To truly learn the lessons from shutting down the Poletti power plant, we must confront environmental injustice and replace isolation with community. Among other things, that means electing politicians committed to social justice.
In 2013, the New York Power Authority razed the Charles Poletti Power Plant in Astoria, NY. In doing so, Power Authority removed what local elected official Michael Gianaris had characterized as a “symbol[] of pollution that haunted [the] neighborhood”. The characterization was an apt one. The Poletti Plant had for years been the single-biggest polluter in New York City. In 2000, the Poletti plant alone spewed 263,376 tons of pollutants into the airshed—more air emissions than the rest of the city combined. Not surprisingly, the surrounding community was part of New York City’s asthma alley: a band of elevated asthma rates that stretches from the Bronx through Queens. The plant posed a particular risk to the thousands of children in Astoria’s three major public housing projects, including Astoria Houses—largest public housing project in the United States. One local leader claimed that, as a result of the pollution, birds would not nest in Astoria. The story of shutting down the Poletti is a tale worth telling, and a potential template for successful environmental justice advocacy.
Beginning operation in 1977, the 885 megawatt facility was named for New York’s 46th Governor Charles Poletti. If there is anything in a name, the Poletti facility had an auspicious one. Charles Poletti graduated from Harvard Law School, served on the New York State Supreme Court, and been elected New York’s Lieutenant Governor alongside Governor Herbert H. Lehman. Poletti had the distinction of being the first Italian-American governor in the United States (albeit serving only 29 days to complete Lehman’s term after Lehman joined the World War II effort). During World War II, Lieutenant-Colonel Poletti was in charge of restoring essential public services in occupied Italy. After the war, New York Governor Averell Harrimann appointed Poletti to the New York State Power Authority. So, when the Astoria generating facility was named in his honor, it had a lot to live up to. Sadly, the facility was far less impressive than its namesake. Indeed, by the time Charles Poletti died in 2002, New York Power Authority was mired in litigation with angry neighbors bent on shutting the dirty, polluting facility.
The Poletti plant served the state and local government; generating electricity to run schools, public hospitals, government offices and New York’s extensive subway and electric commuter train system. However, the toll it imposed on the surrounding community of Astoria was immense. The Poletti Plant ranked among the dirtiest plants in the United States.
In 2002, the year NYPA agreed to shutter the facility, the Poletti emitted more than 78,000 pounds of sulfuric acid, and that was a 78% decrease from 1998 when the plant emitted more than 358,000 pounds of pollutants.
That year, the Poletti also released 38 tons of small particulates (PM2.5), 44 tons of larger particulates (PM10) 1311 tons of sufur dioxide, 78 tons of volatile organic compounds, and over 2000 tons of nitrous oxides.
Despite this immense pollution load, New York Power Authority proposed to add a new 500 MW facility alongside the Poletti plant. Astoria was already home to 60% of New York City’s generating capacity and the local community objected to an additional polluting facility in their neighborhood. Their legal strategy was innovative, involving a coalition between Natural Resouces Defense Council, a national environmental group, New York Public Interest Research Group, a New York environmental group, and a community NGO called the Coalition Helping Organize a Kleaner Environment (CHOKE). Joining with local politicians, and public housing leaders, the coalition intervened in the administrative permitting process and challenged the issuance of a “certificate of environmental compatibility and public need”—a legal prerequisite for the new facility. The coalition argued that the community was already overburdened, and that the additional particulate pollution from the new, albeit cleaner facility would jeopardize public health and environmental safety.
While that proceeding was ongoing, another environmental justice group was attacking New York Power Authority from a different angle. In 2001, the Power Authority announced plans to install eleven additional natural gas turbine units around New York City. This plan was nominally in response to the rolling blackouts that California had suffered that summer (which were later revealed to have been caused by Enron’s market manipulations, not an actual shortage of generating capacity). Each of the proposed new units could generate 44 MW of power, and the majority of the units were to be placed in pairs at multiple sites around New York City. Thus, the paired units could together generate 88MW of power. Under New York Law at the time, any facility capable of generating 80 MW or more was deemed a “major generating facility”, a label that triggered a host of public hearings and certification requirements (called an Article X application). However, the Power Authority obtained an exception by promising that each pair would be configured to generate only 79.9 MW of electricity—just below the 80 MW threshold.
The Power Authority then concluded that there would be no negative environmental impacts from this project, and that the cumulative impacts of the proposed eleven turbines would be insignificant.
UPROSE, an environmental justice group, sued, alleging that NYPA failed to adequately consider the environmental impacts of the plan. Although UPROSE lost at the trial level, the appellate court overturned the decision, and found that there were potential environmental impacts sufficient to require an environmental impact statement. In particular, the court required NYPA to assess the impacts from PM2.5—small particulate pollution that can cause or worsen respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
The anti-Poletti coalition used the UPROSE decision to its advantage, persuading regulators to order a hearing on particulate matter associated with the Astoria facility. This administrative ruling gave the coalition leverage that they used to strike a deal. In exchange for a withdrawal of coalition objections to the new 50 MW plant, the Power Authority committed to a six to eight year timetable for shutting down the dirty Poletti Plant, converting to the cleanest fuel available, investing in the community, and reducing the Poletti’s operation during the interim. So, the dirtiest plant in New York City was replaced with a facility reputed to be “one of America’s cleanest”. Perhaps learning from poor Poletti’s tarnished name, the replacement facility was simply called Astoria I.
In the years since Poletti shut down, the air quality in Astoria has improved markedly. Particulate pollutants have plummeted.
Asthma hospitalizations are down well below the average for New York City.
American Lung Association. Source: http://www.stateoftheair.org/2015/states/new-york/queens.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/Source: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/data/2015chp-qn01.pdf
A cleaner environment has taken a toll on the community in a different way. Gentrification is rife, with property values increasing 75% in the years since the Poletti Plant was shuttered. Long-time residents are beginning to find themselves priced out of the neighborhood they fought to improve.
The saga for shutting down Poletti served as inspiration for Bina’s Plant, Book 2 of the Environmental Justice Chronicles soon to be released by the Center for Urban Environmental Reform.
Cover from the forthcoming Environmental Justice Chronicles, by La Greca and Bratspies.
I wish I had a brick from the Poletti. I would display it in my office as both a celebration and a reminder. Environmental justice victories are rare enough that they need to be savored, but it is vital that the benefits of those victories redound to all citizens, and that those who achieve those victories are not pushed out of their neighborhoods.
So what lessons does shutting down the Poletti offer for other similar campaigns? First, collaboration is key—local groups must lead the way, but they need resources and support from state-wide and national groups. Second, it helps when local politicians are fully on board. With the campaign to shut Poletti, elected officials joined the lawsuits, and used the platform of their office to advocate for environmental protection.
That sounds so simple. Yet, too often, institutionalized racism is a barrier to achieving the kind of cooperation that was so successful in the Poletti campaign. De facto segregation and racialized voting can leave poor and minority communities isolated in their battle against pollution in their neighborhoods. Air quality in those communities can stagnate or even decrease, even as rest of the city improves. For example, even though New York City now has the cleanest air since monitoring began, asthma rates are still unacceptably high in parts of the Bronx and Manhattan, with black and Latino/a children hardest hit.
Child asthma in Harlem, compared the rest of New York. Source: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/data/2015chp-mn11.pdfChild asthma in Mott Haven and Melrose, The Bronx, compared the rest of New York. Source: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/data/2015chp-mn11.pdf
We can and must do better. To truly learn the lessons from shutting down the Poletti, we must confront environmental injustice and replace isolation with community. Among other things, that means electing politicians committed to social justice. National environmental groups must also do their part to confront their past disengagement with issues environmental justice. Fortunately, this kind of rethinking is already starting to happen.
There is virtually no graffiti in Iran. But there are many and varied nature-themed murals, on walls and fences of schools, buildings, homes and construction sites.
We walked approximately 1,500 kilometers in Iran, and something was noticeably missing: Graffiti. Scribbled names or tags, spray painted symbols, and thought-provoking political commentary were absent in cities, towns and villages from Sarakhs on the Turkmenistan border to Astara on the Azerbaijan border to the sprawling capital of Tehran to the desert gems of Esfahan, Shiraz and Yazd.
The author’s route through Iran. Solid lines on foot; dotted lines by public bus.
Instead, nature-based murals and geometric patterns appeared on walls and fences of schools, buildings, homes and construction sites. In small communities along major roads, advertisements and phone numbers were painted on concrete walls, an ideal way to catch the eyes of those driving by.
At home in Barcelona and out traveling in the world, I keep a deliberate eye out for graffiti. While I may not understand the written messages because of language barriers, the visuals give me a small window into what’s on the minds of some locals and what issues carry weight. For me, good graffiti, those paintings with a targeted point of view, is an old-school social media tool that creates awareness in a community.
Graffiti also can be a tool to express alternative ideas or offer new perspectives to mainstream thinking. Surprised about the absence of graffiti in a country of 80+ million people and undergoing noticeable political and social change after 38 years of imposed religious-based law and order, I asked about it.
Some people I spoke with informally brushed off the lack of graffiti, saying graffiti makes cities ugly. Others said graffiti was not part of their culture. And a few said, half-joking and half-seriously, that the government wouldn’t allow graffiti, and especially not anything that would have a political slant.
While graffiti is missing from the walls, murals are popular. Many cities and individual property owners have embraced murals as a way to take a plain, boring eyesore and add color and beauty to the urban landscape. Murals, locals told me, are more closely linked to traditional Persian expressions or art; historically, murals were commonly painted in palaces and tea houses.
This historical link is evident in neighborhood strolls around the country.We saw murals of all sizes and varieties in many of the cities we passed through, and, in Tehran, we found many examples in a short stretch around Vali Asr square. Here are some of them.
Jenn Baljko
Bangkok to Barcelona on foot
All photos by Jenn Baljko.
In rural areas, walls are billboards advertising local businesses.
We first noticed the murals on the main street leaving Mashhad.
Bojnourd’s downtown area featured geometric shapes.
Along the way, we found a range of different motifs.
And in Tehran, we didn’t have to walk far to find these paintings.
Other areas had a wide range of themes and styles, from surreal and psychedelic, to cartoon and trompe l’oeil.
Cities have been recognized as key drivers toward the successful governance of resources and as the front line in combating climate change. But there is a huge urban-rural inequality in carbon emissions in the making, particularly in rapidly urbanizing developing countries. Thus, the political and economic divide between the Global North and South that historically has shaped debates on climate change could soon be overshadowed by inequalities related to a potentially stronger disparity between rural and urban areas regarding carbon emissions.
Global North-South carbon inequality is reducing in the aggregate, but the urban-rural difference is increasing in rapidly urbanizing developing countries. Those inequalities can only be properly addressed nationally/locally.
Analyzing data from more than 200 countries over five decades shows some astounding results. Although carbon emissions are heavily correlated to its wealth (in terms of gross domestic product per capita), the data analyses suggest that a country’s level of urbanization correlates more with carbon emissions than its wealth. As countries urbanize, their cities’ contributions of carbon emissions and greenhouse gases start to become disproportionately high in comparison to their population and wealth.
Quito, Ecuador. Photo: José Puppim
The rural-urban divide is likely to precipitate into a more local yet complex governance to mediate carbon disparities between urban and rural areas. This will be particularly relevant to the developing world, which faces the triple challenge of rapid urbanization, social justice and environmental sustainability. As global emissions disparities move from North-South to rural-urban, there is a greater need to address these local and sub-national inequalities at a national level. Cities in urbanized middle-income countries emit comparable levels of carbon dioxide per capita to those in richer countries, while some rural areas in these low and middle-income countries have low or even negative carbon emissions per capita.
Historically, urbanization has been correlated with wealth creation and the massive consumption of fossil fuels that accompanied it. Some accounts indicate that more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gases are produced within urban areas, which consume 60 to 80 percent of the world’s energy. As the world makes an unprecedented rural-to-urban population shift, the 21st century poses a challenge in further addressing inequalities in access to resources and allocation of carbon emissions.
International climate governance recognizes the divide between “have” and “have not” countries in terms of carbon emissions. The Paris Agreement 2015 has shifted the onus of mitigating emissions back on voluntary contributions (through the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) of respective nations. But focusing on inequalities in terms of carbon emissions from a rural-urban perspective further differentiates the have-nots and establishes that “rural” developing countries are the most disadvantaged. Thus, a country’s degree of urbanization, and not merely its economy, also determines its carbon emissions.
The rural constituencies in Africa are the most disadvantaged, with electrification rates reaching only 28 percent of the population. Electrification rates are the lowest in sub-Saharan Africa, at 19 percent. This has implications for designing a fair global regime for ending energy poverty and tackling climate change due to ethical, empirical and governance gaps related to urban-rural carbon dynamics.
Meanwhile, population growth for the remainder of this century is predicted to occur primarily in cities in low- and middle-income nations. Asia alone saw a surge of 1 billion urban dwellers from 1980 to 2010—more than the population of Western Europe and the United States combined—and the region is expected to add another billion by 2040. Thus, a radical and urgent transformation in the way we build our cities is needed to avoid disproportional increases in carbon emissions and disparities between rural and urban resource access and carbon emissions.
But there are new answers, and new momentum, around how to structure this transformation being discussed at the international level. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the global urbanization strategy adopted late last year, known as the New Urban Agenda, offer opportunities to provide solutions leading to sustainable cities by making leaders accountable for the ecological impacts of their cities.
For example, the New Urban Agenda recognizes the unsustainable patterns of consumption and production in cities with impacts beyond urban areas. See for instance the agenda’s Paragraph 63: “Given cities’ demographic trends and their central role in the global economy, in the mitigation and adaptation efforts related to climate change, and in the use of resources and ecosystems,” it states in part, “the way they are planned, financed, developed, built, governed and managed has a direct impact on sustainability and resilience well beyond urban boundaries.”
It is clear that equal access to resources forms the bedrock of sustainable human settlements and future urbanization. However, this translates into immense barriers to changing national urbanization pathways, particularly for developing countries, which seem to be following the unsustainable examples of urbanization in rich countries. For example, some cities in China now emit more carbon dioxide per capita than many cities in developed countries.
Promoting cities solely as engines of economic growth creates stiffer competition among cities, which leads to more consumption, higher concentration of wealth and carbon emissions in urban areas. In turn, these dynamics increase inequities, particularly affecting the poorest and weakest in rural areas—those who have little voice and suffer from having fewer resources and opportunities. In order to decrease emissions and urban-rural inequalities, there is an urgent need to catalyze and scale up innovations that provide adequate housing, energy access, transportation and economic opportunities for the growing urban population in a sustainable manner.
The SDGs, New Urban Agenda and Paris Agreement on climate change together offer a chance to show the importance of sustainable urbanization in fighting inequalities within and beyond cities. Still, although changes made toward more-sustainable urbanization patterns would yield immense climate co-benefits to both urban and rural areas, the implementation of international agendas is far from catalyzing the necessary changes on the ground. For that, we need to strengthen institutions and capabilities at the local and sub-national levels so they can lead the urban transformation—one that positively impacts on cities and beyond, reducing the growing urban-rural divide in the highly urbanizing developing countries.
This article is based on a paper that was part of the United Nations University’s Habitat III series featuring research and commentary related to the U.N. Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development that took place in October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador. To read more on this topic, see the following publications:
Sethi, M. and Puppim de Oliveira, Jose A. (2015). From global ‘North-South’ to local ‘Urban-Rural’: A shifting paradigm in climate governance? Urban Climate, 14 (4) 529–543. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2015.09.009
Biosolar Roof in Lausanne, Palais de Beaulieu—taking a break & contemplating —European goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) Photo: Antoine Lavorel (2017)
Some weeks ago my colleagues (from the University of Applied Sciences in Geneva and the City of Lausanne, Nature and City Department) and I organized a half-day event: an exchange of experiences on the Swiss green roof standards practice with the Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects (SIA) in Lausanne.
It is easier to continue pretending that nature-based solutions can’t work than to take a new step which is not based on economic gain, but is instead based on ecology and the promotion of biodiversity.
“The SIA is Switzerland’s leading professional association for construction, technology and environment specialists. With 16,000 members from the fields of engineering and architecture, the SIA is a professional and interdisciplinary network whose central aim is to promote sustainable and high-quality design of the built environment in Switzerland” (http://www.sia.ch/en/the-sia/).
“The SIA and its members stand for quality and expertise in architecture and construction. The SIA is well known for its important work on standards. It develops, updates and publishes numerous standards, regulations, guidelines, recommendations and documentation, which are of vital importance for the Swiss construction industry. Some 200 committees are responsible for further developing these standards” (http://www.sia.ch/en/the-sia/).
The standards SIA 312 were published and printed in November 2013. The goal of this event in Lausanne was to see, after more than three and a half years, if these “practices“ are used and if they are an instrument to achieve requirements.
Standards in general
In this article, I discuss technical standards within the construction sector. There are various standards, meaning technical requirements that apply to various systems. Although not a legal tool, the standards insure that there are certain tested applications and practices which should guarantee a good quality planning, application and maintenance.
What is special about the standards SIA 312 “green roofs”?
SIA 312 is a highly technical document, which leads with very precise and short sentences, taking the reader from the main chapter of project study, through materials and implementation. I was a commission member when the project started in 2008, and the challenge of creating these standards was to integrate ecological parameters in order to achieve green roof quality as well improve biodiversity. Quality in terms of creating well thought out projects: planned wisely to achieve the desired vegetation, consideration of the life cycle of materials to be used, and the fauna and flora to be established in the long term. For the first time, ecological compensation matters and requirements were integrated in such a document in Switzerland.
The commission members represented all stakeholders involved in the building sector: architects, engineers, green roof companies, waterproofers, substrate producers, seeds and plant nurseries and city authorities. So, the points of reference were appropriately broad.
A brief overview of our federal law.
One key element is that the law incorporates the idea of ecological compensation. Ecological compensation is a collective term for measures that serve to maintain and restore the function of the habitats and their networking, especially in intensively used or densely populated landscapes. The Federal Act on the Protection of Nature and Cultural Heritage (NCHA) requires the cantons (federal states) to provide ecological compensation (Article 18b (2) NHG, Art. 15 NHV). One of the goals of ecological compensation is the promotion of indigenous biodiversity.
The following measures are suitable ecological compensation:
Strengthening and re-creating natural areas
Biodiversity support areas (formerly ecological compensation areas)
Ecological improvement in urban areas (cities etc.)
Measures in the forest (for example by natural forestry, old woodland, forest reserves)
Habitat connection and networks
The goals for ecological compensation can be subdivided according to quantitative, qualitative and disposable criteria, which are explained in the Swiss Landscape Concept.
Digging into the law itself can be very helpful, and reveals other requirements for the purpose of protecting the environment. Specifically, with regard to the green roof standards, there are the following:
2.7.1.1 Where ecological compensation measures are required, the following criteria shall be considered:
thickness of the substrate (variation). This means two things: 1) mix natural or recycled substrates (the natural environment in which an organism lives, or the surface or medium on which an organism grows or is attached) like sandy-graveled, excavation soil, gravel, sand, compost, crushed bricks, crushed ceramic etc. and 2) vary them in thickness for the application all over the planned surface (builds more micro habitats)—the minimum is 100mm thickness.
type of vegetation (plant associations), combination of species, depending on the environment you want to establish. For example, a dry meadow—open spaces with low and scarce vegetation, mixed perennials etc., this has to be considered in the planing process.
distribution of the substrate (variation): designing various landscapes on the surface.
storage of meteoric waters: the more variation in substrates thickness the more retention and buffer of meteoric waters / rain waters.
structures and networks for animal species (fauna), like wood logs, stones, piles of branches
seeds species and seedlings (local & indigenous species); choose local species and support the local flora and fauna (genetic diversity as well).
2.7.1.2 The following local conditions have an influence on the success of the greening of a roof; They are therefore to be taken into consideration during the study:
solar radiation (drop shadow, reflection, thermal radiation)
precipitation (sites that may be sheltered from rain)
2.7.1.3 The requirements for ecological compensation shall be classified as follows:
basic requirements (Table 2),
high requirements (section 2.7.2),
special requirements (section 2.7.3).
Within this classification we offer three choices, as well as the option to go directly to the utmost classification (special requirements). In the standards only the high and special requirements are described in detail. The basic requirements are included in the general information found within the standards (like 2.7.1.1. and plant species details).
2.7.2.1 High Requirements:
basic requirements as a function of climate
variable distribution of the vegetal layer: shaping of the vegetal layer on surfaces (From a static point of view, e.g. Minimum thickness of the vegetal layer of 80 mm, 120 mm and 150 mm, distributed for each thickness on 1/3 of the total area.)
plant class 3 (Table 6 within the standards).
Lausanne Service de Parcs et Domaines (SPADOM), different type of biodiverse green roofs. Photo: Nathalie Baumann (2017)
2.7.2.2 In addition four other criteria are to be defined according to the following list:
use of two or more substrate types (mixes)
use of topsoil or earthy materials of local origin, provided that their quality (permeability, part of clay, etc.) is appropriate, or of mineral substrates produced locally
Biodiversity-improving structures (facilities): sandy areas
Biodiversity-improving structures (facilities): gravel areas
Biodiversity-improving structures (facilities): dead – wood (piles of branches)
Biodiversity-improving structures (facilities): dead – wood (logs)
Biodiversity-improving structures (facilities): stone pile / mount
Biodiversity-improving structures (facilities): for target species, etc.
The list is extensive, providing specifications for plant associations and species. Of course you can also find information on extensive and intensive green roofs, plant species and vegetation methods (seeds, seedlings, plugs and hay mulch/dry meadow cut grass) water retention, grey water usage, biosolar (combination of biodiverse green roofs and solar panels) in this document.
What is the connection between a standard or a norm and nature in the city?
Standards are a tool or instrument, which can be used to require from any stakeholder in the construction environment, “standards” for ecological measures, on how to implement biodiverse nature in the building environment, in order to be sure that nature and biodiversity can be improved. Cities normally add to the base standards, providing additional documentation with graphics and photos in order to provide greater detail about the topic.
Another possible method of communicating standards is a demonstration installed by the city of Lausanne a year ago; a green roof exhibition square. The exhibition features different types of green roofs, including combinations of different natural substrates (mixtures), different vegetation methods (local & indigenous plants) and projects from biosloar roofing to urban farming on roofs.
Green roof exhibition, Lausanne SPADOM, Photo: Nathalie Baumann (2017)
The event we organized welcomed approximately 80 visitors; from private companies to public institutions, politicians, and stakeholders from the construction and building sector, coming from the whole Swiss French-speaking region.
Welcoming the participants at the SIA event and explaining the exhibition square of green roofs. Photo: Nathalie Baumann (2017)
We started with a visit of the exhibition square, one year after it had opened, to show that this demonstration is an additional feature that can accompany the written standard SIA 312. It serves as an excellent tool for the purpose of education and communication.
After the introduction, presentations and discussion, architects, waterproofers and the University of Applied Sciences in Geneva, demonstrated their experiences, their actual research, and best practices with regard to using this tool in implementing the SIA 312 standards.
All the presentations showed fabulous improvement either in research or in planning and/or installation of green roofs (including biodiverse and biosolar ones).
Background, a biosolar roof. Foreground, a modular box on wheels for expositions (mobile box), Lausanne, SPADOM (exhibition square). Photo: Nathalie Baumann (2017)
It demonstrated that with the help of an exhibition square, a different perception and awareness was awakened; as was an interest in changing practices and learning new ways of creating nature based solutions.
Looking back on this event, a number of questions arise. Why don’t we embrace these projects more readily, even though we know, that they are possible and easy to do? Why is there a kind of “fear”, that it is not going to work, despite the decades of work documenting good and best practice? Why is there disbelief in it?
My hypothesis is that it is easier to continue pretending that it (nature-based solutions, discontinued reliance on industrialized products, protection of resources, etc.) can’t work than to take a new step which is not based on economy or gain / turn over but instead is based on ecology and the promotion of biodiversity. We come back to the old and ongoing discussion about human beings and their relationship to nature. In my opinion, this remains paradox and represents the ongoing fight between the desire to control nature and wanting to keep it at a distance.
I was very pleased with the progress made within three years, knowing very well that such changes normally don’t come quickly. However, in the case of Lausanne, changes in the French speaking part of Switzerland have come quickly. With good tools, motivated and engaged people who want change, good communication and education actions, it is possible to change awareness among different professions and stakeholders in a short time frame.
Conclusion
What is the essence of this “standards story” for non-Swiss citizens? What is it for?
The idea behind this essay was to provide an example of something that could take place in any country and city in the world. But how can I be sure that this can happen everywhere? The key, in my opinion, is to find personalities in politics, urbanism, and the construction business and persuade them of the benefits and positive impacts of biodiverse & biosolar green roofs to both the environment and to people. Is not going to happen on its own, for sure. But as we did in Switzerland, pursue those ideas and practices you believe in, and which can be proved to work, given patience and determination. In doing so, you will demonstrate to other parts of the world, that change can happen, and instruments can be installed, which will have a positive impact on the environment as well as on the green economy.
A review of: Sparrow by Kim Todd. 2012. 192 pages. ISBN 978-1-86189-875-3. Reaktion Books, London. Buy the book.
“Picture the basic bird, the stripped-down, super-efficiency model, and a sparrow probably comes to mind.”
Sparrows are everywhere! They are varied in types and forms, offering a unique repertoire of opportunities to get to know and assess them, from their scientific study to the most diverse artistic interpretations. In Sparrow, award-winning, science and natural history writer Kim Todd, journeys through the “sparrow” concept in revealing ways.
As an urban ecologist, I’ve studied the house sparrow, the “agrarian” (as we call it in some Mexican regions), for over a decade now, and had never been aware of the infinity of human expressions related to sparrows in general. In this book, Todd gathers an impressive cumulus of facts, stories, and references to the generic concept of “sparrow” together with an exquisite palette of artwork by artists from around the globe.
“It’s hard to generalize about sparrows”, Todd argues while transiting spontaneously between their natural history, ecology, distribution, related art, references in stories and books, and shifting species to present different sparrows to the reader, making this book feel like an encyclopedia of sparrows.
“House sparrows are not picky (…) They are risk-takers.” Given their boldness, broad diet, and feeding and breeding strategies and behaviors, they have become one of the most successful invasive birds of the world. Albeit the current perception of the sparrow is, overall positive, it has not been so throughout time. Todd comprehensively reviews the metaphoric use of the sparrow concept in texts and shows that it has been associated with a wide array of perceptions that range from death to love and desire.
But sparrows have not only been on our minds and books, they’ve also been in our crosshairs and on our tables! Haunting images of sparrow hunting together with impressive data on their culinary use color Chapter 2, Sold for Two Farthings. One generally unknown fact related to sparrow massacre is summarized in this book: the massive killing of sparrows (together with rats, mosquitoes, and flies) in Mao’s Great Leap Forward sought to make China competitive industrially with Western nations. “Nature was the enemy of progress, and China would fight back with its most potent weapon—its large population.”
Cover image. U.S. Department of Agriculture leaflet, Kalmbach, E.R., 1931.
I must confess that, given my interest in the invasion of the house sparrow and its ecological effects in North America, my favorite part of the book is Chapter 4, The Sparrow War. Briefly, this section reviews the reasons behind the idea of introducing birds, including the “English sparrow” in New England. “Slowly, notes of doubt began to creep in. In 1867, Dr Charles Pickering gave a talk at the Boston Society of Natural History, warning of the evils of these introductions.” With a detailed walk-through of the social and environmental process, Todd describes the realization that bringing the sparrow to the New World was not a great idea at all.
By the end of the book, Todd describes the current history of house sparrow studies focused on its ecology and traits that make it an incredibly successful invader, as well as its role in contemporary art, including poetry and photography. “One reason for the sparrow’s success appears to be its flexibility in terms of behavior, particularly when moving to a new place. (…) All of these traits combine to make a very hardy bird. ‘They are survivors’, says researcher Denis Summers-Smith, who is known as the ‘sparrow guru.’
The final chapter emphasizes the environments that sparrows face at present, during the so-called Anthropocene. With the extinction of the dusky seaside sparrow, Todd’s view always contextualizes both the facts and the social perceptions. Finally, the current house sparrow paradox is set on the table, with it being a hyperabundant invasive bird in North America and with declining populations throughout Western European cities. Such a scenario is really intriguing, as no precise answer exists to date to solve the riddle.
To end with a golden snap, Todd wraps this singular piece with a Timeline of the Sparrow, going from “A sparrow ancestor begins to radiate out from the African tropics” 1 million BCE, to “House sparrows join the list of UK’s ‘Birds of Conservation Concern’” in 2002, providing a brilliant temporal synthesis of the book.
Ted R. Anderson’s 2006 Biology of the House Sparrow: From Genes to Populations gave us the first comprehensive radiography of the species from the natural sciences lens. With Todd’s Sparrow, we now have a thorough, yet subtle, expedition through the sparrow concept in an accessible book woven with natural history and cultural knowledge as approachable guiding threads.
One adage I want to share after finishing the US Forest Service Inaugural International Urban Forestry Seminar is: look more closely, think more deeply. This was something that one of the presenters said to us on our first day in Chicago and it stuck with me throughout our journey.
Collaboration is key and we need to listen to one another actively and globally to achieve common goals.
Over the course of two weeks (4-17 June 2017), our delegation of 19 participants representing 16 countries had the unique opportunity to learn about programs in Chicago and New York City, as well as from one another. Participants included natural resource professionals, municipal government officials, community leaders, activists, Foreign Service nationals and NGO managers who are engaged in urban forestry and community outreach. The countries represented included: Armenia, Bhutan, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Georgia, Jamaica, Jordan, Malawi, Mexico, Morocco, Palestine, Philippines, Tanzania, Uganda, and I had the privilege of representing Canada.
Our group at SWALE, Photo credit: Pam Foster, US Forest Service
Given my eclectic academic and professional background, my view of urban forest management, research and planning has largely focused on Canadian needs and perspectives. The experience of this two-week seminar broadened my understanding of international viewpoints and directions with every site we visited by sharing outlooks on the challenges facing communities and greenspaces in urban environments. Although many of the sites overlapped themes, this only served to emphasize the complex integration of urban issues. The themes we dealt with at specific sites over the two weeks included:
Environmental education (Seward Elementary);
Resiliency and restoration (Gary, IN);
Alternative education and community development (El Valor)
Environmental justice (Faith in Place and Sacred Keepers)
Building social, ecological and disaster resiliency (NYC Parks)
Governance and community connectivity (STEW-MAP)
Social and ecological restoration (Rockaways)
Access, environmental education (Biobus)
Activism and partnerships (Community Gardens)
Community engagement, art and innovation (SWALE)
Food justice and food security (Brooklyn Grange)
Environmental stewardship and youth development (Rocking the Boat)
Our itinerary included a wide array of field trips, site visits and case studies to examine approaches, techniques, tools, and partnerships that showcase the overall theme of the seminar: Community Engagement—the underlying significance being that without community support, the natural (physical) environment we strive to conserve cannot be sustained. Through engaging discussions, presentations and experiential learning, we shared understandings about urban forest management, urban planning, and community engagement.
Side of Lincoln Hotel, Chicago, IL. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
The seminar exceeded my expectations and afforded me an opportunity to experience a multitude of community activities and programs related to social and environmental justice. One of the main things that stuck out for me was the importance placed on the multi-level partnerships and the scale with which these relationships are imbedded. I am thankful to have met new and inspiring people from around the world. The primary lesson I take from this group is that collaboration is key and we need to listen to one another actively and globally to achieve common goals.
Prior to arriving, we were asked to identify questions and challenges to natural resource management and urban communities facing our countries. During the first few days, each participant offered an introductory presentation on urban forestry and community outreach issues in our home country, allowing us the opportunity to get to know one another more closely, to recognize the common challenges facing practitioners worldwide, and to find common (or dissimilar) entry points into critical dialogue.
Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
From a Canadian perspective, the main questions I proposed were: (1) Given that some countries have competing (or other) priorities (e.g. poverty, political unrest), what are the motivations for engaging governments and communities in urban forest stewardship and education? (2) What are the considerations for being inclusive with respect to diverse cultures, ethnicities, religions, and economic backgrounds? Questions that my seminar colleagues offered included: What are the regulations for planting specific species in urban areas? How do you engage people that have limited access to education? How can we move away from science being an elitist activity or concept and make it accessible and fun? What are the similarities and differences among departments at different levels of government and how can we learn from one another to bridge gaps?
Overall, our collective challenges to urban natural resource management included: lack of awareness and urban forestry education programs; disconnect between research initiatives and applied practice; lack of policies incorporating urban greening in infrastructure; increased residential and commercial development; absence of strategic approaches at federal and regional levels; and lack of knowledge exchange between communities and across professions.
One of the main goals of the seminar was to enable and empower participants to ask questions about how we can develop, replicate and maintain similar programs around the world. Daily, the seminar left me considering the notion of responsibility and what we can do in our respective positions and countries to enhance community resilience and engagement in urban environmental sustainability. In my case, for Canada, one of my roles with Tree Canada, a national NGO dedicated to urban forestry, is to provide direction for the Canadian Urban Forest Network (CUFN) and Strategy (CUFS). Our national steering committee is currently in the process of updating the Strategy for the 2018-2023 term. We have an opportunity to move in a more socially inclusive direction by revising the five working groups of the Canadian Urban Forest Strategy to include critical operational elements that will benefit urban forest infrastructure. Specific activities organization-wide can include:
To advocate for alternative modes of education and creative communications
To better integrate citizen science and crowd-sourcing into our knowledge sharing and knowledge production work
To incorporate more inclusive community engagement strategies for long-term volunteer commitment
To actively broaden the multi-disciplinary Canadian Urban Forest Network and reach the audiences that are currently under-represented
To determine and explore areas of collaboration with the US Forest Service to bring iTree and STEW-MAP into Canada
To engage with the Canadian Forest Service as their primary external partner to help develop urban forest policies/mandates
In Tree Canada’s work with municipalities across Canada, communities have expressed that the primary challenge is a lack of federal support. The Canadian Forest Service is currently developing their internal mandates related to urban forestry; this new development in Canada’s federal government offers an opportunity for closer collaboration.
