Urbanism as a Creator of Value—but is it Sustainable?

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To fully realise the advantages of increased urbanism, people will have to influence the decision-making process within their cities, to ensure that the value that is being created is not accentuating inequality but rather promoting inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities.
There is unanimous agreement that the 21st Century is the century of urbanism. In 2016, an estimated 54.5 percent of the world’s population lived in urban settlements. By 2030, urban areas are projected to house 60 percent of people globally and one in every three people will live in cities with at least half a million inhabitants.[i]  The Human Development Report[ii] now describes urbanization as a new frontier of development because it is not a passive outcome of development, but a creator of value—the more than half of humanity living in cities generates more than 80 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP). Furthermore, according to UNHABITAT III[iii], cities today contribute 70 percent of the global GDP, while consuming over 60 percent of the global energy and producing over 70 percent of global waste and over 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Which is exactly why cities are where the battle for sustainable development will be won or lost, as they are the main place where GDP and waste are produced and energy is consumed.[iv]

The sustainable development framework recognises the importance of cities for sustainable development, where Goal 11 of the Sustainable Development Goals[v] is to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, with specific targets to be achieved by 2030:

  • Target 11.1 by 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, and upgrade slums.
  • Target 11.2 by 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons
  • Target 11.3 by 2030 enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacities for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries
  • Target 11.4 strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage
  • Target 11.5 By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially decrease the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations
  • Target 11.6 by 2030, reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality, municipal and other waste management
  • Target 11.7 by 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, particularly for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction[vi] (SFDRR) also has goals, at the national and city level, to make cities more inclusive, safe, sustainable and resilient.

Notwithstanding the importance of the above frameworks, goals and targets within, these on their own will not effect change as their implementation remains optional, and in some instances runs against deeply engrained short term vested interests. Indeed, recent past experience in the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) have shown that implementation was partial. In order to be truly holistic, with a higher chance of successful implementation, these frameworks need to account for the following challenges and opportunities:

  • Global wealth has become far more concentrated among fewer people. Source: Human Development Report 2016, Human Development for Everyone, United Nations Development Programme.

    Inequality in general is increasing, where global wealth has become far more concentrated. Around 2000, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population had 32 percent of global wealth. By 2010 it was 46 percent. The share of national wealth among the super-rich (the wealthiest 0.1 percent) in the United States increased from 12 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 2008 (before the financial crisis) and to 22 percent in 2012 (critics pointed to inequality as one of the key causes of the crisis)[vii]. Within cities, in 2010, more than 827 million people were living in slum-like conditions[viii] and nearly 40 percent of the world’s future urban expansion may occur in slums[ix]. In spite of great progress in improving slums and preventing their formation—represented by a decrease from 39 percent to 30 percent of urban population living in slums in developing countries between 2000 and 2014–absolute numbers continue to grow and the slum challenge remains a critical factor for the persistence of poverty in the world[x]. Hence upgrading slums is of paramount importance to reduce poverty in all its forms (poverty, abject poverty and chronic poverty) and dimensions (access to water and sanitation, decent and safe housing, clean and affordable energy, health, education, livelihoods, employment, etc.), thereby also addressing inequality.

  • The issue of slums must also be addressed in order to reduce violent extremism, where according to the World Bank among the factors that lead people to leave the country and join radicalized groups is the lack of social and economic inclusion in their country of residence[xi]. According to the United Nations Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism[xii], there is a need to take a more comprehensive approach which encompasses not only ongoing, essential security-based counter-terrorism measures, but also systematic preventive measures which directly address the drivers of violent extremism namely: lack of socioeconomic opportunities, marginalization and discrimination, poor governance, violations of human rights and the rule of law, amongst others.
  • Institutional, physical, and natural factors also contribute to vulnerability within cities, in addition to the economic and social factors. Understanding how this complex vulnerability varies within the city, geographically and with various other parameters including gender, ability, income level, remains a challenge. While data exists on global disaster losses and their impact in terms of economic output (e.g. the Gross Domestic Product), little information exists on how these losses (a) vary within cities with various socio-economic parameters, (b) affect livelihoods, (c) are concentrated amongst the more vulnerable populations and communities[xiii]. This challenge (capturing the variation of vulnerability within cities) becomes more acute when we try to account for the effect of climate change on the severity and frequency of hazards, and the effect of sea level rise on coastal cities and livelihoods[xiv].
  • In many parts of the world, housing and landuse policies continue to be driven by short-term profit considerations and speculative investments in real-estate, while resisting meaningful environmental regulation and sustainable development considerations that can address.

To fully realise the advantages of increased urbanism, people will have to influence the decision-making process within their cities, to ensure that the value that is being created is not accentuating inequality but rather promoting inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities, partly through:

  • Carrying out a regular critical review of the indicators used to assess the “health” of the city. This is needed in order to ensure that state of the environment and the ability of the people to meet their socio economic needs are part of all assessments on the health of the city.
  • Underlining the notion that a city cannot do well if its environment, and the majority of its people are not doing well (as for example measured by different forms of pollution, access to common space, resilience to climate change, resilience against disaster losses, poverty, inequality, access to affordable and good quality health and education, etc).
  • Highlighting the notion that “trickle-down” urban, landuse and housing policies that focus almost exclusively on “entrepreneurial growth poles” do not work. Instead, investments should also be directed at poorer neighbourhoods, communities, livelihoods and associated infrastructure.
  • Highlighting the people’s Right to the City[xv]. For while International frameworks can provide evidence-based guidelines and recommendations, it remains the duty and privilege of city dwellers to call for a more inclusive and participatory urban decision-making processes.

Fadi Hamdan
Beirut

On The Nature of Cities

[i] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2016). The World’s Cities in 2016 – Data Booklet (ST/ESA/ SER.A/392).

[ii] Human Development Report 2016, Human Development for Everyone, United Nations Development Programme, 2016.

[iii] HABITAT III, United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, 2016.

[iv] Deputy Secretary-Remarks at the High-Level General Assembly Meeting on New Urban Agenda, UN-Habitat, 2016.

[v] Sustainable Development Goals – Seventeen Goals to Transform Our World, United Nations, 2016.

[vi] Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, UN, 2015.

[vii] Human Development Report 2016, Human Development for Everyone, United Nations Development Programme, 2016.

[viii] HABITAT III, United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, 2016.

[ix] Human Development Report 2016, Human Development for Everyone, United Nations Development Programme, 2016.

[x] Slum Almanac, 2015/2016, Tracking Improvement in the life of Slum Dwellers, EU, UN-HABITAT, Participatory Slum Upgrading Program, 2016.

[xi] Economic and Social Inclusion to, Prevent Violent Extremism, World Bank – MENA Economic Indicator, 2016.

[xii] Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, United Nations, 2016.

[xiii] Global Assessment Report, United Nations, Geneva 2015.

[xiv] Global Platform, United Nations, Mexico, 2017.

[xv] The right to the city, H. Lefebvre, (1996), in Writings on cities, Kofman et al, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996.

 

Blandscaping that Erases Local Ecological Diversity

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By appropriately designing and carefully applying nature-based solutions and urban green infrastructure strategies we can provide functioning ecosystems in urban areas for the rich range of natural communities on which we depend, rather than just a select few.
Ecological gentrification (Dooling, 2009) is a negative social process in which ecological improvements to neighbourhoods lead to gentrification and displacement of the neighbourhood’s original inhabitants. There is an analogous process of ecological gentrification at the level of ecological communities: many vulnerable ecological communities that persist (and in some cases, thrive) in urban areas are being displaced or extirpated by greening approaches that impose “standard” global designs. Whilst nature-based solutions (NBS) and urban green infrastructure (UGI) strategies have great potential to solve real urban challenges; they must be appropriately designed and delivered if they are to simultaneously provide ecological, environmental, social and economic benefits in urban areas. When reflexively or generically applied, they risk erasing key and valuable local ecological elements.

Displacement of urban biodiversity through “blandscaping”

Historically, aesthetics and recreation have been the overriding drivers for urban green space (UGS) design and management. This has led to the simplification of habitats through frequent mowing, pruning of trees and shrubs, removal of dead wood and mulching (Aronson et al., 2017). Human-mediated planting choices motivated by visual impact or ease of management have typically favoured horticultural cultivars over native species. These actions can diminish the value of UGS for biodiversity as it becomes characterised by a small range of introduced, frequently non-native species that can tolerate the anthropogenic conditions (McKinney, 2006 & 2008). These practices have created structurally and functionally similar urban ecosystems across bioregions, which are distinct from local native ecosystems, but are close in character to each other—a phenomenon called urban biotic homogenisation (McKinney, 2006; Groffman et al., 2014).

This generic approach to urban greening constitutes “blandscaping”—landscaping that uses the same designs, and often the same species, has become a “best practice” model that has been shared and used across different urban regions nationally and globally. Whilst the current paradigm of maximising the multifunctionality of UGS should address the shortcomings of blandscaping, all too often designs focused on narrow anthropogenic ecosystem service needs (e.g., aesthetics, stormwater management, etc.) have perpetuated this approach. There is still a prevailing assumption that UGI and NBS will automatically support biodiversity conservation goals by virtue of being green. In our experience of surveying such landscapes, this is not the case. Homogenisation and simplification of habitats through blandscaping has segregated natural communities, enabling urban exploiters/generalists to proliferate and marginalising habitat specialists (urban avoiders) that tend to inhabit more natural sites within the urban matrix (Blair, 1996).

Invertebrates (a vital but all too often overlooked group) are particularly prone to the loss of natural habitat in urban areas. Whilst studies have linked the use of exotic planting choices with benefits for certain pollinators (Salisbury et al., 2015), the use of horticultural cultivars over native flower species has also been linked to a reduction in the forage value for native pollinators generally (Bates et al. 2011; Salisbury et al., 2015). This manifests in considerably (40-50 percent) fewer visits to exotic flowering plants, compared to native and near-native species, with even the more generalist groups such as honeybees and short-tongued bumblebees favouring native over exotic plantings (Salisbury et al., 2015). The urban story, however, is not as simple as merely providing native plants as part of UGS design. Structural complexity and, crucially, the juxtaposition of all of a species’ complex life cycle requirements over suitable spatial scales is also critical. Once the fragmentation between these habitat features becomes too great within a landscape, these species are no longer able to persist (Glaum et al. 2017). This pattern has repeatedly been demonstrated in urban areas. Urban gardens have been found to sustain only large populations of a small group of ubiquitous and generalist butterfly and bumblebee species, with specialist species being confined to less disturbed semi-natural habitats (Cameron et al., 2012). A study of butterfly species richness in ruderal sites and traditional and semi-natural parks found local habitat quality was more important than patch size (Öckinger et al., 2009). Overall, patterns from such studies have revealed that more specialist species with more complex habitat requirements are more likely to show a negative response to urbanization (Bates et al., 2011).

Creating “inclusive” urban green space—mimicry of habitat mosaics

So, should we assume that these specialist communities cannot persist in urban areas and focus our conservation efforts on urban exploiters/adapters? Quite the opposite. If suitable quality habitat is available, urban areas can provide an oasis for many of these specialist species that are being squeezed out of the rural hinterlands by intensive agricultural practices that have degraded and simplified swathes of non-urban habitat (Baldock et al. 2015). In fact, because most UGS is not subjected to the intensive levels of management and pesticides used on farmland, urban areas can support locally, nationally and even internationally important biodiversity that is struggling to persist in the wider countryside.

Cities and Biodiversity Outlook presents an interesting global overview of the rich biodiversity that can occur in cities (SCBD 2012). From a more local perspective, post-industrial sites in the urban fabric of London and the Thames Corridor region of the UK exemplify this potential. Despite being labelled as “wasteland” (implying a barren or vacant area of little value), post-industrial “brownfield” sites represent a uniquely urban form of “wilderness”, with the capacity to support diverse natural communities of great value for nature conservation (Gilbert, 1989). The term brownfield refers to previously-developed land that has been abandoned or become unused, and many of these sites are spontaneously inhabited by natural communities. In contrast to traditional green spaces, lack of regular management allows flower-rich, structurally diverse habitats to establish supporting abundant biodiversity. Brownfield sites with heterogeneous edaphic conditions can develop unique habitat mosaics. This mosaic can provide the juxtaposition of “microhabitats” so valuable for many invertebrates (Gibson, 1998; Bodsworth et al., 2005). The microhabitats within brownfield sites have been found to function as analogues of natural/semi-natural habitats such as meadows, saltmarsh and chalk grassland that are declining or have become degraded in the wider landscape (Gemmell & Connell, 1984; Eversham et al., 1996; Eyre et al., 2003). Widespread depletion of natural habitats has forced many of the species that inhabited them to relocate to avoid extinction. Whilst the surrounding landscape can offer a variety of opportunities for generalists, many of the specialist species of natural habitats can only find suitable homes within these urban brownfield mosaic analogues. An example is the ground beetle Scybalicus oblongiusculus, which historically inhabited specialist coastal habitats, but is now critically endangered in the UK and is confined to brownfield sites in the East Thames Corridor region that offer analogous conditions.

Despite recognition of the importance of brownfield sites for these increasingly marginalised, conservation priority communities, planning policy in the UK targets brownfield for redevelopment to house growing human urban communities (Harvey, 2000; Roberts et al., 2006; DCLG, 2012; Robins et al., 2012). A chief justification for this approach lies in this perception of brownfields as “waste” land; as brownfield sites are often a legacy of the deindustrialisation of an area, their presence may be inextricably linked to socio-economic problems such as unemployment, deprivation, and degeneration, and they are often perceived as a blight on the urban landscape. Their redevelopment, therefore, is seen as an opportunity for urban regeneration and renewal but, if not carefully planned, this process can perpetuate gentrification by acting as a catalyst for increasing property prices (Bryson, 2012), displacing vulnerable low-income residents. A parallel ecological gentrification also occurs to biodiversity associated with these sites. When brownfields are redeveloped, typical mitigation comprises ornamental or structurally simple landscapes and generic green roofs, with the only species able to persist in these environments being the urban exploiters/generalists.

Similar to the pitfalls of socio-ecological gentrification, this process of converting urban “wild space” containing complex mosaic habitats into urban blandscaping is also often underpinned by the espousing of an environmental ethic and a belief that green (of any type) is good for biodiversity. In reality, such development, with little regard for the ecological functionality of greenspace design, could be said to represent a type of “ecological cleansing”—removing species/guilds from landscapes by removing the habitat heterogeneity that provides the range of niches and resources needed to support diverse communities (MacArthur & MacArthur, 1961).

The ecological value of post-industrial sites in the urban fabric has been recorded elsewhere internationally (Dolnŷ and Harabiŝ, 2012; Kratochwil and Klatt, 1989), but these are certainly not the only urban habitats to have such value. We need to learn from these urban examples that are so rich in biodiversity and embed that learning into UGS design through a process of mimicry. By doing so, it might be possible to avoid imposing the analogy of human socio-ecological gentrification on our urban biodiversity.

Developing effective measures to recreate biodiversity-rich habitat mosaics within urban green space has the potential to deliver significant gains for biodiversity and nature conservation. Ecomimicry (locally-contextualised mimicry) of important elements of biodiversity-rich habitat mosaics could emulate their key function as anthropogenic analogues of natural/semi-natural habitats. As with natural ecosystems, the communities that develop on UGI will be a function of the niches that are created by their design. Such a habitat mosaic approach could positively contribute to the heterogeneity-diversity relationship, even at small spatial scales (Lundholm, 2009).

Although they are often described as artificial habitats, or even a novel ecosystem, high-quality brownfield sites can teach us much about how to design our green space to provide the juxtaposition of habitat features that much of nature needs to thrive. Embedding such knowledge into UGS design in balance with art, ecology, aesthetics, and multifunctionality is now the great challenge facing NBS innovators. Pioneering approaches to this challenge can provide a vital step towards combating ecological gentrification. Increasingly, innovators are rising to this challenge with emerging techniques that deserve to be promoted and replicated more broadly.

Emerging approaches to habitat mimicry in UGS design

i. Building breeding sites for bees—Aculeate Hymenoptera nesting planters

Figure 1. Bee post cavity nesting opportunities for aculeate Hymenoptera featuring holes of different diameters to cater for different species. Photo: ©John Little

Nectar and pollen provision through floral planting is a key resource for pollinators and schemes to boost floral availability have become popular. However, unless suitable nesting habitat is provided over appropriate spatial scales to be energy efficient for foragers, then many species are unable to exploit this resource. Cavity-nesting provision through the construction of ‘bug hotels’ is becoming increasingly common in urban landscaping. These designs typically follow a generic template, with the outcome often being unsuitable for target insects. But UGS design innovator, John Little, has been developing new ways to embed these features effectively into the design of multifunctional greenspace for high-density urban areas. This has included creating aculeate nest ‘posts’ for local schools (Figure 1) and embedding nesting cavities into the construction of small-scale green roofs to cover bicycle racks and bin covers. Examples of this can be seen as part of the Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) Pocket Park at Derbyshire St in East London, UK (Figure 2).

Figure 2. biodiverse small-scale green roof bicycle shelter as part of a SuDS pocket park in London, UK. Providing cavity nesting habitat, bird nesting and gabion cages as habitat niches in addition to the green roof. Photo: ©UEL SRI
Figure 3. Sand nesting planter. A combination of traditional floral planter (that can be planted with anything from wildflowers to herbs and vegetables) surrounded by sand with a perforated metal mesh to enable vertical and horizontal surface aculeate Hymenoptera nesting. Photo: © John Little

Only a proportion of aculeate Hymenoptera are cavity nesters though, with a substantial proportion being ground-nesting species. Many of these species require specific ground conditions for nesting including varied preferences for particle size, compaction, and slope angle (Srba and Heneberg 2012). There has been very little focus on nesting habitat provision for these species in proximity to ‘wildflowers for pollinators’ initiatives and suitable features are not typically provided by blandscaping approaches. These are, however, the types of habitats that typically occur on brownfield sites and make them such rich habitats for aculeate Hymenoptera. John has been pioneering a solution to this challenge, inspired by the brownfield habitats in the area where he lives and his experience of working with UGS in cities. His nesting planters combine nectar and pollen sources with nesting opportunities to provide a neat solution that can be incorporated into any urban area (Figure 3). Results from trials at his home have demonstrated that a number of ground-nesting species will utilise the horizontal and vertical sand surfaces for nesting, including the Red Data Book 3 species Gorytes laticinctus. The planters are now being rolled out more widely.

ii. The Beetle Bump—habitat design for a single species that benefits many

Figure 4. Aerial photo of the Beetle Bump habitat creation at the University of East London, Docklands Campus. Photo: ©UEL SRI
Figure 5. A selection of the wildlife utilising the Beetle Bump’s wildflower resources. Photo: ©UEL SRI

An example of embedding species-led learning into landscaping innovation emerged from a mitigation project to rescue one of the UK’s rarest insects from extinction. Associated with brownfield sites in the London Docklands area of the East Thames Corridor, the last known site of the streaked bombardier beetle (Brachinus sclopeta) was due to be demolished for a new development. With no appropriate mitigation planned, this scenario represented a classic example of a specialist species being subjected to ecological cleansing through site redevelopment. A rescue attempt by Buglife (the Invertebrate Conservation Trust) and the University of East London, led to the creation of the Beetle Bump (Figure 4) on the University’s Docklands Campus. The Beetle Bump is a small brownfield pocket nature reserve forming part of the landscaping of the new Sports Dock development. The Beetle Bump was designed to mimic the habitat features associated with the last site on which the beetle was found. It was created using a blend of low-nutrient, recycled aggregates sown with wildflowers typical of the region’s brownfield sites (Connop 2012). Streaked bombardier beetles rescued from the development site were transferred onto the Beetle Bump. Surveys on the Bump in subsequent years revealed that not only was the streaked bombardier able to persist on the site in the short-term, but a rich community including other conservation priority species was also utilising the habitat. The contrast with the depauperate biodiversity found on nearby traditionally blandscaped areas of the campus was stark (Figure 5).

 iii. Barking Riverside Brownfield Landscaping—brownfield mimicry in urban landscaping

Another example of taking inspiration from brownfield habitat for UGS design was the brownfield landscaping experiment at Barking Riverside, UK. Barking Riverside is a large brownfield site currently being developed for housing. The site was recognised as supporting valuable biodiversity prior to development. This included vulnerable invertebrate communities that have been displaced from their native fluvial grassland habitat due to intensive farming and development, and now rely on brownfield mosaics for a home (Harvey 2000). As part of the mitigation for the Barking Riverside development, there was a requirement to try to conserve these important communities through a combination of landscape design and biodiverse green roofs (Nash 2017). To ensure that the new landscaping supported the rich array of communities associated with the brownfield site, an assessment was made of the key habitat associations of the invertebrates found on the site pre-development. These features were embedded into an area of innovative office landscaping on site which was designed by landscape architects DF Clark. This novel landscaping approach included a mosaic of habitat pockets comprising key brownfield features such as south-facing sand banks (Figure 6), deadwood piles and standing deadwood, wildflower meadows, and rubble, concrete, and metal design features (Figure 7). The landscaping was designed to marry together elements of traditional landscape design with ecologically important brownfield mosaic features.

Figure 6. Brownfield landscaping Sand Bank pocket at Barking Riverside, London, UK. Photo: ©UEL SRI
Figure 6. Brownfield landscaping Sand Bank pocket at Barking Riverside, London, UK. Photo: ©UEL SRI

The locally-attuned landscaping developed into a mosaic habitat of tall and short herbs, with bare ground, rubble, and deadwood niches. Monitoring recorded 148 plant species in just 0.5 ha of landscaping, many of which were characteristic of the region’s high-quality brownfield sites (Connop et al. 2014). Comparison with more-traditionally blandscaped areas of the development revealed a much richer floral and invertebrate communities on the brownfield landscaped areas (Nash 2017). This included some nationally rare and scarce species associated with the specialist habitat conditions found on brownfield sites in the region.

Summary

It is clear that UGI and NBS implementation has the potential to affect the demography of both human and natural urban communities. Similarly to human communities, natural communities are not equally at risk to human-led urban landscape change. When greening strategies fail to prioritise inclusiveness, they can end up exploited by the privileged few, but sensitively designed urban green space could potentially benefit diverse social and ecological communities. The examples presented here demonstrate what can be achieved for specialist species if we apply ecologically-informed design principles to urban green space creation.

If an ecosystem service approach should have taught us anything, it is that biodiversity has innate value beyond what we can easily understand, quantify, monetise or model (TNOC blog). NBS and UGI represent amazing opportunities to ensure that we are providing functioning ecosystems in urban areas for the rich range of natural communities on which we depend, rather than a selected elite. A number of new EU Horizon 2020 NBS projects like CONNECTING Nature are providing a mechanism for ensuring that these innovative solutions are rolled out on a scale to affect real change in our cities. The great challenge now for NBS innovators is to seize these opportunities to design scalable pioneering solutions that balance art, ecology, amenity, and multifunctionality. For us urban ecologists, the great challenge is to ensure that this innovation is underpinned by a deeper understanding of locally-appropriate, functioning ecosystems in an urban context, and how a mosaic approach to UGS creation can support the habitat requirements of the many, not the few.

Stuart Connop & Caroline Nash
London

On The Nature of Cities

Caroline Nash

about the writer
Caroline Nash

Caroline is a Research Assistant in the Sustainability Research Institute at University of East London, working primarily on biodiversity and urban green infrastructure design

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Öckinger, E., Dannestam, Å., & Smith, H. G. (2009) The importance of fragmentation and habitat quality of urban grasslands for butterfly diversity. Landscape & Urban Planning. 93: 31-37.

Roberts, J., Harvey, P. & Jones, R. (2006) All of a Buzz in the Thames Gateway. Phase 1: Identification of the Brownfield Resource and Preliminary Assessment of the Invertebrate Interest. Buglife Report, Peterborough, UK.

Robins, J., Henshall, S. and Farr, A. (2012) The state of brownfields in the Thames Gateway. Report produced by Buglife – the Invertebrate Conservation Trust.

Salisbury, A., Armitage, J., Bostock, H., Perry, J., Tatchell, M. and Thompson, K. (2015) Enhancing gardens as habitats for flower‐visiting aerial insects (pollinators): should we plant native or exotic species?. Journal of Applied Ecology, 52(5), pp.1156-1164.

SCBD (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity) (2012) Cities and Biodiversity Outlook. Montreal, 64 pages.

Srba, M. and Heneberg, P. (2012) ‘Nesting habitat segregation between closely related terricolous sphecid species (Hymenoptera: Spheciformes): key role of soil physical characteristics’, Journal of Insect Conservation, 16(4), pp. 557-570.

Reflecting on Two Years Walking in Asia

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10,500 kilometers by foot has made us advocates for cities that put citizens’ nature-based needs in the center of their urban planning process.

My eyes fall on the big tree in the far side of the courtyard.

It casts a spell on me. Its leafless branches twist toward the sky, claiming a beauty few notice. I notice, and stop mid-step to admire this natural wonder. I take a picture of it so I won’t forget this moment.

Tree love, Istanbul. Photo: J. Baljko

Behind me groups of tourists and school kids rush to see the grandeur of Ottoman wealth in the form of Topkapi Palace, which once housed sultans and harems. Its decorative blue and white tiles, some of which may date back to the 15th Century, have their appeal, and I appreciate their historical importance.

For more in the Bangkok to Barcelona series, click here.
Beyond the walls of the palace-turned-museum, I can hear the tram, and imagine the locals and foreigners weaving around each other on one of Istanbul’s busy commercial streets.

The tree, though, is what has captured all of my attention. After almost two years of walking mostly treeless roads connecting mostly crowded or overcrowded cities, trees, when I see them, get all of my love. Some of them I acknowledge with a nod, others I blow a kiss to, and some I touch as I stroll by. Many trees are so irresistible that I must hug them.

Yes, I’m a tree hugger now.

Tree hugger. Photo: Lluís.

Walking since January 2016 through large swaths of Asia is to blame for my current tree obsession. This foot journey of nearly 10,500 kilometers to date has impacted Lluís and me in ways that we wouldn’t have expected.

Traffic in Bangkok. Photo: J. Baljko

For one, we hug trees in the middle of the street without shame. We loved trees before, but their absence in our day-to-day walking lives—along roads and highways where we can’t escape trucks, buses and cars—has created a hole in our hearts.

We also peek through fences to admire gardens, and stop to watch the birds fly by. We marvel at the colors of flowers blooming and wilting, and freeze-frame pretty buds with our mobile phone cameras.

Small things we notice in cities. Photo: J. Baljko

Everywhere, and especially when we pass through cities, we crave open, green spaces. We find ourselves lingering longer in parks, and skipping the main attractions guidebooks recommend.

Scarred by constant horn honking for seven months of walking in Bangladesh and India and almost two years of walking mostly on asphalt, we desperately seek out quiet places. The profound sound of silence simultaneously takes our breaths away and fills us with life.

Most of the cities we have walked through from Thailand to Turkey have lost their souls, in our humble walkers’ opinion.

They have been designed or redesigned—not usually in a good way—to move cars and trucks through their boundaries. The idea that people may still want to walk around by foot feels like a long-lost impulse.

How do we get through this? Photo: J. Balkjo

In many places, simple things like sidewalks don’t exist, and if they do, they are in no condition to walk on or have been overrun by mopeds, restaurant tables or vendors who sell any sort of thing off the tarp they threw wherever they decided to sit. Parking laws are for “those other people” not the ones who leave their cars any which way they feel like it, and street lights change before a pedestrian can make it the full distance across. Trees have been cut down to make high-rise apartment buildings, park benches are empty, swings are broken, and buses spewing black exhaust hoard around markets and malls making it impossible for anyone get around.

Walking views in Dhaka. Photo: J. Baljko
Marks of the city limits. Photo: J. Baljko

Most of the hundreds of cities and villages we have walked through have disappointed us. They are gritty places, gray from smog and filled with weary faces. We join the weary, and pass through with our heads down and our elbows tucked in to avoid being clipped by a reckless driver. We refill our water bottles, get something to eat and press on, waiting for the next rural stretch where we can breathe easier.

We think out loud about what so many cities we see seem to be missing. Our repeating chain of thought is that many cities surviving alongside roads lack a place where its citizens can step away from the grime, disengage from the urban world around them and momentarily slip into a natural, and much-needed state of stillness.

The idea of finding stillness, noticing silence and enjoying the traces of nature relegated to tiny slivers of cities is very present in our walkers’ minds. These are some of the things we miss terribly walking 10 hours a day in all sorts of weather and cultural conditions.

When we find them, we latch on to them.

That’s why we liked Mashhad, Iran, or Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, or Chandigarh, India, for instance. Mashhad’s parks and brightly painted benches felt inviting. Bishkek’s pedestrian walkways gave us a space to listen to the birds. In Chandigarh, unlike any other city in India, we could actually walk down a tree-lined street and not fear getting swiped by a moped.

 

Hitting the pavement.

10,500 kilometers by foot has made us advocates for cities that put citizens’ nature-based needs in the center of their urban planning process.

We like to think that if city planners and developers walked around their cities and up and down all of their streets for a couple of weeks, they would see what we see.

They would notice when the birds are singing or not singing, and where they are nesting. They would make note of all the cracks on their sidewalks. They would fix the broken swings no child wants to use. They would put in more trash bins and encourage recycling. They would realize they don’t have enough time to get halfway across a big intersection. They would see a rose, and may stop to smell it.

And, they would notice the big tree sharing its quiet beauty, and save it from ruin because, in a single moment of stillness and quiet reflection, they would feel their primal bind to this natural wonder.

Their footsteps would echo louder than the cars and trucks they think matter most.

Jennifer Baljko
Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot

On The Nature of Cities

City Living from Baku to Batumi

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West Asian countries Azerbaijan and Georgia recreate themselves and their cities in post-Soviet times.
Walking gives us a slow and intimate way to notice the subtle similarities and differences between cities.

We consciously and sub-consciously collect details and compare cities as we slowly make our way from Point A to Point B by foot. We have even created a mental game to pass the time during the many hours we are outside.

One version of the game is mentally listing and analyzing the things we perceived about cities in countries that have had a recent shared history but are now left to cast a new footprint in the world. Since we have spent many months walking in Central and West Asia, we often find ourselves stacking up cities that until the 1990s were under Soviet rule, and are now defining their new niche on the regional and global stage.

Azerbaijan walking route.

We started doing this last year when we passed through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan and stayed for some time in the cities of Bishkek, Osh, Khorugh, Dushanbe, Bukhara, and Samarkand. We consider the look and feel of the cities now, imagine how they were before and guess what direction they are heading in. We notice things like architecture, infrastructure, housing construction, cars driven (a subjective wealth indicator on our list),  popular shops, how people spend their time in the city and what products line market shelves (are they locally grown and made or imported?). From this, we make very subjective conclusions about whether the city is thriving or struggling in their new age, and whether we think it’s a livable place, at least in our heads.

For more in the Bangkok to Barcelona series, click here.
We continued this game play in August and September 2017 when we walked through Azerbaijan and Georgia, former Soviet countries nestled between Iran, Turkey, Armenia, and Russia. Their main cities’ sense of place made strikingly different impressions on us.

Baku’s influence

Baku is a place where people come to be seen, party, shop, and stroll along the renovated waterfront promenade.

The Azerbaijan capital seems to have a new-found sense of itself, even if the urban zoning and planning elements look randomly assembled rather than thoughtfully and uniformly considered.

Baku’s post-Soviet personality is being built with oil and natural gas money, an image reinforced by the drills holing the dry earth around the Caspian Sea city and the number of tankers and trucks waiting to be loaded near its port. Modern buildings—the most famous of which are the flaming towers, which when lit, resemble flames of fire—are located a short walk away from historical sites and traditional houses.

Commercial centers and pedestrian areas lined with shops selling Western brands, trendy and crowded restaurants and cafes, expensive, luxury apartments with “For Sale” signs draped on balconies, and this “look at me” feel walking through city center rounds out the picture.

