capacities had exceeded thresholds, and that trends (including physical elements, transport, tourist perceptions, etc.) were already unsustainable.
To date, in 2018—more than twenty years after the realization that Boracay was in danger, fecal coliform is still a problem, with “contaminated surface runoff” affecting the coastal waters. “Alarming” coral deterioration and excessive algae growth have also followed suit. The 25,000-person carrying capacity of the island is far exceeded by its 75,000-person tourist-inhabitant state. This is despite multi-decade efforts, such as the island’s declaration as a special tourism zone and national government control.
While efforts are now being announced to address the decades-long issues—a six-month closure of the island (that poses displacement and economic degradation), better wastewater services and sewage systems, needed legislation, and a “masterplan” following numerous other masterplans that were not implemented—we see here how glaring the presence of ecological perspective in planning and developing islands is. The New York Times, way back in 1996, phrased the debate between the economy and the environment pointedly: “…economic progress is fighting with ecology as the Philippines struggles to raise living standards for its population and catch up with booming Asian neighbors.”
In 2014, the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) issued the guidelines for land use in the Philippines, integrating ecology in the planning process for cities and municipalities. It provided for a reef-to-ridge basis, making profiles and plans inclusive of all types of ecosystems, adequate for islands and coastal areas. This has created more awareness for planners and general stakeholders to consider environmental impacts and consequences, of development, making Philippine planning closer to the upfront natural resources instead of simply conducting planning on maps and political documents.
The ecosystem-based management is a good start and has yet to be realised in the case of Boracay’s planning. Putting ecology first in environmental and urban planning is, indeed, vital to the implementation of development plans, progress, and long-term sustainability.
But it is not only in the field of urban and environmental planning that ecology should be a part. For Boracay, this opens doors for governance, legislation, and the tourism industry to truly embrace what ecological tourism (or ecotourism) really means and move away from its reality which is currently an irony. An ecological perspective towards planning has also paved the way for the Philippines to integrate climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction in environmental planning.
Ecology’s importance cannot be stressed enough in planning—it is critical to the country’s many islands in determining if, in the long-run, we would be able to retain the paradise we are blessed with or be left with wastelands.
Diane Pataki is a Professor of Biological Sciences, an Adjunct Professor of City & Metropolitan Planning, and Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Utah. She studies the role of urban landscaping and forestry in the socioecology of cities.]
Diane Pataki
One way that planners need to change to work with ecologists, and one way that ecologists need to change to work with planners
If planners are willing to embrace uncertainty and negative results, and ecologists are willing to put science to the challenge of envisioning and testing bold new configurations of nature, maybe we can make a joint effort work.
In my experience as an urban ecologist, both urban planning and ecology need to change to make this collaboration really work. Here are two of the key issues that I’ve encountered:
Ecologists can be downers: I think many early collaborations between ecologists and planners get stymied because ecologists are pretty typical scientists. We’ve been taught to focus on uncertainty and to test assumptions about how urban greenspace really works or doesn’t work for cities. The truth is that much of what we think we “know” about how urban nature can contribute to better, more livable cities is untested. And some assumptions about how nature works in cities have actually been proven to be false. For example, ecological research has shown that there are few scenarios in which urban greening programs can appreciably mitigate urban greenhouse gas emissions. The empirical evidence for using urban greening to mitigate other pollutants such as PM 2.5 is also much weaker than commonly believed. Discussions of using urban trees, for example, to sequester carbon or mitigate poor air quality are often wildly optimistic relative to our basic scientific understanding of what’s really possible.
This kind of negative feedback for urban greening planners and managers is not often well-received, in my experience, but it still has major policy implications. Together, we all need to discuss recent findings that show that urban greenspace rarely has the much-anticipated pollution mitigation effects that people were hoping for. One conclusion is that programs to reduce urban pollution need to focus on reducing emissions. This is a critical finding for highly polluted cities where air quality is a matter of life and death. (I live in such a city—Salt Lake City rivals the world’s most polluted cities for particulate pollution.) But it’s also just one example of how the sometimes less-than-sunny messages of scientists are needed to make urban policy effective.
Therefore, my first “demand” is that planners be willing to let science overturn convention when empirical data disprove deeply held assumptions. But that doesn’t mean that ecologists don’t need to change as well. There’s more potential for scientists to go beyond simply testing basic assumptions about urban nature. In fact:
Ecologists need help to be more visionary: Having that said, ecologists can get stuck in an overly “critical” mode, and it can be hard to get them unstuck, even when it might greatly benefit cities to incorporate visionary science into urban planning. Ecologists are trained to recognize problems and understand the world they see around them, but they’re not really trained to build, design, or create new things. In fact, many ecologists have an aversion to the notion of building, creating, or designing ecosystems, other than for the purpose of restoring the natural ecosystems that pre-dated cities. The result is that radical new ideas about how to make cities better don’t tend to originate in ecological science, especially right now when scientific visions of the future are not as optimistic as they once were.