Lastly, even though diversity was not an overtly identified theme, it permeated every discussion and presentation we experienced. The contribution of women in urban forestry and arboriculture is the overarching narrative that I am currently examining in my postdoctoral research through the University of British Columbia. As such, it was particularly interesting to me that the majority of our host speakers were women. It was inspiring to see the influences of so many women at different ages and stages in their careers, not to mention the diversity in race, ethnicity and perspectives.
In order to better understand some of the questions being raised and the challenges with which we were contending, I want to share some of the places we visited during our seminar that best exemplified the major themes listed above.
The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum: environmental education
Tour of specimen collections at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum with Michelle Rabkin. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Also known as the Chicago Institute of Science and Technology, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum serves to bridge the gap between science and practice working with communities both on and off site. With both their live and dead specimen collections, the Nature Museum offers unique learning opportunities for students and the public with their summer camps, overnight and after school programming, and series of exhibits and events. This site was our home base for much of the Chicago portion of our journey. Our discussions here began with introductions to the seminar and the space as integrative gateway for access to nature and science knowledge. Set within Lincoln Park, the Museum serves as a model for environmental education facilities.
Seward Elementary School and Jardincito: environmental education and community engagement
Jo Santiago, US Forest Service, at Seward Elementary. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
At the Seward Elementary Communication Arts Academy we experienced how environmental education programs are brought directly to the classroom. Jo Santiago of the US Forest Service presented live raptor specimens and discussed habitat, behaviour, individual stories, and the lessons birds of prey can teach us about ourselves.
Jardincito. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
We also learned about engaging communities where they live at Jardincito in south Chicago with Carina Ruiz of the National Audubon Society. We discussed urban environmental stewardship and resiliency against challenges of poverty and gang violence. The takeaways here for me included bringing passion to our jobs and using non-traditional ways of learning and understanding how profoundly surrounding environments can impact student learning and development.
Gary, Indiana: resiliency and restoration; brownfields and reindustrialization
The visit to the Mayor’s office in Gary, Indiana, fostered discussion on how industry can often have such a deep impact on the social succession of a community—who was there, who came after and the impact on landscape use. With the continuing decline in population since the 1960s, 10,000 houses are currently abandoned. Brenda Scott-Henry, Director of Environmental Green Urbanism Affairs, and Deirdre Campbell, Director of Commerce explained that the City of Gary is working hard to stabilize neighbourhoods through community green infrastructure plans and programs like Universal Access at Marquette Park among others like nature tours and historical preservation tours.
Graffiti in Gary, IN. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
During our tour of the surrounding neighbourhoods in Gary, I was struck by the long-term commitment of some of the volunteers who have settled in empty communities maintaining anywhere from three to six houses at a time. The City also encourages volunteers to paint decorative board-ups and fake windows during “blight” removal (blight: term used to describe building decay and illegal dumping). In addition, local and international artists come together each year for the Graffiti Art Festival as part of community building and beautification.
As we drove through the east side of Indiana, which is overwhelmed by the impact of its steel mills, the question we grappled with is what do you do with these spaces when the mills close down? This reminded me of the Ruhrgebiet, or Ruhr region, in Germany (cultural capital 2010), and the reindustrialization of Landschaftspark in Duisburg-Nord, for the purpose of tourism. While not at the same scale in Gary, however, the City’s efforts to restore the declining population and devastated landscape is ongoing. The takeaways here for me included understanding how to engage the local communities based on their immediate needs and create community ownership.
El Valor: alternative education and community development
El Valor. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
El Valor, a non-profit social service agency with programs focused on engaging adults and children with cognitive and physical disabilities, serves communities mainly comprised of immigrant families, a majority of them from Mexico. Monarch butterfly symbolism is used as a cultural metaphor for migration and journeys. Integration of environmental art using cultural connections like “dia de los muertos” (a cultural celebration of our life cycle in remembrance of relatives) is a cornerstone of their program.
As a non-traditional partner, the El Valor children’s centre and programming supports 500 families to train families together. Parents are valued as their child’s first teacher; as such, much importance is place on family engagement in the knowledge sharing and learning process. It may be common to walk by a piece of artwork created by a child and not realize the complexity or the impact behind it. The takeaways here for me included a better understanding of using symbols as cultural connections for environmental education, that everyone is a stakeholder and can be involved in the process of conservation through creative pathways.
Faith in Place and Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab: environmental justice
On our last afternoon in Chicago we had a panel discussion with Reverend Debbie Williams, Veronica Kyle, and Toni Anderson about environmental justice. I was moved by each speaker’s passion and intimate integration into the community. The question that this conversation raised is how do you have the uncomfortable, complicated dialogue about race and environment?
First, Veronica Kyle, Chicago Outreach Director for Faith in Place, spoke about engaging faith-based communities in developing green teams to deliver programs of environmental stewardship and conservation. Their mission is to reach diverse people of all faiths, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations to share the commitment to care for the earth. She made a compelling argument to make room in operational budgets for diversity. She also spoke about overcoming the resistance to the message of environmental impact by meeting a community’s immediate needs (e.g. jobs). For example, if you have mold in your home, you are not going to care about geothermal solutions.
Environmental justice panel: From right to left: Reverentd Debbie Williams, Veronica Kyle, and Toni Anderston. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Second, Reverend Debbie Williams from Faith in Place spoke about story circles and the importance and power of narrative and storytelling in connecting people to people and people to nature. Encouraging leaders to be inclusive and listen to the priorities of communities and explore multiple avenues of entry into the environmental conservation conversation. “Fostering the family and people connections is key in environmental programs because people will do things for the love of one another.”
Finally, Toni Anderson of Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab spoke about indigenous cultural connections to nature, youth engagement and the need to understand the importance of histories and legacies of ancestral land and settlement. This raised questions about equity, power and race and how these issues underlie land use and ownership and ultimately governance. The takeaway here for me included a better understanding of how to engage with groups who are often overlooked in the environmental science discourse.
NYC urban natural areas: building community resiliency (social, ecological and disaster resiliency)
Highline in New York City. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Our first day in New York was spent discussing how we build, develop and maintain resiliency after disaster; the importance of public-private partnerships— how we develop them and leverage resources; and the balance of green and gray infrastructure. Land use management is a 3-way partnership in New York between the US Forest Service (who does not own any land in NYC), The Natural Areas Conservancy, and the NYC Parks Department. Bram Gunther, of the NYC Parks Department and Natural Areas Conservancy provided an overview of NYC’s natural areas and greenspaces, restoration, and green infrastructure.
Our group walking along the Highline in NYC. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Dr. Lindsay Campbell of the US Forest Service spoke about the important role of the Urban Field Station as a research base for studying the city as a social ecological system (integration of social and biophysical). This is done through adaptive management, applied science, and public-facing programs. The Urban Field Stations serve to create a space of meaning where people can be innovative and where new topics and ideas can emerge. In NYC, the importance is focused on forming interdisciplinary teams and operating as a network across the country. The takeaways for me here were the importance of people underlying land use management and their individual responsibilities for tree care.
STEW-MAP and i-Tree Tools: governance and community connectivity
How do we understand the social, spatial and temporal interactions within a city of 9 million people? This is the research question that underlies the Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP), a civic capacity map and a data-driven set of tools that has resulted in a regional list of 12,000 groups who steward the urban spaces across NYC. Drs. Michelle Johnson, Lindsay Campbell and Erika Svendsen explained that the tool itself is for natural resource managers, funders, policy makers, educators, stewardship groups and the public.
The tool collects information on organizational characteristics, physical geography and organization social networks (relationships). Maps and databases can be generated to better understand civic capacity and support community development.
Slide presentation on Stew-Map. Photo1: Adrina C. Bardekjian
On the application side, the benefit is building a community of data contributors who share the same goals for sustainability. With respect to governance, people can be positive agents of change; without stewardship groups, there is a high possibility that the landscape will not be sustained. The mapping provides a legitimacy of these groups. Stewardship and indicators of social resilience include: place attachment, collective identity, social cohesion, social networks and knowledge exchange.
Our group using i-Tree in Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
In addition, Scott Maco of the Davey Institute spoke about i-Tree Tools as method for urban forest management and research. Analyzing the structure of the forest to garner present data that is relatable to a general audience and useful for proactive planning given its applications (e.g. i-Tree also measures health and vulnerability data). These tools are available for free.
Native grasses planted to stabilize the dunes at Rockaway Beach. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Rockaways: resilience and ecological restoration
The Rockaway Institute for Sustainable Environment (RISE) is a community hub for artists, residents and scientists to congregate and collaborate on issues facing the Rockaway peninsula. At RISE we discussed disaster response, the impacts of Hurricane Sandy on the surrounding community and the efforts to plant native grasses to stabilize the dunes at Rockaway Beach.
Our team at Biobase examining lab specimines. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Biobus/Biobase: access, environmental education
At the Lower East Side Girls Club in Alphabet City we were introduced to the Biobase and the Biobus, a mobile science lab that serves 150-200 elementary, middle and high school students on any given day, across 111 schools in 154 days per year. As students discover science through the Biobus, they have opportunities to explore their interests in more depth and then pursue after school programs. Dr. Ben Dubin-Thaler, founder of the Biobus, spoke to us about how the bus provides access to science knowledge and equipment and offers an alternative approach to environmental education.
Community gardens in NYC: activism and partnerships
La Plaza Cultural Community Garden. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
We examined community gardens through the lens of activism, community partnerships, resiliency and public health with Aziz Dekhan, New York City Community Garden Coalition, and Charles Krezell from LUNGS (Loisada United Neighbourhood Gardens). We were introduced to the rich history of NYC community gardens and how they offer a refuge for communal gathering and contribution.
Some of the sites we visited were long-established gardens that the organizations had to fight the City (via litigation) to keep, due to threat of increased development. More broadly, many communities struggle with this challenge and can either grow closer in the process of standing together, or some projects can come undone in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Our group at SWALE. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
SWALE: Community engagement, art and innovation, food security
Our visit to SWALE, New York City’s floating food forest, integrating permaculture, social design and art for education was innovative and inspiring. Founded by artist Mary Mattingly, this garden is built on a barge and travels to the various piers in NYC, serving as a mobile outdoor classroom to educate visitors about food security and stewardship of land and public waterways. This initiative addresses the challenge that many citizens live in food deserts (areas with limited access to fresh food). The correlation between public health and greenspaces is becoming more widely acknowledged and projects like SWALE are important models for public education. For me, this site captured many of the themes of that we dealt with during the overall trip: integration of nature and cities, community coming together, art and creativity, mobility and transformation.
Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Brooklyn Grange: food justice and food security
At Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm, we received a tour by founder Anastasia Cole Plakis, who spoke about the important role that urban agriculture plays in connecting communities to nature and getting people to think about where their food comes from on a broader scale. She spoke about the necessity of educating inner city youth about nutrition and how many of them do not think of the space as a farm so much as a park until they see the four chickens in their coop. The chickens are kept to connect the space with farming and food in the minds of schoolchildren who visit the rooftop. The cycle of this for-profit business involved growing food, selling it to local restaurants, and then using part of the profits to host education programs.
Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Rocking the Boat: environmental stewardship and youth development
Rocking the Boat. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Rocking the Boat, an organization that focuses on youth development and environmental stewardship through boat building, environmental science and sailing offered us a unique experience to row down the South Bronx river with youth educators as our guides. Their three core programs engage over 200 youth per year who move from being students to paid apprentices to alumni then to being eligible for part-time work with the organization as Program Assistants. Participants in the program also receive services from social workers and counselors who help them plan their long-term goals. Groups like this help youth to build strong foundations in environmental stewardship. Click here to hear from the team at Rocking the Boat.
Our team at Rocking the Boat. Photo: Adrina C. Bardekjian
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the US Forest Service International Programs, for including Canada in this seminar, and I’m thankful to Tree Canada for recognizing the importance of this seminar and affording me the opportunity to attend; our work will certainly benefit from the insights garnered during this two-week journey.
The organization of this inaugural seminar was seamless due to the dedication of the coordinating team; a huge thank you to Kristin Corcoran, Mike Rizo, Liza Paqueo, Rachel Sheridan, and Pam Foster, for making our experience as comfortable and fun as it was informative and memorable. I look forward to future collaborations.
I’m also grateful to all the hosts of this seminar over the two-week period in both Chicago and New York. The shared insights are beneficial to my practical work and academic research; but I’m particularly grateful for the personal experiences this journey afforded, including:
Getting out of my comfort zone on more than one occasion (e.g. speaking to 5th graders);
Re-learning the meaning of acceptance by feeling humbled by the social interactions and level of compassion and commitment of volunteers;
Being exposed to the challenges of urban forestry and social engagement from different countries around the world;
Re-kindling my own passion for collaboration and knowledge that people can achieve anything if they’re kind, open and community-focused.
Finally, I’m grateful to my co-participants for their honesty and openness during our sessions while sharing stories and experiences. It was an honour to be part of this incredible group and I’m thankful for the opportunity to learn from, and contribute to our engaging discussions. After all, the best experiences are the ones that are shared with the people we meet along the way. Adrina C. Bardekjian
Montreal
US Forest Service International Programs. 2017. Concept Note: 2017 International Seminar on Urban Forestry. Introductory document given to participants about the seminar.
The city landscape, because of the holistic nature of city-forming factors and urban community, is like a book in which the various characteristics of the city and its citizens are visible: values and norms, economic conditions, tastes and aesthetic criteria, commitment to the living environment, and so on. Throughout history, the city, as a dynamic system, is a result of the interaction between city-forming factors and the urban community. It has a powerful and significant impact on the cultural, economic, aesthetic aspects of its citizens’ lifestyle.
Tehran is in critical condition ecologically. Thoughtful design based on a set of ecological values is key. Unfortunately, what is going on is the complete opposite.
Vegetation and urban green areas are one of the most significant ecological elements in the urban landscape. Their location, their density and distribution, biodiversity, native vegetation, and maintenance costs, are crucial factors in determining both current and future sustainability and resiliency status. So, anthropogenic interventions or other main factors that effect floristic composition and vegetation structure in the city can lead to fundamental irreversible changes in the ecology of the region.
This article addresses the human interventions in the selection of plant species in green spaces of Tehran, and the cultural, social and lifestyle roots of these interventions.
Plant selection models and abundance of non-native species in Tehran’s green areas
Today, Tehran is in critical condition ecologically. Tehran’s water sources are alarmingly declining. The effects of global warming are clearly visible on weather conditions, rainfall and the annual maximum and minimum temperatures of the city. The problems of air pollution and groundwater pollution are growing. In this situation, thoughtful design based on a set of ecological values is key. Unfortunately, what is going on is the complete opposite.
Plants are an important and effective element for environmental designers and landscape architects to create one of the most important soft parts of the landscapes—the greenery. Although it may be appealing to be innovative in design and in the choice of materials and tools, to create a new atmosphere and the perception of a unique space it is prudent to be cautious. When plants play the key role of the in creating a new space, decisions about the other design features should be made rationally. There must be considerations beyond the morphological expression and aesthetic features such as texture and color, and the visual and sensual attraction that they can add to space. Ecologically, botanically, and biochemically they have a specific quality which must be elevated above any other design element.
The invasion of exotic and non-native plant species into urban areas and private gardens is the result of neglecting these very important ecological aspects of plants. This can lead to the extinction of native species and a disturbance in the ecological balance of the floristic community of an area. “Today, many native wildlife and plant species struggle to compete with exotic, invasive horticultural and anthropogenically related non-native species for survival. Aggressive species with no natural predators are, in many areas, replacing native plants and animals at an alarming rate.” (Kevin Songer, TNOC Roundtable, August 12, 2015).
For more than two decades, the use of exotic and non-native plant species which are not ecologically adapted to the climate in Tehran has resulted in high maintenance costs. The expense is the result of the lack of effort among designers to create innovative aesthetic combinations of native species.
Recently, in many of the world’s most important and beautiful cities, such as London or New York, planting designers have been choosing native species with low input maintenance, and that are climatically and ecologically adapted to the region. Researchers such as Professor Nigel Dunnett and designers such as Piet Oudolf and many others have been successful in this regard. The spaces they have created are very impressive, soulful, aesthetically eye-catching, biodiverse and sustainable, and in harmony with the ecosystem. The methods of meadow-like, low input planting, the reuse of forgotten, resident species in creative combinations, and the simultaneous screening out of invasive species are important achievements of these designs. All of these efforts are being made because of the growing demand for more sustainable development, especially in cities like Tehran, with severe climatic conditions and limited natural resources.
If the use of non-native exotic plants, especially water-loving species, with high-cost maintenance, is a concern in a city like London, it is ecologically critical in Tehran. The use of creative combinations of native and resident plants is more necessary in Tehran than London.
Grass in Tehran urban green areas
Currently, grass is one of the main plantings in public and private green areas in Tehran. Despite the various municipal and environmental organizations’ declarations to prohibit the use of this plant, it is still used because of the rapid growth and rapid greening of flat lands, in vast areas like highway corridors, neighborhoods, and extended flat areas in city parks. The most important reason for using grass as a ground cover in cities with adapted climates is its ability to tolerate trampling and providing a leisure space for citizens.
Grass-covered highway corridor. Tehran. Photo: Tehran Parks and Green Spaces organization
In Tehran, there are many spaces such as highway corridors that are not accessible by citizens and pedestrians, which are covered by grass. Why? In parks and green spaces, areas that ought to be accessible to pedestrians, citizen access is limited due to the severe vulnerability of this grass in the semi-arid climate. Entrance barrier signs are installed in the lawn, preventing people from using parks and green spaces as they are intended. In both of these situations, the use of grass as ground cover seems ridiculous.
The very shallow depth of the grass roots, in comparison to the other meadow-like and ground cover species, increases the need for irrigation several times in semi-arid climates like Tehran, due to high evaporation and rapid outflow of water from the grass root. The reliance on grass as a ground cover, whether in highway corridors or parks imposes significant damage to water resources, the ecosystem and the economy of the city, and yet most important feature of this plant—its ability to withstand foot traffic—is not used.
Eye-catching wildflower native meadows in Tehran neighborhood. Photo: Maryam AkbarianA genome of Frankenia salina, a native to the desert regions of Iran, Meyghan Desert, Arak. Photo: Maryam Akbarian
In such a situation, the use of native meadow-like species seems a very good idea. Some of them, such as Taraxacum officinale (dandelion), red Kan poppy (Kan is a green lush mountainous region in the west neighborhood of Tehran), Achillea millefolium (yarrow), Berberis thunbergii, Origanum vulgare, Mentha pulegium, Ferula gummosa and other species can be used to create aesthetically eye catching ecological mixes. Drought resistant species such as Sedum are another solution. As is a species of the perennial herb Frankenia salina that is native to the desert regions of Iran, beautiful in different seasons, and is very tolerant of severe climates.
Use of evergreen non-native exotic species in Tehran
Platanus is one of the most nostalgic and native species in Tehran which is being seriously damaged. Photo: Maryam Akbarian
Living organisms and biodiversity have naturally reached a degree of equilibrium and adaptation so that in some cases small inappropriate changes may cause great stresses in a region. The plant community diversity and floristic composition of Tehran is no exception to this general principle. The invasion of non-native exotic species has caused many ecological problems in recent years and has been costly in terms of natural and economic resources, such as reduced groundwater levels, and losses of soil quality from both macro and micro features.
For example, the excessive planting of inappropriate and non-native varieties of cedar and pine species has led to a change in the nutrients and acidity of the soil, which has led to the disappearance of many native species such as Platanus and Populus. The problem of water and air pollution are the main reasons for increased use of some non-native species such as Arizona cypress (Cupressus arizonica ) and other needle-leaved evergreens in recent decades.
“Evergreens”, poorly suited to the climate in Tehran. Photo: Maryam AkbarianNon-native species filled planter. Photo: Maryam Akbarian
In addition to their ability to withstand pollution, evergreens, due to their novelty in shape and aesthetic aspects, are very popular with people and plant designers in private and medium-scale public green areas. And so, at a very high rate of speed, these non-native, ecologically incompatible and climatologically inappropriate species made their way into construction areas and now fill the city’s public and private green space. Acer palmatum, Buxus semperviren, Cycas, Thuja occidentalis, Chamaecyparis lawsoniana, Myrtus communis, Juniperus excelsa and others are found in Tehran’s public and private green spaces. And annually, hundreds of such species disappear because of winter and summer drying. Vast sums of money are spent on the costly purchase and maintenance of these plants, which in many cases are not long-lasting.
Old Platanus trees in northern Tehran, which were dried and cut during construction. Photo: Tabnaak News Agency
Tehran has been a city under construction for many years. In any part of the city if you stand on the roof, with a 360° degree view, five or more tower cranes, are visible. This permanent state of construction, with the its associated damage to the resident trees during the construction process, has destroyed the precious, and original native green areas of the city.
On the other hand, because of the heavy cash fines the municipality receives from owners due to the loss of the original trees, there is no incentive to re-plant. If the new tree dies, the owner will be subject to yet another heavy fine. Perhaps a better solution for municipal associations would be to require project owners, in lieu of cash fines, to plant native and high-tolerance trees in urban areas and city green belts in large numbers.
The prevalence of planting styles related to humanism
In some periods of the world’s garden design history, due to the historical and social conditions of that era, the designers used the plants in a very formal and pruned way. They created harmony with symmetrical plans, and were in keeping with the humanistic values of the time. The art of topiary, rooted in ancient Greek gardens, once again climbed into to the green spaces. The garden was arranged in a logical way and was filled with manmade features meant to display the power of humans over nature and the whole of the universe, and to maximize enjoyment for the landowner. The glory of this style is seen in the Italian Renaissance garden.
Saraye Ameriha, Kashan. The eyvan (iwan) is one of the most original and important elements in Persian style architecture. Its main function is to create a place for the best view of the natural features of buildings or landscapes. Photo: Maryam Akbarian
Contrary to this trend, one of the most important features of Iranian traditional gardens is naturalism, and avoidance of non-practical decorations and non-productive plant species. Optimization and the use of indigenous materials is one of the main features of Iranian architecture and gardening. No species in the traditional Persian garden was planted solely for decorative purposes. Water was used as a very valuable element, with great caution and skill, throughout the garden for both dramatic and irrigation purposes. In traditional Persian-style gardens, nature is the dominant element due to cultural beliefs and climate demands.
Nature as a bracing and divine element has always been a special interest of Iranians rooted in both religious belief and life-style. Green areas were greatly valued in this semi-arid land. The courtyard (Hayaat), the site for planting trees and placing the Persian traditional water pond (houz), is the most important part of the traditional Iranian house plan. All parts of the house are visually and locationally arranged around it and based on its axes. The tradition has always been to plant native species with the highest tolerance and lowest maintenance. When studying historic examples of traditional houses in Iran, from north to south, you can see the climate adapted changes in plant choice.
With such a historic and cultural background, the current trend in creating planting designs for Tehran landscaping projects is to be more contemplative and strange.
Non-traditional garden design. Photo: Google image
It seems that the new trends ignore the traditional patterns and achievements in general. Not of course in the direction of improving natural environment and quality of life for citizens, but only for the purpose of demonstrating luxuries and inappropriate temporary modes. For many years, the overwhelming influx of imported, non-traditional, and eclectic architecture style has changed the face of Tehran into a combination of super-luxe neo classic style informed by Arabian taste.
A design featuring indigenous plants and elements of traditional Iranian architecture. Photo: Google image
However, in recent years, many efforts have been made by contemporary architects and municipality organizations to reduce and correct this trend with greater emphasis on indigenous materials and prototypes of Iranian traditional architecture. Unfortunately, tastes of investors, builders and owners still trend toward super-luxe and costly architectural styles from beyond the region.
Lands that were once covered with native mature trees, are converted into “luxury” buildings with low-depth planters filled with exotic non-native species, small green areas and decorative roof gardens which with the slightest neglect of the gardener, or sudden changes in the weather during winter or the hot drought days of summer could be lost. Suddenly, these “luxurious” buildings with their decorative “green” spaces, in both public and private areas, will not be appealing to buyers.
This trend has already been exported to other major cities in Iran. Not only private spaces, but also small-scale urban areas have been affected. The use of resident native species of Tehran such as Nerium oleander, Syringa vulgiris, Chimonanthus, Alcea, Forsythia, Cercis canadensis, Spiraea vanhouttei, Fraxinus excelsior, Ulmus, Platanusand others are almost obsolete. The planting style that fits the luxury, neo-classical architecture has become widespread. Inexpensive native plants are not used due to the lack of attractiveness for buyers of these properties, and formal and sculptural looking plants are so popular, that only the most apparent characteristics of species are considered. Plant nurseries are also reluctant to produce better samples of native species, preferring exotic imported ones with high sales profits.
The “green” roofs associated with this neo-classical construction has also become an epidemic luxury element. These roofs are for appearance only, having nothing at all to do with the ecological goals of creating a green roof. Elements such as a roof top swimming pool, water features, antique pots and expensive stone sculptures and other decorative elements are the featured elements of these green roofs. The plants are just decorative, contributing no more than the hardscape.
In summary, both the public’s taste, and prevailing popular cultural trends on how to design and create urban and private constructed environments has had a damaging direct impact on Tehran’s ecosystem, floristic composition and diversity. It has led to the vanishing of native species and changed the greenscape of the city as a whole. The visual impact of these changes on the landscape, and the tendency for Iranian middle-class culture to follow the predominant style, unfortunately means that these anthropogenic interventions and their after-effects will continue to increase over time.
In many cities, urban nature is managed in a multicultural landscape. The ethnic and cultural diversity seen in many western cities today, mostly driven by recent immigration, is unprecedented. For example, Toronto boasts a foreign-born population of about 50%. In Australia, 25% of the population is foreign-born. In many European cites, this is about 15-20%, or higher.
Promoting the urban-nature agenda in multicultural environments may involve evoking a different language, one that speaks to the different values and meanings we attach to urban nature, instead of simply advancing one-size-fits-all solutions and techniques.
One of the goals of managing urban nature is to create successful human-nature interactions in cities. If the population of a city is ethno-culturally diverse, it must account for what these diverse people want from urban nature. However, previous research has suggested that immigrants and ethno-culturally diverse people don’t like trees or urban natural areas as much as others. These diverse people also tend to live in areas with less access to urban nature than non-immigrants. Today, new research is helping us overcome this chicken-and-egg puzzle, and revealing how diverse people attach meaning to urban natural areas, although this meaning is not what is expected.
Different people assign different uses to urban natural areas. Photo: Pexels
In this article I wish to discuss the evidence on how immigrants and people of ethno-cultural diverse backgrounds value urban nature, based on my own review study in urban forests. My tree-centred lens, albeit limited, provides a more concrete way to understand how diverse people relate to tangible features of urban nature, instead of just looking at the loose concept of “green space”, which may or may not include natural elements. Ultimately, trees are a common element of urban nature, and the ones being planted, removed, and distributed in our cities.
Race, culture, or both?
Ethnicity has different interpretations. Here, I define it broadly as the social boundary that defines who is inside or outside a group of people based on a shared culture or a physical characteristic, where culture is the system of symbols, such as language, and shared values of a group of people. What defines the borders of any human group usually depends on a context. In the United States, ethnicity is usually interpreted racially (i.e., Black vs. White). In Europe, it is interpreted to mean a non-European, or foreign-born. Canadians use a variety of terms that reflect different aspects of ethnicity, including visible minorities (i.e., non-White), non-European origin, and foreign-born (i.e., not born in Canada).
Here, I use the term ethno-cultural diversity to emphasize the cultural aspect of ethnicity. Race is an inherent aspect of ethnicity, and it is not my intention to separate them. However, by focusing a bit more on culture I can discuss the differences driven by immigration, such as those between a recent arrival from Mauritania in Canada and a native black Canadian, both of whom, although visually similar, carry a distinct cultural baggage. Other experts on this blog will touch upon issues of race. Also, this lens lets me discuss the nuances of managing urban nature in a multicultural world. By multiculturalism I mean the condition and principle of politics and planning embedded in many national agendas (e.g. Canada; Australia), that recognizes, accommodates, and integrates cultural differences.
A little bit about me
When we speak about ethnic issues it’s also important to speak about where we stand in relation to them. So, I’ll put myself out there. I am Colombian and I see myself as a diverse person. People obsessed with visual differences may not see me that way (see my bio picture!), but, like many Latinos, I am of mixed Spanish, Indigenous, and Black background. My mixed background is indicative of the complexity that emerges when you define yourself based both on what people think you represent and how you see yourself.
I have a personal fascination with issues of multiculturalism due to personal experiences. I am a researcher on urban nature, but I’m also a Latino immigrant to Canada. Early in my life I had the opportunity to study at an international school that promoted multiculturalism, and have lived in seven different countries, including India and Germany. These experiences have predisposed me to think deeply about identity, race, culture, ethnicity, and immigration.
What the research says
I want to write about the science and not the politics of race and immigration. By this I mean the research studies that are based on the views that diverse people have about urban nature. Given this interest, I do not cover studies that focus on the distribution of urban nature resources. Many excellent studies have demonstrated the uneven distribution of urban parks and urban trees and vegetation in the social landscapes of cities, and the consequence of this unequal distribution for service provision, such as low health outcomes in minority groups. Nevertheless, as important as these studies are for managing the distributional aspects of nature, they do not give people of different ethnicities a voice to inform us how they see their relationship with it.
Of those studies that do give a voice to the people being studied, many of them, particularly those that use surveys to capture data and focus on people’s preferences, show that immigrants and/or ethno-culturally diverse people prefer more manicured natural landscapes with less trees than those of European, White decent. A small amount of studies, particularly more recent ones that focus on the meanings diverse people attach to urban nature and that use different means to capture data, such as interviews, say that ethno-culturally diverse people value urban forest spaces greatly, mostly for social interaction and integration—the most frequently mentioned idea by far— escape from urban life, stress reduction, and reminiscing childhood memories. This contrasts with the meanings attached to urban forests by the general population, which focus on aesthetics, environmental benefits, connection to nature, and feelings of calmness and relaxation (for examples, see my review study).
What the research (may) mean
To put it bluntly, much of the evidence to date suggests that immigration and multiculturalism are inconvenient for advancing the agenda of solving urban environmental problems with nature-based solutions, such as planting more trees, or making natural areas wilder. This is why the idea that “immigrants don’t like trees” has settled deeply in many of us, whether we are urban planners, architects, managers, or researchers.
Hanging out in the park after school or work in Cali, Colombia. Photo: Camilo Ordóñez
However, the studies on immigrant perceptions of urban nature, particularly those on urban forests, vary so greatly in areas of focus, research designs, and approaches to capture ethnic identities, that it is actually very difficult to generalize across them. For instance, most studies (see the 30 studies covered in my review) take place in the US and Europe, where the most common definition of an ethnic group is a person of non-European/non-White background. This is understandable given the broad definitions of ethnicity in many countries (see above), yet it puts people who may be very different, such as our friends from Mauritania and Canada described above, in the same basket. This is what we in the field call intra-ethnic variation, or differences within ethnic groups, and many studies do not account for this.
Another caveat is the wide range of areas of focus. Most studies either investigate people’s preferences of aspects of urban nature in a specific context, such as trees in front of a house, or investigate the uses people give to urban natural areas, such walking or picnicking in a park. Preferences and uses can be context-specific and variable. A problem here is that the lower preference for trees held by immigrants and ethno-culturally diverse people may be conflated with the fact that trees are not well distributed in the places these people live. Research has demonstrated that people’s preferences for trees depend on whether they have a tree in front of their house. Although studies on preferences and uses are vital to answer questions about attitudes and uses, and to compare dominant vs. non-dominant groups, most of these studies don’t answer the question that is most interesting: what meanings diverse people assign to urban nature?
People enjoying a multi-use trail surrounded by trees in Toronto, Canada. Photo: Camilo Ordóñez
The few studies that try to address this question (see the studies covered in my review) have not only revealed different meanings attached to urban nature, but also new ways of thinking about the role of ethnic background in our perception of nature. The meanings attached to urban forests, usually social interaction and integration, stress reduction, and childhood memories, among many others, emerge for a variety of reasons, some of which have not been fully explored and are opening new avenues of research. For instance, people’s previous lifestyles, such as urban and rural lifestyles, may influence people’s perception, as does childhood experiences in nature. People who come from countries where lack of investment in green infrastructure and lack of security are more prominent issues may be more aware of the disservices of trees and, perhaps, more fearful of crime in treed areas. Moreover, people’s ecological background, that means, the natural landscape they grew up with, such as a tropical coast, or a dessert, may influence people’s perceptions of urban forests. Undeniably, the different paths people follow to immigrate to a new country, such as those taken by refugee and economic migrants, will influence people’s relation with their immediate urban environment. Finally, people’s cultural differences, such as those between collective and in individualistic cultures, or spiritual and materialistic cultures, may also influence people’s perception of urban nature.
Managing urban nature in multicultural cities
If you live and work in a multicultural city, and if you have something to do with the design or management of urban nature, you may agree in principle with the idea that the meanings attached to urban nature by people of a diverse ethno-cultural background must be accounted for in the way urban nature is managed. However, you may struggle with this idea in practice, since previous research has shown that “immigrants don’t like trees”. Although there has been an excellent amount of research on the topic, I believe that this conclusion is premature. I don’t think there is enough evidence to fully understand the importance urban nature has for people of a diverse ethno-cultural background in multicultural cities. The reality is certainly more complicated than simply saying that some “immigrants don’t like trees”. Only future research, that focuses on decoupling cultural background from lifestyles, childhood experiences, socioeconomic backgrounds, immigrant paths, ecological background, will clear the way for a better understanding.
I believe that the urban-nature agenda does not necessarily collide with the multicultural agenda. However, to manage urban nature in a multicultural city, we must adopt a broader view about what urban nature means to people. Urban nature means many more things to people than we expect, especially people who have recently arrived and come from a very different ecological and cultural background. We have to be open to new ways of envisioning the ideal we have come to embrace. The fact is that engaging immigrants and people of ethnic minorities is vital to advancing the urban-nature agenda in multicultural cities. But this may involve evoking a different language, one that speaks to the different values and meanings we attach to urban nature, instead of simply advancing one-size-fits-all solutions and techniques. If you don’t know what your diverse constituents think, go out and ask them, involve them, give them a voice. What you will find may surprise you.