While the city is growing into its new shoes, so to say, and staking an economic claim in its ability to be strong trade partner with its regional neighbors (namely, Iran, Turkey, Russia, Georgia and Europe), Baku’s wealth, at least superficially, seems to trickle out to other cities along our walking route. *

The increasingly obvious movement of goods and money, along with the development of sea and land logistics infrastructure (including the construction of a cargo and passenger train line that will connect Baku with Tbilisi, Georgia, Kars, Turkey and eventually Istanbul, the doorway to Europe), touches other towns, like Ağstafa, Ganja, Lankaran and Yevlakh. These smaller urban hubs have refurbished their city center streets in a way that makes strolling easy. There are sidewalks and benches and conformity in the facades. Men, mostly retired men (never women), play backgammon for hours on patios of tea houses in nicely manicured parks. Drivers look for customers in high-end, second-hand Mercedes and Sprinter microbuses, and farmers use Russian Ladas, workhorse-types of cars common throughout former Soviet countries, to get from their homes to their fields.

Supermarkets have a broad display of products, written mostly in Russian letters, but also in Turkish, which is a cousin of Azerbaijan’s local language.

Although Azerbaijan is still less developed compared to its powerhouse neighbors and may be developing at a pace similar to Uzbekistan, in our walkers’ eyes, it seems to be faring better than, say, Georgia.

Georgia’s hope

Across the border in Georgia, another former Soviet country shaping its place in the 21st Century, a different scene plays out.

Georgia walking route.

Tbilisi, the capital, feels like a place where legends and fairytales were born. Old bathhouses, churches, a fortress on a hill and riverside buildings embedded into the rock cliffs mark its history. Crumbling apartment buildings that would be condemned as uninhabitable in other places may initially come off as charming pieces time forgot, but, really, they are a reflection of the city’s challenge in levying affordable property taxes and securing local and foreign investment for development.

Bakeries selling hot bread from deep circular ovens and ladies selling fruits, flowers, and churchkhela (candle-shaped, local type of energy bar traditionally made from grape must, nuts and flour) are quaint Tbilisi features, instilling a romantic feel of age-old customs.

Although there are places in the old (and hyper touristic) part of the city and upscale neighborhoods where it’s easy to find Western amenities and brands, the number of second-hand shops, and the number of women inside them, gives me pause. The frequency of these shops, both in Tbilisi and in other cities we walked through, lead me to believe that locals have to manage their budgets, and opt for classic black pieces (black is the popular color for women of all ages in Tbilisi) that can be mixed and matched instead of spending their cash on fast fashion that eats away at the little extra they have at the end of the month.

There are, too, signs of shifting tastes. Tbilisi’s urban development leans towards catering to tourists and creating a European feel. A new park, the elegantly designed Bridge of Peace, trendy cafes and bars playing Russian and Western pop music, and upscale wine shops cover up scars from the civil war that started after the Soviet Union collapsed. Fenced in construction sites usher in the new hope of urban chic, and renovated, modernized apartments are being rented out on Airbnb, a common trend among Tbilisi’s citizens looking to profit from increased tourism.

Outside Tbilisi, we follow a route through the southern mountains. We simultaneously feel Georgia’s natural beauty and its isolation. There are long, stunning stretches of wheat and grass fields being cut and dried for livestock during the harsh winter, and farmers scurrying to pile up their old Soviet-style military trucks with as much hay as possible before the frost comes. Other rural stretches come with miles of barren, wind-swept nothingness. Small villages—with bare-shelved shops where locals buy basic goods like sunflower oil, biscuits, pasta and frozen chicken—are depressing with their abandoned, windowless houses, signs that locals have packed up and moved on.

Throughout Georgia, we walk with a feeling that most people are just getting by, and are struggling to accomplish that. Many Georgians have left the country, migrating to other parts of the world for economic security. And while politicians set their eyes on developing stronger relationships with the European Union, as witnessed by the EU flags flying on nearly every public building and police stations, Georgia’s West Asian geography and mountainous tough-to-mine exports of copper, gold and ferroalloys limits wealth distribution throughout its cities. It feels that way for weeks of walking… at least until we reach Batumi.

Batumi, Georgia’s important port and resort city on the Black Sea,* feels like a circus after the miles of quiet rural areas and small gray towns we passed.

Like Baku, which has a certain appeal for Iranians who are looking for a nearby, easy-visa place to party (many Iranian men told us they go to Baku to drink and dance at night clubs), Batumi attracts its share of Georgian, Russian and Turkish partiers. Its waterfront park, a good green space in its own right, is filled with clubs, bars and restaurants and kitsch tourist amenities catering to summer beachgoers; and for about 100 kilometers in Turkey, we saw billboards advertising Batumi’s luxury hotels, casinos and night life.

But, inside Batumi’s neighborhoods, where locals stroll, there is something subtle that makes the city livable.

There is a bustle that moves at a more relaxed, less heavy pace than Tbilisi. Whiffs of sea air catch us as we criss-cross city streets and parks, and there appears to be more investment in making the city a nice place to call home.

Still, though, locals want more.

“How do you like Batumi?” we ask a 20-something-year-old woman working in a fast food shop.

“It’s okay, but it’s too small for me,” she answers handing a customer an orange Fanta. “I want to live in a big city. I’m going to Russia…in Moscow, there is a lot to do”.

This is a sentiment we have heard in many former Soviet cities across Central and West Asia.

Young people, faced with limited job opportunities in their recovering and developing countries, want to go to Moscow, Istanbul, Berlin, New York, anywhere but where they are.

We walk on wondering who will stay behind to build whatever comes next for Baku, Tbilisi, Batumi, and all the cities in between.

* Baku and Batumi were not directly on our walking route. We took public transportation to visit them.

Jennifer Baljko
Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot

All photos by Jenn Baljko.

Baku, Azerbaijan

Baku’s development, which is being fueled by the oil and gas industry, has “look at me” feel. Its post Soviet style blends modern buildings, a recently built seaside promenade and restoration for old monuments.

Other cities in Azerbaijan

The wealth being generated in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, seems to trickle out to other main and smaller cities. Outside Baku, we found pretty main streets, modern buildings and parks where residents shade themselves on benches or play backgammon.

Tbilisi, Georgia

Tbilisi reminds us of legends and fairytales with its old castles, fortress and churches. New apartment buildings, that may be rented to tourists, are being constructed next to buildings that would be condemned in other places.

Other cities in Georgia

In rural areas, Georgia’s natural beauty captures our imaginations, but that doesn’t seem to be enough to keep the locals living there. Many cities in southern Georgia feel run-down, depressing, abandoned. Those that stay work the land or tend to livestock.

Batumi, Georgia

Like Baku, Batumi has a circus feel, a place where people from neighboring countries come to party on the beach. With that has come new development and renovations to parks, neighborhoods and shopping areas, all of which help make the city livable.

Highlights from The Nature of Cities in 2017

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Today’s post celebrates highlights from TNOC writing in 2017. These contributions, originating around the world, were widely read, offer novel points of view, are somehow disruptive in a useful way, or combine these characteristics. Certainly, all 1000+ TNOC essays and roundtables are great and worthwhile reads, but what follows will give you a taste of this year’s key and diverse content.

Check out highlights from previous years: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.
2017 has been an important year at The Nature of Cities. The number of contributors has grown to over 650, and we published 150+ long-form essays, reviews, and global roundtables. We have conducted an ongoing survey of reader desires for types of context and we’ve been planning new efforts.  We launched the Stories of the Nature of Cities 2099 prize for Flash Fiction. We began a collaboration with Ray Cha, funded by the Transit Center, to produce education modules for better utilization of open data produced by cities. We had the first physical meeting of TNOC writers, in Portland, where we discussed the possibilities for a global TNOC meeting.

In essays, roundtables, and reviews we continue to seek the frontiers of thought found at the boundaries of urban ecology, community, design, and art. Importantly, we’ve attracted more and more readers: in 2017 we had over a half million readers from 2,500+ cities in 150+ countries. Thank you.

New things are coming in 2018, including:

  • We are working toward incorporation in Ireland, creating an organization foothold in the European Union;
  • A series of collaborative poetry in place-making, called TransRengas, in collaboration with ArtsEverywhere.ca and Musagetes Foundation;
  • We hope to announce soon a series of international transdisciplinary TNOC meetings;
  • As an outgrowth of our Nature of Graffiti project, we will embark on the beginning stages of an interactive, creative exhibit of art on social-environmental themes in urban “vacant” lots, generously funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts;
  • And of course, over 150 new essays, reviews and roundtables.

(Banner drawing by Richard Register.)

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Roundtables

Are cities ecosystems—analogous to natural ones—of nature, infrastructure and people? Does thinking about cities in this way help us think about urban design?

Are cities ecosystems in the senses in which we think of classic natural and ecological areas outside of cities? After all, urban spaces are connected mosaics of green space, biodiversity (including people), non-biological structure, biophysical processes, energy flows, and so on. That sounds a lot like a natural ecosystem. Many of these contributors say, yes, certainly, cities are ecosystems. Not all, though. A few more are skeptical that an ecosystem concept is central to planning better cities. The more common belief among this group might be that a socio–ecological and landscape approach to cities is more important, and one that is imbued with values.

…with contributions from: Marina Alberti, Seattle | Erik Andersson, Stockholm | Sarah Dooling, Austin/Boston | Paul Downton, Melbourne | Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm | Nancy Grimm, Phoenix | Dagmar Haase, Berlin | Dominique Hes, Melbourne | Kristina Hill, Berkeley | Madhusudan Katti, Raleigh | Francois Mancebo, Paris | Clifford Ochs, Oxford | Steward Pickett, Poughkeepsie | Stephanie Pincetl, Los Angeles | Rob Pirani, New York | Richard Register, Berkeley | Eric Sanderson, New York | Alexis Schaffler, Berkeley/Johannesburg/Cape Town | Vivek Shandas, Portland | David Simon, Gothenburg | Jane Toner, Melbourne | Yolanda van Heezik, Dunedin | Ken Yeang, Kuala Lumpur

Who should have access to the myriad benefits of ecosystem services and urban nature? Everyone. Does everyone? No. What now?

Do we truly believe in the benefits of ecosystem services? If so, then who should enjoy these benefits? The answer is self-evident: everyone. But do all city residents around the world currently enjoy these benefits? No. What is the answer to this challenge? Is it just about building more green infrastructure? Building smarter? Being clear about “ecosystems for whom?” Or perhaps something more radical is needed—a fundamental reinvention of our economies?

…with contributions from: Isabelle Michele Sophie Anguelovski, Barcelona | Georgina Avlonitis, Cape Town | Julie Bargmann, Charlottesville | Nathalie Blanc, Paris | PK Das, Mumbai | Marthe Derkzen, Amsterdam | Maggie Scott Greenfield, New York | Fadi Hamdan, Beirut | Nadja Kabisch, Berlin | Jim Labbe, Portland | Francois Mancebo, Paris | Harini Nagendra, Bangalore | Flaminia Paddeu, Paris | Steward Pickett, Poughkeepsie | Andrew Rudd, New York City | Suraya Scheba, Cape Town | Marcelo Lopes de Souza, Rio de Janeiro | Hita Unnikrishnan, Bangalore | Diana Wiesner, Bogota | Pengfei XIE, Beijing

You say po-TAY-to. What ecologists and landscape architects don’t get about each other, but ought to.

In the creation of better cities, urban ecologists and landscape architects have a lot in common: to create and/or facilitate natural environments that are good for both people and nature. And yet, they are still two distinct professions, and so there are ways in which they may say similar sounding things but mean something different. How can we get them better integrated in the service of better cities?

…with contributions from: Gloria Aponte, Medellín | Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos Aires | Jürgen Breuste, Salzburg | Mary Cadenasso, Davis | Danielle Dagenais, Montreal | Susannah Drake, New York | Vero Fabio, Buenos Aires | Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires | Andrew Grant, Bath | Amy Hahs, Victoria | Steven Handel, New Brunswick | Marcus Hedblom, Stockholm | Sarah Hinners, Salt Lake City | Mark Hostetler, Gainesville | Yun Hye HWANG, Singapore | Maria Ignatieva, Uppsala | Jason King, Seattle | Nina-Marie Lister, Toronto | Ian MacGregor-Fors, Veracruz | Jala Makhzoumi, Beirut | Diane Pataki, Salt Lake City | Kevin Sloan, Dallas | Christine Thuring, Sheffield | Anne Trumble, Los Angeles | Mike Wells, Bath | Peter Werner, Darmstadt

What are we trying to accomplish with biophilic cities? What are ambitious goals and targets, and measures of success?

As a design imperative, biophilia indicates that cities are more livable when they have more nature. But is biophilia an actionable driver of design in cities? If so, what should cities have as targets or goals for biophilia? If the aim is to create a “biophilic city”, how would you know when it was achieved?

…with contributions from Pippin Anderson, Cape Town | Tim Beatley, Charlottesville | Lena Chan, Singapore | Ian Douglas, Manchester | Paul Downton, Melbourne | Dusty Gedge, London | David Goode, Bath | Bram Gunther, New York | Chris Ives, Nottingham | Tania Katzschner, Cape Town | Steve Maslin, Bristol | Peter Newman, Perth | Phil Roös, Geelong | Eric Sanderson, New York | Jana Soderlund, Perth | Fleur Timmer, London | Chantal van Ham, Brussels | Mike Wells, Bath | Ken Yeang, Kuala Lumpur

Imagine an “ecological certification” for urban design. What are such a certification’s key elements?

Urban sites get planned, designed, and built. Many are called “sustainable” or “ecological”. Are they so? And who makes the evaluation? We gathered 15 designers and ecologists to talk about ecological design certifications. They were invited to celebrate or criticize existing systems, if they cared to. Mostly they were prompted to discuss key principles and metrics that would make the phrase “ecological design” harmonize the words ecological and design.

…with contributions from: Ankia Bormans, Cape Town | Katie Coyne, Austin | Sarah Dooling, Austin/Boston | Nigel Dunnett, Scheffield | Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires | Sarah Hinners, Salt Lake City | Mark Hostetler, Gainesville | Jason King, Seattle | Marit Larson, New York | Nina-Marie Lister, Toronto | Travis Longcore, Los Angeles | Colin Meurk, Christchurch | Diane Pataki, Salt Lake City | Mohan Rao, Bangalore | Aditya Sood, Delhi

To whom does a city’s nature belong? Is it a common pool resource, or a public good? And who decides? 

Who decides what happens to city spaces of nature? Is it the community that lives closest to the sites? The entire city? Conflicts between these two different conceptions of to whom the “goods” of urban nature belong are fundamental to many urban contestations. Fourteen TNOC contributors describe examples of urban nature as public goods, as commons—or, most often, as intermingling of both.

…with contributions from: Amita Baviskar, Delhi | Lindsay Campbell, New York | James Connolly, Barcelona | Sheila Foster, New York | Phil Ginsburg, San Francisco | Jeff Hou, Seattle | Marianne Krasny, Ithaca | Mary Mattingly, New York | Oona Morrow, Dublin | Harini Nagedra, Bangalore | Raul Pacheco-Vega, Aguascalientes | Michael Sarbanes, Baltimore | Phil Silva, New York | Diana Wiesner, Bogotá

Essays

Singapore through the Eyes of a Young Planner in Manila
Ragene Palma, Manila

How has Singapore created itself as a “city in a garden”? As a Manila planner, my trip there was eye-opening. I live in a metropolitan area that favors a built-up environment, and always viewed green spaces as isolated areas for beautification, or as something held aside until a developer decides to use for more profit. Singapore shows that my everyday normal could be so much more.

Ostrom in the City: Design Principles for the Urban Commons
Sheila Foster, Washington, DC & Christian Iaione, Rome

Ten years ago, we began to explore the governance of the urban commons as a separate body of study—how different kinds of urban assets could be reconceived as urban commons, and later to conceive the whole city as a commons. Where there is a network of urban commons, we begin to see the transformation of the city into a commons.

Seven Things You Need to Know about Ecocities
Paul Downton, Melbourne

An ecocity is about ecological health. It is conceived in aspirational terms because we don’t yet know even half of what we need to know to make the concept real. But the assertion of the ecocity is an article of faith: the idea is strong enough to set development and political agendas, and can be understood by the wider community. Only then can people engage with it and live the idea.

How to Make Urban Green Verdant and Sustainable: Designing “Wild” Swedish Lawns
Maria E Ignatieva, Uppsala

Stockholm, is a famous “green” city. But, ordinary urban landscapes in Stockholm and other Swedish cities were mostly created during an period of fascination with lawns. Research suggests that Swedes like lawns, but many also desire a more biodiverse landscape. So, how can we design “wild” nature in urban environments?

Ecologies of Elsewhere: Giving Urban Weeds a “Third Glance”
Daniel Phillips, Bangalore

Volunteers. Exotics. Aliens. Weeds. Cities are full of novel ecosystems. Should we include them in our definitions of “urban resilience”? A growing body practice says yes. Indeed, new modes of engaging with the urban landscape will not be based on superficial aesthetic concerns or sentimental rear-view thinking, but a celebration of the messy complexities of novel ecosystems, and the active role they will play in the nature (and future) of our cities.

Crossing the Design-Science Divide
Jason King, Seattle

Designers and scientists are different. We think, communicate, and interact with the world in vastly different ways. The challenges are immense, but to expand the potential of projects we need to mediate the disconnect between science and design, building on positive strategies by ecologists and designers to increase collaboration and success.

Restoring Indigenous Trees for Scaling Up City Resilience: The Role of African Millennials
Aliyu Barau, Kano

It is crucial for municipalities in African countries and beyond to tap into millennials to achieve the SDGs. Millennials have the capacity and energy to engage their peers, younger and older generations who look up to their innovative energies, aspirations, and commitment to rebooting environmental wellbeing and welfare. At MR CITY Lab, our approach is practical. University student millennials make contact with communities and introduce tree species into neighborhoods with tree toponyms.

Five Reasons to Conserve Nature in Kampala
Shuaib Lwasa, Kampala

Cities in developing countries have many challenges—poverty; deficiency in infrastructure; high risk to climate-induced. Less literature or practice views these cities as sites of opportunities for enhancing ecological processes that have local as well as regional and global benefits. Here are five reasons why Kampala’s nature, if conserved, can enhance ecosystem services.

Walking on Rivers — Dry Riverbeds as Public Parks?
Sareh Moosavi, Melbourne

Dryland settlements were historically established along flowing rivers, where freshwater bodies sustained the communities for centuries. But this is changing. In most arid regions of the world, cities are growing and rivers are running dry. Global warming and misuse of water resources increasingly leave dry riverbeds in their wake. Rapid urbanisation has left little room for creating new public open spaces, but could urban riverbeds that remain dry for an extended period of time provide potential for new public parks?

World Enough: Tales from the Bottom of the Garden
Katrine Claassens, Montreal

A painted essay with text. Excerpt:
When you drive at night from Cape Town city centre into its suburbs, there’s a scent that hits you as you get to Kenilworth, a sweetness in the air that spills from our gardens into the street. Kenilworth is pretty established, but I remember in Johannesburg, in the 80s, when we lived in the new suburb of Sunninghill. A place where the wildness was not quite bred out yet. The lawns were were still being coaxed out from the veld and paper thorns were a feature of any barefoot venture.

What the Zika Epidemic Means for Gender and Urban Adaptation Planning in Brazil
Katerina Elias, São Paulo

Two years ago, South America was swept up in a public health crisis that affected hundreds of thousands of women across the continent. In Brazil, more than 2,600 children were born with the microcephaly and other health complications resulting from the viral infection Zika. But the end of Zika doesn’t begin with the eradication of a mosquito: it requires a systemic, intersectional analysis to help identify how social, economic, urban, health and other structures shape women’s lives, power, and their vulnerability to climate impacts and access to resources.

Of Flash Floods and a Lost Indian Waterscape
Hita Unnikrishnan & Harini Nagendra, Bangalore

In the weeks prior to the writing of this article, the city of Bengaluru was reeling from torrential rainfall. Effects of this downpour were felt in many ways—flash floods, trees uprooted, lives lost, and traffic standstills. Several lakes breached their banks, while minor rivers like the Vrishabhavati, which have not held water within city limits for decades, came back to life. It made people realize the faulty infrastructural planning of the city. The story of the Dharmambudhi lake serves as a reminder of the fact that disrupting the connectivity of a waterscape can have serious implications.

Where Can I Dream? Eight Stories of Life in Bogotá / ¿A donde puedo soñar? Ocho relatos de vida en Bogotá 
(Essay in English & Spanish.)
Diana Wiesner, Bogotá

In pondering the question, “Who should have access to the countless benefits and services that urban ecosystems provide?”, we put together a collection of eight first-person accounts that portray city dwellers’ dreams. These sketches of life explore both individual and collective human experiences as participants narrate their lives and reveal their innermost thoughts. These acts of remembrance provide a key to human identity and give meaning and substance to daily life.

Can Smart Cities be Smart Green Cities? We’ll See
Gary Grant, London

As yet, there are no smart cities, although plenty of people and organizations are working hard to create them: initiatives, policies, strategies, and some projects, but no examples of cities where it all comes together. In addition, most of us are still wondering what is meant by the term “smart city”. Smart cities are coming… eventually. When they do, it is important that they be as much about nature, health, and wellbeing as traffic flows, crime detection, and evermore efficient provision of utilities.

Reviews 

Designing Urban Nature: The Domain of Ecologically Informed Planners or Landscape Architects?
Will Allen, Chapel Hill

As I opened the handsomely large Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, I was pleased to see a quote from Ian McHarg near the front. Through a conference and now this book, Nature and Cities has successfully advanced the urban nature literature—even for a McHarg disciple like me!

How Large Parks Complete Cities
Lynn Wilson, Vancouver

It would be hard to imagine the world’s great cities without their iconic parks. Large Parks, edited by Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves, helps readers understand the complexities inherent in designing, planning, and managing these often contested public spaces, and I have a greater appreciation of the challenges that they face now and into the future.

Biophilia’s Place in an Integrated Approach to Urban Planning
Mike Wells, Bath

Tim Beatley brings us a useful primer on incorporating biophilia into planning and design in his new Handbook of Biophilic City Planning and Design. Based in part on case studies from The Biophilic Cities Network, the handbook moves the biophilic city concept an additional step in the direction of an integrated approach to urban design.

New York’s Central Park as Muse, as Imagination, as Home
Mary Mattingly, New York

Reading Painting Central Park, by Roger Pasquier, convinced me that, although a term usually reserved for ornamental architecture that is out of place, parks in cities are all follies to an extent. Through being out of place they insist we confront difference. Artists who paint the landscape inside of the city are drawn to these differences. With a preface by Amanda Burden—asserting a human necessity to engage with flora amidst urban life—Roger Pasquier writes and shows an homage to Central Park.

Urban Farming for Everyone / La Agricultura Urbana para Todos
Francois Mancebo, Paris

Graciela Arosemena’s intruiging book “Agricultura Urbana – Espacios de Cultivo para una Ciudad Sostenibles / Urban Agriculture – Spaces of Cultivation for a Sustainable City” (with facing pages in English and Spanish) not only considers the merits of urban agriculture, it also provides insight, knowledge and techniques to make urban agriculture an activity accessible to everyone.

 

Half-Earth Cities

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If everyone on Earth lived like the average Melburnian or San Franciscan, we’d need the equivalent of nearly 8 planets. Seven of those planets don’t exist.
In Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, published in 2016, E. O. Wilson made a reasoned and impassioned call for making our human future fit within the boundaries of just half a planet, with the other half given over to human-free nature. He reasoned that unless natural systems have sufficient wildness and integrity to function and evolve without human interference then it was entirely conceivable that the biosphere would be damaged beyond repair, and that its ability to support human societies would cease.

E. O. Wilson is a leading light amongst a coterie of scientists and conservationists “who have argued for years that setting aside at least half of the world’s land mass as off-limits to human enterprise is necessary if we are to conserve our planet’s biodiversity.”  Wilson doesn’t seem to envisage fencing things off with a Berlin or Trump wall, and argues “that the process of setting aside half the Earth doesn’t mean moving people out, but being creative with park designations, restoration, and encouraging private-public partnerships.”

Drawing by Paul Downton

In this essay, I’m not going to reiterate all of Wilson’s arguments (his book is a good read and I exhort you to get hold of a copy), but I am going to accept his conclusion that in the interest of simple survival we can’t afford to use more than half the planet for human purposes. Just half.

From a nature of cities perspective, or at least from the point of view of non-human nature, the Half-Earth concept paints a rather wonderful picture of unspoiled wilderness and rampant, healthy, biodiversity. For those of us inclined that way, the biophilic quotient of the idea is staggeringly high. Assuming that such a goal was ultimately possible, and even before we look at how it might be possible, it is reasonable to ask what sort of cities could possibly fit such a vision. Although they are epicentres of human civilisation and culture and perpetrators of just about every environmental crime on the planet, Wilson doesn’t have anything to say directly about cities or urban systems in his book, so this essay is by way of a tentative exploration of the role of cities in achieving Half-Earth.

Unequal feet

The world’s urban areas take up only 3% of the Earth’s land surface—about 1.5 billion hectares—and half the world’s population lives in one third of that total urban area (see here). So if half the world’s population can live on just 1% of its land surface, what’s the problem?

The problem is that cities have two footprints, created by very unequal feet. The cities may only occupy 3% of the planet’s total land area but they have evolved and grown in areas of ecological productivity and occupy 12.5 percent of that area where they consume 75 percent of resources and produce 75 percent of all waste. One of the footprints is made by buildings and infrastructure that can be fairly easily measured in simple “plan view” (the 12.5% of ecologically productive area), and the other is the ecological footprint that Rees first described in 1992, expanded on and expounded in the pioneering book, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, which he co-authored with Wackernagel in 1996. “Ecological Footprints estimate the productive ecosystem area required, on a continuous basis, by any specified population to produce the renewable resources it consumes and to assimilate its (mostly carbon) wastes” (Moore & Rees 2013), and a city’s ecological footprint can be hundreds of times the size of a city’s physical footprint in plan. The area of London, for instance, is 157,200 hectares but its total ecological footprint is some 250 times greater at 39,500,000 gha (global hectares), an area larger than all the British Isles (31,515,900 hectares)(see here).

Biologically bound

Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we have always been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world.
— Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, p. 211

That cities should be understood as not simply a collection of buildings and infrastructure but as an interdependent part of a larger regional entity is an idea that stretches back to the Ancient Greek concept of the “polis” and was fundamental to the thinking of Patrick Geddes, “founding father of town planning and environmentalism” (Kitchen 1975). Geddes inspired the work of that incomparable writer about cities, Lewis Mumford, who joined Geddes in his advocacy for a view of cities as entities intimately connected with the biological processes of their surrounding environs. Geddes “…recognized the important role of cities in the evolution of culture and maintained that a city has to be understood and integrated in the context of its biological and geographical region” (here).

A century after Geddes’ work this way of thinking about cities has yet to fully enter the mainstream, although change is afoot. Ultimately, the hinterland of cities needs to be regarded as part of their cities’ responsibility as de facto planetary resource managers. The framing of our thinking about cities has to see them in the larger context of city-regions or region-cities but as the Ecological Footprint model makes clear, the hinterland of a city can no longer be regarded as a garland of biology and resources that somehow fits neatly around its built form, but is instead more like globally distributed patches of resources, materials, water and energy connected to the city’s more familar physical form by both obvious and tenuous tentacles of road, rail, flightpaths and electronic communication.

The Eden Project rainforest biome. Photo: Paul Downton.

Roads and buildings

There are approximately 200,000,000 hectares of road surface (paved and unpaved) on the planet. The problem with roads isn’t just the area covered by their surface, but their facilitation of intrusion into ecosystems. Driving 100 kms of 10 metre wide road through a rainforest doesn’t just result in damage from clearing vegetation for the roadway, its impacts are far wider, and the collateral damage from edge effects can spread into the adjacent environment much further than the width of the roadway. Road building and associated clearance in the Amazon provides a classic example.

Every building changes the condition of the place in which it is situated. Buildings modify the climate at a very local level. It’s the reason we build in the first place. Although there are innumerable buildings that don’t work very well or even exacerbate local conditions, buildings are fundamentally about creating shelter. This is why we manipulate material and resources to provide protection from the rain, channel cooling breezes, make shade, trap the warmth of the sun, and keep out the cold or the heat. The built environment can be configured to contain nature too. There are buildings that can produce conditions favourable to non-humans (albeit for human purposes) like the dovecotes that provide a home for pigeons and greenhouses that enable tomato plants to grow in cold weather. The use of glasshouses to create favourable conditions for certain kinds of vegetation and (to a lesser extent) fauna, has a history as long as that of the glass industry and 27 years ago found a kind of apogee in the shape of Biosphere 2, which was conceived as a prototype for constructing an entirely closed complex environment—an ecosystem in a very big bottle.

Advances in materials and technologies have continued to extend the scope of the humble greenhouse to embrace the concept of what might be called “pocket biospheres” across the globe, the most famous example of which is The Eden Project, constructed in a disused clay mining pit in Cornwall, England. The ambition behind these structures is often laudable, with lofty goals. The Eden Project is an educational charity that “connects us with each other and the living world” and proudly boasts that it houses “the largest rainforest in captivity”. It has spawned or inspired similarly ambitious projects such as The World’s Largest Oasis in Oman, where “A collaboration of engineering and architectural expertise has resulted in a botanic garden design that will become the world’s largest eco-park and serve to conserve hundreds of endangered botanic species”.

All of which is wonderful and positive and somehow encouraging, but as E.O. Wilson says:

The surviving wildlands of the world are not art museums. They are not gardens to be arranged and tended for our delectation. They are not recreation centers or reservoirs of natural resources or sanatoriums or undeveloped sites of business opportunities—of any kind.

He reminds us that the wildlands stabilize the global environment which supports our existence and that “We are their stewards, not their owners”.

Terraforming, and the trajectory of evolution

Let’s not be shy about this. We are unabashed planet-shapers—terraformers—and what we do affects the trajectory of evolution but, as Wilson puts it: “There is greatness in understanding the basic elements of human evolution and wisely acting upon the way they are linked”. In Half-Earth he writes optimistically that: “the biosphere gave rise to the human mind, the evolved mind gave rise to culture, and culture will find the way to save the biosphere”(p.50).

This echoes Vladimir Vernadsky’s proposition that “Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere”. This third phase of the Earth’s development (the other two being its geosphere and biosphere) he called the “noosphere”: the sphere of human thought. An atheist, Vernadsky shared the earliest use of the term noosphere with the radical Roman Catholic priest Tailhard de Chardin, who popularised the concept of the noosphere but related it to theology and his conviction that evolution was leading through complexity and consciousness to an ultimate “Omega Point”.

De Chardin’s ideas exerted a powerful influence on architect Paolo Soleri who interpreted complexity as key to the making of “arcologies”extraordinarily compact cities intended to maximise the growth of human consciousness and cultural endeavour whilst minimising the physical impact of the cities on the biosphere. His arcology designs provided the first detailed propositions for a kind of extreme urban solution that has had a formative influence on the development of the ecocity idea, particularly in its insistence on compact built form, the exclusion of motor vehicles and trenchant criticisms of suburbanism. Contained within their clearly defined physical boundaries, Soleri’s arcologies were designed to have (at least notionally) a minimal impact on wild nature and were conceived of as being instrumental in advancing human evolution towards the Omega Point. The idea that cities and evolutionary processes have some connection has a history dating back over a century when one of the finest and most influential sages in the realm of urban theory, Patrick Geddes, published his seminal work on Cities in Evolution in 1915.

Ecocities

Although ecocities have entered the lexicon and their influence on core ideas about what is loosely called ‘sustainable’ urbanism is undeniable, ecocity pioneer Richard Register (who became an advocate for what he came to call ecocities after being strongly influenced by Soleri) points out that their role as evolutionary agents has been almost completely neglected, that it rarely, if ever, surfaces in discussions about ecocity ideas and that evolutionary ideas are essentially absent from mainstream urban systems discourse (personal communication).

Evolution, it should be remembered, is not necessarily about upward and forward movement or progressive change. We can diminish ourselves and our world as readily as we might enhance it. It is potentially of great importance to understand that the making of cities is integral to whatever evolutionary process it is that humans are part of. The idea of Half-Earth is about understanding that humans have the power to influence the course of evolution and to make or break the ecological integrity of the planet in its presently evolved state. Failure to act on that understanding is to betray our species and diminish the potential for our collective future. The role of cities in evolution has to be embraced as a core concern in any proposal for achieving Half-Earth.

Reality and inhuman ethics

The reality of the world’s cities is so far removed from what the Half-Earth vision demands that it may simply seem preposterous to suggest that they could ever be changed sufficiently to fit on half a planet, but the picture of reality described by that vision demands that the operational values of human society and the cities that reflect those values simply must change if we are to have any hope of survival as a civilised species.