So far, it’s been easier to keep ecologists out of the process than to help them transition into thinking more like planners who need to transform, and not just understand, the environment. I totally understand why that’s the case, but there could be great benefits to working with ecologists to help transition them into a more prescriptive mindset, so that they’re willing to put science to the task of envisioning and testing new and exciting outcomes for cities. In my view, we’ve only scratched the surface of how we might apply ecological knowledge to plan better cities. To think big, we’ll need answers to questions such as: what’s the maximum ecological capacity of increasing greenspace as cities densify? What specific types and configurations of nature would most benefit different communities? If we free ourselves from the constraints of current cities and think about novel configurations—extensive green roofs and green walls, corridors, terraces, or other new structural and design solutions—how can we implement these solutions at scale so that they’re not highly resource intensive? What types and magnitudes of biodiversity can they support relative to what’s needed to achieve different goals? Ecologists are not, on the whole, thinking about these questions now, but they have the tools and expertise to address them if they can work in partnership with planners.
That’s the basis for my second “demand,” which is for ecologists to embrace the possibility of using new and emerging science to help envision new scales and configurations of urban nature that we haven’t ever seen before.
So, if planners are willing to embrace uncertainty and negative results, and ecologists are willing to put science to the challenge of envisioning and testing bold new configurations of nature, can we make a joint effort work? What do you think?
Gil is a Portuguese transformative action-researcher on integral sustainability and nature-based design. He is a father, a PhD program lecturer and co-founder of ECOLISE (http://www.ecolise.eu/) a European platform of Community-led initiatives towards a Sustainable Europe.
Gil Penha-Lopes
Urban territories as thriving Natural ecosystems
Integrating nature-based design into urban planning can be a regenerative pathway to solve something that was done previously, without any good planning, often times done the wrong way and in the wrong place.
As a biologist who has worked in applied ecology and now trying to bring nature-based design into local communities and territories, my perspective and line of inquiry for how it could be done is to ask: How would Nature do it? We humans are a part of Nature, so what we do is also natural. It is my belief that if we design cities using the thriving strategies developed by Nature over more than 3.8 billion years we would save time and resources and enjoy a much-improved urban landscape and environment.
Biomimicry 3.8 is an institution that takes into consideration Nature’s six key life principles representing the general patterns that species and ecosystems use to survive and thrive on Earth.
Evolve to survive,
be resource (material and energy) efficient,
adapt to changing conditions,
integrate development with growth,
be locally attuned and responsive, and
use life-friendly chemistry.
I consider “integrating development with growth” to be an obvious principle that we could bring into cities. Having a good understanding of how social and ecological systems work at the city-level, and a shared vision of the cities full potential, would allow us to integrate development of the city with its growth. Some necessary elements would be support for self-organization (building capacity and empowering parishes and neighborhoods), building from the bottom-up (allows us to have urban cells, urban tissues, urban organs and the full body system working in harmony), combine modular and nested components (allowing the city to understand what is needed for each smaller unit of the territory, how these modular units complement each other. For example, having some parishes more involved in food production and others involved in research and innovation in the energy sector).
The other principle that I feel easily applies is to “be resource (material and energy) efficient”. With the smart city concept and circle economy becoming key goals for urban areas, low-energy processes and the recycling of all material ingredients could be integrated. Non-human ecosystems make the most of the structures, using the energy available mainly from the sun, both in colder climates and in humid environments. This principle also encourages cities to think about multi-functional designs, where one place can have different and sometimes simultaneous functions, such as designing green parks to clean the polluted air of the city, allow citizens a place for recreation, provide for improved water retention during storm events, and create organic matter to be used by local urban farms, etc. Fitting form to function is also a great ingredient of this principle, requiring city planners to design the city with sustainability in mind. We need more places that make sustainable behaviors simpler and easier.
Being “locally attuned and responsive” demands cities favor the use of local resources for building material, store and use rainwater, promote the efficient use of local energy sources, build capacity among local citizens to provide the local services needed. Making good use of cyclic natural and socio-economic processes is another way to be attuned and responsive. For example, there are several public buildings that have some resources available outside normal working hours or even during holiday seasons. Gyms of public schools, for example, could be used by local groups to gather and organize their events or meetings.
Trying to work in complex and transdisciplinary challenges, such as climate change mitigation and adaptation in municipalities, I built a team of more than 20 people of varying backgrounds and expertise, from urban planning to biology, anthropologists to engineers, and even artists. I fully agree with building transdisciplinary groups when designing the cities of the future. Natural ecosystems are also complex, interconnected, and interdependent systems. This is an example of why cities need not only to become more self-sufficient but also more collaborative, mainly at the sub-national regional level, where proximity interaction is possible and desirable. Some of the management and planning needs to happen at the bioregional scale whether it is the water basin regarding the water sector, or the coastal territory to deal with coastal dynamics, among others.
I strongly believe that if cities want to thrive in the future it is fundamental to integrate in their genes and memes people that are able to complement the expertise in the urban planning department and that bring more organic, fluid and natural examples to provide inspiring metaphors for the city sustainable development.