A review of: Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planningby Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, Armando Carbonell (eds.). 2016. ISBN 9781558443471. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 465 pages. Buy the book.
Nature and Cities, through the conference and the book, has successfully advanced the urban nature literature—even with the high standards of a McHarg disciple like me!
As I opened this handsomely large book, I was pleased to see a quote from Ian McHarg near the front, even before the Preface. You see, Ian McHarg was the primary reason that I went into the city and regional planning profession. I have always suspected I was not the only one, and within the first few pages of Nature and Cities, I was able to confirm this. I found McHarg’s iconic book 1967 Design with Nature to be the fundamental manifestation of what I thought land use and environmental planning should be, where the suitability of the land drives decision making on land use and design. It inspired me to study planning with an emphasis on environmental design and sustainable development, in urban and rural environments, and at multiple scales. Inspired by McHarg’s layer cake, I steered towards spatial planning using geographic information systems as my fundamental toolbox rather than the design toolbox of landscape architecture.
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Little did I know at the time as I was preparing to go to graduate school, in April 1993, a two-day international symposium was held in Tempe, Arizona entitled “Landscape Architecture: Ecology and Design” which brought together an “all-star team” to present on the practice of ecological design and planning in landscape architecture. Four years later, in 1997, the symposium resulted in the publication of Ecological Design and Planning, a volume in the Wiley Series on Sustainable Design. This publication became a seminal publication in the body of literature focused on the role of ecological design and planning in designing and enhancing urban settlements.
Fast forward to 2014, when the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the School of Architecture at the University of Texas, and George F. Thompson Publishing essentially “brought the band back together” by co-hosting an international conference with the goal to “create a synthesis of new perspectives and projects, evolving models and even theories in landscape architecture and its ever-expanding role in improving urban settings at every human scale” (page xiv). This 2016 book is the proceedings from that event and serves as a de facto “revised edition” to Ecological Planning and Design. The book includes 16 contributed essays from conference presenters as well as an introduction and afterword from the book’s editors.
Given the topic, I knew that McHarg would be front and center in many of the essays. Little did I realize, however, that some of the chapters would become a referendum of sorts on the McHargian philosophy. In Richard Weller’s essay entitled: “The City Is Not an Egg: Western Urbanization in Relation to Changing Conceptions of Nature”, Weller identifies what I would call the “McHargian Paradox”—that is, any attempt to apply a prescriptive method to designing with nature in cities is virtually impossible given the complexity of natural systems, functions, and processes that make aspects of nature “unknowable”: “[McHarg] was showing how development can be adjusted to fit with the basic flows of landscape ecology, but, even so, the theoretical flaw in his thinking remains…Whereas McHarg tried to determine the broad-scale future form of the city predominantly through biophysical data…landscape urbanists embrace the subjectivity of the designer and attempt to integrate a diversity of data across both the sciences and the arts” (p.45). This chapter captures that essence of the ongoing tension between urban spatial planning through geographic information systems and the landscape architecture profession. Here I am, a McHarg disciple, but thanks to my primarily practitioner-based career, I did not realize the fierce debate in the academic world over his legacy.
The chronicle of this paradox continues in the essay by Charles Waldheim, entitled “The Landscape Architect as Urbanist of Our Age”. Waldheim observed that McHarg’s branch of “environmentally informed regional planning…came to be perceived, rightly or not, as ultimately anti-urban” and led to “a generation of landscape architects trained as empirical advocates…that was dependent upon a robust welfare state for implementation” (p.71). Waldheim credits the recent renewal of landscape’s relevance for contemporary urbanism not to McHarg but to design culture. I find this one of the most interesting discussions in the entire volume, as it digs deeply into the role of planners and landscape architects to positively impact urban form. I am not able to do the full discussion justice in a short book review. Perhaps with a little touch of irony, however, the example at the end of this chapter on China’s National Ecological Security Pattern looks very McHargian to me.It is perhaps only fitting that the next chapter in the book is from the author of the China work in Waldheim’s chapter—Kongjian Yu—who focuses on “Creating Deep Forms in Urban Nature”. Such forms seem to embrace the best aspects of McHarg’s environmentally informed regional planning and design culture and achieve “human desires within natural processes and patterns”. This “détente” between McHargian planning and design culture continues in the next few chapters, with the McHargian “layer cake” method being acknowledged as a valuable tool to understand a site’s capacity but sustainable landscape design being acknowledged as an essential “systems approach” that leads to creative design solutions. Elizabeth K. Meyer focuses on aesthetics and sustainability that delivers a “manifesto for sustaining beauty”, while José Almiñana and Carol Franklin discuss “creative fitting”, an alternative design practice and theory that attempts to provide a new framework for an “Ecological Aesthetic”.
At about this time in the book, the tone starts to shift away from being a referendum on McHarg to more of an emphasis on defining and developing an operational framework for the concept of resiliency. Intellectually, this is one of the best contributions of this publication. The word resilience gets thrown around a lot in planning circles these days, and the authors tackle this subject very effectively from their unique perspectives. Meyer, for instance, points out that resilience, adaptation and disturbance are becoming operative words in ecosystem studies. Almiñana and Carol Franklin list resilience, biophilia, and regenerative design as three key elements of a new alternative design practice and theory.
The focus on resilience continues in Forster Ndubisi’s chapter entitled: “Adaptation and Regeneration: A Pathway to New Urban Places”. In this chapter fundamentals of resilience theory—the adaptive cycle of ecological systems—are first introduced in detail: growth, consolidation, collapse, and renewal. This leads to a commonly accepted definition of resilience from Pickett et al, 2004[i], which is “the ability of a landscape to absorb change or disturbance, without modifying its underlying structure and functionality or transforming it into a new state” (p.197). Ndubisi lays out seven aspirational yet pragmatic concepts for spatial planning and design and principles for creating and maintaining resilient and regenerative urban landscapes: (1) designing for change and uncertainty, (2) conservation of ecosystem services, (3) adapting and mitigating impacts of climate change, (4) embracing regeneration, (5) affirming regional thinking and action, (6) collaborative processes, practices, and learning, and (7) maintaining places.
Most of the remaining chapters in the book address strategies for implementing these best practices for creating resilient and regenerative urban landscapes. Susannah Drake offers an infrastructure-based approach—a Works Progress Administration 2.0—in which green and gray infrastructure work together to create a “new natural infrastructure system”. As a planner who has practiced green infrastructure planning at multiple scales over the past 20 years, this philosophy resonated with me, and Drake provides some excellent implementation examples from her work, including the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park and the Highway Overpass Landscape Detention (HOLD) System to collect and filter stormwater from highway downspouts. Tim Beatley points out that 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 40 miles of a coastline, so he discusses biophilic cities and strategic elements of “blue urbanism” that would certainly support regional thinking and action in urban coastal cities if his recommendations were implemented.
Click on the image to expand.
Nina-Marie E. Lister digs deep into implementation with “Resilience Beyond Rhetoric in Urban Landscape Planning and Design”. She provides cross-section diagrams developed by University of Toronto Landscape Studio students that demonstrate resilience opportunities in the Greater New Orleans Water Plan and Toronto’s Wet Weather Flow Master Plan (pages 318-319). Laurie Olin’s essay on “Water, Urban Nature, and the Art of Landscape Design” showcases best practice examples from Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York, and New Jersey where water is a central design aspect that positively promotes urban nature.
As I reached the end of the book, I began to ponder whether the co-editors’ achieved their goal: to create a new synthesis of ideas. My first thought was that it did achieve an objective that Ignacio Bunster-Ossa points out in the back cover quote: that ecology is at the center of an urban future and provides “a systemic way of thinking toward building a healthy and resilient future”. But after absorbing so much information from 16 nationally acclaimed experts on urban nature, I still felt some of the frustrations that were identified by Anne Whiston Spirn way back in Chapter 3, in “The Granite Garden: Where Do We Stand Today?” Spirn argues there is a “crisis of comprehension and synthesis” in research on cities and nature: “edited volumes…are valuable, but they are not comprehensive and they do not offer a synthesis”. Her solution is a combination of literature reviews, teams to review the state of research, and clearinghouses that provide models of practice. I absolutely agree, but in order to do effective “meta-analysis” of these important urban nature concepts, there needs to be first-class applied research and publications and high-quality forums to share the work. Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, through the conference and the book, has successfully advanced the urban nature literature—even with the high standards of a McHarg disciple like me!
[i] Pickett, Steward, Mary Candenasso, and J. Morgan Grove, “Resilient Cities: Meaning, Models, and Metaphors for Integrating the Ecological Socio-Economic, and Planning Realms,” Landscape and Urban Planning, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October 2004): 369-84.
To buy the book, click on the image below. Part of the proceeds return to TNOC.
Designers and scientists are different. We think, communicate, and interact with the world in vastly different ways. For instance, designers often develop evocative renderings of our creations, varying in style, but of a similar nature to the image below: a collage perspective showing a scene explaining a design concept. For a designer, this form provides three-dimensional shape to the design, and helps communicate cues for spatial arrangement, the relationship of the building to the landscape, and the intention of human experience such as arrival and wayfinding.
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.
What, however, would a scientist think of this image, and how would they interpret meaning? They would perhaps look at the vegetation and if it was appropriate to the site conditions, interpret the shape and size of patches of habitat and the ability to provide for the needs of different species, and perhaps wonder, again, why designers love to place flocks of birds in all of their drawings.
Conversely, scientists have a process and protocol for communication, using a distinct language, graphic style, and structure that allows for interpretation and analysis using proven scientific methods. Scientists hypothesize, reason, test, and verify, and then present this information in a format that can be inaccessible and daunting to lay-people, and perhaps similar to a scientist trying to derive meaning from a designers drawing, can be downright confounding when attempting to extract useful information to inform their work.
Integrating Habitats Design Competition.
Ecologists and landscape architects, however, are both key actors in preservation and enhancement of biodiversity in cities, and have unique opportunities to inform one another in the creation of environments for urban ecological design. Yes, we’re different. Our challenge, then, to achieve these shared goals is to better align the key strengths of each discipline—focusing the scientific analysis to achieve accessible and applied solutions, while integrating design synthesis that achieves cultural goals and rigorous, measurable ecological outcomes. There are many good examples of collaborations that result in positive urban habitat for flora, fauna, and people, often emerging from these interdisciplinary efforts. However, firms that include both designers and scientists on staff (i.e. integrated design/science firms) or even the inclusion of scientists on most design and planning teams is still relatively rare. The disciplinary boundaries continue to perpetuate a disconnect of academia and practice, resulting in scientific research that is inaccessible, offering little to designers, and design solutions that privilege aesthetics goals and offer shallow, ‘boutique’ ecologies lacking function.
As an extension of the TNOC’s January Roundtable “You say po-TAY-to. What ecologists and landscape architects don’t get about each other, but ought to”, contributor Mark Hostetler from University of Florida invited some folks, including myself, to a similar session at the recent International Urban Wildlife Conference in San Diego in early June. While the focus was on urban wildlife habitat, the broader idea of communication between scientists and designers offered another opportunity to discuss the dual issues between ecologists and designers. The concept of “Crossing the Design-Science Divide” provides the context for my part of the discussion, which is briefly summarized in the remainder of this essay.
Context
As some inspiration for my talk, I was thinking in terms of art and science, and stumbled upon some amazing images from artist Xavi Bou entitled Ornitographies, “…a balance between art and science; a nature-based dissemination project and a visual poetry exercise but above all, an invitation to perceive the world with the same curious and innocent look of the child we once were”. The chronophotographs depict the vibrancy of the movement of species of birds in new ways, and the child-like ‘way of seeing’ provided an apt metaphor for the distillation of complex ecological systems and visualization, with the result blending beauty and utility.
I was also thinking back to successful collaborations with interdisciplinary teams, including the winning entry for the Metro Integrating Habitats Design Competition in 2008, which had a goal to explore and create habitat-friendly development strategies. Our project, which included landscape architects, architects, engineers, wetland and ecological scientists, illustrators, and more, developed a concept of urban ecotones. An ecotone is the transitional zone between two biological communities, such as the shift from a forest to a grassland. Because the ecotone blends the species of each distinct zone, these areas, among other features, develop a high level of diversity. The usage was ecological and social in our design—to protect wetland enhancements, mediate impacts of climate change, and create an adaptable, flexible, and resilient big box development.
The Integrating Habitats Design Competition sponsored by Metro (2008) sought multi-disciplinary, collaborative designs of the future that integrate built and natural environments. The winning design proposal for Urban Ecotones: Transitional Spaces for Commerce and Culture, embodied this ideology through a team of scientists and designers that developed a plan for a big-box store that was adaptable to future climate change and restoration of natural lowland wetland habitats. Image: Jason King, Brett Milligan and Bruce Rodgers. Click on the image to expand.
The challenge of working with designers and scientists on wildlife friendly concepts was evident in a number of ways, including differing language, methods, and workflows. One way to achieve common ground came in starting to map out, on the site, specific flows, including biological and physical, as well as social patterns that identified both potential conflicts and opportunities. The resulting diagrammatic chaos is indicative of the challenge of mapping complexity, but also allows for a spatial investigation, by zooming in on key zones and seeing opportunities to engage with specific system, aesthetics, and technical requirements around stormwater for instance, as a functional amenity.
The interdisciplinary mapping between ecologists and designers was an opportunity to visualize complexity in a way to aid in decision-making. We developed ‘flow diagrams’ of flora, fauna, water, goods, and people on-site to identify conflicts and opportunities. Image: Jason King. Click on the image to expand.
Beyond the larger theoretical framework of urban ecotones, we are able to use this information in design strategies, applied to specific site areas to define gradients of protection and integration. This is illustrated in this section showing the transition from large-scale composting facility to community garden and plant production nursery, transitioning through recreational space and interior habitat patches, all of which allow flows of materials and resources for a number of species.
Sections show simplified relationships and highlight ecological flows of species and resources across the ecotone, from developed edges to natural buffered wetland resources. Image: Brett Milligan and Jason King. Click on the image to expand.
On a smaller scale, the concept of small scale patches of habitat, even on small scale and urban projects, provide value in urban areas that are perceived to be habitat free. The Move the House Apartments project in Portland allowed for investigation of which habitat would be able to live on small infill projects, and what strategies, such as plantings, could facilitate a successful mix of food, forage, and shelter for a number of species.
The relationship of planting species to provide food, forage, and shelter to multiple species is outlined in this diagram for Move the House Apartments, a dense infill project in Portland, Oregon. Image: Jason King. Click on the image to expand.
This is similarly explored in the context of green roofs, which provide not only stormwater management opportunities and aesthetic value to building residents, but provide proven options for viable urban habitat. The Bonneville Power Administration Headquarters that I designed in 2011, mixed topographic variation, substrate, three-dimensional habitat, and seasonal variations of flowering plants to expand the notion of flat sedum roofs to connected patches of urban wildlife habitat.
Green roofs, such as the Bonneville Power Administration Headquarters in Portland, Oregon, provide multiple opportunities for urban ecological function by promoting biodiversity and a range of habitat needs. Photo: Jason King
Doing it well by avoiding mistakes and maximizing value
Information of the right kind, in sufficient detail, and up-to-date, is essential to perceiving the city as a whole. The generation, collection, assimilation, and dissemination of information—information about the natural environment of a specific city, research on the urban natural environment and the investigation of potential applications of that research, and reports of successful case studies—are major but essential tasks. … More applied research, for example, is needed within specific scientific discipline, as well as across disciplinary boundaries.
— Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden (1985)
While the projects above provide a small snapshot of support from designers to maximize habitat, there are a number of questions that need to be addressed to avoid mistakes and maximize value. The definition of value changes depending on each project, but in this case our aspiration was true integration of ecological wisdom into the design process and solution. The opportunities for cross-disciplinary work informed by research is immense. There are, however, some key challenges. I presented at the 2014 Ecoroof Symposioum in Portland, and was inspired by the above quote as well as Ms. Sprin’s keynote address.
My presentation was a meta-analysis on ecoroof research literature, and analysis of how this information could better inform designers. I discovered a total of 202 peer reviewed articles on green roofs from over 52 Journals, spanning habitat, stormwater performance, energy, and more. While tapping into the research was one facet of this study, the other was to illuminate the lack of access to relevant research. Academics benefit from access to a plethora of research material through university and other supported means, while professionals are limited by paywalls and high costs of journal subscriptions and individual articles. In fact, of the 202 research articles I found, very few of them were available from open access journals. If I were to purchase them on an article-by-article basis, the total cost would be over $5,000.
Image: Policies for Action 2017
This access is acute, and reinforced by a recent article from Turning Research into Action, that outlined a short summary of issues and barriers, and identified that of the 2.5 million academic articles published “just 12 percent of those articles are published in open access journals”. Beyond access, there also needs to be attention on ways to communicate better, including issues such as:
Lack of a shared language
Lack of resources for integrated teams
Translating Facts into Values & Principles
Asking the Right Questions
Access to information
Communication
Strategies for success
While there are still barriers, a number of efforts provide guidance to moving forward with better collaboration between designers and scientists. Firms such as Andropogon have made a commitment to this evidence-based process, looking at operations and maintenance, with research documented on a separate Andropogon Research site. These design-science firms provide a model for new modes of practice.
The literature on urban ecology is also expanding, and there are good precedents for synthesizing this research into a language accessible by designers and planners. Now over 20 years old, by far still the gold standard for this is Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-Use Planning by Wenche Dramstad, James D. Olson, and Richard T.T. Forman. A slim but heavily graphic pamphlet, the premise is simple:
Landscape ecology has emerged in the past decade as an important and useful tool for land-use planners and landscape architects. While professionals and scholars have begun to incorporate aspects of this new field into their work, there remains a need for a summary of key principles and how they might be applied in design and planning. This volume fills that need. It is a concise handbook that lists and illustrates key principles in the field, presenting specific examples of how the principles can be applied in a range of scales and diverse types of landscapes around the world. Chapters cover: patches — size, number, and location, edges and boundaries, corridors and connectivity, mosaics, [and] summaries of case studies from around the world.
We need more examples like this, not to over-simplify concepts, but to deliver key principles and research in visual format to develop the shared language and allow designers to ask the right questions.
Another good model for research and design is healthcare, which has developed robust resources for evidence-based design (EBD) that is driven by the need for credible and defensible solutions that support theories of the environmental benefits of health outcomes. The Center for Health Design has pioneered the connection between designers and researchers through advancing best practices and empowering people with research. Similarly, sites like Research-Design Connections are an example of both a clearinghouse of information and synthesis of research accessible to designers. From their site, they connect “what cognitive scientists and other researchers in the social, design, and physical sciences have learned about how design affects human thoughts and behavior”. And also offer “design-relevant info in concise articles—some covering a single study, others integrating info from several analyses into a topical report, all written in everyday language—no jargon”. These types of evidence-based strategies, although more mature in a healthcare setting, can be expanded as models for sharing of urban ecological knowledge.
Developed by designers and scientists, Salmon-Safe offers a series of peer-reviewed certification and accreditation programs linking site development land management practices with the protection of agricultural and urban watershed. Image: Salmon Safe
Adoption of ecological principles in design can also be disseminated through certification and green rating systems. The most well-known is LEED, which incorporates site elements, however with wide consensus that it is more building-focused. This has opened up additional territory for site-based certification systems like the Sustainable Sites Initiative, which is a much more holistic framework informed by designers and scientists.
An ecologically informed system in the Pacific Northwest is Salmon Safe, which provides an example of a more focused, site scale interdisciplinary approach that focuses on urban ecological systems. With origins in certification of farms, vineyards, and parks, the system now provides opportunities for evaluation of campuses, urban projects, and infrastructure. Certified projects follow a set of standards, developed by designers and scientists including engineers, landscape architects, natural resource specialists, ecologists, and experts in integrated pest management. I worked on the team developing the urban standards, which has opened up a new realm by translating this ecological focus into strategies for dense, urban projects. The system has been embraced by Seattle Developer Vulcan Real Estate, who shares a commitment to the system for their projects. Multiple projects have been certified, as well as contractors accredited for their commitment to these principles.
Summary
The challenges are immense, but to truly expand the potential of projects we need to mediate the disconnect between science and design. To do this, we need to develop an understanding of new ways of crossing the divide, building on a number of positive strategies to be employed by ecologists and designers to increase collaboration and success. We need to create opportunities for building research into projects, and to expand the concept of “evidence-based design” aided by a greater understanding of urban science, to better inform flexible design solutions.
The solutions aren’t just generative, but could also be employed in post-occupancy evaluation to measure success and provide feedback loops for subsequent projects. We also need more opportunities to create teams that yield ecologically informed design strategies and expand the potential through use of habitat-focused certification such as Salmon Safe. The goal is to shape and expand the potential of biodiverse projects by developing shared language, and translating facts into ecological values and principles. Together, these strategies can reduce the impacts of urbanization on biodiversity and enhance urban wildlife through better collaboration.
We need to continue to gather stories of challenges and opportunities—and successes—in melding science and design. These stories need to be shared.
Post-industrial cities in the United States and elsewhere are implementing brownfields to brightfields programs that help develop local economies, generate clean energy and manage pollution. Brownfields are former industrial sites or landfills with contaminated soil. These sites pose both environmental and social challenges, as contamination must be remediated prior to redevelopment. Slow redevelopment processes can lead to or reinforce cycles of community disinvestment in neighborhoods already suffering from job and population losses. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency provides resources for remediating brownfield sites, and encourages the development of “brightfields”—solar power production on vacant lands—as one way of converting contaminated land for productive use. Renewable energy projects like solar can provide a way to bring additional financial resources to remediation projects and other underutilized urban properties, while at the same time mitigating climate change and fostering energy independence.
Holistic approaches for brown-to-brightfield programs can couple solar with other strategies to meet multiple goals on the same site.
However, depending on the way solar projects are designed and whether communities lack input in their design, energy projects in inner-city residential communities can be contentious. To date, most large solar projects are encircled in unsightly barbed wire—a design choice that few residents are likely to embrace in their neighborhoods and one which prevents integration with other community activities. These projects can also raise questions about the potential for alternative uses and competing goals, especially since communities in which vacant lands dominate the landscape often confront a multiplicity of economic and environmental challenges. Moreover, post-industrial cities face additional challenges related to infrastructure age and post-industrial disinvestment—including combined sewer overflows, substandard housing, soil contamination and lack of parks and open space. Holistic approaches for brown-to-brightfield programs can couple solar with other strategies to meet multiple goals on the same site.
Students at the University at Buffalo recently initiated the task of exploring such multifunctional redevelopment possibilities. Their efforts are part of the University’s initiative to produce 100 megawatts of locally generated solar power by 2020. The project—entitled Localizing Buffalo’s Renewable Energy Future—aims to advance clean energy in New York State by increasing the use of solar energy in the City of Buffalo and on university campuses. The initiative is working to demonstrate the viability of coordinating multiple property owners (including the University, City, other intuitions of higher education, and potentially residents) in the negotiation of a solar Purchase Power Agreement (PPA), thereby leveraging the benefits of a large-scale solar PPA in the implementation of many smaller-scale solar PV installations. Through pedagogy and research, University faculty, students, and staff at New York State colleges and universities are building clean energy literacy and development while also working to advance multi-use solar projects within the urban core. This University effort is part of Governor Cuomo’s statewide “Reforming the Energy Vision” program, which is designed to prepare for and mitigate the impacts of climate change by expanding renewable energy and modernizing energy infrastructure to withstand disruption. The Reforming the Energy Vision Campus Challengepromotes clean energy efforts by recognizing and supporting NYS colleges and universities that implement clean energy projects and principles on campus, in the classroom, and in surrounding communities. As part of a Master’s Studio in Environmental Planning, students developed multi-dimensional goals associated with the potential for vacant land in Buffalo to create more resilient communities, and assessed the potential of more than 17,000 vacant parcels to meet these goals.
Local Waterfront Revitalization Area (LWRA), Buffalo Green Code. Map: Andrew Abbey
In Buffalo, small parcels of vacant land are strongly concentrated in the residential east side, while large formerly industrial sites are located along waterways and railroad corridors. Residential east side communities have high populations of racial and ethnic minorities, with high poverty and unemployment rates. Low to moderate-income households bear disproportionate energy costs—not only because energy comprises a disproportionate amount of their income, but also because many occupy older, less energy-efficient housing. Moreover, renters in these communities may have little control over their housing quality, including energy efficiency features. Solar projects designed to support additional on-site community uses could be part of renewable energy programs that help lower residential electric bills. The large, non-residential vacant land in former industrial sites along the city’s waterfront and rail corridors tend to be ecologically sensitive areas that serve (or could better serve) important ecosystem functions such as storm water purification and bird habitat. However, they also have the potential to generate large amounts of energy as solar farms. In both cases of residential and non-residential vacant land, considering important tradeoffs and synergies with other ecological and community needs is key.
Vacant Land Density. Map: Dhwani Shah
As students analyzed the potential for these more than 17,000 vacant lots to produce solar energy—by considering site suitability characteristics such as slope, potential solar insolation, brownfield status, ownership, and proximity to existing electrical infrastructure—they also investigated the potential for vacant lots to provide ecological habitat and public access to community spaces. Vacant lots near existing bird habitat and shorelines are crucial for enabling ecological processes, while lots in neighborhoods that lack access to parks could potentially serve as public spaces. Moving beyond a single-objective approach, students considered the potential for sites to meet public access, ecological and energy objectives at once.
Solar Strand, University at Buffalo. Photo: Will Siegner
How could multiple uses take place on the same site? Are ecosystems, social systems and energy infrastructure systems in conflict with one another, or are they synergistic? Intuitively, ecological landscapes may conflict with solar power generation because trees shade the photovoltaic panels and inhibit solar energy. Residential and community uses may conflict with solar infrastructure if sites are unattractive or if vandalism occurs on sites for which there is public access. Although these are valid concerns, we argue that depending on site design, management and community participation in the design of such multifunctional sites, these uses could complement rather than conflict with one another. For instance, integrating solar arrays with low herbaceous vegetation could create habitat diversity and enable more efficient photovoltaic output, as we have witnessed at the University at Buffalo Solar Strand. By providing partial shade habitat for shade-loving plants in an otherwise open sunny landscape, the solar array supports more biodiversity. On hot summer days when heat reduces the energy output of photovoltaics, plants can help to moderate temperatures around solar arrays.
Let’s call these synergistic integrated solar-ecosystems brightgreenfields. Integrated solar-community projects such as the Sol Cinema in Kent, UK—a mobile outdoor theatre powered entirely by solar panels, and the Solar Kitchen in Auroville, India provide examples of solar’s potential for creating community spaces. Imagine an outdoor community theater powered by a brightgreenfield, or a solar incubator kitchen sited next to an urban farm. Co-locating such sites could enable entrepreneur chefs to sustainably access fresh produce and energy while developing small business enterprises.
Not all integrated designs may work in all places. However, if we are to adapt to a changing climate, the process of adaptation must involve experimentation with regenerative design that “consciously repair[s] a degraded environment and actively improv[es] the biosphere whilst providing for the integration of urban systems that provide for human needs” (Thomson and Newman, 2016). We must take bold, holistic and integrative approaches that promote diverse green, grey and social infrastructure.
McPherson was named the University at Buffalo’s first Chief Sustainability Officer. In his role as the CSO, Ryan connects people across the university with information, innovation, and tools to reduce UB’s footprint on the future and enhance quality of life by improving environmental stewardship, increasing economic efficiency and augmenting cultural values and awareness.
Recently, Colding and Barthel (2017) critiqued how the Smart City-model is taken more or less as a given good for creating sustainable cities. This view is deeply rooted in seductive visions of the future, where the digital revolution stands as the primary force for change (for a critical perspective, see for instance Luque Ayala and Marvin, 2015: March, 2016; Hollands, 2015). Smart grids and meters, automated transport systems, communication networks, and data collection and analysis of data are all part of the smart city vision. While the seamless integration of digital technologies for the management of city functions promises greater cost-effectiveness and efficiencies, there are significant questions and philosophical issues that must be addressed as greater reliance on technologies for the running of our cities is pursued.
By intertwining systems that generate different kinds of services—creating a system of systems—the complexity of the whole increases exponentially. As a consequence, the vulnerabilities in a smart city system are significantly higher.
This summer over 7,000 papers will have been published about the Smart City. It is by far the fastest growing discourse within the wider umbrella of urban sustainability. Despite the sheer number of publications, none applies a social-ecological resilience lens in the analysis (Colding and Barthel, 2017). We argue in the letter to the editor of the Journal of Cleaner Production that urban resilience scholars need urgently to engage with this literature to provide deeper philosophical pondering about what really is at stake and if and how the Smart City could contribute to development of a more resilient planet Earth.
Employing a sort of a cyborg worldview—meaning a living system of intertwined human and machine parts—the Smart City system is seen as contributing to urban sustainability with the basic assumption that ‘the Internet of Things’ serves social and public ends. These ends include economic benefits, improving efficiency and quality of life for people by optimizing control of infrastructures. In this view, urban residents are at the center of a city’s sustainability transformation, while at the same time serving as “data sources”, providing urban planners (central controllers of the cyborg) various sources of information about human behavior that may or may not be exploited. While various efficiency measures often are beneficial for society, at least in the short term, the discussions of resilience of such a cyborg is mostly entirely avoided (Colding and Barthel, 2017). Fresh in memory is the recent global outbreak of ‘worms’ which in the UK collapsed large-scale critical infrastructures, like hospitals. Hence, it is necessary to confront how the cyborg strategy may affect resilience related to basic social services, including how basic human needs might be secured, i.e. health care and food-energy-water security.
The literature around the smart city concept appears to rest on the idea of environmental modernization, a paradigm placing particular emphasis on enhancing economic and social sustainability. However, this literature puts hardly any emphasis on ecological sustainability, nor does it include the role of ecosystem services, such as those generated by urban agricultures or wetlands and which could be viewed as technologies, for building urban resilience towards internal- and external disturbances. If the concept of technology is understood as the compilation of techniques, skills, methods and processes used in the production of goods or services, wetlands for instance can serve to shelter cities like New Orleans or the mega city of Dhaka from flooding and denudation, and peri-urban food production systems contribute to a resilient food security by keeping prices low when poor city inhabitants suffer from global price-spikes of bulk crops (like the spike in food prices during 2008).
Photo: Wiki Commons
Colding and Barthel in their recent publication in Journal of Cleaner Production (2017) discuss the resilience of the internet (on which the cyborg feeds), viewed to function as a complex adaptive system. They argue that the internet, like healthy ecosystems, holds vast redundancy that is of crucial importance for its resilience, composed of several seemingly redundant elements that are able to perform the same basic tasks. If one task gets wiped out, others can step into its place. The internet also contains modularity of the totality of the network that prevents disturbances to spread easily throughout the system, or web. However, modularity comes at the expense of connectivity; why it is important to strike a balance towards intermediate levels of modularity that promote resilience in social-ecological systems by keeping enough information and genes flowing, while preventing disturbances from spreading quickly. But such structural characteristics single-handedly cannot build resilience. Learning and memory are also vital for building resilience. Unlike the internet, immune systems of humans can quickly perceive attacks and respond by isolating the damage to one part of the system. In this way, the immune system can learn to detect and remember pathogens, rapidly redirect information and energy, redistribute tasks, and increase immediate counterstrikes (Buchanan, 2002). Compared to biological systems, the internet is but “an elephant trying to play the piano”, and a well-coordinated attack may well disintegrate it into isolated pieces.
New markets that develop rapidly tend all too often overwhelm societies capacity to develop new regulations to respond to unwanted surprises. One example is smart city technologies that develop faster than urban resilience thinking, let alone laws and regulations, creating a gap that leaves ample room for industrial espionage, terrorist attacks, worm infestations and system failures due to natural disaster. By intertwining systems that generate totally different kinds of services (e.g., internet with e.g. flood control systems, traffic control and with power grids), creating a “system of systems”, the complexity of such collaborating systems increases exponentially. As a consequence, the number of vulnerabilities in a smart city system is significantly higher than that of each of its sub-systems (Bartoli et al. 2011). There are also “major privacy concerns” to be overcome in realizing smart cities, such as maintaining confidentiality of personal data of groups and individuals (Batty et al., 2012).
The smart cyborg city may of course also offer benefits for citizens; but those are still largely aspirational. There are a great number of questions that must be addressed both in research and more broadly in society through public debate and in the media. Applying a resilience lens, cyber security is likely to become one of the biggest challenges facing the development of the cyborg. We urge social-ecological resilience scholars to make a mark in the booming literature on smart cities. For instance, how can ‘nature based solutions’ complement in resilience building of basic services for human wellbeing, that may be jeopardized when basic infrastructures become wired in by the ‘the Internet of Things’? How can resilience scholars trained in systems ecology contribute with thinking around cyber security? How may Smart City technologies interact with place-making in cities? These perspectives must be a part of the discussion if smart cities truly will become secure, sustainable, resilient and an asset for city inhabitants.
Johan holds a PhD in Systems Ecology and is an Associate Professor at The Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics where he leads the Urban Research Program. He has served as the research coordinator for the Swedish sub-global Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) and has been on the editorial board of several scientific journals.
Further Reading
Bartoli, A., Hernández-Serrano, J., Soriano, M., Dohler, M., Kountouris, A. and Barthel, D., 2011. Security and Privacy in your Smart City. In Proceedings of Barcelona Smart Cities Congress 2011, 29-2 December 2011, Barcelona (Spain).
Buchanan, M. 2002. Small World – Uncovering nature´s hidden networks. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, GB. ISBN: 0753816879X
Colding, J., Barthel, S., 2017. An Urban Ecology Critique on the “Smart City” model. Journal of Cleaner Production 164: 95-101. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.06.191
Hollands, R, G., 2015. Critical interventions into the corporate smart city. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8: 61–77.
Luque-Ayala, A., Marvin, S., 2016. Developing a critical understanding of smart city urbanism? Urban studies 52(12): 2105-2116.