We now have some remarkable tools that might help us achieve the goal of Half-Earth Cities, including some that promise to do our thinking for us—but there are dangers in believing that we can’t solve our planet’s problems without relying on powerful advanced technology. Imagine, for instance, that we might create artificial intelligence that is charged with the task of protecting the biosphere from further degradation and returning it to ecological health. Given all the available information and a few basic algorithms to do with energy, resources, food, water and population, it wouldn’t take long for the AI to conclude that the planet would be better off without us. So if we want to stay a few steps ahead of our own cleverness, we need to work towards a healthy half planet that can support civilisation without relying on the technologies developed for the wealthy few (which depend upon a largely exploitative use of collective social and intellectual skills) but with the spirit and courage of the wise, and the wisdom that has also evolved, and continues to evolve from social exchange and shared experience.

Ecological footprint of the world’s cities

Drawing by Paul Downton

If everyone on Earth lived like the average Melburnian or San Franciscan we’d need the equivalent of nearly 8 planets just to maintain that level of consumption. Seven of those planets don’t exist. This slightly terrifying statistic is relatively well understood in the sustainable design community where the idea of One Planet Living (OPL)has significant traction. What is less well understood is that even though a full and genuine shift to OPL would be a radical and disruptive departure from business-as-usual, it would be nowhere near enough of a departure to ensure the long-term survival of civilisation.

The metric of the ecological footprint is based on data drawn from what has actually happened. It is, as my colleague Sharon Ede says, “looking in the rear view mirror”. Ecological footprint is about areas being used for productive purposes and does this well. This gives the EF substance and makes it a defensible and credible measure of resource use and its associated impacts but the metric does not include an area for the wild. To accommodate the Half-Earth scenario, OPL based on the EF metric needs to be recast as “Half-Planet Living”. The measure moves as the EF is based on a snapshot in time. As the population increases the amount of land available per person decreases. The world’s land area is 51 billion hectares. Writing in 2013, Moore & Rees observed that “There are only 11.9 billion hectares of productive ecosystem area on the planet. If this area were distributed equally among the 7 billion people on Earth today, each person would be allocated just 1.7 global hectares (gha) per capita. (A global hectare represents a hectare of global average biological productivity.)” ( p. 41 Jennie Moore and William E. Rees, Getting to One-Planet Living; Chapter 4 in State of the World 2013 Is Sustainability Still Possible? The Worldwatch Institute)

With the population now at 7.6 billion the area reduces to less than 1.57 gha per capita. UN mid-range estimates are that the world population is likely to reach 11.2 billion by the end of the century; that would result in an EF of little more than 1 gha per capita. Sharon Ede notes that the Global Footprint Network (who crunch the EF data) “deliberately choose conservative accounting methods (like not including a requirement for ecological space for other species) so they are not inflating the figures i.e., the Footprint is a huge underestimate of the impact we are having…” (email communication 20 April 2017). An assumption that we need to allow for a population of 12 billion would seem to be a reasonable basis for serious long-term planning, so that’s essentially 1 gha per person.

But the EF metric hasn’t included the wild. The basis for long-term planning of resource distribution should reflect the wild and if we accept the work of EO Wilson et al, then that 1 gha per person must be reduced to 0.5 gha. That’s almost inconceivable, but the figures do not lie.

Within this extremely constricted framework the idea of creating cities as models of miniaturisation, complexity and density makes a lot of sense and almost the only concepts developed in the modern era that address that challenge are those generated by Soleri and those extremely few people who have followed in his footsteps. If the noosphere is a real thing and if further densification and complexification are essential to human progress, then the goal of developing Half-Earth Cities becomes both a means of survival and a way to advance the evolution of our very curious species.

One gigahectare each

How do we fit cities into this? If we work with the 1 gha per person, to keep it simple, then the entire city plus the region with which it is interdependent must be planned on the basis of that figure—half of which needs to be wild. To use a very rule-of-thumb basis, a city of 1 million can only occupy 500,000 hectares for all its needs and at the same time be responsible for ensuring the continued existence of 500,000 hectares of wild land. Now, at least, we can see our way to a conceptual model for what a Half-Earth City needs to do and how much physical space it can occupy in order to obtain all of its resources and food within planetary limits. More than their cities’ purely physical dimensions, the ecological footprints of cities have to be massively reduced to fit the productive capacity of the planet and make it possible to sustain half the world in a wild state. For instance, if Melbourne’s EF is currently around 8 gha, then for it to become a Half-Earth city it would need to cut its EF to one-sixteenth, or barely 6 percent of what it is now.

This gives us a design goal. This means we can start working on this massive challenge right now. It will take decades to achieve something as confronting and enormous as Half-Earth Living but at least we can get started. It is through our cities that we act on the world, it is there that we realise the potential to shrink our footprints and manage the protection of wilderness. And, done right, the design of our urban systems can mesh with the work of Half-Earth scientists who are already designing ways to achieve an ecological safety net for the planet.

Paul Downton
Melbourne

On The Nature of Cities

Read This! For Every Continent, Must-Read and Continent-Specific Books About Cities

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Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
AFRICABooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Africa.
ASIABooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Asia, from the Middle East to Japan.
AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALANDBooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Australia and New Zealand.
EUROPEBooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Europe.
LATIN AMERICABooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Latin America, from Mexico through South America..
NORTH AMERICABooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in The United States and Canada.
Isabelle Anguelovski, BarcelonaUrbanismo en el Siglo XXI, by Jordi Borja i Seabastiá and Zaida Martínez
Will Allen, Chapel HillGreen Metroplis, by David Owen
Pippin Anderson, Cape TownFynbos: Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation of a Megadiverse Region, Allsopp, N., Colville, J., and Verboom, G.A.(Eds.)
Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos AiresImágenes del Espacio Público. Paisaje, ciudad y arquitectura, una historia cultural de Buenos Aires. 1880 – 1910, by Mirás Marta
Gina Avlonitis, Cape TownGrowing Together – Thinking & Practice of Urban Nature Conservators, by Bridget Pitt and Therese Boulle
Xuemei Bai, Canberra王如松:《高效、和谐–城市调控原理与方法, Efficiency and Harmony: Principles and methods of urban system regulation and control, by Rusong Wang
Stephan BarthelLiving cities – an anthology in urban environmental history, by Mattias Tegnér and Sven Lilja
Adrian Benepe, New YorkMotherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem
Nathalie Blanc, ParisThe Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa
Timothy Bonebrake, Hong KongThe Ecology of a City and its People: The Case of Hong Kong, by S. Boyden, S. Millar, K. Newcombe, and B. O’Neill
Carmen Bouyer, New YorkMannahatta: A Natural History of New York City by Eric Sanderson
Rebecca Bratspies, New YorkThe Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Eduardo Brondizio, BloomingtonRainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon, by J. Browder and G. Godfrey
Steve Brown, SydneyStories from the Sandstone: Quarantine Inscriptions from Australia’s Immigrant Past, by Peter Hobbins, Ursula K Frederick and Anne Clarke
Lindsay Campbell, New York The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change, by Dorceta Taylor
Katrine Claassens, Cape TownWelcome to our Hillbrow, by Phaswane Mpe
Lorenzo Chelleri, L’AquilaLa Cittá nella storia d’Europa, by Benevolo Leonardo
Katie Coyne, AustinRubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown
Bharat Dahiya, BangkokThe State of Asian Cities 2010/11
PK Das, MumbaiAnil Agarwal Reader, volume-1,2& 3. Pratap Pandey and Sunita Narain (Eds.)
Marcelo de Souza, Rio de Janeiro O espaço dividido: Os dois circuitos da economia urbana dos países subdesenvolvidos, by Milton Santos
Anna Dietzsch, São PauloA Cidade Polifonica – Ensaio sobre a antropologia da comunicação urbana, By Massimo Canevacci
Meredith Dobbie, VictoriaThe Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, by Tim Flannery
Ian Douglas, ManchesterSustainable Urban Environments: An Ecosystem Approach, Ellen van Bueren, Hein van Bohemen, Laure Itard & Henk Visscher (Editors) 2012
Paul Downton, MelbourneGreen Urbanism Down Under: Learning from Sustainable Communities in Australia, by Timothy Beatley and Peter Newman
Ana Faggi, Buenos AiresPlanificar la Ciudad. Estrategias para intervenir territorios en mutación, by Guillermo Tella
Martha Fajardo, BogotaShaping Terrain: City Building in Latin America 2016 René Davids (Ed.)
Emilio Fantin, BolognaL’architettura del tempo. La città multimediale, by Sandra Bonfiglioli
Richard T. T. Forman, BostonUrban Ecology: Science of Cities, by Richard T. T. Forman
Sheila Foster, New YorkPowerbroker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro
Niki Frantzeskaki, RotterdamNature-Based Solutions to Climate Change Adaptation, Nadja Kabisch, Horst Korn, Jutta Stadler and Aletta Bonn (eds.)
David Goode, BathThe Unnoficial Countrysid, by Richard Mabey
Gary Grant, LondonEcoUrbanismo, by Miguel Ruano
Amy Hahs, BallaratLandprints. Reflections on Place and Landscape, by George Seddon
Haripriya Gundimeda, MumbaiA Place in the Shade: The New Landscaoe and other Essays, by Charles Correa
Fadi Hamdan, BeirutUrban Development in the Muslim World, Hooshang Amirahmadi and Salah El-Shakhs (Eds.)
Steven Handel, New BrunswickA Natural History of New York City, by John Kieran
Ursula K. Heise, Los AngelesNew York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Mathieu Hélie, MontrealThe Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler
Cecilia Herzog, Rio de JaneiroBrasil, Cidades – Alternativas Para a Crise Urbana [in Portuguese], by Hermínia Maricato
Mark Hostetler, GainesvilleThe Green Leap A Primer for Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development, by Mark Hostetler
Mike Houck, PortlandThe Last Landscape, by William H. Whyte
Christian Iaione, RomeEuropean Cities, by Patrick Les Galés
Alpana Jain, DelhiCelebrating Public Spaces of India by Archana Gupta and Anshuman Gupta
Maggie Lin, Hong KongCommunity Design: Reimagining “community”, beyond space, but human connections, by Yamazaki Ryo
Nina-Marie Lister, TorontoThe Granite Garden by Anne Whiston Spirn
Shuaib Lwasa, KampalaUrbanisation, Urbanism and Urbanity in an African City: Home spaces and House Cultures, by Paul Jenkins
Patrick Lydon, SeoulJust Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan, by Azby Brown
Ian MacGregor-Fors, XalapaAportes a la Ecología Urbana de la Ciudad de México [Contributions to the urban ecology of Mexico City], by Eduardo Rapoport and Ismael R. López-Moreno
Anjali Mahendra, DelhiUrbanisation in India: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Way Forward”, by Isher Judge Ahluwalia, Ravi Kanbur and P.K. Mohanty
Mahim Maher, KarachiKarachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, by Laurent Gayer
Jala Makhzoumi, BeirutMuqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldun
François Mancebo, ParisLa Ville san Qualités, by Isaac Joseph
Rob McDonald, WashingtonThe Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler
Juliana Montoya, BogotáLos árboles se toman la ciudad, El proceso de modernización y la transformación del paisaje en Medellín, 1890-1950, by Diego Alejandro Molina Franco
Harini Nagendra, BangaloreFinding Forgotten Cities: How The Indus Civilization Was Discovered by Nayanjot Lahiri
Peter Newman, PerthPlanning Boomtown and Beyond Sharon Biermann, Doina Olaru and Valeria Paul (Eds.)
Charles H. Nilon, ColumbiaFitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, by William Bunge
Raul Pacheco-Vega, AguascalientesWater and Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico, by Veronica Herrera
Susan Parnell, Cape TownHow to Steal a City, by Crispin Oliver
Daniel Phillips, BangaloreNature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future, by Harini Nagendra
Steward Pickett, PoughkeepsieThe Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920-1960, by Light, Jennifer S.
Stephanie Pincetl, Los AngelesNature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon
Rob Pirani, New YorkNature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon
Jose Puppim, Rio de JaneroConfidência do Itabirano ( Confidences of an “Itabirano”) A Poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Toby Query, PortlandBlack Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors by Carolyn Finney
Mohan Rao, BangaloreThe New Landscape, by Charles Correa
Debra Roberts, DurbanZoo City, by Lauren Beukes
Mary Rowe, TorontoEmergence: the connect lives of cities, software and ants., by Steven Berlin Johnson
Luis Sandoval, San José Land Use Change in Costa Rica: 1966-2006, as influenced by social, economic, political, and environmental factors, by Joyce, A. T.
Oliver Scheffer, ParisCities and Forms, by Serge Salat
Karen Seto, New HavenNihon No Toshi, by Pradyumna Prasad Karan and Kristin Eileen Stapleton
Huda Shaka, DubaiPlanning Middle Eastern Cities, Yasser Elsheshtawy (Ed.)
Laura Shillington, Managua & MontrealReclaiming Indigenous Planning, Ryan Walker, Ted Jojola and David Natcher (Eds.)
David Simon, Gothenburg Climate Change at the City Scale; Impacts, Mitigation and Adaptation in Cape Town, Anton Cartwright, Susan Parnell, Gregg Oelofse and Sarah Ward (Eds.)
Kobie Brand, Michelle Preen, Thea Buckle, Jessica Kavonic, and Meggan Spires, The State of African Cities 2014: Re-imagining sustainable urban transitions
Keijiro Suzuki, Yamaguchi 神山プロジェクトという可能性（〜地方創生、循環の未来について〜）、NPO法人グリーンバレー（日本語) Possibility of Kamiyama Project (~Regional Revitalization, for the future of sustainability~), by NPO GREEN VALLEY
Jay Valgora, New York Views and Viewmakers of Urban America: Lithographs of Towns and Cities in the United States and Canada, Notes on the Artists and Publishers, and a Union Catalog of Their Work, 1825-1925, by John W. Reps
Chantal van Ham, Brussels Making Urban Nature, by Piet Vollaard, Jacques Vink and Niels de Zwarte
Yolanda van Heezik, Dunedin Tāone tupu ora: Indigenous knowledge and sustainable urban design, Stuart, K., & Thompson-Fawcett, M. (Eds.)
Mike Wells, Bath Nature in Towns and Cities, by David Goode
Diana Wiesner, Bogotá Naturaleza Urbana. plataforma de experiencias, edited by María Angélica Mejía
Pengfei XIE, Beijing 社區設計 by 山崎亮 History of Chinese Urban Planning 中国城市规划史, by Wang Dehua（汪德华）
Lorena Zárate, Mexico CityJueces y conflictos urbanos en América Latina, Antonio Azuela y Miguel Ángel Cancino (Eds.)
David Maddox

about the writer
David Maddox

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

In 2016 we  assembled a list of 90 must-reads on cities suggested by a diverse group of TNOC contributors—a nature of cities reader’s digest.

This year we asked 90 TNOC contributors for a single must-read book on urbanism from a specific continent.  From a diverse set of TNOC contributors, we asked: from your world, discipline, or point of view, if a person were interested in urbanism on a particualr continent, what should they read? The book has to be really about that continent, not a general book about urbanism that happens to apply to the continent. For example, Death and Life of Great American Cities certainly is relevant all over, but it isn’t specifically about Asian cities. The people recommending these books are either from the contents they are recommending for, or work there extensively.

The recommendations are as wide-ranging as the TNOC community, from many points of view, and from around the world. They are a reflection of the breadth of thought that cities need, and they speak to the specific and sometimes unique needs of different parts of the world.

What we have created here is a remarkable and diverse reading list. You will likely think of other essential works yourself, and when you do, leave them here as a comment. There is a rich conversation to experience simply by exchanging ideas on great books.

The list below could serve as a wonderful primer for courses or other gatherings. You can download the entire list as a PDF here.

You can download the last year’s global list as a PDF here.

Check out these titles at your local, corner bookstore. But if you choose to buy one of these titles online, please click here to go to Amazon. Some of the sales price will benefit TNOC.

Get busy.

—David Maddox

AFRICA

Gina Avlonitis, Cape Town

Growing Together: Thinking & Practice of Urban Nature Conservators 
by Bridget Pitt & Therese Boulle
2016

This is a beautifully presented book that gives sincere, first-hand, and humanity-filled insights into the successes and failures of community-development-oriented urban nature conservation in Cape Town. Although it isn’t a theoretical book, it does delve into some of the theory of collaborative management while striking a good balance with offerings of practical experience and solutions on a range of topics: from mapping socio-ecological systems to issues of leadership; from collaborative learning to growing community and passion; from ‘putting food on the table’ to issues of buy-in and access. The case studies and experiences may be Cape Town based, but the book is definitely relevant and a valuable resource for anyone wishing to engage in community driven nature conservation in other contexts.
Buy the book.

Pippin Anderson, Cape Town

Fynbos: Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation of a Megadiverse Region
Edited by N. Allsopp, J. Colville, and G.A. Verbose
2014

I was raised academically as a botanist and as a result my go-to text at the start of any project will always be “Fynbos: Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation of a Megadiverse Region”. This is a second edition and follows nicely on from the first, and to my delight the new edition has a chapter that directly  engages with the role of people and even urban form in the Fynbos biome, titled, People, The Cape Floristic Region, and Sustainability. I think as an urban ecologist my starting point is always the original biophysical template and this book is state of the art with respect to explaining the original vegetation type of the region, the underlying soils and the other factors determining the physical environment.
Buy the book.

Kobie Brand, Thea Buckle, Jessica Kavonic, Michelle Preen & Meggan Spires, Cape Town

The State of African Cities 2014: Re-imagining sustainable urban transitions
2014

This report takes an in-depth look at the opportunities and challenges experienced in African cities, and argues for a bold re-imagining of prevailing models in order to steer ongoing transitions towards greater sustainability based on a thorough review of all available options. The report interrogates what innovative responses are possible in response to the already daunting urban challenges faced in Africa, which are being exacerbated by vulnerabilities and threats associated with climate and environmental change.
Buy the book.

Katrine Claassens, Montreal

Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa
by Phaswane Mpe
2011

Welcome to our Hillbrow provides a poignant description of life in post-apartheid Hillbrow, a neighbourhood in central Johannesburg. We follow the life of Refentše Morrow, a student living in the dirty and unforgiving but yet always alluring city. The novel could have easily been a pastoral lament, filled as it is with references to Refentše’s rural roots in the village of Tiragalong, but the countryside remains a place of unease offering no real respite from Hillbrow’s gritty realities.
Buy the book.

Nadja Kabisch, Berlin

Urban Vulnerability and Climate Change in Africa: A Multidisciplinary Approach
by Pauleit, St., Coly, A., Fohlmeister, S., Gasparini, P., Jorgensen, G., Kabisch, S., Kombe, W., Lindley, S., Simonis, I., Kumelachew, Y. (Eds.)
2015

This book is a must read because, to my knowledge, it is one of the first that presents very concrete methodological approaches and in-depth strategies on the assessment and on how to deal with climate change and urbanisation induced challenges in an African urban context. This context is in so many dimensions different from the context we know from the western developed world. The most interesting is, that related challenges are addressed in case studies such as Dhar es Salam, Tansanina,  with multi-method approaches, including modelling, GIS techniques but also household questionnaires and qualitative interviews to address not only the challenges for a sustainable urban land development but also social vulnerability.
Buy the book.

Shuaib Lwasa, Kampala

Urbanisation, Urbanism and Urbanity in an African City: Home spaces and House Cultures
by Paul Jenkins
2013

This book is a great piece that highlights the everyday experiences of homemaking and space configuration in peri-urban areas inMaputo. Although it focus on Maputo, the text resonates with many African Cities particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. The book raises the notion of building the city from below and the importance of socio-cultural agency that starts from a non normative perspective about African cities. The book underscores how homemaking is shaped by the social systems and a non-structured system of urban governance in which ideal principles exist but often pushed back by the social cultural uniqueness of the place.
Buy the book.

Susan Parnell, Cape Town

How to Steal a City: The Battle for Nelson Mandela Bay: An Inside Account
by Crispian Oliver
2017

On the imperative of protecting strong and robust local states that can withstand the corrosion of corruption that undermine the public good and the benefit of carefully constructed  municipal capacity designed to protect people and planet under conditions of rapid urbanisation.
Buy the book.

Elisabeth Peyroux, Paris

New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times
by AbdouMaliq Simone, Edgar Pieterse
2017

It is a very imaginative, thought-provoking book about how to engage with the “make-shift” character of African (and Asian) cities both within and beyond the boundaries of our knowledge. It connects the practices of everyday life and behavior to current forms of “governing the urban”, acknowledging the need to re-describe the cities along a a multiplicity of story lines. It shows how African (and Asian) urban residents address many possible futures at once.
Buy the book.

Debra Roberts, Durban

Zoo City
by Lauren Beukes
2010

It is a science fiction novel that crafts an alternative a view of one of Africa’s most complex and significant cities. It speaks to exclusion and dispossession in defining the quality of urban lives  and the strong links between the human and natural spirit in defining the essence of an African city.
Buy the book.

David Simon, Gothenburg

Climate Change at the City Scale; Impacts, mitigation and adaptation in Cape Town
edited by Anton Cartwright, Susan Parnell, Gregg Oelofse and Sarah Ward
2012

The ever-sharper focus of climate/environmental change impacts and coping strategies in urban areas is still heavily skewed towards wealthy countries and cities as a reflection of available resources, skills and relative prioritisation. Although the balance is shifting, urban Africa remains under studied, particularly since the continent is predicted by the IPCC to be particularly vulnerable to some of the most severe changes by 2100. This book represents a landmark as the first substantive analysis of the current and predicted future impacts, along with how mitigation and adaptation efforts are unfolding, at the scale of a major African metropolis.
Buy the book.

ASIA

Xuemei Bai, Canberra

王如松:《高效、和谐–城市调控原理与方法》, 湖南教育出版社, 1988, 278页.

Efficiency and Harmony: Principles and methods of urban system regulation and control
by Rusong Wang
1988

Rusong Wang is an internationally renowned urban system ecologist, whose work laid the foundation of urban ecology research in China, and influenced and contributed greatly to the theory and practice of eco-city development in China. Although not always highly cited in the English literature, some of the concepts and thoughts presented in this book—e.g., cities as complex social-economic-ecological systems—were inspirational in the 1980s and are cutting edge even today. Nominating this book is also a way to pay tribute to a fine urban scholar and his achievement—he passed away in 2014 at the age of 67.

Timothy Bonebrake, Hong Kong

The Ecology of a City and its People: The Case of Hong Kong
by S. Boyden, S. Millar, K. Newcombe, and B. O’Neill
1981

This is a classic book in urban ecology that examines the city from an ecosystem perspective, with humans as a key and integral component of the ecosystem. In the 35 years since the book was published, Hong Kong has changed dramatically in many ways, including a 40 percent increase in population size and skyrocketing rates of consumption—this book provides a fascinating source of perspective in light of these changes. While some of the specific conclusions may well be unique to Hong Kong, the general patterns are largely applicable to growing cities worldwide.
Buy the book.

Bharat Dahiya, Bangkok

The State of Asian Cities 2010/11

The State of Asian Cities 2010/11 features a comprehensive review of the trends in inclusive and sustainable urban development in the Asia-Pacific region. Being the first-ever report on the state of Asian-Pacific cities prepared by the United Nations, it brings together rich analysis of and policy review on urban demographic, economic, poverty, environmental and governance issues. As Prof. Andrew Kirby, former Editor of Cities journal and its current City Profiles Editor wrote, “[t]he report represents a benchmark against which we could all measure our urban research”.
Download the book.

P.K. Das, Mumbai

Anil Agarwal Reader, Three Volumes
Content editor: Pratap Pandey
Series editor- Sunita Narain.
2007

A must. In 1982 Anil was the founder Director of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). Although he died in 2002, he established an Institution that continues to drive the environmental message, as loudly and stridently as he would have done.
Buy the book.

Haripriya Gundimeda, Mumbai

A place in the Shade: The New Landscape and other Essays
by Charles Correa
2012

The book offers a wonderful collection of essays on concerns and issues that are fundamental to india and covers several dimensions like 1)  description of the architecture and the cities and the disconnect with people who use them 2) the role of cities in modernizing India: 3) architecture and urbanization in India ; 4) what cities are about and the role of culture. The book also offers some solutions to the modern problems.
Buy the book.

Fadi Hamdan, Beirut

Urban Development in the Muslim World
Edited by Hooshang Amirahmadi and Salah El-Shakhs
1993

A very interesting perspective on the evolvement of some of the historic cities in the Middle and Near East, including Mecca, Delhi, Tehran, Sanaa and various cities in Syria.  The chapters identify various socio-economic and political factors that affected urban development including the spread of Islam, the age of air travel, colonisation and other interesting urban development drivers.  The book also refers to some important North African Cities including Cairo and other Maghreb Cities in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and how these are influenced by, and affected, other urban developments in the Middle East.
Buy the book.

Keitaro Ito, Kyushu

The City of the Unseen
by Fumihiko Maki

A book about the structure of Tokyo: its history and topography, and analysis from architectural point of view. It is very interesting and worth reading, especially the discussion about the philosophy of “the depth” in the structure of the city.

Alpana Jain, Delhi

Celebrating Public Spaces of India
by Archana Gupta and Anshuman Gupta
2017

Through examples it gives a very good overview of the importance of public spaces in the Indian cultural context and how they are being trivialised by insensitive urban growth.
Buy the book.

Maggie Lin, Hong Kong

Community Design: Reimagining “community”, beyond space, but human connections
by Yamazaki Ryo

It shares bottom-up urbanism initiatives, from parks design to department store revitalization, to bring the community together and weave the social fabric. A very human-centred approach: 社區設計：重新思考「社區」定義，不只設計空間，更要設計「人與人之間的連結」

Patrick Lydon, Osaka

Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan
by Azby Brown
2010

Some 400 years ago, Japan was experiencing severe environmental degradation, and the country responded by keeping their borders closed to trade, and learning how to live, build, and think within the ecological means of the land. For two centuries Japan fed, housed, and clothed a population of over 30 million people while simultaneously creating thriving metropolises, market towns, and highly developed arts, crafts, and cuisine. This beautifully illustrated book gives us a peek into the Japanese life and city building during the Edo Period, and helps us imagine how we might again build cities that regenerate the health of the environment instead of degrading it.
Buy the book.

Anjali Mahendra, Delhi

Urbanisation in India: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Way Forward
by Isher Judge Ahluwalia, Ravi Kanbur and P.K. Mohanty
2014

I like it because the chapters offer useful insights and evidence, while covering a rich range of topics related to urbanization in India. The authors comprise a mix of policy makers, researchers and urban practitioners who have worked on these issues for a long time in the country. Finally, based on conversations with colleagues in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, I think many challenges of urbanization in India are common across the sub-continent, where  the majority of cities are facing rapid, under-resourced, under-serviced, unmanaged urban growth. Many of the lessons offered in each chapter are thus widely applicable throughout South Asia.
Buy the book.

Mahim Maher, Karachi

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City
Laurent Gayer
2014

We were lucky, oh so lucky, to have Laurent Gayer explode onto the scene in 2014. Laurent works at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, but came to Karachi for several years to do this book, after having learnt Urdu in India. I believe his ability to conduct his interviews in Urdu, often shocking his unsuspecting subject, was the secret to the success of this granular examination of the forces that shape Karachi. Karachi has a rep for being the most violent city in the world (never mind that Oakland and Ciudad Juarez also once had a higher homicide rate). The violence was inexplicable; sure, experts had their theories, but none of them satisfied me. (I was working as the head of the metropolitan pages during some of its most violent years). What Laurent has done is explain “us”. His brilliant theory is “ordered disorder” or managed chaos. He explains why Karachi continues to function while falling apart every day. Best of all, it is a riveting read because he approaches it almost like a journalist and tells the story. Ordered Disorder is essential reading also for anyone who wants to understand the history of modern Karachi, how certain factors have influenced its growth, decay, and resilience, and how we often work “through” violence.
Buy the book.

Jala Mahkzoumi, Beirut

Al Muqaddimah
By Ibn Khaldoun
1377

The book, an introduction to societies of what today comprises the ArabWorld, is outstanding because of the holistic, dynamic methodology devised by Ibn Khaldun that incorporates the multiple layers of cities, religious, political, demographic and ecological, gauging their collective impact on the evolution of the human and physical geographies of these lands and (b) because of his emphasis on ‘asabiyyah’, equivalent to modern day ‘nationalism’, as underlying the political failure of successive cultures of the time. His method and analysis is as valid today as it was seven hundred years ago in deciphering political failures and social injustice that plagues the Arab World. http://www.kitabfijarida.com/pdf/91.pdf
Buy the book.

Harini Nagendra, Bangalore

Finding Forgotten Cities: How The Indus Civilization Was Discovered
by Nayanjot Lahiri
2013

The book tells the fascinating story of the discovery of the Indus valley civilization, including the excavation of the ancient city of Harappa, which boasts of the world’s oldest urban sanitation system. Reading the book, you not only recognize the fundamental importance of archaeology and archival work to understanding cities, but also get deep insights into the mechanisms that shaped the structure and function of ancient cities in the Indian sub-continent.
Buy the book.

Daniel Phillips, Bangalore

Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future
by Harini Nagendra
2016

A beautifully written and accessible compendium of research conducted in “The Garden City” over many years.  Beyond just Bangalore, Nagendra sheds light on the social-ecological complexities that exist broadly across many contemporary Indian cities as they attempt to balance the forces of development with their historical legacies and natural systems.  In contrast to the narratives of loss, doom and gloom that are typically associated with accounts of booming megacities in the global south, this book has a refreshingly optimistic tone, revealing the subliminal forces and relationships that are keeping the notion of Nature alive in the city despite all odds.
Buy the book.

Mohan Rao, Bangalore

The New Landscape
by Charles Correa
1985

First published in 1985, this seminal work unpacks the nature of urbanisation beyond the physical. When I read this as a student, it really was like an epiphany! Mr. Correa brings his enormous scholarship to examine the myriad layers of our cities in a clear and succinct manner. Though the book is rooted in the Indian context, even after 32 years, the book remains relevant to every urban practitioner of the global south. The New Landscape avoids jargon and reaches out even to a lay reader bringing together challenges of shelter, mobility, livelihood, informal economy, market forces, governance, and so on. I continue to refer to this classic and would recommend it highly to anyone interested in urbanism.
Buy the book.

Karen Seto, New Haven

Nihon No Toshi
by Pradyumna Prasad Karan and Kristin Eileen Stapleton
1997

A book about the structure of Tokyo: its history and topography, and analysis from architectural point of view. It is very interesting and worth reading, especially the discussion about the philosophy of “the depth” in the structure of the city.
Buy the book.

Huda Shaka, Dubai

Planning Middle Eastern Cities 
Edited by Yasser Elsheshtawy
2004

The book is one of the first to critically consider the modern history of Arab cities, with chapters written by local practitioners and academics.  It does each of the chosen cities justice by focusing on their unique history and context and by considering multiple (social, economic, environmental, architectural…) dimensions of its development.  The editor also provides a useful lens by which to view the cities and societies in the region and their struggle with modernity.
Buy the book.

Keijiro Suzuki, Yamaguchi

神山プロジェクトという可能性（〜地方創生、循環の未来について〜）、NPO法人グリーンバレー（日本語)
Possibility of Kamiyama Project (~Regional Revitalization, for the future of sustainability~), by NPO GREEN VALLEY (Only in Japanese)

As an artist, I was looking for an ideal environment that sustains artistic activities with least interference by capitalist society. I came across an artist in residence program in “Kamiyama”, Tokushima Prefecture, Japan and I was totally impressed by their community revitalization program by creative individuals. They locate in a rural area but they take advantages of the internet in order to locally live closely with nature and to keep up with the global community.
Buy the book.

Pengfei XIE, Beijing

《社區設計》
by 山崎亮
History of Chinese Urban Planning
《中国城市规划史》
by Prof. Wang Dehua（汪德华）
Published in Chinese in 2005 by the Southeast University Press（东南大学出版社）Translated into English: Community Design by Yamazaki Ryo

The book gives a holistic picture of the development of Chinese city planning from the Pre-Qin Period (21th Century B.C.-221 B.C.) to the modern times, with theories and practices of ancient Chinese city planning that had impacted the Asian World, and its evolvement with the influence of modern planning approaches. It helps us to review the original intention of city planning, and to better understand the culture of a city harmonizing man and nature.