A preview of the book, Urban Planet: Knowledge Towards Sustainable Cities. 2018. Editors: Thomas Elmqvist, Xuemei Bai, Niki Frantzeskaki, Corrie Griffith, David Maddox, Timon McPhearson, Susan Parnell, Patricia Romero-Lankao, David Simon, Mark Watkins. Cambridge University Press. Available as an open source download here, or purchase as a physical book.
To secure a better urban future, we must strive to produce an integrated and actionable urban knowledge.
We are living on an urban planet. In the coming decades, about 2.6 billion more people will be added to world cities in various locations. Asia now has half of the world’s urban population, while Africa’s urban population is larger than that of North America. Rapid urbanization in countries like China is thought to be one of the biggest human settlement challenges in human history, accompanied by profound social, economic, and environmental transformations (Bai et al. 2014).
But broad recognition that we now live in a majority urban world—and that cities will surely determine our future—does not mean we agree on why nor how the urban era is important. More importantly, neither does it suggest how to design cities that will serve people and nature so that urban spaces are sustainable, resilient, livable, and just. It is clear that progress toward the goal of such cities will require a more open and reflective dialogue that span divides separating points of view, ways of knowing, and modes of action.
But how? This is the spirit of collaborative and diverse dialogue that nurtured the new book, Urban Planet.
Urban Planet draws from diverse intellectual and practice traditions to grapple with the conceptual and operational challenges of urban development for sustainable, resilient, livable, and just cities. The aim is to foster a community of global urban leaders through engaging the emerging science and practice of cities, including critiques of urbanism’s tropes. We hope that ideas about global urbanism that situate the city at the core of the planet’s future will provide pathways for evidence-based interventions to propel ambitious, positive change in policy and practice.
Most of what will actually happen across the global urban system will be down to citizens, political decision-makers, and the actions of people institutions (including governments and civil society). For us, adaptive urban knowledge and practice is imperative: a new way of thinking and acting about cities and with cities. This will require an excitement and curiosity about cities that fuels a massive scaling up and sharing of our collective wisdom about the urban world we inhabit. Good urban ideas cannot remain isolated in academia: they must be invented and re-invented on the ground, both useful and responsive to the needs of city-builders.
With this at heart and in mind, over 100 contributors, from both practice and academia, make this a book that is both idea-driven and grounded in reality. The sections below provide a glimpse into the key ideas in the primary sections of the book.
We inhabit a dynamic urban planet
Urbanization follows diverse patterns and pathways, each presenting unique policy challenges. Some urban regions are growing rapidly but others are shrinking. While mega-cities often receive more attention in global urbanization debates, many smaller urban centres are growing more rapidly. Cities do not exist in isolation: they are open systems, with various processes linking cities and their global resource/environmental hinterlands. These facts have immense implications for global sustainability.
We need to continue to develop and advance thought on urban typologies and complex systems, and understanding of the different dimensions of urbanization at regional and global scales, both at medium and long-term (beyond 2050) perspectives. However, at the same time, there is also the need for knowledge underpinning very local, place-based solutions. We’ve come a long way with more holistic approaches and frameworks, but knowledge gaps still remain when it comes to understanding politics and underlying power structures, political economy, urban macroeconomics, cultural traditions, and preferences/behavior that influence urbanization.
How do we bridge the gap between the demand for local, placed-based solutions and regional, global, and temporal insights on urbanization?
Urban systems are complex, with many interacting parts, and therefore we need to avoid simplistic indicators—hence the need for increasingly sophisticated indicators and efforts to ensure global relevance. Successive generations of indicators and multi-criteria aggregation tools have improved our ability to capture urban complexity and dynamism, though there is often a trade-off between the increased sophistication of more holistic and composite indicators and the availability of the requisite data. More integration with international agencies and governments can help develop indicators that are useful for both science and policy.
For the development of useful knowledge, we can view cities as living laboratories: Big Data, citizen science, co-production, and the data potential of social media have great potential to be of service in creating knowledge for better cities. For instance, citizen science is an umbrella term for numerous ways in which ordinary urban dwellers and community groups can engage in knowledge creation as active data collectors using everyday devices, such as mobile phones, while undertaking their normal daily activities, or carrying out specific surveys and reconnaissance activities to complement conventional research.
A persistent threat to knowledge-based city making persists. We must work to overcome inertia and entrenched interests. Greater inclusivity and multi-stakeholder engagement do not, in and of themselves, overcome these barriers, although they might help to challenge them by engaging and perhaps empowering previously voiceless and underserved groups.
Reconciling the fundamental “disconnects” of global urban sustainability
In fact, urbanization is an opportunity to increase global sustainability. But, what does it mean to create sustainability on the ground? To do this we must connect to local issues, behavior, and politics, not only global patterns since no masterplan will be locally appropriate and legitimate.
One way to focus the idea of “sustainable cities” is to prioritise the areas of greatest need, for example, the urban poor and the areas they inhabit. This addresses the most urgent and often severe aspects of unsustainability and has the potential to make a clear difference. Success will require complex tools and patience to work with the communities through inclusive and participatory or co-productive approaches.
However, it is also clear that urban sustainability cannot be achieved if current levels of consumption persist in the Global North. It is perhaps the greatest geopolitical challenge of our time: how to reconcile, in terms of global sustainability, the need for increased prosperity in growing cities of the Global South with persistently high consumption (and the related production systems) in the developed world.