March, H., 2016. The smart city and other ICT-led techno imagaries: Any room for dialogue with Degrowth? Journal of Cleaner Production-in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.09.154
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.
Marina Alberti, SeattleInstead of aiming at control, we must embrace uncertainty and redefine principles of design to acknowledge the complexity of hybrid ecosystems—expanding the heterogeneity of forms and functions in cities to support both human and ecological functions.
Erik Andersson, StocklolmMore organic, constantly changing and evolving cities could help to shift worldviews back to being grounded in change and changeability rather than control and permanence.
Sarah Dooling, Austin/BostonThe danger of an object-oriented systems approach to urban ecosystems is that it is inattentive to consequential political conflicts arising from competing values and unshared goals.
Paul Downton, MelbourneThe complexity of extended organisms and cities in particular make it difficult to demarcate inviolable distinctions between when it’s an organism and when it’s an ecosystem.
Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm What we really need is closer collaboration among a diverse set of knowledge holders in natural science, social science, humanities, and among practitioners. The term ecosystem, originating from natural sciences, may alienate groups we need to include in diverse city-building conversations.
Nancy Grimm, PhoenixAs ecologists we would be arrogant to assume that our models alone suffice to understand the multifaceted drivers of change. It’s imperative to continue to expand the concept of the urban ecosystem to incorporate a multidisciplinary view.
Dagmar Haase, BerlinCo-evolutionary planning and governance means the elimination of sectoral thinking and actions that favour more holistic concepts of urban, regional and local regeneration, resilience and adaptation.
Dominique Hes, MelbourneCities are ecosystems but they are not well adapted to place; indeed, we have displaced their ecological functions. For this reason, cities have not yet reached their full ecological maturity or potential.
Kristina Hill, BerkeleyCities meet the definition of ecosystems, with important limits—understanding urban ecosystems must start with an awareness of the ethical and conceptual pitfalls of studying human behavior without considering human values.
Madhu Katti, RaleighOf course cities are ecosystems. More interesting is to ask what kind of an ecosystem cities can be rather than worrying about how unnatural a blight they are on more “natural” landscapes.
François Mancebo, ParisCities are ecosystems and a lot more than that: they are social-ecological systems.
Clifford Ochs, OxfordYour habits are our habits, your throwaways are our takeaways, and while you’ve done all the work to make the city for yourselves, we could not resist moving in, migrating across the grid, and settling down.
Steward T.A. Pickett, PoughkeepsieThe deep definition of the word ecosystem is notable for what it leaves out—the minimal baggage carried by the idea makes it nimble and broadly applicable.
Stephanie Pincetl, Los AngelesThe danger of an object-oriented systems approach to urban ecosystems is that it is inattentive to consequential political conflicts arising from competing values and unshared goals.
Rob Pirani, New YorkConsideration of the social benefits of resilience technology, and the civic ecology that it can engender, may well determine whether our urban ecosystems and all of their inhabitants can successfully adapt to a changing future.
Richard Register, OaklandComparing our cities to complex living organisms seems much more fruitful—in other words, to our own bodies, our organ systems, our limits. I think of this as the “anatomy analogy”.
Eric Sanderson, New YorkA city is an ecological landscape—and a landscape, to scientists like me, is the particular pattern of ecosystems, their composition and arrangement, that forms a habitat for plants and animals. Even for people
Alexis Schaffler, Berkeley/Cape Town/JohannesburgPerhaps our insight is not really in viewing cities as ecosystems, but instead lies in how the cities-as-ecosystems idea causes our urban thinking and designs to evolve.
Vivek Shandas, PortlandWhat then can be done to address the historical inequities of applying urban ecological knowledge to exclusionary planning practices? First is the recognition that urban ecological research is not value-neutral.
David Simon, GothenburgPerhaps in the future, the ecosystem analogy might become more apt, but at present it is unhelpful and inaccurate, obscuring or concealing far more than it might superficially promise as heuristic device.
Jane Toner, MelbourneCities are ecosystems but they are not well adapted to place; indeed, we have displaced their ecological functions. For this reason, cities have not yet reached their full ecological maturity or potential.
Yolanda van Heezik, DunedinThinking about a city as a collection of ecosystems influenced by their surrounds could be a more helpful way to inform urban design, and make it easier to identify the elements that make up each particular ecosystem.
Ken Yeang, Kuala Lumpur/LondonWhereas ecosystems are living entities, our existing towns and cities are, in effect, inert structures unlike living things, and have operational and industrial systems that give nothing of biological value back to nature.
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
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.
For example, here is one definition of a natural ecosystem (from sciencing.com):
An ecosystem is comprised of all the non-living elements and living species in a specific local environment. Components of most ecosystems include water, air, sunlight, soil, plants, microorganisms, insects and animals.
That could be a description of a city. Or not (perhaps depending on the city).
But perhaps more importantly, does thinking explicitly about cities as ecosystems help us? Does it offer us any insight into urban design? For example, are our goals for cities—sustainability, resilience, livability, and justice—advanced by an urban eocsystem concept?
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.
Marina Alberti is Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Director of the Urban Ecology Research Lab at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on complexity, resilience, and eco-evolutionary dynamics in urban ecosystems.
Marina Alberti
Cities are in fact ecosystems. Tansley (1935) defined an ecosystem as a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment interacting as a system. Eugene Odum (1971) expanded the definition, calling it “a unit that includes all the organisms, i.e., the community in a given area interacting with the physical environment so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity and material cycles, i.e., exchange of materials between living and non-living, within the system” (p.12).
But one key element—the dominance of humans—makes cities different from many other ecosystems. And that changes everything: composition, processes, dynamics, functions (Alberti 2016). By building structure and infrastructure in cities to support their needs, humans redistribute organisms and the fluxes of energy and materials leading to a distinct biogeochemistry (Picket et al. 2001, Grimm 2008), biotic diversity (Groffman et al 2014), and energy and material cycles (Bai 2016).
All organisms modify the environment to create their habitat and facilitate their survival, and humans are no exception. Darwin (1881) spent his final years observing and describing the effects earthworms had on soil formation. Earthworms feed on plant debris and soil. Because they concentrate the organic and mineral constituents of what they eat, their casts contain more available nutrients than surface soil. Beavers build dams that dramatically alter riparian landscapes across North America—and thus maintain and increase both species richness and habitat heterogeneity (Wright et al. 2002). Ecologists have documented how the changes of many organisms—the ecosystem engineers– can influence organismal distribution and abundance and ecosystem processes at the local and larger scales (Wright and Jones 2002).
So what makes cities different? Although we do not yet have conclusive evidence on whether species diversity and energy flows in cities are qualitatively different, or simply an end point of a continuum, urban ecosystems operate outside the envelope of values observed in natural systems (Grimm et al 2008). Compared to systems not dominated by humans, urban ecosystems are highly disturbed environments (Grimm et al. 2017), very heterogeneous in both space and time (Pickett et al. 2016): complex mosaics of biological and physical patches in a matrix of infrastructure, human organizations, and social institutions.
The ecology of urban ecosystems is only one of the elements that makes cities different. Humans and their communities add a new level of complexity. Humans design and build cities on the basis of their preferences and values. Urban ecology lacks a theory and science of human habitats comparable to those used to study other species’ habitats that fully acknowledges the complexity of the human species and societies. Often we study cities as ecological systems, disregarding the fundamental fact that they are built for humans. Developing a theory that fully includes humans as key agents of ecosystems will require an extraordinary new collaboration among a broad range of disciplines.
Instead of aiming at control, we must embrace uncertainty and redefine principles of design to acknowledge the complexity of hybrid ecosystems—expanding the heterogeneity of forms and functions in cities to support both human and ecological functions.
The ecosystem concept in ecology does not fully reflect our current understanding of dynamic human-dominated ecological systems that may operate far from equilibrium (O’Neill 2001). In his MacArthur Lecture in Ecology, Robert O’Neill (2001, 3276) argued that the assumptions behind the ecosystem paradigm limit our thinking and the questions we ask because they emphasize some properties of nature while ignoring others (Alberti 2016). Crucially, ecosystems can change state in response to a spectrum of variable conditions (Holling 1973); they have evolved over millions of years through changes in biotic-abiotic interactions. But since the Industrial Revolution, humans have increasingly dominated such interactions, creating novel ecosystem functions never observed before (O’Neill 2001; Tilman and Lehaman 2001). Yet in ecology, humans are the only species considered to be external to ecosystems. Furthermore, emphasis on the self-regulating nature of ecosystems has limited the view of disturbance that we now know is critical to understanding stability and ecosystem function.
During the past hundred years, advances in the scientific understanding of ecological systems have called for integrating humans into ecology (Alberti et al. 2003). In ecology, scholars no longer see ecosystems as closed, self-regulating entities that “mature” to reach equilibrium. Instead, they acknowledge that ecosystems have multiple equilibria and are open, dynamic, highly unpredictable, and subject to frequent disturbance (Pickett et al. 1992). But only in the past decade have scholars of urban ecology started to expand their conceptual frameworks and methods of analysis to better represent socioecological interactions (Pickett et al. 2013). To study urban ecosystems, we must integrate multiple agents and boundaries and analyze processes at multiple scales, ranging from local to metropolitan, regional, and global. We must also explicitly represent human agents and link urban structures, biophysical processes, and human behaviors to ecosystem functions.
Cities as hybrid ecosystems
In my recent book, Cities That Think like Planets, I advance the hypothesis that cities are hybrid ecosystems: the product of co-evolving human and natural systems. Urban ecosystems emerge from complex interactions and feedbacks between the human, natural and technological system components of urban ecosystems (Alberti, 2016 (figure below). From an ecological viewpoint, they differ markedly from historical ecological systems (Milton 2003). But urban ecosystems also differ significantly from historical human settlements: they are novel habitats and contain both natural and human historical features.
Credit: The Urban Ecosystem, Alberti 2017, in Press
I suggest that if we are to understand ecosystems in which humans are the key players, we need a paradigm shift in the way we study these ecosystems (Alberti 2016). As hybrid ecosystems, cities operate at the border of a phase transition between alternative behavioral states governed by either historical or novel feedback mechanisms. As ecosystems are increasingly dominated by human action, they move toward a new set of feedback mechanisms. Their state is unstable. We can drive them to collapse or we can consciously steer them toward outcomes we desire. But what is a desired outcome? Desired by whom? What is the role of human values in urban ecosystems? Framing a new science of hybrid ecosystems implies addressing the diversity of human values, their conflicts, and the ethical dimensions.
Designing urban ecosystems
We also need a paradigm shift in system design to accommodate the complexities in these highly interdependent and adaptive hybrid urban ecosystems. Myths and uncorroborated assumptions about how nature works, have led to failures in designing and managing urban environments (Holling et al. 2002). The assumptions that the elements of a system can be controlled and their boundaries can be defined have dominated system design and engineering for a long time influencing both the field and the practice. Urban designers and planners, for example, have assumed for a long time that ecosystems are stable and that their processes and dynamics are relatively well understood and predictable, thus one can find an optimal solution among a set of possible alternatives—but that is clearly not the reality in urban ecosystems.
How do we design complex hybrid systems in which the components are highly diverse, interconnected, and interdependent? (Alberti 2017, In Press) How can we design and build infrastructures that are resilient to unexpected and uncertain environmental change? How can we coordinate the interventions of diverse institutions operating at many scales under a diversity of constraints? How can we resolve conflicts among multiple stakeholders?
Instead of aiming at control, we must embrace uncertainty and redefine principles of design to acknowledge the complexity of hybrid ecosystems. This implies expanding the heterogeneity of forms and functions in urban structures to support both human and ecological functions and supporting modularity of infrastructures to create interdependent decentralized systems. We need to expand our capacity for experimenting and learning. And most of all we need to find new ways to creatively engage the communities in designing the cities of the future.
Reference
Alberti M. 2017, In Press. Simulation and Design of Hybrid Human-Natural-Technological Systems. Technology | Architecture + Design
Erik Andersson works as associate professor in sustainability science at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Erik Andersson
Were cities ever anything other than ecosystems? With additional layers of complexity added to them, of course. I like to think in terms of principles, connections and functions, and they relate to systems, across systems. When we get down to basics, cities are made up by components reacting and acting on their surroundings. We navigate the physical structure and interact with the biological components, although the functional pathways and drivers behind dynamics may have a strong human flavour and a high degree of facilitation. Reframing urban studies in ecological terms may be more or less informative. There certainly are cases where I think ecology can help highlight implicit or neglected system characteristics that would merit more attention. Cities have been conceptualised as ecosystems before, but digging deeper into ecological theory exposes a number of insights and considerations that could be interesting for a broader discussion of what cities are and how they work. And, as the logical follow-on, how they could work differently.
More organic, constantly changing and evolving cities could help to shift worldviews back to being grounded in change and changeability rather than control and permanence.
I will limit myself to two points here, one on time and one on space, and both concerned with function. Space first. Connectivity and the flows and exchange it facilitates is a central concern in cities, and one most obviously manifested in different infrastructural systems. With an emphasis on structure, physical structure. Ecology emphasises that connectivity has two aspects, structural and functional connectivity. I think we sometimes believe that structure is everything; instead, our perceptions, and how we act on them, may be quite as decisive. Connections exist where we understand them to exist, barring some clear misunderstandings. And connections are not just about getting from A to B; while we believe in our maps, sectoral divisions, and clear delineations ecological theory and research points to the importance of edges not as lines but as zones of mixed influences and different functionality.
Then there is the issue of time and our preference for clear and bounded functionality. There is a potential clash between the selective forces at work in and on cities. Considerable human effort and ingenuity have gone into trying to make cities into something other than ecosystems, yet perhaps now is the time to allow them to be ecosystems. Why? Ecosystems come with temporal dynamics, change, cyclicity and evolution. Cities have been prime examples of command and control approaches where built infrastructure is intended to last, and often to support the same function throughout its lifespan. Evolution has proven the utility of open-ended functionality by showing how tweaking the same design just a bit can provide a different, or added, functionality. Invention is more often a case of bricolage and making use of what is already there, with a clear parallel to evolution, than a result of intentional creation of something truly ‘new’. Making urban design a bit more open-ended would do loads of good for cities’ capacity to adapt.
The city, perhaps even more than most other social-ecological systems, suffers from a conceptualisation where we see ourselves as somewhat external observers and users of the system. Yet they are lived-in systems where our presence and long-term exposure and interaction with our surroundings actually is the system. A functional understanding of the city, one based on interactions, similar to that of ecosystems could provide a fresh perspective on design needs and ways we could think about our cities. It is no news that experiences and perceived qualities depend on multiple, interacting factors, where individual components may change. For example, we don’t really want the physical streets and roads when we build infrastructure, we want the function of mobility, which is generated by our understanding and use of structure. Which may shift much more rapidly the structure itself. More organic, constantly changing and evolving cities could help to shift worldviews back to being grounded in change and changeability rather than control and permanence.
Sarah is an interdisciplinary urban ecologist, with 17 years of experience in urban ecology, social work, and wildlife management. She works on colaborative design projects and policy development efforts that integrate ecological design, environmental planning and social equity issues.
Sarah Dooling and Stephanie Pincetl
Beyond progress and ruin: an empowered urban ecology for the Anthropocene
To think of cities as ecosystems is an ecologically radical idea. Declaring places profoundly altered by human construction as ecological holds the potential for transcending the binary, and sometimes oppositional, categorization of people versus nature characteristic of most Western world’s knowledge domains. Yet, the idea of urban ecosystem contains the histories of Cartesian dualities. Recognizing the reciprocity between many different human communities and their non-human neighbors means rejecting nature as independent of urbanization. Social issues, like poverty, become environmental issues. But we’re not there yet.
The danger of an object-oriented systems approach to urban ecosystems is that it is inattentive to consequential political conflicts arising from competing values and unshared goals.
Ecology developed as a science of categories and classifications, committed to revealing patterns with wide applicability. Understanding urban ecosystems as places where people and nature co-evolve is difficult for ecologists because these particular co-evolutionary partnerships upset stable Linnaean categories that are used to organize the world’s life independent of humans. Communities and species were, and continue to be, considered objects of study, separate from and undisturbed by investigators.
The idea of urban ecosystems challenges the anti-urban bias among 19th and 20th century ecologists who considered urbanizing landscapes void of ecological value, degraded by pollution, and cut up by networks of infrastructure. With the eradication of nature the concept of ecosystem in the urban context had little purchase among ecologists. Today, many urban ecologists draw from systems theory to link social and ecological components through themes of connectivity, emergence and contingency. Cities are now considered hybrid systems, a designation undergirded by the pervasive binary categorization held so dear by natural scientists.
Yet, the urban ecosystem concept is insufficient because it leaves out urban realities, such as racism, poverty and criminal justice, because they fall outside conventional topics of ecological investigation.
Cities have developed out of unique urban histories. The legacies of urban renewal and racist policies reinforce pathways of urban development marked by exclusive beneficiaries. Modernity’s narrative of urban progress is undercut by the logic of disposability and excessive surplus that plays out in the dynamics of urban homelessness, multi-generational poverty and racism. Despite conceptual advancements, current ideas of urban ecosystems among urban ecologists remain analytically silent on the power of politics and economics to organize relations between people and nature. They remain silent about the need to understand how humans organize themselves and enroll nature in their power relations. In our era of deepening inequities, questions about the transformation of nature, by whom and for what purpose are increasingly salient as urban patterns of economic and racial segregation intensify while cities are simultaneously held up as the salvation of global sustainability and climate resilience. As many critical thinkers have reminded us, social changes always have ecological consequences, and environmental changes are never socially neutral.
Cities are places of growth and decay, chaos and patchiness. The objective stance of systems theory towards this unpredictable and untamed environment is insufficiently capable of questioning dominant urban scenarios. The danger of an object-oriented systems approach to urban ecosystems is that it is inattentive to consequential political conflicts arising from competing values and unshared goals. Where then do we find the theoretical justification that motivates eliminating practices of disposability and excessive surplus? As researchers, our challenge in these times of uncertainty and loss is to attend to significant moments of difference and variation in co-evolutionary relationships, which may point to a transformative re-imagining. We offer a way forward.
We consider cities as subjects, full of diverse living networks and marked by inequities harmful to communities of people and biota, rocks and soil. We intend to build a science of cities from the inside out, where the historical richness, contradictions and inequities of each city informs context-specific understandings of urban ecosystem. We urge justice and equity — for people, biota and rivers — as central starting points for research, policies and place making. Making equitable urban societies becomes the common goal underlying efforts to become resilient and sustainable. We call for developing a post-Cartesian science that recognizes contingency and mutual construction of the places we live: humans-in-nature, nature-in-humans.
An empowered urban ecological science recognizes the limitations of systems thinking, Linnaean classification, and ecological ideas of ecosystems. Boundaries between humans and environment are dissolving into multitudes of diverse communities interacting across patches of relational intensity. Empirical work, liberated from constraining scientific ideologies, can aid in nurturing collaborative survival by coordinating disturbance and conservation across patches.
The Anthropocene is an Epoch of Reconfiguration. We are being called to develop creative alliances that cut across politics and knowledge domains. Re-building analytic categories starts from the ground up, and involves exchanges across formal and vernacular ways of knowing, where arts, sciences and design converge on pressing issues. Most critically, we must start telling stories that carry us beyond progress and ruin, into the possibilities of ecologically vibrant and socially equitable communities that can sustain in a precarious world.
Pincetl has written extensively about land use in California, environmental justice, habitat conservation efforts, urban ecology, water and energy policy.
Writer, architect, urban evolutionary, founding convener of Urban Ecology Australia and a recognised ‘ecocity pioneer’. Paul has championed ecological cities for years but has become disenchanted with how such a beautiful concept can be perverted and misinterpreted – ‘Neom' anyone? Paul is nevertheless working on an artistic/publishing project with the working title ‘The Wild Cities’ coming soon to a crowd-funding site near you!
Paul Downton
Ecocities and the extended organism or what the hell has the evolution of cells got to do with social justice?
Are cities ecosystems? Yes. And maybe.
If an ecosystem is “a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment” it is also a baseline description of any city. My understanding of ecology is that, for the purpose of studying interactions and interdependencies between organisms and their environment, any set of creatures and their habitat can be understood as an ecosystem once a logical boundary is set. So you can study the ecosystem in an unwashed five day old coffee cup, or someone’s mouth, or a savannah. Or a city.
Logically, the interacting organisms in a city ecosystem include all its humans and non-humans, and the interactions might be as prey and predator, or human-to-human relationships that can be expressed in ways ranging from kinship ties to law suits. All are interdependent. Social concerns, including goals of livability, justice and equity, have to be considered integral to the making and ongoing life of a city and why the ecosystem concept and its paradigm of interdependency advances our understanding of how those goals might be reached.
The complexity of extended organisms and cities in particular make it difficult to demarcate inviolable distinctions between when it’s an organism and when it’s an ecosystem.
Earth’s biosphere is the biggest ecosystem we are able to study but even its boundary is hard to determine exactly as it includes the moon, without which there would be no tides (and like the child working out their first address, you can go on to include other planetary motions, the sun, without which there’d be no life at all, and the rest of the galaxy). Regarding the Earth as an ecosystem hasn’t prevented theorists, including the redoubtable Margulis, from proposing that it also operates as a self-regulating organism (the Gaia Hypothesis).
Cities are organisms too. An organism isn’t conventionally thought of as an ecosystem, but it is. We human organisms carry within and upon us any number of thriving ecosystems, some healthy, some less so, but we are not mere hosts for ecosystems, we are things made up from all our intermingling ecosystems from the bacteria in our mouth and guts to the mites that crawl around our skin. Each of us is an individual and each of us is a legion of organisms. We are only healthy when they, and their relationships with each other, are functioning in an ecosystemically healthy way.
Calling a city an ecocity sets up expectations. It implies a relationship between ecology and the city that isn’t conveyed in terms like sustainable and green except by ponderous definition. That relationship is the key to understanding that even if a city is not, by itself, an ecosystem, it can exist only because of its relationship to living systems. Once you’ve got the message that an ecosystem is integral to the city’s existence you have to pay attention: if the city is to be healthy, then the larger ecosystem that contains it has to be healthy.
Are cities’ ecosystems like a natural ecological area? If there’s life, that’s nature at work, that’s “natural”. Humans manufacture cities, but they are still part of nature – as far as we know we haven’t been teleported from some abiotic planet of pure machine intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy and even if we had you’d have to start arguing about what constitutes life and where it comes from… as Barry Commoner said “Everything is connected to everything else”.
Defining the health of a city ecosystem means defining the health of its constituent organisms, and in the city the dominant organism is us. So a healthy urban ecosystem requires healthy people and healthy people require a healthy urban ecosystem.
An ecosystem contains a collection of interdependent organisms; an organism is a collection of interdependent ecosystems. Very fractal. It goes on down to the scale of individual cells, where the very existence of cells with nuclei (eukaryotes) is now understood (thanks to the work of Lynn Margulis) as dependent on a symbiotic relationship between organelles that are descended from bacterial species that were once independent.
Building on Richard Dawkins’ “Extended Phenotype”, J. Scott Turner observes that many species make artefacts that are essential to their capacity to survive, be it through creating places in which to birth and succour their young (bird nests) or air-condition their colonial habitat (termite mounds). He calls this species+artifice an “extended organism”. Our species has evolved to be dependent on making the complex artificial habitat we call a city. We need cities to survive, people+city is, arguably, an extended organism. In all cases, with all species, the extended organism has to be able to function without damaging its environment, it has to evolve in a way that sustains the operation of the larger ecosystem within which it resides. Beavers cut down trees to build their extension but, over time, the impact of their dams and lodges has resulted in the beaver+lodge organism evolving as a positive contribution to the overall functioning of its local environment—it has evolved to become a healthy part of a larger ecosystem. Which is exactly what the human+city organism needs to do. Although cities are massively complex compared with birds’ nests, they are just as essential. One could study the life of organisms that reside in and depend on the nest as an ecosystem. One could study the life of organisms that reside in and depend on the city as an ecosystem. The complexity of extended organisms and cities in particular make it difficult to demarcate inviolable distinctions between when it’s an organism and when it’s an ecosystem.
Relationships and symbiosis are key. If the interdependent parts of a city have a functionally symbiotic—as in mutually beneficial—relationship with other parts, that is a part of being healthy and will enhance social cohesion. Relationships are about the exchange of information. Both the quality of that information and how it is exchanged affects the consequent relationship. And those relationships are at the core of how city ecosystems work.
In a city, virtually all relationships are made and mediated by people. That includes relationships between individuals, between people and their institutional and physical artefacts, and between people and the rest of nature. (Shall we bulldoze that wetland because it’s worth more as a building site, or protect it because its role in our ecosystem is greater than anything that money can value?) The values, aspirations and attitudes of those people are paramount in determining the type and quality of those relationships. (Do we bulldoze that run-down part of town because it’s worth more as a building site, or redevelop it to provide a healthier environment for its residents even though they’re not individuals of high net worth?) That’s why purely mechanistic approaches to city making can’t work in the long term. It’s why cybernetic systems (including smart city algorithms) can work, but all such systems rest on assumptions embedded in value-based decisions. Information connects everything and in an urban ecosystem what constitutes good or bad depends on the exercise of a set of values. Bulldozers, hammers, trucks, cars, big data, zoning laws—anything can become a weapon. Tools will do what we want them to do. To deal with the information flows and interdependent nature of an urban ecosystem its planning and management must transcend disciplinary boundaries.
Cities are human constructs and for justice and equity to be part of the city, they have to be considered and included from the outset and consciously maintained as part of the life of the city regardless of whether we define it as an ecosystem or an extended organism.
Thomas Elmqvist is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University and Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center. His research is on ecosystem services, land use change, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions.
Thomas Elmqvist
What we really need is closer collaboration among a diverse set of knowledge holders in natural science, social science, humanities, and among practitioners. The term ecosystem, originating from natural sciences, may alienate groups we need to include in diverse city-building conversations.
Although I fully agree that the current framework of cities as social-technological systems is too narrow and should be complemented with the view of cities as complex social-ecological-technological systems, as recently advanced within urban ecology and based on social-ecological systems perspectives. This advance is critical given that the continuum of urbanity includes many characteristics and processes other than the particular density of people or land area covered by human-made structures. However, I remain skeptical that the use of the concept of ecosystem to depict cities and urban regions will be of help in this regard.
The ecosystem concept has a precise meaning in ecology and was originally defined by the British Ecologist Sir Arthur George Tansley. In 1935 Tansley published The use and abuse of vegetational terms and concepts, in which he introduced the ecosystem concept: “An ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment interacting as a system”. This may look like an attractive way of viewing cities and urban regions as a system of interacting living components (humans, plants, animals, microbes) as well as non-living components (buildings, soil, water, etc.), and would imply a holistic view and a systems perspective. However, I am skeptical. The reason is that it may be counter-productive. What we really want to achieve is a closer collaboration among a diverse set of knowledge holders in natural science, social science, humanities and among practitioners. By using the concept of ecosystems of a city or urban region, originating as it does from natural sciences, we may alienate exactly the group of people we want to include: the social sciences, humanities, practitioners, etc. I fear that it may simply put some people off, when in fact we want to reach out and be inclusive.
What should we use instead? I think that we should define an Urban Sustainability Science and develop a new framework that explicitly addresses the question of multiple-scale interactions, feedbacks, tradeoffs, and synergies among components (human and non-human) in complex urban systems. The challenge is still, however, how do we integrate diverse scientific approaches and knowledge domains grounded in multiple epistemologies and how do we further integrate with other non-academic knowledge systems.
Nancy B. Grimm is an ecologist studying interactions of climate change, human activities, resilience, and biogeochemical processes in urban and stream ecosystems. Grimm was founding director of the Central Arizona–Phoenix LTER, co-directed the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, and now co-directs the NATURA and ESSA networks, all focused on solving problems of the Anthropocene, especially in cities. Grimm was President of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and is a Fellow of AAAS, AGU, ESA, SFS, and a member of the NAS. She has made >200 contributions to the scientific literature with colleagues and students.
Nancy Grimm
Are cities ecosystems? Of course they are. But does this concept satisfy the requirements for understanding these complex, heterogeneous, adaptive, self-organized systems? Over the past twenty years, urban systems have come to be seen as complex, adaptive, social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Yet the core ecosystem concept remains fundamental to understanding them. It is a simple idea that can accommodate the complexities of diverse components arranged in space in a variety of ways, as well as dynamic change, that are hallmarks of urban systems.
As ecologists we would be arrogant to assume that our models alone suffice to understand the multifaceted drivers of change. It’s imperative to continue to expand the concept of the urban ecosystem to incorporate a multidisciplinary view.
The ecosystem concept is the foundation of my thinking, originally as a stream ecologist but then as an urban ecologist. An ecosystem is a piece of Earth (writ large) with biotic and abiotic elements (i.e., the structural components of the system) that interact within a boundary. The interactions involve energy, matter, and information; ecosystem ecologists often refer to these as function but a more general term is processes. The boundary idea sets some folks off: if we can’t see a clear, unvarying boundary, then the ecosystem can’t be a real thing. But in fact, the fluidity of the boundary (and our ability to define it to suit our purposes) is perfect for urban ecosystems—systems that have massive throughput (movements of materials into and out of the ecosystem) and large dependencies on external, connected ecosystems. If we identify a boundary for convenience sake (for example, a jurisdictional boundary or a transport boundary), we can quantify these movements across the boundary and that dependence becomes a definable characteristic of the system (i.e., internal stocks relative to import rate gives us residence time for a material).
Ecosystem structure in urban ecosystems is unique. Not only do we have the organisms within populations that are structured and located in space; we also have the artifacts of human enterprise: the built environment. And we have unseen structure, for example of culture, government, economic systems, and power hierarchies. These additional elements of structure don’t negate the idea of cities as ecosystems but they cause us to ponder the types of biotic and abiotic elements that make up these ecosystems. The SETS concept helps to incorporate the built environment and social institutions; I would argue that SETS is a sub-set of the more general term, ecosystem, even though in common usage ecosystem refers to named biome types like forest, desert, or lake (so why not city?). Cities are SETS, and so are parts of cities like neighborhoods, parks, and infrastructure of various kinds. Perhaps the most important thing about SETS is that they are systems. This means that we cannot consider the parts in isolation, since they interact to form the whole.
As with structure, some of the processes and material, energy, and information flows of cities are unique in character. For example, the exchanges of information in social networks via the internet are phenomena that change so rapidly today they defy understanding using traditional ways of knowing. Yet these information pathways may drive dynamic change in urban ecosystems. A key characteristic of ecological processes in urban ecosystems is the degree to which human decisions control them – usually, quite a lot! For example, we know that instead of traditional biophysical variables that determine rates of primary production in Phoenix, it is the amount of outdoor irrigation, which is subject to the whims, desires, financial capacity, and access to infrastructure of urban residents that sets the rate of production.
Traditionally, the ecosystem concept hasn’t handled spatial heterogeneity well (think of the classic ‘black box’ approach to ecosystem energy budgets). The rise of landscape ecology, with its recognition of multiple systems arrayed in configurations that could affect process, was therefore a boon to understanding our world. And so it was for urban ecology: urban ecosystems are very heterogeneous on some scales, more so than many ‘native’, non-urban systems, and urban ecologists have recognized that heterogeneity as key to understanding cities. Deciphering how the configuration of parks, rivers, transportation infrastructure, housing developments, and central business districts affects biodiversity, ecosystem function, or ecosystem services is an important frontier for building sustainable cities.
Change is ubiquitous in the Anthropocene. Urban ecosystems are subject to massive change driven by social, ecological, and technological processes. Ecological theory—for example, disturbance theory (Grimm, Pickett, Hale, and Cadenasso, 2017, Ecosystem Health and Sustainability 3(1):e01255. 10.1002/ehs2.1255)—can contribute to our understanding of change. Yet as ecologists we would be arrogant to assume that our models alone suffice to understand the multifaceted drivers of change. The imperative is to continue to expand the concept of the urban ecosystem, bringing in the extensive knowledge of cultural and social systems, values, and hierarchies that has developed through the work of our social-science colleagues, the knowledge of infrastructure needs from our engineering colleagues, the creativity and vision of our design colleagues, and the practical understanding from practitioners who work and make everyday decisions in cities. An inclusive concept, the ecosystem can accommodate these ideas and diverse perspectives toward a better understanding and ultimately a pathway to transformative action for our cities.
Dagmar Haase is a professor in urban ecology and urban land use modelling. Her main interests are in the integration of land-use change modelling and the assessment of ecosystem services, disservices and socio-environmental justice issues in cities, including urban land teleconnections.
Dagmar Haase
Does thinking explicitly about cities as ecosystems offer us any insight into urban design? Are our goals for cities—sustainability, resilience, livability, and justice—advanced by an urban eocsystem concept? Some reflections based on my research on urban ecosystems in national and international contexts: Over the last two centuries, both scale and rate of change of cities have developed rapidly. Yet in terms of space, less than 5 percent of the Earth’s surface is urban. And not all urban areas are expanding or expected to grow in the future.
Co-evolutionary planning and governance means the elimination of sectoral thinking and actions that favour more holistic concepts of urban, regional and local regeneration, resilience and adaptation.
Cities are unique among all landscape types because they are where the human-inhabited, built, and ecosystem services provisioning spaces overlap and interact. Cities are rich in the niches for organisms they provide, such as almost invisible spaces between buildings and open soil or unused constructions and in the number of species that use them such as raccoons, the green woodpecker, Acer species (maple), or cactus species. What has become clear in recent decades, starting with the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and strongly supported by the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity-TEEB-process and protocol since 2009, is that ecosystems in and of urban areas—urban ecosystems—can provide a range of benefits that include recreation facilities, local food production and, most importantly for coastal cities, storm water control, to sustain and improve human life, health and well-being.