AUSTRALIA and NEW ZEALAND

Steve Brown, Sydney

Stories from the Sandstone: Quarantine Inscriptions from Australia’s Immigrant Past
Peter Hobbins, Ursula K Frederick and Anne Clarke
2016

This newly published book is an archaeological-historical investigation of rock inscriptions at Sydney’s former Quarantine Station (1835 – 1979). It charts stories of new arrivals to Australia and the diseases that saw them held at this place for days, weeks, and months. I recommend it for its multiple narratives of the growth of Sydney as an urban, ethnically diverse, and spectacular city from immigration and medical perspectives.
Buy the book.

Meredith Dobbie, Victoria

The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People
Tim Flannery
2002

If you are interested in the landscapes upon which Australian cities have been created, read The Future Eaters, by Tim Flannery (Grove Press, 2002). Flannery, a renowned Australian environmentalist and zoologist, writes with flair and fascination about the geography of Australia and various processes of change in the landscape wrought by a succession of human settlers, starting with the Aboriginal people more than 40,000 years ago. The book is an oldie now but remains a goodie.
Buy the book.

Paul Downton, Melbourne

Green Urbanism Down Under: Learning from Sustainable Communities in Australia
by Timothy Beatley and Peter Newman
2008

There aren’t many books that deal specifically with Australian urbanism, perhaps because, in this historical bastion of suburbia, the whole idea is a fairly recent discovery. The really worthwhile stuff that’s happening in Australia is in the realm of green urbanism and this 2008 book provides a neat and worthwhile exploration of projects that not only have intrinsic merit but are also selected for their relevance to that other example of a sprawling, gas-guzzling civilisation gone wrong, the USA. Its value isn’t limited to American readers though, not least because the dystopian dreamscapes of fossil-fueled, nature-killing urban form that blight the US have been exported worldwide as models of development, so this is a book that can inform our whole planet of cities with practical examples of how to counter the killing machines of conventional urbanism – although the authors, an American and an Australian, are both much too nice to put it in those terms.
Buy the book.

Amy Kristin Hahs, Ballarat

Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape
by George Seddon
1997

This book is a joy to read. Published 20 years ago, but bearing keen insights that remain just as timely and relevant today.  Landprints is as much a celebration of Seddon’s passion for the diversity of Australian landscapes, as it is a critique on the relationships between landscapes, human experiences and how these shape our understanding of place. Essential reading for anyone who wants to examine more deeply the connections between people and the land.
Buy the book.

Peter Newman, Perth

Planning Boomtown and Beyond
Edited by Sharon Biermann, Doina Olaru and Valeria Paul
2016.

Perth has some special books like George Seddon’s Sense of Place written in 1968, which set up planning for the next 50 years and is a brilliant combination of science and literary writing. Planning Boomtown and Beyond has 28 chapters on our city and covers the next 50 years after we realized we are going to be a big city after 400,000 people came here in 7 years during our recent boom. Most stayed as it’s a good city to live in. This book tries to keep it that way.
Buy the book.

Yolanda van Heezik, Dunedin

Tāone tupu ora: Indigenous knowledge and sustainable urban design
by Stuart, K., & Thompson-Fawcett, M. (Eds.).
201

—How can traditional Māori built environments inform contemporary urban development?
—How could Māori values inspire our visions for the 21st century city?
—What can indigenous knowledge tell us about how to create a more sustainable design for the future?

Tāone Tupa Ora suggests answers to these important questions, by bringing together perspectives on a broad range of urban issues, from Māori development to architecture, town planning to strategic growth management. It collects stories of iwi experiences in the 21st century, and suggests principles and theories on which to base change. This book explores indigenous knowledge and sustainable development in New Zealand, reminding us of the importance of connection, respect and the role of spiritual knowledge in understanding how humans have interacted with the land over many centuries. It helps the reader to understand the origin of Māori values and their relationship with the land. It provides a set of principles for preserving culturally significant resources and landscapes to build community identity and participation. It compares Polynesian to European values with respect to housing and site design and shows how indigenous knowledge can be used to bring about sustainable planning and design. The book is easy to read, has useful illustrations and a glossary of Māori terminology.
Buy the book.

EUROPE

Isabelle Anguelovski, Barcelona

Urbanismo en el Siglo XXI
by Jordi Borja i Seabastiá and Zaida Martínez
2004

A critical analysis of the present and future urban development of European cities, through the lens of four Spanish case studies (Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, and Bilbao). The right to a citizen’s centered urbanism is at the heart of the book and highlights the needs to build cities for people based on their individual and collective rights.
Buy the book.

Stephan Barthel, Stockholm

Living cities – an anthology in urban environmental history
by Mattias Tegnér and Sven Lilja
2010

The Living City is about urban envrinmental history within some European cities and with 4 (hi)stories about Stockholm. A good read—read it to understand how we came up to where we are today.
Buy the book.

Nathalie Blanc, Paris

The Book of Disquiet
by Fernando Pessoa
2010
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Not being afraid of being tagged as a nostalgic urban lover, I would argue that Pessoa taught me that to have a good read on cities you needed to feel alive in their midst, meaning to feel powerful emotions, to long for impossible things, precisely because there is nothing there, and to resent yourself for it. You needed to desire what never was, and be dissatisfied at the city’s existence, and feel the potential for utopia. You could feel the numerous flux that impaired, defined the urban spaces and long intimately for them to stop or to be prolonged elsewhere. To paraphrase Pessoa, all these “half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape”, but also bond us with the pulsating urban spaces in a long term companionship.
Buy the book.

Lorenzo Chelleri, Barcelona

La Cittá nella storia d’Europa
by Benevolo Leonardo
1993

Not a recent book, but a fascinating account of Europe in the making through the lens of cities history and evolution. An Italian and European centred version of Lewis Mumford. The book was translated into English in 1995.
Buy the book.

Ian Douglas, Manchester

Sustainable Urban Environments: An Ecosystem Approach
Ellen van Bueren, Hein van Bohemen, Laure Itard & Henk Visscher (Editors)
2012

Urban nature provides multi-functional benefits for life in towns and cities, but has to be fitted into the design and management of more sustainable human settlements.  Europe has many examples of carefully planned low-carbon, resource efficient, livable cities that embrace ecosystem thinking, good governance and effective citizen participation.  Holistic thinking about all aspects of urban infrastructure at different scales facilitates better integration of urban nature into the energy, water and materials fluxes  and economic activities of cities.
Buy the book.

Emilio Fantin, Bologna

L’architettura del tempo. La città multimediale
by Sandra Bonfiglioli
1990

I suggest L’architettura del tempo (for those who can read italian). I appreciate the author’s point of view about architecture and urban planning. She has been working for years on the field of urban time policies in Italy. The book gives an overview of the time-oriented research. Since the beginning of the 20th century, time has been at the very core of the philosophical and scientific thinking showing revolutionary results. Sandra Bonfiglioli has extended this revolutionary force to the architecture and urban planning studies.
Buy the book.

Niki Frantzeskaki, Rotterdam

Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas: Linkages between Science, Policy and Practice
Edited by Nadja Kabisch, Horst Korn, Jutta Stadler, Aletta Bonn (Editors)
2017

With many examples on how nature-based solutions change the urban features and how cities in Europe showcase the benefits to nature and to adapting to climate change. Why to read it? It is about European cities, it is about solutions that provide a brighter future for Europe and exemplify what other medium and large cities can do to enter a pathway for more sustainable and livable urban futures. Simpler: It is a book about solutions not problems.
Buy the book.

David Goode, Bath

The Unofficial Countryside
by Richard Mabey
2010

My choice, published in 1973 by Collins with a new edition by Little Toller Books in 2010, is a seminal work of great significance it demonstrated the boundless capacity of nature to thrive in forgotten corners of towns and cities where a remarkable array of habitats including industrial wasteland, cemeteries, railsides, sewage farms and disused gravel pits support a multitude of species. Mabey turned our perception of town and country on its head.  Though his examples came from personal experience of London the book is relevant in any urban setting. It was a profound milestone and remains a joy to read today.
Buy the book.

Gary Grant, London

Ecourbanismo, Ciudad, Medio Ambiente Y Sostenibilidad, Segunda Edicion (Spanish Edition)
by Miguel Ruano
1998

The case studies are now dated, but this is an important milestone in the process of reconciling the once-conflicting ideologies of ecology and urban design. It has influenced many landscape architects.
Buy the book.

Christian Iaione, Rome

European Cities
by Patrick Les Galés
2002

It’s the most comprehensive but also trustworthy account on how European cities can thrive if they accept the challenge of facing social conflicts in cities through new urban governance approaches.
Buy the book.

François Mancebo, Paris

La Ville sans Qualités (in French)
by Isaac Joseph
1998

Isaac Joseph gives precious insights into how people take ownership of public urban space: In his perspective living in a city is not only residing in it, but also to be constantly re-discovering it, relocating from one place to another, experiencing manifold territories, and finally changing oneself as well as transforming the city itself.
Buy the book.

Olivier Scheffer, Paris

Cities and Forms
by Serge Salat

Cities and Forms is a must-read for anyone interested in the morphogenetic laws of cities
Buy the book.

Chantal van Ham, Brussels

Making Urban Nature
by Piet Vollaard, Jacques Vink  and Niels de Zwarte
2016

Making Urban Nature provides knowledge, guidance, practical advice and inspiring examples on nature-inclusive urban design in European cities. It describes various aspects of ecological design, highlighting many species and biotopes that can be found in cities useful for policy makers, practitioners. The book is of great value to everyone who would like to create space for nature in cities, while improving quality of life, but does not know how to start.
Buy the book.

Mike Wells, Bath

Nature in Towns and Cities
by David Goode
2015

It most beautifully addresses and with passion the nature IN cities and starts at the end to talk about the nature OF them going forward. It rekindles ones love of the former and may start interest in many in the latter.
Buy the book.

LATIN AMERICA

Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos Aires

Espacio Público en Imágenes. Paisaje, ciudad y arquitectura, una historia cultural de Buenos Aires. 1880 – 1910.
by Mirás Marta,
2013

Este libro es el resultado de la investigación en los registros de imágenes, notas e informes del Buenos Aires de fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX por la Dra. Marta Mirás. Teoría e Imágenes ilustran una era con profundas transiciones sociales, políticas y culturales. A través de sus páginas nos sumergimos en los complejos cambios de la estructura urbana y podemos comprender la evolución de una sociedad, su arquitectura y su paisaje, desde un entorno de aldea rural a una ciudad cosmopolita.
ENGLISH: This book is the result of the research in the image records, notes and reports of the Buenos Aires of the late ninetheen century and early twentieth by Dr. Marta Mirás. Theory and images illustrate an era with deep social, political and cultural transitions. Through its pages we immerse into the complex changes of the urban structure and we can understand the evolution of a society, its architecture and landscape, from a rural village setting to a cosmopolitan city.
Buy the book.

Eduardo Brondizio, Bloomington

Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon
by J. Browder and G GodFrey
1997

Rainforest cities brought international attention to the urban transformation of the Brazilian Amazon at a time when the conversation was mostly focused on the expansion of cattle ranching and deforestation in the region. Its publication, along with the work of Brazilian scholars, such as that of Berta Becker, spurred a wave of research on rural-urban networks, urban expansion, and the articulation (or disarticulation) of regional urban centers.
Buy the book.

Marcelo de Souza, Rio de Janeiro

O espaço dividido: Os dois circuitos da economia urbana dos países subdesenvolvidos
by Milton Santos
1979

O espaço dividido (“Shared Space”) was published originally in French by Milton Santos, Brazil’s most famous geographer, when he was living exiled in France. The book was later translated into Portuguese and English. This book is not concerned only about Latin American cities or urban problems, but with the so-called ‘two circuits’ of the urban economy of the ‘underdeveloped countries’ (as they were named in the 1960s and 1970s). The theory of the ‘two circuits’ challenged dualisms such as ‘modern’ versus ‘traditional’ on the basis of a dialectical approach that demonstrated how formality and informality are inextricably linked with each other, showing that poverty and informality are ultimately functional and useful in terms of the capitalist economy and reproduction of status quo.
Buy the book.

Anna Dietzsch, São Paulo

A Cidade Polifonia: Ensaio sobre a antropologia da comunicação urbana
by Massimo Canevacci
Studio Nobel, São Paulo
1993

In a very coloquial and creative way, the Italian anthropologist weaves his personal experience in São Paulo with an anthropological reading of the metropolis, placing before our eyes pieces of a puzzle that result in something like and emotional-analysis of the city through the superimposition of readings by Levi Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino and others. It results in one of the best descriptions of this “non-descriptive” megalopolis.
Buy the book.

Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires

Planificar la Ciudad. Estrategias para intervenir territorios en mutación
Planning the City: Strategies to Intervene Territories in Change
by Guillermo Tella,
2014

El Dr. Arq. Guiilermo Tella examina a la ciudad como el espacio en el que la sociedad se reproduce, en el que los asentamientos humanos se expresan. Así mismo se pregunta de qué modo intervenir en estos complejos territorios en constante mutación.  Ofrece estrategias para reconocer procesos de diferenciación de lugares y generar una mayor interacción física entre grupos que comparten el territorio. Con un ejemplo puntual, el de la ciudad de Lobos en la provincia de Buenos Aires, da muestra de que el planteo de la ciudad para todos  más amigable, más saludable y equitativa es posible.
ENGLISH: Dr. Arq. Guiilermo Tella examines the city as the space in which society reproduces itself, in which human settlements express themselves. He also asks himself how to intervene in these complex territories in constant mutation. He offers strategies to recognize differentiation processes of places and to generate greater physical interaction between groups that share the territory. With a specific example, that of the city of Lobos in the province of Buenos Aires, he shows that the approach of a City for All, being more friendly, healthier and equitable is possible.
Buy the book.

Martha Fajardo, Bogotá

Shaping Terrain: City Building in Latin America
by René Davids (Editor)
2016

Shaping Terrain focuses on the ways existing topography has shaped postcolonial urbanism, showing how physical landscape and local ecology influenced human settlement and built form in Latin America since pre-Columbian times.
Buy the book.

Cecilia Herzog, Rio de Janeiro

Brasil, Cidades – Alternativas Para a Crise Urbana
[in Portuguese] by Hermínia Maricato
2011

This book is seminal to understand housing and social challenges that Brazilian cities face. The author has a critical knowledge about urban planning in the country, and she proposes alternatives for inclusive and just cities.
Buy the book.

Ian MacGregor-Fors, Xalapa

Aportes a la Ecología Urbana de la Ciudad de México [Contributions to the urban ecology of Mexico City] by Eduardo Rapoport and Ismael R. López-Moreno
1987

This book is one of the first attempts to understand the ecological complexity of one of the most populated cities across the globe, providing a solid foundation for the currently growing urban ecology movement. From plants to birds, the editors guide readers to get to know the environmental part of such an interestingly complex asphalt jungle.
Buy the book.

Juliana Montoya, Bogotá

Los árboles se toman la ciudad, El proceso de modernización y la transformación del paisaje en Medellín, 1890-1950
by Diego Alejandro Molina Franco
2015

A través de este libro, se puede comprender el proceso de la modernización de la ciudad de Medellín a través de las posturas y percepciones de ese momento frente a los árboles, desde la experimentación, simbolismo, adaptaciones y la ornamentación vegetal típicos de esa epoca. Este libro es la construcción de lo que conocemos hoy como la naturaleza de la ciudad de Medellín. http://www.universocentro.com/ExclusivoWeb/ImpresosLocales/Losarbolesetomanlaciudad.aspx
Buy the book.

José Puppim, Rio de Janeiro

Confidência do  Itabirano (Confidences of an “Itabirano”)

A poem from Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brazil’s best poet, written in his 1940’s book Sentimento do Mundo (The Feeling of the World) with his feelings about the changes in the world, including his home town. This is one of my favorites poems. The poem is about the landscape changes since his childhood in Itabira, his home town in the State of Minas Gerais, due to iron ore mining (Itabira is home of one of the iron ore’s largest mines operated by Vale, a Brazilian mining company that caused the worst environmental tragedy in Brazil in 2015). The poem, allied to the recent tragedy, shows that development aiming at short term lead to long term problems.
Read the poem here.
Buy the book.

Raul Pacheco-Vega, Aguascalientes

Water and Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico
by Veronica Herrera

In Water and Politics, Herrera analyzes the politics of urban water provisioning in eight Mexican cities. Undertaking extensive (2.5 years) fieldwork, Herrera shows how politicians manipulate water provision in cities for electoral gain. Through in-depth interviews and process tracing techniques, Veronica Herrera demonstrates that elites are able to manipulate how water is governed in cities. Even more importantly, Herrera’s insights can be translated to other Latin American countries and sub-national contexts.
Buy the book.

Luis Sandoval, San José

Land Use Change in Costa Rica: 1966-2006, as influenced by social, economic, political, and environmental factors
by Joyce, A. T.
2006

This book is a very good introduction on how the land use change over a 40 year period in a tropical country after population growth. Additionally, the book makes comparisons between different ecosystems and elevations showing how the land use change is not equally distributed throughout different ecosystems.
Buy the book.

Diana Wiesner, Bogotá

Naturaleza Urbana. plataforma de experiencias
edited by María Angélica Mejía
2016

Es necesario contemplar las acciones concretas de la Ciudadanía respecto al cuestionamiento del papel de la naturaleza en la ciudad. Los gobiernos locales subestiman el poder de la acción ciudadana. Uno de los potenciales más poderosos es la capacidad que puede tener una complicidad público privada para una gestión efectiva de la biodiversidad en la transformación positiva de las ciudades. Este libro se logró gracias a la participación de más de 80 casos en diversos lugares de Colombia.
The Spanish version of the book can be downloaded here. Also available in English.

Lorena Zárate, Mexico City

Jueces y conflictos urbanos en América Latina
by Antonio Azuela y Miguel Ángel Cancino (Coordinadores)
2014

Almost by definition, urban means high levels of complexity and conflict. What are the tools that different social actors (citizens, communities and activists, professionals, academics, public officials, legislators, lawyers and judges) have at hand to deal with them? What are the gaps, contradictions and overlapping between the approaches from social sciences, domestic regulations and international human rights commitments? This book presents a fascinating collage of a relevant current debate about the urban transformation in many Latin American countries and the role of law in creating more just and inclusive cities.
Buy the book.

NORTH AMERICA (not including Mexico)

Will Allen, Chapel Hill

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
by David Owen
2010

I liked this book, because it kind of turns environmentalism on its head. Compact urban centers actually are the most environmentally friendly option for people and nature, and this book makes a great case for that.
Buy the book.

Adrian Benepe, New York

Motherless Brooklyn
By Jonathan Lethem
2000

It is set in and summons up the pre-gentrification Downtown Brooklyn and Gowanus, it all its gritty glory  It features an unlikely protagonist, one of the most memorable private detectives in the business, Lionell Essrog, who is afflicted with Tourette Syndrome, and can’t halt either nerves tics or a steady stream of involuntary, hilarious obscenity.
Buy the book.

Carmen Bouyer, New York

Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City
by EricSanderson
2013

Mannahatta has introduced me to New York City like no other book did. I discovered the very poetic of this place through understanding its ancient forests, groves, rivers, creeks and the widely divers fauna of fishes, mammals and birds migrating through it, at sea, on the land, and in the air, like I just did myself, flying to this new land. In fact, I think every city needs its Mannahatta project, to excavate the wisdom of the land upon which the cities are built, and let it inform how to regenerate and expand its organic forms in the cities of tomorrow.
Buy the book.

Rebecca Bratspies, New York

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
by Jane Jacobs
1961

This book is a timeless love letter to great cities and urban life. It provides a critical reminder of the law of unintended consequences, and a cautionary tale for why theories, especially theories about urban environments must always be reality tested.
Buy the book.

Lindsay Campbell, New York

The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change
by Dorceta Taylor

This book covers a long historical arc, from 1600-1900, focusing on the development of the urban environment and urban environmentalism.  Taylor draws attention to activism, community organizing, reformers, and environmental justice work. She examines persistent environmental inequities and conflicts that shape our urban realm, as well as the role of residents, particularly communities of color, in transforming these systems.
Buy the book.

Katie Coyne, Austin

Rubyfruit Jungle
by Rita Mae Brown

What is urbanism? Rather than speak of a collective version of urbanism – my version is one that thrives on connections between people and place and is focused on the intersectional opportunities design and planning provides. My intersectional identity is a driving factor in my evolving understanding of systems thinking – a concept central to my urban ecology work. I read Rubyfruit Jungle when I was an undergraduate student. It tells a nitty gritty story of my foremothers and chronicles the social dynamic of growing up a lesbian in Florida in the 1970s, the initial escape to higher education (which just so happens to be at my alma mater), and the eventual journey to the “big city” in a time when migration to urban life was common when the anonymity it provided was of more relevance to queer physical safety and long term happiness. This book offered me a window into a historic (and still ongoing) reality of systemic discrimination against people like me and gave me perspective on the cultural importance of urban spaces today.
Buy the book.

Sarah Dooling, Austin

The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir
by Vivian Gornick
2016

Gornick’s memior is located in New York City, and she described how the city became part of her sense of self and the friendships she shares with other New Yorkers. Loneliness, emotional connectivity, the power of space to create containers for life experiences are the main themes. New York emerges as protagnoist, changing physically and socially, as Gornick’s incisive commentary about urban life and the friendships she sustains as she ages intersects with descriptions of urban change more broadly.
Buy the book.

Richard T.T. Forman, Boston

Urban Ecology: Science of Cities
by Richard T. T. Forman
2014

For thirty years pioneering ecologists have explored urban areas, both as a promising scientific frontier and as places crying out for improvement.  Urban Ecology: Science of Cities, the first comprehensive book on the subject, was a finalist for the Society of Biology (London) Book Award and now a Chinese Edition strategically spreads the book’s messages. Dig into the pages, and gain a new vision of life today and tomorrow, with and without nature, for most of us on Earth.
Buy the book.

Sheila Foster, New York

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
by Robert Caro
1975

The Powerbroker is the ultimate introduction to understanding the semi- public, semi-private nature of city building in the United States.  The story of Robert Moses, a bureaucrat who oversaw numerous public authorities and massive amounts of public funding while mobilizing the private and nonprofit sectors, is an instructive but cautionary tale of urban resurgence and subsequent urban decline.  It is a revealing and riveting read about how power works in U.S. cities which remains quite relevant today.
Buy the book.

Mathieu Hélie, Montreal

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape
by James Howard Kunstler
1993

The Geography of Nowhere presents the  real outcome of the utopian ideals of modernist suburbanization as a tragedy, and its eventual metamorphosis into the driving economic engine of all America as a doomed project. It is a prophetic book that future generations will study to attempt to understand the confusing origins of their landscape as they struggle to repair it.
Buy the book.

Steven Handel, New Brunswick

A Natural History of New York City
by John Kieran

John Kieran’s classic 1959 book discusses simply but in detail the vast natural resources and biodiversity of the city to which  most residents are totally blind.  New York is the largest metropolitan area in North America, but even there the pockets of habitat that remain, many “degraded” to a naturalist’s eye, harbor thousands of species and vary in character from marine coast to rocky upland crevices.  The book forces us to rethink the dichotomy between “nature there, city here”  into “nature is all around us; Broadway is alive.”  And if NYC is alive, what about all those other North American cities??
Buy the book.

Ursula K. Heise, Los Angeles

New York 2140
Kim Stanley Robinson
2017

Robinson’s most recent science fiction novel delivers a lively portrait of a still vibrant Manhattan that’s been hit by 50 feet of sea level rise by the year 2140. Buildings collapse, and others rise up. Real estate speculation still exists, Wall Street still exists, Internet celebrities still ply their trade: and the need for social and economic reform also continues, and triggers a surprising turn in the plot.
Buy the book.

Mark Hostetler, Gainesville

The Green Leap: A Primer for Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development
by Mark Hostetler
2012

I think this book is an easy read for interested folks wanting to shift conventional development to alternative development that conserves biodiversity. Targeting many urban decision makers, including developers, environmental consultants, city planners, and the public, this book gives examples and strategies to create functional conservation developments. It explains the challenges and solutions during the design, construction, and postconstruction phases of development that is required to conserve biodiversity.
Buy the book.

Mike Houck, Portland

The Last Landscape
by William H. Whyte
1970

Whyte builds a rationale for protecting natural landscapes at the local, city and regional scales based on their importance to human health, ecological sustainability, economic health and quality of life.  He traces the evolution of open space planning in the U. S. and builds a solid case for regional planning.  While written in the 1960s The Last Landscape is even more relevant today in the face of the need for mitigating and adapting to climate change by making the case for integration of natural systems, what today we refer to as natural and built green infrastructure into the urban landscape.
Buy the book.

Nina-Marie Lister, Toronto

The Granite Garden: Urban Nature And Human Design
by Anne Whiston Spirn
1984

A classic, beautifully written and illustrated, one of the first books to effectively link landscape, ecology and urban infrastructure. As a landscape architect, Anne Spirn reveals how making legible landscape and ecological functions can lead to nature-based solutions that remediate and heal environmental problems of the city.
Buy the book.

Rob McDonald, Washington

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape
by James Howard Kunstler
1993

What I love about this book is that it centers its critique of suburbia around the idea of the common good, and of what kind of world we want to live in. As I research and advocate for more natural infrastructure in cities, as part of the agenda of making them thriving places to live, I find this frame really powerful. We are creating the cities of the future, now, and Kunstler reminds us it is a moral choice, a choice that shows what we truly value.
Buy the book.

Charles H. Nilon, Columbia

Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution
Bunge, William.  1971
2011

William Bunge was an urban geographer who during his years as professor at Wayne State University developed an intensive study of the one square mile Fitzgerald neighborhood.  The project was part of the  Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, an extension course offered to inner city Detroit residents. The study was designed to be a study conducted by Fitzgerald residents to inform the about where they live and also to meet their needs in changing their neighborhood and city.  The book is a product of that study and in current urban ecology terms it is a study of a complex social-ecological system.  It combines physical geography, ecology, urban history, urban sociology and urban planning.   However the book is much because it illustrates the power and potential of urban residents designing and conducting a study of where they live.  It also has an optimistic tone that values the inner city and its residents that is missing from much of the current literature on the ecology of cities.
Buy the book.

Steward Pickett, Poughkeepsie

The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920-1960
Jennifer S. Light
2009

This book is important to me because it uses rigorous historical analysis to examine how ecology was (mis)used as a metaphor by the Chicago School of urban sociology in the 1920s, and how the misunderstandings resonated in policy well into the 1960s. It is also important for reminding us that not only social sciences and urban planning are key bridge professional links for ecology, but also that the real estate industry is key causal factor in the shape of urban areas and, hence, their ecology.
Buy the book.

Rob Pirani, New York

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
by William Cronon
1992

Cronon’s opus shows how urbanization, landscape and economy combined to shape the “City of Broad Shoulders” and the settlement of the continent.  It is a  richly detailed trove of urban environmental history as well as a great testament to the importance of regionalism in shaping cities and nature.
Buy the book.

Toby Query, Portland

Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
by Carolyn Finney
2014

Finney provides a personal and academic history of race and the environment (focusing on African Americans and whites) in the U.S. Although not focused on cities, this book highlights the need for the inclusion of the diversity of cultures and histories when advocating for and designing public space.  As a manager of urban greenspaces, I think it’s essential reading for people that want to create just and equitable environments, in the woods or the urban core.
Buy the book.

Stephanie Pincetl, Los Angeles

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
by William Cronon
1992

Cronon explains how cities emerge from their landscapes and then harness and capture those landscapes to further their development.  He further explains how Chicago, in the case, and the emerge of the railroad, rationalise the landscape and lead to a deep transformation of space and time. Chicago’s development, intertwined with the rise of the railroad, transformed a good part of the great plains and corresponding livelihoods.  The book provided a new way of thinking about cities and landscapes.
Buy the book.

Mary W. Rowe, Toronto

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
by Steven Johnson
2001

Johnson provides a brilliant analysis of self-organizing systems that occur in nature and in human creations, including cities.
Buy the book.

Laura Shillington, Montreal

Reclaiming Indigenous Planning
edited by Ryan Walker, Ted Jojola and David Natcher
McGill-Queen’s University Press
2013

Why do I think that everyone (involved in planning and urban development) in North America should read this book? Urban planning, as most contributors to Nature of Cities have underscored, is a political process. Conventional urban planning in North America is guided by European understandings of development and cities. Yet while many cities in North America were founded on Indigenous trading sites and villages, they have been developed around the belief that Indigenous peoples do not belong in urban areas. Reclaiming Indigenous Planning challenges the socio-political and ecological foundations of conventional planning, asking the questions: what is being planned, why and for whom? These are critical questions that need to be asked, in particular within the Canadian urban landscape where the Indigenous population is one of the fastest growing urban demographic. As the editors of state in their introduction, the book “calls for more critical understandings of what planning entails and how the ideas and visions of Indigenous communities can best be captured in future planning processes” (p. xix). Reclaiming Indigenous Planning is edited volume with chapters on Canada and the United States as well as Australia and New Zealand. Sections I and II will be of particular interest to urban planners. My favourite chapters are Chapter 3, which discuss planning as a tool for dialogue between Indigenous and settler communities, and Chapter 12, which focuses on the power of statistics in planning – how statistics can be transformative. I would argue that this book should be required reading in urban planning programmes across Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. http://www.mqup.ca/reclaiming-indigenous-planning-products-9780773541948.php
Buy the book.

Jay Valgora, New York

Views and Viewmakers of Urban America: Lithographs of Towns and Cities in the United States and Canada, Notes on the Artists and Publishers, and a Union Catalog of Their Work, 1825-1925
by John W Reps
1986

First, it’s hard to find a book for North America, as one wants to give justice to all the countries of North America, which is difficult for a good book on urbanism (unfortunately). This book at least covers both Canada and the United States.  But more importantly it focuses on evidence rather than theory- and uses a denigrated but highly useful art form (lithographs and aerial views) to tell the story of urbanism in both countries at one of its periods of both greatest expansion and invention.  It focuses equally on large and small cities, illustrating greater interest in ambition, typology, variation, and representation— rather than simply scale.  One of the best.
Buy the book.

 

 

 

 

 

Shifting the Paradigm: Art and Ecology Unite!

Art & Awareness, Essay, FRIEC, FRIEC Essay, Stories, , , , , , , ,
Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Artists bring into focus the complexity of our current situation and, in the complexity, there is beauty and potential in uncovering new pathways forward.
The world’s ecosystems are rapidly changing, and urban natural areas are often the first to exhibit these changes. The urban heat island effect and increased air, water, and soil pollution are some of the impacts of the increasing human imprint that affect urban natural areas disproportionately. Symptoms of these impacts are expressed ecologically through the rearranging of biotic communities, soundscapes that emphasize the industrial, and the migration of vertebrates and hydrology being contained and controlled. These issues are complex, and we need new ideas and creative solutions to begin to address them.

Can collaborations between artists and ecologists inspire new ways forward?

Photo of Host Analog by Buster Simpson. Photo: Stephen Davis

To explore this idea, I collaborated with artist Linda Wysong. Together we designed a bike ride field trip as part of the Ecological Society of America’s annual conference in August this year. The bike ride starts at the conference center with Linda and me as guides for the visiting ecologists. Artist Peg Butler helps us interpret our first stop: “Host Analog” by Buster Simpson. Simpson created a “process piece” by taking an old growth log from an ancient forest, brought it to the city and let it be. Sprinklers were installed, but weeding was forbidden. Twenty years ago it was a bare spliced log, and now it is a mini wild forest surrounded by a brick plaza next to a metro stop. Buster, in effect, brought the wild into the city, forcing us to contend with natural processes, changing aesthetics, and re-connecting ancient forests to the city.

We weave down a bike path along the Willamette River, with views of the central city, stopping near the Hawthorne bridge in one of the heaviest used sections of the river. It is also an ecological restoration site. The program I work for tried to establish a native forest in soils that were a composite of rock and concrete fill, with more rock placed on top. What does ecological restoration mean in the middle of the city, and who is the restoration for? People reclaimed this spot with the help of trail and boat dock improvements, but the mix of native plants continues to struggle, as do the salmon that migrate in the river below.