To engage multiple points of view is to create more robust solutions
There are many and diverse stakeholders and actors that play a role in urban transformations to sustainability, from city officials and private and civil-society actors, to the people who live in cities. We must actively engage them. A key revelation lies in acknowledging that because a diverse agency is active in cities, we must create solutions that have wide currency, and are born of multiple streams of thought and care. Such a rich solution base can be the stepping stone for positive trajectories to sustainable, resilient, livable, and just cities.
Recognising the diverse agency and the richness of solutions they bring forward, we need multi-actor knowledge building and governance that invites new and unusual partners to play a role in urban transitions, and proposes to deepen research about relations between these urban change agents for new approaches and new collaborative and empowering means to facilitate urban transformations to sustainability. One common thread—and perhaps at the core of such challenges—is the need for merging work across disciplines, integrating other forms of knowledge, opening to multiple forms of knowledge, and embedding urban research into global policy processes.
Views from practice
For many writing from the street view, there is a great distance between academic knowledge and effective practice and city and neighbourhood scales. While the provocations from 38 designers, artists, activists, and other practitioners focus on an array of topics, they tend to hover around a set of key ideas or themes. Central to many of the chapters is the idea that the political reality of local sustainability is often ignored by academic treatments of the subject. For Mahim Maher of Karachi, this means that the concept of sustainability as it stands in New York and London is attractive but meaningless for her hometown, where there have been long periods without a mayor, there is little organized city planning and water has been sold by organized crime.
Good ideas must not remain solely in the academic realm—untranslated in common language, unreported outside of academic journals, not matched with workable solutions, and not addressing the needs of decision-makers in cities. Policy needs a human scale, and so does knowledge. The academic knowledge will mean nothing if the lives of people are not improved. For some of our provocateurs, the core Western economic model is fundamentally flawed or even broken. For example, Guillerma Ramirez, an indigenous leader from the Mapuche region of South America, believes that technical sustainability solutions without fundamental social reform are bound to fail.
Other essays point to the fact that cities around the world increasingly benefit from greater participation and activism by civil society, practitioners, and regular citizens. This activism has two key benefits. First, it facilitates the grounded practice of making better cities through not just knowledge, but action: the design of neighborhoods, infrastructure, and open spaces that better serve the needs of both people and nature. Second, participation by urban citizens in decision making and urban creation should be the driver in any connection between academic knowledge and policy. Indeed, what knowledge do cities themselves feel they need?
Persistent fault lines
First, there is lack of academic knowledge on and voices from cities of the Global South compared to the Global North, which is an apparent and common knowledge gap demonstrated across all the academic chapters (but less so the contributions from practitioners). Indeed, even in cases in which knowledge and experience from the Global South are well-developed, it often does not find its way into traditional academic forums. Even when they do, they tend to receive less attention and less prominence in the traditional academic ecosystem of ideas.
While cities in the Global South are and will be the home for most of the current and future urban populations, and they are confronted by very complex urban challenges, the reality is that more influential and dominant voices in academia are from the Global North. Books such as this one, while still imperfect in this respect, are an important advance, in which ideas and experience from the Global South are integrated into a book with global reach.
Second, there are drastic differences between the perspectives of practitioners and academics. Here it is critical to note that there are many styles, sources, and uses of knowledge that typically exist in isolation from each other. In an attempt to pursue more universal and scalable patterns and processes, academic knowledge can sometimes be agnostic on the idea of social values. It cannot remain so, as we are deeply fragmented, from Global North to South, and from rich to poor.
As demonstrated by the diverse perspectives represented in the section called Provocations from Practice, many urban stakeholders other than researchers hold deep insight into urban issues. Urban practitioners’ knowledge of what works and what does not, based on long-term experience of practice and context-specific knowledge, can be key, and an invaluable complement to scientific knowledge. But, in traditional urban literature,these distinctions only receive peripheral acknowledgment, at best. This is, in part, due to the formalities of academic publishing, which discourage the “informality” of practice. But in general, there is a paucity of forums for sharing practice-based solutions among city and communities. This is starting to change (for example, The Nature of Cities).
Visions of the cities we want
Building better and sustainable cities requires knowledge from multiple sources. It also requires visions of the cities we want that are grounded in values. High-level policy goals for cities will require science (or, at least, a new integrated urban knowledge), imagination(formulating and utilizing collective visions of the future), and open minds (understanding and embracing deep uncertainties and risks into the future).
The lack of connection of policy and science to the attachment to place by people (a lived experience) is repeatedly highlighted in the practitioner chapters in this volume. Visions need to be co-created in inclusive, experimental settings, varying from demonstrators, to civil society initiatives, to seed-projects and urban living labs across cities around the globe. Uniform across all types of cities is the need to create conditions for inclusive, just cities in which voices and aspirations across social groups are heard and considered and city-wide visions like smart cities are democratic and open for debate.