Understanding how such urban ecosystems function, how they change, and what limits their performance can add to an understanding of ecosystem change and governance in an ever more human-dominated world. Is there a novel concept or a new way to approach this? Recent ways of thinking combine both to promote dialogue between academics and practitioners in the field of urban ecosystems and ecosystem services and to build a novel framework of co-evolution in today’s cities. It is vital to recognize that urban systems are both highly complex and a product of ongoing emergence, suggesting the need for co-evolutionary approaches to managing the city as a social-ecological system and the integration of ecosystem approaches into spatial planning frameworks. For example, plans encouraging a compact city model could be used in combination with interim-use sites designated in the inner city as temporal refuges for nature, ecosystem services and nature experience by urban residents in the form of a participatory co-development process and multi-stakeholder usage. Thus, the rather static compact city model also includes temporal-spatial windows of green, spatial flexibility and land-use dynamics. Co-evolutionary planning and governance also mean the elimination of sectoral thinking and actions that favour more holistic concepts of urban, regional and local regeneration, resilience and adaptation; this approach includes the global context and network, which involves many and varied actors.
Not exclusively in shrinking cities, but most notably, the concepts of green and blue services provide the potential to move from a comparatively simple “land-use view” of green, brown, and blue areas in cities toward a valuation of ecosystem goods and processes and spatial potentials for each piece of land. A co-evolutionary approach also needs to explicitly address the technological, transport and built system/sphere of the city, as these include important aspects of and opportunities for co-design and co-development. In cities, the built and technical infrastructure is often viewed as the most important line of defence against natural hazards and disasters.
By contrast, more flexible ecosystem-based solutions include elements and processes of urban nature, such as green and blue infrastructure, permeable pavement, and nature imitations such as bioswales and wetland-like constructed retention basins, to name a few. They afford both city dwellers and planners a new way to think about risk and safety based on the dynamics of nature and ecosystems. For example, an ecosystem could be designed so that it does not completely prevent water from entering an urban environment but instead reduces the amount and velocity of the water and thus the risk to people; the same design keeps water in the city as buffer in times of drought and heat.
Thus, in the long run, nature-imitation, or biomimicry designs help cities live with nature and become more resilient and prepared for different types of hazards. Such nature-based solutions mediate the relationship between human activities and ecosystem processes in urban landscapes and, if developed appropriately, could mitigate human impact. In developing nature-based solutions for a city, including the co-existence of built, grey, brown, green and blue places, it is essential to include the full spectrum of urban land uses.
Despite the considerable progress in urban planning, governance and land management, a fundamental rethinking is urgently needed regarding what makes both the natural—urban ecosystems—and built “infrastructures” of the urban community adaptive and resilient to current and future social-ecological challenges, such as flood and storm hazards, other climate extremes, air pollution and large-scale economy-driven land-use interventions such as densification and gentrification.
The Clara Zetkin Park in the city of Leipzig, a wonderful expression of the human habitat in urban areas. Photo: Dagmar HaaseA green roof in the city of Leipzig—another wonderful expression of the human habitat but also flora and fauna habitat in urban areas. Photo: Dagmar Haase
Jane Toner is a Biomimicry Professional seeking to create innovative design solutions that are ecologically regenerative, socially just and joyous.
Jane Toner and Dominique Hes
This short paper is based on the work of practitioners and academics in biomimicry, biophilia, positive development and regenerative development. We cover 4 points in response to the above challenge. We argue that cities are ecosystems but they are not well adapted to place; cities have not learnt from the nature of place and have displaced its ecological functions; cities have not yet reached their full ecological maturity or potential; and, how our cities can learn from nature strategies to benefit all life.
Imagine walking through a tropical rainforest. Light is dappled and muted, the air is warm and steamy. Trees reach for the sun, harnessing freely available energy that nourishes the whole system; they provide support and scaffolding for mosses, lianas and epiphytes that add complexity to the forest’s architecture and they in turn provide habitat and niches for other organisms. Water is a precious commodity that is harvested, filtered, stored and cycled through the system. Below your feet, the ground is moist and teeming with unseen life breaking down forest debris, silently cycling nutrients that promote the growth of the rainforest. Mycelial networks connect the trees below the soil, transferring information and resources between them. Everything is intertwined and interdependent; all elements of the rainforest inadvertently collaborate to nurture a thriving system greater than the sum of the parts.
Cities are ecosystems but they are not well adapted to place; indeed, we have displaced their ecological functions. For this reason, cities have not yet reached their full ecological maturity or potential.
Our cities are ecosystems too but they are currently not as well adapted or resilient as the ecosystems they’ve disrupted and are nested within. While life abounds in cities, diversity is limited and dominated by one species. Cities are the culmination of our species’ survival strategies, helping us mitigate the extremes of environment, shaping our culture, and extending our range on the planet.
There is no doubt that humans are clever ecosystem engineers. We have transported, accumulated and consolidated many resources to shape our cities and yet, for all our cleverness, we have forgotten that we are part of nature and subject to the same rules as the rest of life.
Rather than creating conditions conducive to all life we have been focused on our own species’ needs and spent excess energy and resources in maintaining stasis (even if we label that as growth). Cities could currently be viewed as being biophobic, or manifestations of our disconnection from nature.
What if our cities learnt from mature ecosystems like the rainforest? Photo: Jane Toner
Cities have often replaced the ecosystem services freely supplied by nature with engineered systems that are more energy intensive, less effective and that create other problems solved in a similar fashion.
Ecosystem functions are biotic and abiotic processes involving the exchange of energy and nutrients that contribute to the health of an ecosystem, while ecosystem services are what our ecosystems “do” for us, the benefits they provide our species. These include: providing habitat, sequestering and cycling carbon, trapping nutrients, decomposing matter, recycling waste, filtering water, and pollination.
If we view cities as ecosystems yet to reach maturity, we can plan to enhance their capacity to support life, human and non-human by learning from organisms and systems adapted to the same place and have solved the same challenges. For urban design, this means that our cities need to evolve symbiotic relationships with organisms that provide ecosystem services. We can do this by creating a complex array of varied niches at different scales, different levels of contribution to increase the emergent evolutionary potential of cities.
Lichen is a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship between algae and fungus. Fungus provides the structure while algae provides energy harvested from the sun.What if our cities had a mutually symbiotic relationship with nature? Photo: Jane Toner
For urban design, the implications are transitioning the city to be better adapted and more resilient. By integrating nature to restore ecosystem services we also meet our own biophilic needs, increasing the potential for human health and happiness. We are a young species still learning how to fit in and it is time we remembered that we are nature and that connection with it promotes our own well-being.
What needs to be valued is that, as Australian indigenous culture suggests, cities also have a potential role in benefiting nature. That is, the human capacity within the city can understand future change and therefore support nonhuman systems to better adapt. Designing this mutual reciprocity into our cities is the challenge of the future.
We have countless opportunities for our cities to become mature ecosystems embrace this relationship by relearning and applying the deep patterns that nature has evolved to survive and thrive on Earth.
Life builds from the bottom up. Layer by layer, ecosystems have evolved from bare rock, concentrating and transforming locally available, easily accessible, abundant resources into dynamic complex systems that promote and reward interconnection and interdependence. Cities have also evolved in a similar way, the layering here is historic and often based on ways of economic and industrial change. The challenge then is for the urban designer to think of a city as a constantly evolving co-managed rainforest, savannah or reef, intrinsically intertwined with the ecosystem in which it resides.
Hill works on adaption to climate change in biophysical and social systems at the University of California, Berkeley. Her focus is on design for sea level rise and flooding.
Kristina Hill
Cities are a type of ecosystem, because they contain all the components and connections we use to define such systems. But since they both include and are shaped by people, urban ecosystem research is more akin to medical research than to traditional ecological studies. Like medical research, urban studies require the articulation of an ethical framework before questions, methods, or conclusions can be developed. The scientific method should not be applied to cities without the use of an explicit ethical frame.
Cities meet the definition of ecosystems, with important limits—understanding urban ecosystems must start with an awareness of the ethical and conceptual pitfalls of studying human behavior without considering human values.
Urban ecosystems have been studied for more than a century. For more than 100 years, urban ecological theories have developed from the idea that natural processes, built environments and human communities are part of an interacting system of stocks and flows. As early as 1829, J. C. Loudon proposed a design for London using concentric greenbelts to improve air quality and human health. Large-scale urban design interventions were constructed in New York and Boston by Ellen Swallow Richards and Frederick Law Olmsted, with the explicit aim of influencing human health and urban ecology as early as the 1870’s. These projects launched the American professions of landscape architecture, environmental engineering and public health. Current urban design efforts based on Olmsted’s early examples often contribute to urban stratification by social class. In the 1960s, Donella Meadows and her colleagues at MIT applied the system concept to human populations, economies and natural resources, in order to model the possible consequences of the over-use of natural resources. Their results have often been used to argue for limits on population growth in developing countries, with negative consequences for women. Herbert Sukopp studied ecology in cities, focusing on the microclimates and species distributions of West Berlin’s confined spaces in the 1970s. Sukopp arguably introduced the field of urban ecology. He did it within the nexus of a tense geopolitical conflict, but tried to restrict his questions to non-human species.
In contemporary ecology and planning, a group of scientists and planners in the San Francisco Bay area are actively using the concept of “Operational Landscape Units” (OLU’s) to build a map of estuary shoreline reaches in which processes establish a pattern of connections, similar to a watershed but based on nearshore geomorphic and hydrologic processes as well as upland flows. These OLU maps will become the basis for planning urban adaptation strategies for sea level rise. They are based on the concept of an ecosystem, with stocks and flows, as well as theories about spatial connectivity that come from landscape ecology. Urban OLU’s are becoming an important vehicle in the SF Bay region for understanding linked systems driven by groundwater dynamics, sediment transport, wave energy regimes, sewer pipes forming “sewersheds,” and gradients in salinity and water quality, among other human and non-human drivers. This approach will help us come up with urban designs for coastal adaptation to flooding while supporting biodiversity and ecosystem services, which we would otherwise lose if we protect cities with new storm surge barriers, seawalls and levees alone. It will also identify surprising vulnerabilities in our existing underground infrastructure systems, and allow us to predict new contamination risks that will affect many lower-income communities.
I argue there are important limits to the successful application of ecosystem concepts to humans and the built environment. When E.O. Wilson sought to extend evolutionary genetic theories to human societies in the 1970s, critics were quick to point out that culture and social environments also shape human behavior to a very significant degree. Ethical questions immediately emerged about the scientific characterization of human behavior, and the extent to which it is determined by processes of natural selection or by individual choice and social communities.
Anyone who studies urban ecosystems today must start with an awareness of the ethical and conceptual pitfalls of studying human behavior without considering human values. Applying the concepts of dominance and competition to human social and biological diversity provides a case in point. Research shows that exposure to lead in soil reduces learning ability, and that exposure to air pollution causes genetic damage in human children. If those children are subsequently disadvantaged in social competition, implying that this is “natural” (i.e., the result of natural selection), would be both incorrect and reinforce the repressive dynamics of the economic concept of social class. If urban ecosystem studies are used to naturalize social dynamics, the science will be seen as justifying social hierarchies that restrict social movements in pursuit of greater equity. Particularly in an era of increasing economic and ethnic divisions, studies of urban ecosystems that include human health and behavior require a clear ethical foundation. The limits in this context reveal the limits of scientific method generally, which is that our selection of research topics, our approaches, and the uses of scientific findings are all influenced by power dynamics within human societies.
In summary, I would argue that while urban systems can be studied as ecosystems, an ethical framework is required a priori. Ethical perspectives will change over time, as culture changes. But the need to understand social influences on scientific research – both in development and in application – is acute. Without a clearly articulated ethical framework, scientists should recognize the philosophical limits of the scientific method by restricting themselves to the study of ecology “in” cities, not “of” cities.
Grunewald in Berlin was the kind of landscape studied by Herbert Sukopp in the early days of urban ecology, circa the mid 1970’s. It was a politically symbolic landscape as well as an ecosystem inside the city walls.
Madhusudan is an evolutionary ecologist who discovered birds as an undergrad after growing up a nature-oblivious urban kid near Bombay, went chasing after vanishing wildernesses in the Himalaya and Western Ghats as a graduate student, and returned to study cities grown up as a reconciliation ecologist.
Madhu Katti
Coral reefs of the land
It is a hard nonliving complex three-dimensional structure built by living beings, often covering extensive areas of habitat, and unlike anything else naturally found in the vicinity. It is the product of the labor of an organism that has evolved to transform the materials in its surroundings into a protective home for itself and its progeny. It is built in layers, growing upon itself as its occupants continue to build it over generations. It does the job of protecting its inhabitants well enough to outlast them, standing firm over scores of generations, thousands of years. It helps concentrate the flow of energy and materials from its surroundings to make life more efficient for its denizens, thriving sometimes even in places that otherwise seem deserted.
Of course cities are ecosystems. More interesting is to ask what kind of an ecosystem cities can be rather than worrying about how unnatural a blight they are on more “natural” landscapes.
It not only provides shelter and resources and a supply of energy to the species that built it, but also supports a wider range of other species that may come seeking its riches and adapt to new ways of making a living in this strange new construction. It can vary in appearance and color and occupants from one part of the world to another. It is large enough in some places to be visible from space. It is resilient to a surprisingly wide range of environmental variation, yet vulnerable to catastrophic collapse under conditions such as rising sea levels and warming ocean temperatures. And even when it collapses, and is no longer able to support its creators and main occupants, it continues to loom in its place, casting shadows deep into history, until the patient forces of water and wind and temperature wear it down and its remains wash up on some shoreline in the sands of time.
It is a coral reef, built by ingenious soft-bodied, tough little creatures that can scarcely survive on their own in the vast ocean outside its protections. It is a city, also built by ingenious creatures with bodies softened by civilization, too clever by half, but creative and tough as hell, that may also struggle to survive outside the city walls.
Coral reefs are ecosystems rich in biodiversity, often concentrating biological productivity and wealth amid relatively poor waters. Coral reefs are described as rainforests of the ocean, harboring as much, if not more biodiversity underwater as tropical rainforests do on land. They stick out in the underwater landscape as distinctly as forests full of tall trees do in terrestrial landscapes, marvelously unlike anything around them, but teeming with a richness of diverse marine organisms that have evolved to be uniquely adapted to life in the coral reef, lured by its richness to tie their evolutionary fate to that of the reef itself.
Explaining to children how a coral reef functions like a city. Photo:
It may seem odd, but coral reefs are also often likened to cities. The City, that quintessential “artificial” construction by human beings alienated from nature, symbolic of how we pave over natural ecosystems, is often used as a metaphor to understand and explain the complexity of coral reefs. There are even children’s picture books full of wonderful artwork that explain how coral reefs function much like cities: where tall structures rise up from the ocean floor like skyscrapers; where schools of fish and mollusks and crustaceans scuttle about busily at work commuting among productive nooks and crannies where they can feed and nest and raise babies securely; where diverse species evolve to specialize in different tasks, much like guilds of craftsmen and workers in medieval cities divided up human labor to make it more efficient, enabling us to produce ever more wonders of craft and art and technology, diverse and creative, and also sometimes horrific.
We have never debated whether coral reefs are complex ecosystems in their own right, worthy of protection. We should also be long past debating whether cities are ecosystems. Of course they are, unique ones described in much of the recent literature as complex social-ecological systems, because we like to pull the human social elements apart from the “natural” in our cartesian ways of thinking. A much more interesting exercise is to ask what kind of an ecosystem cities can be rather than worrying about how unnatural a blight they are on more “natural” landscapes.
As they stand, and unlike coral reefs, cities are not founts of biological diversity amid less diverse landscapes. In the relatively short timespan of human history, cities have become known more for destroying biodiversity rather than enhancing it anywhere, although more recent work in urban ecology is finding a surprisingly high diversity of species in many cities. Do cities destroy other habitats and ecosystems? Of course. Do cities cause local extinctions of many species? Undoubtedly, because we never built them as habitats for any species other than ourselves. Indeed it would seem that we build cities as places where we seek refuge from “nature” in all its vagaries and its “red in tooth and claw” horrors. Yet, we also bring a lot of that nature, and many other species, with us into the city, planting some in our gardens, growing others on our walls and balconies, feeding and watering many with intent or benign neglect, and willingly or unwittingly sharing the bounty of resources we concentrate for ourselves in cities. We know now that we depend on many of these other species for food, water, and air, for our bodies and our minds, and for our culture and artistic inspiration—even though we never built cities for anyone but our own selves. Just like the mindless tiny organisms that build coral reefs.
But unlike the coral organisms, we have minds capable of reflecting on our own actions, and of imagining different futures. Imagine building cities more intentionally like coral reefs on land. The oldest cities are just a few thousand years old, an order of magnitude younger than the oldest coral reefs. That deeper span of time has allowed coral reefs to evolve into the diverse ecosystems we now celebrate and whose decline through our actions we dread and lament. Yet, to borrow that tortured phrase from urban land developers, the coral organisms simply built their little shelters, and they came: all the diverse algae and plankton and fish and mollusks and crustaceans in the ocean to evolve together into a diverse ecosystem thriving under the ocean. A growing body of research on urban wildlife is now showing us that many species on land are also coming into our cities once we build them, so long as we leave enough of our surplus of resources for them. Recognizing the value of nature and wildlife, the biological and cultural ecosystem services they provide us in the current jargon, we are also actively bringing other species into our cities. Why not go all the way and reimagine our cities as bustling diverse coral reefs on land?
Surely, if we build cities with intention, with niches full of unique resources, many other species will come on their own, and over time will adapt and evolve into unique urban creatures, tying their fates to ours just like the house sparrow or the chimney swift have done. Even underwater, our artifacts, like sunken ships, can act as surrogates for species fleeing damaged coral reefs, and are being used intentionally to restore reef ecosystems threatened by warming oceans and rising seas. It is not hard to imagine some of our major coastal cities also turning into such surrogate reefs as they submerge under the rising oceans. So let us also reimagine and reinvent our cities as terrestrial reefs, as rich and full of other species as we can learn to coexist with, becoming not just their competitors and killers, but also their gardeners and nurturers and symbionts. Let us think as deep into the future as the coral reefs teach us about the past, and turn the metaphor of the coral reef as a city into the real city as a coral reef, diverse and resilient and full of evolutionary ferment to match the tides of our changing world.
François Mancebo, PhD, Director of the IRCS and IATEUR, is professor of urban planning and sustainability at Reims University. He lives in Paris.
François Mancebo
Almost everybody agrees on the fact that cities can be considered as complex systems. Are they ecosystems? Proving it is another kettle of fish altogether. The idea that cities are complex systems took shape in the sixties from two standpoints:
Cities are ecosystems and a lot more than that: they are social-ecological systems.
On the one hand, the very idea that cities are complex systems originated in the seventies with the article of Eugene Odum “The Strategy of Ecosystem Development”, which describes urban areas as ecosystems. Many authors continued in this vein later, one of the more famous being Wackernagel and Riess with their book Our Ecological Footprint. In this sense we can consider—as far as cities are concerned—complex system and ecosystem are used synonymously.
But on the other hand, at approximately the same time, many authors developed the notion of cities as complex systems from a completely different perspective. The general system theory from Ludwig Van Bertalanffy combined with Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and Warren Weaver’s organized complexity to provide a conceptual framework to another vision of the city as a complex system. This vision described the city mainly through mobility and transport, energy and financial flows, logistics etc.
Thus, in the eighties, two distinct visions of cities as complex systems were encapsulated in two metaphors: The machine metaphor, usually associated with rigid urban projects, and hub and spoke transport models—which eventually generated dysfunctional social design, ineffective land use, pollution and congestion—and the organic one, built in analogy to organisms—the city as an ecosystem. Well, that would be too simple! Two more visions emerged then: The first one developed by Jane Jacobs considered cities as social-economic systems, while second one, supported by Manuel Castells, primarily saw cities as networks for information exchange.
Later, urban planners and scientists began to realize that cities could not be modeled as equilibrium systems changing smoothly and progressively. Discontinuous and chaotic change reigned everywhere in urban areas. New structures and behaviors emerged constantly, in an unpredictable way. A consequence of this new insight is that urban planners started focusing on how emergent patterns could be generated in the city, by examining how people make decisions—or even micro-decisions—and how local actions confront and aggregate into global patterns. To do so, it proved necessary to consider cities not only as complex systems, but also as complex adaptive systems as mentioned by Michael Batty.
Mitchell Waldrop explains in his key book Complexity—The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, that complex adaptive systems can learn from experience and change accordingly. Two characteristics of complex adaptive systems are of significant importance to the structure and functioning of the cities: simple decisions made by individuals aggregate to give rise to complex global patterns, and each agent is co-evolving with the structure resulting from the actions of all the others; change stays dormant up to a tipping point at which these systems flip dramatically and irreversibly into a different state, which is almost impossible to predict. Many irreversible futures are possible.
The agents that interact in the complex adaptive systems of the cities are social and biophysical by nature. From this point of view, cities may be considered as social-ecological systems. What differentiates social-ecological systems from non-human complex adaptive systems is that the former deals with humans who apprehend their world through abstract thought. This symbolic construction is based on the ability to use language and symbols, to communicate across space and time. It has to do with the capacity of human beings to learn from the past, imagine the future, and finally materialize these thoughts in new types of entities that only exist in the noosphere (institutions, political and economic structures, as well as values, norms and beliefs). Erik Swingedouw highlights the circulation and metabolism of nature in urban areas, the role of history in producing them, and how this production drives, and is driven, by unequal power relationships, economic inequities, and competing knowledge. Marina Alberti demonstrated in her article “Integrating Humans into Ecology: Opportunities and Challenges for Studying Urban Ecosystems” that it is impossible to explain how human societies can be integrated in the ecological systems of a city, except by considering the city as a social-ecological system.
Clifford Ochs, Ph.D. is Professor of Biology at the University of Mississippi. He is an aquatic ecologist and conducts research on the Mississippi River and other aquatic ecosystems. Additionally, he is Director of the Mississippi Water Security Institute.
Clifford Ochs
The city ecosystem—the street view of a common resident
Sometimes we move alone, other times we move en masse, after the sun has set, a migration from street to dump, and back to safety. If you stay in the light, you may not notice us. But pay attention when passing a dark alley, and you may see our glowing eyes, and hear our high chirps of communion.
Your habits are our habits, your throwaways are our takeaways, and while you’ve done all the work to make the city for yourselves, we could not resist moving in, migrating across the grid, and settling down.
Perhaps you think we are out of place in your city, that we don’t belong. Oh, please. As someone has said: “If you build it, they will come”, and so we came, and we’ll stay. How could we resist? It’s like you created this place to meet not only our needs, but our desire.
It’s dark. Mostly, it feels safe. And everything we could want is nearby. The pantry is always stocked, with crusty bagels, a piece of hot dog, sometimes with a little cheese sauce, pigeon tartare. Garbage, spillage, dusky stormwater, toasty sewer pipes, plenty of pack mates. Like you, we are yearning to be free, and here in the city you have built for us, we surely are.
Warmth is appreciated, and thanks be to you, the city is a heat generator. Pavement catching sunlight, taxies and furnaces burning oil, its organic flotsam and jetsam radiating heat into the atmosphere. Baby, even when it is cold outside, we stay warm and cozy in our rent-controlled little homes, we and our passenger fleas snoozing the day away.
Come darkness, when we do venture out, we must be cautious. Many rewards await us, but all is not safe, the city is also home to terrible predators. Cats are the worst, quiet, leaping, crazy, red in tooth and claw. When we see a cat, a cry goes out, run, find a crack in a wall, stay still until the danger slinks on. With patience and luck, we will survive another night, and tomorrow there will be even more of us!
It is our secret weapon. With all the nibbles you leave behind, a warm nook, and the right kind of company, make room for babies. Lots. A dozen at a time is not unusual, and it takes only a few weeks to make them, and shortly after birth, we are ready to make some more. Really, if it wasn’t for the cats, an occasional terrier, the diabolical contrivances of human pests, and an unfortunate tendency for internecine conflict, how much faster our family would grow.
People, thank you for the city. Your habits are our habits, your throwaways are our takeaways, and while you’ve done all the work to make the city for yourselves, we could not resist moving in, migrating across the grid, and settling down – waiting each day for the sun to set, and the streets to be our playground.
Steward Pickett is a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. His research focuses on the ecological structure of urban areas and the temporal dynamics of vegetation.
Steward T. A. Pickett
A city must be an ecosystem
The fundamental idea of the ecosystem is one of the clearest in contemporary ecology. It has survived intact since it was introduced by Sir Arthur Tansley in 1935. Few scientific concepts have such longevity.
The deep definition of the word ecosystem is notable for what it leaves out—the minimal baggage carried by the idea makes it nimble and broadly applicable.
According to Tansley, and leaders in ecosystem ecology since his time, an ecosystem occupies an area and comprises the complex of biological organisms in that place along with the physical environment complex, and the interactions among these two complexes. The use of the word “complex” indicates that there are interactions within the biological and the physical parts of an ecosystem as well as between them.
So an ecosystem is a place that combines interacting biological organisms and physical features. The biological includes the conspicuous plants such as trees and herbaceous species, the microbes such as fungi, bacteria, and viruses, the animals ranging from large carnivores and scavengers, to the inconspicuous creatures like worms and insects. But the key word—interacting—is what makes it a system.
The deep definition of the word ecosystem is notable for what it leaves out. Indeed, the minimal baggage carried by the idea makes it nimble and broadly applicable. The definition of the ecosystem does not require things like closed boundaries, stability or equilibrium; nor a focus on any particular time or spatial scale. It doesn’t require or deny directional changes through time, or an inevitable terminal condition of diversity or productivity.
The sort of things the definition leaves out, however, become the fodder for research questions or applications. The features absent from the definition can be addressed in specific ecosystem models that apply to certain broadly distributed conditions, or to particular locations or time periods. A researcher or practitioner can always ask, what if the ecosystem I’m studying or designing were in equilibrium, or had closed boundaries for some material? The model that an investigator creates would take the basic idea and add the constraints she wanted to investigate. But notice that in this application something new becomes apparent: the fundamental definition is free from most assumptions, whereas the specification of the basic concept in a particular model states explicit assumptions, exposing them to test. The ecosystem concept and its specification describe a two tiered strategy: concept as clear but lightly burdened generalization, applied though many different specific models that state the precise assumptions they make. This is a common strategy in science.
As specific ecosystem models have proliferated and been tested, ecosystem thinking has broadened in practice. In some ways this evolution has confirmed the wisdom of avoiding assumptions in the definition, such as equilibrium or closed material boundaries, or strict spatial isolation among ecosystems. The breadth of models has demonstrated that actual ecosystems can have an amazing variety of forms, contents, and dynamics. For example, various specific models have documented that ecosystems are three dimensional bodies, extending deep within terrestrial soils or aquatic substrates, and high above the canopies of tall trees. Other modern insights include the widespread role of natural disturbance in shaping ecosystems, or the almost universal presence of humans, human effects, and human legacies in ecosystem structure and function. None of these conditions is required, but neither are they excluded by the fundamental definition—which brings us back to cities.
How could a city, or a suburb, or a town, or an agricultural village not be an ecosystem? Cities have biological components—including of course humans—but also wild organisms passing through or adapted to the new range of conditions that exist in cities. Organisms long-adapted to and dependent on human largess and waste are a part of urban ecosystems as well. Soil invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria inhabit urban soils and waters. Urban organisms are as involved in the transformation of energy and matter, and the transmission and receipt of information, as are their wild cousins.
Urban systems of course contain the particular physical environment within which and with which the organisms interact. Sunlight for photosynthesis, the cues of daylength and the seasonal swings of temperature, the exaggerated heat budgets, the stresses of low humidity, the soils, rubble, and fill as substrates, the rush of wind through the streets or the stagnation of air in deep street canyons, and the alteration of topography, with its importation of stone and the alkaline ingredients of concrete, are among the many aspects of urban physical environments.
All of these interacting components define an urban instance of the basic idea of the ecosystem. And all of these components reflect the desires, plans, mistakes, accidents, and unintentional effects of decisions made by individual people, households, and institutions. Clearly the physical environments of cities are constructed by or profoundly modified by people. Equally clearly, the biological complex of cities where humans are the predominant actor, has social features as well as compositional and spatial biodiversity.
All of this complexity and dynamism fits easily within the basic definition of the ecosystem, and invites the burgeoning of specific models that contribute to surprise, delight, and utility in the urban sciences and design professions. In an era of global urbanization, climate change, and deepening social inequity, urbanists must recognize the many jobs that even the inconspicuous biological elements of the urban ecosystem perform.
But beyond recognizing the role of the biological component of urban ecosystems, it is imperative to increase the ability of these systems to do ecological work. This means leaving or making space for organisms, which are the creators of ecological work, in new or retrofitted cities. It means allowing streams to interact with marshy banks. It means growing trees to form connected canopies for reasons of aesthetics and climate moderation. It means supporting food webs that generate local crops and control problematic species. Finally, it means sharing benefits equitably among empowered and marginalized people. These are important outcomes that can come from acting on the idea that any city must be an ecosystem.
Robert Pirani is the program director for the New York-New Jersey Harbor & Estuary Program at the Hudson River Foundation. HEP is a collaboration of government, scientists and the civic sector that helps protect and restore the harbor’s waters and habitat.
Rob Pirani
Cities are ecosystems! Let’s help them adapt and evolve
Cities are ecosystems! Affirming that people and our culture cannot be considered apart from nature offers both useful metaphors and new urban practices. But just as people are a particular and complicated part of the biota, cities are ecosystems with some particular and complicated characteristics. Improving our understanding of those details can certainly improve urban planning and design.
Consideration of the social benefits of resilience technology, and the civic ecology that it can engender, may well determine whether our urban ecosystems and all of their inhabitants can successfully adapt to a changing future.
What is less clear is whether human-dominated ecosystems, like cities, can successfully evolve in the rapidly changing world we have created. Rapid population increases, urbanization, introduction of novel contaminants and species, and now climate change all pose challenges to both people and other urban inhabitants.
Consider how understanding cities as ecosystem improves both the built and natural worlds.
By definition cities are a human adaption to help produce and distribute energy, transform materials, and shape their consumption. Healthy ecosystems have a balance of production, consumption, and decomposition. Cities can promote virtuous cycles that return these materials and energy to new uses. Whether building soils by composting organic waste or creating buildings that recycle and reuse the rain, urban planners and designers are fostering a host of more sustainable practices.
Understanding cities as ecosystems can also help us conserve and restore valued ecological characteristics and services. The ecological structure and functions of our urban greenspaces and waterways provide people with a wealth of services, from moderating air temperatures to producing fish. Defining these ecological characteristics is an important way of improving management and defining restoration goals. Identifying the value of these services is a critical piece of information that can help us locate and design buildings and infrastructure so that they positively contribute to nature. These ecological characteristics also define place, the genius loci that makes each city special and valuable.
But can understanding cities as ecosystems change the way cities adapt and evolve? The evolution of ecosystems is shaped by life histories, natural selection and the biological evolution of organisms over time. Cultural forces guide the evolution of cities. These individual and group decisions operate for the most part on the time scale of markets and politics, and do not always account for ecological considerations. In particular modern society tends toward silo management and investment by sector and by jurisdiction, making it difficult to advance integrated decisions at an ecosystem scale.
Consideration of how we can successfully employ natural and nature-based coastal features to increase the resiliency of our waterfront cities offers some specific lessons for what is needed to move forward.
The health of our coastal cities/urban ecosystems are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of flooding, due to the combination of human population growth, real estate pressures, sea level rise, and coastal storms. Here in New York and New Jersey, Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath continues to pose challenging questions of how to mitigate mounting hazards to people and property along our urban shorelines. Such challenges will only increase with a rapidly changing climate.
One set of answers is the increased use of natural and nature-based features for coastal adaptation (NNBFs). Such strategies recognize that natural features along our urban shorelines, like beaches, coastal dunes and wetlands, have evolved over the years to survive and indeed thrive in face of changing sea levels and storms. Nature-based features are engineered infrastructure designed to employ the characteristics of these coastal landscapes, specifically offering services such as coastal risk reduction, restored habitat, and stormwater management. The US Army Corps of Engineers (http://www.nad.usace.army.mil/Portals/40/docs/ComprehensiveStudy/Bridges-Wagner_Natural_and_Nature-based.pdf), US Housing and Urban Development (http://www.rebuildbydesign.org/), National Oceanic Administrative Agency (http://sagecoast.org/), state and local agencies (for example see the Coastal Green Infrastructure Plan for New York City at http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/remediation_hudson_pdf/cginyc.pdf ), and academic partnerships such as Sustainable Adaptive Gradients in the Coastal Environment are actively promoting these concepts.
The promise of NNBFs, like other green infrastructure and green building technologies, offers a kind of symbiotic evolution. That adapting our cities can meet the linked challenges of more people and a changing climate in a way that improves or at least sustains the rest of the ecosystem.
To meet this promise will require new metrics for success and the means of adaptively managing these living shorelines. It will require the will to cooperate across boundaries. It will require the science needed to understand whether such infrastructure does indeed provide an ecological lift. It will require rethinking permit guidance to allow for this hybrid infrastructure. There are many efforts to better define these metrics and monitoring requirements, and consider needed policy and management changes.
But perhaps most critically, successfully deploying such technology will also require designers and engineers and decision makers to consider how to better integrate long term monitoring, community stewardship, and social resiliency into engineering decisions and practice. NNBFs, like most green infrastructure, require time for plants and animals to establish themselves. Monitoring and in many cases active stewardship is critical for their enduring success.
This need for stewardship offers an opportunity for engaging community and building the social resiliency critical to mitigating coastal and other hazards. Consideration of the social benefits of this technology, and the civic ecology that it can build, may well determine whether our urban ecosystems and all of their inhabitants can successfully adapt to a changing future.
Richard Register is the Founder of the International Ecocity Conference Series and the NGO, Ecocity Builders.
Richard Register
Are cities ecosystems—analogous to natural ones—of nature, infrastructure and people? Not so much.
There is a better comparison: with complex living organisms in all their three-dimensional glory.
Ecosystems are certainly crucial to the health of their living inhabitants. And certainly lessons like “conserve energy and utilize renewables primarily” and “recycle assiduously” are good lessons for the functioning of cities as well as relevant models for our education about biological systems of rich biodiversity and high biomass. As individuals and groups of people, we are fed by the environment and by observing, say, trees that grow great and provide shelter from rain and wind in their hollow trunks, or under their big branches, we can learn something leading into architecture, for example. Maybe that’s where architecture started.