Linda Wysong’s “Shifting Assets” with Linda in center. Photo: Stephen Davis

Our next stop is at Oaks Bottom, a natural area that has been transformed by both Linda’s public art pieces and the forest restoration work that I have been a part of. In this riparian forest, we explore where art and ecology overlap by opening our senses and noticing our surroundings. We walk silently in the forest for ten minutes. Then Linda describes her sculpture “Shifting Assets”, formed from a glacial erratic stone mined from the river. The basalt stone was sliced and layered with translucent acrylic that changes with the sun and the season. Linda’s sculpture creates a meeting spot, a discovery and a conversation with the river. The ecological work transformed the bramble thickets to a young riparian forest, adding structure and shade with the intention of improving wildlife habitat and water quality. Although different in expression, both of our labors speak to place making for humans and non-humans alike.

Our bike ride continues to a local gallery, Indivisible, run by Christine Toth, where we eat tacos and discuss art and ecology. Linda curated the art show featuring Peg Butler, Bruce Conkle, Egg Dahl, Ardis DeFreece, Adam Kuby, Vanessa Renwick, Buster Simpson, and herself. We are joined by Vanessa, Ardis, Peg, Bruce, and Emily Bosanquet, founder of the Art + Science Initiative at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) to discuss where our disciplines overlap, and how we can better work together. One ecologist suggests there wasn’t always a division between art and science. Leonardo Da Vinci sketched and painted, continually updating and improving his observation skills, which improved his art and scientific ventures. Another ecologist found it to be true as well: by sketching a plant, he learned more about its structures and its ecological functions. Artists are often masters at observation and take the time to interpret what they see and feel. Scientists often do the same, but use data collection and analysis to aid in their interpretations. Also mentioned was that artists tend to be poor note takers and scientists poor communicators. By working together, artists and ecologists can remediate their weaknesses. Collaboration could also lead to breakthroughs in sustainability science, new methods to translate and document ecology, and provide a platform for a deeper connection between people and the land. Thinking about all the possibilities, we all agreed that these conversations need to continue and advance into more tangible partnerships.

Lunch at Indivisible Gallery. Photo: Stephen Davis

Art and ecological restoration

I am fortunate to manage a natural area that is dotted with carved stones by Fernanda D’Agostino. While Linda’s work highlights the site’s industrial and environmental history, Fernanda highlights the unseen: the plankton, diatoms, and invertebrates. D’Agostino’s most recent work, Generativity, is an immersive experience, forcing viewers to be inside natural systems, or to acknowledge that they are already inside natural systems. Her art serves as a conduit for interpretation, discovery, and connection to place.

Portland Ecologists Unite!, a local igniter of ecological conversations of which I am founder and a steering committee member, curated six artists to be a part of a panel discussion titled “How art is necessary in ecological restoration”. This discussion took place inside an ecological restoration conference on the opening night and served as inspiration for the rest of the proceedings. One artist on the panel, Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, is a contemporary Klamath/Modoc indigenous artist. She utilizes painting and sculptural art forms to explore the space between indigenous and western worlds. A major goal of Ka’ila’s work is to acknowledge indigenous land, and to perpetuate narratives that embrace the indigenous paradigm of inter-generational community. Indigenous voices are crucial in the dialogue of how to create sustainable and just landscapes. Ka’ila gave attendees a gift of shedding light on the current and historical injustices that have occurred on the land, and inspired many people through her words and her art.

Carved stone by Fernanda D’Agostino near the Columbia Blvd. Wastewater Treatment Plant, Portland OR. Photo: Toby Query

Collaborations between artists and ecologists

Ka’ila is also the co-director of Signal Fire Arts, an NGO that brings artists into wild places, educating them about public lands and creating space for collaboration and art making. Signal Fire knows the value of artists in society, and that they are essential in the struggle to protect our planet. They also have created the Tinderbox residency which embeds artists in environmental non-profits. Those artists then create work that informs, promotes and translates the non-profits work into something tangible, thought-provoking, and creative, such as Holcombe Waller’s collaboration with Columbia Riverkeeper. PNCA has created an Art and Ecology Minor for students “who want to reimagine what art and design can do in the world” and creates student residencies in public agencies. These organizations are merging arts and ecology and creating transdisciplinary dialogue and advocates for a greener tomorrow.

“MNI WICONI Banner” (Water is Life in Lakota) by Ka’ila Farrell-Smith. Mixed-media painting on canvas with hand-twined red cordage. Approx. 72″ x 116″, 2016. Image references Klamath basket design and stenciled texts from Standing Rock Oceti Sakowin camp.

These examples are excellent models, but I would like them to become more commonplace, with artist-in-residence programs in NGOs, scientific conferences, and within governmental agencies. This would benefit the larger society by igniting new conversations and triggering the formation of new partnerships that could prepare organizations to better adapt to current and future situations. It’s a tough sell, using public money to hire artists, but it’s worth it! We are already using public dollars for public art works, why not have artists work from inside public agencies? Merle Laderman Ukeles spent nearly 40 years as an artist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation. She researched the complex garbage disposal system and created art and performances. One performance took over a year, in which she shook hands with each of the 8,500 sanitation workers. In-effect she broke down barriers between districts and disciplines in the department, and was a conduit in revealing the maintenance work that thousands of workers do each day to keep New York City clean.

What can ecologists gain from artists?

Many ecologists have been trained to look for linear associations; e.g., this animal causes the reduction in this plant. But ecology, at its best, is a systems science. Ecologists seek to know how all parts are interrelated, how those connections function with each other, and how the interactions change with different influences. In our current world of accelerating change ecologists need creativity (and artists!) to help discover important components of the socio-ecological system. Ecologists are brain heavy and eye heavy, learning what’s relevant through observation, notation, and reading. We rarely use our ears, our nose, our hands, or our whole body to assess the ecosystem and our effects on it. Creek College is an experimental school that works to empower all senses to creatively connect and explore the natural world. I attended a few Creek College classes, and they were all compelling, in that they changed my perspective on how to see and sense the landscape. Classes included a soundscape exploration with Lisa Schonberg, an indigenous plant medicine class with Clay River, and a movement class led by Hannah Krafcik and Emily Jones. Creek College has created workshops that are exploring exactly what I’m trying to articulate: that transdisciplinary dialogue and information sharing can create a more connected and inspired human community. This inevitably leads to new ideas, new energy, and potential to transform the future.

Adam Kuby is an artist and landscape architect who seeks to add niches and ecological value to the built environment. He has proposed a Peregrine falcon nest cliff built into the face of a downtown building and to convert a rock jetty into a series of tide pools. These are outcomes that most ecologists would embrace, but only an artist could envision and elaborate on the idea. In collaboration, artists and ecologists, along with decision makers can produce inspiring and eco-friendly infrastructure.

There are calls to change the way sustainability science and ecology is practiced in the city. Grove et al. (2016) argue to form project teams in which scientists and decision makers work collaboratively. This approach is great but will have better outcomes if artists are equal players within these project teams. This happens when all parties are paid equally, where there is a horizontal power structure, and where there is space for the artist, scientist, and decision maker to explore ideas without the need for preconceived outcomes. It’s in the exploration that creative ideas can be formed and elaborated. Ideas coupled with science and policy can identify leverage points for change.

Now more than ever we need to embrace artists. Artists have helped change my perspective on how I practice ecology. What I once thought I knew through my studies as an ecologist, I now actually experience. I now notice layers of the soundscape, see multiple values in different plants, and acknowledge layered cultural meanings of wild spaces. Artists bring into focus the complexity of our current situation, and in the complexity, there is beauty and potential in uncovering new pathways forward.

Toby Query
Portland

On The Nature of Cities

Citation:
Grove, J. M., D. L. Childers, M. Galvin, S. Hines, T. Muñoz-Erickson, and E. S. Svendsen. 2016. Linking science and decision making to promote an ecology for the city: practices and opportunities. Ecosystem Health and Sustainability 2(9):e01239. 10.1002/ehs2.1239

Can Smart Cities be Smart Green Cities? We’ll See

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Smart cities are coming. It is important that they be as much about nature, health, and wellbeing as traffic flows, crime detection, and evermore efficient provision of utilities.

As yet, there are no smart cities. I read of plenty of people and organisations working hard to create them. However, so far, we have had initiatives, policies, strategies, and some projects, but no examples of cities where it all comes together in a genuinely city-wide way. In addition, most of us are still wondering what is meant by the term “smart city”. When I read that Bill Gates was planning to build a smart city from scratch in Arizona[1] and that the global market for smart cities will be more than a trillion dollars per annum by 2022,[2] I thought I should find out more.

It is my understanding that smart cities will use internet-connected sensors to supply information that will make them more efficient. Sam Musa[3] defines the smart city as one that engages its citizens and connects with its infrastructure electronically—a process whereby the city becomes part of the Internet of Things (IoT), something for which the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has now agreed standards.[4] Most of the efforts to develop smart cities have involved the monitoring of transportation networks and power and water supplies, with other projects looking at waste management, crime, educational establishments, and hospitals. Stated aims are to reduce costs and resource consumption, with many cities interested in improving communications between officials, service providers, and citizens. There is much excitement over the possibility of cities monitoring activity in real time and being able to adjust service provision, in some cases immediately by remote-control. The hope is that the smart city will be able to adapt more effectively to climate perturbations, demographic changes and the budgetary cuts being made in most developed countries.

As I said in my opening remarks, although the smart city is still more of an aspiration than a reality, many cities have initiated programs and projects. The European Union has smart city projects under the auspices of the European Digital Agenda,[5] and there are similar initiatives in cities in North America, Asia, and the Middle East. According to Boyd Cohen,[6] the top ten smart cities are Vienna, Toronto, Paris, New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, and Barcelona. In North America, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver are said to be leading the way.

I will describe projects from some of these cities in order to provide an insight into current thinking and priorities. Since 2011, Vienna has been setting ambitious targets for the management and consumption of energy, with a strong emphasis on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.[7] Toronto is working with a Google company to create a community in the eastern waterfront that will use connected technology to provide self-driving vehicles and “climate-friendly energy systems”.[8]  In 2014, the Innovation Path of Paris was launched.[9]  This puts people at the heart of the initiative. It is looking for modernisation of the administration for better services and places great importance on ingenuity. Themes include better planning and transportation and more efficient resource consumption. Under the Ingenuity heading, resilience, revegetation and the circular economy get a mention. The authorities in Paris have recently attracted attention for their initiatives to promote urban greening (including the green roof law that turned out not to be a law).[10] However it is not clear how the smart city agenda is being integrated with urban greening initiatives.

In New York City, there has been much excitement over talking lamp posts. Street lamps send messages to smart phones. There is a serious aspect to this: ubiquitous street lamps, with their access to power, could become a useful way of bringing about a range of smart city projects.[11]

London has a congestion-charging system which uses vehicle license plate recognition software. Police in the United Kingdom use the same technology to operate a nation-wide vehicle tracking system. The companies behind these vehicle-tracking operations are also active in developing the sensors and software for the smart city, working with Urban Systems Engineers at Imperial College[12] and other institutions, who are looking for new opportunities to tackle urban problems. License-plate recognition is just the beginning – algorithms that allow computers to recognise things will become increasing important, speeding up the identification, mapping, and analysis of all kinds of objects, living and inert, static, and moving.

Tokyo, which will host the Olympic Games in 2020, has put energy security and efficiency and showcasing technology as the key objectives of its smart city program. One initiative involves the relocation of utilities below ground to allow more space for advertising, emergency information, hotspots and power outlets for pop-up businesses.[13]

Berlin sees the smart city as an interdisciplinary process which uses information and communication technologies to make the city more efficient, healthier, more sustainable, more livable and cleaner. Berlin’s smart city strategy[14] is comprehensive and refers to the need to maintain green space and unsealed surfaces and evaporation, as required by its urban climate plan. However, there is no mention of biodiversity in the city’s smart city strategy (I checked).

Hong Kong pioneered the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in smart cards. Hong Kong citizens access public transport and pay at convenience stores and fast-food restaurants with their Octopus smart cards, which were launched in 1997.[15] Hong Kong also pioneered the use of smart cards for use in libraries, buildings, car parks and other facilities.

The technology has spread to other cities in China and across the world.[16]

The smart city agenda has a strong green emphasis regarding reducing the production of carbon dioxide, through the operation of smart electricity supply grids, increasing efficiency and harnessing low-carbon energy supplies. Nature, however, in terms of soil, water, habitats and species, does not usually feature in smart city thinking. There are themes and initiatives which could bring nature into the planning and operation of smart cities, and I consider some of them here.

Thermal image of living wall, Rubens at the Palace Hotel, London. Smart cities could continuously monitor habitat and microclimate across the whole conurbation. Image: Courtesy of Victoria BID

We know that water, soil,and vegetation modifies urban microclimates. Studies by Akbari[17] and others since the 1990s have shown how shade and evapotranspiration provide summer cooling and winter wind-shielding. Now researchers are placing sensors beneath and upon green roofs and green walls to understand how buildings are protected from the extremes of weather. An example of this is the work in Vienna by Scharf and others on green walls.[18] The next step with this research will be to place temperature and humidity sensors and thermal cameras across whole precincts, to understand how the microclimates of whole neighbourhoods change through each day, through the seasons and extreme weather events.

The measurement of rainwater flows through downpipes, into tanks, and drains can also be added to this capability. City planners will be able to identify places where green infrastructure is urgently needed to improve microclimate and drainage, and the information will allow architects and urban designers and those planning, design and operating buildings and streets to be more sophisticated. Software that can monitor weather forecasts and remotely empty rainwater tanks in advance of downpours in order to avert flooding already exists.[19] Such systems could become city-wide, not only reducing flood risk, but also boosting irrigation rates of roof gardens and other irrigated plantings in advance of heatwaves.

Global positioning system (GPS) technology allows organisations to follow vehicles and equipment like cell phones, but these techniques are also being used by biologists to follow free-ranging and migratory animals.[20] Although there are policies that promote the creation city-wide ecological networks, the planning and enhancement of these networks tend to be based on theory rather than the observation of the movement of individuals of various species through the city. GPS technology could be applied to the study of the movement of wildlife through cities, helping planners to identify barriers to movement and where best to create new habitat.

Less intrusive than tags are cameras (including camera-traps)[21] and listening devices. The ultrasonic calls that bats make, for example, enable us to identify species and to plot the places where bats feed and the routes that bats take when they commute between roosting and feeding sites. Permanently stationed bat detectors can automatically monitor and map calls in real time. This is already being done by University College London in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, for example.[22] It is easy to imagine such a scheme being expanded to cover a whole city, so that habitat networks for bats could be monitored and improved. As well as bats, many other species can be identified by sounds, from insects to birds, to whole ecosystems, so that work of Krause[23] and his natural soundscapes could be brought into the city, in a way that will help us to green the city in a more effective and informed way. Machine learning will mean that the identification and mapping of habitats, species and green infrastructure types using aerial photography, cameras and camera-traps with both visible and invisible wavelengths can be expanded and refined.

In conclusion, it seems that smart cities are coming. However, it is important that smart cities are as much about nature, health, and wellbeing as traffic flows, crime detection, and evermore efficient provision of utilities. Making the city more permeable to both wildlife and people is a process that could be informed by bringing sensors that monitor the movement of wildlife. Climate change adaptation using natural interventions is already on the agenda of many cities. However, the efficacy of green infrastructure types and combinations in providing cooling and absorbing rainwater will be significantly improved through both detailed and wide-scale real-time measurement of temperature, humidity, evapotranspiration rate and flows. Combining this data with maps of hardship and deficiency will help cities to become smarter in the way they prioritise greening efforts.

Gary Grant
London

On The Nature of Cities

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/14/16648290/bill-gates-smart-city-arizona
[2] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/smart-cities-market-542.html
[3] https://www.academia.edu/21181336/Smart_City_Roadmap
[4] http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/recommendations/rec.aspx?rec=y.2060
[5] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/
[6] https://www.fastcodesign.com/1679127/the-top-10-smart-cities-on-the-planet
[7] https://smartcity.wien.gv.at/site/en/the-initiative/start-of-initiative/
[8] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/17/alphabets-sidewalk-labs-to-turn-toronto-area-into-a-model-smart-city/
[9] http://cor.europa.eu/rie/Pages/story-18.aspx
[10] https://livingroofs.org/french-solar-green-roof-law-kicked-out/
[11] https://smartcitiescouncil.com/article/new-yorks-talking-lamp-post-and-what-it-implies-your-city
[12] http://www.imperial.ac.uk/urban-systems-lab/about-us/
[13] http://www.silicon.co.uk/networks/tokyo-2020-panasonic-212535?inf_by=5a1c7539671db811588b48d9
[14] https://www.berlin-partner.de/fileadmin/user_upload/01_chefredaktion/02_pdf/02_navi/21/Strategie_Smart_City_Berlin_en.pdf
[15] https://www.octopus.com.hk/en/consumer/octopus-cards/about/index.html
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smart_cards
[17] https://www.epa.gov/heat-islands/using-trees-and-vegetation-reduce-heat-islands
[18] https://www.academia.edu/6649534/Living_Walls_more_than_scenic_beauties
[19] https://optirtc.com/
[20] http://www.microwavetelemetry.com/
[21] http://popups.ulg.ac.be/1780-4507/index.php?id=11542
[22] http://www.batslondon.com/
[23] https://www.wildsanctuary.com/

Dubai – Arid Lands Innovator

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To endure in the coming century, cities like Dubai will have to lead the world in innovation for sustainability.

We step off the plane at Dubai International Airport—the third busiest in the world—and the surroundings are familiar: faux granite, glass, stainless steel, arrival/departure screens, duty-free shops, food courts, escalators, the usual. Maybe a bit grander than most, but familiar. We move through customs, hit the duty-free for a few bottles of wine (we’ll want them; it takes about a month to get your alcohol-buying license).

Figure 1. Dubai skyline from the Metro train, looking west. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

Then we step outside with our host, and it hits us. Slams us, really. It’s 7 pm and 45 degrees C (113 degrees F). The concrete is still releasing heat. It’s so ridiculously hot; we laugh because we’ve been told that it will be ridiculously hot. We didn’t believe it. We’ve lived in hot, dry places. We’ve been through the Mohave, Phoenix, the Great Basin. This is different. We were warned.

Figure 2. Outdoors in the UAE, it’s all about the shade. Courtyard of the NYU Abu Dhabi campus looking to the city. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

We’ve heard stories of people coming to live in Dubai fleeing after a few months, or even weeks, as the heat was just too much. Literally leaving all their belongings, driving to the airport, abandoning their car, and getting on a plane. Every place has its apocryphal stories.We push our luggage to our host’s SUV, load up, and notice a late model white Lexus parked next to us. It’s coated with several months of fine ochre desert powder—abandoned. Someone has finger-scrawled on the windshield a single word: “Coward!”

We’ve arrived in Dubai during the hottest month of the year, the middle of August. My wife has taken a job here. I’m along for the ride. I want to learn as much about this place as I can in a few weeks. I’ve heard a lot about Dubai: Instant city. Growing skyscrapers like weeds (I count hundreds of active construction cranes). A stunning skyline. Las Vegas of the Middle East. Winter playground. Huge per capita ecological footprint. And also, few natural resources—little energy, water or arable land. What’s going on here?

Figure 3. Construction and construction cranes are ubiquitous in the United Arab Emirates. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

The contrasts between this desert kingdom/metropolis and my squeaky green hometown of Portland, Oregon, are stark. Hot versus cool. Dry versus wet. Car-focused versus bike-dominant. Fast paced versus laid back. Dishdasha versus flannel. A recent commitment to sustainability versus a half-century of green planning. And some similarities: an excellent food scene, five months of perfect outdoor weather, and tourists flocking to shop and play (Dubai) versus chill and play (Portland).In the next few weeks, I’ll visit the Dubai Design District, the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve, the Emirates Wildlife Society, NYU Abu Dhabi, and the Masdar Institute for Sustainability. I’ll talk with new acquaintances, and visit a dozen malls (Dubai has 71), souks, and warehouses to help furnish our apartment and learn my way around. What follows are first impressions of a fascinating place. First impressions are important (people and cities alike strive for good ones), sometimes insightful (our eyes are often open widest in novel environments), but also incomplete (we often don’t know to look for).

Figure 4. Dubai is a mall culture, especially during the hot summers, attracting millions of international visitors to its 71 malls. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

I’m coming in with assumptions. Dubai and its oil-rich neighbor, Abu Dhabi are growing at breakneck speed, in one of the hottest, driest environments on earth. How will Dubai’s 2.8 million residents endure in the long run with virtually no natural water or energy resources, and six months of daily high temperatures exceeding 38 degrees C (100 F)? Dubai’s only significant food crop is dates. Despite ambitious public transportation plans, the city is designed for automobiles (as was Portland, ca. 1960), with urban development spread across the desert in patches. The combination of high temperatures and urban patches makes the city un-walkable. Contrast this scene with contemporary Portland: planned growth, ample water, fertile soils, hydropower, bike-able and walkable.

Everyone says you need a car in Dubai. It’s true. For now. Modern Dubai rose from a modest regional port of 40,000 in 1960, centered on Dubai Creek (a lagoon, not a creek), to a sprawling metropolis of 2.8 million today. Unless you live in one of the high rises near the Dubai Metro rail, which runs a mile back and parallel to the coast, you’ll be driving. Even if you live along the Metro, you’ll probably be driving. Public transportation is present, even ample, but waiting for a bus in 45-degree C heat makes an air-conditioned car an attractive option. If you live in one of the dozens of developments southeast of the main strip, you’ll definitely be driving.

Figure 5. Dubai has just recently begun to name roads and assign addresses. Many Emiratis navigate by landmark rather than address. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

Here’s the reason. Dubai’s basic transportation infrastructure—massive freeways, complex cloverleafs, self-contained subdivisions, malls clustered toward the coast—was designed for the automobile. I’m told that Dubai’s leadership is moving to re-engineer transportation systems. But roads are the skeleton of any city. This will take a while. (On the other hand, things happen quickly here: just mix concrete, steel, asphalt, and money, and voila!)

In the meantime, there’s one feature of Dubai’s road system that really stands out to a new driver: U-turns. Whoever designed the road system had an affinity for U-turns. They’re everywhere. You often have to drive a mile or more past your destination, and then U-turn back to your target. I want to know how this pattern emerged.

Here’s another wayfinding challenge: Emiratis don’t use addresses to navigate; they use landmarks. If you give your native Emirati Uber diver an address, they may get lost. But if you say, “go inland, just past the race track, and then turn right at the Spinney’s Market”—they’ll know exactly where to go.

One thing long-term residents tell me repeatedly is, “When I got here, there was nothing west of Old Dubai. We used to drive 15 miles west through the desert to hit the Hard Rock Café.” The 25 kilometers of skyscrapers along the coast that give Dubai its iconic skyline—that was desert 20 years ago.

Dubai’s unique development, wayfinding, and U-turn dependency trip me up the moment I pull away in my rental car on the west end of the city—and lead to an arresting sight. The city ends abruptly in a confusing nest of freeway cloverleaf interchanges—some still under construction—spilling me out onto the road to Abu Dhabi, and to my right, along the coast, the biggest power plant I’ve ever seen. I later learn that the DEWA Jebel Ali a 10-gigawatt natural gas plant powers most of the city and desalinates the equivalent of 200 Olympic pools of water per day. Dubai makes no small plans. Since I missed my U-turn, I’ll be driving past several exits for the largest deep-water port in the Middle East, until I can back-track.

OK so “driving Dubai” is a new experience, kind of like driving Los Angeles if all the freeways had been built since O.J. Simpson’s famous hejira. Time to try public transportation.

Figure 6. View from Dubai’s Metro looking west. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

I leave my car at Emirates Mall in “mid-town” Dubai, which is connected to the elevated Dubai Metro train. It’s efficient and fast and offers commanding views of the linear strip of coast and high rises, suburbs in the middle distance, and finally, desert fading into the morning haze. Twenty minutes later I’m walking along Dubai Creek (lagoon), visiting the historic district, wandering through the textile souk, and stopping at the historic home of Sheikh Saeed Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai from 1912 until his death in 1958. The home’s courtyard is quiet, modest, and offers cool shade against the morning heat. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is at work here. It feels familiar—the courtyard plan, the shade, the small exterior windows, the cooling wind towers—this Arabic architecture traveled to Spain with the Moors over a thousand years ago giving rise to the haciendas in the arid western Americas.

Figure 7. The restored home of Sheikh Saeed Al Maktoum (1889 – 1958), a cool quite respite on a hot morning in historic Old Dubai. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker
Figure 8. Dubai Creek divides Old Dubai (right) from Deira (left). Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

So this is “Old Dubai” and Deira (on the east side of the lagoon) a modest historic pearling and gold trading port. It’s easy to envision the city 50 years ago: this, and then desert. You can tell where the edge of town was from the jumbo jets just clearing buildings 4 km away. Dubai/Deira rapidly enveloped the airport, built on the edge of town in 1960. Now the edge of town is 20 km past the airport.

Figure 9. Falconry mews 60 km south of Dubai. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

I’ll drive another the 40 km past that to reach the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve. On the way, I pass an abandoned camel racing track now surrounded by suburbs, and later on, the new Dubai Camel Racing Club. It looks like any high-end luxury horse club, just different animals. I also pass a 5-km line of slow-moving trucks waiting to exit near a large escarpment. I’m puzzled. I thought the Al Hajar Mountains were further to the east. I drive on, turn off on a dirt road toward the research center, and run into an unsupervised herd of camels. They nose up to my car to see what’s up before moving on. Passing date palm plantations and other farming operations, I notice in the distance the largest shade-cloth tents I’ve ever seen: 75 meters high, maybe a hectare in area. What’s growing under those? I soon find out when I arrive at the Conservation Center: nothing.

These huge circular tents recently held hundreds of falcons, until Dubai’s head falconer convinced the emirate’s leadership, avid falconers, that Scotland would make a better mews. Peregrine and gyre falcons and their hybrids like it a bit cooler (ok, a lot cooler). The 25,500 ha Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve originated as an ecotourism site for Emirates Airlines’ Al Maha luxury resort. The initial focus was on larger charismatic wildlife, like the Arabian oryx (Al Maha), but more systemic research and conservation now includes the full biodiversity of the region. As with most arid land, much of the wildlife gathers around water. Oddly, there is abundant water here—some it only three meters below the surface, suitable only for agriculture, and non-renewable. A recent study has estimated that UAE’s groundwater may be depleted by 2030.

Figure 10. Trucks lining up to exit Al Ain Roads and climb the Dubai landfill. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

On my way back into the city I take a closer look at that long line of trucks. They’re all turning off near the escarpment that’s in the hazy distance, and all are climbing up a set of switchbacks on this 200-meter-high feature. Then it dawns on me. This is no escarpment; it is the approach to Dubai’s municipal landfill. As with the natural gas-fired electric/desalination plant, it’s massive. It’s the largest landfill, with the longest line of trucks I’ve ever seen (Dubai plans to shift 75 percent of its waste stream away from landfills). So now I’ve witnessed some of the core input and output sites through which Dubai’s energy and materials flow: a world-class airport, huge deepwater port, massive energy plant, a geologic-scale landfill. More opaque for a first-time visitor are the social and financial systems that drive it all.

Figure 10. Trucks lining up to exit Al Ain Roads and climb the Dubai landfill. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

And the products of these flows? Well, clearly the built environment—the 25-km strip of skyscrapers, the dozens of new and recent developments scattered into the desert, requiring thousands of building cranes, and connecting freeways (and U-turns). And Dubai’s attractions—71 malls, golf courses, theme parks (e.g., Ski Dubai!).

Figure 12. Drip irrigation is standard procedure. Sprinklers are seldom seen. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

Underlying these attractions: green habitat. That is, conspicuous displays of public water opulence—artificial lakes, wetlands, fountains, vegetation. But if you look closely, drip irrigation is the standard technology, and desert-adapted species are standard—neem, acacia, native succulents, etc.

Dubai is essentially an artificial oasis. If you’re looking for wildlife, this is a good thing. The birding is excellent in Dubai’s parks, even in the hot off-season. During the fall and spring migrations, the watering and greening of the UAE desert coast vastly expand habitat for migrating birds. I’m looking forward to returning later for the fall migration.

Figure 13. Dubai Design District, shady and active. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

All these visible stocks and flows of energy and materials supporting this oasis are emergent properties of perhaps a more important characteristic of Dubai: This is a trading city, a crossroads where new ideas and practices are being interwoven into a traditional culture. For the past few decades, those practices have manifested as energy, water, and infrastructure development. Now Dubai and its neighbors appear to be pouring serious money and effort into innovation for sustainability. The city’s building code for sustainability was drafted by one of Portland’s leading green architects in collaboration with Dubai’s urban planning agency.

The Dubai Design District has opened as an innovation hub, and its Institute for Design and Innovation, opening in fall 2018, will enroll 400 young designers when it is fully up and running. Further west in Abu Dhabi, the Masdar Institute for Sustainability has brought in a global faculty to design and prototype sustainable energy, water, and built-environment systems. The Masdar campus is itself a test case for high efficiency, low energy building. The exterior environment is designed to take advantage of shade and cooling winds, much like Sheikh Saeed Al Maktoum’s residence (and many others) in Old Dubai. It’s a synthesis of TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) and tech.

Figure14. Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Note the shade, vegetation, solar and water facilities. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

Energy may be the easiest fix for Dubai. Solar arrays are everywhere. And massive solar farms are taking shape along the city’s outskirts. Water will be tougher. There simply isn’t any significant regional water resource. Thus, (desalinated) water availability will be energy-driven, first by natural gas, but soon enough by renewables, as gas peaks and declines. Food resources are limited as well. And even with desalinated water, massive food imports will continue. But in some ways, that’s the case for many cities. Los Angeles gets its water at great energy cost. And all cities, including wet, green Portland, have continental scale “food-sheds”. All cities are natural resource sinks by nature. Dubai, for now, is just more so.

Figure 15. Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque, Old Dubai. Photo: Peter K. Schoonmaker

So here’s an observation, a hypothesis, and a proposition: There are no “sustainable” cities (yet); the future of any particular city depends as much on ideas and innovation as on natural resources (unless your entire city lies at or below sea level); if this is true, global crossroads like Dubai may fare as well or better than current “greener” outposts like Portland.

Regardless of how it goes for Dubai and its UAE neighbors, the city’s ambitions may lead to potential paybacks for the rest of us. Dubai has the resources and the intention to pioneer innovative solutions for urban sustainability in arid environments. With much of the world’s population living in hot, dry climates, and with those climates getting hotter and drier, Dubai may end up being a leading sustainability adopter. The most valuable ‘product’ of Dubai may not be shopping or winter recreation or lifestyle—it may very likely be innovation for sustainability. I’m headed back to learn more.

Peter K. Schoonmaker
Portland

On The Nature of Cities

Why the Heart Matters in Hurricanes: How to Carry the Emotional Weight of the World without Being Crushed by It

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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The only way to succeed is when this is a truly global project—that is, where everyone is doing everything they can, individually and collectively, pressuring elected officials and policymakers to put us on a clean and sustainable energy pathway into the future.

As 2017 draws to a close in the U.S., we are still getting our lives back in order, reeling from the human and economic losses of the recent hurricane season. Experts estimate that hurricanes Irma and Harvey combined will cost more than the $160 billion in damage in comparison to Hurricane Katrina. In Puerto Rico, there is an ongoing environmental crisis with water contamination from sewers. This summer, similar disasters unfolded in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, where record levels of flooding caused massive destruction and loss of homes, killing more than 1,000 lives and the estimate is over 41,000 people are affected.

Hurricanes are part of the expected seasonal changes in many countries, and in fact, human populations everywhere have always risen to the annual test with courage and resilience, as documented in Steve Curry’s award-winning photography of the South Asian monsoon season in 1983. However, while hurricanes (or typhoons, or cyclones) will continue to take place, they will be more intense, and the potential damage and loss exacerbated.

Climate science is clear. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s findings confirm that with global warming, we can expect tropical cyclones to be more severe, and very intense storms are more likely to occur as hotter air has the capacity to carry more moisture. Furthermore, with sea level rise, the impact of coastal storm surge is worsened. Incidentally, with this season of unprecedented hurricane disasters, we find that August 2017 was the second hottest August on the record. “Climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly,” renowned atmospheric scientist Michael Mann stated in a recent article.