Conceptualization of the inter-linkages between factors and dynamic processes shaping urban futures. Visions are represented as societal goals influenced by worldviews, value systems, politics and power, culture and choices, and play an important role in intervention, innovations, and transformation that can lead to alternative and more desirable urban futures (McPhearson et al. 2017, modified from Bai 2016 ).
Visions, in particular, shared positive visions, can play a critical role in shaping desirable futures. Of course, visions alone are not enough. There is urgent need for action-oriented research and practice that links positive visions to on the ground transitions and transformations. While we acknowledge that the formal attribution of transformational change as a causal result of visioning is entangled with a myriad of social, political, cultural, ecological, and technological factors, examples of successful implementation of positive visions offer the optimism and empirical basis we need for replication and scaling up to the cities we want.
A way forward
Some of the tensions revealed in this book, especially between the academic and practitioner worlds, present opportunities for synergies, while others represent fundamental frictions and clashes of worldviews, ways of knowing, and modes of action. The reasons for such disparities vary across geography and communities of practice. It is not the intention of the book to present an analysis of the underlying factors (although this would be a worthy direction of research). Rather, by presenting them side by side, we wish to showcase the diverse perspectives, contrast the state of research insight with lived realities in communities of practice, and present different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing.
By doing so, we point to the need to resolve the gaps and produce new types of knowledge that integrate knowledge from applied, practical, and academic sources. There are many more bridges to cross in order to connect knowledge with lived reality. For example, does research-based knowledge truly reflect reality or does it cater to policy and practical needs? To what extent academic knowledge is translated into practice, or, more importantly, correctly translated with all appropriate constraints and caveats? In which areas do practitioners even need research? How can practice-based knowledge be better shared?
These are just a few of the important questions suggested by discussing research and practice in a single volume. Bringing these into one volume in itself is a pioneering attempt, and we hope the creative tensions presented can serve as a springboard to futher discussions.
One thing is clear: To secure a better urban future, we must strive to produce an integrated and actionable urban knowledge.
Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm Xuemei Bai, Canberra Niki Frantzeskaki, Rodderdam Corrie Griffith, Phoenix David Maddox, New York Timon McPhearson, New York Susan Parnell, Cape Town Patricia Romero-Lankao, Boulder David Simon, Gotthnberg Mark Watkins, Phoenix
Bai, X. et al. 2016. Defining and advancing a systems approach for sustainable cities. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. Volume: 23 Pages: 69-78 Part: 1 DOI: 10.1016/j.cosust.2016.11.010
McPhearson, T., D. Iwaniec, and X. Bai. 2017. “Positives visions for guiding transformations toward desirable urban futures.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (Special Issue), 22:33–40 DOI: 10.1016/j.cosust.2017.04.004
Niki Frantzeskaki is a Chair Professor in Regional and Metropolitan Governance and Planning at Utrecht University the Netherlands. Her research is centered on the planning and governance of urban nature, urban biodiversity and climate adaptation in cities, focusing on novel approaches such as experimentation, co-creation and collaborative governance.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Dr. Timon McPhearson works with designers, planners, and local government to foster sustainable, resilient and just cities. He is Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Professor Sue Parnell is an urban geographer in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town and is a founding member of the African Centre for Cities there.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
The non-linearity of neural networks provides a useful illustration of how details can matter in complex systems, but also of the importance of iteration for adaptation. Is it possible for our cities to learn and adapt as neural networks do?
Jane Jacobs’ final chapter of Death and Life of Great American Cities, titled “The Kind of Problem a City Is”, remains its most misunderstood. The principal ideas of the book have become the mainstream of urban know-how and helped the triumphant turnarounds in the fortunes of American cities, most notably for New York City. But the last idea in the book—that the scientific foundation that is the basis of the planning profession is founded in error—has not had the same impact. The debate over the scientific basis of urban planning was set aside.
To explain why, I could refer to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, which states that a discredited paradigm, even though no one believes its conclusions any longer, cannot disappear until a new, more effective paradigm appears. But Jane Jacobs already had a proposed paradigm for a science of cities. She described it as a problem of “organised complexity”, much like biology, contrasted with problems of “disorganised complexity” that are tractable with linear statistical modeling, and problems of simplicity, or constant relationships between variables (Jacobs p. 429).
A likely explanation for the remaining mystery is that the tools of organized complexity science had not become mature enough to be relatable to urban planners, while statistical science was a hundred years old.
We struggled for decades to express problems of organized complexity in formal mathematics, but recent breakthroughs in computer science have provided models that successfully replicate the behavior of biological neural systems. The artificial neural network is now a workhorse technology for some of the world’s biggest enterprises and should be considered an inspiration from which a science of cities can be built. Before we can explain how let’s first provide an illustration of artificial neural networks and how they are constructed from systems that solve for disorganized complexity and simplicity.
Problems of simplicity
These are the classic two, or three, variable problems that began the scientific revolution. Since Newton was hit on the head by an apple, we have known, among other problems, how to measure precisely how much work needs to go into a device to lift a specific weight, as long as we can measure the weight. That is a linear law between two variables. Another classic expression of a problem of simplicity is e=mc2—once we know the mass of an object, we can derive its potential energy by plugging it into the equation.