Comparing our cities to complex living organisms seems much more fruitful—in other words, to our own bodies, our organ systems, our limits. I think of this as the “anatomy analogy”.
But where cities have come to date is something far more complex: add to buildings systems of transportation, paved and rail, supply delivery, recycling and waste disposal back into the environment, public open spaces such as parks and plazas, designed treatment of elements of nature from river and water fronts to rooftop gardens and window box gardens attracting hummingbirds and bees. Then there are special function organs like restaurant, arts, education and medical districts and the various zones of built infrastructure for various other functions, neighborhoods of different cultural emphases. So though there is much to consider regarding designing healthy cities to be gained by looking at the way our all-embracing environments work, there is much more to be learned from complex living organisms.
Nature hints architecture
In fact, the more I think about it the more I think we are off on the wrong foot to make a big deal of the analogy between cities and ecosystems. In a sense, that’s what sprawling suburbs do. Comparing our cities to complex living organisms seems to me much more fruitful, comparing cities, in other words, to our own bodies, our organ systems, our limits. I think of this as the “anatomy analogy”.
There is a basic mathematical truth at the heart of the universe here, a geometric truth: complexity becomes well ordered in three dimensions, like the compact ultra efficient form of living beings like us. The “environment” models scattered two-dimensional layouts such as hyper inefficient car-dependent, land, resources and energy squandering sprawl development. That two-dimensional layout of ecosystems is not purely so–of course. Take a kelp forest 250 feet from anchorage to top, or a redwood forest towering almost 390 feet tall, more including roots, 3-D to that degree. But the general and overall form, covering vast areas of land and waters of these environments is basically 2-D.
At the core of the issue is that three dimensions works—overlapping lines of connection, either by simply “bumping up against one another, one function to another” and with overlapping veins, nerves, lymph ducts, digestive/excretory tubes, etc. But try to squeeze it all down to the flats like suburbia tries to do and you have a tangled mess of concrete and steel freeway over- and underpasses, miles and miles of pipes and wires that in the compact form of highly mixed uses well organized is much, much shorter, more materials and energy conserving.
This is the basic formula also expressed as “access by proximity.” My father, a sailor and a pilot, liked to say, imagining tacking toward the finish line, “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line”.
But the more fundamental truth is “the shortest distance between two points is moving the points close together”. You can’t get more basic than that and that’s exactly what’s at the basis of the preference for using the complex living organism as an urban model over the much more fundamentally two-dimensionally semi-organized environments of various ecosystems.
Eric Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.
Eric Sanderson
Cities are not so much ecosystems as they are ecological landscapes
In the biological sciences, we think of life as a set of Russian dolls, with different kinds of scientist to examine each type of matryoshka. Cells are made of molecules, and so there are molecular biologists (and biochemists) to study them, and cellular biologists to study the cells. Cells are organized into tissues studied by histologists; tissues are assembled into organs, which are studied by anatomists and physiologists. (For the human organism, you see a cardiologist for your heart and a nephrologist for your kidneys.) Organs in turn make up organisms, the province of classical biological types: mammologists for the mammals, ornithologists for the birds, herpetologists for the reptiles and amphibians, ichthyologists for the fish, entomologists for the insects, botanists for the plants. Each branch of science has its own division of the evolutionary tree to care for.
A city is an ecological landscape—and a landscape, to scientists like me, is the particular pattern of ecosystems, their composition and arrangement, that forms a habitat for plants and animals. Even for people.
Once we start to nest organisms into the environment, we enter into the realm of ecology. Community ecologists study the interactions between and among different kinds of organisms; ecosystem ecologists study the interactions of ecological communities with the non-living aspects of the environment: water, air, soil, nitrogen, energy, and so forth. And landscape ecologists, my particular tribe, study the assembly of ecosystems into mosaics that vary in space (i.e. what you see looking out of an airplane) and in time (i.e. what you see in a time lapse movie.) One could go on to speak of regional ecology (and ecologists) and planets and their devotees, and eventually, if we find life on another world, then exobiology and trans-planetary ecology will be latest academic fad, but we’re not there yet. For now, when it comes to cities, I think landscape is the doll on which we should focus our energy. Because cities are not singular ecosystems, they are ecological landscapes composed of many kinds of ecosystem.
To landscape ecologists, a landscape is not just a considered view of the outdoors (as seen in a landscape painting), nor is it a manicured garden (as created by a landscape architect); a landscape, to scientists like me, is the particular pattern of ecosystems, their composition and arrangement, that forms a habitat for plants and animals. Even for people.
—from Mannahatta
And what are these urban ecosystems? Buildings, streets, sidewalks, gardens, empty lots, baseball fields, parking garages, bridges, ponds, lakes, streams, forests, grasslands, beaches, marine waters, and so forth. Since an ecosystem is itself a composite of living and non-living elements, one can distinguish them by their different biotic and abiotic components. A forest is not only the trees, shrubs, herbs, squirrels, fungi, bacteria, etc. but also the soil, water, and energy. A building also qualifies as an ecosystem by this definition, inhabited by living people and our commensal pets and also composed of non-living walls, floors, ceilings, insulation, furnishing, electrical wires, and so on. Just because an ecosystem is designed by a human being doesn’t mean it’s not an ecosystem. Indeed if we began to think of buildings as the ecosystems they are, we might design them better.
More to the point, urban ecosystems are arranged in distinct and recognizable patterns as landscapes. Just take out your phone and look at a mapping application of your favorite city neighborhood. Rarely does nature compose such exquisitely structured and rigorously enforced patterns. Hardly does nature lay down such straight lines or place such elements of fundamental difference in such close proximity. And never does nature let a singular idea (the city grid, impervious pavement, the motorcar) run roughshod over all others as we have it in most 21st century cities.
To the extent that we want to find and restore nature in urban landscape, landscape ecology must be our essential framing discipline, embracing of many disciplines, and yet providing its own tools and thought processes. Remember within the landscape are all of nature’s other Russian dolls and their devotees: ecosystems, communities, plants and animals, and so on, down the biological hierarchy to the molecular level. Landscape ecologists integrate across these ways of imagining nature and then bring to bear our own expanding bag of tricks. On the theoretical side, landscape ecologists might wax eloquent about how disturbance processes (e.g. fires, floods, gentrification) change the urban form or habitat models can be deployed to predict where different species (or subsets of a species, drug dealers, philanthropists, potential sweethearts, etc.) hang out. Landscape ecology helps us see the urban mosaic in terms of its connectivity for not one or a few transportation modes, but for the many different types of organisms co-inhabiting the city, and for energy, biogeochemicals, sewage, and other materials, intentionally or inadvertently passing through. Landscape ecology opens us to explore the complex scaling rules that explain how the ever-changing interactions of the city work themselves out at different levels and for different reasons and into different spatial forms. Similarly, the tools of a wildlands landscape ecologist can provide insights for the technologically-minded urban planner, who deploys GPS, GIS, satellite imagery, aerial photography, computer modelling, visualization, and so forth to make a better landscape of ecosystems, that is, a city.
Alexis is a doctoral student from UC Berkeley's Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, at the College of Environmental Design. Her research interest is the shift towards multifunctional infrastructure, a framework that connect commonplace services such as transport, potable water, sanitation, housing with other functions, such as ecosystem services, climate action and sustainable resource use.
Alexis Schaffler
Cities as ecosystems—a cultural reflection
As an academic and occasional policy advisor from the Global South, “cities as ecosystems” has been an attractive metaphor. Intellectually, I was brought up by what I call academic activists or planners, taking on the challenge of urban sustainability in a context of familiar development struggles. Our context commonly appears in terms of ‘unprecedented’ urbanization, often without the necessary growth; inequality and unemployment; and perverse infrastructure legacies of unsustainable resource use and environmental degradation.
Perhaps our insight is not really in viewing cities as ecosystems, but instead lies in how the cities-as-ecosystems idea causes our urban thinking and designs to evolve.
Retrospectively, cities-as-ecosystems was a natural step on my journey investigating options for more sustainable urban futures. In 2013, I led a Green Infrastructure research project at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), a partnership between academic institutions and governments in South Africa’s smallest, but most densely populated urban region. Green infrastructure offered exciting analytical opportunities—we could develop impressive maps, visuals and economic values—to show how the region’s green assets form a network that provides ecosystem services in the same way as conventional grey infrastructure. In 2013, the GCRO published a State of Green Infrastructure, the first of its kind to visualize and assign economic, as well as cultural values to green infrastructure, the “interconnected set of natural and constructed ecological systems, green spaces and other landscape features.
The indigenous and planted trees in Gauteng, strikingly showing the extent of tree cover within the urban core, roughly covering Johannesburg. Although the majority are planted and non-indigenous, the trees in Gauteng provide important services, such as air purification and erosion control. The map also demonstrates the power of high resolution satellitle imagery in mapping individual ecological assets such as trees (Khanyile, 2017).
Like other similar endeavors, there have been necessary evolutions to the GCRO’s green infrastructure work. Much of this evolution rests on the ecosystem services metaphor, which helps us to understand the benefits provided by ecosystem to society. This metaphor is the basis of impressive work around the world that assigns green infrastructure a monetary value, with the ultimate goal of incorporating these values into municipal budgeting and accounting procedures.
The endurance of the GCRO’s green infrastructure work is inspiring. Compared to my preliminary, and admittedly naïve work, their current green infrastructure engages spatial, economic and social analyses that contain more of the necessary detail for understanding cities as ecosystems. While innovative at the time, our 2013 State of Green Infrastructure report encountered major data challenges as we learnt about the deficiencies of our local government datasets. This was illuminating, highlighting the critical role of data consistency and capacity, but it was also very costly, requiring the services of external data contractors with the requisite data and technical capacities.
Perhaps most importantly, the GCRO’s Green Infrastructure City-Lab facilitates the sharing and co-production of knowledge between government officials and other stakeholders to develop green infrastructure within municipal planning (Culwick & Bobbins, 2014). This is a welcome resolution to our early situation with local government databases. The connection and interest between scholars and government practitioners may well prove the most important anchor in future work. There are important movements to watch within some of Gauteng’s local governments expressing interest in green infrastructure as a more formal strategy for urban planning.
Yet, I am also cautious of the above in my current role as a PhD scholar at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. In part, there is a romanticism in thinking about cities as ecosystems, particularly whether green infrastructure can truly contribute to meet our ever-demanding human needs. We also have to be wary of the attractive, yet rather ambiguous, renditions that use ecology to model urban processes. This is most clear in the North American discourse, Landscape as Urbanism, with a following of ‘intellectual’ designers, eluding to ecology in their vocabulary but largely producing intriguing visual renditions and models of cities as complex ecosystems (Duany et al., 2013; Corner, 1999: Waldheim, 2008).
I do find conciliation in remembering the linage of ‘bringing nature back in’ to urban design and planning. Olmstead’s ‘parkways’ concept, Howard’s Garden Cities, proposals in Spirn’s The Granite Garden (1965), McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969), and Hough’s City Form and Natural Process (1984) are important examples in history showing both the intellectual and strategic power of viewing cities as ecosystems. The GCRO’s green infrastructure work is certainly part of this global lineage and experimentation with what it means to articulate, and invest in, cities as ecosystems. Yes, this casts a wide net of intellectual idealists and activists, but perhaps our insight is not really in viewing cities as ecosystems, but instead, lies in how the cities-as-ecosystems ideas causes our thinking and designs to evolve.
One of the best lessons we receive is, of course, from practice. Portland, Oregon, presents a unique case of two sustainable urban design experiments attempting to integrate social and ecological functions. The New Urbanist project, Jamison Square, includes an iconic fountain, a boardwalk, an outdoor gallery and often features in media as a socially vibrant, active and lively public space” (Senville 2015). In contrast, Tanner Springs Park, emerging later in the city’s history as a Landscape Urbanist project, primarily a stormwater project that transitions from a relaxing meadow with stone walkways, a cleansing biotope and wetland plantings (Senville 2015). Duany et al. argue that Tanner Park is largely devoid of humans, rather focusing on maintaining prairie grasses and preventing the adverse aesthetic effects of citizens’ and animals feet and posteriors (2014).
The social and ecological differences of Jamison Square and Tanner Park are not necessarily unhelpful trade-offs. There is immense value in foregrounding the vital functions performed by landscapes, such as mitigating climate or providing drainage. Highlighting landscape infrastructure as well as the more commonplace, albeit often invisible networks of transit or waste disposal systems also opens urban design to the crucial sustainability question of how to sustain urban functions given available resources. The conundrum in designing more sustainable urban forms is therefore how to provide for social and ecological urban functions in a way that resonates with humans, without comprising affordability nor the requirements for density, mix and scale (Kelbaugh in Duany et al., 2014, Hill & Larsen, 2014). As Thompson reflects, while working through the nature-cultural dichotomy is complex and challenging, urban design experiments are an essential part of responsive, creative and catalytic thinking about the major structuring elements of urban form (2012). While sustainable urban design experiments often reveal the discontents of paradigmatic thinking, they are also significant as empirical opportunities to critically reflect on the realities of ecological and social integration in urban form.
References
Corner, J. 2006. Terra Fluxus, in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Charles Waldheim, 21-33. New York: Princeton.
Culwick, C., Bobbins, K., Cartwright, A., Oelofse, G., Mander, M. and Dunsmore, S. (2016). A framework for a green infrastructure planning approach in the Gauteng City-Region, Johannesburg: Gauteng City-Region Observatory.
Duany, A. & Talen, E. 2013. Landscape Urbanism and its discontents, Dissimulating the
Sustainable City. Canada: New Society Publishers.
McHarg, I. 1969. The Plight, in Design with Nature, 31-41. New York: The Natural History
Press.
Schäffler, A., Christopher, N., Bobbins, K., Otto, E., Nhlozi, M.W., de Wit, M., van Zyl, H., Crookes, D., Gotz, G., Trangoš, G., Wray, C. & Phasha, P. (2013) State of Green Infrastructure in the GCR, Johannesburg: Gauteng City-Region Observatory.
Spirn, A.W. 1965. The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, Basic Books, Inc.,
New York
Waldheim, Charles. 2006. Landscape as Urbanism, in The Landscape Urbanism Reader. NewYork: Princeton Architectural Press.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
David Simon
I have always been wary of organismic analogies seeking to compare human artefacts such as urban systems or individual cities with the human body or natural systems because they never stand up to inspection. Even possibly the most famous analogy of natural systems across very different scales, namely James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which likens Planet Earth to the human body, is analytically problematic despite its innate appeal as a rhetorical device.
Perhaps in the future, the ecosystem analogy might become more apt, but at present it is unhelpful and inaccurate, obscuring or concealing far more than it might superficially promise as heuristic device.
Fundamental to natural systems, including ecosystems as variously defined (including the Science.com version cited in the curatorial note) is the holistic integration of all their components within a system which makes the whole more than the sum of its parts and is normally sustainable. That said, ecosystems are not closed systems since they exchange nutrients with adjacent systems through different mechanisms, in part through being open to the atmosphere, soil and groundwater.
Individual cities are also open, indeed, far more so than ecosystems: there are constant inward and outward flows of resources and wastes of various sorts, commodities, people and finance. Despite our current and very necessary preoccupation with urban sustainability, no individual city or even system (network) of cities is sustainable in the sense of being autochtonous. No matter the extent of nutrient and water recycling and waste reduction, progress towards carbon reduction and renewable energy, or shift towards integrated and efficient public transport, cities are necessarily open and reliant on such fluxes and flows. Indeed, it is important to acknowledge that this is not a failing but both by necessity and design. No city anywhere has ever been able to survive for an extended period when cut off from its hinterland and isolated, as in a siege.
My scepticism about the analogy rests on three main factors. First, no existing city is fully internally integrated and harmoniously or efficiently functional. The extent of dysfunctionality, or harmony versus conflict, varies greatly but the diversity of urban residents in terms of both visible and invisible markers, and their divergent or overtly conflictual interests, militates against this. Second, with very few exceptions like mining company towns, urban areas are not designed and built at one time to a comprehensive plan with the explicit intent of becoming a “complete” entity in any way comparable to an organism or ecosystem. Instead, they grow in phases, usually incrementally or with distinct new neighbourhoods being added, at different rates at different times. Over time there is also periodic decline, dereliction and eventual redevelopment of areas or neighbourhoods that become obsolete as a result of technological change or shifting trade and political relations, or become depopulated or economically or socially undesirable through changing income or social profiles and preferences. Third, governance is often deficient or dysfunctional, with urban politics revealing differing degrees of contestation among different stakeholders and tensions between social welfare and private or corporate profit.
That said, current urban greening initiatives, often including wetland and river rehabilitation; rewilding of derelict or biologically degraded areas; networking of open space systems; water reuse and recycling; and small-scale renewable energy generation are increasing urban biodiversity, enhancing climate change mitigation and adaptive capacity, and providing more “green” jobs and livelihood opportunities. To some extent, then, these may be integrating urban areas in novel ways, also softening or blurring some of the sharp discontinuities referred to above, and enhancing urban liveability and wellbeing.
Furthermore, some critiques of technocentric visions of smart cities and urbanism are beginning to gain traction and might shift the focus towards more locally appropriate and sustainable interventions. Perhaps in the distant future, the ecosystem analogy might become more apt but at present it is unhelpful and inaccurate, obscuring or concealing far more than it might superficially promise as heuristic device.
Yolanda van Heezik is currently exploring children’s connection with nature, and how ageing affects nature engagement. She is part of a multi-institutional team investigating restoration in urban areas, and cultural influences on attitudes to native biodiversity.
Yolanda van Heezik
The notion of the city as an ecosystem is not new—“the ecology of cities” as a paradigm was introduced in the late 1990s and the holistic nature of this paradigm implies that the city itself is an ecosystem. But how is a city ecosystem defined? It is difficult to define the spatial contours of any ecosystem, and this is certainly the case in cities, where the ecological footprint can be many times larger than the geographical boundary of the city itself. The quantities of food, energy and other natural resources and products that flow between the city and its surroundings are very large relative to that which is cycled within the city. Environmental philosopher Mark Sagoff (2003) argues that we need to be able to define an ecosystem before we are able to understand it, to manage it, and to develop general theories of ecosystem functioning, but that in fact we lack the “criteria that determine what kinds of things count as ecosystems”. The challenge for urban areas is how we can define a single ecosystem that encompasses all the variability that characterises any given city. If we are unable to identify a single ecosystem we can’t then re-identify it over time and in the face of change.
Thinking about a city as a collection of ecosystems influenced by their surrounds could be a more helpful way to inform urban design, and make it easier to identify the elements that make up each particular ecosystem.
An analysis by Cadenasso and Pickett (2008) of urban principles for ecological design and management, applies a widely-used definition to assert that cities are ecosystems; i.e. that they have “interacting biological and physical complexes”. The additional complexity added through acknowledging the role humans play in urban ecosystems, and the patterns and processes that result from interactions between social, built, and ecological components of the system, are seen as extensions of the basic ecosystem concept. It is possible though, that such an over-inclusive definition, which implies that the ecosystem can be of any size, with boundaries defined only by the research questions, might hinder the development of theories of ecosystem functioning that could be generalised across many cities.
Cities vary hugely in size, spatial form, and history. I live in a city in New Zealand that is so small that people from more populated countries might consider it not to even be a city. In contrast to the high-density megalopolises, New Zealand’s cities do not contain many millions of people, high-rise living, dense housing blocks, or extensive industrial and commercial area—rather they are cities of sprawling suburbs. A lack of clarity around what is considered ‘urban’ was identified by Pickett et al. (2009) as a challenge to developing an urban ecosystem theory.
Can ecosystem theory developed for huge cities, or very old cities, be generalised to newer small cities such as those in New Zealand? Perhaps it would be more useful to think of cities as collections of ecosystems. After all, if no settlers had arrived to occupy the space where I live, ecologists would not treat the area covered by my city as one ecosystem, but as coastal, sub-alpine, swamp, mixed-podocarp forest, and freshwater ecosystems, to name a few. Cities often occupy large areas and show very high cultural and socio-economic heterogeneity, as well as heterogeneity of land covers imposed on a variety of natural landforms. Treating the city as one ecosystem overlooks this variety.
Cities are usually characterised by significant dynamic change. Rapid changes in human population size and composition are followed by major changes in land cover characteristics and built infrastructure, which affect processes such as primary production and nutrient assimilation, as well as biodiversity characteristics, connectivity, and the production of goods and services. Interactions and feedback loops between social and ecological factors continually evolve in response to different cultural and socio-economic influences. In the face of constant and massive change, that can occur at different rates and in different ways across a city, is it appropriate to consider the city as one and the same ecosystem over time?
Does thinking explicitly about cities as ecosystems offer us any insight into urban design?
The holistic approach that is implicit in our understanding of ecosystem function, which recognises interactions and connections between constituent living and non-living parts, should provide pathways for better, more liveable urban design. The paradigm “ecology for the city” (Pickett et al. 2016) recognizes the applied role of ecological research and a responsibility to create a sustainable, liveable and resilient urban environment, and the term ‘ecological urbanism’ has been adopted to describe a more holistic approach to the design and management of cities. Resilience goals might be met using a socio-ecological approach, which acknowledges the unpredictability and complexity of city systems. This kind of holistic approach has been used at least in the short term in New Zealand, after the 2010-2011 Christchurch earthquakes, to not only restore the city to its previous state, but also to introduce regulations to ensure that the city would be better able to endure future disturbances.
Conceptualising cities as a series of ecosystems, rather than just one, could make urban design more tractable, since it wouldn’t be necessary to try to manage everything all at once. Much of my research has focused on private green spaces in suburbs or neighbourhoods. A focus on a coherent sub-area, such as a collection of suburbs or a neighbourhood as an ecosystem, would be useful, as ecological concepts could then be applied to urban design within and immediately around that space. For example, urban design could accommodate connectivity across suburbs and between other parts of the city in the spatial configuration of public and private green spaces and the location of highways and other transport corridors. Urban design could mitigate the impacts of hard edges, where suburbs abut onto other, less biodiverse, land covers. A holistic approach would accommodate the significant and dynamic human influence on management of private green spaces, and recognise important interactions, such as those potentially existing between human well-being benefits and biodiversity benefits. Thinking about a city as a collection of ecosystems influenced by their surrounds could be a more helpful way to inform urban design, and make it easier for us to identify the elements that make up each particular ecosystem.
References
Cadenasso, M & Pickett, STA. 2008. Urban principles for ecological landscape design and management: scientific fundamentals. Cities and the Environment 1(2): article 4, 16pp.
Pickett, STA, Cadenasso, ML, Childers, DL, McDonnell, MJ, Zhou, W. 2016. Evolution and future of urban ecological science: ecology in, of, and for the city. Ecosystem health and Sustainability 2(7) e01229. Doi 10.1002/ehs2.1229
Sagoff, M. 2003. The plaza and pendulum: two concepts of ecological science. Biology and Philosophy 18: 529-552.
Sanchez, AX, Osmond, P, van der Heijden, J. 2017. Are some forms of resilience more sustainable than others? Procedia Engineering 180: 881-889.
Dr. Ken Yeang is an architect, planner, and ecologist. The Guardian newspaper named him as one of 50 individuals who could save the planet.
Ken Yeang
Whereas ecosystems are living entities, our existing towns and cities are, in effect, inert structures unlike living things, and have operational and industrial systems that give nothing of biological value back to nature.
Are our existing towns and cities ecosystems? Cities are referred to by many as ecosystems, but in reality and systemically they are not. Cities are far from ecosystem-like, being almost entirely inorganic and abiotic, mostly bereft of nature and biotic constituents (except for the occasional park, green squares, hedges, roadside trees and verges). Simply stated, cities do not have the complete biological structure of abiotic and biotic constituents acting together to form a whole that is the fundamental characteristic of an ecosystem.
Whereas ecosystems are living entities, our existing towns and cities are, in effect, inert structures unlike living things, and have operational and industrial systems that give nothing of biological value back to nature. Humanity’s existing towns and cities are mostly inorganic, synthetic, biologically inanimate and are parasitic and dissociated from nature yet dependent on its bioregion and its hinterland for providing the vitally crucial ecosystem services, for its food (mostly transported from distant sources), for its source of energy (which in most instances is not from renewable sources as in naturally-occurring ecosystems), for its water, for the raw materials that it needs for its incessant production of artefacts for humanity’s benefit for its everyday domestic and commercial existence.
Professor Vivek Shandas specializes in integrating the science of sustainability to citizen engagement and decision making efforts. He evaluates the many critical functions provided by the biophysical ecosystems upon which we depend, including purifying water, producing food, cleaning toxins, offering recreation, and imbuing society with cultural values.
Vivek Shandas
Nature-Based Segregation: The inequitable ecological turn in planning practice
Walking down the residential streets in Seattle, Washington or Portland, Oregon, one cannot help to notice several small and vegetated areas that occupy portions of the street right of way. These minor changes to the urban landscape represent a physical manifestations of what I call an ecological turn in urban planning practice. This ecological turn refers to a change from two centuries of urban development that emphasized the importance of engineering systems for roads, buildings, and the myriad layers of infrastructure that make up our cities, to a recognition that patches of nature can provide services previously taken for granted or dismissed. Arguably, these attempts to change the gray infrastructure of roads and pipes to green receptacles to collect and infiltrate strormwater were the earliest modern examples of planning practice taking seriously the contributions in the field of urban ecology. As a result, cities around the world are attempting to reintegrate nature into human habitation, and increasingly looking to urban ecology for principles to inform planning practice.
What then can be done to address the historical inequities of applying urban ecological knowledge to exclusionary planning practices? First is the recognition that urban ecological research is not value-neutral.
While others on this blog are describing specific examples of nature-based solutions for cities, I argue here that the emerging ecological turn in planning practice remains conceptually and spatially a movement that benefits communities with privilege. Those who are white, higher-income, and educated have greater access to and benefits from urban nature, while those communities of color and lower income face a disproportionate burden from environmental pressures. These communities often live in “nature deserts” or places that are replete with the biggest disasters of planning practice, such as strip malls, big box stores, and/or mega transportation projects that least benefit communities most need. To take for example, evidence from around the U.S. that suggests an inequitable distribution tree canopy among cities, which as a simple yet poignant indicator offers a window into planning system that has not taken seriously the centuries of exclusionary practices that privilege the few.
While the history of U.S. planning practice is replete with stories of segregation, whether of schools, housing, or services, yet today, we face an ongoing ecological segregation that is amplifying environmental pressures to those most vulnerable in our cities. As many communities grapple with the foreboding challenge of managing the increases in frequency, duration, and magnitude of extreme climate events, we need now more than ever to integrate our knowledge about urban ecosystems into planning practice. As way of example, our research team at Portland State University is engaging with an international network of practicing planners — as part of a National Science Foundation Sustainability Research Network (SRN) — to understand the implications of extreme climate events on vulnerable populations. The project begins with the idea that all urban communities differ in terms of their knowledge of, access to, and control over resources, and that to create transformational change in cities we need to co-produce knowledge by engaging practitioners with researcher. Although the SRN is a first step and relatively limited in terms of the communities we can transform, a lot more needs to be done.
So what then can be done to address the historical inequities of applying urban ecological knowledge to exclusionary planning practices? First, is the recognition that urban ecological research is not value-neutral, and we have a responsibility as scholars, practitioners, teachers, and citizens to highlight those inequities. In our own work, we are attempting to understand how heat waves impact those most vulnerable and supporting climate action planning through identifying urban development projects that can reduce temperatures in low-income multifamily developments, while reducing expenditures on energy. Second, we must participate in the political process to ensure that science is part of any decision making process. Albeit a generally progressive Mayor and city council, Portland’s decision makers have been highly receptive to a scientific argument during public testimonies.
Finally, urban ecologists must engage in social movements that support the rights of communities that have been (and will continue to be) disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis. While ecologists applying their tools to urban systems may help to advance the ecological turn occurring in cities, without explicit and concomitant aims to restructure exclusionary planning systems, our work will not be transformational. Increasingly community groups with interests outside traditional environmental concerns recognize that climate change will amplify inequities (e.g. housing, transportation and employment access, education, etc.). By engaging with “non-environmental” organizations, urban ecologists can help to empower organizations that are reducing nature-based segregation, and improve the public goods upon which we depend. Indeed, thinking about cities as ecosystems can be transformational for building more resilient, livable, and just communities.
In the Lille citadel example that we saw in the previous part, we could observe a building technology achieving greater complexity over time, as each iteration survived or failed a new series of tests. Another aspect of the complexity of a geometric process seen in the Lille citadel example is its contextual adaptation. The shape of the city and the surrounding landscape is chaotic, and the encircling fortifications bend to match this randomness, leading to Nouvel’s claim that it is an early example of morphing. But again there is no deliberate attempt at morphing going on. Since each component of a star fort is defined as a recursive transformation of the basic wall corner, Vauban only had to design the wall and the other parts aligned themselves as a result of the wall’s configuration. If the outcome has artistic value, it is only incidental.
Nesting idiosyncratic details inside commonly shared building plans was how every building in a city was tied together in a web of geometric relationships; these relationships give cities their quality of wholeness and beauty. Forests patterns are similar.
So how did human creations stop being natural art? We look at a tower block, a subdivision or a shopping mall parking lot and see the worst of industrial civilization translated into form. We tolerate them as necessary to achieve the material comfort we expect of our civilization. Those human settlements that are still natural we grant special protections through UNESCO and historical preservation laws. We do not have a law that promotes the creation of new historic settlements because we are not quite certain about how they are made.
I believe that our mistake is not in the things we make, that there is nothing unnatural about a shopping mall parking lot from a functional point of view. What makes the shopping mall parking lots we build so unnatural are errors in configuration of the design elements. To understand this, one must understand the difference between design and configuration.
Adaptation to chaos and complex geometry
A chaotic configuration of a standard design. Source: http://emergenturbanism.com/2008/11/06/design-configuration-and-natural-form/
The form of a tree is an ideal example to illustrate the difference between the two concepts. Any particular species of tree will have a design that is essentially the same from one tree to the next, minus small genomic variation. In fact trees can be cloned, sometimes to such an extent that most of the world’s bananas are produced from the DNA of the same original individual. The design elements in the tree are all the named parts: trunk, branch, leaf, root, bark, and so on. These parts are organized into complex relationships with the whole tree and with each other. Such a relationship is a design solution that achieves a specific result. However, the shape and position of any of the parts is not fixed. In the DNA of the tree are rules that instruct cells to adapt themselves to the larger context the tree finds itself in, through feedback loops from environmental stimuli. The different configuration of parts that result from this cellular action will therefore adopt a position that reflects the particulars of time and place, ensuring that the tree’s form is constantly adapting to its environment, as well as the history of its growth. No two branches or two leaves will be identical, even though the cells operate on identical DNA.
When we look at a traditional village, we find that the same house design is repeated time and time again, but configured in such a way that it is differently adapted than the other houses, like leaves from the same tree. The reiteration of an often very simple design is all that it takes to create a natural landscape, so long as each house is configured to adapt to its context in time and place, and the design elements of the house are themselves configured to adapt to these adaptations.
Palaos Panteleimonas, a mountain village in Central Macedonia, Greece; the same house design is repeated time and time again, but configured in such a way that it is differently adapted than the other houses. Source: http://emergenturbanism.com/2008/11/06/design-configuration-and-natural-form/
Even today this kind of natural adaptation takes place in modern settlements where planning regulation is loose enough or constrained by historical land usage patterns.
The Monaco skyline. Source: http://emergenturbanism.com/2008/11/06/design-configuration-and-natural-form/
This is the skyline of Monaco, which by necessity of the small size of the city had to be built piecemeal but yet is still made from a modern building stock. The piecemeal process allowed each building to be configured to its site and thus, despite the fact that the buildings’ design is very basic modern architecture, the whole landscape looks natural.
Rochina favela, Rio de Janeiro. Source: http://emergenturbanism.com/2008/11/06/design-configuration-and-natural-form/
This the Rocinha favela of Rio de Janeiro. Here the building design is as bare as could be made, the houses being built by poor residents with little capital to invest, but investing it over a long time. The resulting configurations adapt perfectly to the shape of the hill and the other buildings, and the overall look of the place is that of a human jungle. The buildings in Rocinha are just as natural as the trees.
And here is the rule 90 cellular automaton that we previously saw making a Sierpinski triangle, but this time started from a randomized line of black and white cells.
We see the program attempt to generate the fractal, but become constrained by neighboring attempts, and starting the process over. The end result is a chaotic, complex texture.
How do we translate these facts back into our shopping mall parking lot? It means that although the relationship between the parts, for example the lanes, the spaces and the paint that demarcates them, must be defined, the length of the spaces or the thickness of the demarcations do not have to be identical from one element to another. The chaos of natural and historical context requires that they be slightly different from one to the next to properly fit in their environment, and that means the people who build them must be able to make decisions while they are building, integrating the information from the real world at that moment into the planned design. Simply translating an AutoCAD drawing made in an office onto the physical landscape is unnatural, and to demonstrate that the builders typically begin by wiping away anything that might confuse the plan (“grading”).
The design must be expressed into a language that instructs the builders to make configuration choices while constructing the defined forms. This kind of language is how builders have made star forts, traditional towns, and how DNA becomes organisms. It can be as simple as rules of thumb passed orally, or as sophisticated as a procedural model simulated on a computer. What it needs to be is fractal and adaptive.
Path dependence
What does the Lille citadel look like in the present day?
Satellite imagery of Lille citadel. Apple Maps.
As fortifications became obsolete with the invention of artillery, many cities found themselves encircled with open spaces that served no purpose. Some cities took advantage of the situation to expand significantly, as was the case with the Eixample (extension) district of Barcelona, built out of the open space the Spanish military had claimed for a clear line of fire around the city. In some instances the demise of fortifications coincided with the need for larger-scale transportation, and the walls were replaced with boulevards. In other instances walls filled in a more urgent need for recreational green space. But in almost all instances the traces of the walls still remain, the energy being necessary to fully remove such large structures being out of consideration. The conclusion is that the configuration of a whole city is dependent on its past iterations, much like the configuration of a living tree.