The truth is a hard pill to swallow

We have known for a while now that our planet is warming up because of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activities. Anthropogenic global warming is a fact endorsed by 97 percent of research with a position on the matter. Essentially, scientists point a finger at us as responsible for climate change and, by extension, many other socio-environmental and humanitarian crises taking place today all across the world. Not only hurricanes and flooding, but many of the occurrences of forest fires, droughts, erosion of topsoil, loss of farmland fertility and rural livelihoods, food insecurity, internal displacement and political conflict can be connected to global warming. Observers point to the severe climactic conditions and drought from 2006 to 2011 in Syria as offering an important back story to understanding the unravelling of the social compact and subsequent unrest and refugee crisis in the region.

Most of us are not yet prepared to confront our personal role in causing global warming and to see that we stand as an essential part of a causal chain of suffering from our carbon-dependent modern lifestyle. Even if we appreciate our causal role, it is even more challenging to commit to giving up the convenience of using private transportation, changing to a meatless diet or just consuming less stuff.

Beyond the individual level, there is progress, and there are setbacks where it comes to GHG reductions and energy policy at the city, national or global corporate level. While we cheer on the many city mayors who are taking the lead on climate action, unaligned state and federal level policies can limit their effectiveness. We should be aware that a clean energy, zero carbon future is technologically and financially attainable but the link to this future is tenuous. In this light, rather than bemoan the lack of action by politicians and corporations, anyone who is interested in securing the long-term sustainability and continued viability of this planet—including citizens and businesses, NGOs and associations—need to work continuously to make each voice and vote count so as to realize the clean energy agenda, more jobs and training in sustainability, and to save ourselves from further disruptive climate events in future.

The work needs to start by swallowing the hard pill. Only with awareness can there be action.

We are emotional beings

Emotions are the drivers of our participation in political action. Some constituencies are overwhelmed into inaction, even as they disagree with those who actively deny climate change and lobby for our continued dependence on fossil fuels. While anxiety does not lead to participation and influential action, anger and enthusiasm can trigger one into action but also propagate partisanship and confrontational policies. None of these common emotional reactions are that helpful in the larger scheme of solving the climate crisis. In short, science meets its limits even if it has all the answers. In order to change (for a better future), what we need to pay attention to are our emotional gatekeepers, which shut out changes deemed unpleasant or threatening to our being and familiar way of life, even if we know that these changes will ultimately save us from destroying the fragile balance that makes this a livable planet.

This is why the heart, feelings, and emotions matter so much when we are talking about climate change, and how we got here to a year filled with hurricanes and other climate disasters of unprecedented severity. Looking at this from a positive angle, we can tap into our instinctive caring and empathetic emotions in response to our friends and family’s suffering during the superstorms, or when reading the news of populations displaced from regions that are no longer habitable. If we allow ourselves to be moved, most of us can develop a strong and authentic personal connection to global warming and climate disasters. What we need is the skill to be able to sit with these strong emotions and not be overwhelmed, the latter of which would switch us into emotional shut-down mode instead. Leaders have a role to play in facilitating the process of reframing emotions and nurturing climate action within their communities.

The Climate Reality Project©. Photo: Hui Ling LIM

As a Climate Reality Leader, I am committed to presenting climate reality and truth-telling on climate change. At our recent gathering in Pittsburgh, while there was no lack of panels speaking about the science and logic of global warming and extreme weather patterns, the key message was about engaging hearts on this topic. We need to use our combined emotional intelligence to reach everyone and get them onboard the climate movement. The only way to succeed is when this is a truly global project, that is, where everyone is doing everything they can, individually and collectively, pressuring elected officials and policymakers to put us on a clean and sustainable energy pathway into the future. Because this is the only way that we can all come out winning.

Carrying the weight of the world

Being in fellowship with other members in our communities can help many of us to see with eyes wide open, to witness the role of human-caused climate change, acknowledge our mutual pain, distress and concerns, and be able to come to dialogue with others who agree or disagree with us, and find out how we can take action from a common ground.

To get from where we are now to where we need to be, any discussion on climate change needs necessarily to start from the issues that affect us directly. Earlier this year, Lima-born architect Rossana Poblet Alegre started the “Women’s Initiative” with a group of international professional women at her current base, Berlin. The group is currently preparing an exhibition, using photos, maps and art installations to showcase citizen´s views and perception of climatic water events, like the floods caused by El Niño Costero in March 2017, which caused devastation in the coastal cities of Peru.

Art is a great medium that can trigger a range of emotional responses at the same time as it can stimulate insight and encourage constructive dialogue on challenging issues. “We believe that the art component will help us to reach a broader public to reflect not only on the overflow but also on the benefits of water as an element of energy and flow. The question is how to find the balance!” Rossana Poblet Alegre shares. On this side of the Atlantic, artist Carolyn Monastra not only documents climate change to spur action but highlights the “solutions” found by individuals who have taken it upon themselves to make a difference while they share this planetary home with others.

From architects to artists and others, we need more leaders to step up from every group, in every community, in service of the climate movement. So, my first challenge to you is to start listening out for the one issue that is a key concern in your area of expertise or influence. We convene, and we listen—especially to emotions and underlying unspoken positions—and allow the process to bring us all closer towards that which binds our destinies together.

Parenthood, health, and energy costs are some entry points that can lead people from climate apathy to action. “Women are speaking up. Our children are watching us. Their health, their future and their now are at stake and weigh heavily on our hearts and minds,” says Harriet Shugarman, Executive Director of Climate Mama, an organization that helps families to implement a low carbon future. In a similar vein, expectant parents carefully checking Zika virus maps do not need a hard sell to see that the reach of mosquito-borne viruses can be curbed by reducing global warming and the spread of tropical regions. Everyone is interested in reducing their costs; so in cities within deregulated energy markets, more can be done to bring awareness to the cost-effectiveness of sustainable energy choices. Wherever we look, there is an opportunity to uncover a climate solution that addresses a particular need and speaks directly to a particular group. The good news is, the more we talk about climate change in a way that is meaningful to the groups we are engaging with, the more we normalize it as a real and salient issue.

My second challenge to leaders is to take care of regulating our own emotions. Doing so ensures that we can communicate openly with those who may challenge our facts and our cause, without taking it personally. At the same time, this is a big job with no fixed end date. We can only do this sustainably if we are not drained by the process ourselves. The most reliable tool in our kit is within us. When we cultivate self-awareness through any mindful, contemplative practice, we can find that deep within, each of us is naturally called to take action for a cause in which we truly believe. Be it reducing climate caused suffering, or preserving our last natural heritage, a strong cause will come with the requisite strength that will help us remain steadfast and clear as we lead others through uncertain terrain. Additionally, meditation and retreat groups, interest-based circles, faith-based organizations all have a lot to offer where it comes to providing the community to support our practice and self-care, and structure to facilitate self-investigation and refining of our purpose. As we renew our commitment to this cause, we can carry the weight of climate change without being crushed by it.

Hui Ling LIM
Prague

On The Nature of Cities

Urban Connectivity is a Catalyst for Leaving No One Behind

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The principle of “leave no one behind” can be made operational through socio-economic and ecological connectivity for overcoming the neglect of equity and inclusion in cities.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Agenda 2030), which is comprised of a global commitment to “leave no one behind” and “endeavor to reach those furthest behind first”, explicitly details neither the pledge to leave no one behind (LNOB) nor establishs a shared understanding of what LNOB means in a city-specific context to drive action and share creative practices. Here I argue that urban connectivity—incidental contact with or direct exposure to the natural or built environment in cities—is closely linked to the broad drivers that contribute to people being left or furthest behind across city scales. I also think that understanding the linkages between urban connectivity and LNOB can inspire action and collaboration on the development of a methodology for city-level assessments of populations and groups who are (or are at risk of) being left behind in any given city, and why they are being left behind. Such advances would inform efforts for achieving SDG 11, which focuses on making cities safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable.

There are two broad categories of urban connectivity—socio-economic connectivity and ecological connectivity—that can function in a city as catalysts for leaving no one behind. Socio-economic connectivity focuses on the characteristics of urban system services (transportation, sanitation, water, etc.) and the way these play out across different socio-economic groupings to overcome inequality, marginalization, and deprivation. Ecological connectivity, on the other hand, centers on natural and semi-natural habitats in cities (green parks, urban forests, domestic gardens. etc.), and how these are supportive to the ecosystem services needed by urban residents to live and work in the city in the face of inequality and marginalization.

Socio-economic connectivity

In terms of socio-economic connectivity, transport network planning, for instance, can promote urban connectivity at three levels: inter-city connections, intra-metropolitan connectivity, and local-level connectivity. Connectivity gives firms access to input (including labour) and output markets, and it facilitates choices for consumers. It also enables the creation of public spaces for fostering conviviality, artistic expression, street markets, and cultural events that make cities spaces of consumption, entertainment, pleasure, and festivity.

Inter-city connectivity stimulates the growth of secondary and tertiary cities as land- and capital-intensive operations move outward in search of cheaper land that is well-connected to the primary city. This helps to prevent land prices in the primary city from being driven upwards with exclusionary effects. The result is a well-articulated system of primary and secondary cities interconnected by LNOB transit systems that enable different social groupings to access public utilities, jobs, and recreation services, such as India’s freight corridors[1].

Intra-metropolitan connectivity is often characterized by unreliable and/or unaffordable public transport that confines citizens to their neigbourhoods and limits livelihood prospects. Long commuting times can force people into crowded inner-city slums so they can walk to work. If a city faces both of these challenges, economic productivity will be unequal, and wellbeing will deteriorate. Intra-metropolitan transport plans must provide for mixed transit modes that achieve two objectives: increased supply of affordable transport options (possibly by making them compete with each other in real terms, not via false internal markets managed by monopolies to manipulate prices); and minimized congestion and limited pollution. The full cost of individual motor vehicle use should be transferred to the users (e.g., fuel levies, road tolls, charges for single occupancy cars, traffic lanes for multi-occupancy vehicles, congestion charging, etc.), thus raising the personal costs of this mode, which, in turn, will force households and firms to relocate to access public transit services. The result will be strategic intensification, higher land rents, and shorter transport distances, thus fostering urban efficiencies and a more human-scale livable urban environment.

Local-level connectivity, which includes wide traffic-oriented neigbourhood streets connecting large superblocks of gated, low-density residences should be avoided. The street network should occupy 30 percent of the land—this would be equivalent to 18 km of street length with 80-100 street intersections per km2 of residential development. Well interconnected streets with varying widths within these parameters will create a secure but accessible high-quality urban fabric that saves infrastructure costs, reduces energy use, enables non-motorized travel modes and improves efficient through-flows of traffic by 25 percent compared to the wide streets/superblock model[2]. This kind of urban fabric would support building heights of 5 to 8 stories, with relatively small floor area per person ratios—which is only possible if the architectural designs are appropriately inspired by the need for small but highly livable spaces with good natural lighting, effective soundproofing, and a sense of privacy and security. Walkability and biking along tree-lined attractive streets with good pavements and biking paths, benches, outdoor cafes, kiosks, social services and other amenities hold the key to high-quality and safe neigbourhoods. Investments in streetscapes and public spaces will be required to support these kinds of high-density livable neigbourhoods.

Livable streetscape. Photo: Google Images

While London, New York, and Vancouver are well-known for their livable streetscapes[3],  other cities are investing in similar ways: Colombo, Cape Town, and Lagos have invested in public spaces, streetscapes and their waterfront areas, Ahmedabad has used rights-of-way to support pedestrianisation and the BRT, Chennai, and Johannesburg have plans for improving cycling and pedestrian walkability[4].

Ecological connectivity

Goats grazing in Muyenga Kampala. Photo: Buyana Kareem

 With regard to ecological connectivity, urban greening interventions that are targeted at community cohesion and improved social relations have created possibilities for improved ecological functioning and ecosystem services. In Kampala, for instance, the planting of indigenous trees and grass in high-income areas like the Muyenga suburb in Makindye Division, attracts not only pollinators and birds but also grazing of animals for small-scale animal husbandry. This, in turn, permits social engagement with the urban poor who stay in low-lying areas but graze their goats uphill, while protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services that can spur the demarcation of green corridors for recreation and urban agriculture in the greater Kampala metropolitan area.

However, Kampala is increasingly plagued by erratic development. Plots of differing sizes are opened up for construction of housing, infrastructure, or industrial development without attention to conservation of green areas, thus affecting the lives of urbanites who are prone to be left behind. For example, women who are typically the primary caretakers of the home in Kampala usually prefer green areas and recreation facilities that are nearer to their residence or within the neighborhood[5].  Women and children need green parks for play fields near to their homes or within recreation centers that can guarantee safe and amenable access by boys and girls, especially during weekends and school holidays. The same category of urban service-users requires good lighting and landscaping, which creates active spaces for women to rest and not feel isolated during their chain of trips and varied destinations at the neighborhood level.

The making of charcol briquettes in Kampala. Photo: Buyana Kareem

Ecological connectivity can also be visualized in the growing waste economy, where organic and inorganic waste processing is gradually gaining ground in Kampala. On a small scale, individuals and community groups helping the poor are experimenting the reuse and recycling of nutrient-rich organic wastes for improved agricultural yields but also recycling of inorganics. But knowledge about the transformation of organic wastes into eco-friendly products has remained at micro scale in communities, even where research and pilots have been undertaken over the last two decades. If they remain at micro-levels of operation, such alternative means of managing the organic waste by turning them into resourceful products, such as energy briquettes, is estimated to recover less than 5 percent of the organic wastes generated in the city[6].

Similarly, New Hope Ecotech, a technology company in Brazil, provides a digital platform to connect manufacturers with waste pickers via an innovative environmental currency, similar to a carbon credit. Founded in December 2014 by Luciana Oliveira and SBAC Lawyers, New Hope Ecotech uses waste recyclables rather than the traditional carbon credit as an environmental currency. By issuing “recycling certificates” to private enterprise, the group helps enterprises to meet their corporate social responsibility commitments or regulatory-based obligations, while aggregating recyclables as an output that directly creates work opportunities for informal waste workers.

In 2015, New Hope Ecotech tracked over 3,600 tonnes of recycled material among 1,120 waste workers across 53 waste management and recycling facilities. New Hope Ecotech issued approximately US$500,000 in certificates to private enterprises. Current clients of the group include AB Inbev, NeoEnergia, Giral Viveiro de Projetos[7]. This is an example of a creative practice for leaving no one behind, which Kampala city could learn from, to enable the transition of the current micro-scale interventions of energy briquettes to meso- and macro-scale, with double edged outcomes of mainstreaming the urban poor into the urban economy while reducing the adverse effects of indiscriminate dumping and management of wastes in the city.

Take-away message on leaving no one behind

The principle of “leave no one behind” can be made operational through socio-economic and ecological connectivity for overcoming the neglect of equity and inclusion in cities. The concept can be visualized in the form of an “LNOB tree”—an image that makes visible the connection between “rooting” (in-building equity and inclusion into urban system services and environmental conservation projects at neigbourhood to city, national and global scales) and “fruiting” (achieving LNOB results and impacts), underlining the message that leaving no one or those furthest behind is a means to an end rather than an end in itself in advancing Agenda 2030.

Buyana Kareem
Kampala

On The Nature of Cities

Notes:

[1] Dhar, S., Pathak, M., & Shukla, P. R. (2017). Electric vehicles and India’s low carbon passenger transport: a long-term co-benefits assessment. Journal of Cleaner Production, 146, 139-148.

[2] Swilling, M., Hajer, M. et al. Forthcoming. The Weight of Cities: Resource Requirements of Future Urbanization. A report for the International Resource Panel. Paris: United Nations Environment Programme.

[3] Harvey, C., & Aultman-Hall, L. (2016). Measuring urban streetscapes for livability: A review of approaches. The Professional Geographer, 68(1), 149-158.

[4] Grieco, M. (2015). Social sustainability and urban mobility: shifting to a socially responsible pro-poor perspective. Social Responsibility Journal, 11(1), 82-97.

[5] Buyana, K., & Lwasa, S. (2014). Gender responsiveness in infrastructure provision for African cities: The case of Kampala in Uganda. Journal of Geography and Regional Planning, 7(1), 1.

[6] http://ual.mak.ac.ug/awelis-green-sustainable-energy/

[7] http://breakthrough.unglobalcompact.org/briefs/wealth-in-brazils-waste-new-hope-ecotech-luciana-oliveira/

Transforming Great Lakes Pollution Hot Spots into Gathering Places for People and Wildlife

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The restoration of the Great Leaks pollution hot spots has become a springboard for local communities to convert areas that were once a detriment to economic growth into valuable community and economic assets.

Cleanup of Great Lakes pollution hot spots has not been easy, and required networks focused on gathering stakeholders, coordinating efforts, and ensuring that the results promote the public interest. Even with the compelling case of the Great Lakes being a continentally- and globally-significant natural resource, it has proven incredibly challenging. For those working in the trenches of ecosystem-based and watershed management, it is best described as a challenging puzzle requiring a marathoner’s discipline and perseverance.

The Great Lakes are freshwater seas that contain nearly one-fifth of the standing freshwater on the Earth’s surface. They are also a shared resource between Canada and the United States. Approximately 34 million people in the U.S. and Canada live in the Great Lakes Basin. Both countries depend on the Great Lakes for drinking water, transportation, economic opportunities, power, and recreation. For example, 48 million people in the U.S. and Canada get their drinking water from the Great Lakes. Cargo shipments on the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway system generate $US 34.6 billion of economic activity and 227,000 jobs in Canada and the U.S. The Great Lakes directly generate more than 1.5 million jobs and $60 billion in wages annually and provide the backbone for a $5 trillion regional economy that would be one of the largest in the world if it stood alone as a country. Recreation on the Great Lakes—including boating, hunting, fishing, and birding opportunities—generates more than $52 billion annually for the region. Commercial, recreational, and tribal fisheries in the Great Lakes alone are collectively valued at more than $7 billion annually and support more than 75,000 jobs.

Given the level of population density, and commercial and industrial development, it is not surprising there have been considerable environmental impacts. From extirpation of beaver during the fur trade, to sedimentation and loss of habitat during the logging era, to waterborne disease epidemics in the early 1900s, to cultural eutrophication starting in the 1950s and continuing to the present, to toxic contamination as a result of the industrial revolution, to the introduction of exotic species, and climate change in more recent years, the Great Lakes have experienced substantial human use and abuse.

Canada and the U.S. have worked together for over a century to resolve problems along their common border. For example, the 1909 U.S.-Canada Boundary Waters Treaty provides the principles and mechanisms for preventing and resolving disputes concerning water quantity and quality along the entire border. Far ahead of its time, the Boundary Waters Treaty also states that waters shall not be polluted on either side of the boundary to the injury of health or property on the other side. As such, this treaty is often described as the world’s first environmental agreement. The International Joint Commission (IJC) was established under the Boundary Waters Treaty to foster binational cooperation in resolving trans-boundary environmental issues.

The IJC is an independent and objective advisor to the U.S. and Canada, and works for the common good of both countries in preventing and resolving any disputes regarding boundary water management issues. The IJC uses experts, serving in their personal and professional capacities, to undertake independent fact-finding and to provide independent advice for problem resolution. Its processes have compiled agreed-upon and trusted scientific and socioeconomic data, and have interpreted these data in a public fashion to build broad-based understanding and support for action. More recently, IJC processes have fostered use of a systematic and comprehensive ecosystem approach.

The Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement was initially signed in 1972 and revised in 1978, 1987, and 2012. As such, this agreement is described as an evolving instrument for ecosystem-based management. It represents a commitment between the U.S. and Canada to restore and protect the waters of the Great Lakes and provides a framework for identifying binational priorities and implementing actions that improve water quality and ecosystem health. Canada and the U.S. are responsible for final decision-making under the agreement and for the involvement and participation of state and provincial governments, tribal governments, and other stakeholders.

Since 1973, the IJC’s Great Lakes Water Quality Board, the principal advisor to the IJC on matters about the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, has periodically assessed the state of the Great Lakes. As part of these assessments, the Great Lakes Water Quality Board identified specific harbors, embayments, river mouths, and connecting channels where one of more jurisdictional standards or general or specific water quality objectives of the agreement were not being met. Initially termed “problem areas”, they were later called “Area(s) of Concern” (AOCs).

The list of AOCs changed over time due to the implementation of remedial and preventive programs and improvements in water quality, and the emergence of new problems and/or reinterpretation of the significance of earlier reports. The major problems identified also changed in response to the evolution of scientific understanding of ecosystem problems, improved ability to detect and measure problems, and progress in environmental cleanup and ecological restoration.

Despite progress in abating bacterial and phosphorus pollution in many AOCs, the Great Lakes Water Quality Board reported in 1985 that progress had been stalled in 42 AOCs where general or specific objectives of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement were not being met. This failure had caused or had likely caused impairment of beneficial use or of the area’s ability to support aquatic life. A 43rd AOC was identified in 1991 (i.e., Presque Isle Bay, Erie, Pennsylvania). Impairment of beneficial use means a change in the chemical, physical, or biological integrity of the Great Lakes ecosystem sufficient to cause any of the following:

  • Restrictions of fish and wildlife consumption;
  • Tainting of fish and wildlife flavor;
  • Degradation of fish and wildlife populations;
  • Fish tumors or other deformities;
  • Bird or animal deformities or reproductive problems;
  • Degradation of benthos;
  • Restrictions on dredging activities;
  • Eutrophication or undesirable algae;
  • Restrictions on drinking water consumption, or taste and odor problems;
  • Beach closings;
  • Degradation of aesthetics;
  • Added costs to agriculture or industry;
  • Degradation of phytoplankton or zooplankton populations; or
  • Loss of fish and wildlife habitat.

As a result of the recommendation of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board, the eight Great Lakes states and the Province of Ontario, with support from the federal governments of the U.S. and Canada, committed in 1985 to developing and implementing a remedial action plan (RAP) to restore all beneficial uses in each AOC within their political boundaries. This RAP commitment was then codified in the 1987 Protocol to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Each RAP identified the use impairments and causes, the remedial and preventive actions needed to restore use impairments, the agencies or organizations responsible for implementing the actions, and the timeframe for implementation to increase accountability. Further, RAPs adopted an ecosystem approach that accounts for the interrelationships among air, water, land, and all living things, including humans, and involves all user groups in management. RAPs have been implemented in an adaptive management fashion where assessments are made, priorities set, and actions taken in an iterative fashion for continuous improvement.

Figure 1. AOCs in the U.S.-Canada Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem. Adapted from a map provided by the U.S. EPA

Since the commitment to RAPs in 1985, it is fair to say that there were 43 locally-designed ecosystem approaches to use restoration in AOCs (Figure 1). In total, as of 2016, seven AOCs have been delisted, two AOCs have been designated as Areas of Recovery, 18 AOCs have implemented all remedial actions deemed necessary for use restoration, 65 of 146 known use impairments identified in Canadian AOCs have been eliminated, and 62 of 255 known use impairments in U.S. AOCs have been eliminated. Although much has been accomplished, much remains to be done to restore all impaired uses and delist all AOCs.

Overall, it is fair to say that progress has been challenging and slow. However, it took over a century to create these problems, and it should not be surprising that restoration would be a long-term process. In such urban, environmental restoration work, benefits assessments have proven to be an important tool to help make the case for restoration and requisite funding, sustain momentum over decades, and manifest return on investment. Further, such economic benefits studies have attracted considerable backing in support of sustaining seed funding from governments to finish the job of cleaning up AOCs that has helped leverage money. Selected examples of benefits assessments are presented below.

Detroit River

During the 1960s, the Detroit River was one of the most polluted rivers in the Great Lakes Basin. Considerable remediation has occurred in and along the Detroit River resulting in substantial ecological recovery, including the return of bald eagles, peregrine falcons, osprey, lake sturgeon, lake whitefish, walleye, mayflies, wild celery, and more. This restoration has laid the foundation for the revitalization of the riverfront with the building of the Detroit RiverWalk for all (Figure 2). The Detroit RiverWalk is now one of the largest, by scale (5.5 miles in downtown Detroit), urban waterfront redevelopment projects in the United States, resulting in over $1 billion in economic benefits in the first ten years. The Detroit RiverWalk has utilized democratic design to achieve benefits for all. The Detroit RiverWalk has also helped reconnect citizens to continentally-significant natural resources and has helped Detroit become an urban getaway for outdoor recreation.

Figure 2. The Detroit RiverWalk is a gathering place for people and wildlife. Photo: SmithGroupJJR

Hamilton Harbour

Hamilton Harbour lies at the western tip of Lake Ontario near the cities of Hamilton and Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Hamilton is considered the “steel capital” of Canada. Contaminated sediments are a major problem. Located in the harbor is Randle Reef, a 148-acre contaminated sediment hotspot where sediment remediation is underway (Figure 3). The cost of sediment remediation of Randle Reef is $138.9-million. Local businesses are projected to realize about $600 million in gross accumulated benefits with full sediment remediation. Likewise, recreational users are projected to realize about $500 million in gross accumulated benefits with full remediation.

Figure 3. Sediment remediation underway at Randle Reef in Hamilton Harbour, Ontario, Canada. Photo: Environment and Climate Change Canada

Muskegon Lake

Muskegon Lake is an over 4,000-acre inland coastal lake along the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan. It has over a 100-year history of anthropogenic impacts from lumbering, industry, and urbanization. Considerable restoration has occurred, including remediation of contaminated sediment and restoration of habitats. A considerable portion of the shoreline that was once natural wetlands had been filled in with foundry materials. A $10 million shoreline restoration project was implemented to soften the shoreline and restore wetland habitats. An economic benefits study has shown that this $10 million shoreline restoration project on Muskegon Lake will generate more than $66 million in economic benefits, resulting in a 6-to-1 return on investment.

Kinnickinnic River

The Milwaukee Estuary in Wisconsin was designated an AOC primarily due to contaminated sediments and loss of habitat. In 2009, a Great Lakes Legacy Act project dredged a 0.4-mile section of the Kinnickinnic River on the south side of Milwaukee. In total, 158,000 yd3 of contaminated sediment were removed and disposed at a cost of $22.4 million. Milwaukee literally transformed this former toxic hot spot into a waterfront destination for businesses, recreation, and tourism. Direct benefits to Milwaukee from this sediment remediation included: adding more than 100 jobs; supporting more than $1 million in wages for new workers; increasing revenues along the Kinnickinnic River, realizing more than a 30 percent increase when Pier Milwaukee reopened alone; and creating and restoring 26 boat slips, with 23 more planned in the future, yielding the potential for increased revenue from slip rentals and tourism.

Buffalo River

The Buffalo River caught on fire in 1968 and has long suffered from considerable water pollution. The Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper has worked for decades with all stakeholders to leverage $48.5 million from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative for cleanup of the river. Considerable environmental improvement has transformed a derelict industrial waterfront into a nautical playground with over $200 million of private sector investment (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Buffalo River restoration has been a catalyst for creating waterfront public spaces in Buffalo that have generated considerable economic benefits. Photo: Joe Cascio

Concluding thoughts

The cleanup of pollution hot spots in the Great Lakes has proven difficult and has spanned many decades. Such restoration work has helped reconnect people to their waterfronts in ways that enhance community well-being. Indeed, the cleanup of such legacy pollution has become a springboard for local communities to convert areas that were once a detriment to economic growth into valuable community and economic assets for all. Economic benefits assessments have proven to be important tools to: sustain long-term momentum in urban environmental restoration work; manifest return on investment; and attract champions and advocates for sustaining funding from governments, foundations, and businesses to help finish the job of cleaning up AOCs. Other key lessons include:

  • establish a compelling vision that can be carried in the hearts and minds of all stakeholders;
  • recruit a well-respected champion;
  • establish networks with broad support from key stakeholder groups;
  • establish core delivery team, focused on outcomes and success;
  • build trust and ensure cooperative learning;
  • secure seed funding for projects that will attract other funding partners;
  • evoke a sense of place in all projects;
  • measure and celebrate successes to sustain momentum; and
  • recruit and train sustainability change agents and facilitators.

John Hartig
Detroit

On The Nature of Cities

Inhabiting a Post-Urban Twenty-First Century

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The capitalist paradigm as a world economic system that works for people and the planet is failing. For cities and nature, shifting graciously and well into the Anthropocene requires a fundamentally different political-economy that reflects new ethics and priorities.

I am spending this Fall in Kyoto Japan, traveling a bit in the country. The Institute for Humanity and Nature is my sponsor for the stay and this blog is inspired by Japan’s complexity. The nation is the home of the first, and still largest, mega-city in the world, Tokyo, a megalopolis of about 39 million people, woven together by trains, trams, subways, buses, vast infrastructure, shrines, and parks. There also still exists a vibrant artisanal culture, deeply immersed in knowledge of materials—clay, wood, silk, cotton, bamboo and stone, fire—handled with dexterity, skill, and concern. Along with the intensity of agricultural production, there is ample evidence of how deeply interwoven the Japanese continue to be with their environment. The country, one could argue, has been in the Anthropocene for a millennium. The Japanese have managed forests and streams, engaged in mixed cropping, the harvesting of wild plants and engaged in fiercely intense environmental management. Of course, they are not flawless or faultless and are now importing more food than they produce, more items than they manufacture. But there remains a great deal of food for thought in this historical relationship where nature is not alienated from human beings.

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Kyoto. Photo: Jonathan Katz

There seems to be growing consensus that the 21st century will be the century of the city, the new habitat of humans, and most especially in megacities. Cities are, of course, major sources of global greenhouse gas emissions due to their reliance on hydrocarbons for fuel. Their development creates storm water runoff due to the pervasiveness of impermeable surfaces, such surfaces—often made of dark materials like asphalt—capture heat and lead to heat islands compounded by waste heat emitted by heating and cooling equipment, vehicle traffic and more. They require vast networks of commodity chains to keep them functional, importing food, fiber, consumer goods, building materials, water, and power. They transform land as they expand, and leave contaminated land as they contract. Although cities cover only 2 percent of the world’s land surface, they consume over 75 percent of the earth’s material resources (UNEP 2016). Cities create many undesirable environmental impacts, near and far, including within the city sphere itself. Earth resources are treated as inputs, not assets with which humans are not engaged and responsible for, thus ensuring on-going existence of both the resource and human well-being. Currently, the environment is an abstraction, not a living, reacting and creating life force with which we are in a co-productive relationship.

Osaka City. Photo: Jonathan Katz

Given how they concentrate human activity, attention has turned to the possibility of cities also being able to lessen their impacts through the implementation of ecosystem services such as bioswales and permeable surfaces to capture stormwater, the planting of trees to mitigate urban heat, and the expansion of urban open spaces to enhance the quality of life in cities. With the possibility of utilizing renewable sources of energy, recycling water, and many other techniques, cities have recently been seen as not just global economic forces, but also able to implement sustainability programs and policies that will reduce their impacts, and hence on Earth systems, including on the climate. Actions to make cities more sustainable, it is believed, will mitigate global climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and more. Cities, it is argued, are therefore both drivers of global environmental change, and the places where that change can be mitigated. The implementation of green infrastructure, reclaiming a place for nature in city functioning is an integral part of that strategy.

One major driver for the urgency to make cities more sustainable is to mitigate the acceleration of greenhouse gas emissions. This is to avoid the worse impacts of global climate change and increased temperatures that will cascade through Earth systems and upset the relatively unusually stable Holocene era. The Anthropocene, it is predicted, will bring enormous changes, including species extinctions, more violent weather, droughts, floods, and essentially more difficult conditions for human and other life. In this context, oddly, cities are seen as offering an ability to alter this frightening destiny. Yet it is clear that cities today, are artifacts of hydrocarbon energy. Reducing, or decarbonizing human activity and cities, undermines cities as we know them and thus the ability of cities to become the new homes of humans. Indeed, cities themselves must fundamentally change, shrink, scatter and return to the constraints of place. There must be a deconcentration of cities, a repopulation of abandoned countrysides through deliberate city building, cities whose activities are dependent on a deep understanding of places, resources, and scarcity in order to achieve the low or post-carbon future.  Clearly this will also require a fundamental shift in economic regimes, and, no doubt, a deep transformation in lifestyles and wealth.

We should consider whether smaller low or decarbonized cities, embedded in landscapes, might not be the path to reduce human impacts. It is time to move beyond accepted and repeated tropes to go a bit deeper into the question of urban dwelling by humans and to expand our thinking about cities and what they can and have been.

Kyoto power. Photo: Jonathan Katz

Lefebvre (2003:57) already has suggested that cities have exploded out of the historical space of the city to create worldwide urban society, erasing the qualitative differences between the city and the countryside (in Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015), enlisting in their metabolisms planetary resources (see the literature on urban metabolism Kennedy et al. 2007, Pincetl et al. 2012). If the planet is already urban, and humans, even if they are not living in what can be formally described as a city, are implicated in the modern networked lifestyle of internet and cell phones, does this not provide the launchpad for rethinking the scale and intensity of cities?