What distinguishes problems of simplicity from those more complex are their use of constants—we know precisely how the gravity of Earth affects motion, at the rate 9.807 m/s², and that doesn’t fluctuate over time, though it’s different on the Moon.
Problems of disorganized complexity
These are problems that appear to present random relationships, but that can be tackled statistically and described as an average relationship. For example, when conducting studies on the efficacy of new medicine, the measurements of the results are not precise enough that a single observation can confirm or refute its efficacy. We need to measure a whole population against a control group, and different statistical measures are used to establish whether or not the medicine worked. The most widespread technique for tackling the solution to such problems is called a linear regression. It has successful applications in both science and business.
A linear regression starts from a table of known data points, such as the prices of multiple apartments on the market combined with their area, and whether or not they are in a particular neighborhood. Is it possible to devise a “law” that predicts whether or not an apartment will be in this particular neighborhood if we know only its price and area? Using linear regression, we can estimate the relationship, on average, between these variables, by plugging in different multipliers for the input variables and finding the two multipliers that are the least-wrong over the whole table of known values, meaning they produce the real answer as closely as possible as often as possible. (Different algorithms and techniques exist to produce this kind of result.)
Linear regression, and other such statistical estimation techniques, are the foundations of modern 20th-century science, and are used throughout scientific experiments to verify whether or not results are statistically significant. They are not as reliable as simple linear models, which will never present a significant statistical error in predicting the position of a planet, as one example. Thus, using these techniques implies a tolerance for error and confidence in the value of an average.
Nonetheless, this is what modernist planners thought gave them authority. They knew the numbers and could determine precisely, if not exactly, how much sunlight the average human needed. They believed that if they gathered enough data points, they could solve all the averages in the system, and their policies would be beyond debate, a matter of scientific fact alone.
Of course, people build and live in cities for more than average reasons. There are no average households and businesses, just average measurements. This idea is what Jane Jacobs spent most of her words attacking in her chapter on complexity. Around that same time, the US Air Force conducted a statistical study that proved that there was no average pilot in their service after many pilots crashed because the cockpit, having been designed to average dimensions, obstructed them. The problem was resolved by developing an adjustable seat for the fighter jet, but the ideology of the average has been slow to fade away.
Problems of organized complexity
How can we arrive at a statistical model that accounts for all relevant details, without averaging them over? After Jane Jacobs published her book, computer scientists began exploring a system that they believed functioned much like neurons from a biological organism: the neural network.
To understand neural networks, it is surprisingly easier to start from linear regression than it is to start from the biology of neurons. Recall that a linear regression model relates multiple input variables to a single output variable through error-minimizing coefficients, which we can picture as inputs (circles) combining to form an output (a circle) through multipliers (lines).
Illustration by author.
One of the characteristic flaws of linear regressions is their namesake linearity. They only work if the input always affects the output in the same proportion. In the neighborhood apartment example before, if the apartments in our neighborhood are either large and expensive or small and cheap, with no middle ground, a linear regression will not be able to draw any conclusions. What we need instead is a model that can keep track of details. In the complex world, some details matter sometimes but are irrelevant other times. The easy way to model these conditions is to connect many linear regressions using a middle “layer” of activations.
An activation is an intermediate prediction—instead of predicting whether an input corresponds to an apartment in our neighborhood, we predict how strongly this input activates another set of predictions. Only when a particular combination of inputs is “strong” does the middle layer provide its part of the output. Thus, when an apartment is small and cheap, an intermediate neuron activates, if it is large and expensive, a different intermediate neuron activates, and the linear sum of those two neurons tells us whether or not a specific apartment is in our neighborhood.
Illustration by author.
Neural networks had limited success for decades after their invention, being applied mainly by the postal services to read the handwritten addresses on letters, until scientists began assembling them with very large numbers of activation layers, in so-called “deep learning” models. They could do this because computational power and speed increased dramatically and they now can afford to run exponentially increasing iterations. The result is an explosion of applications in advanced pattern detection, from identifying fraudulent financial transactions, to filtering spam email, to suggesting movies you might enjoy watching right now, or identifying which of your friends appears in a picture someone took at your birthday party.
The success of deep learning on large data sets had two interesting outcomes. First, there is no longer any clean mathematical description of the solution to such a network. The state-of-the-art algorithm to train them is called stochastic gradient descent, which is a fancy way of saying that the coefficients are iterated by a random amount of error correction until they fall into place (or like shaking a box until it stops rattling).
The second outcome is that it becomes practically impossible to understand how the model makes its predictions. We can look at them and be amazed or amused only.
The focus on building up predictions using combinations of small details can produce results that seem to us absurd. For instance, here are many pictures of dogs and muffins that are highly similar. The world’s most complex neural networks struggle to tell them apart.
This shows that an enormous gap remains between machine intelligence and human intelligence. We know so much about context that it is obvious to us when a chihuahua differs from a muffin, but the machine knows only pixels and how they combine into activation patterns.
The interesting fact, however, is how efficient this machine is at combining its ability to identify muffins with its ability to identify dogs. Its first layers activate almost identically for both kinds of pictures because at that level of detail they are nearly the same. This means that the more layers of complexity a neural network is built from, the more it is able to retrain to answer wildly different, or never yet encountered questions, so long as the basic patterns of those questions match patterns that were encountered before.