Path dependence affects us at any scale that makes energy conservation necessary. The neighborhood scale is particularly affected, since buildings grow and die essentially at random. A single street can see households move in, leave, break apart and form, shops open and close, with no predictable pattern. Buildings must adapt to these circumstances. In order to create something harmonious, a new building may have to find symmetrical elements with neighbors that are 10, 50, 100 and 500 years old.
We find ourselves facing these historical constraints at every iteration in the process of urban growth. But each generation the constraints come from a newer form of obsolete technology. Today our constraints are the inheritance of post-WWII suburbanization. Elevated highways are crumbling and we must decide how or if to rebuild them. Whole subdivisions must renew themselves because the first generation of children who grew up there have now become adults. Shopping malls and other retail enterprises who dominated the late 20th century are shutting down under intense competition from internet commerce. It is the older cities that are adapting the fastest to these trends, mostly because they have already had to adapt to the previous cycle and adaptation is now integrated to their system.
But our grim reality is that at least half of our urban heritage is automobile sprawl, and we do not have the energy to replace it whole. We now must find a way to increase its depth, to repair it and allow it to become something new. We must do this against the resistance of the system of planning that created it in the expectation that the plan would be final and perfect.
What should a natural urban design movement be about?
Classicism describes itself as the imitation of nature. Complexity, on the other hand, does not imitate. It is nature, or perhaps nature imitates complexity. To create a natural urban design movement requires not adopting a certain style or program, but ensuring that any style or program can be adapted to a particular context. What that requires us to do is use different tools than what we have grown accustomed to.
The tradition of teaching the classical orders in architecture was once an imperfect approach to granting architects this skill. The classical orders are one form of geometric substitution system, where large-scale elements are decomposed into smaller-scale elements which form the whole column structure. Thus when many architects, trained to share this system as part of their skill set, worked on completely different buildings, their work could easily form a larger whole; whenever they hit similar problems, they would employ the similar solution they were trained to employ. While two buildings may have completely different sizes or roofs, or one could have a bell tower while the other didn’t, if both buildings had windows and columns, the windows and columns would be made the same way, and thus symmetrical to each other. Nesting ornamental symmetries inside economically-necessary building plans was how every building in a city was tied together in a web of geometric relationships, and it is the density of these relationships that gave cities their quality of wholeness and beauty.
In the early 20th century, a movement in architecture started by Adolf Loos began to denounce the use of classical patterns in architecture, considering it immoral to increase the cost of buildings with columns that had no tectonic purpose when what the modern world needed was efficient construction relying on new technologies. What it was denouncing was a practice we could compare to building a medieval castle inside a star fort, an expensive folly that would be militarily disadvantageous. On that point we must agree with it.
Art Deco was a step in the right direction in adapting ornamental technology to contemporary construction technology, but the technological basis of architecture soon shifted again to glass, concrete and metal construction. This rapid rate of technological obsolescence was in itself turned into an ideology (modernism), then a counter-ideology (post-modernism) and finally the computer-aided confusion we live in today.
There is a glimmer of hope that the process of technological iteration is still working to create complexity. Streets that were deadly automobile speedways are now being converted into complex superblocks and shared spaces, highway underpasses turned into recreational areas or nature preserves, shopping mall parking lots turned into fairs. The modern autotopia is iterating and growing more complex as its first life runs its course. Inevitably, those systems that are not complex, such as zoning codes, are straining and becoming complicated to the point of failure under the pace of change. Their failure will accelerate.
Life finds a way. The metal, glass and concrete structures we build tomorrow may be as marvellous as the Mandelbrot set fractal. The IKEA parking lot may be a pleasant place to meet someone for a morning stroll. The subdivision neighborhood may become a complex tapestry of gardens and shops. Time and change is the only necessary ingredient, every other obstacle comes from a belief we must unlearn.
(This article has gone through many iterations, and began as a series of blog posts in 2007-2008. It will likely be iterated on again and again.)
A review of “Liquid City,” The Darkened Mirror,” and “Fragile Waters,” a trio of water-related exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, currently on view together through August 6, 2017.
As the representative contemporary art institution of Silicon Valley, the San Jose Museum of Art might be expected to engage technology a good bit. They do. Yet growing up in this area — and serving shortly as an arts commissioner for the city — I always understood the bigger strength of this museum to be in its responsiveness to the issues facing the diverse denizens of the region. From immigration and borders and local migrant culture, to race and religion and suburban sprawl, SJMA has done an admirable job of serving its community through art.
In these rooms are some of the most powerful and emotive landscapes you might ever come across.
This season, water and urbanism are the featured fare, and it couldn’t have come at a more relevant time. The period from 2011–2014 was the driest on record in California, sending the largely agricultural state into a panic. This year, the drought subsided and the clouds returned in fierce form, dumping enough water onto the region to mark the wettest year on record. The rains triggered a state of emergency complete with collapsed roads, broken dams, and severe flooding.
The floods that ravaged Silicon Valley this winter may have dried up, but there is still plenty of water flowing through the San Jose Museum of Art. Luckily, it’s not the actual wet stuff, but instead comes in the form of silver gelatin prints, etchings, digital films, and sculptures that comprise three complimentary exhibitions currently on view.
Diana Al-Hadid, “Nolli’s Orders,” 2012. Steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, wood, foam, plaster, aluminum foil, and pigment. 156 × 264 × 228 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery. Installation view, San Jose Museum of Art.
In the central skylight gallery is the Liquid City exhibition. Sparse in content, this exhibition is dominated by Diana Al-Hadid’s massive flowing sculpture, titled Nolli’s Orders. The museum’s curator, Lauren Schell Dickens, raises her eyebrows and gives a sly triumphant grin as she tells me that the piece arrived in 70 some odd boxes on two freight trucks, taking a crew of five the better part of a week to assemble.
Although there are remarkable works throughout the museum right now, it is Nolli’s Orders that provides the gravity here.
Lauren tells me she sees the sculpture functioning as a fountain and community meeting place in the tradition of Bernini’s fountain in the Piazzo Novona and the other great public fountains of Italy. Fountain is a good metaphor for this, a flowing, dripping sculpture that intertwines human form with architectural and natural features. Nolli’s Orders bends, twists, and knocks off kilter our established ideas of social order and the built city.
The ability of my words to convey experience easily finds its limit in trying to talk of this sculpture. But a certain writer, Italo Calvino, does come to mind. A bit sheepishly, I tell Lauren that Nolli’s Orders feels like a physical manifestation of Calvino’s fantastical and expressive writings. Especially, in the book Invisible Cities — a book which was glowingly recommended in a recent TNOC reading list.
“That’s profound,” says Lauren “this very sculpture was originally commissioned for an exhibition based on Invisible Cities.” The relationship to Calvino’s writing only deepens as we continue walking around the piece. Moving toward the half-way point on our 360-degree trip around the sculpture, the perfectly weighted facade begins to give way. Suddenly, figures are awkwardly contorted, space floats. The sculpture seems to “unmoor” itself, in Lauren’s words.
By the time you reach the rear of Nolli’s Orders, you feel as though you’ve ventured into an off-limits underbelly. Here you find that the solid-looking figures that presented themselves to you upon your entrance to the space are, in reality, all hollow shells.
Lauren explains this a purposeful nod by Al-Hadid — who lives in the United States, but was born in the Syrian city of Aleppo — to issues of society and identity. In context of America’s current relationship with places like Syria, the sculpture reads radically differently. Sitting with it for a while, you might discover multiple socially and environmentally relevant references flowing through these sculptural forms, all twisted just as freely as the physical perspectives are.
Or perhaps you’ll just see a warped, ethereal city.
Across the foyer from Liquid City is The Darkened Mirror: Global Perspectives on Water, a collection of mostly video-based works from international artists. Somewhat of a tonic to Al-Hadid’s oracular work, these pieces each focus on very specific issues: water pollution in India, destruction of lakes and water ecosystems during urban development in Cambodia, and hypnotic imagery of industrial agriculture in the United States.
Khvay Samnang, Untitled, 2011. Digital still from video. Image courtesy of the artist and SA SA BASSAC.
Hidden in the back of this part of the exhibition and barely mentioned in the catalog is a film called Llano, a cinematic tour that is at once absurd, humorous, and unflinchingly critical. In it, Danish film-based artist Jesper Just brings us into the abandoned town of Llano del Rio, a utopian commune that launched in 1914 in the desert just northeast of Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, the community, which was home to 1,000 people, failed just four years after its founding, mainly due to lack of water.
Just’s film takes us through scenes of a woman fruitlessly trying to rebuild the structure of the commune, block by block, as the structure relentlessly deteriorates right before our eyes on account of water pouring down on it. A nod to the artist’s cinematic background, the rain comes courtesy of what Lauren calls a “Hollywood style rain machine” that the artist brought in for filming. The work had me laughing. Albeit, at the inevitable destruction of the material-based society which I am so tethered to.
It’s good to be able to laugh at yourself, your country, your aspirations. Isn’t it? Well, an artist named Just apparently thinks so. His work seems often to aim at, and hit, this mark.
Installation view of Amy Balkin et al., “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting,” 2012 – ongoing, as installed in “The Darkened Mirror: Global Perspectives on Water” at San Jose Museum of Art.
Attached to this video-based exhibit is also a tactile work, this one by a San Francisco Bay Area artist, Amy Balkin, titled Sinking and Melting. The work invites visitors to contribute items related to climate change, along with stories about the items.
All of this is cataloged and presented as if it were in an old-school history museum, yet Silicon Valley still gets a foot into this one nevertheless; the entire work also exists a digitized version of the exhibition on the artist’s Tumblr.
This side of the museum is full of irony.
Reading room for the “Fragile Waters” exhibition at San Jose Museum of Art. Image courtesy of the museum.
Leaving these works, we walk downstairs to what some might call the blockbuster of the museum’s current offerings. The Fragile Waters exhibition fills the entirety of the main floor gallery spaces with one hundred and seventeen large scale black and white photographic prints by seminal nature photographer Ansel Adams, along with the works of contemporaries Earnest H. Brooks II and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly. The exhibition also includes an extensive reading room.
Whereas the other two exhibitions here approach water and the environment from a wide societal view — making various connections between human habits and the rest of nature — the images on display downstairs are decidedly focused on the beauty of what we humans like to call ‘pristine’ nature.
Stepping in front of these images, you are asked to forget that there is a road just behind Adams’ giant 8×10 view-camera, or that boats carve fluid channels just beyond the reach of Brooks’ lens. The images are here to remind us of what is possible, of what exists outside the walls of our offices, of the grand and unbelievable treasures that nature consistently builds.
Indeed, in these rooms are some of the most powerful and emotive landscapes you might ever come across. In the case of Adams’ work in particular, these are images which literally changed the course of nature conservation and national policy nearly a century ago, popularizing the appreciation of nature for nature’s sake, and inspiring a nation and its leaders to save these treasures for future generations.
Lest we think that the job of these images is over, one only has to take a look at the current precarious situation regarding national parks under the current United States administration. Public knowledge and the building of support for nature is, in the end, what drives public policy. Adams knew that well, and his images still carry a salient message today.
Still, the world has changed much since Ansel Adams took his stand and conveyed his love of nature through images. As a collection, these images can only tell a small piece of the story that desperately needs to be told today.
The success of the work on display here at San Jose Museum of Art, and for that matter its power to change us, lies not in any one work, but rather in this carefully-programmed trio of exhibitions. The curatorial staff deserves much credit here and I suggest, if you do get the chance to see this extraordinary gathering of work, to give yourself ample time to experience it all.
Good thing for you that all of this is on view together in San Jose, California until 6 August 2017. After that point, the photographs come down.
The other two exhibitions mentioned, Darkened Mirror and Liquid City are on display until 27 August, and 24 September, respectively.
In a previous article I proposed that we adopt a perspective on preservation that allowed for transformation and change of what is to be preserved. This type of change has a more precise definition: iteration. To iterate means to “cover the same ground twice”, using feedback from the result of previous attempts and from environmental change to improve the result. In this article I mean to demonstrate how the phenomenon of iteration creates complexity and explains the form of our cities, how it relates them to the morphology of nature, and how to use it to reshape the cities we inherited from the static, final plans of 20th century modernist design.
Complex things can have very simple foundations. Natural world morphology and even pure abstract ideas like mathematics are full of very simple iterations—repeated fractals—that rely on the impact of time and the abundant data of physical matter to produce very complex forms.
How complexity is made
Fractal geometry has infiltrated popular culture since it was formalized in the early 80’s from the works of Benoit Mandelbrot. While it has been used mathematically to study the form of cities by researchers such as Pierre Frankhauser and Michael Batty, the insights to be drawn from this research have not yet penetrated the field of practical urbanism, defined as the construction of cities. Connecting the fractal city by Nikos Salingaros approaches the topic by asking what type of city is fractal, without going into depth as to how a fractal is made. Christopher Alexander, in The Nature of Order: The Process of Creating Life, begins to develop profound ideas on the topic.
The basic quality of fractal geometry is that it is iteratively-defined geometry; it must be described in terms of steps involving the result of previous steps. Euclidean geometry, in comparison, is built up by combining basic elements into different, higher-dimension shapes. A point becomes a line, which becomes a triangle, which becomes several different kinds of polygons, and so on. Fractal geometry does not take this approach of combination. Instead of using a triangle to make a square, in fractal geometry we use a triangle to make more triangles, such as this Sierpinski triangle, below.
Sierpinski triangle.
At each step we use the results of the previous step and repeat some procedure, in this case either adding two copies of the previous object below the current one (composition) or replacing the three large triangles each by a copy of the whole object (decomposition). Both approaches will generate the Sierpinski triangle over an infinite number of repetitions.
It is generation and infinity that make fractal geometry so different from euclidean geometry, which can be drawn instantaneously and linearly. Because fractal geometry is recursive, it is in theory infinitely complex, and the only way to see what a fractal object will look like is to run the computation that generates it until we grow tired of watching the process unfold.
Objects substituting themselves for copies of themselves are all around us. It is the basic process that underlies all living things. In a living system a starting point, the embryo, contains a program, DNA, that will be multiplied into trillions of cells. The cells follow the transformations described by their DNA codes by taking certain actions depending on their environmental factors and previous states. Christopher Alexander uses the example of a bone, whose shape evenly distributes structural stress across its surface, by claiming that the form of a bone emerges from a program telling cells to add bone mass where the stress is most intense. It is physical and structural feedback that shapes the bone.
Benoit Mandelbrot wrote The Fractal Geometry of Nature, a book that pretty much started the fractal revolution by providing a mathematical framework for understanding real physical space. He also used fractals to describe the movement of stock prices. In his honor, a mathematician named a curious mathematical object the Mandelbrot set, which you are likely to have heard of or seen before.
For given coordinates in the plane made up of the normal and complex numbers (basically an x and y graph, where y is that funny number i, the square root of -1), each coordinate sum will either spin forever in the orbit of radius 2, or escape after a determined number of iterations. The coordinates which never escape are defined as being part of the set, but they are actually not that interesting. What is interesting is what happens when we count iterations and use the results to color the graph.
If, each time we throw out a pair of coordinates (absolute value bigger than 2 at any iteration), we assign to it a number equivalent to the number of iterations it took to figure out it didn’t belong in the set, we will form groups of iteration equivalence. And once we apply a single, shared transformation (a “DNA code” for the chaotic equation) to these sets, in this case defining a specific color for each iteration that threw out some coordinates, applying this color to these coordinates while drawing the Mandelbrot set, we will generate this kind of geometry:
The total Known “Mandelbrot set” in black. Shades of colors are brighter the more iterations it took to determine they were not part of the set. Image: Wolfgang Beyer, WikimediaStep 6 of a zoom inside the edge of the set. A self-similiar set appears, surrounded by complex shapes. Image: Wolfgang Beyer, Wikimedia
The construction of the Mandelbrot set pictures is a fascinating exercise in computer art, especially since it is so simple but generates practically infinite geometry (the computer eventually runs out of cycles calculating all those iterations at the edge of the set, but a stronger computer can always go deeper).
But before we start thinking that this is only a weird property of iterating over complex numbers, we can simplify the generation of fractals even further. Let’s not complicate things with two dimensions and color. Let’s have only one dimension (a line) and show each succeeding iteration as another line.
Stephen Wolfram wanted to figure out what could happen if he tried every possible combination of the most simple program he could imagine. This is one combination of the program, which he called Rule 30 (or 00011110): This diagram describes the following computation: for each row, observe the cells from the left, middle and right neighbor of the previous row, and select the matching color in the rules.
This is the output of running the program, line-by-line:
Iterate infinitely, get infinate complexity.
Here is what happens when the rule changes from 30 (00011110) to 90 (01011010):
These discoveries led Wolfram to write A New Kind of Science, inviting scientists to study pure computations as a model for understanding the physical world. What we should learn from it is that natural world morphology and even pure abstract ideas like mathematics are full of very simple iterations that rely on the impact of time and the abundant data of physical matter to produce very complex forms. Once we start looking at things through the lens of iteration, we start to see how they might have started very simply and been generated.
Geometric depth from the iteration of technologies
I don’t believe that there is a strict separation between a supposedly modern and traditional architecture. Instead there exist different geometric processes, and while traditionally builders have employed nesting and fractal processes in their work, for perhaps no other reason than that it came naturally to them, modern builders have restricted themselves to linear geometric processes due to drawing their inspiration from Cartesian science and engineering. They then created tools, such as drafting tables and computer-aided design software (drafting tables with an undo button) to make linear processes more efficient.
There are only so many tricks that one can perform with linear geometry, although computers have extended the reach of those tricks. But the confusion of modern architects becomes even more obvious when they ascribe artistic merits to traditional builders who never aspired to be artists at all. One such instance is the introduction by present-day star architect Jean Nouvel of a biography of the 18th century French military engineer Vauban. Nouvel describes Vauban’s fortresses as an early form of land-art and morphing, then asks: could a man be an artist without being aware of it?
Vauban was not an artist at all. Military necessity led him to employ geometric processes that significantly increased the complexity of fortifications, and it is incidental that today we find his projects to have artistic merits. The process through which Vauban’s work became worthy of architectural praise provides the key to the distinction between linear and complex geometry, and the process of iteration of new technologies. We see in the construction of star forts the impact of evolving technology and obsolescence on the landscape of cities. That it had no aesthetic purpose makes it even more interesting.
Vauban was not the inventor of the star fort. Those had been around for more than a century when he began his career for the army of Louis XIV. The basic star fort was a simple concept: the old masonry walls with towers of the medieval age had shown themselves obsolete with the advent of cannons, and they had been replaced with thick banks of earth dug out of trenches. The major flaw of this design, it was soon discovered, was to provide space out of reach of defensive fire at its corners. In the first iteration of the design, the corners were extended into diamond-shaped turrets, introducing a first level of nesting geometry and beginning the genesis of a fractal.
Military engineers kept improving on the star fort technology’s effectiveness by correcting their vulnerabilities. And so, iteration by iteration, the geometric depth of the star fort concept increased.
Vauban’s supposedly great invention was nothing more than repeating this process of increasing geometric complexity by iterating again and again, ultimately creating what many now consider to be his masterpiece, the Citadel of Lille, a showcase of complex geometry made from the refinement produced by centuries of iteration of the star fort concept.
Citadel of Lille, and……the system of fortification of the City of Lille, as designed by Vauban.
It is important to note that the Vauban extensions to star fortifications did not mean that the simple early star fort became obsolete. In fact many simple star forts were built in the 18th and 19th century in America as the military threat was low and simple forts much cheaper to build. The difference between a simple fort and Vauban’s complex fort is one of depth and effectiveness, not technology, and there is a real cost-benefit choice to make. The star fort only became completely obsolete when the concrete bunker replaced it, and the early bunkers reset the process of complex geometry generation to its starting point by being simple concrete shells.
When we seek to create symmetry in an urban environment, we want buildings to be as alike as possible while allowing for adaptation to context. If we understand geometric depth we can build in such a way that poor and expensive buildings have the same basic design in their first levels of geometry, but expensive buildings have many more scales of geometry nested within that basic design. It is not necessary for an entire city to be made of the same materials, for instance. Materials are one of the last visible scales of geometry, and so we can have a city of mud bricks and marble buildings that nevertheless share 95% of their geometry and beautifully complement each other to create an emergent structure, while both poor and rich citizens have a home adapted to their situation.
We can look at these examples from Korean traditional architecture for an illustration. The first image (below) is a simple house and the second is the tomb of a great king. Both buildings use the same design, but the building on the right has much greater depth in this design.
Another interesting comparison is between the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco and the Verrazano Narrows bridge in New York.
The bridges start off from the same technology, but the Golden Gate bridge develops into more depth and detail within this foundational design, and is for this reason the more famous of the two bridges. That doesn’t mean the Verrazano Narrows bridge isn’t beautiful on its own.
Golden Gate bridge, San Francisco.Verrazano Narrows bridge, New York.
And to make things as simple as they can get, we can compare a Sierpinski triangle with four levels of iteration with one that has six levels.
The fractal on the right has all the same elements as the one on the left, but also has more.
The framework of analysis presented here gives us a very powerful instrument through which to understand the shapes of buildings and open spaces of cities and measure their complexity. It does not, however, sufficiently explain what can make a city appear to be a natural object over greater scales.
I will cover another aspect of iteration, one that occurs in a sequence of fractal objects growing together in an ecosystem, in a following article.
“Do you seek the highest, the greatest? The plant can teach you to do so. What it is without will of its own, that you should be with intent – that’s the point!”
—Friedrich Schiller
Some days ago, after giving a lecture in a west German city, I arrived back at my Berlin neighbourhood subway station and walked home. I dragged my baggage trolley after me, tired from the journey, with a certain numbness of having seen and thought and being told too much. Too much dispersion, too many other lives entwined with my own, and a creeping loss of clear perspective on what I truly needed. Slowly walking back, I tried to exclude the sounds of passing traffic and the faces of passing humans from my perception.
It was not at all about city vs. nature, or human vs. technology. It was about the struggle between control, and obedience—and being, and needing.
I was torn out of my numbness by a glowing red haze that hovered above a traffic island overgrown with herbs. At first, I only felt this: a sensation of something glowing, emanating warmth, literally palpable on my skin. I stopped and focused my gaze. There was a patch of vivid redness spreading in the middle of the streetscape with its hushed silhouettes of cars, passers-by, and cyclists. The colour seized my senses like a distant blaze.
Poppies in a Berlin traffic isalnd. Photo: Andreas Weber
I stood for some seconds and then I nodded. It was a tiny field of poppies. The blossoms of the common European field poppy (Papaver rhoeas) emerging from the small wasteland on top of the traffic island. As I stared at them, I could vaguely discern the single petals, shivering under the oblique sun. In a slight gust of wind the stems bowed, sending a wave that rippled through the glow. Some of the petals gently swirled to the ground. The blossoms seemed to burn away silently, flanked by the makeshift ecosystem of slender blades of grass, of mallow (Malva sylvestris) and broad-leafed sorrel (Rumex acetosa).
What is the essence of a city? What is the kernel of urban civilisation, which, as we know, is engulfing the planet? Urban life is spreading from a minority’s lifestyle to be the predominant fate of human and increasingly nonhuman beings. As I thought in a first glimpse, being stopped at that glowing traffic island, the essence of a city is a constant immersion of everything and everybody in human affairs.
And human affairs are affairs of control. They secure that we do not trespass norms, behave accordingly, function, are on time, cope with what is desired and what one increasingly is desiring—status, a beautiful face which does not show the traces of age and of any vulnerability. Traffic noise, anonymity, peak-hour hurry, traffic lights, cars rushing by with deadly speed are not “inhuman forces” destroying human naturalness. They are forces in service of control.
Urbaneness is a big experiment against the vulnerability that goes with life. At the same time, it generates more of it. More wounds. More fertile soil. Cities are not only the loci of efficiency, but also the places of failure. They gather poverty, breakdown, despair, crime—and unexpected solutions. They are meant to be run as machines, and they partly come out as alive. This is what always fascinates me, and what makes me cling to my home city, Berlin. Blossoms are drawn to a city, as there are always crevasses in the functional façade.
When I stood in the light of the poppies, halted in my tracks, the trolley handle-up on the street, and let my eyes sink into the flickering red rising into the air, I felt in the flowers’ precarious exuberance, the power of vulnerability unfold. In this vulnerability, the streetscape revealed itself as wild. It was not because a small piece of “nature“ was preserved, but because the poppies so adamantly insisted on displaying their vulnerability on this bit of casually neglected dirt. Glowing in the evening sun, they dwelled on their ramshackle settlement. It was a pledge for being whole even while under assault. It was a pledge of being whole not in spite of, but because of being vulnerable.
I was reluctant to carry on walking. The traffic rushed past me. My bag sat there, on the curb, as if it had been forgotten by someone anonymous. The evening sun warmed my hair and my body from behind. The poppies’ embraced me from in front. I was immersed in sweetness, and melancholy, and did not immediately understand why. I could not walk away.
Last summer, the poppies had been our company, when I was falling in love with a friend I had known for some time, but distantly. I looked for her at her place, which was in a tiny village in the Southern Alps, in Italy. We walked the fields among the vineyards, the evening air vibrating between us, with the glow of a light still hidden. It was the time of the poppies. Grasses and flowers freckled the side of the small road, but the poppies were in the middle. They stood there, glowing, and untouched, formed of slender, hairy stalks, and fluttering petals opened to the light. Their beauty called to us.
Photo: Andreas Weber
We walked there, feeling gifted by the flowers’ naturalness. Not by the fact, that they were “nature”, as we commonly say, but by their gesture of being totally, naturally, what they were. They completely believed in themselves. They surrendered to their fragility without reserve. “I don’t have that”, my friend said. “I do not have this softness.”
In this moment, I felt the desire to stroke her skin in the same manner as the blossoms stroked my gaze. I yearned to see her walk into some of that warm glow that emanates from beings who are openly needing what is truly needed. I wanted to kiss her, because the poppy had kissed me, had embraced me with its warmth that was total surrender, and I wanted my friend inside that embrace, too.
For a short time, the time of the poppies of last year, I forgot that we cannot grant this to another person. Only poppies can do it, as any other living being who does not know, but simply is, can. They love, because they totally surrender to their own fragility.
In Berlin, that evening, I could not resume walking home from the traffic island. My thoughts returned to the poppies of the year before. Each time, when I returned to Italy to see my lover, I was greeted by the poppies. They grew along the railway embankments, and between the tracks, welcoming my approach with their radiance and fragility. The blossoms risked themselves totally in their gesture to unfold, to be fertilized, to connect, to multiply. They knew dying was included in this.
I found the poppies everywhere in Italy; between the tangled steel lines of Milano Stazione Centrale, along ripening wheat fields, under greyish olive trees, beneath the umbrellas of maritime pines on the way to Rome, where we once met. I saw them in the crevasses of the streets in Roman living quarters. I spotted poppies emerging from the ruins along the antique Via Appia, where one endless afternoon we lay in a freshly harvested field.
Their blossoms watched us, and they allowed us to be fragile, as long as they watched us. They watched us by being fragile. They granted us space by basing their radiance on the fact that every petal only lasted for a few hours. When I tried to gather a bouquet for my friend once at her village, I came back with the stalks only. The fire could not be conserved.
The poppies were summer, but a summer as a pledge, still not totally and reliably there, a gesture of summer sweetness rather than its installation. It was like Natalie Babbitt writes in Tuck Everlasting of the early days of the hot season hanging at “the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn…”. Our love was in the poppies, and when I think back, its sweetness is part of what the poppies did, rather than the other way round. When our love blossomed, a slight breath could extinguish it.
Journal page and drawing, by Andreas Weber.
At some point, in Berlin, I walked on, dragging my trolley after me. It seemed to me that its wheels circled with smoother revolutions, in a more effortless way as when traveling to Italy in the previous year. I slowly walked towards my home, not numb anymore, but vulnerable, feeling all sorts of feelings, sweetness, and soreness, birth, and death. “Blender”, my lover had called the states of her unseparated, undiscernible emotions, when she was in them, that numbness I also had felt stepping out of the subway. But that was gone now, substituted by something clean, and melancholic. The poppy’s blossoms are a sort of centripetal agent. They help solidify feeling, as the slender flowers show what they need. There is no error possible in what makes them live, or die.
With the anesthesia gone, I gazed around on my short way back home. I returned the gaze of all the blossoms I encountered, growing from slits in the curb, from untended spots between the green stretches in front of the tenements, in the neglected yard around the building of the high school my son graduated from last year. I felt seen, and I felt allowed to feel. I could be, because all these others trusted their needs. I could trust mine. And in the slight afterglow of the poppy’s blossom everything settled into clarity. I started to blossom myself.
The poppies I encountered, now and last year, are not a feature of rural areas (rural like the sweet southern alpine landscape where my lover lived). They are not a feature of “nature”, which could awaken me and console me by the way it had found its path between the “human-made” landscape of the inner city of Berlin. It was not at all about city vs. nature, or human vs. technology. It was about the struggle between control, and obedience –– and being, and needing.
It was about what family psychologist Virgina Satir calls the “Five Truths”, which are about being genuine about what we need, and perceive, and want to do. The poppy grants itself the right to be real. By its nature, it has no choice. We can see this absence of choice as determinism, like mainstream science is inclined to do. The blossom as genetic machine, totally dead from the inside. But we can also see it as a fantastic intuition about the right thing to do. As self-confidence. As a statement, announced by a red glow, and hairy stalks, and total wastefulness, about a real individuality.
“I am what I am”, reads a famous line in the old testament. I never really appreciated this enigmatic phrase, beyond it being a bit tautological. But what the poppy tells me, and other city dwellers, is just that. I am what I am. And what my lover for those days of the poppies, last year, until all the petals had been blown off by our reluctant breath, was telling me again and again, was the opposite of this: “I am not what I am, and that makes me suffer.”
So, what we call nature, is not about being self-made (organic) against human-made (technological). It is about being oneself, making oneself from the powers of the flesh that yearns for unfolding, against not being oneself, enclosed by powers who tell me what to do, how to behave, what to feel, until I have completely forgotten what my powers are—forgotten the fact that I also long for blossoming. That, indeed, blossoming is what all beings not only want, but need: to become a manifestation of blossoming, as my friend and colleague Hildegart Kurt puts it.
One of the places to blossom is the city. We all know this. It’s the reason we constantly travel to cities, although we are yearning for “unspoiled nature” at the same time. Wild flowers in the city are not a contradiction, but one way a city blossoms, and hence also allow me to blossom. I am lucky that Berlin is full of flowers in summer, full of small wild spaces, sought by rare plants, and peopled by rare beasts.
Plastic and poppies. Photo: Andreas Weber
Berlin is not the world’s poppy capital, though. That is Rome. Not the official beautiful Rome, but the dirty backdoor, hidden Rome, which you cross when approaching or leaving. It’s the Rome where I had stayed with my lover last year, for one short week, under an uncompromisingly blue sky. And when it was over, something was lost. It’s the Rome of the memories which grow not from idealizations, but from wildness, which has been watching us with tenderness and irony, and hence granted us to be wild for a couple of moments. Wild, here, does not mean unchained. It means self.
Self is a call. To see others blossom is a call. This explains the strange mixture of joy and longing I experience when I see other beings blossom. It shows me that I need to blossom, and it highlights for me the degree to which I already do. Or do not. Or can’t yet. The joy of the blossoms is a yearning.
There came a time, at the end of the season of the poppies, when my lover started to be wary of her vulnerability. She felt she had already shown too much of it to me. “It’s holes all over”, she said, feeling ashamed of herself. Of her individuality, which was beauty, in one individual making, from vulnerability, in one specific cast. Holes, like we all have, in her brilliant arrangement. Poppiness, ready to shed all the petals at one shy breath.
“Loving is touching souls” writes Joni Mitchell in her song “A Case of You”. This includes being allowed to be vulnerable, finally. That is why we are all searching for it, in the haze of the cities, among other single humans, hasty, lonely, very much in control. But love not only allows vulnerability, it also needs it. Loving is a call for vulnerability. A call like the poppies were uttering on the neglected island in the rushing Berlin traffic, which made me stop in my tracks, and let the wounds of the last year re-open, sweet and sore.
Love is a call for vulnerability. To let yourself be loved is to show all your vulnerability, because one who truly loves you wants you to be true. To be who you are. That’s the essence of it. And this is why the poppy is leading the way. It is encouraging us to be all we already are. It is a fundamental way of loving. The time of the poppies was over when my lover started to close herself, feeling too fractured, and I let the petals fall. We had lost our pact with the blossoms.
Cities abound with difference: people, buildings, trees, plants, animals, etc. People in cities (and beyond, of course) inhabit various and fragmented identities that include gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and ability/disability. These identities are produced in relation with other people, living- and non-living entities, and the landscape. These social identities are shaped through, and reflect differential access to, experiences of, and control over nature, both rural and urban.
Women and men develop different environmental knowledge based on their experiences and because of their labour and social positions.
In this, the first part of a two-part series I discuss why paying attention to gender is necessary for making cities more sustainable and just. An individual’s gender—woman, man, transgender, or other gendered—determines their spatial freedom, behaviour, and -experiences in cities. There are spaces in cities women feel unsafe, but men do not. For many women and transgendered individuals, large forested parks are not always the therapeutic, serene green spaces they were planned as; indeed, they can often be spaces of fear and anxiety. There are also spaces that women occupy and use more than men, thus developing different knowledges about the city. Because of the differential experience and knowledge of cities, we need to recongise that the spatial organisation of cities is never neutral. As such, any work towards creating more sustainable cities needs to pay attention to difference in cities.
As Elizabeth Grosz so eloquently summarizes:
“The city provides the order and organization that automatically links otherwise unrelated bodies […] The city orients and organizes family, sexual and social relations insofar as the city divides cultural life into public and private domains, geographically dividing and defining the particular social positions and locations occupied by individuals and groups.” (1992, p. 250)
Gender, class, and race are the three main categories that underlie social and spatial difference. The second part of the series will focus on the importance of paying attention to race as it relates to nature in cities.
Gender roles and relations as markers of human difference grounded in biology continue to be commonplace ways of conceptualizing relations within and across societies. As such, gender is a significant factor in understanding a diversity of human-environment relations as well as environmental management, polices, and practices.