To meet the challenges of the inevitable Anthropocene we need to ask how we can best inhabit this new epoch. We must explore the potential of a deliberate, slow shift to deconcentrated urban agglomerations no longer dependent on hydrocarbons, but deeply dependent on keen Earth systems knowledge and observations in a changing world.

This is an alternative path that reconnects humans with nature and place. It is no longer about seeing nature as an external entity impacted by humans, but rather starts from the understanding that humans co-produce Earth systems. Nature is not a thing that reacts. Rather we live in an animate environment that is actively engaged with human activities and whose comportment creates conditions for its and our daily life and future.

The post megacity alternative proposes that in the age of the Anthropocene, it is possible to transcend—indeed necessary—the historic human/nature divide that emerged in the 17th century with the rise of natural and physical sciences. It involves, as LaTour (2010), Descola (2015), Ingold (2012) and others have noted, a revalorization of an understanding and engagement with nature that does not exist outside of what it is to be human. The objectification of nature as something outside of humanity, and unrelated, has enabled humans to exploit resources, people and places with complete disregard for short and long-term impacts and consequences: mountain-top coal mining, dumping of toxic wastes, spraying pesticides and herbicides and introducing genetically modified seeds, transforming rivers and water ways, depleting aquifers, filling in wetlands, enslavement of other humans who are different (dehumanizing them). The list is long, and indicates a lack of fundamental understanding that, whether we recognize it or not, we are in a partnership with nature, and that partnership may involve huge unintended consequences like global warming and resource exhaustion. It is the thinking that pervades the financialization of ecosystem services and greenhouse gas emissions, a kind of magical thinking that puts a monetary value on a finite set of natural processes, and through the trading of those values or services, the planet’s assets will be protected. The modernist hubris and cleverness in developing technologies and techniques—including markets—to harvest and manage the Earth has succeeded in pushing the planet into another state. The Anthropocene forces us to question scientific epistemologies that alienate the researcher, the modeler, the technology developer, the land developer, the profit-seeking firm, from the place we inhabit.

The challenge then, for the twenty-first century, is how to reclaim our humanity as a member of the Earth community, and recognize that our activities have consequences, as they don’t fall on an inert, static, set of Earth systems.

The current era of the Anthropocene, of which we are so terrified, is a co-produced era that we must learn to inhabit. There is no return to the Holocene, there is just living on a changing planet as a member of the planetary community. What this means for the future of cities can be revolutionary. I argue it means that we engage in a creative reinhabitation of what we term the countryside through smaller scale networked cities that are based on the rediscovery, renewal, revitalization of perceptual skills that are grounded in involvement in specific environments. Such skills are a necessary grounding for future human survival and well-being and involve treating the environment with knowledge and intimacy and, ultimately, respect. It requires developing an ethics of care for place, a sense of empathy for the lives of others, the life processes that both support us and which we are actively co-create.

Weaving room, Kyoto. Photo: Jonathan Katz

What would these cities be like?  A decentered urbanism would mean that cities would have to be more locally resourceful and embedded in their locality. The nature of the city would be the nature of the local environment—the soil, vegetation, minerals, water, sun—upon which that city would primarily depend. Over time, cities would be built, or rebuilt, using local resources, including mud, wood, straw, and manufactured or recycled materials constrained by energy inputs and locally available materials, including recovered ones. And those resources and local attributes would have to be thoughtfully and intelligently managed so they are not depleted, polluted or damaged. This will have to be industrious (re)manufacturing, a people-intensive patient production, based on production for need rather than production for profit. It will be based on hybrid systems of information technology and artisanal dexterity, knowledge of local materials and their capacities, combined with cradle to cradle processes for recovery and reuse.

In this vision, city and nature fuse into a partnership of caring for the long term, for a livable Anthropocene. Agricultural practices will need to be more intensive and localized. Soil fertility and loam will be critical, and dependent on night soil, compost, and green waste. Decentered cities will be a mix of density interspersed with fields and gardens, zones for water capture and infiltration, food provision and preservation and energy production. Cities will be strongly connected to peri-urban areas for their resources, energy and agricultural production. Peri-urban areas will be managed with foresight for long-term resource stability. They will be a mix of cultivated and managed wild. Peri-urban regions are precious areas for cities as they will depend on the ecological health of those areas including foraging, timber, hunting, water supplies and hydropower. What such health might mean in the Anthropocene will evolve over time and involve human perception and understanding of the dynamic adaptation of different places to a different climate.

Vegetables the city, Kyoto. Photo: Jonathan Katz

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the ultimate sustainability of megacities. They must source food and materials from far-flung places, entraining significant greenhouse gas and other costs, and displacing environmental externalities to those places, degrading them. As megacities expand their range of imported foodstuffs, for example, they destroy local food networks and self-reliance, encourage substitute crops for money, shifting the supply of food sources around to other places, disrupting ecologies and patterns of human-environment interrelations. Megacities are dependent on utilizing hydrocarbon energy that packs a hugely dense portable power. Other sources of energy, like solar or wind, need to be collected over large areas and stored. Such differences mean that it will be difficult to maintain megacities, or even large cities, using alternative sources of energy. Deconcentrating cities and relocalizing agricultural production, for example, alleviates those impacts but raises big challenges about the ability of humans to sustain themselves based on working with the potential of the soils, water, and sun in specific places. It may be impossible, but the megacity future is as well given the intensity of energy resources needed to make them function without creating sacrifice zones around the world to support them.

Ohara field. Photo: Jonathan Katz

For humans to thrive in the future, it will require us to perceive ourselves as inextricably intertwined with the animate and inanimate forces that surround us, (and indeed inhabitat us like the biota in our guts). This means, paradoxically, a more deep and extensive inhabitation of the planet—people nearly everywhere in small and larger agglomerations, working in and with nature for mutual survival and well-being.

What looms large in this transformation is the question of the economy. It is clear that none of this can be accomplished without a radical transformation of the current global economic system that is increasingly financializing Earth systems, and human relations, supported by the current political regime. The dramatic intensification of monetizing: the pricing of greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystem services (an instrumentalized view of the living world), water resources, land and more, further alienates humans from living in the world and the potential sewing together a polychromatic quilt that reconnects us to the very planet we depend upon.

Abandoned store in Tokako, Hokkaido. Photo: Jonathan Katz

It is clear that the current neo-liberal political-economic system is deepening economic divides among people and countries. Its economic instruments applied to nature, are simply displacing impacts from one place to another, but at an accelerating pace of destruction. Economic growth, in contrast to enrichment, is slowing and becoming more elusive. The capitalist paradigm as a world economic system that works for people and the planet is failing. For cities and nature, the ability to shift graciously and well into the Anthropocene requires a fundamentally different political-economy that reflects new ethics and priorities. These are ethics of care, ethics of compassion and an orientation that asks what is sufficient for human well-being. It will involve degrowth in places, and a new type of growth everywhere, growth of partnerships among people and the planet for a wholesome future. And it will take reflection and time.

Stephanie Pincetl
Los Angeles

On The Nature of Cities

References

Angelo, H., Wachsmuth, D., 2015. Urbanizing urban political ecology: a critique of
methodological cityism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39, 16–27.

Descola, Philippe. 2015. Prof. Philippe Descola: Winner of the 2012 CNRS Golden
Medal. College de France newsletter 7: 22-24.

Ingold, T. 2012.Toward and ecology of materials. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:427-42.

LaTour B. 2010., “May Nature Be Recomposed? A Few Questions of Cosmopolitics”. The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie-_erFVz5A

Lefebvre, H., 2003. 1979] The Urban Revolution, Translated by R. Bononno. University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Kennedy, C., Cuddihy J., Engel-Yan, J., 2007. The changing metabolism of cities. Journal of Industrial Ecology. 11, 43–59.

Pincetl, S., Bunje, P., Holmes, T., 2012. An expanded urban metabolism method towards a
systems approach for assessing urban energy processes and causes. Landscape and Urban
Planning 107, 193–202.

United Nations Environmental Program. 2016. Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity Assessment Report for the UNEP International Resource Panel.

Biodiversity vs. Livability: What to do on the Victorian Western Volcanic Plain?

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Managing the tension between biodiversity and livability on Melbourne’s volcanic plains grasslands is possible, using scientific evidence to support tree selection and habitat design, balanced with an understanding of the biological, social and cultural needs of people.

What to do when biodiversity ideals conflict with livability imperatives for a city? A fascinating example of this tension is the western suburbs of Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, Australia. The greater metropolitan area of Melbourne lies on several bioregions. Most of the northern, southern, and eastern suburbs lie on the Gippsland Plain and Highlands-Southern Fall bioregions, with small areas within the Otway Plain, Central Victorian Uplands, and Highlands-Northern Fall. In contrast, the western suburbs lie on the Victorian Volcanic Plain.

The vegetation communities of these bioregions vary greatly, and therein lies the tension: the indigenous landscapes of the Victorian Volcanic Plain are largely treeless, predominantly grasslands. Yet, livability dictates the inclusion of a tree canopy for shade, aesthetic value, sustainable water management, connection with nature, etc. Nevertheless, requirements for biodiversity can be reconciled with requirements for livability. It just requires a flexible approach and evidence-based design.

View to Melbourne from the volcanic plain to its west. Photo: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/melbournes-western-grasslands-going-going%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%A6

The Western Volcanic Plain extends as a belt 100 km wide from the Yarra River where it passes through the inner-eastern suburbs of Melbourne to 350 km west. With an area of approximately 20,000 square kilometers, it is the third largest volcanic plain in the world. There are many ecological vegetation classes (EVC) in this bioregion, some of which include trees. Overwhelmingly, though, it is plains grassland that is thought to have covered most of the area now being settled to the west of Melbourne. It is to this EVC that environmental officers would look when establishing public open space.

Victoria has embraced the need for sustainable and resilient development, which must include addressing urban heat island and sustainable water management issues. Inevitably, trees are an important element in these approaches. There are three tiers of government in Australia and all have policies that affect biodiversity in our cities and the presence of trees.

At the national level, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 is the Australian Government’s key piece of environmental legislation, supported by a set of regulations. Commencing in July 2000, the EPBC Act provides the framework for a national scheme of biodiversity conservation (as well as environment and heritage protection). Responsibilities are split between the national and state and local governments, depending on the level of environmental significance, i.e., national, state or local.

The EPBC Act enables the Australian Government to join with the States and Territories in providing a truly national scheme of environment and heritage protection and biodiversity conservation. The EPBC Act focuses Australian Government interests on the protection of matters of national environmental significance, with the States and Territories having responsibility for matters of state and local significance. Amongst the objectives of the legislation particularly relevant to cities are the conservation of Australian biodiversity and promotion of ecologically sustainable development through the conservation of natural resources.

At the State level, Victoria has developed a plan—Protecting Victoria’s Environment – Biodiversity 2037—“to stop the decline of our native plants and animals and improve our natural environment so it is healthy, valued and actively cared for”. The plan addresses biodiversity on private land, on public land and in conservation reserves. Working with the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act and native vegetation clearing regulations, the plan provides a mechanism to protect and manage Victoria’s biodiversity. Relevant aspects of the plan to protect biodiversity in Victoria’s cities relate to more effective management of threats “across the landscape to ensure that species and ecosystems are conserved, and to give biodiversity the best chance to adapt to the effects of climate change and human population growth”. Importantly, the plan notes that the system of conservation reserves should be reviewed periodically “to ensure that permanent protection of biodiversity is as effective as possible under changing climate conditions and land uses”.

There are 79 local councils in Victoria, of which 31 lie within greater Melbourne. Each council operates independently. An elected group of councilors sets the agenda for the municipality, and professional members of staff fulfill various roles to achieve the council’s objectives. Although biodiversity objectives of local councils must align with the state’s objectives, each council can set its own priorities. In an interesting study, Peter Morison found that commitment of local Melbourne municipalities to water-sensitive urban design (WSUD) varied with “environmental values, demographic and socio-economic status, local organized environmentalism, municipal environmental messages, and intergovernmental disposition” (p. 83). Commitment to WSUD was greatest in those local councils closest to the coast or with more than 50 percent cover with natural vegetation. It would not be surprising to find that support for biodiversity conservation varied similarly. Thus, local councils might be expected to differ in their policies on biodiversity and their management of it in response to the demand for more livable cities as populations grow and the suburban fringe expands.

Greater Melbourne within urban growth boundary (shaded blue). Image: http://www.sro.vic.gov.au/greater-melbourne-map-and-urban-zones

The Victorian government has established an Urban Growth Boundary to manage the expansion of greater Melbourne. The intent is to direct Melbourne’s growth toward land that can be readily supplied with infrastructure and services and to protect valuable peri-urban land and environmental features from urban development. There are many threatened ecological communities in greater Melbourne, but the natural temperate grassland and grassy eucalypt woodland on the Victorian Volcanic Plains to the west of Melbourne are especially pressured by urban development.

Each of the local councils responsible for management of biodiversity within their municipalities has biodiversity strategies and/or plans, recognizing that “the conservation of native biodiversity in close proximity to a large and dense human population is a challenge that relies on planning and active management” (p. 13). These councils also recognize that open space available for biodiversity management includes not just remnant native habitat but also parks and gardens, recreational areas and constructed landscapes. Thus, many councils have developed urban forest strategies and broader environmental strategies. Ideally, these strategies and plans, at different scales and with different focuses, are complementary and mutually supportive.

Let’s look at the approach of one council in particular, out on the western edge of Melbourne’s urban growth boundary. This area is experiencing rapid population growth, accompanied by development of residential estates. The challenge is to conserve the remnant biodiversity of the volcanic plains grasslands and yet create livable sustainable communities. Wyndham Council has developed a Biodiversity Policy 2014, an Environment and Sustainability Strategy 2016-2040, and a (draft) City Forest and Habitat Strategy 2018-2040, amongst others. Within a framework established by the Environment and Sustainability Strategy, the Biodiversity Policy commits the council “to:

  • Enhance: Local flora, fauna and ecosystems make an important contribution to life in our community. Wyndham City is committed to ongoing, high quality management and improvement of its own natural assets.
  • Plan: Wyndham City has a responsibility to lead by example and influence the protection of biodiversity on behalf of the community, with a focus on strategic conservation gains in planning and decision making and long term resilience of biodiversity in a changing environment and climate.
  • Educate: An educated and engaged community will value, support and protect the conservation of local biodiversity.
  • Partner: Sustained partnerships will maximise conservation outcomes within Wyndham and the wider region.
  • Monitor, Learn and Adapt: Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting and Improvement (MERI) is integral to ensure that management regimes are effective and benefiting biodiversity.”

The (draft) City Forest and Habitat Strategy then provides specific actions to ensure that “the right tree in the right place” is achieved. To manage the tension between biodiversity objectives associated with the largely treeless plains grassland and the desire to increase canopy cover in the municipality, tree selection criteria varies with location. For example, locally indigenous trees should be used in streets, depending on street character and habitat zones. If the median strip is wide enough, such trees should be chosen for attributes that will provide habitat for local wildlife. Suitable indigenous trees are limited, though. So, native Victorian trees might be used instead. Unfortunately, suitable native Victorian trees are also limited, in which case native Australian trees are suggested, with flowering trees preferred as a food source in habitat zones and invasive species to be avoided. Use of exotic (overseas) trees is to be limited in habitat zones, again with a preference for trees with flowers. In contrast, along rural roads, trees are to be selected to match existing plantings. Grassland quality along roads should be assessed before planting trees, which should be spaced widely to reduce their impact on the adjacent native grasslands. Trees along drainage lines and general reserves should be selected from indigenous and native Victorian species where the trees can contribute to a contiguous habitat. Native Australian trees should be used in such locations to match existing character and to create habitat. Exotic trees should only be used to maintain existing character. In natural waterways or wetlands, indigenous trees should be used in most cases. In constructed parks and around ornamental waterbodies, park character determines the choice of tree species; if exotic trees are to be used, flowering forms are preferred, to contribute to habitat. Wyndham Council aims to increase the tree canopy cover in its open space, excluding grasslands, from 4.3 percent in 2017 to 35 percent in 2040.

In addition, BOBITS are proposed. These “bits of bush in the suburbs” would provide patches of habitat within a matrix of residential development. Ideally, such patches would also form corridors for wildlife movement between patches.

Image: https://www.wyndham.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2017-09/City%20Forest%20and%20Habitat%20Strategy%20-%20Annexes%20%28Appendices%29.pdf

In choosing the right tree for the right place, aesthetic considerations are less important than the ability of the tree to grow in the location and to provide the most benefits for the community. Life expectancy and maintenance requirements are also important, as is choosing a tree with the largest canopy possible.

In applying these selection criteria, Wyndham Council is practising the principles identified by American landscape architects Garrett Eckbo, Dan Kiley and James Rose, in 1939 and 1940 in three articles titled “Landscape design in the urban environment”, “Landscape design in the rural environment” and “Landscape design in the primeval environment”, in the Architectural Record. Their message can be summed up quite easily: any place should be designed for the needs of its primary inhabitants. In their words: “The design principles underlying the planning of the urban, rural, and primeval environments are identical: use of the best available means to provide for the specific needs of the specific inhabitants; this results in specific forms”. Thus, urban areas should be designed bearing in mind primarily the needs of its human residents. However, Eckbo, Kiley and Rose continue: “None of these environments stands alone. Every factor in one has its definite influence on the inhabitants of the other, and the necessity of establishing an equilibrium emerges. To be in harmony with the natural forces of renewal and exhaustion, this equilibrium must be dynamic, constantly changing and balancing within the complete environment. It is this fact that makes arbitrary design sterile and meaningless—a negation of science. The real problem is the redesign of man’s environments, making them flexible in use, adaptable in form, economical in effort and productive in bringing to individuals an enlarged horizon of cultural, scientific, and social integrity”.

Managing the tension between biodiversity and livability on the volcanic plains grasslands is possible, using scientific evidence to support tree selection and habitat design, balanced with an understanding of the biological, social and cultural needs of the place’s primary inhabitants, the humans. Wyndham Council has demonstrated how balance can be achieved between environmental preferences for indigenous landscapes and social preferences for treed landscapes in our suburbs. In contrast, primeval landscapes, such as remnant grasslands, should be managed for their primary inhabitants, the indigenous flora and fauna. This doesn’t mean that such grasslands have no place in suburban landscapes, nor that they do not contribute to livability, but that is a topic for another post.

Meredith Dobbie
Victoria

On The Nature of Cities

 

Thinking Like a Lake in Mexico City

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When faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, it’s a good idea to call upon the forces of nature. First you have to think about the nature of your city, how it works and how to work with it. Mexico City is built on a lake, so start there.

A satirical video circulated this past summer announcing Mexico City as the country’s newest and most exciting water park, featuring waterfalls in the metro and an airport runway turned waterway.[1]  I thought they might have included the geyser spouting out of a drain that I saw next to the sign for the Fuentes Brotantes (Gushing Fountains) Metrobús station.

Mexico City as a Waterpark. Photo: http://quinto-poder.mx/videos/video-nuevo-parque-acuatico-la-cdmx

Instead of draining away the rising water that was filling the major arterial road Avenida Insurgentes Sur, the sewage system was channeling rushing water from higher up the slope of the Valley of Mexico into the centre of Mexico City at the bottom. Similarly, roads running perpendicular to the avenue became fast-flowing streams with cascades forming as the water flowed over outcrops of urban infrastructure. The force of the water provided a new reason to take care when crossing intersections as the water level crept up our legs and hinted at the possibility of being swept away. But my real moment of fear came when edging along a ledge over several feet of murky water and thinking about the unlucky combination of my natural lack of balance and the number of electronic devices in my backpack.

From drain to gushing fountain. Photo: Janice Astbury
Intersection with waves. Photo: Janice Astbury
The view from the edge. Photo: Janice Astbury
The view from the Metrobús. Photo: Janice Astbury
Metrobús station as dry land. Photo: Janice Astbury

This watery urban adventure had begun when my boundlessly adventurous friend and colleague Jürgen Hoth decided that we should get off the Metrobús and continue our journey on foot along the flooded expressway. This seemed perhaps the only way to avoid spending the night in an articulated bus which had come to a complete stop with the thousands of other vehicles on the road.

We saw the reason for this paralysis after an hour or so of wading through water and clambering over railings and road dividers and across Metrobús platforms in search of higher ground over which to continue our journey. At the front of the sea of immobilised traffic we saw that a lake had started to form in the lower part of the expressway. Emergency workers were moving about with hooks presumably trying to unblock drains, which appeared to be a hopeless endeavour. People kept saying to me: “This city was built on a lake”. And although it looks like every last vestige of water has been drained away, “The lake keeps coming back”. This lake, with no natural outlet, was Lake Texcoco where the Aztecs turned an island into their capital city of Tenochtitlan.

To wait or to wade. Fording the Avenida Insurgentes. Photo: Janice Astbury

The flooding on the day of my watery adventure was by no means the worst of this past rainy season. It was only one of many days where people spent hours and hours moving small distances within the city-becoming-a-lake. Mexico City dwellers spend huge amounts of time sitting in traffic under all climatic conditions but the addition of water shifts the question from “what time will I get home tonight?” to “will I get home tonight?” As in many places, there is a sense that the climate is changing and that the flooding is getting worse. It is a big problem that requires a big solution. Some have decided that the solution is to build a giant sewer to carry more of the city’s unwanted water away. The Túnel Emisor Oriente (Eastern Discharge Tunnel) is scheduled for completion, after various delays and budget overruns, at the end of 2018. Despite the enormous investment, according to some critics, it will not be able to prevent flooding.[2] This massive engineering project raises questions about the effects of being on the receiving end of the wastewater of nine million people and their economic activities. It also seems unwise to channel water away from a thirsty city with a falling water table (and a serious subsidence problem), which must resort to piping water in from further and further away. The Sistema Cutzamala (one of the largest waterworks in the world, and possibly the most expensive to operate) brings water from about 150 km away and pumps it 1 km up to the elevation of Mexico City—and still only provides about 30 percent of the water required.

It’s an absurd situation for a city that was, and to some extent still is, a lake.

Fortunately, a growing number of people are thinking about what it means to be a city that was a lake, and are exploring ways to work with their ecosystem rather than against it. Many of them believe this is the only feasible solution given that conventional water management infrastructure has been tried unsuccessfully since the arrival of the Europeans. Academics, civil society organisations, and government officials are now talking about what are increasingly described as nature-based solutions. I have been fortunate to speak to some of them about this in my role as a researcher within the programme NATure-based URban innoVATION (NATURVATION).


Within the city boundaries: Milpa Alta. Photos: Janice Astbury

Fortunately, Mexico City has nature on a grand enough scale to play a significant role in providing solutions to its big problems. One of the most surprising things about this densely populated city is that more than half of the area within the city boundaries is a conservation zone, the Conservation Land (Suelo de Conservación). This large area of 85.5 hectares was designated for conservation some years ago (classified in 1976 and clearly defined in 1987).[3] This designation recognised the importance of the local ecosystem within the growing city. Unfortunately, there are many threats to the Conservation Land and the regulations governing its use are not always respected. However its very existence is testimony to the long-standing, prescient vision regarding the role of natural processes in the city, and an enduring legal framework that facilitated emergence of these nature-based solutions.

The Conservation Land is deemed to be of particular importance because of its role in recharging the aquifer, which still satisfies about 40 percent of the city’s water needs and has potential to do more. The slopes of the Valley of Mexico must retain their vegetation in order to absorb rainfall and recharge the aquifer. Vegetated slopes retain rainwater in the upper parts of the basin, slowing and absorbing the flow and lessening the likelihood of creating lake-like conditions and flooded roads and buildings at the bottom. Below much of the paved surface of the city lies an impermeable clay lakebed. There is nowhere for the water to go. It is therefore infinitely better for this runoff to be absorbed higher up and converted into good quality water for humans and non-humans, than becoming an agent of destruction, picking up contaminants, doing damage and ultimately requiring costly removal by a yet to be effectively implemented grey infrastructure.

It is also important to note the existence of the pedregal in the Valley of Mexico, an ecosystem of drought-resistant vegetation in a water collecting landscape of basalt (volcanic rock). It has the capacity to store water and to channel it into the deep aquifer below the lake bed so maintaining its functioning is crucial.[4] There are remnants of this landscape in the built-up portion of the southern part of Mexico City and there are opportunities to protect and restore it using approaches showcased around the campus of the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM).[5]


Pedregal landscapes at UNAM. Photos: Janice Astbury

But while there is growing awareness that the best solutions to Mexico City’s water problems must be nature-based solutions, the challenges of implementing these are greater than engineering a giant sewer. Multiple overlapping layers of grey infrastructure and the social infrastructure that facilitates its expansion limit the opportunities to benefit from the green infrastructure underneath.

People looking for housing can find cheaper options by moving to the edge of the city and up the slope. This land is thus sealed off beneath homes and roads and the other facilities that will eventually follow. Both real estate development and irregular settlements facilitate this sprawl, and are in turn encouraged by the social, economic, political, and legal context in which they unfold, with vulnerability and corruption playing big roles. Poorer people in this very unequal city often find themselves driven away from central areas and forced to settle far from their places of work and the amenities and communities that may be important to them. Sadly they become both victims and sources of the traffic problems, spending hours each day in buses that move even more slowly during flooding exacerbated by their dislocation.

Some areas are safeguarded by the presence of traditional practices of cultivation, now also combined with newer forms of sustainable production and land management. These are often in the care of indigenous communities or ejidos (campesino communities), which collectively own their lands. In the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Xochimilco (the last vestige of the Mexico City lake system) people still grow food using chinampas, the floating gardens that once fed the entire city and that are now also noted for their water filtering and flood mitigation capacity. But alongside these are a growing number of greenhouse operations and throughout the Conservation Land intensive cultivation both reduces and pollutes the water that makes it to the aquifer, while illegal cutting or clearing and land use change removes trees and displaces the native grasses that have a key role in maintaining the healthy functioning of the ecosystem.

All of this is made more complicated by the presence of criminal activity and accompanying impunity that can make it dangerous to confront people engaged in illegal activities. In parallel other forms of criminality direct attention and enforcement resources away from protecting a vital ecosystem and the communities maintaining sustainable livelihoods within it.

This complex dynamic plays out within an equally complex web of land tenures and jurisdictions including collectively owned lands, protected natural areas, cities and their boroughs, and several states. Fortunately various entities (states, municipalities, local communities, civil society organisations, academics) within what is now known as the megalopolis have come together to collaborate in an initiative called the Water Forest which covers an area of about 1000 square miles. They recognise that the ecosystem of the wider Basin of Mexico is essential to the survival of Mexico City and surrounding settlements with their 23 million people, and its protection and restoration is, therefore, a question of national security.[6]

The current investment of effort, creativity, and goodwill of many actors engaged in diverse activities is a source of hope, particularly as the work is taking place at multiple scales including within local areas like Xochimilco, the wider Conservation Land, and the umbrella initiative of the Water Forest. This is accompanied by the development of innovative approaches to financing that reflect the high value of the ecosystem services provided and it is facilitated by the expansion of perspectives that acknowledge and work with the complex overlapping systems that are the source of and solution to challenges, as is evidenced by the Mexico City Resilience Strategy[7].

Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, remains the socio-cultural shift required among all urban actors who need to move away from thinking like a builder of a machine and move toward thinking like a collaborator in an ecosystem. When faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, it’s a good idea to call upon the forces of nature. First you have to think about the nature of your city, how it works and how to work with it. Sometimes it’s not obvious on the surface, as in the case of Mexico City where water scarcity is emblematic but where the solution is to think like a lake.

Janice Astbury
London

On The Nature of Cities

NATure-based URban innoVATION (naturvation.eu) is a 4-year project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme involving 14 institutions across Europe in fields as diverse as urban development, innovation studies, geography, ecology, environmental assessment and economics. The partnership includes city governments, non-governmental organisations and business. The project will assess what nature-based solutions can achieve in cities, examine how innovation is taking place, and work with communities and stakeholders to develop the knowledge and tools required to realise the potential of nature-based solutions for meeting urban sustainability goals.

[1] Quinto Poder. (2017). El nuevo parque acuático de la CDMX at http://quinto-poder.mx/videos/video-nuevo-parque-acuatico-la-cdmx/

[2] López, J. (2017). ‘Túnel Emisor Oriente no acabará con inundaciones’ in Excelsior, 27 July 2017, at  http://www.excelsior.com.mx/comunidad/2017/07/27/1178183

[3] Connolly, P., & Wigle, J. (2017). (Re) constructing Informality and “Doing Regularization” in the Conservation Zone of Mexico City. Planning Theory & Practice, 18(2), 183-201.

[4] National Research Council. (1995). Mexico City’s Water Supply: Improving the Outlook for Sustainability. National Academies Press.

[5] Suárez, A., Camarena, P., Herrera, I., & Lot, A. (2011). Infraestructura verde y corredores ecológicos de los pedregales: ecología urbana del sur de la Ciudad de México. UNAM, at http://centro.paot.org.mx/documentos/unam/infraestructura_verde.pdf

[6] Hoth, J. (2014). ‘Urban Jungle: No Forest, No Water for Mexico City’, in humanature, 21 March 2014, at https://blog.conservation.org/2014/03/urban-jungle-no-forest-no-water-for-mexico-city/

[7] CDMX Resilience Office. (2016). CDMX Resilience Strategy, September 2016 at http://100resilientcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/CDMX-Resilience-Strategy-English_2.pdf

What the Zika Epidemic Means for Gender and Urban Adaptation Planning in Brazil

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The end of Zika doesn’t begin with the eradication of a mosquito: it requires a systemic, intersectional analysis to help identify how social, economic, urban, health and other structures shape women’s lives, power, and their vulnerability to climate impacts and access to resources.

Almost exactly two years ago, South America was swept up in a public health crisis that affected hundreds of thousands of women across the continent. In Brazil, more than 2,600 children were born with the microcephaly and other health complications resulting from the viral infection Zika. Brazilians quickly became accustomed to the unfamiliar name of the disease, which spread fast across the North East of the country and across borders to Colombia and Venezuela. By February 2016, the World Health Organisation had declared the Zika epidemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)—the fourth PHEIC it had made after the swine flu (2009), polio (2014), and ebola (2014). Zika, a mosquito-borne viral disease that emerged in South America in 2015, is carried by the mosquito Aedis aegypti and can also be transmitted sexually.

As someone who works with climate change adaptation, I was particularly struck by the climatic and systemic elements of the epidemic. In the North East of Brazil, the area most affected by Zika, droughts are not uncommon and are intensifying with climate change. Many households, particularly among the poor, store water to deal with shortages that result from inefficiencies in urban water supply. Struck by abnormally high temperatures in the region, the combination of heat, stored water, and poor urban infrastructure provided fertile breeding ground for mosquitoes. Studies published since the crisis have helped establish that the El Niño contributed to unusually high temperatures in the region and that climate change is a contributing factor to Zika.

A woman in a favela in Maceió, northeast Brazil, looks out onto open sewage. Photo: Pedro Trindade/Flickr

Another element which affected me was the evident gender inequality that marked the health crisis. As a middle-class white woman living in São Paulo, I felt far removed from the Zika crisis despite the incessant national and international media coverage and messages of concern from my friends abroad. Even Olympic athletes were considering not coming to Brazil and made elaborate plans to protect themselves. I was not concerned with my exposure to Zika. I do not, however, live close to informal settlements or suffer from water shortages or poor urban development, and neither am I stuck in poverty.

Six percent of Brazil’s population—almost 12 million people—live in informal settlements known as favelas. Amongst this population of slum dwellers, roughly half, or 6 million people, are women. The gender disparity of the crisis is emphasised by the law professor Debora Diniz in her New York Times article: “Lost in the panic about Zika is an important fact: The epidemic mirrors the social inequality of Brazilian society. It is concentrated among young, poor, black and brown women, a vast majority of them living in the country’s least-developed regions.” Many of the urban regions affected by Zika lack basic public services, such as water supply or waste treatment. In 13 of the 27 state capital cities in Brazil, less than half the population has access to municipal with sewage collection services. On average, only 42 percent of cities have installed appropriate municipal sewage treatment services.