The kind of system a city is
How does this help us understand cities and problems of organized complexity in general? I am not suggesting that cities are neural networks, but that they both belong to the category of complex adaptive systems, and show similarities in behavior. The non-linearity of neural networks provides a useful illustration of how details can matter in complex systems, but also of the importance of iteration for adaptation. Many problems can share details yet resemble nothing at the large scale, such as the problems of identifying muffins or dogs in pictures. It turns out that a system trained in one area can quickly adapt to the other. It also turns out that we can’t really plan for these outcomes.
As an example of how this works for cities, the decades following the publication of Death and Life of Great American Cities saw the end of a particular kind of harbor-industrial economy, notably along the harbor of New York. The city was left with warehouse after empty warehouse, an emblem of the decline of cities until some adventurous citizens began repurposing them as workshops and condominiums. The industrial city, while preserving some of its details, completely shed its industrial function and soared back to life as a new form of urban living.
It turns out that the city is not a machine for living or a machine for production, but it is a learning machine, exactly like an artificial neural network learns. A few cycles after the activations for industry stopped, the system found a new path to iterate on while preserving the bulk of its structure.
There is another field where the distinction between linear models and complex models matters greatly: agriculture. Linear agriculture was championed by the United States government in the 20th century for its simplicity and the abundance it produced. All a farmer needed to know was that combining specific land, machinery, fertilizers and pesticides (the inputs) could greatly increase the yield of a crop (the output). The agronomist Norman Borlaug was even given a Nobel prize for inventing a particular combination of inputs that led to wheat being practically free to purchase for the average family. Linear agriculture was driven to its absurd extremes in the Soviet Union, where large state-owned farms could specialise in such narrow crops as beet seeds, under the theory that ever larger and more specialized farms would produce even better yields.
Organic farmers rebelled against this model because they considered it unsustainable, meaning it could not be retrained to adapt to changing conditions. Organic farming’s product is not a commodity crop but the vitality of the soil itself and its ability to produce again, the equivalent of training the middle layers of the neural network or improving the streets of a city to invite buildings of an unspecified type. Organic farmers thus produce what is best to improve the soil, and their main challenge is finding markets for those products, instead of optimizing for existing commodity markets by refining the inputs.
The urgency of thinking of cities in terms of complex or organic models has now moved from industrial cities, which have completely transformed and reinvented themselves and in essence are learning how to learn or become organic, to the suburban sprawl cities that are now finishing their first lifecycle and have never had to endure loss of purpose. Becoming a complex system is learning how to change, and when the next unexpected cycle occurs those cities that have already been through major change start with a strong advantage over those that have always followed the same path.
After the retail apocalypse is the office park apocalypse and the housing subdivision apocalypse, as they both reach the end of their initial lifecycle. The lessons learned by the retail zones will be crucial to the adaptation of the other two, and may even prevent an apocalyptic outcome by encouraging local inhabitants to welcome change in their environment. Urban planners increasingly must rely on complexity science to inform the decisions that these communities will make, since those decisions make no sense under any other scientific paradigm.
It is important to examine not only the relationship between sustainability and resilience, but also the embedded cross-scale effects of decisions about whose future should be made more sustainable or resilient.
In recent years, city plans, international organizations, private foundations, and policy discourse more broadly have presented resilience as a necessary characteristic for communities to cope with natural hazards and climate change. Numerous cities around the world are now developing resilience strategies or implementing policies with the stated aim of becoming more resilient.
Resilience agendas and efforts are often justified by the need to guarantee security, reduce risks, and foster sustainability. A more critical take on the “resilience renaissance”, however, suggests that resilience may be a more appealing goal for policymakers because it focuses our attention on managing short-term threats and maintaining the status quo, rather than system transformations required for long-term sustainability.
We can debate the underlying motivation, but there is no doubt that more and more cities are striving to become resilient. In the policy realm, this is widely heralded as a positive development. Within the academic literature, there is greater disagreement about the merits of resilience.
We appreciate these critiques but also see that they have not stymied cities’ resilience policies. In a recent paper, Chelleri and colleagues argue for a more critical and nuanced approach to urban resilience: one that recognizes that many urban policies prioritize certain risks, groups or scales at the expense of others, and acknowledges, documents, and negotiates these trade-offs. Unfortunately, to-date there has been limited research on resilience trade-offs. Published studies suggest that resilience-related strategies seeking to reduce the exposure or sensitivity to certain stresses can exacerbate existing inequalities by disproportionately affecting disadvantaged groups or favoring the interests of others.
This is where our new project comes in.
Leveraging the Urban Resilience Research Network (a virtual platform with more than 250 members), we are crowdsourcing case studies of trade-offs that emerge in resilience-building efforts from all over the world. We will analyse the results to identify common trade-off patterns and to develop a trade-off typology. This can help decision-makers to think through the potential unintended or undesirable consequences of resilience policies and to be transparent about who they seek to benefit and at what scale (resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why?).