The entrance to a patio in Managua, showing ornamental plants. Photo Laura Shillington
Gender intersects with race and class in complex ways (Mollett & Faria, 2013). While I concentrate on gender in this article, it is important to stress that gender is never universal. Gender is contextual and always needs to be considered in relation to race, class and place (geography). A white woman living in New York City has different knowledge of, experience with, and access to “nature” than a black woman in Lagos, Nigeria, or an Inuit woman in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik. We can also look at the differences in a specific place: for example, a white woman in Los Angeles may have different knowledges and experiences than a Latina woman in Los Angeles. Such differences may be racial, they may be class related, or both. The differences can also be a function of location—living close to an urban park or beach (easy access) or having to rely on public transport to access urban nature. Alongside the differences among and between women mentioned above, there are also differences between genders, and how gender roles shape and influence one’s perception of and interaction with their environment.
A canopy of fruit trees in Managua. Photo: Laura Shillington
What is gender? Gender, as I use it in this article, refers to the categories of male and female that do not necessarily have to relate directly to biological sex. In other words, the socially constructed ways in which we categorise masculine and feminine—those cultural characteristics that define masculinity and femininity. Moreover, the categories of male and female are diverse and dynamic. What counts as feminine may differ between cultures. Nonetheless, male and female (and masculinity and femininity) have defined social roles and relations in everyday life in most cultures and places in the world.
For example, in North American society, women are still the primary caretakers of children and responsible for domestic tasks. There are, of course, strong challenges to this assumption and gender roles have undergone changes, but a division of labour remains based on traditional (Western) gender roles: men as paid workers (productive labour) and women as caregivers (reproductive labour). This division is reflected in the recent Canadian census. In Canada women are still less likely to be employed than men: 77.5 percent of women were employed in 2015 compared with 85.3 percent of men (Moyser, 2017). Moreover, women are also more likely than men to work part-time (18.9 percent versus 5.5 percent), and to do so for voluntary reasons (67.2 percent versus 53.0 percent), typically to care for children. This meant that women spent an average of 5.6 fewer hours per week on paid work than men (35.5 hours versus 41.1 hours) (Moyser, 2017). While involvement in the labour force is now commonplace for Canadian women, over half (56.1 percent) are employed in traditionally-female occupations: teaching, nursing and related health occupations, social work, clerical or other administrative positions, or sales and services (this is compared with 17.1 percent of men and has changed little since 1987) (Moyser, 2017).
In the domestic sphere, gender roles have also changed, but just like in paid labour (working sphere), traditional gender roles remain. Women continue to do the most household work: in 2015, 93 percent of mothers reported participating in different types of household work and accounted for 61 percent of the total number of hours of household work (an average of 3 hours per day) (Houle, Turcotte & Wendt, 2017). However, men are doing more domestic tasks—in 2015 the proportion of men in families doing household work rose from 51 percent in 1986 to 76 percent in 2015 (mainly preparation of meals) (Houle, Turcotte & Wendt, 2017).
While there have been some changes in the Canadian context, overall there remains a traditional gendered division of labour. One of the key reasons for this—despite the desire to change for many individuals—is the lack of transformation within the workplace to support change, for example, affordable daycare and legislated paternity leave. (see Bloomberg and the Globe and Mail). But what does the gendered division of labour have to do with nature? I propose, that at a fundamental level, what individuals do in their everyday life and their role in broader society shapes how they understand, experience, and know their environment and nature.
There are three key ways that gender shapes relations with nature and the environment: Knowledge, Rights and Responsibilities, and Environmental Interests. I take these from the early work of Diane Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter and Esther Wangari (1996) in feminist political ecology. My aim here is to offer a starting point to those who have not had the opportunity to think about gender, nature and cities before. I draw on my research in Managua, Nicaragua to illustrate the ways in which gender shapes relations with nature.
Knowledge
Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Wangari (1996) emphasise that a person’s knowledge of nature and the environment comes from their material, everyday interactions with a specific environment (both built and nature, a combination of). How they interact with their everyday environment is shaped by the role that person plays in the household, in the community, and in broader society. If it is expected that women are responsible for domestic work and space, then their experiences with and knowledge of nature will derive out of their everyday tasks and the spaces they move through and in while doing those tasks.
For example, if women are primarily responsible for the domestic sphere—the home, childcare, eldercare, and other tasks that make up reproductive labour—they will develop intimate knowledge of the surrounding nature and the natural environments close to the home. Such natural elements could include water delivery and quality in the home and green spaces (private yard, community parks, schools, sidewalks, etc.). Such spaces and natural elements comprise their everyday patterns; going to the park everyday with children, walking children to school, carrying out domestic tasks in the yard and home.
In contrast, if men work outside the home most of the day, their knowledge of the environment and nature will be different. Their knowledge of the environments listed above will be less intimate because the interaction is not quotidian. They may learn very little about the nature of the schoolyard and only experience community parks on weekends. Conversely, weekends may involve leaving cities and going out to rural environments and nature, thus reducing their intimate knowledge of commonplace nature in cities.
A gender-based difference with regard to knowledge of nature in everyday spaces can been seen in a collaborative research project I was part of in Managua, Nicaragua in 2006. We had household members in an informal settlement map their home patios to identify the diversity of species (participatory ecological inventory). The majority of women involved in the project worked at home and the men worked away from home (e.g. as taxi drivers, casual labourers, gardeners, agricultural labourers in rural areas). On average, women identified 22 different species in their patios while men averaged thirteen. This difference was a result of the large number of ornamental plants that women mapped: in their patios ornamentals comprised 54 percent of the different species. Men tended to map trees, and the species-diversity they mapped comprised 40 percent fruit- and 18 percent non-fruit trees. By comparison, species diversity in women’s maps consisted of 22 percent fruit trees and only 8 percent non-fruit trees. Overall, women identified 123 out of the 130 species identified (95 percent of the total species-diversity of the patios).
If we had carried out the mapping in upper class households in Managua, the results would have been different. Knowledge of nature and environment will differ also depending on social class and race. A wealthy woman will—as mentioned in the introduction—have a radically different everyday interaction than a lower-income woman.
In other words, women and men develop different environmental knowledge based on their experiences and because of their labour and social positions.
Gendered access to resources resource and environmental services
Access to resources and to environmental quality, also varies according to a person’s identity. Gender plays an important role in many places around the world in defining a person’s access to and control over different natural resources and environmental services, access to clean water or sanitation for example. In many places, the responsibility for securing water for drinking, cooking and bathing falls to women. In many cities (as well as rural areas), women gather water at collective sources (such as wells, taps, and rivers). Travelling to and from the collective water source can be risky—exposing women to theft, to assault, and sometimes rape. The same is true for women who live in without household sanitation. They are required to use public toilets and bathing areas, increasing the risk of assault and rape (see for example Travers, Khosla & Dhar, 2011). Thus, lack of access to certain environmental services raises many security issues for women throughout the world. Environmental quality rights intersect with issues of gender inequality and environmental justice.
We can also think of gendered rights and responsibilities in terms of natural resources, as Rocheleau et al (1996) discuss at length in their book. Land tenure is the classic example, but there are also finer nuances of resource tenure. For example, there are specific gender-defined rights to different parts of a tree (fruit versus timber). The above example of mapping patios in Managua reflects the difference in gender-defined rights. The men in the mapping project identified primarily large trees. Women identified almost all the species. Why? Because men in the household were responsible for maintaining the health of larger trees—trimming the branches, gathering fruit from upper branches. Women were responsible for all other plants in the patio—they use the leaves, seeds, and fruit for food and medicine. Moreover, their everyday tasks take place in the patio and not inside the house in Managua, so they are surrounded by the plants and trees all day. The ecology, that is the nature of their patio, is important in their daily routines.
Women considered ornamental plants and fruit trees to be the most important plants in the patios, both in number and species diversity. Their benefits to the household were numerous. Ornamental plants create an aesthetically pleasing space, and a more homey and comfortable environment. They also are easy to grow and propagate rapidly, and are the only plants that flourish under the shaded canopy of fruit trees that dominate patios. The fruit trees—in addition to providing fruit—create privacy in and shade for the patios. Shade is critical in Managua, where daytime temperatures average 32°C year-round. Thus, large fruit trees such as mangoes and avocados protect the houses and patios from harsh sun and heat, keeping them cool. The shade allows women to carry out their household tasks in relative comfort. Indeed, the combination of fruit trees in all the patios creates a micro-climate in the neighbourhood, with a lower temperature compared to other parts of the city.
The importance of the patio ecologies in the everyday lives of women influences them to fight to maintain their patios when confronted with external pressures to alter the local environment.
Patio in Managua showing kitchen area. Photo Laura Shillington
Gendered interests in environmental politics and grassroots activism
Gender differences in knowledge, rights, and responsibility translate into differences in environmental interests or stakes with regard to environmental change. In the mid-1999s then Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Wangari wrote Feminist Political Ecology,they pointed out that women made up a minority in many of the traditional environmental conservation groups in the developed world , but that they were often in the majority in environmental grassroots movements. Women are now more present in conservation and environmental groups as well as remaining the majority in grassroots movements. Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Wangari (1996) argued that women and men also differ in the types of environmental issues with which they engage politically, as well as in the manner in which they carry out their political and activist interests. For example, women deploy their position as mothers or their place of labour—the home—in their engagement with grassroots environmental movements.
In the example of the patios in Managua, environmental change (in the patios) has come primarily by efforts to establish household scale urban agriculture. Many urban agricultural projects in Managua have encouraged the conversion of the more ornamental patio ecologies described above into so called ‘productive’ ecologies. Fruit trees, for example, have been viewed solely for their role in producing fruit in urban agricultural projects. Indeed, many projects saw the fruit trees as hindering the ability to grow vegetables and recommended that households reduce the number of fruit trees in their patios. However, this view ignores that such trees have roles within the household. Cutting large shade-producing fruit trees to allow vegetables to grow brings about numerous changes in the everyday activities of the home: increased heat in the cooking areas, fewer private areas in the patio (e.g. for showering), increased water runoff during the rainy season, fewer shade-loving ornamental plants to cover the house and make it ‘homey’, and a change in the micro-climate of the barrio (increased temperatures). Most women in the neighbourhood refused to cut any trees and, even though they were interested in growing some vegetables, preferred to keep their patios as they were. However, men in many households were keen to grow vegetables and were willing to cut down trees. In the end, households agreed to create a pilot urban agricultural project in the community areas and school rather than alter the patios and women’s workspaces.
The households in Managua, Nicaragua reveal how gendered knowledge of nature is created through inhabiting the local environment and interacting with it on a daily basis. Moreover, the societal gendered power relations—the gendered division of labour—shape the dynamics of resource access and control.
Uncovering the gendered use, knowledge and spatial practices in private (as the example of Managua here) and public spaces in cities is helpful primarily because it makes visible what is usually invisible in cities. Urban planning historically and at present is still dominated by male planners. And as discussed above, an individual’s gender shapes how they understand, experience, and know spaces. Everyone’s knowledge is always partial and as such urban spatial organisation only reflects certain knowledges and experiences of space. The more diverse spatial knowledge we can uncover, the more inclusive cities can become. This also means that planning becomes more difficult and that we need more diversity in planning departments. Linked to this, recognising gender helps to reveal the unequal power relations within urban order and organization, including green spaces and other ecological organisation in cities. Just as urban spaces are never neutral, planned green spaces and environmental/ecological services are also not neutral.
By paying attention to gender differences in urban experience, we get closer to creating better cities. But emphasised above, we cannot look at gender on its own—we need to also pay attention to race and class. The second part in the series will tackle the question of race, nature, and the city.
Mollett, S. & Faria, C. (2013). Messing with Gender in Feminist Political Ecology. Geoforum, 45: 116-125.
Moyser, M. (2017). Women and Paid Work, in Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, Statistics Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-503-x/2015001/article/14694-eng.htm
Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B., & Wangari, E. (1996). Feminist political ecology: Global issues and local experience. New York: Routledge.
What inspires our work? Why have we each chosen to pursue a vision of cities that incorporates and expands our views of nature? Was it a particular mentor, a class or school experience, time spent in wilderness, or a book or film that led us to think boldly about a green future for cities?
Aspirational solutions that are largely unattainable but serve to awe and inspire can also help us progress—just as the golden age of science fiction motivated us to keep striving for something better, even though the political realities of the present made progress seem impossible.
I grew up in a part of Queens, a borough of New York City, that at the time was almost entirely devoid of the types of nature-inspired and integrated projects and spaces highlighted here at TNOC. But inspiration can come from many places, and I was recently reminded of the importance of the formative experiences that influence us while chatting with the wonderful New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) Career Ladder staff about my early experiences there.
The author in the 1980s, with her brother Thomas. Photo: George Pataki
Founded as the part of the 1964’s World’s Fair, NYSCI is now a designated New York City Cultural Institution, and has to date enlisted more than 3000 inner city students to work as museum “Explainers” communicating science to the public. I recall my high school experiences in this program clearly, and think of them often as I work toward inspiring young people to study science, nature, and the nature of cities. These days, at least in my part of the world (the western U.S.), students are increasingly choosing scientific disciplines as their course of study. But when it comes to nature and the nature of cities, I feel that it’s actually becoming more difficult to inspire young scientists and ecologists to join the collective effort to build thriving cities and spaces that draw on and harmonize with nature. After speaking with many students and colleagues, I think one important reason has to do with major shifts in our beliefs about the future of cities and the role of science from the mid to late 20th century to today.
The 1980’s were a difficult period in New York City, which lost almost 1 million residents between 1950 and 1980. Schools and public infrastructure were drastically underfunded, crime rates were perceived to be dangerously high, and the inner city was not considered a particularly desirable place to live. In short, the city had many, many challenges that seemed difficult or nearly impossible to overcome. And yet, as a child I never doubted that the city and that our civilization as a whole had a great future that would be better than the present. Luckily for me, growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s I caught the last glimpse of the “golden age” of futurism of the early to mid-20th century. It was obvious in the remnants of 1964 World’s Fair, famously dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe”. Its many (somewhat neglected) artifacts loomed large in my childhood visits to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, such as the “Tent of Tomorrow” designed by Philip Johnson, and the “Unisphere” (which has an interesting design history closely linked to Robert Moses). For a large part of the 20th century, books, films, and television programming offered paths toward a better future in which human ingenuity solved the most pressing issues of our time. The fact that many of these ideals were overly “techno-optimistic” and likely unattainable is immaterial, as described by Neal Stephenson in his essay Innovation Starvation:
The fondness that [researchers and engineers] have for science fiction reflects, in part, the usefulness of an over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision…scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.
Remnants of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The New York State Pavilion is on the left with the Tent of Tomorrow in the center. The Unisphere is on the far right. Photo: Johnathan Reich, Wikimedia
In retrospect, it’s striking to me how many of these shared visions include cities with significant green spaces (even in outer space!) or innovations that expanded our ideas of the potential for nature in cities. Science fiction illustrators like Harry E. Turner and Frank R. Paul and space artists like Robert T. McCall combined daring, aspirational technology with vast expanses of green, recognizing the role of urban nature in the best possible vision of future cities, while through the 1970’s writers speculated about utopian visions of the human-nature relationship, perhaps culminating with Ernest Callenbach’s iconic Ecotopia.
New York State Pavillion at the 1964 World’s Fair. Photo: Unknown
Of course, most of these visions were not to come to pass. Technological advances certainly have their dark side as we now well know, and these were as visible in New York City as anywhere when the “golden age” of science fiction and futurism came to a close. As humankind’s capacity to engineer the built environment grew ever more grand, futuristic new freeways arrived to divide communities, well-loved monuments like the original Penn Station were razed, and “slums” were demolished in the name of urban renewal, altering cities in ways that we’re still trying to recover from today.
In many ways, these events were the embodiment of the urban visions that were presented at the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, and showed us the unanticipated consequences of re-engineering cities on a large scale. Humanity’s footprint on the environment also became more and more difficult to ignore. As Jane Jacobs battled Robert Moses in lower Manhattan, Rachel Carson warned of the collapse of food chains, and The Nature Conservancy was founded to protect dwindling open space. In the face of cities that were becoming less livable, more unsustainable, and increasingly isolated from surrounding ecosystems, many people lost hope in the possibility of building amazing new places, and in the potential for science and technology to bring about a future that would be substantially better than the past. It’s ironic that just at the dawn of the space age, the Apollo missions brought us moving images of the Earth from space, such as “the Blue Marble” taken in 1972 on Apollo 17. Our early forays into space didn’t much resemble the fiction that inspired it, but instead showed us a lonely and vulnerable planet in the vastness of the solar system. These images helped to crystalize the urgency of the environmental movement to preserve and protect our critical natural resources.
Today, very few of my students profess to be very optimistic about the future of cities. Most choose to contribute their scientific knowledge to medicine, engineering, finance, or computer science, where the rewards seem greater than in the fields that tackle urban challenges. Those that take on urban issues hope mainly to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, resource depletion and urban sprawl, and basically keep things from getting any worse. The faith that we have the potential, the knowledge, and the political will to build places that are far, far better than what we see today seems to have faded away. To quote Stephenson, “the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone.” More directly, young people are now surrounded by the most dystopian visions of the future imaginable, with every possible permutation of the post-apocalyptic city from floods, disease epidemics, and nuclear wars to of course, zombies (so many zombies!) permeating popular American culture. This is most worrisome, since we’re unlikely to achieve a future that’s bolder, more daring, and more innovative than we allow ourselves to imagine.
I became an urban ecologist because, like so many contributors to TNOC, I came to believe that a promising future for cities will be found in re-imagining the relationship between the built environment and nature. While some see the goal of bringing more nature to cities as a rejection of technological innovation, I believe in the possibility for a re-alignment of science—both natural and social science—with the design and planning fields, recognizing the central role of design in finding novel and exciting ways to bring nature to the urban experience. Philip Silva summarized this well in his TNOC essay, “Sustainable cities don’t need nature–they need good design”, where he explained that rejecting our humanity and “retreating from society to find holiness in the purity of streams and meadows, forests and mountains” cannot solve the puzzle of how to build cities that allow communities and culture to thrive. Human ingenuity, culture, and imagination will be key ingredients in the green cities of the future, which will need an ever more advanced understanding of the relationships between human well-being, ecological processes, and attributes of the urban environment. And although we always want to apply our best scientific understanding to urban design, in my view these visions don’t always have to be practical and fully feasible to serve the common good. Aspirational solutions that are largely unattainable but serve to awe and inspire can also help us progress—just as the golden age of science fiction motivated us to keep striving for something better, even when the political realities of the present often made progress seem impossible.
So is green the new flying car? We know from the hard lessons of the last several decades, now that flying car technology as actually arrived, that it will not solve all, or perhaps any, of our transportation problems. But wasn’t it worth imagining for all of these years? How many people thought bigger, better, and more boldly about transportation solutions because of it? Now it’s time to do the same for green initiatives, not just here at TNOC but widely throughout popular culture. In my opinion, we need to surround our students with far fewer zombies and far more designs by Vincent Callebaut. Fortunately, we have already taken the first steps, in that the inner city has once again become a desirable place to live. In New York City and many other U.S. cities, including Salt Lake City where I currently live, the urban core is thriving again. There are still enormous challenges ahead, including gentrification, growing wealth inequities, and persistent air and water pollution problems. But there are also promising indications that big ideas may be back. In Flushing Meadows Corona Park, just adjacent to NYSCI, the nearby “Tent of Tomorrow” from the 1964 World’s Fair New York State Pavilion was the focus of a design competition sponsored by the National Trust and People for the Pavilion. The submissions were amazing, awe-inspiring, and truly reminiscent of the spirit of the World’s Fair, which Isaac Asimov described “as the direction in which man is traveling…viewed with buoyant hope.” And tellingly, green components were everywhere in the winning designs for a re-imaged pavilion.
It’s interesting now to revisit Asimov’s 1964 article, Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014, in which he predicted “that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.” Arguably, that prediction became a reality in the early part of the 21st century (as did several other aspects of Asimov’s essay).
1964 World’s Fair. Photo: Unknown
So what now of our prediction for the World’s Fair of 2064? We’ve gathered enormous knowledge about ecology, social systems, the built environment, human-environment interactions, and both the pros and cons of technology in the last 50 years. Will we be bold enough to imagine aspirational cities in which nature and culture are beautifully integrated in entirely new ways, and on a scale large enough to reach all of the urban population? How will we recruit the next generation to join that effort, despite the prevalent belief that it will be too costly, too politically challenging, and too risky to fully achieve? I choose to believe that design, transdisciplinarity, ingenuity, and collective engagement will bring about an exciting new future for cities and urban residents. Leaders in education and outreach such as NYSCI’s Design Lab are preparing the next generation for that vision, but they can’t do it alone. Many, many more of us are needed to join this effort.
As Asimov wrote in Prelude to Foundation:
You don’t need to predict the future. Just choose a future—a good future, a useful future—and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.
A review of: Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, by Robert Kaniglel. 2016. Knopf. 512 pages. Buy the book. Garden Legacy, by Mary Louise Mossy Christovich and Roulhac Bunkley Toledano, with a foreword by S. Frederick Starr. 2016. The Historic New Orleans Collection. 268 pages. Buy the book. Ecocities Illustrated: the easily built visionary future of Richard Register,byRichard Register. 2016. Buy the book.
The pile of books that I am reading is usually a hodgepodge of different subjects and eras. But this month there seems to be a theme. The new, well-regarded biography of Jane Jacobs, an illustrated history of New Orleans landscape architecture, and a new book about designing cities using natural forms are all there.
Clearly, I am presently concerned about cities. And especially about my own city of New Orleans and those similar, meaning those that start as a colony, and continue to find it difficult to know how to design a visionary future with those who live there.
Cities are made better when their spaces are designed with citizens’ full input, using the patterns of nature and when managing precious resources ably, so they and future generations can live in harmony with each other and with the natural world.
New Orleans, according to many locals, is in a downward spiral that has quickened since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina’s levee breaks, an event seen by locals as a betrayal of the city by the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers. But even before those dark days, the decay of this colonial city has been tragically evident for some time. I remember a colleague saying decades before, quite earnestly, that New Orleans has been in decline since the late 1860s.
His (and others) definition is referencing those leaders who, from the 1860s to the 1960s, began to actively promote and support the narrative of the city’s slavery era over the city’s more multicultural story—the one which has seen waves of successful immigration, the development of a modern art form in jazz, heroism in managing the most important river basin and Southern port on the continent, artists who offer poetic tales of the human condition that stand the test of time, the genial and joyous use of public space unparalleled by any other Global Northern city, and so on. In order to continue to serve the false narrative of the “glory” of the antebellum period, the continued presence of a subjugated population and an official lack of regard for the intrinsic value of the place were continued and define New Orleans as a colony still.
The ongoing attachment to the colonial mindset by many here was made clear yet again in 2016 when Mayor Mitch Landrieu decided that four statues of U.S. Civil War Confederates, erected during the Jim Crow days, were to be removed from public space. [Jim Crow laws were enacted by local and state governments to enforce racial segregation and discrimination in the United States from the late 19th Century up until, in some cases, the 1960s.] The city remained in an uproar for the next six months as the idea was debated in contentious City Hall public hearings and in boardrooms and bars. The lack of agreement on what to do was indicated by the Council’s vote of 6-1 to remove the statues but with no funds provided and the business community’s ignoring the mayor’s pleas for equipment loans for their removal. As the last of the four statues was dismantled (by masked city workers) on the evening of 22 May 2017, Confederate flags were still being waved by defiant protesters in front of weeping African-American activists who thought that even this the day would never come. The argument continues as decisions about where the statues will go and what will be raised in their place have yet to be made as of this writing. What is clear already is that the issue of racism will continue to tragically thrive in a city populated by a majority of people of color.
That long decline and the current controversy for updating its symbols in public spaces is why my current pile of books is about public involvement in the design of cities. One person who considered this issue in great detail was writer Jane Jacobs, best known as the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, and six other books, including a children’s book and a memoir about a great aunt who was a teacher on Alaska’s frontier.
Her life is the subject of a new opera, a new documentary (“Citizen Jane: Battle for the City”), and the impetus for a series of annual walks (“Jane’s Walks”) organized in a dozen cities on the anniversary of her birth in early May. Since Jacobs’ work could never be separated from the places and people that she lived in and around, Kanigel’s biography offers much relevant detail about how that life was shaped. And because she will be quoted for generations, it is helpful to finally have a record of the circumstances about each of her books to refer to when others get her wrong. Of course, her big idea was that cities were the intersection of achievement and innovation and to fulfill that role, had to be considered and managed according to their best uses in making human-scaled connections, and not through a lens of bureaucratic tangles of misshapen policy and hubris handed down from City Hall, or by the best way for developers to sell it.
Her consistent disdain for top-down, by-the-book planning and economic theory was on display to such a degree in her books and interviews that is understandable why some of those by-the-book planners or economists still dismiss her work. After all, this biography shows again and again that she expected those officials to shut up, to listen, and to observe. An aside: Even her supporters can quibble with a point of hers here or there, but still read her words with gusto: one such example is she believed that cities came before the development of agriculture, a theory not supported by most archaeologists or anthropologists, then or now. This is one of those ideas that may be seen as an indication of the zeal that she had for her subject rather than her relying on a great deal of empirical evidence to support her theory. Even so, her few miscalculations notwithstanding, her brilliantly crafted analysis stands the test of time, parrying most of the slings and arrows of her detractors and leaving no doubt that her practical and accessible prose with its curious, professorial voice will continue to inspire new generations.
That disdain for top-down decisions was developed in the work she also managed to do even while becoming a best-selling author: being a savvy neighborhood organizer in New York and later in Toronto. The role of a community organizer and its focus on temporal tactics is in many ways the antithesis of the role of an author specializing in deep analysis of different systems, and so the details of those campaigns in Kanigel’s book make her seem even more impressive. Through anecdotes and letter excerpts, her belief in direct action was made clear and her skill as a grassroots leader presented with engaging detail by the author.
Is New Orleans a great city when seen through Jane’s spectacles? In some ways it is, because of the resilience of its people, who are doing exactly what she noticed in place after place: finding ways to make public and private spaces useful, beautiful, and dynamic even when those in charge make it difficult.
Such work is evident in the next book on my table: Garden Legacy, a coffee table book was published by The Historic New Orleans Collection, a French Quarter-based museum, research library and publisher of books on the region’s history. Using the 300-years of notary archives of New Orleans, it gives neighborhood-by-neighborhood examples of the green spaces made by early settlers of the city in illustrations of those spaces and of the homes attached. Early watercolors, sketches and plans of landscaped areas of the French Quarter, Uptown and Bayou St. John neighborhoods of New Orleans are included along with the authors’ architectural expertise and deep research into the properties being displayed. In this history of 18th and 19th-century landscapes of the city, one can easily see how individuals patterned the place we now inhabit through designs that took into consideration the curves and intricacies of the natural world that they found—and marveled over—here. One émigré to the city wrote this in 1803 to his wife:
“I have found, following my usual good luck, a very pretty little house with courtyard and garden…I shall, while awaiting you, have flowers planted which shall only be dried and pressed by you and whose first blossoms shall only be picked by my sweet wife…The sky here is so beautiful here, the greenery so lush, one can sometimes travel a league under an alley of orange trees, their aromas will even go to your head. Think then what the whole country must be like.”
The authors, Mary Louise Mossy Christovich and Roulhac Bunckley Toledano are both well-known preservation activists in New Orleans. Christovich was instrumental in the successful fight to stop the 1960s federal highway spur project slated to run through the French Quarter, originally proposed by none other than Robert Moses. The authors are both experts on the architectural history of New Orleans, having authored over a dozen books on the architecture and preservation of New Orleans, (eight together) including Toledano’s impressive A Pattern Book Of New Orleans Architecture.
Thinking about design of natural places leads me to Richard Register’s book: Ecocities Illustrated: the easily built visionary future of Richard Register. I met Richard when he came to New Orleans during the recovery from 2005’s levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina, hoping to inspire planners and neighborhood leaders with more relatable and sustainable recovery designs. He saw much potential in using the natural world that had reasserted itself since the levee breaks as the basis for rebuilding. His work to illustrate living cities that resemble the human body or other natural curves and designs has always been thoughtful and hopeful and those qualities were in short supply in New Orleans in those (literally) dark days. Yet I remember meeting with him in my Federal Emergency Management Agency-supplied trailer at the edge of the very bayou that had spilled over its banks into my apartment months before and telling him regretfully that I was at a loss to find people in power who would be open to his wonderful ideas. The truth was, at that moment City Hall and most residents were suspicious of people who came with visionary ideas (actually, the suspicion of any outsider with ideas is a typical colonial mindset) and would be doubly so of those who expected them to love the natural world and its power so soon after it had destroyed their homes and lives.
It may just be that he simply came too soon: in 2017, many natural design projects and collaborations are now underway, especially in terms of living with the water that surrounds us rather than frantically attempting to pump it all back to the Mississippi River or to Lake Pontchartrain. As a result, New Orleans is becoming a center for sensible water management and in the battle against coastal loss. Still, many scientists expect the erosion and increased ferocity of the weather patterns to submerge our city within the next century. Nevertheless, we persist.
After he went back to California, I bought his Ecocities, book and did my best to share it and his ideas with any neighborhood leaders who would consider honoring those recalcitrant waterways and would allow native greenery to take over previously paved areas. I’m not even sure whose library that book ended up in (as it was passed into so many hands in the last decade), but I hope it helped steer some of my colleagues towards those offering better design.
His new book offers many of his original lovely, quirky drawings that are at the basis of his presentations and books. These illustrations allow citizens to imagine their city as a whole, living organism, rather than as asphalted streets, laid out to save time or money, but not to encourage human-powered traversing or to offer a style of living that works easily and well. The sketches are organized by subject: whole cities, plazas, transport, natural features, and mapping, accompanied by strategies for advocating for them. He shows examples of how places can uncover their natural rhythms and spaces so that floods, winds, and other natural phenomena don’t have to destroy them. In addition to serving as a primer for the ideas of natural designs for cities, it serves another purpose: as an illustration of Jane Jacobs’ theories, and of the words of that New Orleans settler who marveled over making one’s way using the shade of the orange tree alleys.
* * * * *
Here is what these books and these writers have taught me this spring: A city’s best eras are not defined by its bureaucracy or only by its grandest designs, as even those designs can be divisive, badly crafted or out of scale to the patterns of use in that city. Cities are made better when their spaces are designed with citizens’ full input, using the patterns of nature and when managing precious resources ably, so they and future generations can live in harmony with each other and with the natural world.
Beginning operation in 1977, the 885 megawatt facility was named for New York’s 46th Governor Charles Poletti. If there is anything in a name, the Poletti facility had an auspicious one. Charles Poletti graduated from Harvard Law School, served on the New York State Supreme Court, and been elected New York’s Lieutenant Governor alongside Governor Herbert H. Lehman. Poletti had the distinction of being the first Italian-American governor in the United States (albeit serving only 29 days to complete Lehman’s term after Lehman joined the World War II effort). During World War II, Lieutenant-Colonel Poletti was in charge of restoring essential public services in occupied Italy. After the war, New York Governor Averell Harrimann appointed Poletti to the New York State Power Authority. So, when the Astoria generating facility was named in his honor, it had a lot to live up to. Sadly, the facility was far less impressive than its namesake. Indeed, by the time Charles Poletti died in 2002, New York Power Authority was mired in litigation with angry neighbors bent on shutting the dirty, polluting facility.
As an urban ecologist, I’ve studied the house sparrow, the “agrarian” (as we call it in some Mexican regions), for over a decade now, and had never been aware of the infinity of human expressions related to sparrows in general. In this book, Todd gathers an impressive cumulus of facts, stories, and references to the generic concept of “sparrow” together with an exquisite palette of artwork by artists from around the globe.
Grass in Tehran urban green areas
While there are still barriers, a number of efforts provide guidance to moving forward with better collaboration between designers and scientists. Firms such as 
The 
, a book that pretty much started the fractal revolution by providing a mathematical framework for understanding real physical space. He also used fractals to describe the movement of stock prices. In his honor, a mathematician named a curious mathematical object the Mandelbrot set, which you are likely to have heard of or seen before.
This diagram describes the following computation: for each row, observe the cells from the left, middle and right neighbor of the previous row, and select the matching color in the rules.
References
Such work is evident in the next book on my table: Garden Legacy, a coffee table book was published by The Historic New Orleans Collection, a French Quarter-based museum, research library and publisher of books on the region’s history. Using the 300-years of notary archives of New Orleans, it gives neighborhood-by-neighborhood examples of the green spaces made by early settlers of the city in illustrations of those spaces and of the homes attached. Early watercolors, sketches and plans of landscaped areas of the French Quarter, Uptown and Bayou St. John neighborhoods of New Orleans are included along with the authors’ architectural expertise and deep research into the properties being displayed. In this history of 18th and 19th-century landscapes of the city, one can easily see how individuals patterned the place we now inhabit through designs that took into consideration the curves and intricacies of the natural world that they found—and marveled over—here. One émigré to the city wrote this in 1803 to his wife:
Thinking about design of natural places leads me to Richard Register’s book: Ecocities Illustrated: the easily built visionary future of Richard Register. I met Richard when he came to New Orleans during the recovery from 2005’s levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina, hoping to inspire planners and neighborhood leaders with more relatable and sustainable recovery designs. He saw much potential in using the natural world that had reasserted itself since the levee breaks as the basis for rebuilding. His work to illustrate living cities that resemble the human body or other natural curves and designs has always been thoughtful and hopeful and those qualities were in short supply in New Orleans in those (literally) dark days. Yet I remember meeting with him in my Federal Emergency Management Agency-supplied trailer at the edge of the very bayou that had spilled over its banks into my apartment months before and telling him regretfully that I was at a loss to find people in power who would be open to his wonderful ideas. The truth was, at that moment City Hall and most residents were suspicious of people who came with visionary ideas (actually, the suspicion of any outsider with ideas is a typical colonial mindset) and would be doubly so of those who expected them to love the natural world and its power so soon after it had destroyed their homes and lives.
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