The most devastating impact of the Zika crisis was the impact on women’s human rights and the sheer lack of power, access to resources and information, and control they had over their bodies. In Brazil abortions are illegal; 20 percent of all pregnancies are in teenagers and half of pregnancies are unplanned. Access to family planning and reproductive information is limited. Throughout the Zika crisis, women infected with the virus were not granted abortions, and initial government response to the crisis focussed on advising women only to withhold from sex and delay pregnancy. The onus to prevent Zika or minimise risks of infecting was shouldered onto women.

As the crisis unfolded, I found myself trying to gather insights into how Zika affected women from public health, racial injustice, water security, climate change, gender inequality, abortion, urban development, and human rights perspectives. I developed a sense of urgency that the epidemic afforded us an opportunity to understand and gain insights into how potential climate change impacts in cities must be understood from a systemic and intersectional approach. Climate change impacts are distributed locally and unevenly in cities, both spatially and socially. Given projected urban growth and climate change, how can cities ensure their most vulnerable citizens are protected from and prepared for climate change? More importantly, how can cities account for the varying impacts on climate change across diverse groups of people, identities, and individuals?

Two years on, and there seems to a collective memory loss about Zika in Brazil. Many articles in Portuguese have appeared referring to the forgotten state of the women affected by Zika. Many women have been abondanoned by the fathers of their children with microcephaly, receive no government support to deal with rising healthcare costs, and are unable to effectively cope with caring for a child who has special needs and uphold a full-time job. Urban services such as public transportation is often limited, which means that mothers have to travel long distances to reach medical and support services. The burden to prevent, cope and recover from Zika thus lies with these women who live in informal housing, tend to be brown or black, and poor.

In the English-language world, the recent and excellent report “Neglected and Unprotected: The Impact of the Zika Outbreak on Women and Girls in Northeastern Brazil”, published in July by the Human Rights Watch, analyses the long-term impacts of the Zika epidemic on women, with far-reaching analysis that goes beyond climate change and gender inequality. For example, the report looks at how public healthcare, abortion laws, and urban development structure women’s lives and realities and therefore influence the impact that Zika had on them. To prevent and reduce the impacts from future outbreaks, the Human Rights Watch report makes technical recommendations that address public health emergency response, access to health information, education and awareness raising, child support, people’s rights to water security and sanitation, sexual and reproductive healthcare, decriminalisation of abortion, climate change adaptation policy, and urban development amongst others. In short, the end of Zika doesn’t begin with the eradication of a mosquito: it requires a systemic, intersectional analysis to help identify how social, economic, urban, health and other structures shape women’s lives, access to resources, power, and their vulnerability to climate impacts such as Zika. Such an analysis should inform appropriate urban planning.

The term intersectionality was coined by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw and is defined as “the interaction between gender, race and other categories of difference in individuals lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these intersections in terms of power.” Whilst Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality within the field of critical race theory, it serves as a relevant lense through which to analyse climate change impacts in cities. As researchers Anna Kaijser and Annica Kronsell point out, “since the effects of climate change are mediated through social, cultural, and economic structures and processes, the need for social analyses in relation to the issue has become more recognised”. Yet gender-responsive and intersectional analysis remain largely absent from urban climate change adaptation planning. Literature and research on climate resilience, in particular, has been critiqued for not addressing enough issues of power and inequality. For example, a study from 2015 analysed 123 papers and looked at how gender is incorporated into adaptation, resilience and vulnerability (ARV) studies published in the peer-reviewed literature. The research concludes that whilst gender is increasing in focus in ARV research, it is still marginal.

Adopting intersectional approaches can help reveal otherwise hidden information about groups of people or individuals that are useful for climate change adaptation planning and extreme weather events. Natalie Osborne notes that in disasters risk management research, for instance, intersectionality helped develop understanding that although vulnerability to extreme weather events is gendered, it is “also shaped by ability, family type, cultural/racial group, and class.” This type of knowledge can lead to more effective interventions to minimise vulnerability. As Osborne also writes in her paper ”

Intersectionality and Kyriarchy: a framework for approaching power and social justice in planning and climage change”, “there is a lot of data to suggest that today’s marginality is tomorrow’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and peak oil”.

Here are some practical questions developed by Matsuda that city managers should consider when working on urban adaptation planning:

“When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’ When I see smoething that looks homophobic, I ask, ‘Where is the class interests in this?”

Asking such questions can help internalise a method for analysis and planning that can generate more nuanced understandings of people’s vulnerability to climate change impacts.

At this given moment, cities in Brazil are being dramtically impacted by climate change-driven weather extremes, such as droughts and flooding. Currently, the country’s capital, Brasília, is going through a historical drought and households have been subjected to a water rationing scheme whereby two days a week water supply to households is limited. As cities prepare to build capacity to plan for and manage climate change impacts, this process should ensure it is accountable to individuals’ and groups’ different needs, life experiences, power, access to resources and vulnerability. The Zika epidemic demonstrates how particular groups of women are more exposed to the outbreak and long-term consequences due to a set of social norms, institutional arrangements and physical structures over which they have little control. With a better grasp of the realities that poor, black and brown young women face, urban planners could have better identified the need to reduce the risks of mosquito proliferation and developed longe-term support structures to help mothers care for their children with microcephaly.

City managers and planners need to internalise and promote awareness of intersecting structures to identify particular needs and vulnerabilities that aren’t at first obvious and develop plans accordingly. Solutions to climate change will come through better governance, planning, and efforts to increase participation and social inclusion. It is crucial to derive lessons from the Zika epidemic that could benefit and improve urban climate change planning and adaptation in Brazil.

Katerina Elias
São Paulo

On The Nature of Cities

Of Flash Floods and a Lost Indian Waterscape

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The story of the Dharmambudhi lake serves as a reminder of the fact that disrupting the connectivity of a waterscape can have serious implications.

In the weeks prior to the writing of this article, the city of Bengaluru was reeling under the onslaught of torrential rainfall, the likes of which it had not witnessed in decades. Effects of this downpour were felt in many ways—flash floods in several parts of the city, trees uprooted, lives lost, and gnarly traffic standstills. Viral visuals also surfaced showing the city’s main bus station, its prominent indoor stadium, and several other parts of the city knee deep in water. Several lakes breached their banks, while minor rivers like the Vrishabhavati, which have not held water within city limits for decades, came back to life.

It was also this rain that made people realize the faulty infrastructural planning of the city. Images of flyovers draining floodwaters into roads below like mini waterfalls, further contributing to floods, went viral in several circles (Image 1). Reports surfaced of citizens unable to go about their daily lives owing to rising water levels inside homes, and forced to explore outside the box ideas to combat these issues. One woman invested in a rowboat to navigate floodwaters (in land locked Bengaluru!) and ferry her children and those of her neighbours to their after-school tutoring.

Image 1. Mini waterfall created by a flooded flyover – Bengaluru, 2017. Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan

In addition to human suffering and infrastructural challenges, these events have another common thread running through them—that of a vanished waterscape brought to life in unexpected ways when nature decided to pay a call. The city’s present struggles with water are linked to its past, when the intimate relationship between the urban landscape and the waterscape was manipulated over several centuries, leading to its eventual loss. Flash floods, such as Bengaluru recently witnessed, jog memories and nostalgia surrounding Bengaluru’s lost lakes, channels, and streams. Several areas that were flooded in these rains were—for obvious reasons—locations of former lakebeds, storm water channels, and lake wetlands. The Kanteerava Stadium (formerly Sampangi lake), Majestic bus terminus (formerly Dharmambudhi lake), National Games Village (formerly Koramangala tank) and several others were recalled by popular media and cited as examples of bad urban planning by civic bodies.

Why did flooding at such a scale occur in a land locked city that is geographically prone to aridity and does not have a major river flowing through it? The answer to these questions requires one to revisit the city’s past. Early settlers and rulers, recognizing the geophysical constraints imposed by Bengaluru’s topography, exploited natural depressions in the land to engineer a series of networked, cascading water bodies connected by numerous channels. Filled seasonally by monsoon rainfall, water from one lake would overflow into the next across gradients of elevation, creating a flowing waterscape that met the water requirements of its early inhabitants. Water thus harvested and stored was supplemented through massive open wells that tapped into shallow aquifers recharged by lakes, thus ensuring further water security. Why and how did this all-important waterscape disappear across the centuries? Moreover, what does this mean for contemporary urban planning?

Any visitor to Bengaluru city traveling either by train or by bus cannot miss the sprawling Kempegowda bus station, the city’s central bus terminus. The area welcomes visitors and residents with a strong flavour of old Bengaluru—narrow streets, with colourful shops selling all manners of clothes, cheap plastic toys, bangles, vegetables, fruits, and flowers; traditional musical instruments, and old-style homes, juxtaposed to create a cacophony of noise and colour in this space. This is what remains of the Pete: the agricultural and industrial hub of colonial Bengaluru, which was separated from the anglicized cantonment, complete with parks, boulevards, and bungalows. Dharmambudhi lake in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, together with three other minor water bodies in the vicinity served to meet the water requirements of the Pete through the diversion of lake water into strategically placed stone troughs that enabled the collection of water. Sluice gates around the lake also enabled the provision of water for agriculture. The banks of storm water channels were used for a variety of domestic activities including washing clothes, swimming, and bathing. Access to pasturage was, however, regulated through tenders and public auctions. A lake deity on the banks of the lake provided the cultural and spiritual connection to the water body and was worshipped through an annual boat festival.

Dharmambudhi was further connected by means of several manmade channels to several other lakes in the vicinity—the Millers tanks, Sankey tank, and the Sampangi tank being the most prominent. Of these many tanks, today, only the Sankey tank survives in a shrunken form. The channels connecting the Dharmambudhi to these other lakes proved to be a source of conflict and were instrumental in catalysing large-scale change to the lake system. Several channels from this lake were diverted into other water bodies or were closed up and built over for several decades before the effects of these activities were perceptible. The lake was considered to be in decline as far back as 1877, and this decline exacerbated conditions of famine in Bengaluru between the autumn of 1876 and March 1877. The main channels connecting this lake with the Sampangi lake (Image 2) were diverted to a newer lake up north (presumably the Sankey), thereby reducing the water flow to the Dharmambudhi. This diversion was meant to clear the way for new railway lines connecting the city. By the October of 1882, the lake had dried up completely, an event linked to a loss of water for farming, and inflation in the prices of food grain.

Image 2. Lakes connected by the Dharmambudhi lake around the year 1885. Map: Hita Unnikrishnan. Click on the image to expand.

The effects of a disrupted channel system began to be felt in other lakes of this network by 1883, causing communities dependent on water for livelihoods such as horticulturists to rise up in revolt. Restoring the channel became an issue of contention between the Mysore kings and the British administrators. A number of technological solutions were proposed, ranging from restoration of the channel to digging a tunnel under the railway line to channel water. None of these proposals were however taken up. All this while, other channels connecting the lake were also disrupted for various purposes, further reducing the inflow of water into this lake and rendering it completely dry by 1892. The city started receiving piped water from distant sources by this time, rendering activities to restore the Dharmambudhi redundant. By 1935, most of the lake was completely dry (Image 3) and the land began to be utilized for a playground. One swampy marsh, where little water was left, was considered too dangerous to negotiate. As with other lakes in the city, the attention of planners was focused on making “use” of this land, by converting it into a playground or a school. Rallies for Indian independence, cattle fairs, exhibitions, and circuses were held on this land, transforming its identity.

Image 3. Urban sprawl and loss of lakes in the same landscape by the year 1973. Map: Hita Unnikrishnan. Click on the image to expand.

Together with a strategic renaming of the landscape into Subhashnagar (in honour of an Indian freedom fighter) after Indian independence, the former waterscape was relegated to the realm of hazy memories, soon to die out and be replaced by others.

Image 4. A view of the present day Kempegowda bus terminus. Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan

The present-day bus station (Image 4) was conceptualized and built on the land by the late 1980s—a brainchild of the then Chief Minister, who was inspired by bus terminals during his tour of New York. Today’s generation of inhabitants around the area, have few memories of its former existence as Dharmambudhi lake. Remnants of the past remain however: a portion of the sluice gate overwhelmed by roads and debris, a single storm water channel today transporting sewage (permeating the air with its unique stench) and flooding the landscape periodically, and temple of the former lake deity, who now occupies a rather privileged position in the middle of a busy road (Images 5 & 6). Otherwise, it is only during rains such as the one Bengaluru witnessed this autumn, when the bus terminal fills up with water that memories are jogged and one remembers the past.

Image 5. The former lake deity stranded in the middle of the road. Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan
Image 6. Remnants of the sluice gate situated amidst construction debris. Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan

The loss of connectivity in this waterscape resulted in the destruction of not just one but several lakes along the chain, which then began to be built over with malls, residential layouts, sports arenas, and other structures. The city expanded phenomenally, began to attract immigrants, and sourced water from a river (the Cauvery) almost 100 km away. Ecological memory persisted, however: the floodplains recalled their original functions despite being unrecognizable from the past, and water continued to flow along the elevation gradient and filled up naturally occurring depressions of the landscape in accordance with the engineering design of long ago.

The floods of 2017 serve as a stark reminder of this lost waterscape, occurring predominantly in converted beds of former lakes, or along channels converted long ago and the serious implications of destroying floodplain connectivity. Effects of such disruption are not limited to the famines and drought resulting from immediate disruption, but can manifest themselves centuries later, such as through the floods in Bengaluru. This ecological history provides potential lessons to upcoming cities of the global south that follow similar trajectories of urbanization, to be aware of the complexities of their waterscapes and plan cities accordingly. Cities need to focus efforts on not encroaching or otherwise destroying the floodplains, while at the same time investing efforts to sustain their existing water infrastructure. This even while sourcing water from elsewhere for meeting rising demands. This will ensure better urban flood mitigation strategies while also creating a secondary dependable water source for the city to fall back on, in case of adverse conditions. Planning strategies of this nature therefore necessarily needs looking to the past in order to create a more resilient and sustainable urban future.

Hita Unnikrishnan and Harini Nagendra
Bangalore

On The Nature of Cities

Harini Nagendra

about the writer
Harini Nagendra

Harini Nagendra is a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. She uses social and ecological approaches to examine the factors shaping the sustainability of forests and cities in the south Asian context. Her books include “Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities” and "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities" (Penguin India, 2023) (with Seema Mundoli), and “The Bangalore Detectives Club” historical mystery series set in 1920s colonial India.

Walking on Rivers — Dry Riverbeds as Public Parks?

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Global warming and misuse of water resources are increasingly leaving dry riverbeds in their wake. Now designers are looking for ways to safely create vital public spaces out of these open spaces while also preserving their historic hydrologic function.

In most arid regions of the world cities are growing and rivers are running dry. While rapid urbanisation has left little room for creating new public open spaces, could urban riverbeds that remain dry for an extended period of time provide potentials for new types of public parks?

Dryland settlements were historically established along flowing rivers (e.g. Mesopotamia (Tigris and Euphrates), and Egypt (Nile)), where freshwater bodies sustained the communities for centuries. But this is changing. With global warming, population growth and human-induced changes to water resources, the number of drying urban rivers has increased. Currently, drylands, including arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions, occupy 41.3 percent of the globe’s land area and support more than 2.1 billion of the world’s population.

It is unsettling to know that a number of permanently flowing rivers around the world including the Indus (Pakistan), Ganges (India), Amu Darya (Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), Murray (Australia), Colorado (United States of America), Tagus (Spain) and Nile (Egypt) are now discharging very little, or no water to the sea for months during the year. Most of these rivers passing through old settlements and ancient cities, used to be the lifeline of the citizens.

A representative example of a drying urban river is the Zayandeh Roud in Isfahan, Iran. Literally meaning the “life-giving river”, Zayandeh Roud was one of the largest rivers in central Iran and a major source of water for the country. Many have memories sitting next to the flowing water, watching the glimmering lights reflecting from the Khajoo Bridge on the water surface, or picnicking in green parklands adjacent to the water edge in the midst of the city. Since the early 2010s, the lower segment of the river basin has dried out due to reduced rainfall, mismanagement and overuse of groundwater and surface water resources.

Zayandeh Roud has turned into a scar on the face of the city. Visitors can now walk and play inside the fractured dry riverbed. Some even have picnics next to the remaining waterholes where spontaneous vegetation grows, resembling oases in a desert.

Figure 1: Residents in Isfahan playing volleyball in the dry riverbed of Zayandeh Roud. Photo: Courtesy of Ako Salemi/Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting.

The absence of water has created a different aesthetics; a landscape that reminds us of our drying climate. Meanwhile, it has also provided new and unique recreational opportunities; a meeting place for the inhabitants. The spasmodic flow of water has created a place of isolation and re-connection; when water flows, it re-connects the isolated living ecosystems adjacent to the riversides, and when dry it connects the inhabitants to the isolated riverbed. The river has become a contested space between natural flows and human activities.

Learning from arid Middle East

A closer look at some other arid cities in the Middle East shows that dry riverbeds were informally used as social spaces in the past. Wadis (the Arabic word for river valleys in drylands), acted as oases suitable for settlements and natural drainage systems for seasonal floods. They provided underground water resources, connector routes, sources of food, and shaded areas for nearby inhabitants.

Socially, the wadis had important cultural functions. In Muscat, Oman, for example, before the growth of the city as an expanding metropolis, the wadis and the riparian vegetation provided the nearby inhabitants a refuge from the hot summer weather. They were used as gathering spaces for families, tribes and villagers, by creating a microclimate of fresh and moist air with cooling effects of land-sea circulation.

Nowadays, dry riverbeds in urban areas are often composed of waste, gravel and dust, used as car parks and roads, and perceived as dumping grounds. They are over-engineered with altered morphologies, locked in concrete, or buried underground for fear of flooding and exposing the citizens to pollution accumulated over years of neglect. This has resulted in the deterioration of their natural ecology, and their disconnection from the urban context.

Figure 2: Wadi Al Kabir’s current conditions in Muscat, composed of gravel and dust. The void space is used for car parking. Photo: Sareh Moosavi

However, there seem to be changes in the making.

Our research shows that the role of wadis in the Middle East is shifting from junkyards to public parks, with a number of projects emerging to restore their natural and cultural values and reconnect them to urban life.

A new type of public open space in drylands?

An investigation into a number of wadi projects in the Middle East reveals that these void spaces can be transformed into public parks that provide new outlooks and forms of recreation.

The restoration of Wadi Hanifah in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, provides an example of recognising the opportunities for creating recreational uses along and inside the undeveloped riverbed when dry, while restoring ecological processes through revegetation and naturalisation. Designed by Canadian Landscape Architects, Moriyama and Teshima Planners, and UK based engineers from Buro Happold, the new walking trails and picnic areas proposed along and inside the dry segment of the wadi has created a new type of public open space; a large linear thin park previously unknown to the citizens.

Figure 3: Wadi Hanifah, Riyadh: Semi-enclosed picnic facilities to provide a level of privacy for Saudi families. Photo: Courtesy of Arriyadh Development Authority

Similarly, a number of wadi park projects have been commissioned in Muscat, Oman, where international designers were asked to create safe access to the wadi beds, and provide walking promenades, green spaces, playgrounds, and sport fields for users to reconnect them with these underutilized spaces.

Figure 4: Women often use the walking paths on the upper banks of the new Wadi Azeiba Park in Muscat, Oman. Photo: Sareh Moosavi

Wadi Azeiba, designed by Atelier Jacqueline Osty & Associés, is the first completed wadi park project in Muscat. Field observations showed that the newly created park has successfully encouraged many nearby residents, particularly women, to walk more and interact with their neighbours, while their kids play in the open areas.

Figure 5: Vegetation and walking paths in the upper and lower parts of the Wadi Azeiba Park. Photo: Sareh Moosavi

The wadi park acts as a hybrid space, which can be flooded when it rains, and transformed into a public park when it’s dry. However, questions of safety persist in the use of these dry riverbeds, which are at risk of flash flooding and turning into giant flood drains.

In the design of the Wadi Adai pedestrian bridge in Muscat, the Norwegian landscape designers, Snøhetta, took a creative approach to tackle safety issues. The descending ramp designed in the middle of the new pedestrian bridge, enables access to the dry wadi bed, while providing an option for quick evacuation from the wadi bed in times of sudden flash flooding, minimising the risks to users. With minimal design interventions and keeping the wadi bed free from building development, the designers aimed to retain the wadi’s hydrological function.

Figure 6: Snøhetta’s proposal for the pedestrian bridge and wadi park in Wadi Adai, Muscat. Photo: Courtesy of Snøhetta

Looking forward

Can these projects provide a model for the transformation of other drying urban rivers into spaces of public use? Can these models be replicated in other cities? And what are the long-term impacts of this transformation on the rivers’ ecosystem, the local ecology and public life? These are important questions that require longitudinal studies of the ecological and social impacts of these new spaces. A data-driven design approach is required to ensure the solutions are responsive to the specific hydro-ecological and cultural characteristics of the context. This needs a multidisciplinary approach to design, where designers work closely with engineers, hydrologists and ecologists, as well as the local communities to understand how these transformations can achieve best performative outcomes.

Nevertheless, it is clear that with the advent of global warming and the number of urban rivers drying up, it is time we think about how to turn these scars into living spaces.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Dr Margaret Grose and Dr Jillian Walliss at the University of Melbourne for their support, help and guidance during this research.

Sareh Moosavi
Melbourne

On The Nature of Cities

Some Kind of Nature… But What Will We End Up With?

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There are many motivations to create urban green space, but current trends suggest that real ecological value and function is losing its place among them.

Whenever I listen to the song Some Kind of Nature by the Gorillaz & Lou Reed, it makes me think about what kind of nature we are going to end up with in our cities, even though the song isn’t actually about urban nature at all. From my perspective here in New Zealand, it seems as if there are some prevailing ideas driving urban biodiversity research and urban restoration initiatives that might compromise the ecological authenticity of the nature that results from these efforts. I think we are in danger of ending up with a very watered-down and biodiversity-poor version of nature. This reduced version of nature will only exacerbate the ongoing process of shifting the baselines of expectations of what nature of urban nature is. Are we all going to end up with fake nature, and be happy with it?

Urban ecologists see nature in cities through a lens that is focused on the requirements of other species, the integrity of habitats and systems, and the potential for enhancing and restoring biodiversity to spaces that are often quite small. Urban ecology also recognises the significance and the potential of the human dimension, and acknowledges the importance of community-driven approaches to restoration projects. To be successful, restorations need to include families and communities, provide opportunities for social connections, be relevant to everyday life, encourage free choice and learning, target local issues, promote collective action, foster roles of local stakeholders, and promote direct experiences with nature. Of this list of requirements (Wilson 2011), most of the objectives are social.

While satisfying the human dimensions is essential for success, and acknowledging that restorations should be community-led, social and management constraints associated with urban restorations include “lack of ecological knowledge, lack of social acceptance of management approaches, human-wildlife conflicts, and conflicting goals based on varied views and value systems” (Clarkson & Kirby 2016; DOI: 10.1111/emr.12229). Research shows that many urban residents do not know what natural habitats look like, they aren’t able to recognise common species, they don’t know how those species function within the food web, and they do not feel comfortable in wild spaces with which they lack familiarity. If the health of cities, in terms of ecosystem services, biodiversity, and the quality of the nature experiences available to adults and children, depend on how much local communities value and know about nature, then we could be in trouble. For example, In New Zealand, many urban residents are unaware of the impacts their pet cats have on native wildlife. Many believe that it is natural for cats to kill native wildlife and it’s just a question of reaching a new equilibrium. In community consultation about cat management, I’ve heard people say that cats are just like lions, at the top of the food chain, so it is natural that they eat native birds and lizards. This attitude reflects a lack of awareness that in New Zealand there are no native terrestrial mammals except for two species of bat. I’ve also been asked if there are even any native birds within the city. A city-wide survey revealed that only a few nationally iconic bird species are recognised by most people as being native, while between a quarter and two-thirds of people are uncertain or incorrectly label other common urban native species as exotic when they are native, or native when they are exotic. This same lack of knowledge has been reported in other countries and attributed to the abundance of exotic species in home environments and the media. However, values drive community demands for green spaces and the design of these spaces. Can we rely on those things a community deems valuable if we are to achieve worthwhile ecological outcomes? Shifting baselines mean people’s concept of “wild” and “natural” will have changed.

An example of a restoration that was driven at least partly by community consultation is Boneyard Creek, which flows through Champaign, Illinois (USA), draining much of the city, including the central business district and the University of Illinois Campustown area. Poor water quality and flooding issues prompted the city and university to create a redevelopment plan. The redevelopment plan involved community consultation, and took into account social acceptance of restoration techniques, the socio-political atmosphere in neighbourhood groups, and was careful to include cultural perspectives. However, none of the reported wishes of the public reflected a desire to restore ecological function, except possibly tree planting and the creation of a pond, but rather reflected a desire for recreational spaces. The list on their website includes the following: provide landscape plantings; bike and pedestrian paths; get rid of ugly stuff; create parks; create a beautiful, safe trail; trees; create an outdoor amphitheatre; create a pond; build a beautiful bridge; convert the lumberyard into a beer garden. The completed restoration serves its primary function of increasing stormwater capacity and improving flood protection, and it provides an attractive amenity park with spaces for recreation, fulfilling four of the five defined goals, but the fifth goal of enhanced wildlife and habitat is hardly met. While some new species, such as ducks, Canada geese, turtles, and green heron have been observed on the site, the habitat value of the site has increased from being “poor/marginal” to only “sub-optimal”.

Is functionality for social purposes always going to conflict with ecological functionality? The aesthetic values of many people still reflect preferences for an Arcadian/Romantic landscape form, seen in parks with widely spaced trees that in New Zealand are usually exotic species, scattered across a mown lawn with no understorey—not the best habitat to support wildlife. Recreational spaces are not always conducive to thriving wildlife populations, except in the case of the most tolerant urban adaptors. Popular recreational spaces are likely to be noisy and well-lit. Some animals abandon areas when frequent or chronic noise interferes with their ability to pick up auditory cues, or when sounds are perceived as threats. Pedestrians interrupt bird foraging, causing birds to flee, and the presence of dogs can force birds to spend more time being vigilant, waste valuable energy, and lose foraging opportunities if they have to repeatedly fly away.

Another urban ecological restoration that is often touted as a great example of what can be achieved is the Cheonggyecheon River in South Korea. A critique of the restoration by Cho (2010; doi:10.3828/idpr.2010.05) provided a very different perspective on this restoration. Although a dramatic transformation was effected, and social goals were achieved, little public consultation was involved and the opinions of ecologists ignored. The end result has been labelled fake nature by some. The Cheonggyecheon Highway, which ran through Seoul, was seen as obsolete and an impediment to the competitiveness of the city, and so it was removed as part of an urban renewal project. It had covered the Cheonggyecheon River for decades. Now the space is occupied by a stream, lined with parks and urban-gathering spaces. It is very popular; 90,000 people visit the stream banks on an average day.

Figure 1. A view of the Cheonggyecheon River restoration in Seoul, South Korea (https://inhabitat.com/how-the-cheonggyecheon-river-urban-design-restored-the-green-heart-of-seoul/)

However, the result is hardly ecologically authentic. Almost all of the water that now flows between the mostly concrete banks of the Cheonggyecheon is pumped there through 11 km of pipes from another river. Cho (2010) describes the whole process as a staged political performance, launched on the eve of the Mayor’s inauguration and completed 10 months before the end of his term. Criticisms are that the Mayor used the environment as an instrument of urban development, that engineers were not open to alternative ways of water flow because it would take too long to construct, and that the approach prioritised flood control over restoration of the range of habitat types and associated species assemblages that likely existed long ago before the river was modified. Its design allows a high volume of water to flow downstream promptly, but it is not a good habitat for species. Stream engineering dictates its design, the stream bed is cleaned of moss, the water quality controlled daily, and plants are actively maintained. It is simulated nature.

But what kind of nature experience should people be entitled to? A body of literature is accumulating that supports the connection between nature contact and human well-being. Frumkin (2001; doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(00)00317-2) stated in his review; “As we learn more about the health benefits of contact with the natural world, we need to apply this knowledge in ways that directly enhance the health of the public”. As ecologists, we should be pondering what the consequences are of a focus on using nature to enhance human health. For example, a rise in green prescriptions has the potential to intensify use of green spaces, increasing levels of human disturbance, and even resulting in pressure to modify green spaces to make them more user-friendly, with the likely result that wilder areas will be lost.

The concept of nature contact as a therapeutic device has been widely applied, but recently more specific questions regarding the required dose of nature have been asked (Shanahan et al. 2017, doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biv032; Cox et al. 2017; doi: 10.3390/ijerph14020172). That is, for how long and how frequently do you have to be in nature to gain benefits? A few studies have tried to identify the elements of nature that people perceive and respond to. Do we enjoy the same benefits from a park filled with introduced species, as from a native woodland? These studies are presented in the context of public health gains and aim to identify minimum doses needed to effect well-being benefits. For example, Cox et al. (2017) conclude that their analysis demonstrates that quantifiable reductions in the population prevalence of poor mental health can be achieved if minimal thresholds of vegetation cover are met. My concern is that we should not be cornered into thinking about the minimum amounts of nature needed to improve human health.

While human health gain is a powerful rationale for investing in green spaces, inevitably human need will dominate all other justifications, and quantifiable needs tend to trump those that are less easy to quantify. By viewing nature as a commodity that supplies health benefits, and by identifying the minimum needed to gain benefits, we run the risk of trivialising a deep and significant affective response to nature. This view could provide an incentive to create natural spaces that are structured primarily to satisfy our well-being requirements, rather than according to ecological goals. What if we discover that we get the same well-being benefits from sitting on a lawn as from a biodiverse wetland, or woodland? And what if we gain the same benefits from a virtual experience? Chang et al. (2016; doi: 10.3390/su8101049) asserted that the absence of a relationship between physiological benefits in relation to different levels of invertebrate diversity meant that city planners should not hesitate to use ecological best practice in their designs, since settings rich in biodiversity will not necessarily influence people’s physiological well-being in a negative way. I might be accused of being cynical, but I believe that that kind of information could be used to do the exact opposite: to create spaces with minimal ecological value. The infographic below outlines all the benefits we can gain from nature in our backyard, but the yard itself is presented as just lawn with one tree. The website advises that lawns can make you feel happier.

Figure 2. Infographic from Orethapedia website (https://orethapedia.com/2017/04/10/your-lawn-can-make-you-happier-infographic/) outlining well-being benefits in a biologically depauperate garden environment.

Biodiversity has been conceptualised within economic frameworks, and can be divided broadly into use values and non-use values. Non-use values include those values relating to the feel-good factor nature provides us with—existence, altruistic, and bequest values. We should be careful not to shift the way we think about and value our natural green spaces more into the “use” part of the framework. Whatever the motivations for protecting and restoring green spaces in cities, the input of ecologists, as well as input from a well-informed public, is essential. Despite principle motivations that may not be primarily about biodiversity enhancement, such as social, hydrological, and well-being goals, and despite lack of knowledge in the public driving the project, what we end up with must have ecological value.

Yolanda van Heezik
Dunedin

On The Nature of Cities

 References

Chang, KG, Sullivan, WC, Lin, Y-H, S, W, Chang, C-Y. 2016. The effect of biodiversity on green space users’ wellbeing – an empirical investigation using physiological evidence. Sustainability 8: 1049; doi: 10.3390/su8101049

Cho, M-R. 2010. The politics of urban nature restoration: The case of Cheonggyecheon restoration in Seoul, Korea. International Development Planning Review 32 (2) doi:10.3828/idpr.2010.05

Clarkson, BD, Kirby, CL. 2016. Ecological restoration in urban environments in New Zealand. Ecological management and restoration 17(3): 180-190.

Cox, DTC, Shanahan, DF, Hudson, HL, Fuller, RA, Anderson, K, Hancock, S, Gaston, KJ. 2016. Doses of nearby nature simultaneously associated with multiple health benefits. International journal of Environmental Research and Public health 14: 172. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph14020172.

Frumkin, H. 2001. Beyond toxicity: human health and the natural environment. American Journal of Preventative Medicine. 20:3. 234-40. doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(00)00317-2

Shanahan, DF, Fuller, RA, Bush, R, Lin, BB, Gaston, KJ. 2015. The health benefits of urban nature: how much do we need? BioScience 65(5): 476-485. doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biv032

Wilson, C. 2011 Effective Approaches to Connect Children with Nature, Department of Conservation: Wellington, New Zealand.