What is an urban resilience trade-off?
An urban resilience trade-off occurs when an effort to build resilience by increasing adaptive capacity and/or reducing sensitivity and/or reducing exposure leads to a reduction in adaptive capacity and/or an increase in sensitivity and/or exposure at another spatial or temporal scale, for other individual(s), or to another threat. These trade-offs can occur across spatial scales (one community or city enhances its resilience at the cost of increasing the vulnerability of other places), groups (one group’s resilience increases the vulnerability of others), between threats (when a solution to, e.g., drought implies increasing social fiscal pressures), or even across temporal scales (when a short-term solution results in the lock-in of a particular unsustainable trajectory). As this last point suggests, there can also be trade-offs between resilience and sustainability, a tension that has been discussed in prior TNOC posts.
It is helpful to examine these dynamics in the context of a current event. At the time of writing, “day zero” was rapidly approaching in Cape Town—the day when the taps of four million inhabitants could have run dry because of a historic drought. After almost three years of diminishing rainfall, and notwithstanding recent water use restrictions, the city should have been prepared for this contingency. Indeed, the city is actively working on water transfers, an emergency plan for day zero, and four desalination plants that should already be operational. While day zero has very recently been indefinitely delayed, discussions continue about long-term policies for reframing water management. When addressing these pressing water concerns, however, city officials should consider other aspects of resilience and sustainability beyond the current drought emergency. For example, the energy required to operate new desalination plants could threaten energy resilience and sustainability in a country where electricity is primarily generated from fossil fuels, and long-term supply continuity is unreliable.
In this example, enhancing resilience to one threat may undermine resilience in another system and have negative environmental consequences, thus illustrating a potential trade-off between urban resilience and sustainability. Additionally, the media and policymakers’ focus on the potential day zero heightens local debates about whose needs are most urgent and how funding is prioritized to guarantee fresh water from dams or desalination plants, all within a context of persistent urban informality. Indeed, informal settlements have long had to grapple with periodical flooding and sub-standard water, energy, and sanitation facilities.
Trade-offs related to ‘resilience for whom’ often extend far beyond municipal boundaries. In Morocco, for example, solar power plants built in the semiarid south through the DESERTEC project aim to provide renewable solar power to Europe. However, as reported in a recent publication, the Ouarzazate solar plant almost doubled water consumption in the region, resulting in a dramatic increase in the social-ecological vulnerability of neighbouring oases and increased urban migration.
These two examples highlight the need to examine not only the relationship between sustainability and resilience, but also the embedded cross-scale effects of decisions regarding whose future should be made more sustainable or resilient.
How and why to contribute to our database
To engender these critical discussions, the Urban Resilience Research Network (URNet) is opening a new section on its website featuring short case studies of urban resilience trade-offs. The aim is to gather evidence from different parts of the world, illustrating these trade-offs and lessons learned from urban resilience implementation. The global database will be presented in Barcelona, during the international conference entitled “Reframing Urban Resilience Implementation”, co-organized by URNet, UN Habitat City Resilience Profiling Program, the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC), and the International Forum of Urbanism (IFoU). We encourage every scholar, practitioner, or individual critical of “business as usual” framings of resilience to contribute to our database and help advance our collective understanding of the (un)intended consequences of resilience efforts. Simply fill out our short questionnaire (it should take no more than 10 minutes to complete) and your thoughts and case studies can be published on the URNet website and presented and discussed at the Barcelona conference, thereby contributing to international debates on resilience. We thank you in advance for helping us reframe resilience to avoid trade-offs and better align resilience, sustainability and social justice.
Sara Meerow is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. She is an interdisciplinary social-ecological systems scientist working at the intersection of urban geography and planning.
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)
Second, the Canadian Urban Forest Strategy (CUFS) offers guiding principles for urban forestry at the national level. In recent years, more and more Canadian municipalities have been developing urban forest management plans and tree protection policies. Feedback from stakeholders and members has evidenced the need for a national strategy supported by all levels of government; as the Secretariat for the CUFS, Tree Canada promotes its importance to municipal, provincial and federal levels. In collaboration with multiple and diverse partners, several recent achievements include:
The CUFN Steering Committee, along with a secondary review committee consisting of provincial and federal government representatives, is currently in the process of updating the Canadian Urban Forest Strategy for the 2019-2024 term. This process began with public consultation workshops in autumn of 2015 in each region and has been ongoing for the past two years. The objective of the workshops was to ensure that regional voices were heard in the strategy’s redesign. The new version of the CUFS (2019-2024) will be presented at the
The second experience I want to share that demonstrated collaborative learning was participating in the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies International Roundtable (October 23-25, 2017) called, “
As a social scientist, and through my role with Tree Canada, and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the University of British Columbia 
But broad recognition that we now live in a majority urban world—and that cities will surely determine our future—does not mean we agree on why nor how the urban era is important. More importantly, neither does it suggest how to design cities that will serve people and nature so that urban spaces are sustainable, resilient, livable, and just. It is clear that progress toward the goal of such cities will require a more open and reflective dialogue that span divides separating points of view, ways of knowing, and modes of action.
Leveraging the 
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